So that’s generally my train of thought, but from what I know there were serious vulnerabilities discovered in OpenSSH throughout the years, doesn’t it increase the risk for open ssh port or were the vulnerabilities discovered never touched those areas of ssh authentication. Seems to me that tools like tailscale and so on aren’t open to this sort of risk but I definitely can be wrong
They pushed them out of Italy, which forced mafia to adapt in the US, eventually becoming richer and stronger. A much more powerful transnational mafia returned back to Italy.
What exactly Leonardo Sciascia mean in his "Porte Aperte" is the fascism merely "anesthetize" the mafia rather than eradicating it (gaining temporary Sicilian consent through illusionary repression)
The purpose of democracy is to create stable governance with peaceful transitions of power, so that people feel confident about the future and are willing to invest in long term things that require long term stability. It's not because we think the plebiscite are really wise and effective at governing, they're not, but stability is more important and ultimately more humane than government which is truly effective but not stable in the long run.
Mafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments.
To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t.
I don't think they actually pushed the mob out, but evidently they did succeed in pissing off the mob enough to make the mob happy and willing collaborators with the Allies.
With Putin's Russia transition to authoritarian and recently becoming fully totalitarian, the Russian Mafia of 90s (with the 90s being the most democratic time in Russian history), is pretty much no more. FSB and police have replaced them in the protection and extortion domain. Thus nowdays an arrested colonel of FSB or police may easily have a couple cubic meters of money (euro and dollars) at home, to the envy of many mafioso around the world. Or Chechnja - instead of many smaller (and poorer and less organized) warlords of 90s, now there is only one with personal army of 40000 and exploiting the whole region in the style of the most cruel mafia.
This. We do't have bribery have made the bribery above the table to "legitimize" it and make the useful idiots and enablers simp for it. The "pure" act of lobbying is only the tip of the iceberg. There's all sorts of incestuous revolving door and distasteful but not illegal dealigns between government and the industries government favors.
If I had a nickle for every time I read a "if you don't like your tax dollars being spend on <obvious handout bullshit with negligible positive impact on anything> then you should go vote about it" or "if you do't like the govermet squashing <something> at the obvious behest of <entrenched interest> just vote harder" comment I'd be rich enough to buy an entire train worth of boxcars to put those comment's authors on.
There's corruption, and then there's corruption. Yes, lobbying does look a lot like bribery, but it's a matter of degree, and the difference in the degrees matter.
I don't doubt that a fascist regime can solve problems like organized crime effectively. This is because they don't need to care about human rights or the rule of law. The problem is that once the mob is gone, the fascists stay.
I’m no expert on global crime stats, but it feels like organized crime used to be way more 'in your face.' Back in the day, the countries you mentioned including Eastern Europe, you’d hear about car bombings, public shootouts, and blatant protection rackets. Doesn't the relative disappearance of that kind of chaos suggest things have actually improved? Look at the UK, for instance the fact that average police officers patrol without firearms feels like a pretty strong indicator of a more stable society, doesn't it?
Organized crime doesn't like publicly visible violence. That's bad for business. They only resort to that when they feel they have no other choice. They do shit like bomb judges and get into shootouts with the police when they have to exert their power, not when they feel secure and business is good.
A better measure of organized crime is the sort of crime they profit from, like the general availability of illegal drugs, trafficked women, etc.
But aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime?
It seems to me there always be someone who thinks he can get more money by leaving a group and creating one of their own or some other group trying to expand revenue and territory
> aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime?
Check out the Japanese Yakuza. Yes, they are in decline, but even at the peak of their powers they didn't really do that sort of thing. Gangsters can be pretty private.
Besides, gangsters are not stupid. By now, Hollywood has produced tons of material about the rise and fall of criminals, with increasing realism; effectively, they educated the newer generations into not being as stupid as Tony Montana.
Not necessarily. Intra-gang violence can be done in more private ways, public terrorism is a choice but not an inevitability. Gang splits are also less likely to occur when the government is corrupt and working with some gangs but not others; the intra-gang violence can be disguised as law enforcement action and the overwhelming power of the government makes them a powerful ally that deters competition from even trying.
People lose touch with reality when life becomes too rich and comfortable, and they become too focused on security. You miss all the other corrosive influences on society.
I've travelled the entire United States, multiple times over, and seen quite a bit of Europe and South America, and I'm in Colombia now.
Latin America, and Colombia in particular would be far more of a "narcostate" according to the popular Northern definition - but perception often isn't reality.
I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well. The fabric of society functions pretty well - health care and healthy food is far more available, far less conflict with government apparatuses (try walking into a DMV anywhere in the states, vs. walking into a government office in Latin America - I think you'll find it enlightening).
The security-obsessed mindset in the United States and Europe leads people to want to stamp out the mafia and cartels, but if you look at the actual outcomes I think it's pretty clear that that approach fails in the long run. Look at Mexico for the worst example of what can happen - being next to the United States the pressures have been high, and it hasn't worked, and cartel violence is absolutely ludicrous.
When people have more of a "live and let live" approach, things tend to stabilize in unconventional arrangements that are on the whole much less toxic to society. So Colombia, which does have cartels, doesn't have the same level of warfare or violence that affects the average person as Mexico does - where you'll regularly see a half dozen army/swat guys on patrol in a pickup with M-16s. Even so, you don't feel the same level of tension about that in Mexico vs. seeing a LEO presense in the United States, where that often means outright harassment for the populace.
There's a lot more to having a functional society than just eliminating elements that run contrary to "popular order".
