People are far too entitled....

I might be outing my age here with this, but it seems like the past decade has hyper-accelerated people into an expectation of everything being instant, effortless, available 24/7 with no consideration for security, privacy or even just an agreed-upon standard of reasonableness. You have individuals whose lives are subsumed by an seemingly endless flood of constantly updating Amazon and Netflix shows, same-day delivery of anything under the sun made possible by a Rube Goldberg machine of human suffering, sticking home assistants with cameras into their living spaces giving it no second thought over where this video and audio data even goes. As far as the layperson is concerned, nothing fundamentally changed between 2014 and now - things just arrive faster, WiFi is more reliable, your phone camera is nicer, electronics cost less and are more convenient, and if they stop working in 6 months you just throw it away and buy a new one. As someone ostensibly in a service industry role, this makes dealing with people normalized into this mindset, from the office workers across middle management to the top C-levels, an absolute nightmare. You can't deliver on unrealistic expectations shaped by things just magically appearing around someone, and we're still being told that meeting those pie-in-the-sky demands are somehow achievable if we just work hard enough to keep the smoke-and-mirrors bullshit running. We have the ability to spin up several traditional datacenters' worth of resources in a cloud provider with the push of a button. Businesses are slicing 8+ hour workdays into a spiderweb of metrics reported down to second-spanning intervals, and using those to blindly drive decisions based on nothing but next-quarter profit projections. And it's getting faster every year - more content, more resources, more expenditures, throw AI into the mix to crank out (mis)information at a rate that not even current traditional automated systems can keep up with. And we're jammed in the middle, tasked with keeping this collective fever dream operational and secure for the same pay we received 5-10 years ago, in the same 8 hour day we were expected to do a fraction of the work using a fraction of the tools we need today. Technology evangelists will tell you that the rate of automation to allow maintaining, securing and administering these new types of systems naturally grows at the same pace as the innovations themselves, but that's just not true; we have increasingly more impactful threats and larger attack surfaces to deal with using fewer and fewer actual people at the wheel in a continually more centralized and monopolized ecosystem. Profit-chasing and cost-cutting has rendered even the basic premise of all these systems and software being reasonably securable into a laughable concept. I can't be the only one bereft of the impression that all this far from being sustainable and normal. The problem is, it’s not an illusion we can keep up forever. The cracks are already starting to show. We see it in the continually larger data breaches that seem to happen weekly, in the increasingly complex vulnerabilities across endless dependencies, and in the burnout across industries trying to meet impossible demands with shrinking resources and staffing. At some point, the system becomes so stretched that it collapses under its own weight, and when that happens, it’s us - those tasked with holding it all together - who are left to pick up the pieces. That can't be the endgame here. I’m not saying we need to hit the brakes on progress. Innovation is essential, and the technology we’ve created has incredible potential to solve real-world problems. But we need a serious conversation about sustainability—not just in the environmental sense, but in how we use, build, and rely on these systems, and the expectations people attach to them. We need to stop pretending that “faster, more, now” is a goal worth chasing if it means sacrificing security, privacy, or even just a reasonable work-life balance.

