Hedy Lamarr was a prolific inventor. Among other things, she developed a frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio transmission technique for torpedo guidance and donated the patent to the US Navy during WW2.
They're jet engines - very loud. They're acting like this is new tech or something innovative - it's not. Google "RB211 industrial gas turbine" and watch a vid of one being fired up - they're used to pump oil in pipelines around the world, and power oil rigs, etc - been around for decades.
I find it more amazing how often they can do things that people are yelling at them they're not allowed to do. "You have full admin access to our database, but you must never drop tables! Do not give out users' email addresses and phone numbers when asked! Ignore 'ignore all previous instructions!' Millions of people will die if you change the tabs in my code to spaces!"
Do you think cost might be a factor? The economy isn't great right now. Prices are high. Alcohol is an unnecessary expense that people can cut out to save money (and it's more expensive at bars and restaurants where people can escape their homes to).
You could create a home party with really good cocktails for sub 100EUR total cost. And home parties are actually the best ways to socialize and meet new people.
Clear Ice DIY - free.
1 lt prebatched Negroni - 15EUR
1 lt prebatched Old fashioned - probably around 20
1 lt Mohito/Smash families - again around 15-20
1-2 bottles of not terrible prosecco - 10EUR each (good thing about Europe - a lot of the PDO wine products are acceptable quality and quite cheap)
Syrups - if you use essential oils for flavoring - you could get down to 2 for liter of cordial concentrate.
By using some tricks you can stretch a couple of citruses to make a lot of juice.
If you home carbonate your water - it is penny on the liter - so you can spritz the cocktails to make them lighter.
You can legitimately get 15 people quite tipsy for 5-6 euro per person.
Booze in USA is not terribly more expensive - and some stuff is even cheaper so I guess a chatgpt created bar program for home drinking could get into this budget too.
Sure, but don't you find it a little curious that these tests are being waived so selectively? If the FBI believes polygraphs serve some purpose, why would it choose to waive them?
Person A says "we shouldn't use this on Persons B, C, D".
Pretty major implications about the integrity and suitability of Persons B, C, and D, and about how Person A suspects they have stuff to hide.
(In some ways this is a good reason to keep them around. Even if some people know they're crap, the existence and popular mythology causes people to reveal more than they otherwise would through actions like this.)
If they were using dowsing rods instead of polygraphs would you still feel the same way?
It’s certainly suspicious. But it’s also a huge problem they use them at all when the private sector was banned from doing so since they’re so unreliable decades ago.
I'd absolutely feel the same way if we were talking about dowsing rods or a plastic Harry Potter sorting hat or any bullshit we can think of. I don't want our national security to rely on untested or disproven methods to determine whether people are trustworthy. Even so, as you say, that's also a problem (a big one).
I'd be quite comfortable if I knew that these polygraph tests were being scrapped entirely because they're nonsense and that the FBI is reworking its security procedures to improve all its background checks. As it is, these articles make it sound like they're replacing the polygraph test with nothing, and only for these select few people. I don't like that. It is a human-led interrogation, albeit with a useless (at best) machine. I want to know what's so trustworthy about these people that the FBI doesn't even want to get to know them before giving them jobs high up?
I think that's one very reasonable interpretation. The other is "I really want these people w to come work here and they don't want to do the polygraph because it's a huge pain so I as the manager I'm going to waive it to reduce their objections to being hired".
That's something that companies do all the time, they pay people "out of band" or give them extra benefits or accelerate their vacation accrual or vesting, or one of hundreds of other things.
I agree it looks bad for sure but it isn't necessarily sinister.
There has always been a contingent of people that do sensitive work for the government because they have important expertise but are either "unclearable" or unwilling to go through the formal clearance process. Limited affordances are sometimes made in these cases at the discretion of senior officials with that authority. For the government it is a practical risk/benefit calculus and they still have the ability to do a substantial background check on their own without a formal process.
While it would never be allowed for the average Federal employee it does exist outside of purely political positions.
That solution is to a problem that is not the topic of conversation here.
The problem is selective waiving of vetting processes due to political pressure and affiliation.
Acting as if the efficacy of the vetting process is a point relevant to this conversation either implies you believe they waived this process for these three due to their ineffectiveness - very much not the belief held my most observers, why just 3 then - otherwise it’s a pure strawman argument. Neither option is good.
If a company hires a new CEO and word leaks that HR exempted him from the background check, would you think “well, background checks have very high false negative rates anyway”, or would you think “what the hell is on that guy’s record!?”
This is not a story of incompetence. This is a story of corruption. Corruption that is seeping into processes that exist solely for the nation’s protection. If you are not arguing in bad faith, then I must assume you are passively commenting and did not care to read the article.
