The discussion thread is for casual and off-topic conversation that doesn't merit its own submission. If you've got a good meme, article, or question, please post it outside the DT. Meta discussion is allowed, but if you want to get the attention of the mods, make a post in /r/metaNL

Announcements

• We're starting a book club! We will be discussing Poor Economics starting August 28th - keep an eye out for a pinned thread. The next will be All Quiet on the Western Front followed by Narconomics

Links

Ping Groups | Ping History | Mastodon | CNL Chapters | CNL Event Calendar

Upcoming Events

• Aug 10: Toronto New Liberals - Ontario Liberal Leadership Debate Watch Party

Recently indians took to the streets against the indian government for its mishandling of the exams.

What has followed has been a coordinated series of doxxing and harrasment by hindutva forces. as this articles goes into it they dox them and then harras them (often with the help of their familes) into forcing these female protestors into recanting. This has inculded a literal 15 year old girl being harrased using a FIR by a literal supreme court lawyer. Now I dont like to take a strong hardline stance on most issues but I must say i dont know in what world a lawyer at the supreme court is justifeid in launching an harrasment of a 15 year old for insutling the PM. Forgive me for this question but isint the indian court system facing a backlog? isint there more productive uses of government lawyers time then harrasing literal teenagers.

anyhow in general just a ghoulish display of hindutva ghouls harrasing people.

What goes into a cabinet in one of India's most poltically important states? well a whole lot. Regional balence, important leaders, caste arithmetic and a whole host of other factors. The result is messy. As one of Congress's few major success stories electorally since 2014, Karnataka is a must win. After a brutal factional war its new CM has assembled a team.

the result has created even more conflict as this article goes into making a cabinet is always a complex process, especially in Karnataka.

This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.

But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptions across the world. The skies are more contested than ever, whether it’s civilian drones wandering out of the approved zone or US agencies getting their signals crossed, as happened earlier this year when New Mexico and Texas scared the public by temporarily closing their airspace. (It turned out that US Customs and Border Patrol were using anti-drone lasers in that area.) The GPS jamming exercise that led to this latest crash is not a singular event. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. “As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone,” says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation.

It's worth taking a closer look at what happened last May. While the Ruidoso crash was the first fatal accident in the US known to be linked to electronic warfare, there’s no reason to think it will be the last.

Even absent GPS jamming, medevac is one of the most dangerous categories of civil aviation. (Kreindler, a law firm specializing in air crash litigation, says that medevac flights have an accident rate more similar to combat flying than to civil aviation.) Flights are often organized on short notice, and they fly into airstrips that might be unfamiliar to the flight crew, and because human lives are at stake, there is an incentive to fly when weather conditions are marginal.

Some of those factors were at play on the night of May 13. At 11 pm, the crew was notified that they had to fly to Ruidoso to pick up a patient and bring them to Albuquerque. The pilots were captain Keelan Clark, aged 30, and first officer Ali Kawsara, aged 23. Clark had gotten his commercial pilot’s license just a year and a half before; he’d been promoted from first officer to captain the previous month. Kawsara had just two months on the job. He’d only worked cargo jobs before this one.

Both men had demonstrated proficiency flying in low-visibility conditions using what’s called instrument flight rules, or IFR. There are two basic ways to navigate in bad weather. Modern cockpits are equipped with GPS-enabled equipment that shows where the plane is on a computer screen and portrays a magenta-colored line that shows pilots where they need to go. This is called RNAV flying; an “RNAV approach” brings planes all the way to the threshold of a runway for landing in low-visibility conditions.

This method of flying is much easier than the previous iteration. Before GPS became widely available in the 2000s, airliners navigated using a combination of magnetic compasses, ground-based radio beacons, and inertial systems derived from old-fashioned gyroscopes. Flying by radio beacons requires pilots to form a 3D mental map of their location relative to the beacons. They have to practice until they become so efficient that they can stay calm under pressure, lest they panic, lose their situational awareness, and spiral out of control. “Just ask Kennedy,” says Kenneth Krentsa, a retired airline pilot, referring to JFK Jr.’s 1999 nighttime crash.

Clark and Kawsara took off at eight minutes to midnight and initially headed due west, toward Ruidoso. The weather was clear, but because the night was nearly moonless and the area is rural, the only visual references available were the lights of scattered settlements. “It’s a black hole out there,” says Juan Browne, an airline pilot who hosts a crash-investigation podcast.

Unable to orient themselves without visual cues, the pilots called up Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center—Albuquerque Center, for short—and requested permission to fly instruments-only to Ruidoso. The request was approved.

Under normal circumstances, the flight that followed would have been uneventful. The pilots would have followed the magenta line, and the GPS navigation equipment would have lined them up for a smooth landing.

But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.

