An America-Less Internet
nthbrock.com
nthbrock.com
It's a big reason why I disengaged from Reddit and read selectively on HN. I don't dislike the US at all, and it still permeats through culture here regardles. I just don't think soaking in the latest US drama is great for your mental health or a good use of your time, unless you actually live there. It's one thing to stay informed but another to let yourself get invested in the daily controversies.
It's not good if you live here either.
Heck, me and my Dad can't even talk politics because of how toxic it is. The worst part is that, if you live here, you need to pay attention for economic reasons.
As much as fund managers tell you to 'not time the market'. It seems obvious to pay attention to things like interest rates, stock market prices, etc... before making major purchasing decisions. If I ignored the news, I'd be buying a lake front property at 8% interest rate, instead I'll wait for a collapse. (Did it with COVID in April 2020 and got ~30% off on my indexes)
I've been waiting for the housing market in my country to go bust since 2008. Any day now.
We got our real estate absurdly cheap at 3.1% interest rate.
Makes it really hard to find a bigger place when everything is 3x more expensive now. We tell our real estate agents how much we pay now, and they are mind boggled.
What does this mean? You were invested in equities before Jan 2017, then sold them, then held cash between Jan 2017 and Mar 2020, and then bought equities again precisely at the bottom in mid Mar 2020?
Does the 30% off factor in missed dividends?
I'd probably start pulling back about 10 years after 2008. Basically, when times are too good, that is when to sell.
Although, selling means you have to pay tax, so I'd probably just horde cash more than selling.
I've only played the market on a few different 'news' things that I'm an expert in, put like 2k in, stock price goes up 10%, make $200... Too high risk for $200.
Right now I'm dumping everything I have into stocks and resource based trusts. (and as mentioned, looking for more real estate)
And your metric for this is what? An even sounding number in base 10 after an arbitrarily chosen dip?
> Although, selling means you have to pay tax, so I'd probably just horde cash more than selling.
So you would bet the drop in prices will be less than the 20% tax on the capital gains just before the drop in prices?
> I've only played the market on a few different 'news' things that I'm an expert in, put like 2k in, stock price goes up 10%, make $200... Too high risk for $200.
I do not understand. If it was too high risk, why did you do it?
Read Tao Te Ching(I liked Stephen Mitchel Translation, its only 80 pages, its the first book of Taoism, 2nd favorite book of all time). I'm a numbers guy, but I can't deny that you can 'feel'/'see' the Tao. When your redneck neighbor buys a gigantic boat and has a 7 year car loan, its something you notice.
>So you would bet the drop in prices will be less than the 20% tax on the capital gains just before the drop in prices?
This ignores risk too.
>I do not understand. If it was too high risk, why did you do it?
It was a good stock in general, I was 100% certain the market made a mistake on the news, $2000 dollars is nothing, if I lost it, my life wouldn't have changed at all.
The US for better or the worse is the 'world leader', the current big 'empire', every country in the world reports on US news.
Of course in Australia it doesn't help that you have Sky News (Fox News for Australia) riling people up over stuff that doesn't concern them at all.
It's very easy as an ABC journalist to rehash Reuters and AP without fear of incorrectly publishing something
That's why you'll often see domestic Australian stories reported in all other outlets except for the ABC - they do not trust other domestic news sources
Every country's stability, for better or for worse is at least significantly affected by US Politics and their foreign policies
In Australia it's been that way since well before LBJ. But even far flung states in different continents are directly affected by US foreign policy, perhaps even moreso than Australia
I don't think so; what people (not necessarily in this thread) are discounting is the importance of Pax Americana coming to a close.
Like all other empires and world superpowers that came before us, the Age of America will almost certainly end, likely some time this century, whether any of us like it or not. The writing is on the wall for anyone who cares about it, and no it doesn't take a degree in geopolitics or economics to see it.
Who's going to be up next to bat? Personally I don't know, though odds seem good it's probably China. Whoever it's going to be though, we will be living our own flavor of an interesting time.
