Yes

FYI:

Elephants are megaherbivores. They eat up to 300 kilograms (5% to 10% of their body weight) of food each day. To meet their needs, they require 50,000 to 70,000 calories daily.

Even if they're eating the cheapest plants you can buy that they can digest, that will still probably be hundreds of dollars per day.

These are annoying in the context of a job interview. But, these are definitely interesting questions to think about. How much does an elephant eat? How much space do they need? What temperature is too cold for one? Do they need to be around other elephants, or is a loving human enough? What are the laws about privately owning an elephant? I know they can make trumpeting noises, but do they do that often? Would they annoy neighbours with their noises?

If this works, it's a flex of the king's power. The other person is bankrupted and the elephant is cared for until that happens.

On the other hand, this could also show that the king has lost a power struggle. Imagine if that lesser noble announced to the court that the king had bestowed on him a great gift, and that all the members of the court were welcome to come to the noble's estate and leave gifts for the king's elephant.

If the nobles did that, it would be a sign to the king that the court was sick of his bullshit and his rule might be in trouble. Just like he couldn't just order a noble to be punished outright and had to gift them a white elephant instead, the king presumably also couldn't forbid his court from giving gifts to this noble to help care for the elephant.

Oh no, my ideas on how to... checks notes... care for an elephant, will be appropriated!

Which if you squint hard enough, means as long as the elephant lives, I must be invincible

That's an absurd amount of squinting. You can't give it away. When you're dead, that obligation is no longer in force.

Has he had on Timothy Mellon, the second largest political contributor after Elon Musk in the last election cycle? Has he had on the Uihleins or the Adelsons?

Only a small subset of the people making huge political donations want publicity, and only an even smaller subset of those are interesting enough that Joe Rogan would do a podcast with them.

Don't think that most of them are interesting in a macabre way like Thiel or Musk. Most are old, crotchety assholes who inherited vast fortunes who aren't interesting, don't seek publicity, and just want to remake the world without pesky democracy interfering.

Why not just stick to the facts? The facts were damning enough.

By speculating on things and getting them wrong, he opened the door to them saying he was wrong about everything.

Yes, but...

He was a definite hero in releasing what he discovered. He blew the whistle on things that the government was doing that it had no right to do, and that people had a right to know about. He risked his life and freedom to do it, and is paying for that by having to live in exile in Russia.

The "but" is that at times he has speculated on things that he doesn't have any direct knowledge of.

For example, what he revealed in the PRISM leaks is that the US was tapping into submarine cables owned by companies like Google and getting the data that was going between various Google datacenters unencrypted.

That showed up in the PRISM leaks as this slide:

Snowden claimed that Google was cooperating with the NSA, when that slide shows what was really happening. The NSA learned how Google's architecture worked, found a vulnerability, and exploited it without Google's knowledge. Google reacted to the PRISM revelations by putting in a huge effort to encrypt data everywhere, in transit and at rest.

Until then they had thought that the data was safe. The places inside the Google network where the data was unencrypted were protected by significant physical security. They didn't think anybody could get in, at least not get in undetected. But, their threat model didn't include the US government treating them the way they'd treat an enemy country.

Google did "cooperate" with the US government, in that when it received a legal order for someone's data they complied with that legal order. They even set up systems to make that process seamless. Things like the FISA court were a bit of a joke, so it was really easy for the government to come up with a legal order that Google release the data. But, Google still did require that the government go through the motions of getting a court to sign off on the orders. I think that's why they were so surprised that the government didn't think that was enough and had tapped into their backbone traffic.

If you look at what actual full cooperation with the government looks like, look at the revelations of Mark Klein. He was also a heroic whistleblower. What he showed was that AT&T set aside a special room in one of their facilities where AT&T would copy all the Internet traffic hitting their network so that the NSA could sift through it as they wished. There was no need for a diagram of where AT&T added or removed encryption because AT&T was just handing it to them unencrypted.

So, yeah. He is a hero for what he did. But, he was irresponsible for mixing the things he knew for a fact with his own personal speculation on them, because some of his speculations were wrong.

That article made me vigorously expel air from my nose.

What's the #1 way that France still controls its former African colonies?

"1. These countries must officially speak French"

Did you know England controls the United States? How? England makes the US speak English. I'm super serial! This isn't a laughing matter, so stop laughing at this matter.

This is especially true for really expensive ads: ads during the superbowl, or during the world cup, or F1 races or something. If a company has that much cash to spend on advertising, they're overcharging their customers.

Unsurprising that the first comment is a "mind control" comment.

The ad companies all want you to believe that advertising is really powerful, and comments like this just emphasize that.

The reality is that we don't know. It might be a "mind control" ray, or it might be that people hate certain things specifically because of the advertising, and will never buy them.

If you actually believe that advertising is so powerful, maybe you should consider that the greatest power advertising has is convincing gullible people that it actually works.

I think, without Snowden blowing the whistle, anti-privacy laws would not face such stiff competition.

You think there's much opposition to laws and decisions that erode privacy? In the US in particular privacy has been eroding at an increasing rate year after year.

Only if you need to use Internet Time.

Google et. al. can't even decide what language to use in ads for me. If they can't get that pretty important detail right, the rest of their information on me must be worthless.

I think the argument is that it acts as a sort of "passive horn". That merely by being near a car you'll be noticed if you have a motorcycle with loud pipes.

It's somewhat true of all ICE motorcycles. They're not silent. But, are they loud enough to wake a driver up out of a daze and cause them to notice the bike?

An electric motorcycle won't be noticed at all through the noise it makes. It might not be that different from a properly silenced ICE bike.

In any case, it's sad that we're in a situation where a driver whose brain isn't engaged with what's going on around him can kill a motorcyclist through inattention.

What is it you think that Kevin Mitnick exposed that should have been public knowledge?

It's more and more clear that the Wikipedia editors made the right choice in deciding that the US lost the war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war

And what I'm saying is that there isn't any evidence that the Snowden leaks resulted in people caring about their privacy.

THE ART OF THE DEAL!

(written by a ghostwriter)