maeil

Wanna go bypass some burglary laws to take expensive things out of people's houses?

Assuming you're a cop of course, otherwise we'll go to jail.

(I'm the person you're replying to, in case you might get confused)

It's very unfortunate that all I received was downvotes, without a single substantial reply as to what would be particularly incorrect about the observations I made. This does indeed seem to stem from infallibility tribalism: "I identify with group A, so literally anything that can be taken as pointing out a flaw of group A is an attack on me as a person".

At the same time, this isn't a particular hallmark of the left; it's even worse on the right. In any right-dominated space, my comment, if the roles were swapped, would simply have been instantly removed rather than just being downvoted. r/conservative is a very prime example. Twitter is another one, having become much more eager to instantly abide by requests from foreign autocratic regimes to remove/ban accounts that oppose them after the Musk takeover.

I do wonder if you're going to downvote me for this comment, reaching a new "irony level" world record :)

To prevent premature downvotes, preface: this comment is not about the merits or demerits of the censorship, just that it took place. Whether it's good or bad was a different question, but it very much happened. One might say that it wasn't "the left" behind it, but if you'd take approval ratings of this censorship at the time across left/right, the latter would've been strongly opposed with the former mixed at best, if not broadly in favor.

If anyone would care to educate me on this, with evidence, I am here for it.

Sure, happy to. I'll focus on the "internet" part. There was mass censorship on the major US social media platforms during COVID in the name of "preventing racist attacks against East-Asians". This is widely documented and admitted.

Yishan Wong, ex-Reddit CEO:

Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic

That Meta and Twitter banned accounts for discussion of it is easily verifiable, Wikipedia also banned discussion of it.

In Twitter's case, they even had a CCP figure on their board of directors during this time [1][2].

[1] https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/3940206

[2] https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2020/5/25/twitters-new...

"Not chipping in" is very different from "Award ceremony set to honor novel by Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair canceled “due to the war in Israel," and unwavering support. "Not chipping in" implies neutrality.

Whatever we as Germans say on Israel/Palestine will be taken the wrong way by someone. Critical of Israel? Still an antisemite! Supportive of Israel? Pathological guilt!

Do you think this does not apply to others? Especially the antisemite thing is extremely commonplace in the US and UK.

If Germany had learnt, then yes, they would be voicing strong opinions. That's the thing - fine, do whatever you want, but don't claim to have learnt.

However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate.

In armed conflict far away from the country in question, comparatively for each side, yes, both sides' deaths getting similar coverage is how one should expect the media to operate.

If Chile and Peru get into a war tomorrow, the expectation would absolutely be that coverage of deaths by the BBC would be similar for both.

How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting?

The obvious key difference here is that in those wars both sides of those conflicts do still tend to get similar coverage per death; which is almost none. At the very least there's not orders of magnitudes difference. Not sure how you missed this, but it doesn't inspire much confidence.

Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?

No, as Russia is a reasonable threat to the UK whereas Hamas is clearly not.

I'm Swedish. Since I was a child, for decades, I was taught and never questioned the idea that Germany had learnt from their history, in the most admirable way. That it was really ingrained into the German culture to never let anything like the holocaust happen again. That the education system there was very good in really making people understand why it happened, what went wrong, and how to make sure there would be no second one.

In early 2024, I was chatting with a German colleague of mine. Great guy, politically we were the most aligned out of anyone in our team. The genocide in Gaza was already well under way, so the topic came up. He told me, as if it was incredibly obvious "Well of course as Germany we couldn't possibly say anything about Gaza, given our history." For the rest of my life I will remember exactly that moment, where we were stood, the scene, because it came as a shock; this belief that I'd had since childhood turned out to be entirely wrong. It was the exact opposite - Germany had learnt nothing, in fact they'd learnt even less than the countries they had occupied. It was all a complete ruse, and I really lost all respect I had for how Germany has dealt with it all. A country like Japan at least doesn't even pretend to have learnt anything, and I'm not convinced that's the worse option.

I should've known the second news started flowing out of Germany such as "Award ceremony set to honor novel by Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair canceled “due to the war in Israel,", along with stuff like designating B.D.S as "antisemitic" but I wanted to believe that was just a tiny minority of ignorant people.

Yes, I know that now "the narrative inside Germany has been turning around" but imo it's far too late, and can't possibly be sincere, being entirely fuelled by external pressure rather than any kind of actual realization.

I'm not sure how to phrase this within the rules of HN, but I don't understand how anyone on HN 1. can not understand why Meta and Microsoft aren't fighting this 2. can still be remotely surprised by any of this 3. can act this has a single thing to do with security or even with Israel - neither of which remotely factor into the reason behind this policy.

Genuinely, have people been living in Bikini Bottom? I'm so tired of this cognitive dissonance, not wanting to face the reality. As tired as I am of these developments themselves, really. I'm too tired to still be nice. I thought people here were bright.