Did the sale of Sky to Comcast cause its editorial voice to moderate at all? As an American it's easy enough to imagine what it used to be like, when it was owned by Rupert Murdoch.
This is one of my two pain points on Quora: not even trying to split among US-related content and international content. Reading all those question where "we" implies US residents is as annoying as those US citizens not understanding that calling themselves American/Italian/Irish in an international discussion can lead to some light backlash.
I thought Quora was overrun by Indians?
There's also the fact that what the US is just more important than other countries by virtue of being such a huge chunk of the global economy. What happens in the US has repercussions to people that live in other countries in a way that is much less true of almost every other country in the world.
If the US had a population of 70M and the UK had a population of 340M and the GDPs were reversed - it would be the other way around.
The number of times, on UK websites or US websites, something is advertised as "Coming in Spring 2024", it baffles me. What months happen to be defined as "Spring" is dependant on which hemisphere of the planet you happen to be on.
It's parochial and wierd.
I live in Australia. I listen to a series of audio dramas created in the UK. They have a website, and sell and promote their releases there. This is the source of information about these items. And when they say "Coming Spring 2024" they are not thinking about their global audience, and I can't get any information about these releases from other websites.
It's parochial and wierd to use an arbitary metric based on what hemisphere you're in and assuming your entire audience is restricted to that hemisphere (or at least, not caring about the others).
It's clear and simple to say "Coming September 2024". That's not tailored for a country, it's tailored for a set of non-geographical overlapping cultures, some of whom might want to give you money.
My guess is, in that context, the US is a neutral target which everyone can have a grab without too much risk of ...say... awkwardness.
Plus, as the world's most powerful nation, the US did many talkable things. It's like a gift that keeps giving, and as soon as you think the topic is finished, the US just stands up and tosses you more.
But I don't think talk == care, though.
In fairness, most of this stuff is globally harmonised, such as by the Berne convention.
L'auteur d'une oeuvre de l'esprit jouit sur cette oeuvre, du seul fait de sa création, d'un droit de propriété incorporelle exclusif et opposable à tous. Ce droit comporte des attributs d'ordre intellectuel et moral ainsi que des attributs d'ordre patrimonial, qui sont déterminés par les livres Ier et III du présent code. L'existence ou la conclusion d'un contrat de louage d'ouvrage ou de service par l'auteur d'une oeuvre de l'esprit n'emporte aucune dérogation à la jouissance du droit reconnu par l'alinéa 1er.
tl;dr: you're allowed to make money off of it because you created it. You cannot give away those author rights. They include moral rights and intellectual rights (intellectual rights are your IP, which can be sold. Moral rights are and will always be yours.)
This is the reason why, I believe, that European countries has had no problem at all signing up for longer copyright because it fits in with our conception that the purpose of copyright is to protect the rights of the creator.
This was normalized by Berne, but let us suppose we got a new Berne convention and the U.S said hey long copyright does not help support the promotion of science and the arts etc. and I don't think that would go over that well, because shortening the period of protection does not fit well with the EU conception of what the purpose of copyright is for.
Hence the reason lots of arguments on here where people say I think it should be 25 years probably won't fly because it seems unlikely people in power are going to want to overthrow the international order on that point.
The US has been a big driver of extending copyright terms on behalf of US media corporations such as Disney. It became very apparent that whenever Mickey Mouse would come out of copyright, Disney would get a change in the law.
Most recently when it was about to expire this didn't happen, possibly as a result of the spat between Disney and Florida Republicans.
For instance, "Woke" has been a huge topic here in Norway the past ~3 months which is funny as it's close to completely irrelevant for the day to day life of 99.9% of Norwegians.
I blame the shifting media incentives and hope that some new platforms pop up, or that the mainstream audience just gets tired of it and stops using it (but due to the addictive nature of these platforms I doubt that honestly..)
What is surprising is how anyone who doesn't use "Pure English" is seen as less than in these circles. Local Indian primary source work is underrated in favor of sweeping generalizations made at invited talks in western universities.
It is changing now, but mostly because the new 'tech money' is questioning the elite status of the previous class and soft replacing them.
