> We are disappointed that our international participants won’t get to experience the Zambia we have come to know through our planning for RightsCon
This strikes as a bit naive. Like a bunch of kids who saw a Disney movie about Zambia and then decided to go there and have a RightsCon. Have they seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Zambia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Zambia? I could see if they wanted to sponsor an action there or protest or something but it's unrealistic expecting RightsCon to go without issues there. Unless... the whole point was to show that Zambia would never allow this and they just wanted to "expose it".
> I would wager that the people running RightsCon are more familiar with Zambia
One would hope, but their actions don't seem to point to that?
So you might have lost that wager, unless you wagered also that this part of an exposure or performance to highlight the issue. It would be kind of an expensive, round-about way to do then.
If wikipedia are not enough another 10 sources probably not going to convince anyone. That's my wager :-)
> We invested months in building government relationships focused precisely on transparency and mutual understanding, including explicit conversations about the diversity of our community. If this foundation was somehow deemed insufficient, we are left to ask: why was that not communicated to us earlier, rather than only five days before our participants were due to arrive?
> This was our red line. Not because we were unwilling to engage, but because the conditions set before us were unacceptable and counter to what RightsCon is and what Access Now stands for. The manner of the government’s communications process this week also raised serious questions as to the integrity, forthrightness, and value of any future engagement based on good faith
I can't read that as anything but being naive and not being able to read between the lines.
(From one of the toots) > That said, I do not believe humiliation is the ultimate goal of the contributor here, nor venting a frustration. The ideal outcome is probably to acknowledge the risk, reduce the interpersonal heat
I think that’s a very charitable interpretation, and that’s a good attitude in general. In this case though, given that this ended up with all toots and tweets about it, I would suspect notoriety and internet points are at the top of the list of at least some parties here…
Just another Mythos breakout. Excuse us while we airgap the affected DC and send in a team to drive framing nails into every storage device in the building.
I think what someone needs to do is before looking up these names or professions, first define a the category of "sensitive US research" well enough (specific institutions, areas, level of access, seniority, etc) and only after that look at history to total missing persons and then decide if there is more or less of them missing in proportion to the total.
In the US, ageism is allowed as long it doesn't discriminate against older people(45 years old or older I think?). You're allowed to discriminate against youth all you want.
Offering a buyout is in no way discriminatory since it is voluntary. If it was forced buyout, then yes it would be discriminatory
> In the US, ageism is allowed as long it doesn't discriminate against older people(45 years old or older I think?). You're allowed to discriminate against youth all you want.
I think it's 40 https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination. So for 40 or less years + X years worked to be more than 70 they'd have to work there 30 years starting at 10 years old or younger. Granted, some of the decisions I saw Microsoft make do look like they were made by 10 year olds, so maybe there is some truth there.
> Offering a buyout is in no way discriminatory since it is voluntary. If it was forced buyout, then yes it would be discriminatory
Still, what if they offered it based on gender, religious belief, or race? Would that look just as good or bad of an offer.
>Still, what if they offered it based on gender, religious belief, or race? Would that look just as good or bad of an offer.
Those would be illegal. Based on age + tenure is not. Simple as that
But in terms of optics, I think this comes out positively. They're basically letting people retire early with a generous buyout offer that they are not required to take instead of just laying these people off with or without severance, which they'd be within their legal rights to do
Oh, I see. The difference there, I think, is that you're illegally discriminating against men by doing that, which is not allowed. However, by law, you can't illegally discriminate against youth, so it's ok.
"Hey, John. I see here that you didn't volunteer to retire. I admire your dedication to your job and to the company. However, I just got a troubling message from HR about your recent performance/allegations of misconduct/social media postings/<etc insert other BS excuse that HR makes up etc> and I need you to come with me to the board room so that we can sort this out. Don't bring anything with you. Just leave it on your desk. That'd be grrrrreat..."
Going by age, wouldn't that be breaking the law? Can't imagine they'd get more than a slap on wrist for it though, so kind of surprised they even bothered with the offer.
