> Ofcom really thinks that their laws apply globally.
The cries of a long-since-dead empire slowly fading into geopolitical irrelevance.
The cries of a long-since-dead empire slowly fading into geopolitical irrelevance.
So it really wouldn't be hard for the same legal framework that restricts age to happen in the US. It just takes compliance on our part. The UK is just one tentacle of the legal bureaucracy. It wouldn't surprise me if a bill appears called the Online Child Safey Act or something like that soon and it happens to coincide with a bunch of issues Ofcom raises in this lawsuit.
we’re seeing some good evidence the most recent pushes were secretly funded and directly written by meta, the corporation. [0][1]
according to the link in there,
> Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her.
and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.
corporations openai, meta, and google were absolutely backing the push for the age verification bill in california and ohio. [2][3][4]
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45244049
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...
[4] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/meta-google-back-differe...
The original research is riddled with baked in conclusions, and has not been verified independently. Its also mostly LLM generated.
The original report that cited the $2 billion number was AI generated slop. The $2 billion number wasn't from Meta, it was from Arabella Advisors.
The AI-generated report showed only about $20-30 million in lobbying efforts per year across all lobbying.
Even the Show HN post was full of AI slop, claiming things like "months of research" when the Claude-generated report showed it began a couple days prior.
So please stop repeating this AI generated junk. It dilutes any real story and the obvious falsehoods make it easy for critics to dismiss.
That is still an absurd amount of money
There’s a motte-and-bailey fallacy happening with that “Meta spent $2 billion” report where the $2 billion number is used as a hook but then replaced with a different argument if the other parties are observant enough to see that it’s BS
I work in safety, and you are right in that this comes up every year. The pressures have been building up and it’s coming to a head. However:
0) Techlash is a thing, and HN regularly underestimates the vehemence and anger behind it.
1) There IS an organic component, driven by voters globally.
2) It is also meta and governments, taking advantage of a crisis to further their ends.
Governments globally are tending towards authoritarianism. Tech firms impact most of the world, but are barely responsive to even the American government.
Voters around the world are increasingly terrified of what tech is doing, while tech is entirely unresponsive to their concerns. Tech is very firmly the bad guy today, when it used to be the “good guy” in the 90s.
So governments are more than happy to be seen as putting tech in its place, while gaining more power for themselves.
A few anecdotes about how bad the safety side is: NDAs are so prevalent and tech is so averse to customer support, that safety teams have no formal signal sharing methods.
The number of requests to recover accounts, point out fraud, or even to address CSAM, that go through WhatsApp, slack, discord, etc. is heart breaking.
To be blunt, it’s a Kafkaesque fuck up that the whole world is stuck in, and people are pissed.
It's 90% corporate lobbying with a "do gooder" varnish
Allow them to have nukes, who are you lol
The US.
Who else on the planet would have the effective power to possibly even think about who should and shouldn't have them, while plausibly being able to do anything about it?
We can't give Ukraine their nukes back because they were decommissioned (and they were rotting at the time), but there'd be no nation more deserving.
Corollary: no individual nation is able to shoulder such responsibilities.
NATO is bad for the world so any one fighting it are pretty cool. Which seems to be Russia and Korea.
[0] Yes, the UK can fire them without US approval, but the actual hardware is maintained and supported by the USA, and they have to be shipped to the USA regularly for maintenance. If the USA decided that the UK should not have nukes, there's not a lot the UK could do about it, the Trident system would have to be scrapped entirely and replaced with some completely different system. Which the UK doesn't really have the capability to do and it would cost a fortune to acquire that capability.
So yes, if the US withdrew support then the existing nuclear program would be pretty fucked for a while, but the US couldn't unilaterally de-nuclearise the UK.
The UK and France have long had a project 'on the shelf' to substitute the missiles with the French M51 ballistic missiles.
They don't want to do it, they'll do it if they have to.
Which country do you believe could possibly qualify for such an impossible task?
You could've said that exact same thing about the US just 10 years ago when Obama was president.
Trump isnt all that different in character to previous administrations he just takes bigger risks and doesnt bother with the mask.
It hasn't happened yet. Is there something you perceive as especially problematic now, as opposed to the last 30 years?
China has been preparing for a global energy crisis for years. It is paying off now
As other Asian economies race to conserve energy, China has huge reserves of oil and gas as well as alternative energy sources like wind and solar
I've never once heard it from somebody who correctly anticipated China's rise though. The imminent collapse story just quietly changes every 5 years or so.
