stctw

There is, in principle, no difference between controlling what people are allowed to say and controlling what people are allowed to hear, including controlling any middlemen who are involved in propagating speech.

In the USSR, you could say what you wanted inside your own home, to your own family, but were you to speak it where others could hear it, or publish it so others could read and share it...

So, no, you are wrong: the ideas are not different at all, and if you are against one, you are against the other. You judge yourself to be worthy of deciding what others are allowed to hear. Would you allow me to judge what you are allowed to hear? If you would, I would feed you a steady diet of history and philosophy until you discarded such ideas, ideas which enabled much oppression and suffering in the 20th century.

Seriously! And this is the comment that gets downvoted? Who is to say what is misinformation, the KGB? What has gone wrong in the past 30 years that we are pining to be like Soviet Russia was? Are we so historically ignorant of world history one generation previous that we don't understand the problem? Or are we so arrogant that we think we are qualified to decide what information other human beings should be allowed to have?

There already was a civil war in the US, and that's not how it happened. What's strange is that anyone thinks that a second one would be a matter of the US Army vs. the People, irrelevant to the States. It's a non-sequitur. Anyway, let us pray that it never comes to that, as much as our enemies would like it to. Imagine how giddy the CCP would be.

You seem to envision a world in which one would have to physically travel outside the borders of your nation in order to hear what people outside the nation think. Do you also propose that foreign printed media be banned in your nation? What if a foreigner writes a letter to a citizen in your nation and attaches a clipping of a magazine article that criticizes your government? Should the letter be confiscated? Should all mail be opened and censored by your government? How would that be any different than life was in Soviet Russia and East Germany? Do you really propose regressing to that, now in the 21st century, after all the oppressive atrocities perpetrated in the 20th?

Banning books

I don't see how comments saying that are accepted here. Everyone knows that no books are being banned anywhere in the country. You can go to a bookstore or web site and buy whatever books you want. They can be bought in public or delivered to your home. Publishers can publish whatever they want. The First Amendment protects authors, publishers, and readers.

Meanwhile, in the UK, if you share a message consisting entirely of a couple of emojis on Facebook, you can be sentenced to 2 months in jail, being convicted and sentenced in merely 3 days.

Yet people here continue to make accusations of "banning books." I hope that the Internet enables humanity to eventually "graduate" out of this state in which we have infinite access to information yet consume enormous amounts of propaganda.

I have a better question: where's the balance in it? All I see are links to biased, left-wing sources. Not a source from the right or center, and not a mention of the defendant's counterclaims.

So the only conclusion one can reasonably draw from it is that the commenter thinks that Paxton is a crook--not that Paxton is one.

But, of course, anyone taking even a neutral position here is heavily downvoted, because Paxton is a Republican, therefore he is guilty. And so the echo chamber echoes.

I am with you 100%. Imagine, if you would, that you lived in an apartment, and that you spent $2,000 on a stereo system, and that you turned up the volume so high that people in vehicles, driving by on the nearby street, could feel the sound waves inside their vehicles from a quarter-mile away.

What would happen if you did that? Well, obviously, someone would call the police, and they would bang on your door, and they would warn or cite you, and you'd have to pay a fine or appear in court. On top of that, you'd probably get an angry call from your landlord, and if you ever did it again, you'd probably be evicted. It would be absurdly anti-social behavior that's prohibited by existing laws and ordinances.

But, somehow, as you said, society tolerates the very same behavior when the source is inside a vehicle rolling around on wheels. And yet, if you think about it, as that vehicles rolls from one end of town to another, down busy streets, past residences and businesses and hospitals, the number of people needlessly antagonized and harmed by the noise must number in the thousands each day.

"But it's only for a few seconds," the other side will say. And yet it happens over, and over, and over again, tens of times a day, day after day, waking people up too early in the morning, disturbing them while they live and work at home, and keeping them up at night.

And the purpose of this noise? Is it a necessary by-product of the vehicle's natural purpose? Of course not. The purpose is solely, completely, 100%, and only, self-aggrandizement of the operator; to intentionally antagonize innocent strangers who can't even be seen by the antagonist. If anyone doubts this, one should look at a few advertisements offering these audio systems for sale. "DISTURB YOUR NEIGHBORS" is a common theme, even an explicit one. The noise is entirely artificial, with no reasonable, ethical, or moral purpose.

To derive pleasure from the mere intuition that someone, somewhere is being antagonized by one's own actions is surely a sociopathic, anti-social, anti-societal behavior. We hear the cries to legalize some drugs because "they don't harm anyone but the user," but where are the cries to de-legalize this widely harmful behavior?

Well, FWIW, I've been told by local cops that the behavior is already illegal in my area, but when they've cited offenders, their cases have been dismissed by local judges, so now they don't bother. Why? Who knows, but when I consider the local businesses that sell these stereo systems, I can only imagine their reaction to a campaign to "lower the boom" by ticketing offenders, and I wonder what influence they may have on local government.

Put that together with increased violence in general, and the increased risk of a confrontation at any traffic stop, and I can imagine that cops consider carefully whether to initiate one for various behaviors.