I welcome any tips. Someone here must have cracked the code to be completely unremarkable and "wholesome" to governments.

Don't go to the US. That's the tip.

It's become very hard to tell whether this is sarcasm. I sure hope it is, though.

The title does not do the content justice. Since Snowden it's been known to the entire world, even outside of HN, that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.

What has changed is that now they're actually using this to a degree that even China generally does not do. If a German had written a comment in support of the Hong Kong protests on Facebook at some point in time, they're extremely unlikely to get denied entry to China over this, despite them almost certainly having even stronger capabilities and databases to easily find this out.

So far, the signs are that Trump is likely a worse steward than Xi. He just hasn't had the ability to properly fulfill his wishes.

Cynical? No my friend, it's what authoritarian dictatorships such as Russia and the US have been doing for years, it's their default! [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...

Israel is in Gaza because they have funded and supported Hamas, in the hope they would use those funds to invade them, giving them pretext for a genocide.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” - Benjamin Netanyahu [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjam...

I strongly recommend going a lot less heavy on the LLM generated writing on HN, it reads far less genuine than when people here right stuff themselves.

Just in case you think it's the em-dashes that do it, it is isn't; it was clear by the end of the 2nd paragraph.

Github -> Microsoft sharing everything with OpenAI sadly sounds realistic.

Or they don't exist in the first pLace, or they're now deleted repos, or they used to be public but went private, etc.

"Maintain the purest racial pedigree"? What does this even mean in actual terms? And there is no desire to accept what?

You're right, solar energy isn't infinite, there's merely orders of magnitudes more available than necessary to power the globe.

(R)ussia only punishes (R)ussian tech when it does not align with the party.

That entirely ignores the reality I displayed showing that such a thing does not exist by law in any meaningful way. Yes, the overwhelming majority of publicly held companies behaves this way. No, this is not because they're bound by any kind of law to do so, nor would they be at any legal risk if they were to behave differently.

Referring to the linked Google Developers thread.

The waste and costs will be socialized, the profits will be privatized.

I think incompetence comes when personal loyalty to Trump is the most important requirement.

It is the only requirement. Loyalty to the party and not a hint of anything suggesting shared views with any of its opponents.

The "defense of the West" narrative has become entirely laughable. The only places left to defend are parts of Europe, Taiwan and Japan, and maybe Korea at a stretch. And those now need to defend against the US, which has become a bigger threat than Russia.

That's.. quite the contradictory sentence.

Incredible that this was locked.

On many threads here regarding EU fines, I see the sentiment "The EU only fines US tech to make a quick buck!".

It could be an idea to, you know, stop doing these things. Would be great to see another few $billion fine for this one.

Satellites and intel are the obvious one where they'd get help, surely? Basically everything else, from strategy to execution, it makes sense that they're ahead as you're suggesting.

Advice, which, as evidenced by this post, is at this point utter nonsense which may at some point in the past have been true.

And I'm tired of this sort of sloppy and inflammatory discrediting.

It fits 'shadowbanning' to an absolute tee. Without any kind of notification, or any recourse, a switch is flicked to "off" in a single moment, putting a domain on the shitlist. This is now very well documented, including by this post, and incredibly obvious from the graph.

As in, don't you know these publicly traded companies are legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust?

Based on your first question, I think you might already know this, but just in case you don't: This is a myth.

The idea that choosing a 1% strategic internal investment over a 4.5% T-bill constitutes actionable "financial malpractice" or a breach of fiduciary duty leading to successful lawsuits is incorrect. Courts recognize that running a business requires strategic choices and risk-taking, not just maximizing immediate, risk-free yield. A lawsuit would fail unless plaintiffs could show the decision was tainted by disloyalty, bad faith, or gross negligence in the decision-making process, none of which are implied by simply choosing a lower-yield strategic project.

Hence why no one ever gets sued for this. It doesn't happen. It lives in the minds of HNers and Redditors to provide a very convenient excuse for their employers, or in general companies, making abhorrent decisions purely based on feels and short-term next-quarter profits/stock price, regardless of the negative externalities they inflict on society.

I think maybe it gets downvoted because it comes across as victim blaming and has echoes of abusive reasoning.

Ah yes, rather downvote because it smells of victim blaming than actually coming to terms with the reality which has played a huge role in a superpower to spiral into facism. Seriously? Now's not the time for that.

The left must change what they want

It could be helpful to point to actual policy failings of Harris

You still don't get it at all, I literally stated it verbatim. It's not about policies, it's about candidates, attitude, messaging, narrative.

The left must change what they want because otherwise the right will throw a hissy fit and start opening concentration camps?

As explained, this is not the case, there isn't a need to change the "wants" - that's the least of the concerns. But let's disregard that and imagine a world where yes, that is the case. Are we going to say "nuh-uh, we rather have concentration camps than change what we want"? If that would be the reality (which it isn't) then that's how things are. Start facing the reality we live in.