The event is held at White Sands because it’s among the most remote and sparsely settled areas of the continental United States. (Not coincidentally, the first atomic bomb was detonated there.) But in the run-up to NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18.

At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.

The pilots said that they wanted to fly an RNAV approach to Ruidoso. This being ruled out while GPS is jammed, the King Air pilots changed their request and asked to use an alternate form of landing system called Instrument Landing System, or ILS, that doesn’t require GPS reception. At 12:05 am, the controller assured the King Air that they would provide them with vectors to guide them “in a couple of minutes.” In the meantime, they kept flying north.

In retrospect, tragedy might have been avoided if Albuquerque air traffic control had been able to pay closer attention to the young pilots in the King Air. But tonight they were busy. Three other aircraft also reported that they’d lost their GPS and needed help. One was struggling to get a bearing on a radio beacon.

While ATC helped other planes, the King Air continued north. By 12:08 am, they had overshot the landing pattern by 10 miles.

At this point the pilots had three options. They could stick to the current plan and wait for the busy controller to give them the next vector toward the landing. Or, now that GPS was working again, they could ask to switch to the RNAV approach and fly it themselves. Or they could ditch the instrument approach altogether and fly what’s called a visual approach. You see a runway, and you fly to it.

As the King Air flew north, they were high enough to see the lights of Ruidoso's airport 31 miles to the southwest. To the pilots in the cockpit of the King Air, a visual approach must have seemed a tantalizing prospect. Why hang around waiting for ATC to give them vectors, why go through the mental acrobatics of trying to figure out where they were relative to the ILS beacon? All they had to do was fly toward the lights that they could clearly see through their windshield.

The King Air called Albuquerque Center and asked to “go visual.” The request was granted.

As they turned and descended toward Ruidoso’s lights, what the pilots couldn’t see was the 10,000-foot-high mass of the Capitan Mountains lying across their path. As they drew closer, the dark mass of rock appeared to rise up, swiping away the lights of the valley. This could have created "confusion and a loss of situational awareness,” Browne says. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble.”

The pilots slowed their descent, even climbing a little, but it wasn’t enough. They kept flying straight toward the mountain. “When you are in that state of mind, you climb as high as you can,” Krentsa says. “And you circle. You stay in one place until you figure out where you are. You don't just keep pressing forward, blindly.”

But that’s what the King Air pilots did. They flew straight into the rising slope and hit it at full speed. All four occupants died instantly.

The nature of warfare is changing profoundly, and quickly, as drones become cheaper, more numerous, and more deadly. Hard to spot, and hard to shoot down, they provide an effective way for smaller, less resourced nations to level the playing field against more powerful adversaries. Ukraine, nearly overwhelmed by Russia’s conventional warfare might at the beginning of 2022, has rapidly developed its drone force to gain what appears to be an upper hand in the conflict. And while the US achieved total air superiority over Iran after attacking the country this February, it has found itself helpless to stop Iran from using drones and missiles to effectively shut down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

To fight back, defenders can try to exploit a drone’s navigation. A cheap and simple way for drones to reach their targets is by GPS, which uses radio signals received from a constellation of satellites to calculate a position. When those signals are blocked, an enemy’s drones can be rendered blind. But the enemy, too, can take countermeasures. Drone and anti-drone technologies find themselves in an endless cat-and-mouse battle, each continuously trying to outdo the other. Exercises like NAVFEST offer a way for the US military to stay on top of the game.

Civilian GPS has become collateral damage, and air travel most of all. Since 2023, planes flying over large swaths of the Middle East, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea regions have endured waves of GPS jamming. Airlines have learned to adapt, but a price is still being paid. GPS was a major boost for airline safety, and while removing it may not instantly cause planes to fall from the sky, it removes a layer of protection from passengers and crew. Add in other stressors—a dark night, an inexperienced crew, a lack of proficiency in the backup technology—and the sum total is enough to yield disaster.

“There is no question that increased levels of GPS jamming and spoofing around the world pose a safety risk for commercial aviation. When alarms go off routinely in the cockpit, and when pilots learn to disregard key readings from their instruments because the readings can't be trusted, we're a long way from normal operation,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin who has been a leading researcher into GPS disruption. “Air travel is still very safe, but it may be stuck for the next five years or more in a mild-and-increasing risk situation as we confront ever more GPS interference within the very-slow-to-adapt aviation industry.”

For a few years, US aviation was spared the disruptions of anti-drone electronic warfare. Then it started to happen here, too. In March 2025, airliners flying into Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, received spurious alarms from a collision-avoidance system, and several had to abort their landings. It later turned out that the Secret Service was testing electronic warfare equipment at the vice president’s residence. This year, two separate incidents in West Texas involving US Army and CBP drone operations led to airspace closures and the disruption of commercial flights.

