odd_primes
1d ago
There is a line in the sand for collaborating with a foreign invader to depose your government and occupy your country, which comes with unavoidable mass murder and atrocities. For Afghanistan, the death toll is estimated at around 200,000, along with the displacement of millions. The government actively trying to genocide you certainly crosses that line. The government enforcing a strict interpretation of Islamic law? That's a lot more questionable. Even a shitty government is often better than a foreign occupation and a low-intensity insurgency. Collaborating means obtaining a personal benefit from and enabling a process that imposes mass suffering on one's countrymen. I think the willingness to do so should be considered an anti-signal when it comes to citizenship, and certainly not an automatic qualification.
odd_primes
2d ago
The incentives seem misaligned when we reward our collaborators for failure. We spent decades and tens of billions of dollars training the ANA only for them to surrender practically without a fight. Giving them the prospect of an escape route to the US likely weakened their resolve rather than strengthening it. It also doesn't seem like the sort of behavior you'd expect from people who genuinely believe they will be executed or harshly persecuted by the new government.
I can see making an exception for rare cases that demonstrate remarkable courage or character as a PR strategy, but extending it to just about any collaborator is completely misguided.
odd_primes
2d ago
The program was not limited to translators, and Scott acknowledges that with "eg as translators". Anyone who worked for the American or coalition forces for at least 12 months can get a special immigrant visa.
Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck? When they swear their oath of citizenship to the United States, promising to bear arms on behalf of the US when required by law, and support and defend the Constitution, why would we believe them?
odd_primes
3d ago
The ones I know seem pretty normal. But they spend the vast majority of their time on site with clients, so that likely insulates them from the corporate culture.
odd_primes
9d ago
Often creditors won't even bother to show up for the bankruptcy hearing and it just gets rubber-stamped. Eg. if someone has $50k in debt split across five different credit cards, it's just not worth a lawyer's time to try to squeeze a few thousand dollars out of the person of which the creditor would only get a fifth.
Depending on the state there are also a bunch of exemptions. For example Alex Jones got to keep his multi-million dollar house under the Texas exemption for a primary residence, despite having an outstanding judgement of over a billion dollars.
odd_primes
12d ago
I have been getting 5-10 second page loads and intermittent 504s as well. It isn't completely broken, but it's definitely annoying and I could see it impacting site usage.
odd_primes
14d ago
odd_primes
20d ago
The real-life version of James Bond would be a bunch of British bureaucrats sitting in meetings for months, punting a decision down the road until a disaster strikes and they are forced to announce that the perpetrator was on their radar the whole time. Meanwhile James Bond becomes a depressed alcoholic doing a desk job and waiting for retirement. High-agency people working in a gay and retarded bureaucracy ruins suspension of disbelief. They either find a new job, or stop being high-agency.
odd_primes
24d ago
Isn't the point of the telepresence operators to help generate training data for complex tasks? Like it's the same idea as autonomous vehicles: first have the human operator in control and record data with sensors, then progressively shift tasks over to an automated system with a human overseeing the task, with the human only intervening where necessary. This works even better with telepresence since the human can just remote into a robot that gets stuck, fix it, and move on to another robot with a different edge case.
This model sounds plausible to me, but I'm not involved in the robotics space, so I'd be curious to know what you think.
In terms of the safety aspect, I'd be much more concerned about the customers than the operators. The human operator can always just take off their headset if they are being harassed, while the customer cannot. And there are pretty obvious issues with having a roving camera controlled by a human operator in someone's home, like the scandal where gig workers for Irobot posted pictures online of customers on the toilet. It turns out that they were shipping images back to a contractor for data labelling. That seems like the much more obvious failure mode for the Neo.
odd_primes
28d ago
One of the key figures behind O9A, 764, Atomwaffen, and other offshoots is a FBI informant who runs an extremist literature publishing company. You have to wonder how many people he radicalized over the years, and what percentage of them the FBI managed to apprehend before they committed a serious crime.
The key evangelical for O9A, the figure who facilitated this macabre wedding of apocalyptic death cults, is Joshua Caleb Sutter, a 41-year-old ex-convict, prolific satanist, publisher of manuscripts advocating murder, torture, rape, and child abuse — and a paid FBI informant since 2004.
Sutter’s influence on 764 is readily apparent in the facts surrounding some of the group’s most violent participants, particularly the possession of O9A texts published by Sutter’s Martinet Press imprint, tattoos and flags of the Tempel ov Blood’s insignia, and his consistent promotion of it on social media and in newer publications. Alleged members of the exploitation network include Angel Almeida, who is currently facing a maximum penalty of life on federal charges of coercing a minor to commit sexual acts and possession of CSAM and a firearm, and a Romanian national convicted of possessing and distributing CSAM and had Tempel ov Blood indicia or tattoos of the group's trident emblem.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dangerous-exploits-of-an-extremist-fbi-informant/
No. I just don't think they are demonstrating qualities that would make them uniquely valuable citizens, worthy of being fast-tracked through a special process. We have plenty of carrots and sticks for dealing with collaborators: money, status, security... And if we want our local collaborators to be effective, they should be invested in the success of our effort for the long haul. If their plan is to be on an evacuation flight out, why not staff the army with soldiers who only exist on paper, and rob the treasury blind?
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