It’s changing rapidly and BBC accent isn’t cool anymore with the rise of a new class of self made elites.
It gets worse when American-Left wokeism completely disregards the native culture and tries to invent racism when there was none, creating unnecessary racial conflict through their shitstorms.
E.g. the American Left is now trying to cancel "blackface" in German Christmas traditions, where the whole point was to highlight that yes, Africans were important in early Christianity and equal to other races (but there weren't enough people with the right skin colour around, so make-up had to make do). But no, black representation is, apparently, more racist than pretending everyone in the bible is white.
You have a lot of small countryside villages where no black people live. One of the three magi you need in your school play about Christmas is, by tradition, considered to be black. What other solution do you suggest to represent that?
Why, other than because Americans have negative connotations with the practice?
> I'm sure there's plenty of other better ways
We're open for suggestions.
But it's not just people from the US. There are protests every year in Europe against various traditions which involve blackface (eg. Black Peter). There are plenty of people who protest and given the colonial legacies of some European countries it's pretty clear to me that this is not just invented racism/conflict from "the American left".
As a European myself I understand the complaints of US defaultism and agree with plenty of them but this simply not one of them.
> The George Floyd protests and subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the Netherlands in 2020 appear to have had a significant effect on the acceptance of Zwarte Piet's traditional appearance among the Dutch public. A June 2020 survey saw a drop in support for leaving the character's appearance unaltered. 47 percent of those surveyed supported the traditional appearance, compared to 71 percent in a similar survey held in November 2019.
Perfectly organic local protests and totally not fuelled by US activism, indeed.
Part of the problem with American righties and lefties is that they tend to make stuff up. The comment you're responding to is very likely an example of that, but in its own way it illustrates how they insert their talking points into even HN threads created to discuss how to get away from their talking points.
Viewed from that perspective, it's insidious even if it is completely fabricated.
If you read about "woke leftists cancelling [my tradition/Christmas]" day in and day out you start believing this stuff, even if it just started out as hanging out on certain subreddits for fun.
I don't believe everyone is as susceptible to this "convincing emotional content built on fear and rage" but it absolutely seems like a decent amount of people are. Especially considering these are usually the loudest voices in any debate.
That's the worst part about the American internet being so prolific in Europe. I don't think Americans understand how much their internet impacts Europe. I can only really speak for Northern Europe. But the impact is massive there, most content we consume after we learn english in our teens is American/English content.
On the topic of the historical wise men who are said to have visited Jesus - they came from the east (Asia), not the west (Africa). While it is true that in some parts of Europe one of the wise men has come to be portrayed as black, it's absurd to say that blackface must be applied in order to preserve the authenticity of the portrayal. If historical authenticity was the goal, the entire nativity should be portrayed by people with Middle Eastern features. And if the goal is merely symbolic - a way of showing that Christianity can appeal to people from all over the world - that can easily be communicated through dialog.
Zwarte Piet has a different history and has nothing to do with early Christianity. If anything it has to do with pagan traditions around winter demons that relatively recently morphed into a black sidekick for Sinterklaas, coincidentally exactly around the time that blackface minstrel shows and human zoos were popular.
But I suspect you know this, and are trying to loop in American "culture wars" as a way of not dealing with something that Afro-Europeans find at least racially insensitive if not outright offensive. This, in fact, is exactly how Americans end up getting shoehorned into every topic everywhere in the world, because even when people claim to want to discuss topics in the local context, they tend to spend more time derailing the conversation into some whining about American cultural hegemony instead.
It's not just that it could appeal to the whole world, but that early Christianity was not just an European affair.
> that can easily be communicated through dialog.
All the counter suggestions so far have been vague and ineffectual. If racism could be solved through dialog, we wouldn't even be here.
> But I suspect you know this, and are trying to loop in American "culture wars" as a way of not dealing with something that Afro-Europeans find at least racially insensitive if not outright offensive.
I would suspect that Afro-Germans rather find it offensive that Germany keeps dodging its responsibility for its colonial war crimes and tries to silence critics of its incredibly dubious 2021 "settlement", after 70+ years of attempts to solve this situation.
