bowcoy's comments

Yes. Those are the questions I'd like to see asked. Right now, it is the convenient talking points that Snowden already seems to have a reply for.

Can you really compare yourself to Daniel Ellsberg, when you take a job with the aim of leaking everything you get your hands on (without being able to vet it)?

Why did Snowden download the entirety of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia What abuses of the constitution did he expect to find in a secure data sharing platform? Were these potential abuses of the constitution worth it to leak its ~255,000 user accounts to a journalist who made his boyfriend travel through customs with an undecrypted USB-stick, thereby globally exposing it?

Why did Snowden steal the passwords from his colleagues and clients to do the leaking? Had he already found documents with abuses of the constitution using this method before? And what about the first time he did this? Was this day-to-day exposure to material that required whistleblowing? Or was this an elaborate hunt for material that could eventually, in part, amount to whistle-blowing-worthy, thereby partly justifying your strange snooping behavior?

Snowden fled to Hong Kong (China) -> Russia -> South-America, and then makes it sound like the US put him in Russian exile.

Then, instead of facing justice in the US, he knew, that by handing over unvetted documents to security-unaware journalists, they would end up in the hands of other security agencies. The damage would be akin to having a administrator-level Russian-China spy embedded in the US IC, leaking everything out. So don't make the damage about "some papers published something about 0.001% of the leaks that was of public interest and of no harm".

About the extract in question: I really believe that if Snowden could have deleted all his old moronic internet posts, he would have. He could not figure it out. Talks about writing an easy script, but then goes on to bloviate about some Southpark "the internet should be a place where people can make mistakes" moral.

> I could put together one tiny little script — not even a real program — and all of my posts would be gone in under an hour. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to do. Trust me, I considered it.

And his girlfriend is still suspicious as hell, given that she visited China and Hongkong for months, before meeting up Snowden by 8'ing all the desk jockey looking men on Hotornot.

I don't know, but those in the know are still (allegedly) using them.

> PRISONERS INSIDE THE U.S. military's detention center at Guantanamo Bay were forcibly given "mind altering drugs," including being injected with a powerful anti-psychotic sedative used in psychiatric hospitals. Prisoners were often not told what medications they received, and were tricked into believing routine flu shots were truth serums. It's a serious violation of medical ethics, made worse by the fact that the military continued to interrogate prisoners while they were doped on psychoactive chemicals.

> BZ was invented by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffman-LaRoche in 1951.[5] The company was investigating anti-spasmodic agents, similar to tropine, for treating gastrointestinal ailments when the chemical was discovered.[5] It was then investigated for possible use in ulcer treatment, but was found unsuitable. At this time the United States military investigated it along with a wide range of possible nonlethal, psychoactive incapacitating agents including psychedelic drugs such as LSD and THC, dissociative drugs such as ketamine and phencyclidine, potent opioids such as fentanyl, as well as several glycolate anticholinergics.[6][7] > By 1959, the United States Army showed significant interest in deploying it as a chemical warfare agent.[5] It was originally designated "TK", but when it was standardized by the Army in 1961, it received the NATO code name "BZ".[5] The agent commonly became known as "Buzz" because of this abbreviation and the effects it had on the mental state of the human volunteers intoxicated with it in research studies at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.[5]

> As described in retired Army psychiatrist James Ketchum's autobiographical book Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten (2006), work proceeded in 1964 when a general envisioned a scheme to incapacitate an entire trawler with aerosolized BZ; this effort was dubbed Project DORK.[8] BZ was ultimately weaponized for delivery in the M44 generator cluster and the M43 cluster bomb, until all such stocks were destroyed in 1989 as part of a general downsizing of the US chemical warfare program.

> The U.S. Army tested BZ as well as other "psycho-chemical" agents on human subjects at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland from 1955 to 1975, according to declassified documents.

Then take it up with the justice system (or intelligence), don't blame Epstein for taking the sweetheart deal, or use that deal to justify further punishment. Similarly, when cops avoid jail time for shooting incidents, society should stop referring to them as murderers when they are acquitted (Zimmerman, Yanez, ...). Accept the decisions of the court, or work to improve them. You have no right to play your own judge. Especially in the Epstein case it is common to take allegations as facts, and this is ugly, since a judge has not even rendered a decision (yet, here we are using allegations as justification for societal excommunication).

I would have commended Harvard and MIT for not taking Epstein's money, with the reasoning that he was a scientific lightweight trying to buy academic clout. As of now, it just sounds like damage control. It takes zero courage to join the herd in saying that sex crimes are horrific.

The justice system means that -- after you committed a crime and done your time -- you are supposed to rehabilitate and rejoin society. I feel the horrific crimes cloud our judgment in this regard: Epstein paid the fine, did the time, and came out on the other end. Again, I am not saying it is wrong to forever brand someone as a persona-non-grata, but it is the easy and predictable way out, distancing yourself to save face. Epstein was sick, paid his debt to society, but we deem his crimes unforgivable, and in shutting down society to rehabilitated criminals, we make sure they also do not get a chance to turn their life around for good.

Obama/Kerry did the Iran nuclear talks and did not invite Israel. Israel deems it necessary for survival to know everything and all they can about Iran. So they (and other capable agencies) basically bugged an entire hotel.