I don't know if it's just because of the type of people I hang out with and the line of work I'm in (academia), but I don't actually know anyone who acts like what you're describing. Maybe my parents are the closest, and I think it's just because they're retired and bored. But I think the only time I ever even considered using uber eats was when I was sick and couldn't go to the store, for example. For most people I know, very "normal person" type of people, but poor and intelligent, the markup that comes with all the same-day delivery this, new version of iphone that, is just too high to justify. We share netflix accounts, steal wifi from our neighbors, torrent things, scrounge free food where we can, buy used items, take the bus, get our neetbux even though we're employed, etc etc. Certainly, this is the kind of person that we are constantly encouraged to be by advertising. The customer is always right, after all, and don't you deserve to be waited on by a bunch of independent contractors making less than minimum wage? Companies really want/need people to demand as much stuff as possible. In many ways, all economic growth since the 50s is tainted by the fact that quite a lot of the demand is artificially stimulated. If people only bought things they genuinely want/need, without being manipulated or primed to want them, the economies of most first-world countries would collapse, because they're entirely set up around having a giant class of near-mindless consumers buying as much crap as they can afford (or more). But I think in the modern world, we're seeing a situation where, because the rate of wealth transfer from the middle class to the already wealthy is so unsustainably high, many people act like me and my social circle. Therefore the companies have to exploit their slowly shrinking base of actual customers more. This is probably why every streaming service is full of slop and the ads are getting more and more intrusive, why every game is now buggy garbage with in-game microtransactions that bleed you dry, why the movies are becoming greater in volume with huge "cinematic universes" that ensure you watch as many of them as possible. They're just trying as hard as possible to hook a few whales, because whales will drop as much as I make in a year without a second thought. >We see it in the continually larger data breaches that seem to happen weekly, in the increasingly complex vulnerabilities across endless dependencies, and in the burnout across industries trying to meet impossible demands with shrinking resources and staffing. At some point, the system becomes so stretched that it collapses under its own weight, and when that happens, it’s us - those tasked with holding it all together - who are left to pick up the pieces. That can't be the endgame here. Yup. This happened in many hospitals too -- which despite often being legally "not-for-profit", are for-profit enterprises through and through. Not a lot of people know this, but when covid hit a lot of hospitals laid off nurses and didn't really bring them back, so most hospitals have been operating off skeleton crews for years. Not all is lost. Many nurses have unionized and successfully demanded better staffing from their bosses. It's the kind of thing that cannot be fixed by market forces; the companies have to be *forced* to slow down their gravy train, because the people at the helm couldn't give less of a soykaf about long-term sustainability. Their modus operandi is get in, make money, get out.

>it seems like the past decade has hyper-accelerated people into an expectation of everything being instant, effortless, available 24/7 with no consideration for security, privacy or even just an agreed-upon standard of reasonableness. You have individuals whose lives are subsumed by an seemingly endless flood of constantly updating Amazon and Netflix shows, same-day delivery of anything under the sun made possible by a Rube Goldberg machine of human suffering, sticking home assistants with cameras into their living spaces giving it no second thought over where this video and audio data even goes. Yeah tailored access via Amazon products combined with their low quality dumb downed shows are real service to society. Also not to mention scamazon everyone is like a whole seller of all those chinese sites.

All ponzi schemes fall apart. But maybe it'll work next time for progress' sake!

Nothing like being competent in a competency crisis.

The world is gridlocked into a crappy dystopian system. There's no hope of significant change in our lifetime. I believe the root cause is our limited monkey brain. Capitalism would work if voters weren't retarded and elected a competent government to regulate corporations. Instead we have this Robocop style dystopia ran by megacorps and billionaires, where it's perfectly acceptable to cause suffering and sacrifice human lives to enrich the already wealthy. A libertarian, socialist, communist utopia could also work. And I don't mean the "everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others" Animal Farm flavor. Think of how many people work on creating: - The 50th type of car of this year, with the entire supply chain, including its all-new laggy infotainment system - The many kinds of human-on-human war machines - Marketing material for some sweat shop low quality clothes line - The latest Windows update, functionally still the same as XP, main feature is turning up spying another notch, month after month - Patent troll lawsuits - Slop TV shows All of it is useless, it's wasted effort. With the automation we have nowadays, these workers could fuarrrk off and chill at home with their families, or do something useful like working ONE day a week to scale high quality useful products (food, water treatment, transport, energy, home, entertainment), or do research and development. Not for money, but to better the lives of others. Well, if we'd be smarter and cared about anyone but ourselves. It's kind of funny that we have the tech to do this today, but it probably wouldn't work. It'd get sabotaged by the type of psychos who "need" another zero in the bank's database next to their name, who "need" slave labor to make and operate a private airplane and mansion for them. That, or due to some weird brain hardwired behavior, a lot people can't be happy in a utopia and naturally crave some amount of suffering, like Agent Smith says in The Matrix. Even fascism would work if done smartly. Let's have all the nations play it out (by war or a chess tournament or whatever), winner oversees that everyone who's "inferior" (by whatever metric) doesn't reproduce, the rest can then live in a man-made heaven for millennia. Anything could work, if executed well. It's not the system, it's the greedy sociopaths and the easy to manipulate masses, the combination of which subverts every ideology and turns it into a farce. Oh well, eventually we'll climate change or nuclear strike ourselves into extinction. Fun fact, if just a single nuke is actually launched by anyone, that'll result in the fiery nuclear apocalypse of the Northern hemisphere according to war games, followed by years of below freezing temps killing everything that remains. Also, there are no abort codes for nukes, they can't be stopped by anyone once launched. Insane that this too is considered fine.

