So we now have a four-way evidence chain - macOS kernel filesystem events, Chrome’s own per-profile state, Chrome’s runtime feature flags, and Google’s component-updater logs - all four agreeing on the same conduct, and the conduct is: a 4 GB AI model arrived on this user’s disk without consent, without notice, on a profile that received zero human input, in a window of 14 minutes and 28 seconds, on a Tuesday afternoon.
You’re right that I oversimplified. Property destruction has always punctuated successful movements, and I shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The Tea Party, sit-ins, suffragette window-smashing. Disruption is part of the toolkit.
Having said that, your three examples all share features that don’t apply here: pre-democratic conditions, no legal redress, and, crucially, organized political infrastructure that the fire punctuated rather than replaced. The colonists had no seat in Parliament, but the Sons of Liberty had been running committees of correspondence for years before the Gaspée burned. The French monarchy hadn’t convened the Estates General in 175 years, but sans-culotte sections were functioning political bodies before they were rioters. Haitian slaves had no ballot, but maroon networks existed for generations before the plantations lit up. In every case, the fire was punctuation on a sentence that was already being written. A Compton warehouse worker has the right to vote, however degraded that channel is, and vastly more material standing than anyone in your three examples. Context matters.
Important to this is this is that in our current context, Chenoweth and Stephan’s data (hundreds of campaigns, 1900–2006) shows nonviolent movements succeed roughly twice as often and are about 10x more likely to produce durable democratic outcomes. That’s not a moral claim, it is a strategic one. The movements that actually built worker power in conditions like ours, 1930s labor, Civil Rights, the UFW, won through disciplined organizing, not arson. The ones that went the other way got the Reign of Terror and Napoleon, or a century of crippling indemnity and isolation. Fire ends things; it doesn’t build them.
Where I think you’re actually right is on voting. “Vote harder” alone is weak. The real lever is organized labor and sustained civic infrastructure, and the U.S. has systematically dismantled both since the 1970s. That’s the fight. Celebrating fires feels like solidarity but functions as content. And content is exactly what the attention economy wants from us instead of organizing.
And when fires have come without that scaffolding, they’ve usually backfired. The 1968 riots after King’s assassination were a human response to grief, but the political result was Nixon’s “law and order” realignment, which has been shaping American politics for almost sixty years. The Weather Underground bombings hollowed out a broad New Left coalition and gave the right a permanent talking point. The 2020 property destruction is the one in living memory: BLM’s public support polled higher before the arson got sustained coverage than it ever did after. The peaceful mass mobilization moved the needle. The fires moved it back. Fire without scaffolding doesn’t just fail to build, it gives the other side exactly the footage they need.
If the fires are a symptom of how squeezed working people are, I’m with you. If they’re being sold as the strategy, I think the historical record and the data both say we lose that way.
And look, the reason I’m pushing on this isn’t to lecture anyone for feeling good about a warehouse burning. I get it. The reason I’m pushing is that the stuff that actually works is boring. Honor a picket line. Donate to a strike fund. Join a workplace organizing effort, you’re legally protected to do that even without a formal union. Show up to a tenant union meeting. Vote in a municipal election where turnout is 18 percent and your ballot is worth ten. None of that trends. None of it feels like solidarity the way a fire does. But it’s the stuff that built the 40-hour week, and dismantling it is what got us here. If the choice is between content that feels like power and organizing that builds it, I’d rather we pick the second one, even when it’s slow.
The ‘7 warehouse fires’ claim is unverified. Only 2-3 can be confirmed, and accounts like @ProudSocialist are framing unrelated incidents as a coordinated uprising. That’s not journalism, it’s narrative-building.
Abdulkarim said on video: "All you had to do was pay us enough to f*cking live. That’s not revolutionary ideology. That’s a 29-year-old warehouse worker who snapped.
Political violence in the U.S. is rising, that’s documented. It’s reaching levels not seen since the 1970s. Meanwhile, overall crime is actually falling. So what we’re seeing isn’t a general breakdown in society. It’s targeted desperation in a country where working people feel increasingly squeezed.
History shows that sustained, organized labor action (strikes, unions, collective bargaining) has done more to improve working conditions than any fire ever has. The most effective ‘anti-capitalist’ movement in American history was the labor movement, and it won through solidarity, not sabotage."
Accounts on the left are celebrating these fires as class warfare. Accounts on the right will use them to paint all workers as dangerous radicals. Both are exploiting real suffering for engagement. Neither is offering solutions.
You don’t need to fabricate a revolution to prove that working people are struggling. A man burned down a warehouse because he couldn’t afford to live on his wages, and that fact alone should be enough to demand change. But celebrating arson isn’t solidarity. It’s spectacle. And spectacle doesn’t pay rent. If you actually care about the working class, put your energy into the things that have historically worked: organizing, striking, voting, and building collective power.
Anything else is just content.
Not sure you would, both are FOSS and if it works I wouldn’t change. Looks like similar feature sets at the core, so unless you want something specific I’d leave it.
Just good to have options.
