_iyig

>Our right to own guns to fight our government is anachronistic and laughable. All other uses for firearms do not demand high capacity magazines.

It's not always about resisting the government (though sometimes it is), and rarely if ever about resisting the federal government.

For example: if and when civil unrest comes to your city, police will not help you. They will neither be willing nor able. Durning the 1992 L.A. Riots, Korean storeowners who defended their livelihoods with guns escaped the worst looting and burning. Those who did not defend their businesses lost everything.

"L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later - Gun Store Manager David Joo Looks Back"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCYT9Hew9ZU

Similar scenes have recently played out in Minneapolis and elsewhere:

"After nights of violence in Minneapolis, locals take up arms to defend their community"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovtLTPrB2MA

Looking further back, during the era of Jim Crow, the armed Deacons for Justice protected black Americans from the Klan and corrupt local law enforcement:

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

Numerous similar examples may be found in American history.

Another effective film in the same genre is "The Day After."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...

>President Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening, on Columbus Day, October 10, 1983.[28] He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed,"[29][25] and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".[30] The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer's, told him "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."[citation needed] Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.

Reminds me of the German government’s decision, made in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, to phase out all German nuclear power:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out

An immediate effect of this decision was to increase Germany’s reliance on fossil fuels, including “brown coal” which is strip-mined in an extraordinarily environmentally-destructive process. Another effect was to increase the German grid’s reliance on nuclear power generated in France.

This is exactly what I'm struggling with. Intuitively, the idea of another person trying to injure me sounds scarier than a harness failing or tree falling. People can be a lot more unpredictable than gravity or metal fatigue. But then again, the safety of loggers and roofers depends not only on their own gear & diligence, but also on human co-workers who can be just as unpredictable. Versus violent criminals, at least the co-workers aren't actively and creatively malicious (usually).

Interesting. Do you have a link? Those numbers are hard to Google, all the results I'm getting are for deaths caused by the police vs. of police themselves.

Would you say there's a difference in kind between the risk of death due to equipment failure or negligence, versus the risk of another human being actively trying to kill you? They seem different to me, but I'm not sure how to reason about the difference.

Brings to mind this classic from the Jargon File:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/koans.html

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

>The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks.

>The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

>Wondering if The Intercept belongs in the nether world of "news" organizations (read: thinly veiled propaganda outlets) along with InfoWars, RT, etc.

It's worth noting that the submission is a link to The Gray Zone, which in my view falls squarely into that category. Their founder Max Blumenthal is a frequent contributor to Sputnik and RT. He also attended the same expenses-paid 2015 gala in Russia, celebrating RT's 10-year anniversary, at which Jill Stein and Mike Flynn were photographed sitting with Vladimir Putin. Flynn was later caught lying about taking payments from the Russian government in connection to the event:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/flynn-putin-din...

One month after attending this gala, Blumenthal founded The Gray Zone. Its funding sources remain opaque. He also did a 180 from his earlier anti-Assad reporting to become one of the dictator's biggest supporters:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/bruce-bawer/usef...

He's also published pro-state narratives for other dictators. Here's a 2019 video of Max cheerfully receiving honors from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has ruled that country by violence and decree since 2015:

https://twitter.com/NicolasMaduro/status/1156588153945427970

And here's a piece that goes into detail on errors in The Gray Zone's reporting from Latin America:

https://medium.com/muros-invisibles/grayzone-grifters-and-th...

Given the historical, cultural, legal, and linguistic differences between Beijing and Hong Kong, perhaps the UK and Ireland are a better analogy here.

"London signals plan to take full control of Dublin" would not go over well. Or Belfast, for that matter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_rule_(Northern_Ireland)

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

Given recent headlines, I wondered for a moment whether Masayoshi Son had served in the U.S. Special Forces.

Vermont has a troubled recent history with expensive, state-wide public initiatives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform#Gre...

The elimination of rent-seeking behavior from healthcare and Internet service is great, in theory. For whatever combination of reasons, the state government of Vermont and city government of Burlington have had difficulty putting this theory into practice.

Moderators, why was this post removed from the front page (and the Ask HN front page)? It is newer and has more upvotes than many other submissions. Are questions like the OP's still allowed on HN?

This is super tangential (to the article, not your comment) but The Last Jedi is a poor film and this opinion is not controversial. See RT audience score of 43%:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi

If you've got 45 minutes to spare, RedLetterMedia's review is an in-depth and entertaining criticism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9hwGZFPSmw

The controversy is explicitly described in the article:

>The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn't been deliberately infected contracted the disease.

>The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.

