So buy a car without those things, or don’t use them. It’s not like you can’t drive my car without those things, and every one of them, barring the camera for obvious reasons, is controlled by a physical button. Better yet just don’t drive. If more people took public transportation we’d be better off.

I don’t particularly want to drive. When I do, I’d prefer to have climate control, not need to crank a window, and for the car to be able to tell me someone is going to clip me when I’m backing up. No matter how small the support bars are, the driver will never have as good a view as the radar sensor mounted on the side of the rear bumper.

Backup cams aren’t a solution to a design that limits visibility, they’re a solution to “most people won’t turn their heads when backing up”. People like their necks more than they like their neighbors kids.

It’s one thing to say that you want a no-frills car, and another entirely to say that car design peaked 30 years ago, and even further than that if you want a car that isn’t impacted by electronic component failure.

Not every car is a piece of shit. Mine has a touch screen for configuring parameters I honestly don’t think you need a dedicated button for, like “lane drift alert volume” and those can only be done when the car is parked.
Everything else either has a button as well even if they had to dig deep into the plausible locations to get there, like “press the button on the end of the turn signal to disable lane centering while adaptive cruise enabled”, or it only allows voice communication while in motion, like the typing based commands for navigation.

I think the only time I’ve wanted to use a setting that didn’t have a button was when I was on a stretch of freeway in traffic where I didn’t feel keen on pulling over if I could avoid it, and I got gunk on one of the radar sensors. Since it couldn’t get a coherent reading it refused to turn on cruise control since it was set to adaptive. I had to drive without cruise control for a while until I pulled into a gas station and was able to clean the gunk. The setting to disable adaptive cruise control was touchscreen only, and locked out when the vehicle was moving.

It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.

The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.

Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.

Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.

As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.

It’s also worth noting that, economically, it’s not surprising that the country with the most people would have the largest economy.

There’s nothing fundamentally different between the people of the US and China beyond the conditions they’re born in. Insofar as innovation is a product of economics, educational investment, opportunity for innovation and a random chance it happens, and economic strength is a product of innovation and raw work output, it follows that more people leads to more work output, and eventually to a larger, more innovative economy.

A disorganized China and some key innovation breakthroughs by the west last century gave a significant headstart, and some of Maos more unwise choices slowed their catch-up, but it’s not surprising that an organized country with five times the US population would surpass us in economics and innovation, to say nothing of being competitive.

Please let’s try to keep generative AI from claiming the entire word “AI”.
Current generative AI is good at and built for mimicking patterns with boundary conditions.
This means it does a decent job of imitating authoritative knowledge, but it’s just mimicking it.
People are hyped for it because it looks knowledgeable, it’s relatively simple to make, and a lot of what we do is text based so it’s easy to apply.

There are a lot of other types of AI, the majority even, that work significantly better, take a small fraction of the computing power and provide helpful and meaningful results. They just don’t look like anything other than complex math, which is all any of them are in the end.

Depends on what you think it represents.

It’s traditionally a symbol of opportunity, or new start style liberty.

America has, for a long time, been a place of hope or opportunity for immigrants. Not necessarily welcome, kindness, or prosperity, but hope.

With the visibly growing xenophobia this has tragically waned, but even still we have some of the highest immigration rates in the world.

Yup. Violating IP licenses is a great reason to prevent it. According to current law, if they get Alice license for the book they should be able to use it how they want.
I’m not permitted to pirate a book just because I only intend to read it and then give it back. AI shouldn’t be able to either if people can’t.

Beyond that, we need to accept that might need to come up with new rules for new technology. There’s a lot of people, notably artists, who object to art they put on their website being used for training. Under current law if you make it publicly available, people can download it and use it on their computer as long as they don’t distribute it. That current law allows something we don’t want doesn’t mean we need to find a way to interpret current law as not allowing it, it just means we need new laws that say “fair use for people is not the same as fair use for AI training”.

Oh, 100%. I had hoped to make it clear that the manager is just another person without any actual power. The only power they have is to not send them home and have them work the register instead of the fryer. That maybe the lowest tier power possible granting the largest yet meager favor they can stands out is, as you said, everyone else failing them.

I feel like the person is failing to see beyond the scope of immediate surroundings. They’re seeing the manager as the village in this case. The manager being about as good as they’re in a position to be (because let’s face it, a McDonald’s shift manager isn’t exactly the 1% and has only probably been there a few months longer and can’t tell them to just go home and they’ll get paid regardless) looks a lot like “support” if you don’t look around for the missing friends, family, community daycares, social programs or charities.

An actual community would see you being supported to be with your child when they weren’t being otherwise cared for. Like a year of parental leave from the government, guaranteed job to come back to, and daycare for when you get back.