That strain is now spreading into every corner of the consumer market as prices rise for materials like plastic, rubber and polyester. The impact is so far most evident in Asia, which accounts for more than half of the world’s manufacturing and is heavily reliant on imports for oil and other commodities.
In South Korea, where people have been panic-buying trash bags, the government has encouraged event organizers to minimize use of disposable items. Taiwan has started a hotline for manufacturers that have run out of plastic, while its rice farmers told local media they may hike prices because they can’t get vacuum-sealed bags.
In Japan, the oil crisis has sparked fears that patients with chronic kidney failure won’t be able to get treatment due to a lack of plastic medical tubes used in hemodialysis. Malaysian glove manufacturers say a dearth of a petroleum byproduct needed to make rubber latex is threatening global supplies of medical gloves.
Says the Cheeto & Chief who used questionable AI images in official government announcements?
It’s really worth reading: https://hntrbrk.com/demining-hormuz/ which TWZ references regarding the demining.
The ending is below as I just had to shake my head and slap my face.
The Washington Institute estimated years ago that clearing the Strait of Hormuz of mines could require “up to 16 MCM vessels.” The Navy has seven. Iran has an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 mines and, according to U.S. intelligence in conversations with CNN, still retains “80% to 90% of its small boats and miners.”
The brief covered a recent MCM Advanced Tactical Training program, the final pre-deployment mine warfare assessment for LCS crews.
Some key findings:
Unreliable unmanned systems. Each Fleet-class USV mission requires over four hours of “pre-mission maintenance” and “1.5 hours of GPS/sonar calibration once launched,” according to the presentation. Multiple hunt missions were conducted where the sonar simply failed to record data — and crews didn’t know until the post-mission analysis. This is especially damaging during reacquire-and-identify missions, exactly the kind of work needed to clear a minefield.
Operators have responded by shortening mission times, which defeats the purpose of using unmanned vehicles in the first place. One pre-deployment exercise with the USS Tulsa off the coast of San Diego resulted in a runaway MCM USV near Mexico’s territorial waters that could not be recovered by the mothership LCS. “Literally, the practice minefield I use is 1 mile north of the US-Mexico maritime border, and there’s a good chance that that UUV drifts or decides to go off on its own. I’m going to get demarched by the Mexican government,” said the leader of the U.S. Navy’s Mine Countermeasures Technical Division. The USVs themselves act as a handicap to minesweeping, with a short bandwidth range forcing the mothership LCS to operate near or inside minefields to maintain visual range to the USV’s antennas.
Visual identification doesn’t work. U.S. MCM doctrine requires a camera to visually confirm mines — the AQS-20 has to drive directly over a bottom mine. But even the relatively clear waters off Southern California have defeated this approach. In the turbid, shallow, current-swept waters of the Persian Gulf, the problem would be far worse. The officer’s conclusion: The Navy needs to adopt high-granularity sonar identification, as other navies already have.
Critical single-point failures. The platform lift between mission bay and hangar, the BIT test laptops for the USV/ALMDS/AMNS, the twin boom extensible crane, and the payload handling systems are all single-point failures with no spares or redundancy aboard. If any one of these breaks, operations stop. When describing the deployment arm, the Navy mine countermeasures lead said, “It is a troubling system. It is highly complex for what it does, and when it breaks, I’m out of a job, I’m out of a mission.”
Multi-mission dilution. The LCS was designed as a multi-mission platform. The addition of Naval Strike Missiles and pressure to support visit, board, search, and seize operations means crews have less time to build and maintain MCM proficiency. “So now my ship with an LCS mission package may not necessarily be practicing MCM.” The LCS platform is also being experimented on as a long-range strike platform. The director’s own conclusion: The LCS will always struggle to match a dedicated MCM vessel.
The Michelangelo system uses sensors and predictive algorithms to detect suspicious activity early and enable the most effective response.
I hope they test their AI.
“Mosaic defence” is an Iranian military concept most closely associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), particularly under former commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, who led the force from 2007 to 2019.
The idea is to organise the state’s defensive structure into multiple regional and semi-independent layers instead of concentrating power in a single command chain that could be paralysed by a decapitation strike.
Under this model, the IRGC, the Basij, regular army units, missile forces, naval assets and local command structures form parts of a distributed system. If one part is hit, others keep functioning. If senior leaders are killed, the chain does not collapse. If communications are severed, local units still retain the authority and capacity to act.
The doctrine has two central aims: to make Iran’s command system difficult to dismantle by force, and to make the battlefield itself harder to resolve quickly by turning Iran into a layered arena of regular defence, irregular warfare, local mobilisation and long-term attrition.
That is why Iranian military thinking does not treat war primarily as a contest of firepower. It treats it as a test of endurance.
Can we get Spain’s leader to say Iran is Trump’s Epstein tax on the world. Or any leader? Chants even? Hell by now we should have a billboard top ten about this.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:
In the request, Tri-State and Platte River say they’ve built sufficient solar and wind farms, and no longer need Craig 1. By forcing the power plant to stay open, the plant owners say they’ve been forced to buy coal and invest in maintaining the facility, unnecessary expenses that amount to an “uncompensated taking” of their property in violation of the Constitution.
