bleepblorp

Point of order: the US is far from unique in having a written constitution. Most developed countries have a written constitution that, among other things, guarantees (on paper) basic rights to their citizens. The only exception is the UK, which does not have a single written constitutional document.

As you say, the commitment to basic democratic rights is considerably stronger in other western countries than in the US. The kind of abuses the Republican party habitually conducts with the aim of disenfranchising Democratic voters would not be tolerated elsewhere; this is reflected by the fact that the US constitution only explicitly prohibits certain forms of electoral discrimination (i.e. it's a blacklist policy) but does not explicitly grant a right to vote.

The Canadian constitution is not designed to grossly overweight the views of rural areas over those of populated areas. Canada doesn't have an institution like the US senate, where voters from the least populous state have over 80 times more power than those from the most populous state.

The spread in riding (electoral district) size in Canada only varies by a factor of 4.5 if the (mostly unpopulated) northern territories are included (the three territories have one MP, each, to represent populations of less than 30,000) and a factor of 1.5 among the populated provinces.

Canadian federal governments are generally comprised of whichever party received the largest share of votes nationally. This is not always the case in the US.

It'd be interesting to see the what percentage of the labor billing rate trickles down to the actual workers in the US vs elsewhere.

If the trickle down percentage is equal then the problem in the US is extractive labor unions; if US workers get a smaller percentage of the billing rate then the problem is extractive behavior by contractors. These problems require different solutions, so any attempts at cost control would need to determine which of these possibilities is in force.

US healthcare costs will also almost certainly feed into higher employee compensation for American workers. European employers will be paying into health care in some form or other (either through taxes or private insurance) but overall healthcare costs in Europe are far lower than in the US.

Again, there's no evidence that paying for service results in better customer service. There are many, many stories of Google arbitrarily killing paid and/or B2B accounts, including Gsuite, Adsense, Play Store consumer (paid apps), Play Store publisher accounts, and so on. If you use Google accounts at all, you're putting yourself at undue risk of getting screwed and paying for the privilege.

Let me explain what happens when you buy a new smartphone (or use a new, cookie-less, browser profile) and connect it to Google because your old phone doesn't work anymore:

- Google detects the new phone as a suspicious device and locks your account until you can authenticate using your old phone.

- You can't authenticate using your old phone because it doesn't work anymore.

- You lose all your Google-connected data.

You don't need a house fire to fall victim to Google; merely dropping your phone will be more than enough.

This is somewhat disingenuous. I doubt very many Americans think Trump is a sleeper agent in the literal sense of that term.

There is, however, considerable circumstantial evidence that he may be compromised by the Russians. The fact that Trump has been less than wholly forthcoming regarding his connections with Russia has only deepened this concern.

Multiple people in the Trump orbit--including Trump himself--have had repeated communications with Putin, Russian oligarchs, or their proxies, and have gone to considerable lengths (such as by conducting meetings in private and confiscating the translator's notes) to hide the contents of these communications from official records and lawfully constituted legal investigations.

Given that Trump is believed to be deeply in debt (see the recent NYT series on Trump's tax records), has had business dealings inside Russia (e.g. Trump Tower Moscow), and has benefited from Russian state-sponsored criminal hacking[0], hidden communications between the Trump orbit and Russia are cause for grave concern over whether Trump has inappropriate ties to the Russian government.

Read the Mueller Report and pay particular attention to what could not be proven because the necessary evidence had been destroyed or was otherwise inaccessible.[1]

Unlike the current flavor of Republican conspiracy theorizing, the Trump-Russia story is not a bunch of lunatics deluding themselves into thinking that the Democratic party is keeping children captive in the basement of a pizza restaurant. It's something backed by actual evidence and has lead to multiple prosecutions.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/15/what-happ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_Hurricane_(FBI_inves...

There is a ratcheting effect in US conservative politics whereby the social conservative voting bloc needs to be cultivated with ever more extreme positions just to keep them interested enough to vote for the Republican party. This has mostly manifest through increasing racism but is also manifest by increasing hatred towards intellectuals and thinking people in general.

The pattern of social conservatives demanding increasingly extreme positions from their leaders is not dissimilar to how addicts become desensitized to their drug of addiction and need increasingly higher doses to get their high.

In the 1960s, using dog-whistles to pander to anti-black racism (through the Southern Strategy[0]) was enough to bring out the social conservative vote for the Republican party. Over time, the demands of social conservatives have made the dog-whistles less quiet and the number of targeted groups has expanded from only African-Americans to Hispanics, people who live in urban areas, to scientists and other intellectuals, and now to all Democrats. By 2016, it took Trump's level of vile xenophobia--directed against anyone who wasn't a willfully ignorant racist--to motivate social conservatives to vote in large numbers. In 2020, the social conservatives are demanding fealty to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that is at odds with objective reality. Whatever degree of racist anti-intellectualism social conservatives demand in 2020 and 2024 will be worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Much the world is in the grips of multiple overlapping political crises, many of which have existential consequences for the communities they impact.

