I recently discovered that the skeleton wears a size 5XL t-shirt, so we've got a whole wardrobe now.
Today in ACAB
I can't stop thinking about this chart.
The proper way to understand your local police department is not as "Law and Order" but as "The Sopranos". Their goal is to amass money and influence (and with those, impunity) while doing as little work as possible.
Every time the cops get a raise without accountability, the president of their Police Union [sic] deserves everything they are paid, because they have delivered on the job they were hired for.
SFPD has effectively been on a work stoppage since the George Floyd protests. This is not a staffing problem; they didn't suddenly lose that much staff. The whole idea of hiring more cops without accountability for the ones we have is nonsense.
This is no "trend". Chesa Boudin was elected in Jan of 2020 and (according to my one remaining sfpd friend) the work stoppage started when he announced he would prosecute that cop who shot the guy through the window while he was running away - on his 3rd day on the job.
So, they basically got together with a bunch of people and started a recall campaign, and stopped arresting shoplifters. Then, when Jenkins was "elected" she promised there was no quid-pro-quo, and then the cops suddenly tripled shoplifting arrests and then she let the arrested cop go, saying the arresting officer didn't mean it - and he later sued her for defamation (because he never said that) and got a private settlement, because the suit vanished.
Honestly, I never thought this city was corrupt (at least not too much) until I watched that all go down.
Even if you HATE and DESPISE that Chesa guy, when cops don't arrest people intentionally, in order to get rid of an elected official, to free their buddy, that's really bad.
When people say "defund the police", the following is exactly what they are talking about:
At the very least, hire not-cops to handle a lot of generic duties that we don't need someone who desperately wants to be a soldier rather than a "peace officer".
I got in a simple bike accident and I was surrounded by 4 heavily armed cops in bullet proof vests, loaded with guns and extra clips and bear spray and batons, their police cars loaded with weapons and bullet proof glass with bars across the rear windows making a portable prison.
If I wasn't a white male, I'd have been pretty damn scared. And these guys were supposed to help? Somehow?
All to fill out a simple police report that my 15yr old could have done faster. For almost a fckin HOUR they stood around.
And every single time there is any kind of vote, they ask for more money and authority.
People call the suicide hotline: cops get sent. People call about a homeless dude with no pants: cops get sent. People call for a wellness check: cops get sent. It's idiotic. Why the F do you send a battalion
Tags: big brother, bike, conspiracies, doomed, firstperson, sf, stormtroopers
Just got my PAC mailing from PlutocracySF
Wow, lots of press today on The Klept's attempt to buy the San Francisco elections!
First a glossary, for those of you who might not be well-versed in San Francisco's political clade. For historical reasons, it is impossible for a Republican to get elected in this city, so all the Republicans register as Democrats and call themselves "moderates". What they actually are is "neoliberals", or, if you like, methane-breathing space zombie free-marketeers. The people to the left of them call themselves "progressives". And "centrist" means somewhere between "Libertarian" and "MAGA".
Mission Local: What do new advocacy groups really want?
They may be difficult to tell apart, but together they represent a tsunami of political spending unlike any San Francisco has seen before. [...]
"What's new is the scale, the tone, the focus on raw politics and the, for lack of a better word, brazenness of the behavior," he said. "You have many of the richest people in the world behaving like aggrieved and powerless activists ... When the powerful begin to behave as if they're powerless, it can heat up the conversation awfully fast."
Sometimes, the groups' objectives can be described as urbanist [...] But others are straightforwardly conservative, such as weakening police oversight; increasing punitive consequences for drug users and dealers, homeless people and the mentally ill; and increasing the power of the mayor in a city with one of the strongest mayoral systems in the country.
Yes, they want an imperial mayor because these techbro edgelords fundamentally don't believe in democracy. They don't want consensus, or oversight; they want their own strongman in place, and they want the bought to stay bought.
Breed, like the rest of the Willie Brown machine that she inherited, stays bought.
Ross, for his part, said the involvement of the wealthy was damaging in more ways than one. The fact that there are such vast sums of money at play in the city, and the fact that San Francisco is often a "test lab" for new technology industries like short-term rentals, ride-sharing or driverless cars, means local regulations have an outsized importance -- and electoral campaigns doubly so.
"The problem in San Francisco with politics is different from the problem you have anywhere else in the country," said Ross. "Most places, there's not enough money to run effective campaigns. San Francisco is the opposite: There's too much money."
