Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

https://www.sambent.com/the-white-house-app-has-huawei-spyware-and-an-ice-tip-line/

Fedware: 13 Government Apps That Spy Harder Than the Apps They Ban

The White House app ships with a sanctioned Chinese tracking SDK, the FBI app serves ads, and FEMA wants 28 permissions to show you weather alerts.

Sam Bent

>This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number.

when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point.

(the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")

It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.

It comes down to two things. One is the well documented issue of how, when you are that rich, you are treated differently, and how that will ultimately modify your behavior. The other is the prerequisites to get to the job. Chances are you aren't fully self-made, receiving no investment. From convincing investors, to having immense faith in a project that cannot be obviously good, as otherwise you'd be building what already exists, to the personality to handle the road upward.

This second effect happens in all kinds of places where you have to jumps througha lot of hoops to just get to get there. Every hoop discards candidates, and promotes different things. Sometimes in ways that make sure that nobody capable of attaining the job is fit to actually do it well. You can see the issue all over the place, once you track people's careers. Sometimes things that should be disqualifying for a role are actually requirements in practice.

- Own a monopoly
- Inherit your fortune
- Run a criminal enterprise

Using just these three filters alone, you encompass more than 99% of all billionaires in existence.
The amount of billionaires who do not fit into these categories can barely occupy a family sized vehicle.

The criteria here suggesting that there is a specific sociopathic personality requirement to being a billionaire as each category can be argued as harmful to societies.

I've been thinking that you can divide businesses on two axes,

Scalable - Many customers
|
Short-term/ Ponzi Scheme | Monopoly Long-term/
Transactional -------------------------------------- Relational
Contracting / | Consulting /
Retail etc | Therapy etc
|
Non-scalable - Few customers

And mathematically, only businesses at the top of the graph are capable of generating a billion dollars. Hence, if you are looking to be a billionaire, the path lies either through a Ponzi scheme or through a monopoly. Both of them, in their most pure form, are illegal, and the challenge in the business model is to execute on them while staying just barely on the right side of the law.

Which one is Minecraft?