Expecting people not to talk about these crises is like expecting Europeans living through WWI not to talk about all that ugly trench warfare business.

See also [0], for some reporting on how Facebook delivers disinformation to the largest, most gullible voting bloc: the elderly.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24932881

It's amazing how links I post to other HN subs always wind up with -1 karma; never positive, never zero, never -2. Always -1. I'm sure that's totally and completely organic.

North Korean state-sponsored criminal fraud activities:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/north-korea-s-apt38-hacking-gr...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/01/politics/north-korea-cyberatt...

Connections between specific Russian financial crime organizations and the Russian government are much harder to pin down as people who try to investigate ties between the Russian mob and the Russian government often wind up dead. However, the Russian government is well known to be tightly linked connected to Russian organized crime[0]. Given the sheer scale of Russian financial fraud operations--Carbanak stole upwards of a billion USD[1]--the balance of probabilities suggest these operations exist with the tacit approval of the Russian government.

[0] https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2019/12/16/gangs-and-gulags-how-vla...

[1] https://securityintelligence.com/carbanak-how-would-you-have...

North Korea is already under severe economic sanctions for its nuclear weapons program and other geopolitical issues[0]. Russia is also under economic sanctions for invading Ukraine. There's very little the rest of the world can do to hold either of them accountable for sanctioning organized fraud groups in their territories.

The concept of TLS certs validating the identity of a business entity--rather than just ownership of a domain name--has merit even though the implementation of EVs was poorly considered.

A system that presented the end user with a business card of relevant information regarding a given website could be very effective if done properly. Presenting a list of industries and trademarks that the site does business under in the user's current jurisdiction would be a good start.

A lot of phishing, and other online financial crime, is perpetrated by groups operating with the support of their home governments. There's no way to hold North Korean state-backed phishing/criminal hacking groups accountable without disconnecting North Korea from the Internet or going to war with them. Similar issues apply to curtailing online crime committed by Russian mafia entities, as they are well connected to the Russian government.

An alternative strategy would be to crack down on the money laundering channels used by criminal entities to get money from their victims, but this would be politically difficult as it would involve shutting down grey-market banks that are well used by the ultra wealthy to evade taxes and pay bribes.

I generally take the view that the SJW identity politics plague was born due to nominally left-leaning people striking it rich in SV and wanting some way to feel 'woke' without feeling guilty over all the money they've acquired.

SJW identity politics is left politics made safe for the California startup equity/VC/IPO crowd because it pays utterly no attention to economic inequality at all.

Fundamentally, investments are a bet that the future will be richer than the present.

If there aren't enough good investments now then that's an indication that the market believes there are major structural problems with the economy that will prevent the future from being richer than the present.

That's a far, far, more serious issue than just a question of what the kind of people who expect to receive passive incomes will do with their time.

Obviously, the pandemic is having a major current impact, but as you say, there has been a shortage of good investments since at least 2008.

I believe the underlying issue is a misallocation of resources into rentier economics and not enough into productive growth. We've collectively put far too much money into monopolies that squeeze larger percentages of money out of people and not enough money into innovation that improves the human environment. We need more of the original Google (i.e. the revolutionary search engine) and a lot less of the current Alphabet (i.e. the rentier advertising monopolist).

In addition to the weath-in-pixels visualization you linked, another very damning graph comes from the Fed's research arm:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK

This is a plot of median household income in comparison to GDP per household, both in inflation-corrected dollars.

The GDP/household line has been pulling away from the household income line since the 1980s. While a great deal of wealth is being created in America, a decreasing share of it is trickling down into the hands of the median person. The rest of it is disappearing into the pockets of the already very wealthy in general, and the billionaires in particular.

Business owners pressuring their employees to take political stances should be illegal.

Employees should not be put into a situation where they feel their livelihoods depend on agreeing with management's sociopolitical values.

I just tried that but all I got was a lot of water on my head and shoulders.

Maybe somebody could push a patch to turn down the average fall-winter-spring rainfall in my area?

I don't think fostering calm discussion is a necessary goal for large-scale social media platforms. Some percentage of conversations will get heated--both online and offline--but that's natural and is something society is able to deal with.