Mission Local: A fun interactive graph showing the interconnected network of these PACs and donors:
While the policies and strategies of the groups are all a little different, they are pulling in the same general direction. This constantly evolving coalition is largely unified by a desire for more police funding, harsher penalties for drug crime, more support for housing developers and housing construction, and the concentration of mayoral power. A huge proportion of the network's cash comes from extremely wealthy tech and real estate donors.
48 Hills: The dizzying web of big-money influence:
Breed's entire re-election campaign at this point seems to be promoting ballot measures that demonize the poor and promote the cops. I suppose that's a strategy. [...]
The San Francisco Democratic Party endorsements are not what Mayor Breed would like. The party backs both incumbent judges (Breed has taken no position, but her allies clearly want to intimidate the judiciary since they have nobody else to blame at this point for crime.) The DCCC also opposes Props. C, E, and F, which are lynchpins of the mayor's agenda and re-election campaign.
That's why the billionaires want to take over the party. In the March primary, the DCCC will have a lot of influence. In the November general, when probably 100,000 voters who pay little attention to local politics will show up to vote against Trump, the Democratic Party endorsements will have a huge impact.
And Breed's allies want to be sure the balance of power shifts, and she gets that nod.
Guardian: Inside tech billionaires' push to reshape San Francisco politics:
"This is a $20bn hostile takeover of San Francisco by people with vested real estate and tech interests, and who don't want anyone else deciding how the city is run," he said, referring to the combined wealth of the most prolific new donors. [...]
The priorities of these deep-pocketed figures have varied. Oberndorf, the hedge fund manager, had been a long-time charter school advocate and major Republican party donor. Larsen, the crypto investor, has been a strong backer of expanding police ranks and surveillance capabilities. Tan, the Y Combinator CEO, has pushed for business policies favorable to crypto, artificial intelligence and autonomous cars.
New Republic: The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming of a Right-Wing San Francisco:
A rogue's gallery of big tech edgelords and their reactionary hangers-on have a plan to remake the city in their own weirdo image. [...]
Tan's more recent drunk tweets also backfired pretty badly. As it turns out, assassination talk gets taken rather seriously in the city where Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were murdered in 1978. Within days, Tan's targets began receiving death threats in their mailboxes. "I don't give a fuck," Tan had declared during his tweetstorm. But he soon changed course, deleting his alcohol-fueled rage posts and hiring a crisis P.R. firm to help with damage control as the negative headlines erupted. A mandatory show of contrition was seemingly ordered: "I am sorry for my words and regret my poor decision," he said in a statement.
It was a terrible first impression to make on voters, most of whom had probably never heard of their city's new self-anointed political king until he became so flamboyantly unhinged and flew off the handle. [...]
Tan and fellow tech barons have promised to invest up to $15 million in local races. Tech-funded front groups are rallying support for a slate of anti-progressive candidates who promise swift action to solve crime, homelessness, and drug addiction. They frame their politics as "moderate," but the terms "reactionary" and "right-wing" often fit better. Their policy wish list reads like a Republican platform: more police funding (along with a repeal of police reform and criminal justice reform); a return to the "war on drugs" (with an emphasis on jailing homeless drug users); a rejection of harm reduction strategies like overdose prevention (in a city where 806 people died of overdoses last year); and the billionaire-funded expansion of mass video surveillance. [...]
If Tan's vision aligns with Musk's, then he's clearly not trying to incubate a centrist revolution. No, this is a decidedly extreme brand of politics, though it's not exactly innovative. Tech bros like Tan think they are reinventing whole systems, conjuring terms like "effective accelerationism" to describe their philosophy. But the ancient Greeks already put a name to their core ideas over 2,000 years ago. For example, there's plutocracy, or rule by the wealthy, and autocracy, rule by dictatorship.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, corporations, doomed, firstperson, sf
Current Music: Elohim -- Fuck Your Money ♬
The Billionaire Who Wants To Live Forever Has Long Covid
Specifically, covid wrecked his lungs:
Bryan Johnson is a 46-year-old tech bro who cashed out a few years ago and now spends all his time trying not to die. He has been interviewed by most mainstream news outlets where he has documented his extreme and bizarre quest for immortality. From a story in The Guardian:
"He rises at 4.30am, eats all his meals before 11am, and goes to bed -- alone -- at 8.30pm, without exception. He ingests more than 100 supplement pills daily and bathes his body in LED light. Two of the three meals he eats every day are exactly the same: boiled broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms and garlic, nuts and seeds. He takes 54 pills in the morning, and the rest in between skin treatments and red-light therapy. He doesn't drink alcohol, and doesn't go out in the evening. He experimented with injecting himself with blood plasma from his 18-year-old son Talmage."Yet apparently none of the journalists at The Guardian, Time Magazine, the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post or many others who have interviewed him ever thought to ask if he had ever been infected with the pandemic virus. In a pandemic. [...]