If the US has an imperial rival one thing you can almost guarantee is that the predictions of economic collapse will be as frequent as they are absurdly overblown and as always, This Time It's Different.
A society that is unwilling to replace itself will inevitably decline.
A policy that ended a decade ago, and was only ever marginally successful (even at the height of the restrictions their birth rate was nearer 1.4 than 1.0)
That’s a pretty big aside.
Joking aside, that was one of the worst own goals in history.
An example in microcosm: a local village suffered road flooding due to failed maintenance of water pipes. Our rent-seeking privatized water company effected the minimum repair required by regulation.
The next section of old pipe burst almost immediately, flooding the road further for most of January, utterly destroying the surface, through the road base in many places. Even at a crawl it's difficult to avoid tyre damage.
Over a month later the water repairs were effected. Then shortly after some local roadwork notification signs were put up.
Those expecting repairs to the moonscaped road were disappointed: instead the relentless bureaucracy of British local government installed traffic calming measures on top of the broken road, as the work had already been booked and could not be stopped by any means as even basic roadworks lack any degree of dynamism in their execution.
All this still needs to be made right. These small scale failures will compound and compound until the entire state is drowned in the consequence of its incompetence.
But the rant is entirely counterfactual. Britain is a very rich country with beautiful and recovering nature, a healthy and educated population, one of the more capable armies in Europe, a functioning deterrent, and a relatively healthy political system. We just got two new parties becoming credible threats to the "main" two (regardless of the parties' views, the political competition itself is a much healthier situation than the American duopoly)! We just abolished hereditary peers, which is a constitutional change (and it can just be done)! Below the everyday media noise, we're doing alright as a democracy.
Your example only compares against the UK past.
It has zero relevancy because it says nothing about relative change against other countries.
Anecdotally for the USA, I went to New Orleans last year, and I was stunned at the rotting infrastructure. Coming from New Zealand, the USA seems to be trying to copy the trajectory of Argentina.
Then again, I see serious problems in my hometown (e.g. sewage treatment plant) and country (e.g. big problems with rail, ferry, air, electricity, 3 waters). Apart from the societal issues that it seems all countries are facing.
I also live within a floodzone. There is a high probability I will learn how we deal with flooding in the future (different flooding - shallower and lacking the winds and hopefully better pre-planning for avoiding harm).
> everything looked brand new
Absolutely not, to me.
And the conversation is regarding infrastructure. A bunch of Christchurch infrastructure is brand new.
Texas, California (the richest state lmao), Puerto Rico, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi etc
In the second, a cult grabs hold of the person and isolates them from their families and loved ones so they can brainfuck them. And, I suspect this has happened to the UK. England doesn't want to be a land for the English, because to do so would make them racist. They have strength in their diversity. Blah blah blah. And the English can't be allowed to talk with anyone else or they might realize how fucked-in-the-head all that nonsense is. They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively. And that cult won't be done with them until it's taken everything from them and coerced them to sign a "billion year contract". And to top it off, you're blaming it on them.
Also, England doesn't need to do anything to ensure that influence of English culture is maintained in the US either.
For as long as we still speak the English language, English culture will continue to live "rent free" in our heads, and that's not going away anytime soon.
This is often cited as a "soft power".
"but whom's English"
Despite its problems, the UK is still a sixth largest economy, a cultural powerhouse (how many Hollywood actors are British?), with a lot of soft power, a capable and currently renewed nuclear arsenal (Astraea and Dreadnought are on track), a globe-spanning network of alliances (from AUKUS to Japan deploying to the UK first time in their history to being one of the closest and most unwavering allies for Ukraine), and a constitutionally healthy and adaptive system of government (we just passed another constitutional change and it's not a big deal, we can just do that).
Frankly, this meme stinks of projection. Going from a shining city on a hill to a place where public executions by state backed paramilitaries are just another partisan talking point, that starts Special Military Operations with no plan or goal, that threatens to annex territory of its allies in about a year is an achievement. I guess projecting this free fall on the UK makes living through it more bearable.
Why would you use the economy to defend the UK's status and then point to a bunch of non economy stuff to try to knock the US? The US is the largest and has been for awhile. Isn't that what mattered to you? Plus, pointing out that a bunch of prominent UK residents leave to participate in US industry hardly seems a point in favor of how well the UK is doing.
