rabite

I don't understand how banks in a country that is completely cut off from the international financial system would be profitable.

If I own a platform I’m not under any obligation to allow you to say whatever you like on that platform.

Before the Internet this was not the case. In Marsh v. Alabama, it was ruled (in line with all previous precedent) that privately owned roadways and sidewalks had to allow religious pamphleters, even though it is private property. The court asserted that anywhere that is the forum for public discussion is de facto allowed for political and religious speech regardless of property rights. In the very early days of the Internet things changed, when people tried to assert First Amendment claims on Compuserve chats. Compuserve claimed they weren't the public square, that they were a private service. I think they were correct, in that Compuserve was a very marginal private space and couldn't possibly have been "the public square". But precedent over this tiny service were eventually laundered into much larger and more critical bits of social infrastructure.

In contrast to Compuserve, Twitter and Facebook are definitely the public square. You cannot petition for a redress of grievances or lobby for policy changes without using them. And the political left delights in suppressing their opponents on them but files lawsuits claiming their rights are infringed when they aren't given access to every inch -- such as when they sued Trump for blocking them on his Twitter account:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-dismisses-trump-t...

When Democrats were barred from interacting even with a very small part of a platform, it is a critical First Amendment violation. When conservatives, racists, sexists, or whatever term you want to use are barred, well, it's a private company bigot.

This hypocrisy must quickly end, or we as a country will end up in a violent conflict. There must be open, public debate on every major platform, and Americans must be entitled to express their opinions because the only other alternative is violence.

After Dorsey sold Twitter to Elon Musk,

Extreme eyeroll on this post. Twitter's shareholders voted overwhelmingly to sell to Musk. 98.6% of them voted an affirmative yes, in which Dorsey was a very small minority. Dorsey could have voted no at ten times his stake in the company and still it would have been sold to Musk. Everyone was in agreement Musk was overpaying to an extreme degree.

and its 11 million tons of annual CO2 emissions

Nobody is more in opposition to the current energy regime than Bitcoin miners. They are consistent lobbyists for deregulating private nuclear power, so that they can cleanly power their operations.

This reads like a petulant Communist's criticism of Dorsey. Much like many other of the author's diatribes.

Shifting away from using capital as the basis for resources allocation has been tried repeatedly and failed catastrophically every time. There's no mechanism than the market better to optimize the problems of supply, demand, and logistics.

However, something should definitely be done about funny money printers. There are plenty of mechanisms in history shown to be successful dealing with them, such as going to where they live and taking care of them in the dead of night. I agree that massive inflation is a serious problem, but the solution is not to say "let's get rid of the utility of money!" -- it is to punish the people subverting market utility for their own gain.

Trying to change reality because a small group of bad actors is absurd. Just get rid of the bad actors.

A fracking rig costs 900k and many of them sit idle for years at a time:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2022/0415/Demand-for-o...

You are essentially saying that the roughnecks that work the rig for $30-40 an hour should be owning it. They don't have the capital to own it and pay for the oil rights to use it, or the risk tolerance that it will sit idle and still have to be maintained, stored in a rented warehouse, and guarded when regulation does not allow them to be used. Nor is there any evidence they would be able to successfully run an oil company even if they were given it for free -- compliance issues surrounding commodities deals typically require a different skillset than the guy working the rig.

The vast majority of businesses are not software. Virtually all industry has capital outlay requirements and capital risks equal to or greater to this.

Panics are safe though (they're a controlled crash).

Here's Linus's commentary on that:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1099

I think that if some Rust allocation can cause a panic, this is simply _fundamentally_ not acceptable.

Allocation failures in a driver or non-core code - and that is by definition all of any new Rust code - can never EVER validly cause panics.

Panics are not acceptable in countless contexts. Plenty of things need to be written to keep working through entire categories of errors. The casual attitude of Rust developers towards error handling is one of the many reasons people have trouble taking it seriously. Reliability and robustness is generally more important than language memory safety for almost all contexts.

Okay. Let's pretend the Soviets killed nobody in Ukraine other than the Holodomor. That's 5 million people. The credible threat of millions more being butchered by the Soviets was real. At this point, we are disputing small fractions of the total deaths. I don't care if it was only 5 million, though it was millions more.

Far short of the 10M figure you are introducing for whatever imaginitive and creative purposes.

I didn't introduce the 10M figure, I linked an example article where it was used (the Ynetnews one) -- it is a common number I have seen of those who died in Soviet prisons. Maybe not specifically those who were captured by the NKVD -- but I think a lot of people were dropping dead who were also not political prisoners.

10M in this category -- the number who perished "Yagoda's torture chambers" throughout the USSR before the start of the war; and "about half" being in Ukraine;

No -- I said about half of these excess deaths were in Ukraine, most of that half being made up of the 5 million people killed in the Holodomor.

