Kinda shameful to boast about a project designed to make it easier for 'authorities' to displace people who are just trying to 'live' some kind of existence.
Please don't justify it with weird edge-cases like 'oh but we can detect drug cartels' or some BS.. This is about forcing people to conform to a designed western capitalist modality that expects humans to be happy living as battery-farmed chickens..
* get an education so you start out life with an 80k debt so you:
* get a high tax paying job so you can aspire to:
* get a home mortgage for the next 45 years with a bank so you:
* support the system that funnels money and power to the few at the top.
This project is just another small rivet in the armor of that system which you should be fighting to de-construct not re-enforce.. wake up and realise you're building your own cage.
If I buy land to start a community on it of like-minded people who don't feel comfortable supporting an oppressive system that creates injustice then that's my business, when are software engineers going to realise we have an OBLIGATION to HUMANITY to refuse to create the chains that bind us to the wheel of oppression?? JUST REFUSE, it's OK! you can get a job elsewhere! You don't NEED to build another system for a company who makes money supplying the technology that governments use to keep their population compliant to the machine.
Clicking through to their sponsor [0], one finds that the purpose of this endeavor is to find undocumented immigrants. Theoretically this would be useful if one wanted to give them food and medicine, but here in the real world there is little cause for celebration.
The best thing we could do is the best thing we could always do: stop the sanctions and aggressive militarist actions.
It's a missing link in our modern sci-fi dystopia. This sort of tooling is how the drones know where to fly to hunt down the intentional community of rebels trying to take down the oppressive systems. The fact that we are using this tooling for ethnofascist tracking of undesirable people is not accidental, but is basically the intended use of the tooling as designed.
What's interesting to me is that this work was funded by a non-profit and under the guise of humanitarianism. They went in through the front door and got legitimacy and funding.
Lots of "humanitarian" work in Colombia are CIA-funded fronts for anti-socialist and anti-indigenous violence. For example, see the "aid convoy" that Maduro supposedly burned. In general many nonprofits don't care to look too closely at their donors. Lots of money is floating around, searching for a way to oppose Venezuelan democracy. Colombian ruling elites are eager to cash in on the gravy train, and the disdain they feel toward the poor and indigenous of Venezuela is actually less than that they display toward those groups in their own nation.
Be that as it may in terms of secretive support for anti-government efforts against a government that the U.S doesn't like for assorted political and often hypocritical reasons, you're deluded if you think the monstrous Maduro Regime is in any sense a good guy in the situation that Venezuela is going through. Opposing it is hardly opposing democracy, given that this government itself is grossly anti-democratic and repressive whenever it feels threatened.
Of course; there are no good people, anywhere, at all; good is a fiction that we tell each other in order to justify our atrocities.
In this particular instance, it can be the case that all of the Colombian, Venezuelan, and American governments are committing crimes against humanity.
This kind of whataboutism does nothing good for anyone who appreciates honest debate. It only helps further cement dishonest arguments. Yes, the U.S has its hands full of cloak and dagger blood from who knows how many regime changes it's been complicit in or a direct cause of (not to mention the deaths caused by its direct invasions), and Colombia has a long, sordid history of human rights abuses by all sides.
Despite these things, both of those countries are internally, practically far better places to live in than Venezuela for both economic reasons and in terms of individual/political freedom. Venezuela is all the opposite in so many more ways. What's more, it is distinctly a repressive state that does not at all allow free elections and whose executive government branch does everything possible, legally or not, to rig all state structures for its own perpetuation. Meanwhile, this same government's economic mismanagement has achieved catastrophic, humanitarian disaster depths of damage.
More basically, whatever the sins of the U.S or Colombia or whichever other country you pick, not one of them excuses any aspect of what the Chavez/Maduro governments have done to their own country.
"Informal settlement" suggests someone's trying to hack the system, that is the social / legal / administrative system for real estate, as in physical land and buildings. But I don't quite understand the purpose, motivation, and mechanics of the hack.
Are these enterprising individuals that built houses on a vacant parcel they don't actually own, hoping the real owners would stay away for 20 years or however long they need to establish squatters' rights? It seems like an incredibly gutsy gamble with an awful risk/reward profile. Surely if you have the resources to build that many buildings, it would certainly be within your means to simply buy the vacant land outright, you know, before you built a single structure, and then maybe build 2/3 as many houses in case your bankroll was stressed by buying the land?
Or maybe they do own the land, but are hoping the local zoning board is more likely to grant forgiveness than permission? So they build houses where they aren't supposed to be built, and hope to get away with it since no one will want to tear them down once they've been constructed?
Maybe it's some kind of tax scam where they don't tell the government the land's been improved and hope to pay property tax on empty land while collecting rent from all the houses? But surely tax assessors will drive by at some point and notice that, y'know, there are buildings there now which sure doesn't match what's in the records? And whoever built them will be in hot water for lying about the tax status of an entire housing development, and owe not just back taxes but fines, fees, interest, and maybe even theoretically be liable for criminal tax fraud? Or maybe they plan to sell the houses and get out of Dodge, the inaccurate documentation's the buyer's problem, the contractor's long gone by the time the authoirities catches up with them? But then wouldn't the sale go amiss when some buyer, y'know, reads the deed for the property they're spending tens of thousands of dollars on and notice it doesn't accurately describe the structures on the land?
It's not exactly out in the countryside, it seems like it's right in an existing suburban area. So it doesn't look like they're even trying to keep it secret from people at street level. Explain again, why do they need satellites and AI image analysis to find this?
Please don't justify it with weird edge-cases like 'oh but we can detect drug cartels' or some BS.. This is about forcing people to conform to a designed western capitalist modality that expects humans to be happy living as battery-farmed chickens..
* get an education so you start out life with an 80k debt so you: * get a high tax paying job so you can aspire to: * get a home mortgage for the next 45 years with a bank so you: * support the system that funnels money and power to the few at the top.
This project is just another small rivet in the armor of that system which you should be fighting to de-construct not re-enforce.. wake up and realise you're building your own cage.
If I buy land to start a community on it of like-minded people who don't feel comfortable supporting an oppressive system that creates injustice then that's my business, when are software engineers going to realise we have an OBLIGATION to HUMANITY to refuse to create the chains that bind us to the wheel of oppression?? JUST REFUSE, it's OK! you can get a job elsewhere! You don't NEED to build another system for a company who makes money supplying the technology that governments use to keep their population compliant to the machine.