The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives in London, despite constantly starring in Hollywood films. It's an example of the UK culturally punching way above its weight in proportion to its population.
Again, you just used the present size of a nation's economy to argue that a nation isn't in decline when someone was talking about the ongoing decline of a nations politics, economy, and culture. It seems odd to me you're able to, for other countries, understand that the present moment can be viewed with both historical and likely future context.
>The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives...
Plenty move, but that wasn't the point I think anyone was making. If I wanted to say they were moving to the US, I would have said that instead of "leave to participate in US industry". And all of that ignores that the original commenter was talking about the decline of British media rather than saying that they're aren't talented Brits. It's not like they they're saying the UK had a bunch of great actors ten years ago and they suddenly died. Them working in American industry rather than the UK producing it own is, I'm pretty sure, the sort of point the commenter you replied to was making.
I feel like we're reading different posts.
[0] https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
They're still in the same cluster of countries by GDP as the #3 country so falling from #4 to #6 doesn't look so drastic.
If you compare per capita, it's a very different story. USA is around $93k, UK $61k and China $15k. So about 2/3 of the USA's and more than 4x China's. This was using my figures calculated from your table and the population figures I found elsewhere.
An actual source of GDP per capita [0] puts the USA at 9th globally, UK at 20th globally and China at 74th.
When you factor in that the US's GDP figures are quite skewed because there are lots of multinationals headquartered in the US. If you ignored just the Mag7, who all derive the majority of their income outside the USA, the USA would be significantly further down that GDP list.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
They're just lashing out, emperor has no clothes, their empire is collapsing, and those who are paying any attention at all, are fully aware of it. All they have left is to go on the internet and shit on Europe for daring to regulate their precious social media companies (that elsewhere they generally admit we would be better off without). They are desperately clutching onto this tech-company-based nationalism. It's absolutely pathetic.
I really hope this wasn't posted by an American....
Venezuela showed everyone what happens when you're a toothless country. USA shows up at your door uninvited, fucks your shit up, takes your oil and kidnaps your president for good measure, just to tack on some extra humiliation.
Don't get me wrong, Maduro deserved an even worse fate than what he got. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. It's still a cautionary tale for nations worldwide. It can happen to you. China continues to erode the economic power of the USA. They could very well discover one day that their military might is all they have left. Who's to say they won't suddenly decide to capitalize on their advantage before it evaporates?
What the west wishes the world to be and how they think everyone does see the world, does simply not apply. No matter how Nash pure. The All defector defects in all games..
The us is the most harmless empire that ever was. The most extreme case in the us evangelical bullshit is a daily buisness case.
The reality of the USA post WW2 is one that is full of plenty of shame. It still might be the most harmless empire there ever was, but that's a relative statement - the US has done * a lot* of harm. Perhaps a lot of good, too. Maybe even more good than harm. But almost all of that harm was unnecessary. But the past is not the future, and the present shows us marching to a darker and darker future.
Better to raise the alarm now and stop that descent rather than letting it continue.
They wouldn't if the us was this bad even now. Reality itself contradicts you..
The moment migration to the us stops- its finally become equally bad..
Is there a nuke authority that I did not know about who decides who should and should not have nukes?
The UK has the 6th highest GDP in the world. Pretty high bar if that make you economically irrelevant.
A quick comparison with [1] (using 1 GBP ~ 1.30 USD) shows that London would rank #8 in Europe (between Denmark and Norway), while the rest of the UK would come in somewhere around #25, between Spain and Italy.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1168072/uk-gdp-per-head-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
Britain does not have colonies. You might be thinking of the British overseas territory but the total population of those islands is less than 400,000
But not all of Britain's colonies are far away.
Not just them, but I'll leave it at that.
Some years ago when the United Nations started critiquing colonies, the British overseas ones were rebranded as "territories" and "dependencies." (The French still have overseas colonies, the so called DOM-TOMs, and also some nearer to home.)
Some of these overseas ones like Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands have overwhelming support for British rule thanks to an aggressive neighbour. Some of these remaining colonies have active independence movements with varying support.
Fun fact: they've not been called that in 23y, they're DROM-COM
Okay then if you're just going to be cute and nonspecific there's no point in continuing this discussion. I'm not interested in trying to decipher vague insinuations.
"Crown dependencies" are one phrase used to rebrand British colonies but there are other ones.
A reasonable case can be made that it should be Irish territory, not British, but that is a territorial dispute.