I'm sorry I don't have perfectly legible accounting of the millions of people Stalin killed in Ukraine, but with the lower bound being in the millions I don't think saying 7.5 million people killed in Ukraine is unreasonable. The Holodomor killed 5 million and then there's assuredly another 2.5 million made up in further excess deaths there somewhere. I don't know if it is perfectly accurate and I don't care. These were the people who Bandera had a fiduciary duty to protect, as a leader of Ukrainians. I don't support the evil things that happened in Volhyn and Galicia, but those things had a historical context where there was a credible threat of millions more lives of his countrymen on the line. Tough choices had to be made and he made them.

Wikipedia cites the Holodomor as 5 million. That was mostly in East Ukraine. That's most of the half. The other 2.5 million were from gulags.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...

There were 20 million+ excess deaths, of which 10 million are commonly attributed to Yagoda:

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

Maybe you disagree with these numbers, but they're the ones I know of.

Yes. It was prudent to do anything to save Ukraine. Absolutely. If you love your country you'd deal with the devil himself to save it from what Russia was doing.

10 million people died in Genrikh Yagoda's torture chambers. Another 5 million starved to death in the holodomor.

Hitler was bad, sure, but only a third as bad as the Bolsheviks. And about half of those 15 million deaths happened in Ukraine, and Bandera's fiduciary duty was to fellow Ukrainians, not to some foreign nation. If you had to pick a side (and Bandera did) it was best to go with Hitler.

Yes, absolutely, the Soviet Union and its Secret Police were an active threat to Ukrainians every day. Adolf Hitler was not.

Though Bandera did work with the Nazis, he later worked against them. They weren't ideologically into Nazism.

Even Karaite Jews in Ukraine joined SS regiments at some points. They didn't love Hitler, everyone knew Hitler was a stinker. They were just more immediately concerned with the immediate threat of forced starvation or torture in a gulag.

This quote doesn't really describe ether at all. I'm not even particularly inclined to stand up while I'm doing ether, much less engage in depravity. I recommend for a more accurate account that you read what Oliver Wendell Holmes said about it.

No, it is like being subsumed into the aura of angels. Like a gate to heaven has opened and is oppressing you with joyous radiation.

The phrase "Slava Ukraini" predates the OUN by actual decades. There are plenty of people in Ukraine, particularly East Ukraine, that have personal objections to the mythos of Bandera as a national hero that still use the phrase, as it was coined in the Ukrainian War of Independence. Comparing it to "Sieg Heil" is utterly disingenuous. Regardless, your summary of Bandera and the OUN is delusionally ethnocentric and clearly biased against Ukraine.

I generally call this behavior that of a junkie

and most people that voted in favor of prohibition would say that everyone that drinks alcohol must be a public drunkard, I guess. Usage of ether is a tradition on par with drinking in at least one part of the world. It is a little more dangerous, given ether's excessive flammability and low flash point, but inhaling some ether does not make anyone a junkie. America doesn't have a tradition of ether at all, and it is the only country where there are shambling masses of xylazine/fentanyl zombies defecating in the streets. Maybe you could all use a little more traditional ether consumption.

Bandera and his nazis

Bandera was fighting against the Nazis by the end of the war. At any given time, he was doing what was prudent for his country and getting resources to fight the Cheka, because the Soviets were disappearing Ukrainians in the middle of the night and sending them to gulags.

Appreciating Ukrainian cultural traditions is not political. "Slava Ukraini" should not be a political or offensive phrase, unless you are a genocidal maniac supporting Putin's mass murder.

a liberal attitude like yours.

Lemkos then and now generally had a pretty high opinion of Bandera (they were forcibly resettled by the Soviets). Doing ether is not a particular indicator of a liberal attitude -- it is a traditional practice in Lemko society, and it was so during the time Bandera was alive. Ether is fun and enjoyable, and I like it better than alcohol. I don't think it changes your political designation. It is maybe a Calvinist/Puritan attitude to see the consumption of ether or alcohol as associated with political liberalism, are you perchance of American Protestant stock? This attitude is extremely alien to me.

I've done Xenon a fair number of times, it is definitely the Rolls Royce of inhalants. I'd recommend it to anyone as long as you can divert a little and aren't paying for it yourself. If you don't have unlimited amounts of money, it simply is not worth it.

If you're looking for a great NMDA inhalant experience I'd recommend another classic 19th century anesthetic, diethyl ether. It is extremely simple to produce -- heat everclear and sulfuric acid together and distill. Adjust the PH afterwards. Anyone can make diethyl ether. The actual meat of the ether experience is actually on par with Xenon. I'd say the only element that makes it worse is the aftertaste.

It's still a tradition among Lemkos in the Carpathians (Slava Ukraini!) to drink ether. Drinking is a little trickier, as the boiling point of ether is lower than your body temperature. You should chew and swallow some crushed ice beforehand, and also serve a bit in a shotglass with some crushed ice and lemon shaved ice to offset the taste. I've also found pina colada mix to be a great accompaniment. If you're just starting out with ether I recommend just inhaling the vapor.