But Americanisms are dominating the public discourse so hard that these topics aren't even on the radar. (Similarly, we can get massive Floyd protests country-wide on a moment's notice, but none against Germany's police giving guns to and covering for Nazi terrorists shooting Turkish migrants.)
So, sorry, I'm not some insidious white supremacist trying to silence critics, I'm just extremely disappointed in our local problems being ignored in favour of doing whatever the Americans are doing.
Certainly, early Christianity arrived in North Africa around the same time it arrived in Eastern Europe, but that's hardly controversial. It's not only geographically and politically obvious, but also a well-documented history, literally going back to the time that the New Testament was canonized - in Roman Africa, no less! There is no need to have 21st century children in Germany apply blackface during the nativity play to show that Christianity existed in Africa several hundred years after Jesus died.
I don't know why you are bringing up being an "insidious white supremacist" (an Americanism you imply other people are using, and yet nobody on this thread is). The issue is that this whole argument that blackface is an earnest celebration of African Christianity is totally contrived, based not on fact, but on the unwillingness to acknowledge that in the modern world doing caricatures of other races is generally seen as culturally insensitive. Majority of Europeans are not crying "racism" (once again - your words), but they still appreciate that this sort of stuff does offend some people and is not something that is a big enough deal to be worth clinging onto. There is no cultural heritage being lost by letting kids perform the nativity play without blackface.
And no need to whatabout back around to colonial history in Namibia as if that's some kind of gotcha. Sure, that's bad too. But once again, nobody was saying to ignore the genocide of the Herero and Nama. There can be two bad things at the same time. The current German government refusing to take responsibility for crimes that happened during colonial times, and also individuals in present-day Germany not wanting to give up a "tradition" that has no educational benefit, no historical accuracy and really does bother some individuals of the minority it allegedly is honoring.
His manifesto cited and occasionally simply plagiarized various anti-muslim UK and US sources. Even apparently the Unabomber.
A similar situation applied to the New Zealand mosque shooter.
It's an impossible counter-factual to run, but if he had never been exposed to US discourse and we remove all the US sources from the manifesto .. would his terrorist attack have happened?
In the broader sense this reactionary stance is the same as the Jihad types in the middle east, albeit with less overly Muslim and more overtly Christian takes. Jihad vs. McWorld covered it decades ago.
> ...soaking in the latest US drama is great for your mental health
Touché.
Might be controversial, but I believe that if you're not part of the USA and can't influence their political choices, it's better to ignore the chatter.
One rule along these lines: if a Congressperson is not in my state or district and he or she isn’t actually influencing legislation, there’s really no reason to pay attention.
Obviously politics is important, but you can’t draw a straight line from that statement to the need to keep up with the US media ecosystem.
There is also US "dark money" in UK politics (e.g. Turning Point and the various Tufton Street orgs). And some UK politicians have "made it" in the US market, such as Facebook VP Nick Clegg.
The diaspora is loud, but views their country from an entirely American perspective. At the same time, Americans uphold the diaspora as defacto representation for the natives.
Because English is an official language in these parts, the national news of these places gets cannibalized by American opinion and Americans look out for blind spots like would when talking about places that don't speak English at all.
This dominance often leads to a digital monoculture where everything seems to be interconnected with US news, pricing, and the relentless pursuit of capitalist growth, which can overshadow other perspectives and cultures.
It's important to recognise that if any other country had the same saturation on the internet, I would likely express similar concerns about its impact on our lives.
I am, of course - a hypocrite as I sit here on a US VC focused website - I guess the chairs really are where the people go.
I'm willing to bet that a large chunk of websites that passed their tests (Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay) are in fact wholly or partially pinging the USA to serve requests.
I find that a bit surprising as well. Though my threat model doesn't currently account for state actors, if it did, this would be concerning.
Further if you are a US Citizen talking with Other US Citizens, then having your data in the US is the best place for it... Putting it outside the US automatically eliminates any of the paper thin constitutional concerns the state actors would have to pretend to care about... If your email in a 5 eyes nation then it makes their job even easier.