>if just a single nuke is actually launched by anyone, that'll result in the fiery nuclear apocalypse of the Northern hemisphere Would that really be the case though? I'm pretty sure all major armies have the means to intercept missiles outside / in high atmosphere. That would include all nuclear powers (except maybe north korea)

>>80587 Got that bit from the book "Nuclear War: A Scenario" by Annie Jacobsen. TL;DR There aren't any working countermeasures, none that the public knows about at least. Even if there was, no system has a 100% success rate and there are a lot of nukes to take out. For context, Russia and the U.S. have about 1500 warheads each, many times what's needed to annihilate each other. Inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the ones that launch from fixed silos, go out to space with rockets, then the payload falls down by gravity (that gravity-only operation is the meaning of "ballistic") and impacts ~25 minutes from launch. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) are even more sneaky because they can launch close to shore from unknown locations and impact in 7 minutes when launched from 1,000 kilometers [621 miles]. They are fast af, traveling at Mach ~5-15, ~4,000-13,000 miles per hour. Spamming relevant paragraphs from the book: The goal of the SBX [pic related] is to provide U.S. interceptor missiles with precise data about where an attacking nuclear warhead is in the atmosphere, in Midcourse Phase flight. Mike Corbett, a retired air force colonel who oversaw the program for three years, had by 2017 already predicted it would fail. “You can spend an awful lot of money and end up with nothing,” Corbett told the Los Angeles Times in 2015, “billions and billions [were spent] on these [SBX] programs that didn’t lead anywhere.” [David Willman, “The Pentagon’s 10-Billion-Dollar Radar Gone Bad,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 2015.] In the history of warfare, the goal in battle is to meet attacking sword with defensive shield. The intention of the interceptor missile system is to shield the continental U.S. from a limited nuclear attack. “Limited” is the key word here because the total number of interceptor missiles is forty-four. As of early 2024, Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, the majority of which are on ready-for-launch status. (China has a stockpile of more than 500; Pakistan and India each have around 165; North Korea has around 50.) With forty-four missiles in its entire inventory, the U.S. interceptor program is mostly for show. The kill vehicle hurtles through space at a velocity of around 15,000 miles per hour. It opens its infrared “eyes” and tries to locate the target. Tries to find a signal from the warhead’s warm surface on an otherwise dark background of space. Once the kill vehicle locates what it thinks is the warhead, attempting to destroy it is an even more radical challenge. To destroy the warhead as it hurtles through space, the kill vehicle must rely on its own propulsive energy and an extremely precise, physical collision. There are no explosives involved in this interception. This is where the “akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet” statement applies. There are significant problems. We know from the history of the interceptor program that its highly scripted tests have been riddled with failure. In missile defense terms, this means a disastrous success rate. In 2017, the tests plummeted to below a 40 percent success rate. Perhaps embarrassed by what it called “design flaws,” the Missile Defense Agency announced it was giving the kill vehicle program a “strategic pause.” That the agency would instead focus on a new system it calls “next generation.” But as of 2024, all forty-four interceptors remain on ready-for-launch status, despite the unacceptable flaws. Russia and the U.S. have about 1500 warheads each, many times what's needed to annihilate each other. ICBMs go out to space with rockets and impact ~25 minutes later. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) are even more sneaky because they can launch from much closer from unknown locations and take just minutes until impact. To defend against short-range ballistic missiles, the U.S. Navy has developed its Aegis program, an anti-ballistic missile system mounted on navy Aegis cruisers and destroyers at sea. Unlike the faulty interceptor program, Aegis missiles have a shoot-down record of 85 percent. But these battleships are out on patrol in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and in the Persian Gulf—defending America’s NATO and Indo-Pacific partners from attack. They are thousands of miles away from being anywhere near shooting range of America’s West Coast. The Pentagon also operates a land-based missile defense program called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system—one that fires anti-ballistic missiles from launchers mounted on flatbed trucks. But as with the Aegis missile defense systems, all of America’s THAAD systems are presently deployed overseas. Years back, after North Korea first successfully fired a KN-23 missile, Congress discussed setting up THAAD systems along America’s West Coast, but as of 2024 has not done so yet.