When you set these concerns next to 2018 diplomatic cables describing safety problems at the biolab in question [0], perhaps the accidental-release theory does seem worthy of investigation.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

>Venezuela is the watched pot: it should have boiled by now!

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

>Venezuela's government is taking better care of its citizens than our government is taking of us, in this current health emergency.

I've seen nothing to corroborate this.

>Don't believe the war media; I recommend The Grayzone.

Here's a video from last year of Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal cheerfully receiving honors from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has ruled that country by violence and decree since 2015:

https://twitter.com/NicolasMaduro/status/1156588153945427970

I do trust The Grayzone to have an anti-U.S. editorial position. I do not trust them to be objective.

>A better alternative is the less sexy but more productive political action obviously with buy in from the power brokers.

This has been tried for many years with little result. People in my social circles have grown fed-up and tired with the U.S. political system, especially those who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 only to watch entrenched power-brokers deny him the candidacy. Some allege similar interference in 2020 (see podcast with former Bernie staffers):

https://soundcloud.com/seeking-derangements/sd7-the-bernie-p...

>unrest is a medicine that is in most instances worse than the disease.

Millions of increasingly desperate and frustrated Americans may not be able to agree with you. People are never purely rational actors, and beat-down emotional people are among the least rational. The LA Riot's immediate outcome was arguably worse than its proximate cause, but nevertheless people rioted.

>I have a hunch that once the severity of the pandemic eases, we may see an increase in car journeys for holidays, particularly for continental Europe. >But people can only tolerate a certain amount of time in the car and so this may affect where people travel.

As an American, I would routinely drive 3+ hours to visit family in the same state, or 6+ hours across several states from my childhood home to university. Growing up in the Midwest, I got used to measuring distance in hours of highway travel time. I wouldn't make those trips every week or every month, but 5-6 times in a year would not have been unusual. I know many people who drove cross-country when moving from East to West Coast (a multi-day road trip), or vice-versa. Road trips in general are firmly rooted in the American experience, as captured in films such as 'National Lampoon's Vacation' or 'Little Miss Sunshine.'

Perhaps post-pandemic Europe will see its own road trip renaissance, complete with motels, minivans, and roadside attractions?

Glad it's not just me. I'm halfway through reading the linked post, and it seems like he hasn't yet gotten to the point.

Wish I lived in a world where $10 billion in graft got someone arrested. Jailed, if I’m recklessly ambitious.

Here is what the parent post refers to:

http://shanghaiist.com/2020/04/13/even-mcdonalds-is-now-turn...

If we're to shift the conversation towards hate crimes targeted at minority groups, I think it's fair to consider hate crimes perpetrated by government mentioned in the article, crimes which are perpetrated for much the same reasons as the suppression of coronavirus research.

Yes, I agree that the feds should step in at this point (and should have done so long ago). What I'm curious about is the responsibility each state has to, for example, maintain their own stockpile of PPE. What are the resources that have been overwhelmed (and does it vary by state)?

Is it? I'm honestly asking. As an American, I understand there's a division of responsibility between the federal state governments for disaster preparedness, but I don't know exactly what that agreement entails (or even if it's clearly written down somewhere). Without a clear understanding of who's responsible for what, it seems easy to point fingers depending on political preference.

If anyone has more knowledge and is willing to share, I'd appreciate it.

You linked to a login-walled article where the section above the fold does not clearly make your point. The subtitle "hidden from authorities" would imply it wasn't authorities doing the hiding. You could have clarified this point in your initial response, instead of leaving an ambiguous sarcastic remark.

>if you do indeed live in such a state and are hoping that information freedom and democracy is enough to protect you and yours.

Never said that. I do think information freedom is preferable to the alternative.

I don't think I did. Please re-read the HN guidelines on comment etiquette, and then explain what you think I missed.

To expand on my own comment: when a private business (a ski resort, for example) decides to cover up the outbreak of a disease in a more-free country like Taiwan or the U.S., there are ways for the rest of society to route around this. When it's the government engaging in this cover-up, especially an authoritarian government with near-total information control, it's much harder to route around that kind of information suppression.

An Austrian ski resort is not the state, and does not have unlimited powers of censorship and arrest like China's one-party government.

>The essential problem is that static credentials are transmitted and can be copied. If they used a randomly generated code to unlock the cars (needs to be generated offline) then that would solve this issue.

Not necessarily. Relay attacks are very hard to defeat, regardless of your crypto scheme:

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/just-pair-11-radio-gadgets-can...

Why have you been downvoted? You are correct. This extradition hearing, and the alleged mistreatment of Mr. Assange, is taking place in London under British authorities.

Thank you for the correction! Apparently I’ve been confused on this for years. Wouldn’t be surprised if Duke University brought a trademark lawsuit.