wz1000

Thank you UN for not being able to do your job!

The UN is simply a forum for countries to meet and discuss international affairs. It is not a global governing body, and wields no power not authorized by its constituent member nations.

I don't disagree with the concept of a "bug bounty for information" but I'm struggling to come up with an idea of what that would look like in a way that is either more effective or different than patents.

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

Zathura supports epubs using zathura-pdf-mupdf

Interesting you pick on any mention of Foucault as giving away ideological leanings, since, incidentally, Graeber was not a big fan.

From "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology":

Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment. Of course, if any of these academics were to walk into their university library to consult some volume of Foucault without having remembered to bring a valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway,they would soon discover that brute force is really not so far away as they like to imagine—a man with a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.

http://abahlali.org/files/Graeber.pdf

And "Dead Zones of the Imagination":

Consider the hegemonic role, in US social theory, of Max Weber in the 1950s and 1960s, and of Michel Foucault since the 1970s. Their popularity, no doubt, had much to do with the ease with which each could be adopted as a kind of anti-Marx, their theories put forth (usually in crudely simplified form) to argue that power is not simply or primarily a matter of the control of production but rather a pervasive, multifaceted, and unavoidable feature of any social life ... Foucault was more subversive, but in a way that made bureaucratic power more effective, not less. In his work on asylums, clinics, prisons, and the rest, bodies, subjects—even truth itself—all become the products of administrative discourses. Through concepts like governmentality and biopower, state bureaucracies end up shaping the parameters of human existence in ways far more intimate than anything Weber might have imagined.

Foucault’s ascendancy, in turn, was precisely within those fields of academic endeavor that both became the haven for former radicals, and were almost completely divorced from any access to political power—or, increasingly, from any influence on social movements as well. This gave Foucault’s emphasis on the “power/knowledge” nexus—the assertion that forms of knowledge are always also forms of social power, indeed, the most important forms of social power—a particular appeal.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau2....

Very ironic mentioning semiconductors, when it was the protectionist US-Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement pushed by Reagan that propped up the American semiconductor industry, while leading to the decline of the Japanese industry

Fortunately, the specific violations have been compiled by the world bank, as pointed out in a sibling comment.

I just have one part I found incredibly funny

The idea that the British were somehow exploitative by resisting renegotiation is ignorant of this fact

If overthrowing a democratically elected government is not exploitative, I don't know what is. "Resisting renegotiation" is a very Orwellian way of phrasing such. I'm guessing something along the lines of "we will topple your government and hand over absolute power to a brutal dictator if the terms are violated" was also part of the the agreement?

What about all the other Iranians, the ones that had nothing to do with APOC or oil or the government. Did they also "deserve" their fate?

You are conflating not investing in a country with overthrowing a democratically elected government. Are you really arguing that it was OK for the US and UK to overthrow Iran's government because otherwise foreigners might not have invested in Iran, or otherwise threatened their investments? Truly, this is what they call "capitalism with a human face".

Are we talking about the D'Arcy Concession? I ask because none of what you are describing is found in the text of that agreement.

The agreement was re-negotiated in 1933, according to terms that the grandparent pointed out. At this point I have to wonder if you are being disingenuous on purpose. The rest of your comment is a moral appeal making a case for why D'Arcy "deserved" the profits. You have to pick a lane, are you arguing on the basis of who "deserves" a countries natural resources, or from the point of view of adherence to contracts and agreements?

If you disagree with the substance then please do so without accusing me of being inhumane.

I'm not accusing you of being inhumane. I'm wondering if you would apply similar moral standards when the shoe is on the other foot, or if you are a hypocrite.

Here is what Iranians see from major American presidential candidates considered to be "highly respected on both sides of the aisle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg

Assassinating Soleimani was definitely not explicitly listed on any treaty.

Why should a concession made by a monarch pre-constitutional revolution be expected to be upheld by a democratically elected leader operating after significant changes in the form and nature of government?

I have noticed all such principled defenses of "property rights" and "capitalism" are built upon a very specific and convenient view of what exactly counts as "legitimate property". Was the oil even the Shah's to give away in the first place?