>>80502 Not much point in worrying about it really. The world is shaped by people with power and money not us. Best you can do is decentralize and insulate yourself from the madness. Be the change you want to see, flex that you're a weirdo who does things differently. Ignore the herd and make your own life better so you don't have to see any of this drivel. Modern living and the consumer lifestyle is extremely overrated but you'll never really be able to explain this to people. they have to look at how you live and then wonder why you choose to do it that way to begin the train of thought that maybe their life could be different from what it is now, where they aren't even that happy.

>>80587 >I'm pretty sure all major armies have the means to intercept missiles outside / in high atmosphere. This is it not true at all, in fact the very idea of ICBM defense has been a long-running scam by the weapons industry. Ted Postol has been dismantling this bullshit as a deluded fantasy for decades, but somehow politicians and their weapons industry boosters keep managing to trick the public into blowing large sums of money on a technology that has consistently failed to demonstrated effectiveness when tested. All a re-entry vehicle needs to do is deploy a large number of cheap reflective decoys and it completely overwhelms any kind of interception system and there is still no practical means of overcoming this. https://undark.org/2017/03/27/five-questions-ted-postol-missile-defense/

>>80588 Annie Jacobsen has a clear Western bias and it comes out in her careless repeating of US military claims. Aegis cruiser missile defense may be able to shoot down a single missile ''with advance warning and detection'' to achieve that touted 85 percent shoot-down record, but this is always in carefully orchestrated scenarios designed to make the weapons demonstration succeed. In the real world where they're unlikely to have advance warning they have to do what is known as a "blind launch" to have any hope of accomplishing anything in time. To attempt any kind of targeting in this process they must rely on radar that is trivially defeated by small radar decoys--we're talking about an extra pound of mass launched with the IBCM to deploy thousands of small metal wires on re-entry, it is that trivial. Here's another source exposing this scam: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2010-05/flawed-and-dangerous-us-missile-defense-plan Note that the practical ineffectiveness of Aegis missile defense was the case already 15 years ago, ''before'' the development of hypersonic missiles. It's even more laughable now.

>>80588 >>80599 >>80602 So we're fuarrrked if someone decides to use a nuke. Good to know

>>80604 Not only that, the systems touted as "missile defense" that the US has been shoving into eastern Europe vassal states to sabotage the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty since the 2010s can be fitted with short-range nuclear warheads that can hit Moscow in a matter of 5-6 minutes or less. This means that if Russia detects something on their radar that might or might not be one of these missiles, they have a handful of minutes to decide if it's real and then to decide whether or not to unleash their nuclear arsenal and end civilization as we know it. So here's an example where so-called missile defense actually makes the entire world less safe by raising the alert level of nuclear retaliation. Add in an on-going proxy war on Russia's borders, with a desperate leader who's been begging Washington to allow him to do deep strikes into Russia with medium-range American missiles (necessitating direct American involvement for targeting and guidance), and you have a situation even more precarious than the Cuban Missile Crisis for the past few weeks.

>>80604 By the way, the greatest danger of nuclear annihilation is not that some insane person will decide willy-nilly to use a nuke. The greatest danger is that some kind of mistake occurs, either technical or personnel related, that ends up triggering a massively automated nuclear retaliation system. Nuclear systems have to be massively automated in order to produce convincing deterrence between rival states, but it is this very automation that makes them prone to a catastrophic unintentional nuclear exchange. I strongly recommend reading this book to understand why these systems are in place and how they function.