In the US ageism is illegal if you are discriminating against someone for being too old. It is not illegal in the US to discriminate against someone based on how young they are
As far as I know, generally, although different categories have different laws. But it's not illegal to have housing that is reserved for elderly people. It's not illegal to require someone to be 18 or 21 to come into your place of business, etc
Yup. Almost every single time NVD came up with some ridiculously inflated numbers without any rhyme or reason. Every time I saw their evaluation it lowered my impression of them.
Problem is not just NVD issuing inflated scores. That's their workaday MO. They are required to assume the worst possible combination of factors.
The real problem is that CVSS scoring is utterly divorced from reality. Even the 4.x standard is merely trying - and failing - to paper over the fundamental problems with its (much needed!) EPSS[ß] weighting. A javascript library that does something internal to software and does not even have any way of doing auth is automatically graded "can be exploited without authentication". Congrats, your baseline CVE for some utterly mundane data transformation is now an unauthenticated attack vector. The same applies to exposure scoping: when everything is used over the internet[ĸ], all attack vectors are remote and occur over the network: the highest possible baseline.
This combination means that a large fraction of CVEs in user-facing software start from CVSS score of 8.0 ("HIGH") and many mildly amusing bugs get assigned 9.0 ("CRITICAL") as the default.
Result? You end up with nonsense such as CVE-2024-24790[0] given a 9.8 score because the underlying assumption is that every software using 'netip' library is doing IsLocal* checks for AUTHENTICATION (and/or admin access) purposes. Taken to its illogical extreme we should mark every single if-condition as a call site for "critical security vulnerabilities".
CVSS scoring has long been a well of problems. In the last few years is has become outright toxic.
ß: "Exploitability" score.
k: Web browsers are the modern universal application OS
> California's proposed legislation to put the burden of blocking 3D-printed firearms onto printer manufacturers
I can only assume California has solved all its major problems if policing 3D printers is at the top of the agenda. It's like when someone complains their neighbor can afford two yachts and they can only afford one, you know they are doing pretty well if that's their major concern.
> “Some will insist that city-owned businesses do not work, that government cannot keep up with corporations. My answer to them is simple: I look forward to the competition. May the most affordable grocery store win,” Mamdani said.
Well it's interesting enough to try. Are they going to keep the stores open at a loss, that's not really competing then, is it?
If they sell things that are much cheaper, restaurants could start sourcing their food from there, too. Why get your chicken from some supplier if you can buy it from a cheaper government run store at much less.
But then, if these stores are not run at a loss, it means somehow there is this large inefficiency that other stores haven't tapped into. And if I had to guess, grocery stores don't seem like a large margin business, but perhaps that's just my ignorance as it's not something I ever looked into in detail.
Store are low margin businesses, unless they own the walls. In this case, what often happens is that when he retires, the owner keeps the walls but sells the business. The walls are put in an asset portfolio, while the poor bastard who bought the business see their renting cost climbing. And that's not talking about the buying group whose margin grow YoY while the shop margin goes down.
> If they sell things that are much cheaper, restaurants could start sourcing their food from there, too. Why get your chicken from some supplier if you can buy it from a cheaper government run store at much less.
Restaurants already do this. They buy from wholesalers, because they're cheaper than the grocery store.
> Restaurants already do this. They buy from wholesalers, because they're cheaper than the grocery store.
But now grocery stores could be cheaper than wholesalers if there are any subsidies involved or selling at a loss is a thing. Why go to wholesalers when you can camp out with a van by the government subsidized stores when it opens or when delivery comes.
Not saying this is insurmountable, the stores can implement a purchase quota: you get X amount of items per transaction and we take your ID or something. But it opens up that kind of a situation. Like I said, I hope it works, it would be interesting to watch.
It's a question of volume. If they're really going to sell things at a loss, then it should create real demand. If you have that demand, then you're going to start running out of groceries mid-day. At that point, the business sucks because you either have to show up at 10 AM to buy anything, or they start some ridiculous rationing program to prevent people and businesses effectively reselling at market rates, or they make up for their negative margins by increasing their volume and losing even more money.
It's a low margin, high volume business. I'm extremely skeptical that this plan works beyond just being a politically popular way to light money on fire. I say that as someone who actually like Mamdani.