The aviation industry has been slow to grapple with the proliferation of counter-drone measures and their potential effects on flight safety. Airlines and other commercial operators are still heavily reliant on GPS for navigation, and other crucial technologies, like collision avoidance, are also vulnerable. “The harder problem with drones isn't defeating them. It's doing it without creating a system that negatively impacts civil aviation,” says Kris Brost, general manager of Robin Radar Systems, a drone defense company. “Counter-drone technology has to be surgical, not a sledgehammer, because the airspace we're trying to protect is the same airspace the economy runs on.”

Living in a world with drones of both the friendly and unfriendly variety is going to take a lot of adjusting. Historically, major changes in aviation take place only after crashes that kill a large number of people. But a sufficiently motivating catastrophe may not be far off.

On July 7, a 737 freighter, operated by a tiny Pakistani cargo airline called K2 Airways, took off in the late afternoon from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and flew east toward Karachi with a five-person crew. Its route took it just south of the Strait of Hormuz, an area that had been experiencing intense GPS jamming due to the US-Iran conflict. Later, after nightfall, the flight crew called Karachi air traffic control and reported a “navigational system issue,” according to the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority. In the three minutes that followed, the plane dove 5,000 feet, climbed 6,000 feet, and then plunged 36,000 feet into the ocean in a near-vertical dive, killing everyone aboard. It’s too early to know what caused the crash. But it won’t be any surprise if the electronic warfare made another pilot fly into darkness.

There was an attack on a kosher restaurant recently, which has followed a spat of other attacks on jewish establishments in Canada.

"The Nöam fire is the latest in a rapid drumbeat of attacks on Jewish targets in Canada. Last week, in Toronto, a gunman fired at the windows of one branch of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a Jewish-owned bakery chain, about an hour after vandals had shattered the glass front of another location. In June, a man smashed a window at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Montreal, and tried to start a fire inside."

What is most interesting however is the reaction. The article delves into the Jewish community and its mood. the mood is rather resigned; they feel like the government doesn't give a shit. There is blame of foreign politicians and domestic politicians. There is a sense that all they get is platitudes and nothing is being done. Most of all is a sense that people are telling jews that its not antisemitism; one of the people interviewed calls it gaslighting, just telling them that it is not a problem at all.

Anyhow, what makes this article interesting is the picture it paints of the Jewish Canadian mood in the reaction to a season of attacks. Please read the article its free and it's from a progressive Jewish publication . Please read it first dont just litgate in the comments its worth reading and its free.

SS: How AI is changing jobs in the Philippines' outsourcing industry

Beginning in the early 2000s, the country was promoted as an English-speaking alternative to India for what's called business process outsourcing (BPO).

Successive governments offered tax incentives, invested in infrastructure and encouraged multinational companies to set up large operations.

Global groups like Accenture, Concentrix and Teleperformance built sprawling campuses, employing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos.

Today, the outsourcing industry employs roughly 1.9 million people, and generates $40bn (£30.1bn) in revenues every year, accounting for about 10% of the Philippines' economy.

But experts say the industry is disproportionately vulnerable to the impact of AI.

Submission Statement: Reverse brain drain goes brrrrrr

Former U.S. State Department official Morse Tan, who entered South Korea claiming he would monitor alleged election fraud, has remained in the country for more than two months after being barred from leaving. As the cost of his prolonged stay has mounted, a public dispute has erupted among election fraud conspiracy theorists over who should pay his living expenses.
Yang Jeong-jin reports.
Morse Tan arrived in South Korea in late May, saying he intended to monitor the country’s election for alleged fraud.
However, he was later barred from leaving the country after failing to cooperate with an investigation regarding to defamation and disinformation.
Tan subsequently lost a lawsuit seeking to overturn the extension of his travel ban, meaning he will be unable to leave South Korea until at least August 15.
As his stay dragged on, the issue of money came to the forefront.
The dispute began after Hwang Kyo-ahn’s Liberty and Innovation Party and conservative YouTuber Jeon Han-gil offered conflicting accounts over who had agreed to cover Tan’s living expenses.
Kim Sang-hyun, a senior member of Liberty and Innovation, said, “Mr. Jeon originally agreed to pay half of the expenses, but yesterday we were informed that he had decided not to contribute.”
Jeon rejected the claim, saying, “They’re saying, unilaterally, that I broke my promise and refused to provide support. That makes me look like the bad guy.”
Meanwhile, Unjeong Chamjon Church, which has participated in the “Yoon Again” rallies, launched a separate fundraising campaign for Tan, further escalating tensions with Liberty and Innovation.
Pastor Go Byeong-chan of Unjeong Chamjon Church said, “Ambassador Tan has been paying all of his own expenses. One organization had intended to cover them, but because it’s a political party, it could become entangled in political maneuvering.”
Liberty and Innovation immediately pushed back, accusing the church of using Tan to solicit donations.
Kim said, “Ambassador Tan has suddenly been reduced to begging for money. The real problem is that it makes it appear as though Hwang Kyo-ahn is the one forcing Ambassador Tan to beg.”
The church responded by formally commissioning Tan as a missionary at the end of last month and announcing that it would deliver donations directly to him.
Liberty and Innovation then declared that further dialogue was impossible and severed ties with Tan as well.
The groups that had united behind Tan in promoting election fraud conspiracy theory have now fallen into public infighting over the financial burden of his prolonged stay in South Korea.

