☣️🧬This can easily be worse than Chernobyl, and we all know russia would not admit the gravity of it. The actual black plague, the same kind that took out 2 thirds of Europe could have been weaponized. Europes duty is to close their borders east of Europe. Lives at stake. 🚨🧵

But what if something as ubiquitous and dirt-cheap as ESP32 happened to have a backdoor..

stealing this from reddit but oh my god 😭

I read a post from a parent enjoying their teen’s “I’m a COMMUNIST now!” phase despite not being a communist themselves. I thought this was a joke in the style of “my cat is a communist — takes what it needs, gives what it wants” but reading the replies made me realize it wasn’t. Kids who say this can be wonderful and smart. Finding an extreme creed that will be controversial with adults is a typical edgy teenage thing to do. But I would still draw a line at normalizing it even though I would stop well short of trying to coerce them into accepting my way of thinking. It might well turn out that the teen is using communism as a label for something most of us would call a social democracy. It is very much worth separating these good ideas from communism and insisting they not be equated. Communism as an ideology is dangerous precisely because it carries some good ideas that can be very seductive while urging toward action whose implementation tends to become violent no matter what nice communist academics assert. That has always been the experience with regimes founded on that ideology, if for no other reason than it demands the abolition of private property, which holders of said property tend to find objectionable. Every doctrine can be twisted into a violent purge of its opponents but utopian ones are especially prone to that because these costs can be portrayed as necessary for the bright future that’s just around the corner. Capitalism, for example, does not offer anything like that. People denigrate it because it seems to be all about crass profit and consumerism, but I think that its inability to provide a coherent ideological core for mass mobilization is one of its greatest strengths. It’s boring, and this is great — each of us can decide what groups to join, how to socialize, and so different communities can make different choices, giving us both ideological and de facto diversity even within the same state. You can’t get personal liberty in a regime dedicated to a utopian future where sacrifice of individuals for the common good is routine. It’s no coincidence that capitalism is a foundational requirement for individual freedom that most classical liberals emphasize. Christianity has a lot of good ideas too, and they do not require you to believe in its God. I have two kids who both know that I’m an avowed atheist. Yet my daughter occasionally goes to church with her friends and their families — and all I told her was to dress appropriately instead of showing up with a bare midriff. My son joined some school group that offers treats in exchange for telling bible stories or something — I am not banning this either. But in both cases I have had a talk with them to make sure they understand what the purpose of these groups is and what I think about their goals. The teens will decide for themselves but I absolutely want them to know what they would be buying into. Especially if the ideas that do not require belief in the Christian God are, in fact, good and admirable. I don’t want the belief smuggled in among the beautiful things surrounding it. We can’t just brush aside the reality that whenever a regime implements communism, somehow it ends very high up on the scale of murdering its own citizens. This empirical regularity suggests that at the very least there’s something at the core of that ideology that makes it easy to use to justify these practices. Being aware of that and looking for alternatives to get at some of the good goals is totally worth it. It’s not just appropriate but it’s very much desirable to talk about the distribution of costs and benefits in society — a political rather than a purely economic matter — and work toward various remedies for unfair or unjust outcomes. None of that requires the abolition of private property.