And we hear these cries to make people live closer together, in smaller dwellings. No, I want to be further apart, with more buffer. I am very careful not to impose my by-products on my neighbors, but not all of them are so considerate.

/rant (I so rarely see like-minded people talking about this issue)

How dare you use "dehumanizing" rhetoric against me, you far-right neo-fascist! That's rude!

The thing about hypocrisy is that it reveals that you think you are superior to others and therefore entitled to rule over them using whatever means necessary, including dishonesty and, ultimately, force. It is the definition of anti-social and is considered unacceptable in society for good reason.

The mind is much like a computer: garbage in, garbage out. You have essentially been mis- (or mal-) programmed. If you were to free your mind of these destructive ideas, you could live a freer, happier life and contribute to society instead of trying to destroy it. Make the choice if you still can, for the longer you hold on to evil, the stronger its grasp on you.

It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means that will preserve as many of your lives as you can?

This century has yet to see anything like WW1 and WW2, and those who are alive today are incredibly disconnected from our recent past.

The device in question had no locking enabled of any kind. The associated Apple ID account was locked by Apple without warning, and so the phone itself was locked for any use other than emergency calls.

AFAICT, this feature requires the recovery contact to also use an Apple device, which does not help us. It seems like another way to try to lock users into using Apple.

His account is 14 years old. He knows the guidelines. Why did you spend your time itemizing supposed violations of them?

Meanwhile, I see in these comments many such violations while advocating the other side of the issue, and none of them are downvoted, flagged, or chastised.

There is a persistent pattern on one side of the political spectrum to hold their opponents to various rules while allowing themselves to be exempt, and it is prominent on HN as well.

If you are here for open, honest, and civilized discussion, will you vouch for some of the comments which violate no guidelines but were flagged because they are in favor of the use of automobiles? Will you chastise some of the shallow dismissals which are against the use of automobiles?

Anecdotes work both ways. Apple recently locked and forced a reset of Apple ID accounts for no reason.[0] This happened to my elderly mother at an incredibly inconvenient time, making her phone completely unusable, and the phone was set up for her by my elderly father, who had had strokes since then, and couldn't remember the account password, and had lost access to the email address. I spent hours on the phone begging Apple to help, and they could do nothing but direct me toward recovery Web pages that had long, mandatory waiting periods. It took weeks for my mom's phone to no longer be a useless brick, and it very nearly didn't work (they already denied one request without explanation). Even sending them proof of purchase from the mobile carrier, as they demanded, was rejected. All in the name of "protecting" the user.

I provided the link to the Forbes article to multiple representatives, including a senior advisor. None of them admitted to knowing anything about it, even a week later. It was reported on various Apple news sites as well.

So, no, I cannot in good conscience recommend buying an Apple device. Even if you pay for it, it effectively does not belong to you, and Apple may suddenly disable it at any time, for any reason, without warning.

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/04/28/apple-id...

What is weird about this?

If a business fails to perform well, its customers can choose another provider, and the business will have to improve, or else it will fail.

If a government fails, what recourse do its "customers" have? Wait a few years for the next election and hope that the truth about the government's poor performance wins out over the propaganda, and hope that the citizens vote in competent, honest officials, who might gradually make improvements, despite having to work through non-elected officials who are difficult to replace for incompetency? How often does that happen? And what if the officials in question are merely appointed by those who are elected, and thereby insulated from accountability by several levels of indirection? What recourse do the "customers" have then? Can they choose another "rail provider"?

The private sector has natural consequences for failure and a natural incentive to excel and be efficient (certain circumstances, such as monopolies, notwithstanding). The public sector is heavily insulated from consequences for failure and inefficiency.

That doesn't mean that everything should be privatized. It means that we shouldn't be surprised when a service provided by the public sector fails to perform well or efficiently, and we should carefully consider what the government ought to be responsible for. Also, we should make it easier to hold government officials accountable and replace them for incompetence. If someone wants the security of a public sector job, they ought to be held to the highest standards.

That's an interesting thought. It's almost like Chrome and Firefox have been in a "browser cold war" for years now, trying to outdo each other's version numbers, trying to entice users with greener grass rather than the stronger "attacks" of the IE-Firefox "browser wars" of the past, and one side trying to imitate the other.

Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated. Users may have gained some rapid iteration, but in the long term, I think we lost the ability to understand how the browsers are changing (of course, some of that is a matter of the inherent complexity explosion in the Web).

And once you change to the constantly-incremented version numbering scheme, how can you ever go back to something more meaningful? Who's would blink first?

Happily, Pale Moon, for example, retains more modest version numbers. I hope their developers continue doing well. Imagine if it (or a similar project) were the next Phoenix, the way Firefox rose from Netscape's ashes.

Rephrase, simplify, eliminate. For example, your comment could be written as:

Frequent readers here know I write verbosely. I communicate clearly, but few people finish reading my messages. Any advice?

William Zinsser's book, On Writing Well, covers this topic. I recommend it.