Lazy dismissal ,but then again, you don't really have a leg to stand on to defend your point.
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
278 karma · joined October 5, 2025
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
Sounds very probable: gives a plausible reasons for sending a lot of infra up, absolutely doesn't have to be profitable or even effective, puts the focus on AI instead of the MIC, and is in line with the kind of contracts Big Tech runs after.
To me this model explains a lot of why so many big companies seem to be investing into what every expert I've heard says goes against basic physics. The only thing missing for it to be more than an interesting idea is why China and the EU are not fighting this.
> The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency
Yes, but this also implies a paradigm shift on the subject of this personal agency.
> very few people are voting anyway
There are countries where voting is mandatory (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Turkey): they're not utopias and they suffer from the same polarisation, corruption, inequalities, threats of fascism, and disenchantment as other countries do.
> they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing
Because doing something about it is either against the rules of the system or requires such an effort in coordination that it'd be effectively indistinguishable from a revolution. A tiny example, the EU Commission tries to pass Chat Control every 6 months: when it does pass (all.according to the system's democratic rules), you won't get referenda on maintaining it every 6 months, I assure you. The power imabalance between the 99% and the ruling class is so massive that positive outcomes from voting alone are effectively flukes, not representative of future performance.
The comment was about 'us vs the ruling class', which is very much how the world works.
Your knowledge of history is equally flawed, if you believe modern democracy is some kind of evolutionary apex tenderly nurtured for the greater good for thousands of years.
The public's disenchantment with politics didn't appear out of nowhere: most of them have personally experienced voting for one thing and getting the same old.
And I'd disagree that democracy still exists [0], if it ever did. The most speaking example, among many [1], is the Gaza genocide: I've never in my life seen as much 'trying really hard and coordinating', the vast majority of the population of almost every country wants this to stop, and yet, 3 years in, it doesn't, and the split on this between the population and the ruling class (politicians, the rich, what have you) is stark and the position of the ruling class very much correlates with the outcomes.
[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/16/vilificatio...
And no, the power is very much not with the people: 4/4th of the pop sure as hell don't want to have precarious lives, yet they don't seem to manage to change that since forever, except if you squint.
The dark ages were indeed a time of cultural collapse: science largely stopped, state capacity was cut massively (one indicator being that the Romans used to field armies of hundreds of thousands and the successor states in Europe would wage war with a few thousand men), large public infrastructure projects disappeared, religion started wielding a stifling influence on all aspects of life and society. Depending on who you ask, people will tell you that things improved for the ordinary people or very much worsened.
History, like other fields in academia, undergoes cyclical periods of rejection of dogma, as new researchers try to make a name for themselves by turning on their predecessors: I see the rejection of Dark Ages in the last decades as largely that, and recently there is more of a reversal, with new Middle Ages researchers turning on those previous researchers.
For crusades: this was not an answer to conquest. Byzantium had lost its crown jewel, modern Turkey, to Turks and then Arabs (a region, by the way, that had been reconquered and lost for centuries). The emperor at the time, Alexios, wanted a few hundred Western knights, to help him reconquer a few cities in the region (Jerusalem was not part of his plans, or at least priorities, religion was very much not a variable in his calculations), but the pope at the time saw a way to increase his own power and stirred up a religious hysteria: when the Western armies arrived to Constantinople, the Byzantines were surprised by the size and the goals of them, conflicts happened immediately, and the entire story of the first crusade is the emperor trying to conquer some revenue-generating lands and distrusting the Westerners, while the Western princes wanted to generate revenue for themselves (on my phone, simplified). Over further crusades, the Byzantines started to hate the 'Franks' (Westerners), as did the 'liberated' cities, for the many crimes and massacres they committed. Religion, and helping the fellow Christians, was simply a weapon wielded by the pope, the emperor, and the princes.
I think the rest of that previous comment is bigotry, but the poster is right about Crusades being a shameful event in the history of Christianity.
If I had one advice, it would be to find someone who relates to how you feel, because being able to talk about it to someone who's been/is there is the one thing that really helps, in my experience. I don't know where, a friend, a suicide support group, a men's group, but being able to talk about these feelings and be really understood does help.
