OSD 306: 2024 in review
The top OSD newsletters from the past year.
Here’s a recap of the top editions of the newsletter from 2024. They aren’t all the most-viewed. They’re just our favorites. Happy new year to you and yours.
OSD 262: Shoot until the acorn is neutralized
“Why do you look at the acorn in your neighbor’s eye and pay no attention to the oak tree in your own eye?”
You know the incident timeline in a police shooting is going to be interesting when it starts with:
• -0:00.033 – Acorn comes into frame.
• 0:00.000 – Acorn strikes the roof of Deputy [Jesse] Hernandez’s patrol vehicle.
What can the famous acorn shootout teach us about humility?
OSD 269: The social credit system has missiles now
The cutting edge of state empowerment technology in 2024 is a system that can do the following:
1. Complete government surveillance of all electronic activity within a territory, and real-time 24/7 location data on all cell phones.
2. Use the data from #1 to assign every person in the territory a score.
3. Automatically kill them and their family when their score crosses a threshold.
4. Lower the threshold as desired, to use up a target quantity of munitions.
Gun rights advocates get mocked for imagining the far-fetched ways that a social credit system, or even the basic power to subpoena cell phone location data, could play out. Lavender (Israel's AI targeting system in Gaza) ends the debate on how far-fetched those ideas are. They’re not only possible, they’re deployed in the wild today. So there’s no longer a question of what a government can do with this data. It’s only a matter of which governments do it.
How will that play out across the world?
OSD 286: The tyranny is here, it’s just not evenly distributed
A dystopia becomes stable when the people inside it think they are free.
So how free are Americans really?
OSD 290: Sins of the father
On charging parents for their child‘s crimes.
It’s a crime to make a negative expected value bet with other people’s lives. And that’s a good thing. Post hoc liability is a great way to manage negative externalities. Much better than imposing ex ante regulation. But the tradeoff is that in nascent domains, there is no immediate consensus about what the rules actually are.
This week’s links
Everything you wanted to know about .44 Magnum
How Aimpoints are made
About Open Source Defense
OSD Capital
Why we’re investing in civilian defense startups:
If gun rights are going to keep growing, it is only going to happen if there’s a thriving ecosystem of founders, investors, and employees in civilian defense. We’re building that mafia.
OSD Podcast
In-depth interviews with outstanding founders and builders in the civilian defense industry.
The company store
Grab a t-shirt or a sticker and rep OSD.
Discord server
The OSD team is there along with lots of subscribers. Paid Substack subscribers can join the chat.