And regarding the privacy risk, we haven't seen a credible threat that would have our servers accessed directly by US law enforcement that isn't just as credible anywhere else in the world. It hasn't happened, we don't believe it will happen.
So yeah, we disappear in an interesting little thought experiment like this one (despite having Australian-owned IP space, it's advertised and routed into our US locations, so fair enough it's blocked in this case)
I do think the timing is ripe for us to look at having more datacenters around the world again. We have had both Iceland and Amsterdam locations in the past, and neither were reliable enough to put production traffic to, multiple hour network outages and inability to contact support and get them fixed - but maybe the landscape has changed enough that it's viable again now.
Fastmail's clients are mostly online only and dont cache much information.
It takes ~5-10 seconds to go from clicking on a notification to actually being able to read anything. It's really not a good experience.
https://paste.debian.net/plain/1282885 (Zoom out a bit to see it properly)
I also created a few measurements on RIPE Atlas.
Ping from all probes in India to api.fastmail.com: https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/55469007/
Traceroute from all probes in India to api.fastmail.com: https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/55469042/
It's not massively worse than what I get from here:
11. 103.168.172.63 0.0% 5 251.0 251.2 250.8 251.9 0.5
We're using cloudflare for DDoS protection and hence our packets all go into their edge where they get scrubbed before being passed to our hosts. They don't inspect the content at all, so they can't terminate early, which means every packet is round tripping that 350ms.
BUT - JMAP should still mean it's only a couple of round trips to have a fully loaded mailbox.
Some sites are good about having a split between "www." (static assets, which can go behind a CDN) and "api." (requests which are live and mostly uncacheable), some aren't - so the data is just being proxied.
Take out a few cable landings and while the L3 network might survive, most of the apps would not.
Take out a few cable landings and you'll lose a big part of the web.
But the Internet will still work fine.
When will this myth die? The Internet was designed as an academic computer network. DARPA provided funding and, yes, very early packet switch-network research was inspired by the desire to maintain communications in wartime, but the first four network nodes were Utah, USC, Stanford, and UCSB. Not NSA, CIA, Pentagon, and USNO.
I really like the idea of switching my internet experience to all non-American companies/websites. Next to Russia and China, America is the most extreme global superpower. I like the idea of getting content and services from less-controversial countries, with [presumably] less controversial businesses and communities.
On the GeoIP side, I see what's causing confusion. Using iplocation.net to look up one of Fastmail's CDN IPs (103.168.172.42), different databases register it as either Melbourne, Australia, or New Jersy, USA. If you check ARIN, the IP block is registered in South Brisbane, Australia, and APNIC has it registered to FastMail in Melbourne, Australia. Personally I would go with the Internet Registry listings before a geolocation database, as that's more likely to be where that IP is terminated (according to its IP block registration).
Interestingly this is fun for the IETF's netblock, which usually geolocates my phone to the previous city we met in, 4 months prior! Heuristic guesses create some crazy stuff sometimes.
If they're so privacy oriented shouldn't they state clearly where your email goes?
We switched to those IPs from a range which was owned by our old datacenter and we were continuing to lease, to give us more network independence and the ability to route our range through better DDoS protection systems.
They say that “fish can’t see water” (or words to that effect). I’m glad someone writes an article like this from time to time, just to point out the water. I’m old enough to remember the early 90s Internet in the UK (my company was the one connecting businesses up). I also remember discussions we had about regulation, the law, state (implicitly, the US) influence on those 2 things, and what the future we were building might look like.
Some of us in the UK were what you might call Internet Libertarians, EFF-like (in a time just before the EFF), the other half was warmer to regulation and government hands on “our Internet”. Their argument was that if we didn’t have UK legislators onboard, we’d end up just dancing entirely to US legislators and regulators. That the alternative wasn’t UK state interference or no interference (You weary giants of flesh and steel), it was the Internet according to some retired Admirals at IANA/NIC.