"Invasion" is also an acceptable and accurate term. The doublespeak of "special operation" as if it is a police issue in a territory they have right to is what he sticks to.

Regardless, Kapersky has plenty of money. If he doesn't support his nation's mass butchering of its neighbors he could easily buy citizenship in a country like Nevis, which puts it up for sale, denounce Putin, and abandon the Russian state. As it is, he is under the control of the FSB, and every dollar he earns generates demand for the ruble and tax revenue for the Russian state.

Eugene Kapersky is a Russian state asset and literally refuses to use the word "war" in regards to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Banning foreign agents from a hostile regime in a time of war is not an attack on free speech. Kapersky is free to speak -- and he has, through public statements from his company. He is not free to do business with the Western world while living in a sanctioned country.

The number of times I've seen HN posters rejoice that people are not allowed to even communicate their political ideas because they are x-ist (it's a private company, bigot!) is too many to count. But the minute there's an actual genocidal war being waged by one of the most wicked nations on earth, people are very concerned about the Constitutional right to commercially sell antivirus software from the enemy's borders. Absurd.

This is absolutely awesome. For ages I have needed an alternative to mosh that did not require UDP -- I run every outbound connection over Tor, so I only have TCP transport available. This is an incredible improvement to my quality of life.

Yes, it is webkit on the engine.

Given that accidents involving BGP within the past several years have led to worldwide outages in the world's most used websites this is just not true. Also thousands of known bad announcements occur every year, which are usually used in a very small window to send large volumes of abusive advertisements.

There's no reason not to force the industry to hold people accountable for false announcements. The privilege of announcement should be acquired by posting a significant amount of capital as a bond, from which damages can be removed when a system makes a false announcement. The vast majority of damages are a result of network operators on the subcontinent -- it is high time we figure out how to make them take the issue seriously, and pay out the nose until they do.

In all fairness, driving a car is a lot more complicated and full of dangerous edge cases than dropping objects or shooting anyone within a geofence.

Your judgement is clouded by emotions.

This is pure ad hominem. My statements are not emotional at all. Ukraine committed no offense against Russia. Georgia committed no crime against Russia before they aided Abkhazian and South Ossetian rebels. Putin committed these offenses unilaterally against these. Russia chose to steal territory and murder hundreds of thousands of people. These are not emotional statements, they are factual ones.

It is in fact your claims which are clouded by emotionality -- obvious sympathies for Russian propaganda.

However, blame is never black or white. It cannot be all Russia's fault.

Most crimes are a single party's fault. One is the criminal, and one is the victim. Saying it is impossible for it to be all Russia's fault is logically fallacious. Russia chose to invade and commit mass murder. Russia needs to be held to account for that.

In the same interview Putin said that if the US had not broken the promise to Gorbachev to not expand the NATO eastward, the war would not have happened.

Yet this contradicts his statements in 2002 that it was not a big deal and not his business. He only changed positions when he viewed the Russian economy as big enough to wage war and take territory.

There was also no such promise, this is a complete myth.

Russia is doing what it has always done: try to steal more clay. They have been doing this for a thousand years, far before NATO. Russia was neither cornered nor threatened.

US led NATO expansion lead to the war in Ukraine, and Europeans are paying the price.

This is the Russian propaganda of 2 years ago, and we know it is a lie because Putin went on camera and told us so himself. When asked by Tucker Carlson why he invaded Ukraine he gave a half hour history lecture telling us about its history of Russian occupation. Putin justifies his murderous invasion by pointing to former borders of historical Russian entities -- which by the way would not just include Ukraine but Latvia, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Germany, Finland, Japan, Mongolia, Romania, and Poland.

Every child in Eastern Europe knows this to be the real case, and only Americans who have no serious understanding of Russian and have generally never even visited believe this hogwash about NATO.

Putin even said in 2002 that Ukrainian NATO membership was a matter between Ukraine and NATO only: "At the end of the day the decision is to be taken by NATO and Ukraine. It is a matter for those two partners."

Librarians should just begin directly teaching people how to use Z-Library and Annas-Archive.

Five eyes governments like having the power to shut the finances of dissidents (see Canada seizing trucker bank accounts, FBI-partnered NGOs getting Trump supporters deplatformed from financial services). Any digital currencies created by governments will still have this same mode of failure by design.

Sure that ApplePay will work, unless Apple disagrees with your political views and deplatforms you, or any of the governments they answer to order them to do so.

Infinite number of things are possible. This article is about Facebook and Instagram, where people make public posts, can be found by searches, and absolutely nothing is end-to-end encrypted. Law enforcement has complete and total access to every single message ever sent over those platforms, which even provide them with an API to query on essentially an honor system trusting that the warrant document LEO submits is legitimate.

It would be equally irrelevant if the Guardian instead of encryption started talking about criminals are aided by guns and explosives in this article.