It sort of doesn't matter. The point is that if the goods are being sold below market value then you will either have shortages, rationing, or accelerating losses. This has always been a problem in non-market socialism.
> The idea that Mamdani is going to undercut a low margin business with higher labor costs is just silly.
Why?
Stock store/generic brands. Don't stock 40 variants of Colgate toothpaste that all have the same ingredients and are described separately as "fresh mint", "cool mint", and "mint". Stock more staples than sushi.
I don’t think you understand what I mean when I say “low margin.” The types of products you are describing are the extremely low margin products.
People pay more for the 16 flavors of Colgate because they want to pay more for Colgate… that higher price means more margin for the retailer. By eliminating the higher margin products in an already low margin business, you are basically making the situation even worse.
The only reason why generic brands at stores can end up being high margin for the retailer is because the retailer has literally used their market position to start manufacturing cheaper versions of high margin products on their shelves. Unless NYC want to start manufacturing dryer sheets and toothpaste, that’s not an option for them.
No! That’s ridiculous. New York City is full of businesses (services) that can barely survive and constantly need to get bailed out by the state.
The idea that somehow NYC is going to start operating a for-profit toothpaste company to prop up a grocery store is genuinely absurd. There likely isn't even enough people in NYC to justify the costs of production! We're talking about national and international retailers engaged in these practices... selling to hundreds of millions of customers.
These are very risky endeavors that have bankrupted multiple grocery chains. NYC should not be operating something with that risk profile to simple get cheap consumer packaged goods on the shelves... especially when the business is already extremely competitive and low margin!
It's still a company and a brand, even if it's a private label or white label products. It's still an investment with the potential to lose a ton of money. It's still a business. I still think the idea that NYC's grocery stores are somehow going to out compete stores with much larger volume is just a ludicrous prospect. Especially when they're going to pay their employee's more.
But, maybe it works and I'm missing something. I mean, is it a worthwhile experiment? Sure, but I hope there is a cap on how much money they're allowed to lose before the program is shuttered.
I mean Costco’s a membership club. This is NYC. Of course somebody’s gonna show up with a truck and arb any profitable grocery item if there isn’t rationing.
Not being able to get stuff on a pallet or in a 5 gallon bucket or whatever has its own cost. Hell, not being able to invoice on NET30 or have a supplier or even not having to pick and pack stuff has a cost.
> For example, suppose you edit /mnt/s3files/report.csv through the file system. Before S3 Files synchronizes your changes back to the S3 bucket, another application uploads a new version of report.csv directly to the S3 bucket. When S3 Files detects the conflict, it moves your version of report.csv to the lost and found directory and replaces it with the version from the S3 bucket.
> The lost and found directory is located in your file system's root directory under the name .s3files-lost+found-file-system-id.
Mounting S3 buckets seemed like a great way to make stateless applications stateful for a while, which sounds appealing, especially for agent-like workloads. Handling conflicts like this means you really have to approach the mounted bucket as separate stateful thing. Seems like a mismatch to me.
> trade, then French Navy picked those gold bullions from NY
I couldn’t find any clear news source or academic reference to that event. I see a lot of references on gold buying/selling sites mostly. I would imagine a Fench Navy ship docked NY and loading tons of gold would make quite a stir.
Gold is very dense. 10 Tonnes of gold takes up less than a cubic meter of volume.
Moving tonnes of gold doesn’t look like huge pallets of gold with tarps over them like a James Bond movie. It looks like a handful of supply crates.
I imagine that the French Navy visits NY ports of a regular basis. Pretty normal for Navy’s to sail into the ports of allies during peace time. There would be nothing unusual about a French Navy vessel sailing into NY loading up with some supplies and leaving.
For a country like France it would be on the order of hundreds or a thousand tons. So that’s maybe on the order of hundred trips by delivery trucks at most. Yeah I suppose spread out over a few years it wouldn’t be noticed. At least not by the general public. But since the claim is that this triggered the collapse of the Bretton Woods system it would be documented and referenced a lot more, still.