But what do you expect to happen when you forcibly take all of the British resources?

Very strange how oil underneath the Iranian soil can be considered a "British resource".

Buying Facebook ads and making fake accounts is not "hacking".

Truly an absurd comment. The US government is the largest employer in the country, with something in the order of 10 million employees. Are they all slaves chained to their desks?

Even if all you say is true and it is truly impossible for the government to replicate any of what Google does, the point is moot. If the government is going to appropriate Google's index, might as well appropriate the datacenters too. Really, whats Google going to do with them once search is gone? According to you, it is the only thing they have have running there.

aren't using a government run one right now kind of undermines the sincerity of your arguments.

First I never said I'm not. Either way it is pretty irrelevant to the discussion.

If, in fact, I am not using a government run one right now, maybe it is precisely because the government hasn't yet stolen Google's? If the government already had something as good as Google, clearly there would be no point in them stealing Google's, would there?

The NSA also monitors most of the worlds communications in near real time. A building full of hard drives is also completely useless without some sort of reasonably decent search and indexing capability, so I'm pretty sure the NSA built something for the task.

Presumably that Google data center does a lot of compute intensive, non search related stuff - like GCP for one.

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

designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger

While google says:

The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexi...

Seems like the government already has the expertise and equipment required to handle data at Google scale :)

Doesn't the NSA have a bunch of massive datacenters?

Regardless of that, the datacenter can be appropriated by the government too.

How are my personal decisions relevant? I'm calling for a government appropriation of the search division of Google.

The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle.

The same approach that works for Google can also work for a public body supported by public funds. It can also use much of the same systems and maybe even personnel that Google currently employs for this purpose. I'm essentially asking for the search division of Google to be appropriated by the government.

Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically.

I'm not asking for a search neutral index - public Google just needs to be (largely) open, transparent and accountable about its ranking algorithm. That's why the stipulation that other entities be allowed to mirror the index - they can optimize the index for their own purposes and rankings on their own hardware.

I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something.

Not for research purposes - other entities will be free to copy it for purposes like sovereignty (governments), less/more censorship or to build their own systems on top of it for profit, or any other purpose.

Here's one idea: Make the index open and public, set up a public body to update it, and allow anyone to build a frontend. Access can be charged per query. Other companies/entities/governments will be allowed to mirror the index for essentially the price of data transfer.

This is just something I thought up right now, and sure, there might be problems with the approach. But to pretend like there is absolutely nothing that can be done betrays a willful lack of imagination.

The Mongolian Empire was very different in operation from the British or other colonial empires. It was not set up with the aim of wealth extraction and economic dominance of subjugated territories back to the parent country. You could not call it "colonial" by any widely accepted definition of the word.

There is certainly a huge difference between setting up extractive institutions designed for the benefit of people living half a world away, compared to extractive institutions set up for the benefit of people living a few hundred kilometers away. In the latter case, you have a much greater chance of seeing some of that wealth again, and of being able to influence the decisions of your rulers.

European colonialism was certainly novel in its sheer scale, and its effects are felt to this day in pretty much every non European country barring a small handful.

Two things:

1. It isn't clear that the (real) cost of essentials like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education is actually going down significantly.

2. Even if what you say is 100% correct, this "extraction of wealth due to inflation" seems to be a somewhat stable scenario, and certainly hasn't lead to the apocalyptic visions of collapse that inflation hawks perennially create a ruckus about. So even if you think we are living through a hyper-inflationary doomsday scenario, certainly this is a very different doomsday than what one is usually led to imagine (Zimbabwe, Wiemar Republic, Venezuela etc.). Maybe inflationary Armageddon isn't so bad after all!

Talking about a revolution

Many economists want precisely this state intervention, but it presents clear risks. Governments which already carry heavy debts could decide that worrying about deficits is for wimps and that central-bank independence does not matter. That could at last unleash high inflation and provide a painful reminder of the benefits of the old regime.

Sounds more like a plea than a warning, coming from The Economist. Prophecies of inflation seem like a joke in a time of record low inflation with high government deficits. Just look at the case of Japan for one.

First flight: 1993

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X