The danger of social media is that it fosters radicalization by connecting extremists far more efficiently than is possible offline, and that in creating communities of extremists who give themselves psychological permission to act out their beliefs. The consequences of this spill out into the real world in ways that society is not fully able to manage.

People using social media to call each other shitheads for supporting (or not supporting) Joe Biden isn't a problem. No one outside of those involved in the conversation will have any reason to care and the people involved will get over it.

Social media connecting unhinged people, however, and helping them create a parallel reality where burning down 5G towers becomes the right thing to do to protect people from autism, is very much a problem. This kind of activity spills over into the real world and does have direct consequences.

Regulations of social media platforms ought to be far, far more concerned with mitigating the risks of the latter problem than with maintaining civility.

We live in a world where almost half of Americans have so little empathy that they are enthralled by the idea of putting non-white children in cages and the American political system is completely indifferent to the policy preferences of the average person[0].

It's beyond the bounds of reasonable probability both that a majority of Americans would develop enough empathy to support the idea of a universal social safety net and that policy elites could be motivated to implement such a consensus.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

How many small retail businesses keep multiple bricks and mortar locations solely as a backup in case one location becomes unusable? How many retail businesses have two locations just in case the street outside their premises is permanently removed without notice by the owning municipality?

There is a limit to how much risk individuals and small businesses can realistically hedge against. Insurance can cover many risks, but it doesn't necessarily cover the impacts of legal, but arbitrary, abuses by business partners. Unpredictable, uninsurable, risks should not be offloaded onto people who are unable to withstand them.

We're on the wrong side of the curve of history for something like that to happen in the US--or anywhere else where it isn't already in place. Social Darwinism has been the fashion for 40 years now, and it's not going anywhere.

US courts have upheld arbitration clauses in shrinkwrap consumer contracts.

Large businesses in America, including Amazon, require their customers and suppliers to waive their right to sue. Amazon et el cannot be held accountable through the legal system.

These abuses will continue unless there is enough of a sea change in Washington that protecting free markets becomes more of a priority than protecting the freedom of large businesses to exploit people.

That will happen no sooner than the day Amazon receives an order for ice skates from the hotter half of the Christian afterlife.

The US (and Canada) have much weaker consumer protections for debit than credit.

If a merchant posts a fraudulent transaction against a credit card, you'll most likely get your money back. If a merchant posts a fraudulent transaction against a debit card, you might not get your money back.

More dangerously, if your debit card credentials are skimmed and used to withdraw money from your account by any means other than the retail debit-card payment system, you won't get your money back.

Precisely. The RIAA (along with the other copyright Associations of America) is a front to suck up bad publicity.

In this case, I would not be surprised if Google was ultimately driving the push to get rid of youtube-dl using the RIAA as a proxy, both for PR purposes and because the RIAA has a semi-plausible claim to legal standing.

Youtube has ramped up its consumer abuse policies lately, such as the begging screen that demands unauthenticated users log in and requires four clicks to dismiss, and it would not be even remotely surprising if Google is also working to get rid of tools that allow people to watch YouTube videos without being subjected to advertising abuse.

Github hosting is not the be all and end all of open source software development. There are alternatives, ranging from hosting on one of the Chinese public clouds, using 'bulletproof' hosts that cater to such things as phishing groups, cutting a deal with the Russian mob to host development in Russia, hosting on an .onion site, or making connections with the Pirate Bay folks.

Did you file ethics complaints with the RIAA lawyers' bar association(s)?

If you want the DMCA changed, you're going to need to find enough money to, as part of a competitive auction against the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA, successfully bribe:

218 Congresspeople

60 Senators

1 President

5 Supreme Court (in)justices.

A conservative estimate is that getting the DMCA reformed would cost at least a billion dollars in bribes ('campaign contributions'). No one who has that much money spare has enough of an interest in public-interest copyright reform to be willing to spend that much money.

As a practical matter, it's much more feasible to cultivate hosting infrastructure outside of the United States than to consider DMCA reform.

None of the vaccines currently on the table are even remotely good enough for 'back to normalish.' The attack rate for this virus is so high that a vaccine good enough (i.e. multiple 9s effectiveness) to allow 'back to normal' almost certainly isn't possible.

The most we're going to get out of a vaccine is a tool that can be used in conjunction with physical distancing, and masks, to keep the infection rate and hospitalization rate sustainable.

Even with a vaccine, COVID-19 will remain one of the leading causes of death among the sick and elderly. The percentage of chronically ill people who live, and the percentage of people who make it past age 65, will plummet.

Everyone who's alive now will almost certainly need to socially distance (and should wear an N95/KN95 mask in public indoor spaces) for the rest of their lives.

What's happening now is humanity's normal.