> I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well.
with all the respect but what a naive paragraph. i suggest you to go away from touristics places or get into a poor part of any big city in Latin america. the stuff is nasty. what you are comparing is relatively stable rural families that would be an akin to a rural medium class on the USA... you can almost say in 100% of the cases a medium class North American is equivalent of someone from the upper class here. in term of goods/comfort, not work. and if you still romantize as a traveler these poor communities on the backcountry, i suggest to try a week or 2 of their work. just take the routine of a +40 y/o man to check what being 'medium class' is about. being on the hunger line with a bare house is poverty and Latin America has many examples
Have you seen the poorer parts of the United States? Or walked around the Tenderloin? Or seen what meth has done to parts of the rust belt, and the farming communities that have been hollowed out and eviscerated across the midwest?
you are comparing a marginalized demographic against people who belong to the middle class on Latin America. it's totally out of sense. we also have cracolandia and favelas and people dying of diarrhoea and dying of hunger in some regions.
please, don't visit a country with probably tourist type of visit and sum up a whole continent on socioeconomics or whatever category your empirical sociologic observation was
Ok, if you're actually from Latin America, I should apologize - I don't mean to say that those kinds of issues don't exist (and actually, I have seen some - Honduras) - I often assume I'm talking to someone from the states, and Americans have gotten insular and really out of touch, and most have no idea how much things have changed over the past 50 years.
That said, I'd rather live in middle lower class Latin America that Estados Unidos any day. The food is probably going to be better - too many places in the States Walmart is the only practical option now - health care won't bankrupt you, and people in Latin America are almost universally better educated and less depressed on social issues.
And I think a lot of that can be traced to a culture that's a bit less authoritarian, because people understand the history of why that doesn't work. Just going to war with the Mafia or the narcos is a trite answer, but it usually doesn't solve things in the long run.
Edit - also, you really should compare the poorer parts of the big cities you're talking about to Detroit or New Orleans or the Tenderloin. In my experience, people in Latin America can also have a skewed perspective. The world is a big place.
Why did your comment omit the American company that thought it’s a good idea to buy it? Do you think it implies something about all American companies?
I think this definitely an improvement to consider, but when comparing I think that big number, i.e. statistics are the only thing that matters. Some human could detect the pattern and come to full halt another human driver could be speeding while texting
No, it doesn't. For example, you could use an AI agent just to aid you in code search and understanding or for filling out well specified functions which you then do QA on.
To do quality QA/code review, one of course needs to understand the design decisions/motivations/intentions (why those exact code lines were added, and why they are correct), meaning it is the same job as one would originally code those lines and building the understanding==quality on the way.
For the terminology, I consider "vibe-coding" as Claude etc. coding agents that sculpts entire blocks of code based on prompts. My use-tactic for LLM/AI-coding is to just get the signature/example of some functions that I need (because documents usually suck), and then coding it myself. That way the control/understanding is more (and very egoistically) in my hands/head, than in LLMs. I don't know what kind of projects you do, but many times the magic of LLMs ends, and the discussion just starts to go same incorrect circle when reflected on reality. At that point I need to return to use classic human intelligence.
And for COBOL + AI, in my experience mentioning "COBOL" means that there is usually DB + UI/APP/API/BATCHJOB for interacting with it. And the DB schema + semantics is propably the most critical to understand here, because it totally defines the operations/bizlogic/interpretations for it. So any "AI" would also need to understand your DB (semantically) fully to not make any mistakes.
But in any case, someone needs to be responsible for the committed code, because only personified human blame and guilt can eventually avert/minimize sloppiness.
You 100% can use it this way. But it takes a lot of discipline to keep the slop out of the code base. The same way it took discipline to keep human slop out.
There has always been a class of devs who throw things at the wall and see what sticks. They copy paste from other parts of the application, or from stack overflow. They write half assed tests or no tests at all and they try their best to push it thought the review process with pleas about how urgent it is (there are developers on the opposite side of this spectrum who are also bad).
The new problem is that this class of developer is the exact kind of developer who AI speeds up the most, and they are the most experienced at getting shit code through review.
Because the question almost always comes with an undertone of “Can this replace me?”. If it’s just code search, debugging, the answer’s no because a non-developer won’t have the skills or experience to put it all together.
That undertone is overt in the statements of CEOs and managers who salivate at “reducing headcount.”
The people who should fear AI the most right now are the offshore shops. They’re the most replaceable because the only reason they exist is the desire to carve off low skill work and do it cheaply.
But all of this overblown anyway because I don’t see appetite for new software getting satiated anytime soon, even if we made everyone 2x productive.
The article you linked contains literally nothing supporting your accusation. Instead, it talks about an investigation targeting the aid recipient:
>The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals
I guess it is to a degree unavoidable - ukrainian units are using a lot of crowdfunded starlink terminals on the front, so even if you geo fenced usage only to the virtual cells outside of Russia controlled territory, you would also disable ukrainian sets at the front. So if Russians smuggle sets from other countries, they might not be really easy to tell from the "good" sets crowdsourced by the ukrainians and used at the front.
As for use in long range strike UAVs I'm sure ukrainian units have specially registered units that will work anywhere but again, Russian long range kamikaze drones you have a smuggled unit that only activates once on ukrainian territory and be used for terminal guidance or reconnaissance. By the time the system spots a new terminal moving quickly in the wrong place the thing would have rammed into a civilian building somewhere.
Could this be a self-inflicted bug? In that case, the broader point still stands: cloud providers can cause outages that are outside your direct realm of responsibility.
Your VPS server and your data center and the ISP your data center uses and the AS system your ISP uses all can cause outages outside your direct realm of responsibility.
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