The U.S. Department of Energy declined an interview request for this story. In an emailed statement, Caroline Murzin, an agency spokesperson, said the U.S. needs vast amounts of additional electricity generation to support domestic manufacturing and the ongoing artificial intelligence boom.
“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, the Energy Department is unleashing energy dominance to reduce energy costs for American families and strengthen the electric grid,” Murzin said.
So you want to keep a coal power plant that even the operators don’t want online, and violate the constitution again, so you can support your pedo-tech buddies and shove AI down our throats?
I thought they like being the lighting rod of dispute, so why would they want to rebut the article?
Really useful article. Rare to read something that actually does a decent job explaining the background from someplace wanting to sell you something.
I see and partially agree with what you mean, but I don’t agree that those actions don’t so anything. Partially it’s having worked for change in Washington and walked away burnt out, that I know how much DC is a bubble that has cascading impacts to everyone.
In some ways yes shutting the government down means services don’t happen, but you are wrong about not getting paid. While they aren’t paid at the time, they have regularly gotten back pay after the shutdown. Some lower level may quit anyway, but often the government job is just to good at a high GS level to really give up, due to the healthcare and retirement. So it’s not easy, but it’s a paid time off.
The real impact is as you mentioned that services aren’t processed. This has a ripple impact across the world due to trade, and finance markets. This in turns puts pressure on politicians to compromise, as a slowing of the economic makes everyone upset, and that is a lever.
So it’s about finding levers that are more than show, like this current “shutdown” as many agencies have already been funded prior to this and the stopgap is likely to get passed shortly, but without longterm DHS funding. Schumer calling it a win, is just for show. DHS will continue, when they could have put their foot down and stopped everything.
Where I agree with you is that the ideal of the conservative movement is to make government small and privatize it. They can only do so much though, as the US federal government is a behemoth, and even what DOGE did–while stuipid, and short sided–barely impacted the overall long term budget. If they were really after shrinking it, they’d cut the military. DOGE claimed they cut around 55 billion, but the senate just passed a 1200 billion dollar budget. And remember the US GDP is 31 Trillion, and the 1.2 Trillion wasn’t all of the budget, just most of it.
I don’t think we need it all, but changes and improvement, especially in governments, tend to be slow and deliberate. Rash acts cause disruptions which have profound impacts, and we’ll see those.
All of which is to say yes, I agree those actions don’t seem like much, but they have more impact than you think.
How about standing for something and sticking to it. One of our senators could filibuster, much like Strom Thurmond did for 24 hours during the civil rights movement.
Or even if you shut the government down for the ACA, you get what you were asking for rather than giving in when it “looks” like you have won the propaganda battle.
Basically they need to put inspiring acts of policy in front of rational reasoned policy, as no one think rational and reasonable is going to work with the Republican Nazis.
“The best they can do is shoot the guy in the back?” That’s not the voice of some liberal commentator. That’s what a homeland security officer told me this weekend, one of over half a dozen who have reached out to express their alarm over the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and beyond.
I’ve listened to the stories and the beefs of immigration officers in Minneapolis across the country, and to a person, they all blame the shooter, one of their own. The major media is stuck on framing the killing of Alex Pretti as some national and partisan battle, highlighting Republicans breaking ranks, the NRA protesting, MAGA wavering, and Chuck Schumer doing whatever he’s doing, but no one is really capturing what the federal law enforcement officers on the ground are thinking. The truth is that they’re fed up and have been for weeks.
They paint a picture that is more Police Academy (or even Reno 911!) than a Gestapo on the march. Yes, they agree that Washington is a huge problem and are uncomfortable with the mission creep that is taking them away from actual immigration enforcement. But internally? Theirs is also a story of gung-ho 19-year-olds, drunken stakeouts, and senior officers disappearing into meetings and all of a sudden needing time off.
…
An ICE agent was even more critical. “Yet another ‘justified’ fatal shooting … ten versus one and somehow they couldn’t find a way to subdue the guy or use a less than lethal [means],” the agent said. “They all carry belts and vests with 9,000 pieces of equipment on them and the best they can do is shoot a guy in the back?”
…
As the meetings are held, the ICE agents and others I’ve talked to say the government versus terrorists narrative is having a tangible (and negative) impact on the ground.
“Lots of people are freaking out,” one ICE agent told me. “Agents are getting seriously paranoid, afraid of being targeted by ‘retaliators.’”
Several agents described receiving briefings about retaliatory threats to ICE inspired by the Minneapolis shooting. “Guys take it really serious, like we are fighting insurgents,” as if Minneapolis is Baghdad, an ICE officer said.
Though all of the federal agents I’ve spoken to this weekend support immigration enforcement, they indeed see the Minneapolis operation as something else entirely — an open-ended counterinsurgency in a faraway land and under an out-of-touch leadership in Washington more concerned with optics than immigration.
“This is a no-win situation for agents on the ground or immigration enforcement overall,” a Border Patrol agent said in the private group chat shared with me.
He closed on a plaintive note: “I think it’s time to pull out of Minnesota, that battle is lost.”
This is 5: https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/
Obviously only windows focused, so how other platforms stop would require more searching.