pjc50

We're really not ready for capitalist-anarchists who think the law doesn't apply to them but still protects their valuable property.

$100k a drone.

Ukraine needs Patriot or an equivalent air to ground capability, but those are extremely expensive.

It sounds like the prop-driven shaheds were being intercepted with prop-driven drones piloted manually? I suppose that shows the relevant technology for guidance has been kept secret enough that it's not instantly being cloned, or is more expensive than human operators.

GDPR enforcement belongs to individual country information commissioners, unfortunately.

The EU is not as federal as the US and has basically no "federales" law enforcement of its own.

National governments kind of suck at enforcing these. In some cases, like the notorious Ireland Apple tax shelter, they may not want to enforce the rules because they feel they are benefiting from the evasion.

This kind of basic regulatory work is pretty thankless even when it's important. But I suspect the toxic politics of data centers will kick up some enforcement action sooner or later.

(Why is it so toxic? Well, the explicit promise from AI companies of mass unemployment combined with higher electricity prices, and maybe even destroy the world https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/anthropic... is why.)

It seems from the outside that Greece never really recovered from being hit particularly hard by the 2008 financial/real estate crisis?

Generated, or translated from Polish?

> finding a solution to something nobody else has managed to solve

In the 21st century, that is definitely something I'd bet on China for being able to do. Across all sorts of problems.

The solution is going to be paying people. No, more than that. No, keep going. Higher. Market-clearing price.

Sure, but I think what they mean is that when you do move somewhere, how you are treated by the humans already there depends on your socioeconomic status. Who may be disinclined to let you have food or safety.

I also sometimes think how people don't realize how good they have things; while Poland is no longer a poor country, it would take an absolutely colossal disaster to reduce the average living standard of America to that of Poland. America hasn't even reached the 'terrifying' level of European petrol prices.

It also depends who you are. A very large fraction of American trans people (not a large absolute number, only a few hundred thousand) have moved from R states to D states recently due to repression, such as Kentucky revoking their driving licenses.

I do think the best political-economic era of my life was 1997-2001: election of Tony Blair until 9/11, covering the first internet boom. That was the closest to "world peace". That includes the Israel-Palestine peace process and the reconciliation of the post-Soviet states into Europe. If that had worked better, with a democratic Russia, the world would be a very different place today.

There is .. with the last of the subsistence farmers already living on it. There is basically no good unoccupied agricultural land in the world. The American settlers never appreciated how much work disease did in creating a seemingly empty space for them.

OPEC are a bit of a dead letter. Two of the key members (Iran and Saudi) are at war with each other!

If anything prices are being kept artificially _low_ by the US withdrawing from the strategic petroleum reserve, and similar (unquantified) actions being taken by the Chinese government. We'll have to see how the situation changes after the US midterms.

Because it's so critical, money will be redirected into oil from other less critical spending.

People on HN really want to believe this because they tend to be hard-money weirdos of various kinds, but no: commodity price rises are inflation.

> Increases in the price of X cause the demand for X to drop

There has been a lot of "demand destruction", but because oil is an intermediate input to so many things, especially anything that requires transporting, what actually happens is it forces up the overall price level.

You have an AI handing out potentially legally binding quotes for you??

And yet everyone is building with lithium, or occasionally sodium. Which leads me to believe that size/weight aren't irrelevant after all.

The technology with PbS or even NiFe has existed for decades, but only took off with lithium.

Most surge protectors are one-shot. They may not make this clear in the marketing.

Tempted to infuriate everyone in this thread by suggesting that the German population will also be fine .. due to Indians moving there.

That enables the hit-and-run incidents. The whole point of making vehicles have license plates in the first place is traceability for criminal and civil liability for injury or damage.

The non-mixed-sex workplace was definitely a thing in the early 20th century that required explicit effort to change.

> population collapse

There are 1.2 billion Indians.

Modernity transition happening in real time. Not just electricity, but also the state institutions and the public.

Yes, but nobody likes the answer: American police are both excessively violent and bad at actually policing. It is fixable but it requires doing things differently, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260626-how-scotland-c...

> (what fact about?) their scooter actually making society better?

- illegal motorbike (ebike not complying with type restrictions)

- no plates (enables evading liability for damage or injury caused)

- underage riders / no license (danger to self and others)

- no helmet (personally I'm least bothered about this, but it is a legal requirement and safety issue if you're doing high speeds on a motorbike without one)

The "no plates" leads to hit-and-run incidents in which people have been seriously injured and a dog killed. There have also been incidents of these underage illegal riders getting themselves killed or seriously injured; while that's their own fault it's not something we should entirely shrug off.

> because UK residents sincerely want one

Yeah, this is kind of a general problem (online ""safety""), but the ebike kids are also a real problem. And not just in the UK.

https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/police-report-th... (hospitalized woman)

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/edinburgh-evening-news/202609... (killed dog)

https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/edinburg...

https://news.stv.tv/east-central/schoolboy-charged-and-teens...

https://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2025/04/28/police-scotland-gi... (hospitalized kid)

All fun and games until someone gets seriously injured or their dog killed. I had a run-in a couple of years ago with some kids on a motorbike trying (unsuccessfully) to knock me off my pedal bike.

The unlicensed ebike, while not a serious problem, is a really annoying one in certain places, and everybody suspects that it's not a wave of people doing it but in fact a fairly small number of people doing antisocial things over and over again. Who are relying on being untraceable and on a versatile getaway vehicle.

https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2025/11/thirteen-e-bikes-...

Note that "illegal motorbike with no plates" is an offense that you can detect just by looking at it. There's no "pre" in the crime. The problem is either stopping them or tracing them.

"What will happen to the many government systems that will never get the chance to be AI-pentested?"

Oh, everybody's going to get AI-pentested whether they want to or know about it or not. It's the cost of being on the Internet. Probably the situation will continue to deteriorate. Both the British Library and Jaguar Land Rover recently suffered long outages due to compromises, for example. I suspect we'll probably just lose a few large, famous businesses entirely to compromises.

Not specifically for that, but if something does go wrong afterwards it makes the company much more likely to be liable for not preventing it.

> A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed

Yes. This is where all the rules come from. It's just like airline safety or workplace safety: for almost every rule, you can find the incident which caused it to be put in place.

The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem. There have been enough women bullied out of jobs they loved by harassment from male co-workers, over and over again, and enough of them have won their lawsuits or tribunals against the employers, that there are rules against this, which will be enforced.

And enough people will have used "I was drinking" as an excuse for harassment that companies feel the need to limit their risk by banning drinking.

People get annoyed at HR for being a "compliance" role, but it's the same phenomenon as hating the people checking the fire exits, the ladders, PAT testing all your electrical devices (this may be UK specific?), making you wear a hard hat and safety boots, or making you reconcile the cash in the register with the receipts.

I don't think Iran are entirely blameless given their sponsorship of Hezbollah and participation in the Yemeni (and previously Lebanese!) civil wars. They've been maintaining a sort of sub-threshold threat in the area for a long time. Which was why, yes, it was an incredibly bad idea for US/Israeli attacks to escalate that.

https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-lebanese-civil-war-in-... (article is rather more favourable to them than I would be, but it describes the basic history)

The "Bangladesh Miracle" says otherwise: by intensive effort the birth rate was brought down from 6.7 to 1.89.

(people keep forgetting how much reducing population growth and teenage pregnancy has been an explicit policy goal for decades! Getting it down to replacement rate is good, now we're arguing about the other direction needlessly)