> When the talks shifted to a luxury hotel in Vienna, the microwave radiation from the surveillance efforts of competing intelligence agencies was so intense that diplomats had to walk some distance from the venue to use their mobile phones.

The new US administration, like Israel, very much opposes the nuclear deal. Trump may give the Israelis a proverbial "wildcard" to deal with a certain problem in a private conversation with an advisor. Or he, or the new administration start to hold a more favorable view on an Iran deal. Israel needs to know this as a manner of their national security.

They experimented with a wide array of drugs, including LSD, fish poison, and Scopolamine. At first, the CIA was predominantly concerned with (aerosol) weaponization and investigating if dosing an unwitting agent, diplomat, or soldier with LSD could be used to extract secrets. Later they became interested in the counter culture of the 60s (and making sure the Russians were not turning a new generation against its own society/military).

https://fightingmonarch.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/human-dr...

> Among the drugs illegally used by CIA against American citizens are (a) hypnotic sedatives such as amobarbital, aprobarbital, butabarbital sodium, chloral hydrate, methotrimeprazine hydrochloride, midazolam hydrochloride, paraldehyde, pentobarbital, pentobarbital sodium, quazepam, secobarbital sodium, sodium pentobarbital, temazepam, triazolam, and zolpidem tartrate, (b) hypnotics like demerol, desoxyn (combined with sodium pentothal), methyprylon, and pentothal acid, and (c) memory blockers such as acetylcholine, BZ, and scopolamine.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4858612A/en

> A method and apparatus for simulation of hearing in mammals by introduction of a plurality of microwaves into the region of the auditory cortex is shown and described. A microphone is used to transform sound signals into electrical signals which are in turn analyzed and processed to provide controls for generating a plurality of microwave signals at different frequencies. The multifrequency microwaves are then applied to the brain in the region of the auditory cortex. By this method sounds are perceived by the mammal which are representative of the original sound received by the microphone.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

> Only a handful of cases in which scopolamine was used for police interrogation came to public notice, though there is evidence suggesting that some police forces may have used it extensively. 2, 16 One police writer claims that the threat of scopolamine interrogation has been effective in extracting confessions from criminal suspects, who are told they will first be rendered unconscious by chloral hydrate placed covertly in their coffee or drinking water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum

> The United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) experimented with the use of mescaline, scopolamine, and marijuana as possible truth drugs during World War II. They concluded that the effects were not much different from those of alcohol: subjects became more talkative but that did not mean they were more truthful. Like hypnosis, there were also issues of suggestibility and interviewer influence. Cases involving scopolamine resulted in a mixture of testimonies both for and against those suspected, at times directly contradicting each other.

This is a contradiction. You first assume complete market efficiency (assets are priced in) to support that the market is random and unpredictable. Then you say that a hedge funds' payroll is no better than random guessing (something you could scale up without hiring anyone). This means that quants are grossly overpaid (assets don't reflect their true price) and that the trader's market is highly inefficient... That's having your cake and eating it too: a rational irrational market.

And it is a hypothesis that can't be disproven or proven, since, in a round-about way, it concerns non-computable concepts like Kolmogorov Complexity/Randomness (The efficient market hypothesis basically states that the stock market is an optimally compressed computer program, there are no discernible patterns left to reduce the "file" size).

There are numerous tried and tested ways to beat the market, including:

- Have more information than other players - Have better models than other players - Make faster decisions than other players - Have enough energy to perturb the system and predict the outcome (this is the big one that is out of reach of most individuals and non-Physics PhD's).

Survivor bias is of course a very real phenomenon, but like other incomplete information games that can be won, or even solved, algorithmically: Poker, international diplomacy, ..., we would not conflate pure luck with the real skills required to play those games consistently well.

Putting your money in a savings account already gets you 6%-10% depending on how Brazil's economy is doing. Putting your money in real estate gets you 10%-50% depending on the neighborhood. But both of those investments require big/old money, and the younger generation does not have that (not uncommon for a highly qualified engineer or mathematician to live at their parents until they are 28, because they can not afford to rent or buy a apartment).

So, daytrading has become extremely popular. It is the "make 2000$ working from home" style and seedily advertised everywhere. For instance, the night door man at a medium-poor hotel was up all night looking at candle graphs and drawing trendlines. My girlfriends social media is full of influencers who get free money to play and then only report on their winnings. I spoke with a professional gamer who quit university to do nothing but Twitch stream and day trade. He makes 6400$ a month in a country where the minimum wage is 290$ (though cost of living can be on par with the big cities in the US).

The data they used is pretty solid, but then again, if you make serious money with day trading, then you find a so-called "little way" to avoid detection and scrutiny. For instance, it would be slightly more complex to use 20 accounts, vs. just 1 account. You can trade on another person's details.

I think the biggest part of the losses are caused by the hype, and targeting this hype to financially illiterate people, who do not have much money to weather a bad streak. Many ordinary people were also sucked into Bitcoin around December 2017, with taxi drivers investing in fractional BTC, only to see their savings and vacation money drop to 25% of the original value.

Market was not super (but is recovering).

Based on year 2018 numbers, Uber needs to grow their revenue by 9.3%, and reduce their expenses by 6% to book a 0.1B profit. Assuming an average employee expense of 230k per year, Uber letting go 435 puts them 6.66% on the way to profitable expense reduction.