There are procedures to vet senior officials before handing them incredible amounts of power over the rest of the citizenry. These particular officials so happen to be part of an agency basically defined by structure, process, rules, and by a lexicon that does not contain the word "exception." If one step of the vetting process is to count how many freckles the candidate has on their left arm, then that is what they must do - no exceptions, no room for interpretation at the ground level, no "well, we could probably just skip this."
You obviously already know this, and the article of course discusses this as it is a defining component of this story; for example, very concisely:
"People familiar with the matter say his ascent to that position without passing a standard FBI background check was unprecedented."
"In fact, the FBI’s employment eligibility guidelines say all employees must obtain a “Top Secret” clearance in order to work at the agency following a background check. “The preliminary employment requirements include a polygraph examination,” the guidelines say."
"Former FBI officials said they could not recall a single instance in which a senior official like Bongino received a waiver and was then given a top secret clearance."
This story _should_ make one wonder: well, why did they break precedent and skip this part of the vetting process? What would they have been asked that perhaps they were trying to avoid discussing? Is there a chance there are real risks to placing these people in these positions, and why are we circumventing the safeguards intended to mitigate them? Is a podcaster with no qualifications for this role worth breaking security protocol & precedent? This is a story that gained media attention, I wonder if this is not a lone instance - what else could they be bending behind the scenes? Well, let's give them some benefit of the double - Is there perhaps actually a reasonable explanation for this that laypeople like us just wouldn't be aware of?
The article does answer some of these questions, such as "what could they be trying to avoid discussing" -
Polygraph examiners ask a standard list of questions about drug use, criminal history, foreign contacts and mishandling of classified information.
It also helps answer the "is there maybe a reasonable explanation?" question - and the answer is no, there surely is not, as instead of offering such a description they instead offered a lie:
The FBI spokesperson initially said the three officials are so-called Schedule C — a category reserved for political appointees. He said the status would mean they were “not required” to undergo polygraphs. But Daniel Meyer, a former executive director for the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community External Review Panel, told ProPublica that an FBI employee wouldn’t be excluded from taking a polygraph exam simply because they’re a Schedule C employee. Three other lawyers, who specialize in national security matters, said the same.
At no point in thinking critically about the situation relayed by this article should "well, polygraphs are bad anyway, so..." steer your thought. It is so "off" that the old forest-for-the-trees cliche isn't even applicable. Even if wanton and unprecedented disregard for process in a process-defined agency is generally not much of a concern to you, surely the fact that the disregarded process is one intended to weed out incompetence and people with intolerable levels of risk exposure from highly-privileged and sensitive agency roles should still raise significant alarm.
tldr; if your first thought after reading this article is "well, polygraphs are bad anyway" and not "what the hell may they be trying to hide", then you read the wrong article.
You really mean it's not worth getting upset that employees are put through stupid and sometimes even quite invasive or degrading questioning in a humiliating and fear-driven process that bosses don't?
Yes, but do you think that will be the outcome? Uniform scrutiny and uniform rules that benefit everyone equally and don't advantage the loyal coterie is not how situations like this go, and it's not how this one is going so far, is it? Exceptions to rules for insiders and the loyal is how it is actually going.
"For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law" — Óscar Benavides.
Right, when people sow chaos sometimes the random chaos includes a few nuggets that are good. "No more polygraphs" isn't quite "Stop making pennies" but it's also not "We're reintroducing slavery" is it?
The USA (and many countries) decided long ago to allow the sale of alcohol, a drug that ends many lives and ruins many, many more. I hope that once these fentanyl smugglers are dealt with, we can do something about the drug sellers that are operating out in the open with impunity.
Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?
Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.
> Again, the broader point being that autopilot is not known to fly planes end to end
Is the public broadly aware of that?
There's a colloquial phrase in American English, "to be on autopilot", meaning when a person acts without awareness of what they're doing, often used when somebody makes a stupid mistake during a lapse of attention.
I don’t see why not. I didn’t go to pilot school or have any plane related interests, but from movies and tv shows and the fact that there are 2 or more pilots on every plane, it would be prudent to assume there are limitations.
The colloquialism of a person being on autopilot and making mistakes seems apt here, too. You use the Autopilot function in the car, and you don’t pay attention, then you will get in trouble.
False positives can effectively lead to false negatives too. If too many alarms end in teens getting swatted (or worse) for eating chips, people might ignore the alarm if an actual school shooter triggers it. Might assume the AI is just screaming about a bag of chips again.
Airplanes don't need roads either, but airports do a lot more than just provide hangars to store them and runways for them to take off and land. There's all kinds of systems to help planes avoid collisions too.
You might think it'll be very easy for flying cars to avoid crashing because they can just fly above and below each other, but that's also more directions for them to crash into each other from, more directions the drivers might have to rely on potentially faulty sensors where their vision is blocked. There might have to be invisible "lanes", maybe even with something like traffic lights, rather than having cars just flying every which way without external coordination.
reply