If it never occurred to you to look for those things, the closest person in authority you can see not being as bad as they could be can look an awful lot like a favor.

I’m of two minds:

People had a knee jerk reaction to the concept of a vaccine requirement, even though they largely weren’t a thing, and didn’t want the government telling them what to do. From there, if the government telling you to take it is bad, then it must be bad, because why would the “bad guy” try to push something good? That made people focus on the real negatives out of context and proportion to reality. It is newer technology that doesn’t have as much testing as other vaccines. That ignores that there’s no theoretical reason for it to be different, and that it’s less tested compared to some of the most tested things ever, and still actually very tested.
Then they started seeing the very complicated approval process that looked like it was being skipped, rather than skipping paperwork and running multiple safe trials at once when they’re justified instead of one at a time.
Combine that with how any major event causes people to become conspiratorial and you end up with vaccines being a “thing”.

Alternatively, if people wanted to intentionally fuck over the country because they were Russian assets, they might do stuff like fire everyone in a bunch of government agencies, maximize chaos to reduce their effectiveness, do random things to tank our stock market and slow the economy, spread disinformation about vaccines and try to get people to avoid them, and then suppress information about the spread of infectious diseases to get a lot of people sick and dead, and generally throw the country into chaos.

The first one looks exactly like what we all saw happen. There’s no evidence for the second one except that if we take motivation out of the picture we wouldn’t be able to tell what’s happening apart from the second scenario.

So, the size of the key doesn’t directly relate to the size of the cipher, which also doesn’t directly relate to security. AES is 128 bit , can have 128, 192, or 256 but keys and is currently not known to have any workable weaknesses.

Largely a cipher isn’t weak if guessing the key is the only weakness, since every cipher is vulnerable to brute force. It’s weak if you can figure out the message without needing the key.

That’s no longer a one time pad. That’s closer to a homebrew stream cipher with the weakness of having a key that you just hope no one notices.

You need a way to generate a psuedo random sequence that’s synchronized. You can then use that random stream as something that works like a stream cipher.

Getting synchronized sources of random numbers like that isn’t trivial, but it can be done.

To spitball a notion: get something like a small microcontroller that can drive a small screen, no wireless capabilities needed. Putting an implementation of something like the hotp algorithm on it will let you get some random data with each button press. That data can basically be used like a one time pad where you press a button each time you need more data. People decrypting the data just need to start at the same point in the sequence.

There are so many issues with this that I haven’t thought of, but it’s the most reasonable approximation of a pen and paper algorithm that has modern security levels and can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

Basically, you’re going to want to look into stream ciphers. Since those can be done without feeding the data into them, it’s possible to have a more disconnected system.

It’s worth noting that against a governmental adversary, you’re far more likely to be revealed via poor application of a custom crypto system than by a targeted bypass of a commonplace one.
If you’re under suspicion, a cop can grab the piece of paper you did your work on out of the trash if you forgot to burn it and no decryption is required. Being physically readable, the key material can be seized and it’s lost. If they have a warrant they can put a camera in your house and just record your paper.
With a cellphone, the lowest level of scrutiny that can use a backdoor that we know of would be a sealed fisa court order. Anything less official would require more scrutiny, since the NSA isn’t going to send a targeted payload to the phone of a generic malcontent/domestic subversive.

Widely used crypto systems address an extremely wide array of possible attacks, most of which aren’t related to the cipher but instead to issues of key management and rotation. This can give you guarantees about message confidentiality being preserved backwards in time if the key is stolen,cand only new messages being readable, as an example. (Perfect forward secrecy)

What you’re looking for can be made, but you need to strongly consider if it actually makes you more secure, or less. Probably less.

I’m sad that it’s children paying the price though. They don’t have any say in anything. It’s child abuse to intentionally infect them with a preventable disease.

Different people have different skin, oils, water supplies and diets.

Everyone needs to clean themselves regularly, but the exact details of what that means varies by circumstances.

Most people are fine with shampoo, a gentle soap, and warm water.
As long as you’re getting rid of old dead skin, excess oils and any grime you’re fine though. Soaps make that easier, but they’re not a requirement.
I’m prone to dry skin and greasy hair, so I use a shampoo, cool water and a scrub brush instead of soap for my body. Perfectly clean, just need to scrub a little longer to make sure I get everything.

You’ll have to be more specific about what “this field” is. Restaurant sanitation? Food safety? Chicken washing? Microbiology?

Whatever your degree, it’s not the recommended practice.
https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Should-I-wash-chicken-or-other-poultry-before-cooking.

You render meat safe to eat by killing the bacteria with fire, commonly called “cooking it”.

There’s none. They would owe him money, so he’d have to get in line with all the other creditors to request that the court prioritize his debt over someone else’s.