I still think about this from time to time.
The one thing that the US does have, is that raucous, "Ain't no one gonna tell me what to do!" attitude. It can be annoying as hell, but does mean that we don't react well to authoritative control.
Despite the "whataboutisms" (PRISM, Snowden, etc.), the US is pretty much a proponent of an unfettered Internet.
So whatever replaces it as a main actor, should be fairly representative of all the stakeholders.
I find that ironic, because US-ians are the first to throw themselves on the pulpit to their chosen deities. Be it politicians (or political parties), especially wealthy people or their favourite corporations.
I suppose the difference is that nobody really forces you worship any of these people in particular, you might, from a far, notice that they all center across worship of the economic system.
Which is "extract value and externalise cost at all times" with a minor emphasis on equating dollar-worth to intrinsic value to society.
EDIT: Downvoting me doesn't really prove anything; You might not feel devout to your overlords but you certainly appear that way from the outside. (from a UK/Swedish perspective~)
It's not whataboutsim, it's one of the reasons for an unfettered Internet. But only if it suits US interests.
Do you remember the crypto wars?
Who should replace them?
UK? France? Sweden? Germany? Türkiye? Kenya? Argentina? Israel? Iran? China?
Every nation has its own agenda.
I do find it interesting that everyone was happy to throw mud at the first part, but completely ignored this part:
> So whatever replaces it as a main actor, should be fairly representative of all the stakeholders.
Consensus is really, really difficult. It’s easy to criticize, but difficult to find common interests.
The internet may be ubiquitous now, but its mainstream adoption is barely 2 decades old. Countries are slow to adapt.
I think it will be natural that eventually they will try to wrest control, at least within their own jurisdictions.
Maybe the age of a more open and global internet will end, and balkanization is inevitable.
Unless you point out America's war crimes, crimes against humanity and heinous violations of human rights at scale.
And then you will be fettered.
I think this is more a fantasy we Americans tell each other, but it isn't true if you actually look at how we live. Police rob, rape, and murder Americans with impunity. Corporations knowingly poison Americans while spending fortunes trying to hide that fact, and they get away with it (only having to surrender a small fraction of the money they made doing it). Still, the jails are filled to overflowing as America locks up more of her own so called "freedom loving" people than any other nation on planet. Americans are obsessed with punishment and we cheer while people are locked away and their lives are ruined. It doesn't matter what they did, or even if they did it.
We've got a government full of people nobody is happy with, and we're only given two parties to choose from anyway. Our constitution is a joke, with our most fundamental rights violated routinely. Fair and speedy trials are rare, while excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel & unusual punishments are commonplace. The fourth amendment is broken on a regular basis and while three letter agencies just ignore it and do whatever they want, police use things like parallel construction to side step our rights as a matter of policy. It's been a constant struggle to retain the first amendment in any way that matters, and the establishment clause may as well not even exist.
For all of our "Ain't no one gonna tell me what to do!" attitude there's very little protest about any of it and Americans pretty much shut up and roll over while they're taken advantage of and their rights are violated.
"the US is pretty much a proponent of an unfettered Internet." sounds nice, until you remember that even when clear corruption is discovered (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biggest-isps-pai...) and assholes like Ajit Pai screw Americans we all just let it happen. America is a race to the bottom where we pay more and get less.
I wish Americans really did value freedom and resist authoritative control like we pretend it does. The closest we seem to get is a kind of ignorant belligerence. Americans will burn books and shun mask wearing while patting themselves on the back for being such independent rebels but we continue getting screwed over and over again where it actually matters without truck convoys rushing to fight oppression or mass protests in the streets.
I'm not accusing anyone, or blaming them for taking it on the chin. I'm just as guilty as anyone else there, but I do wish we'd stop pretending Americans cared about or valued things we clearly don't. I doubt we'll fix anything while we're busy pretending we're something we're not.
Personally, I'd like to see a bit more control, but, to be honest, I have no idea what that would look like.
That should be lower-case "doodle". I was confused for a moment.
Doodle is headquartered in Switzerland, incidentally.