Today, for whatever reason, in response to a tweet I wrote about research showing covid ages a person biologically, he admitted a mild infection in November 2022 (months before those interviews) stripped him of 15% of his lung capacity.
A 15% reduction in lung capacity is no joke.
This is a guy that tweets about every other health gain he says he is making. Most recently he has boasted he reduced his sperm age from 57 to 42.
Last summer he said he had reduced his epigenetic age by 5 years and that he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old (which doesn't appear to square with a 15% capacity reduction). [...]
My guess is, if you're building a career around hacking every organ and bodily function to make it younger, admitting a virus has crushed your lungs in spite of all the supplements, sacrifices and hacks really ruins the vibes.
When I read the headline I assumed this would be about Thiel, but alas, no.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
"Into the garbage chute, Flyboy."
Gomi-Pit Bar:
Patrons came to enjoy the strange experience of tasting local beer and cocktails -- made using honey-soaked mushrooms or locally harvested vegetables -- while taking in the sight of garbage being sorted and prepared for incineration.
Burn Robot Burn!
Now, if I were AI, I might get the feeling that humans don't think you're particularly welcome on those streets. Just sayin'...
That they took it out with fireworks is just... *chef kiss*. Don't fuck with Chinatown!
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Tags: corporations, doomed, grim meathook future, pranks, robots, security, sf, sprawl
Tamper-Evident SOMA Nature Walk
Anyone know what these things are? They are recently stuck to nearly every sidewalk hatch on Folsom. Obviously they're tamper-evident seals, but my spidey sense tells me there's some kind of wireless electronics in them.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Report: One in 20 people are sociopaths and all of them play music directly from their phone speakers in public settings
Jen MacIntyre:
"Almost as disturbing as the 100% probability that wherever you see them next, be it a bus, oncology screening waiting room, or hell, even between songs at an elementary school concert, they will be watching a TikTok about how to earn passive income with compost at full volume."
"Sometimes with headphones visibly displayed around their neck," Kenther added with a shiver. "It's terrifying." [...]
"The reality is, you can spot a serial killer using a number of traits -- reclusiveness, meticulousness, violent outbursts," detective Bob Qundy of the RCMP's Serious Crimes Branch. "But any psychological profiler worth his salt will tell you the easiest way is to hang out at a neighbourhood restaurant at the dinner hour and listen for the guy sitting alone at the bar watching an episode of Scrubs right off YouTube.
"Just remember," Qundy added, "Although all sociopaths blast from their phones, not all people who blast from their phones are sociopaths. It's important to remember that some of them are psychopaths -- there's a difference."
Harassing botnets with zipbombs
The idea is this: instead of just blocking IP addresses that hit honeypot URLs, feed them a compressed document that massively expands on their end, making them run out of memory and crash.
This is extremely hypothetical. Maybe they won't actually crash. We can dare to dream, though.
But, for laughs, I decided to try this out on Ye Olde Webbe Syte. It was tricky to figure out how to get Apache to do that, so here's how I did it. I may turn this off, but it was an entertaining exercise.
Using zip, it's possible to fabricate a 42 KB file that expands to 4.5 petabytes, which is a neat trick. Unfortunately, gzip cannot be similarly abused, so you can get at best around 340× expansion. And gzip is your option for HTTP Content-Encoding, not zip. Alas. ( If anyone knows a trick to get a vastly larger expansion ratio out of gzip, lemme know.)
First, create the payload file. I used:
<!DOCTYPE html><HTML><HEAD> All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play ... repeats about 256,000 times for around 10GB.
Compress it with "gzip -n --best" and put the resultant file somewhere on your web site (in my case the compressed file is 32 MB). Now tell Apache to feed that file as-is, but with proper transfer-encoding headers:
<Files ~ "ZIP_PAYLOAD">
Header set Content-Type "text/html; charset=UTF-8"
Header set Content-Encoding gzip
Header append Vary Accept-Encoding
Header set Cache-Control "public, no-transform, max-age=0"
SetEnv no-gzip
</Files>
And finally, the honeypot:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-login.*
RewriteRule .* /httproot/ZIP_PAYLOAD [LAST]
</IfModule>
I have confirmed that this setup is sending the document as-is without decompressing and re-compressing it first, but oddly, every load of it results in an error_log entry saying:
I would recommend against testing this out against my various web sites or you might get your IP address auto-banned as well.
Tags: computers, firstperson, mad science, pranks, security, spam, www