In the meantime, try just to be around people when it's hardest.
Sorry to not have anything better to offer. Hope you keep going, brother.
It is true that the issues of people who vote far-right are ridiculed, and they themselves are demonised, which the parent holds, and I agree, is unproductive.
Far-right voters are largely the losers of globalisation/economic growth trying whatever they can to improve their situation: the phenomenon of many of these voters alternating between far-right and far-left from one election to the other is one of many indicators of what their real goal is, ie improving their situation.
Re migration: it does have negative effects on the economically marginalised, which the readership of HN and the talking heads in mainstream media are largely not. Among these are increasing housing costs, downward pressure on salaries, rapid and alienating shifts in cultural (and I mean cultural, not racial) makeup of cities and neighbourhoods: none of this should be controversial.
The establishment parties (so right and "left" like SPD, Labour, PS) have financial incentives to increase migration, which they do (see the Boris wave in the UK).
While migration is not an inherent evil at all, the way it's done by these parties does lead to negative effects, which adds one reason among many to vote for the far-right. So the short-term solution (curbing migration) is the simple and popular answer. The long-term solution (curbing capitalism) is harder and unpopular, so radical left parties unfortunately get fewer votes (except in France, where there's a real chance of the LFI showing a better path).
I imagine this fixes the misunderstanding. See you at the next rally, friend!
Pick some other topic. For example: are people who thinkthat slavery is inherently and always wrong just stupid extremists, compared to people who accept that 'some' slavery is fine?
I feel like you're the type to walk around with calipers.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49436484 for a better written argument.
Painting all far-right voters as evil is wrong and unproductive. Saying this as a far-left voter.
What kind of question is that? Did I ask you if you're calling cameras in the UK mythical?
Same as what you said about London, I'm arguing you're dramatising the dire threat of terrorism on the good people sitting in the tube.
In a thread where we're discussing the systematically verified risks of a slippery slope of surveillance measures and the introduction of extremely invasive surveillance in the tube, clutching your pearls about the mean terrorists threatening the public transports for literal generations is a ridiculous exaggeration that carries the same value as "think of the children". How are cameras going to protect you? Do you think they see people's intentions? Even the police didn't use the terrorism excuse for this.
Sorry for the tone, but this wilful misunderstanding of my comments and your statement about the Irish being to blame for the Troubles make it difficult to engage in a gentlemanly manner.
Your comment very much implies a strong link between the two however. That you then switch from data centres to factories is also a shift that is not related to the discussion at hand.
Personally, everything I've read on the issue indicates that the water usage, for a product that I hear mentioned daily by people in the street, is insignificant.
I have many qualms with AI, mainly about the politics of AI labs and its effects on inequality, and I am active in this field. But I see its environmental costs as a weak argument and don't use it, despite of how receptive people that I try to convince are to it: it uses much less energy, harms many fewer animals, and serves more of a purpose than animal agriculture, so I prefer to move my environmental actions towards that.
> We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations
I think your take might be based on myth and dramatisation too, as well as a misunderstanding of what the purpose of surveillance is (it's not about protecting children, or trains).
And agree with sibling about Ireland: the Troubles would have been solved by getting the hell out.
I invite you to check how the English government is reacting to independentist movements in Scotland and Ireland post-Brexit if you think they're happy to let people be.
I'd agree that entities that provide their users' data upon a simple request, and a carveout in regulations that allows (not forces) them to do so, fits the definition of proactive.
As sibling comments mention, countries exist with many cameras, public or private, where driving feels worse. I didn't look at road deaths, but I'd be surprised if Portugal is among the leading countries on this.
Equally, if you take a bit of distance, you can realise that Portugal has many other parents living there, yet they are not clamouring for more surveillance: it's difficult to imagine that the Portuguese dictatorial government is evilly preventing its people from accessing the benefits of surveillance.
Updated link:
Can you stop playing the game of owning people with teenager level zingers based on you yourself being too thick?
Whatever my personal opinions about copyright, this whole thread is about copyright set at 2000 years vs 20, so that answers your first 2 points.
For the last one, 'losing value' obviously doesn't mean they can be safely binned, but that the publisher has no return on keeping it in publication. Again, this is what the entire thread is about.