A one way plane ticket, a rifle, or a drone swarm. (What I’d use if my country blocked VPNs)
Readit Newsrdl commented on Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use? · Posted by u/rickybule
rdl commented on Cloudflare incident on August 21, 2025 blog.cloudflare.com/cloud... · Posted by u/achalshah
> Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline?
Because numerous people in this thread have been parroting the line that homicides dropped since 2023. I'm pointing out that this is cherry picking, since homicides spiked to record highs in 2023.
1991 isn't a good baseline because policing trends started reversing in the 2000s. We did mass incarceration from 1980 until the early 2000s, and homicides dropped dramatically. El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
> Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
Puerto Rico (I've lived here since 2018...) is basically awash in guns for criminals. Since 2020, it's gotten a lot easier to buy/carry guns as a normal person (previously you had to appear before a judge for a ccw, now it's a 1h class and $100 for 5 years). It's the only non-warzone I've lived in where the default criminal gun is fully automatic (usually glocks with switches, but a few other things too). Absolute guns per capita isn't really what matters, it's gun accessibility to criminals.
(And the bigger crime issues in PR are due to dysfunctional/bankrupt government, specific kinds of poverty/culture, drugs (both local and transshipment), gangs, etc. Also really high domestic violence rate. The crime is largely contained to housing projects, inter-gang fighting, etc., and it feels like less petty property crime (at least in the areas where I go) than I remember of SF 2016+, but I'd rather have someone break my car's window than have to shoot people breaking into my home at night.)
One way to now a chess match is about to begin is to see people place pieces on a chessboard. There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C. As a pre-emptive move it is an overt threat and as a response to something that is actually happening it is complete overkill. Either way, trouble is brewing.
If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.
(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
rdl commented on The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report issues.chromium.org/issue... · Posted by u/alexcos
> pretty sure it he could have gotten more tax free on the black market.
How?
I've been paid by bug bounties (although not that big) and I have no idea how I would find a trustworthy criminal to sell to.
I guess I'd need to find a forum? Unless my opsec is exemplary then I'm risking being exposed. I'd need to vet that the buyer would actually pay me and not just steal it from me. Even if they do pay me, I'd be worried that they'd blackmail me or try to extract something from me. But assuming they're good black-marketeers, I still have to explain to the authorities where this large amount of cash came from.
So how do I go about selling to the black market in a safe way?
Oh, and I don't get to write a blog post about the bug or get my name in front of other researchers and recruiters. That can be worth a huge amount - both in cash and reputation.
Mostly the best market is intelligence agency vendors. As a US citizen, I would only be comfortable selling to US contractors. There are a bunch; if you go to conferences you probably meet the people there (look at the sponsors...).
It won't be tax-free, though; you'd probably get a 1099, but if you're smart could set it up as corp to corp and deduct a bunch of other expenses from it. Part of the sale is signing a bunch of NDAs, etc so you can't then release it to others.
rdl commented on Mexico to US livestock trade halted due to screwworm spread usda.gov/about-usda/news/... · Posted by u/burnt-resistor
There is no finishing the job. Screwworm flies have tons of reservoirs in the jungles of Central America that aren’t practical to eliminate for logistical and ecological reasons. We can only control the population in agriculturally important areas by constantly releasing the sterile male flies every year. Whenever we stop the releases, the flies bounce back in a few years.
The durable reservoirs are in South America, not Central America. We actually eradicated it (at least essentially) all the way down to the Darien Gap.
rdl commented on Mexico to US livestock trade halted due to screwworm spread usda.gov/about-usda/news/... · Posted by u/burnt-resistor
It was failing long before this. The border used to be down by Panama.
And the Panama border (Darien Gap, specifically) used to be a stronger natural barrier; humans have been crossing it for years, are starting to graze cows within the exclusion zone, etc.
It's crazy how the P320 has such a bad reputation, while the P365, a 9mm micro-pistol by Sig Sauer, is a phenomenal piece of kit by comparison. I purchased mine in 2018 and it's seen thousands of rounds put through it with zero issues encountered.
I am mostly a P365 carrier/shooter now, but for a couple years a P320 Compact was my primary handgun (with an X5 P226 SAO for competition); I put probably 15-20k rounds through the P320 (1k round classes, etc, back when ammo was $150-180/case) (and never got the drop-safe mod done), and no problems. So it's some combination of QC, specific units, and bad luck -- but even a 0.001% risk of something happening is a big deal.
The quick P250 -> P320 without really designing it properly does seem to have been a mistake, though.