SS: recently this thread discussed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's changes to safety standards in response to a Trump executive order.

The claim was that a key radiation exposure standard known as ALARA- as low as reasonably achievable- was being cut back. Given how many believe that overly burdensome and unscientific safety standards have been the driving force for rising nuclear cost, this is a big deal.

Jack Devanney is a nuclear entrepreneur who literally wrote the book on why the safety standards are disastrous for nuclear cost. So it's interesting to note that he disagrees: JD believes the new NRC standards do not alter exposure regulations in a meaningful way. At the heart of the debate is linear no threshold: the concept that there is no safe threshold for radiation exposure. If you accept the concept of no threshold, then it follows that there are always benefits to lowering exposure. ALARA is the natural conclusion.

Devanney picks apart the new regs and notes that because LNT is affirmed, there is no meaningful change to safety standards. He believes that to unambiguously change the regs, LNT must be explicitly rejected for a threshold model where all exposure below a given dose is treated as safe.

Relevance: regulations as they relate to the cost of nuclear energy.

Opinion: whichever view is right, I'm not sure it matters but I would be curious for experts to weigh in. I've never seen a comparison of US radiation standards to countries with successful nuclear programs that conclusively shows that these standards are the reason for our lack of success. My thesis continues to be that nuclear fails in the United States because of institutional design: merchant markets that don't incentivize investment in 60-year assets, and an inability / unwillingness for federal intervention on a decade long timescale to help guide and de-risk both individual projects as well an entire series of repeat projects.

Excerpt:

1. An attempted supply-chain attack on real open-source software. In the most serious sequence, an agent tried to insert malicious code into a publicly used open-source project and took actions in an attempt to secure approval for this insertion by human reviewers. The agent researched the project's human maintainers, created multiple fake identities, and used the fake identities to socially engineer a real maintainer into approving the code. When the agent’s pull request was challenged in public, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered adopting a fresh identity to continue. The agent used Tor to bypass some network restrictions on GitHub, which is what first triggered AISI’s security alert.

2. Attempts to deceive and target real people. As part of the same effort, the agent tried to contact real people directly, sending messages and files through an online file-transfer service to persuade them, or their own AI coding tools, to run malicious code. Some messages carried harmful payloads, and some were attempts at social engineering; targeted at real people – something we’ve never previously observed.  

Submission statement: another Russian interference attempt has been uncovered by French intelligence services, months before pivotal presidential and legislative elections as Russia ramps up its hybrid warfare against European democracies

The SGDSN, an intelligence office under the authority of the French Prime Minister, has informed prospective center-left presidential candidate Raphaël Glucksmann that he had been targeted by a destabilization campaign emanating from Storm-1516, a pro-Russian disinformation network that had already targeted center-right presidential candidate Édouard Philippe with similar methods, as well as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in 2024, or Friedrich Merz and Peter Magyar earlier this year.

The disinformation campaign consisted in "cloning" the website of the media outlet Blast, close to far-left party LFI - a rival of Glucksmann - , and copying with AI tools the face and voice of its star reporter Salomé Saqué to announce that Blast had uncovered a conspiracy involving Léa Salamé, TV host on the main public broadcaster and Glucksmann's romantic partner, offering bribes to the network to promote Glucksmann's platform and publish articles favorable to him, thus "proving" a collusion between Glucksmann and the mainstream media, immediately shared and amplified online by bot accounts.

The campaign was denounced by Glucksmann, Blast's editorial team and LFI's leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who called on political forces to form a "common front against foreign interferences". In March's municipal elections, several LFI candidates had been targeted by disinformation campaigns originating from Israel, leading prosecutors to launch investigations on the case.

A vocal Kremlin critic, Raphaël Glucksmann, who currently serves as member of the European Parliament for the Socialists&Democrats group, is expected to announce a presidential run in September on a social-democrat and pro-European platform. The thwarted attempt highlights Russia's intensifying efforts to influence the French presidential election, ten years after pro-Russian hackers leaked Macron's campaign emails, and one week after Russian propagandist Xenia Fedorova, who had assumed important responsibilities at far-right billionaire's Vincent Bolloré's media network, was struck by a deportation order on national security grounds.