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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • Your argument is predicated on the idea that a few paying more tax should in some way be spread further which would lead to a drop in education inevitably in many places.

    My point is that, instead of localities paying more (or less tax) it should be a tax across the board from everyone to maintain the best education. So instead of locality A and B paying a higher local tax and locality C and D paying a lower one (meaning that they have to have their system supplemented by localities A and B) we would have a system where everyone pays percentage of tax and that money is divided evenly among schools.

    But by simple math, if we eliminate that tax entirely and instead institute a higher tax rate at the federal level then everyone is paying into the same system and money would be allocated based on the number of children it serves i.e. each child receives $27,000 a year in funding for education to be spent paying faculty, buying school supplies and learning aids and equipment. All of that would of course have to be standardized.

    I can name several problems with the system I’m proposing because a lot of the way we standardize things in this country is to pay a private firm and that in and of itself is a whole can of worms.

    But something this could potentially do is pay teachers a competitive rates (the disparity between teachers salaries from state to state alone is horrendous let along locality to locality), and allow for a more even spread of teachers to students. Less over crowded classrooms. The same or at least equitable activities and opportunities for the curriculum and extra curricular experiences.

    There’s other things that would need to be fixed in society as well. But the current system can do one of two things to make the school system more equitable for all students. They can share (with higher economic yield areas that have higher property values) paying for poor schools to operate at the same standard, or they can consolidate, essentially eliminating the requirement that a student must live in a specific zip code to attend said school.

    But one of those things puts a significant burden on poorer parents, and the kids. Having to be bussed hours to school causes its own snowballing problems.

    Of course doing it the way I suggested will likely eliminate some school types. Technical schools, agricultural schools, specialty schools, schools with fusion style approaches to teaching that often benefit Neurodivergent kids etc.

    But either way I dislike the idea that kids are freeloading by going to the “good school”. If the parents have to game the system then the system to get their child a good education then the system is fundamentally broken.



  • They lost their minds because Nintendo said:

    Last week, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told shareholders that the house of Mario had no current plans to raise the price of its $449.99 Switch 2.

    Then they raised the price of the original switch and a bunch of the accessories.

    Then the tariffs in the US were deemed to be illegal and they sued to get their money profit back and didn’t want to repay the price increase they passed along to their customers.

    There’s also the fact that Nintendo was on a lot of people’s shit lists for their litigiousness and other anti-consumer crap they had done so people were already mad at them before they raised prices.

    When you look at it that way, Sony (who were also on people’s shit lists for a laundry list of reasons) are no better in many’s eyes.

    Also, this completely ignores how small a company Valve is in comparison to Nintendo and Sony. I think that’s the main problem actually. Valve isn’t a hardware power house and they can’t command the kind of sales contracts or parts/fab that Nintendo or Sony can. So they are less likely to be able to withstand raising prices on their hardware as a result. The fact that they have raised prices so late in comparison to their counterparts in the space is interesting even if you don’t find it laudable.

    At the end of the day, the backlash that Sony and Nintendo faced wasn’t because of the price increase so much as it was because of all the other stuff.

    Requiring proprietary hardware for $80+ games that almost never go on sale or have online subscription services that also keep going up, and then anti-consumer practices like (in Sony’s case) the whole have to have an account to play their games on PC and not wanting to issue refunds where a PS account wasn’t available but people bought the game and oh well we just won’t port our games to PC at all then, and so on.

    Like. There’s way more to it than Valve good, Sony/Nintendo bad.





  • My thought process is this. Your neighbor likely has neither the inclination or the technical knowledge to use disturbances in the wifi signals from their own wifi to do this. Additionally they likely don’t have access to every neighbors wifi (which if you had it would likely allow you to fine tune this significantly).

    So basically, every neighbor you have or at least the majority of them are getting together to do this?

    The premise is that a person can set up a wifi network in a place adjacent to [target], monitor that network, map the area they want to surveil (while it’s empty would be better) and then use disturbances in that area to track [target] within the space.

    What you’d still need is time to measure the disturbances and gather a profile on the individual you were tracking in order to remove false positives (people of the same height and weight or body type etc).

    It actually is at least location specific. Because you need penetration of the Wi-Fi signal into the space in order to collect the data necessary. I live in a place that was built on a steel frame with sheet rock. I can’t even get signal from my own wifi standing on my door step. I also don’t pick up the wifi of my neighbors, and can’t get cell signal in the house. So they’d have to break into my home and place monitors to pick up my own wifi in order to do this. At that point it’d be much easier to plant a bug.

    Because it’s location specific and dependent on the materials of the construction of the place being penetrable enough to collect said frequencies (and because wifi is often high frequency and the higher the frequency the less penetrative power it has), it’s much more likely that this kind of surveillance method would likely be used by a 3-letter agency, and at that point they’d drop a wifi pineapple on the roof, assuming they needed to do that at all. Or track you through public wifi.

    There’s lots of news stories about new and old ways of surveillance and some of those are just easier, less intrusive, less expensive, and possibly more effective.

    Some plants have leaves so sensitive you can measure their movements to reconstruct conversations that happened in their vicinity.

    I think a few years ago there was a story about listening in on a conversation by during a laser at a window.

    You could potentially do the same thing with sonar.

    I have questions about why your neighbors would do that. The usefulness of it for your everyday civilian isn’t worth the work, and even if it was it relies on the cooperation of more than one person, and the right location factors to do it.

    I also have questions about what happens when there are no users interacting with the wifi.

    “This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later – for example by public authorities or companies.”

    It is sufficient for Wi-Fi devices in their vicinity to communicate with each other. This creates an image - comparable to a camera image, but based on radio waves.

    It exploits the legitimate users who are connected to the Wi-Fi. They regularly send feedback signals, also known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), to the router in the network - unencrypted and readable for third parties. This creates images from different angles that can be used to identify people. This only takes a few seconds once the machine learning model behind it has been trained.

    This paragraph in particular suggests that you still need training data. That seems like it would require a larger window of data collection and training.

    In the home there must be stationary or rarely moved devices (usually one to three) connected to this router via Wi-Fi — for example, a printer, a smart speaker and/or a smart TV. Sometimes Wi-Fi extenders and mesh Wi-Fi devices can perform the role of a “sensor”.

    Motion detection will occur only in the oval zone between the router and the “sensor”, and post-setup testing is required.

    https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/wifi-sensing-motion-detection-howto/53851/

    https://www.informatik.kit.edu/english/11147_14950.php

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260522023127.htm