NYT says this switch to pagers has been recent, after the Oct 7 attacks last year, when Hezbollah suspected that Israel was spying on the cell network, and using it to locate targets for strikes. So all these pagers got distributed to Hezbollah-affiliated people in short order . This system doesn’t use commercial networks, and has been called a “closed” network by the NYT.

If all that is true, then that means anyone with one of these closed-network pagers got it from being involved with Hezbollah in the first place.

It was, until the mods got rid of it

(Nvm, it is still there, I forgot I blocked the loser)

NYT has a link up which it claims has been verified. It is a video of someone at a market who had one of these in their messenger bag. The video shows a decent size explosion, which blew a big hole in the bag and knocked the guy to the ground.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news/44771255-fd1d-5028-8228-aff0ca5b8139

I doubt you could make an explosion that big with a AA battery. They must have planted the stuff in some massive supply chain hack.

Alternatively, they spend so much of their time listening to bots on the Internet that only other bots make sense to them.

Bullshit. AI are not human. We shouldn’t treat them as such. AI are not creative. They just regurgitate what they are trained on. We call what it does “learning”, but that doesn’t mean we should elevate what they do to be legally equal to human learning.

It’s this same kind of twisted logic that makes people think Corporations are People.

What’s better is that, thanks to Elon Musk, “STINKY” is the default name for its Starlink wifi. These people didn’t even change that.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-starlink-wifi-stinky

Except the one who gets the Nobel Prize for proving it

Cybermen? Daleks? The Slitheen?

I think OPs point is that if Indy was burrowing a hole in the desert, and some random started talking to him, Indy probably wouldn’t respond by punching his way out of the hole.

The PEE market is far less liquid than I would have expected

We all know how this is going to end, right?

He’ll get his fans to buy his shitty token, and maybe even keep custody on his platform. Then if he loses the election, he’s gonna flee to Russia via Venezuela, while pulling the rug out from under all those “investors” and taking it all. Then he will publically state that Harris must have directed the NSA to hack his site. He can live out his remaining time in Russia as a wanna-be oligarch, and Putin will treat him like a leader-in-exile.

I find LinkedIn useful, but absolutely refuse to install the app on my phone. I figure it’s enough to give them access to my contacts and resume to monetize, they don’t need my location also.

Whenever I get an email notification that I have a LinkedIn message, I check it the next time I am at my desktop. Then, without fail, after I check it they send me a follow-up email reminding me that “LinkedIn is better on the app!”

That just reinforces the idea that I will never, ever install their app.

Monero has the additional draw for people who want their transactions really private, not just pseudonymously private. And the fact that some of those private uses may be unseemly I think keeps the VC money out of it. Which is a good thing.

You are much more likely to spend Monero because nobody expects it to get to $1000 or higher unless all of crypto goes up as well. So it is much more likely to get a robust transaction infrastructure.

I honestly think that if the price of Crypto weren’t so darn high, a better ecosystem would have developed around it and it would at least still be useful for payments. But since it is so high, anyone who has any crypto would be nuts to spend it.

Some people hold up the pizzas bought with 10000 BTC as some sort of cautionary tale, because if the guy had held on to the BTC he would have hundreds of millions of dollars right now. But not only was 10000 BTC only worth the price of two pizzas then, nobody back then really knew where the project was going. Certainly no one thought one BTC would ever be worth even $1000 unless BTC transaction adoption really took off. But here we are.

(Plus, I doubt the guy spent his only Bitcoin on pizza for someone else. Someone who had 10K BTC to spare in 2010 likely had a lot more, too. He is probably not eating instant ramen unless he wants to.)

I was originally interested in crypto because I wanted to know how it managed to make truly decentralized, permissionless, peer-to-peer transactions possible. After I learned about how it did all that, I also learned three things:

• decentralized transactions are useless when so much of our economy leverages centralized transactions built around existing payment systems.

• permissionless transactions are useless when governments are ultimately in control of payments, and have the right to restrict certain payments regardless of how they are made.

• peer-to-peer transactions are useless when the currency is in so much investment demand that the price spikes, and nobody wants to spend it because it’s a StOrE oF vAlUe (and because of the tax implications)

So the crypto movement demonstrated it is possible to make a platform to transact on that is free of any reliance on any intermediary, but in practice so much of our existing commerce relies on intermediaries that removing all of them causes more problems.

I hope they paid in Dogecoin

I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy

True, the Genesis Block is fixed, but it’s speculated that Satoshi did most of the mining during Bitcoin’s initial experiment. I have seen estimates online that the first 22k blocks were mined almost exclusively by Satoshi, all to different BTC addresses, 50 BTC each. Worth practically nothing back then but worth over 2.5M today. Every 10 minutes or so, Satoshi found another one.

If whoever invented Bitcoin is still on this earth, they have a bit of a conundrum. Since we can track all transactions, and we know roughly how long Satoshi was mining the first bitcoins before other people got involved, those early accounts are sitting on over 1 million BTC. Even after today’s dump, that’s still over $50 billion. And for reference, the Koch family is 25th on Forbe’s infamous list, estimated to be worth about $56B. So that person is one of the richest people on the planet.

However, those coins continue to remain unspent. And once they are moved in any transaction, the entire world will know. That leads to an inherent assumption that those 1M coins (out of 21M that can ever exist) must be irretrievably lost (due to their private keys being deleted), so most have taken that out of the active supply when estimating BTC value. Once they are moved, the price will probably crash – at least 5%, but more likely much more than that. He is among the richest people in the world on paper, but if he moves any of it his wealth will collapse.

However, one doesn’t have to move coins to prove they own them. Anyone with the private keys could cryptographically sign a message saying “I am Satoshi” with one of the early keys and immediately have 100% credibility. The fact that this hasn’t happened means that those keys likely not longer exist. (I, personally, think Hal Finney took those keys to the grave with him, and Craig Wright is a big fat liar.)

Maybe we don’t need a Bitcoin emoji, but we absolutely need a Doge emoji.