December 22nd, 2024 • 3h 12m
Shownotes
Every new episode of No Agenda is accompanied by a comprehensive list of shownotes curated by Adam while preparing for the show. Clips played by the hosts during the show can also be found here.
Trump
Big Pharma
The Dutch Princesses are on Ozempic
Big Tech AI and the Socials
A Few Notes About AI - Salesforce BOTG
One interesting thing about Salesforce's "Agentforce" is how they're charging customers. They've switched from a license-model to a consumption based model, with the sticker price being about $1USD per conversation. What's a conversation? Basically every time a request is sent to the agent. Complicated diagram below lol. Not really scalable for SMB clients. BTW Friendswood is outside of Houston TX
BOTG - Men who stare at goats
Adam, quick BOTG related to something I just heard you talking about on #1719 regarding the psychological warfare unit in the army.
One of my closest friends have a son that was in that unit. He honorably discharged a couple years ago, due to an injury, and I got a chance to chat with him at Thanksgiving 2022, and a little bit here and there since then.
He was very tight lipped about most stuff, but confirmed some of the things that happened in the george clooney movie. He did say that there was a bunch of other things in the works that were more interesting than what was in the movie.
Regarding the social media warfare aspect, he was very proud of the work the army does to influence social media in other countries. So proud that he laughed at how unbelievably easy it was and how successful they were regularly. I asked him if he honestly thought it was a good idea to do those things and he didnt hesitate to say they were. He also thought that doing the same thing to Americans was perfectly acceptable, because people need to be corrected and steered. It was gross! I believe that there already were operations underway on Americans.
Our conversation tapered off eventually because I couldn't stomach his enthusiasm anymore.
He is now well established as an executive in corporate america, in a large city of a blue state.
Syria
Drones
Baron Anon-Cop Drone Response BOTG
John and Adam!
Just finished listening to 1723, if I can say on behalf of all of No Agenda Nation we hate it when Mom and Dad fight! You're actually both right!
There is absolutely no cop, beat cop or administrator that wants the added duty of enforcing drone-type regulations. Every year we're getting enough case law updates and new statutes of what we can and can't do, we can hardly keep up as it is. Add on top the shortage of cops and the craziness we deal with on a daily basis. I can only speak for the lawless bay area, where we are chasing stolen cars, dealing with domestic calls, handling car crashes, and everything in between. However, there seems to be an underlying tone of these federal lawmakers to remove/ pass the duty of drone regulation from the FAA, who is currently responsible for it, to some other state or local authority to deal with it. This is because the completely overloaded and frankly blind sighted to this technology FAA does not have the capacity or means to enforce what drone regulations do exist. In reality, they only work on a complaint basis and nearly exclusively only when drones interfere with commercial or military aircraft. At this point, they are almost powerless to deal with the tiny fraction of drone operators that use their equipment for nefarious purposes.
As a cop-drone pilot and hobbyist in my off time, I can say that 99% of all drone pilots are law abiding careful people that are cautious and do not perform any hazardous or illegal activities. As a beat cop, I can count on one hand the amount of calls we've gotten in my town about drone use and can tell you that nearly all cops I know would let "Officer Time" (I.e. not show up) deal with it. All the times we've interacted with drone people typically end in nerd-out sessions over equipment, kind of like car people.
Inside baseball: Public safety was warned the last several years during trade show and workshop events that the federal government was becoming weary of the quick rise of Chinese made drones for private and public use and just how great and cheap the products are. From Hollywood shooting 4k shots with a $1500 DJI drone, to the fire department using the same drone with a cheap thermal camera to help fight a house fire - when I first started flying around 2022 there were NO american drones on the market that were remotely capable of competition at the price. We were warned the federal government may make our equipment either illegal, or they would give us a hard date to stop buying DJI and Chinese drones and force us to transition to "Blue Label" equipment, which would cost the local taxpayer sometimes double for the same emergency response capability. It already started with federal agencies, however the amount of drones the federal agencies posses are nothing compared to state and local,, government. The use cases are endless, water department saving time checking on pipes and infrastructure, power utility checking on power line safety, cops catching fleeing badguys after car chases, parks department keeping track of the local animal population for conservation purposes, farmers keeping track of their crops, filming for TV shows and movies, checking out a burn area in advance of sending fire fighters in, documenting car crashes and crime scenes, that's just scratching the surface - **all predominantly done with Chinese (usually DJI) drone equipment.**
Now it seems the US manufacturers (many are smaller companies but are all being heavily invested by the greater military industrial complex) have caught up and decided to have their lobbyists make a move in congress to kill Chinese drones as a whole, not just for governmental entities as we originally thought but for everyone - similar to their Tik Tok war.
I believe this may end with congress **forcing** state and local government to deal with the future proliferation of drones and the regulation of such (especially as amazon and other commercial entities start to make their moves) and take the burden off of the FAA that has no interest in doing it, while forcing **everyone** to buy more expensive/ inferior US products in an effort to push our drone market to a level it can compete at. One facet of the government trying to pass the buck to another to do their dirty work. Don't touch our guns and don't touch our drones!
Sorry for the long winded note, I hope it helps! Oh and if a kid is flying a better drone than I am, oh well - the government is always years behind everyone else as it is!
-Baron Anon Cop
Drones and cops BOTG
ITM gentlemen,
To Adam's point, cops would love the ability to control when drones are flown.
I'm FAA part 107 (unmanned aircraft) drone certified. When I used to fly drones over crime scenes for my news station, half the time the cops would throw a fit. I used to love getting into arguments with them but one time after an argument with one of the departments, they called my news director and asked if I could stop flying my drone.
I'm sure if they were legally able, they would have disabled my drone.
Law Enforcement Drones BOTG
I wanted to reach out about the drone conversation. I am a Trooper Pilot and real aviator not a measly drone operator but I digress. Our collision recinstructionists are issued drones to document scenes. A few years ago our governor outlawed the use of foreign drones for our department. We had DJI and have a few years ago and had since tried a couple of different venders and DJI was clearly a better unit. We will be expanding our use of drones for tactical response. Mostly sending in drones to clear areas so we don’t have to put an officer in a bad situation.
When it comes to the discussion as to whether or not cops want jurisdiction over drones. It’s honestly not even on our radar. The concern of a drone attack at a large public gathering has been brought up and people flying them in secured parking areas of police departments potentially looking to see cops personal cars but that’s about it. As always the law enforcement “community” is not a monolith but most of us wouldn’t want the headache of everyone reporting every drone in the sky to us. It would be a real pain in the behind.
The one thing I DO believe you missed in the conversation is that you should never underestimate politicians speaking out law enforcement’s behalf and using us as a pry bar to wedge what ever issue they want into the conversation claiming our support without ever really discussing it with us. Ironically we’re not so different from the black community in that regard. There was money in the anti Chinese drone lobby from a companies, skydio being one of the them and no doubt lots of money to be spent on anti-drone technology. The DJI drones were twice the product for 1/3 the money and American makers were way behind when this all started. I believe it was the Autel drone we had for a while that would have run away issues just taking off in a direction until it hit something. In my opinion the money is the real reason behind all of this.