The gold would be moved by cash-in-transit trucks which have relatively modest payload capacities of 5000-9000lbs today, a bit less in the 60s. 3 tons per truck is probably on the high end.
Was that the case in the 60s as well? I know trucks of that era had much lower capacity than today, even when comparing across class like "half-ton" trucks.
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 set the gross vehicle weight limit for trucks at 73,280lbs. I imagine trucks of the day probably at least came close to that limit?
Yes I understand, that's why I was asking about box trucks of the day. I'll dig into it myself as I am curious now, I've only ever really looked into cab-over bread trucks from that era and those aren't a great comparison either. I was just curious if the GP already knew what 60s era box trucks would have been rated for.
I seem to be having more luck with French language sources, mostly the Bank of France records. From what I can tell the shipping was done mostly commercially with some later by air[1]. Reportedly De Gaulle was frustrated with the speed of change wanted to use the Colbert warship but was dissuaded by the minister of finance.[2]
What happened is the gold got repatriated. I was looking for a source that a French warship docked and started loading thousands of tons of gold.
Your source confirms it as well:
> Involving the French Navy was considered, but that would have blown the operation’s cover. Instead, BdF used ocean liners from the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique
So it was multiple trips and in commercial liners.
It was also by warship that De Gaulle planned to conduct "Operation Empty-the-purse" in 1963, the code name for the repatriation of French gold deposited at Fort Knox in the United States (1). More than 1,150 tons—the result of converting French dollars into gold, a decision made by De Gaulle in response to the lax monetary policy of the United States—were being used to finance a growing trade deficit through the printing of money.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then Minister of Finance, recounts (2): "De Gaulle was getting impatient and asked me at every meeting: 'So, has that gold finally come back?' One day, he told me: 'We need to move much faster: we're going to send the navy cruiser 'Colbert' which will bring back all the gold that's still there.'" “I told him that if we did that, we would alienate American public opinion forever.” Ultimately, De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and French gold returned from the United States in small quantities. Not for very long, it's true. The events of May 1968 and the ensuing monetary crisis depleted the reserves, which fell from 4,650 tons to 3,150 – 1,500 tons had crossed the Atlantic again to defend the franc, which De Gaulle refused to devalue.
Thank you, this helps and clears up my confusion. I just couldn't imagine this kind of an event, a warship loading this much gold, not triggering some media commentary, even mockery or criticism to defend the US establishment.
> Ultimately, De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and French gold returned from the United States in small quantities.
So I think the story about the warship got twisted from a plan or threat to "it actually happened". Doing it in small quantities over a few years was the right way, indeed. Looking back it seems like it didn't make many waves in the news at the time, so Giscard was absolutely right.
Historically, if a ship carrying gold sinks, whoever salvages the gold/loot gets ownership of it. However, if the ship is a warship, the loot belongs - FOREVER - as the property of the nation-state (or their descendants). This has led to some legal battles over nautical salvage in the Atlantic (were those "Spanish Galleons" military or non-military? Hundreds of millions of dollars depends on that answer during some lawsuits in the 1990s) or nautical salvage in South East Asia where artifacts from long gone kingdoms (that didn't reflect borders created centuries after they collapsed) end up in court over what country gets to show them in museums.
So yes, if you need to move national quantities of gold/silver across the ocean, then for legal reasons, it is best to ship it via your navy.
One armored car can carry a ton of gold. If they left and drove to the closest US Navy port, where the French ship would dock. it wouldn't raise eyebrows.
It’s just that they repatriated close to 3000 tons. That’s one long convoy of armored cars, all going to a French warship docked in New York.
Based on some sibling discussion it seems it just never happened. It was multiple shipments, over many years, going over commercial liners. It may have well been armored trucks but they just didn’t all do it at once. It worked well that it didn’t create much of a media uproar.
This strikes as a bit naive. Like a bunch of kids who saw a Disney movie about Zambia and then decided to go there and have a RightsCon. Have they seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Zambia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Zambia? I could see if they wanted to sponsor an action there or protest or something but it's unrealistic expecting RightsCon to go without issues there. Unless... the whole point was to show that Zambia would never allow this and they just wanted to "expose it".
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