roenxi

Did they even have a referendum on joining the EU? Just skimming through, it looks like [0] they only had a referendum on EEC membership which sounds like it would predate the EU. It is a bit of an unfair ratchet where people can sidle in to the EU but require strong consensuses to leave. It should be symmetrical.

Particularly when the scope of the EU seems to be a bit vague and regularly expanding to micromanage various aspects of life. It looks like they might be trying to rebuild the US federal government.

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

So what makes kid users on linux so special that they don't need nanny state protection? Are the Californian legislators just throwing them to the wolves? Or are the protections being put in place here not actually important?

Seriously, what is the message here supposed to be about the kids using linux? And why are they so different from kids using Windows or Mac? Are there other safety features we can exempt kid linux users from?

> Good job, California lawmakers!

Is this serious or sarcasm? They passed a horrible law, now its an internally contradictory horrible law because apparently it isn't important enough to consistently enforce. So, you know. Why legislate it?

There isn't much of an angle here that reflects well on Californian lawmakers, they're still supporting this authoritarian trend of de-anonymisation and rolling back free communication on the internet. They're just going to come back for linux later once the idea of legally mandated PII on account registration is normalised. Although I do see this "In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law" so we seem to be entering a wild space where they're going to try and micromanage this in a weird way.

If you can figure out how to turn the "should" in that sentence into "can" then you'll die wealthy. Tracking goals and turning them into a coherent strategy is a major unsolved problem in software engineering.

We accept best-effort from CTOs, but that leads to an industry that is a bit like a comet with a few success stories and a huge burning tail of leadership where they have limited to no ability to understand whether they are on track to achieve their goals and those goals don't come together into a coherent strategy. There is a strong argument that many of the success stories are only good relative to companies that failed even worse than they did and we all had to pick one of these bug-ridden software packages.

It is a lot like the era of the manufacturing industry before the statisticians moved in around WWII. We haven't managed a similar moment in software yet.

It's a social manoeuvre, the idea is basically like standing up and clapping to show support. For example, maybe someone wants to support/oppose a position but is genuinely not the sort of person who believes in making an argument. From that perspective a little public "I disagree and question your character" post is an obvious tactic. The idea isn't to make a point so there isn't normally much reason to respond.

Given the relatively recent European experience (Nazis and Communists, among others) there is a reasonable argument for data privacy even if it hampers economic growth. However...

> If the rules are so terrible, why did nobody choose market exit?

Because major players don't particularly mind such rules; the public doesn't care about their data all that much and everything will tick on as usual with some nag banners and compliance officers.

The problem is the major players aren't going to be European because it is no longer legal for EU companies to get started by doing what the US companies did to get started. There is a reason the EU is backseat driving US software companies - EU industrial policy killed off the EU ones in the crib (to be fair that wasn't the GDPR, the GDPR is just part of the same anti-growth regulatory pattern). They died so young we've never really even learned what their names would have been.

EDIT I'll point at companies like Uber. It looked pretty illegal for most of its early years, until it could afford enough lobbyists to legalise its business model. Never would have worked in the EU.

I have to say that is almost an excellent point - think tanks are ultimately propaganda outfits, so it is hard to have a "fake" think tank which is merely that.

But in this case the "fake" label means that the think tank itself doesn't actually exist. The article expands on the topic with "apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports".

So if they hired some people to set up the HIPP and posted the same material it'd be a real think tank, but because the institute doesn't seem to exist at all it is a fake think tank. That isn't a comment on the writing produced.

Its more a foreshadowing of Simpson's paradox and a cluster of similarly counterintuitive effects. Statistical evidence that is technically of high quality can cause decision makers to believe the exact opposite of what is true.

> Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa[g] ... has served as the president of Syria since 2025.

> Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to a Syrian Sunni Muslim family from the Golan Heights, he grew up in Syria's capital, Damascus. Al-Sharaa joined al-Qaeda in Iraq shortly before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and fought for two years in the Iraqi insurgency. From 2005 to 2011, he was captured and imprisoned by American and Iraqi forces. His release coincided with the onset of the Syrian revolution against the Ba'athist regime of Bashar al-Assad. In 2012, with the support of al-Qaeda's central command, al-Sharaa founded Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as al-Nusra Front, to depose the Assad regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_al-Sharaa#Split_from_al-...

You have to jog to keep up with politics in the Middle East.

Yeah, but the anti-datacentre people won't care about that. That is an issue for local people and specific cases. Myrmidon isn't addressing the comment at people who have actual local issues with water issues; it was advice for the partisans.

Credit isn't negative sum, it is a positive sum game. "Negative sum" has a specific meaning here and just because wealth is being transferred isn't that significant; positive sum games also have wealth transfers.

It is risky and it is very easy to lose great amounts of money on a bad decision when credit is involved. Arguably that makes it bad. But still not negative sum.

I don't think we can say this one is a distraction - historically the US dollar has involved the "secret" deal [0] where the US was trading military protection in the Middle East for having a major energy supplier only accept dollars. Probably some other similar shenanigans going on that aren't public too.

I imagine the US's poor showing against Iran and the implied inability to coerce medium powers is a factor in the decision making of the serious buyers of US treasuries. It has never been entirely clear how much value the US military's ability to control global trade really backed the dollar; but Trump's style is to hit people with every possible threat and reason to do what he wants in case it helps.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency#1970_to_2000

I'm torn on whether I like this parody.

It is quite funny and IMO in good taste (which is hard to do when diagnosing 9,625 out of every 10,000 as deficient). It probably works well as an in-joke for people who prefer critical thinking to social proof.

But it isn't really appropriate to fight fire with fire when it comes to calling people disordered and the people who need to hear the message won't understand it because they key off social proof. In fact, they may literally not understand the gentle ribbing and might respond poorly.

3/5 stars.

Yeah but in some sense you can't use any number because we're comparing the incomparable. "Larger economy" isn't a well defined term. And we can't measure it based on nominal GDP because that involves exchange rates and they depend on factors other than economic size.

It could be said that the US was the largest economy when it was 10x the next by most measures, because it was clearly just better than the alternatives. Not so much now (their model still turns out the best per-capita numbers for a large country though).

The more important measure is really who has the economy best configured to win a war. I expect China to be able to out-produce the US at mass cheap components, especially for drones, so for military purposes I'd expect China to have the long term edge in the sort of moderate intensity conflict we're seeing around the globe. Hard to be confident though, and the exact nature of such a war is unclear because diplomacy would be a huge factor.

That sounds like a viewpoint that would be vulnerable to just accepting everything that is as preordained. Every country's destiny is heavily influenced by their neighbours.

It is by no means a given that Britain and France would see a need for a neutral buffer zone given that the home countries of the two powers only had a small channel separating them in Europe. They'd be used to the idea of sharing a border. We can all but guarantee that both of them had people looking at the map every so often and asking if it made sense to officially add Siam to the imperial holdings.

> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.

There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard.

IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.

> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.

He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.

It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.

That goes to the heart of it though. If we approach this cynically there are some massive downsides - we're destabilising the leadership circle that controls the largest nuclear weapons cache in the world and pushing one of the major resource-rich countries away from Europe towards Asia.

The moral arguments for doing that appear to all be rank hypocrisy given what we tolerate of ourselves. So if we go back and accept a certain level of cynicism when asking "why?" what exactly is the upside for us in Ukraine? The downsides seem to be enormous and when pushed for what the actual reasons are the best people have seems flimsy and poorly thought out in relation to the risks. This war could have been approached as though it was the US or China who had instigating it and ended with a call-out as opposed to millions of casualties.

The winning strategy in these things seems to me to be much more of the Chinese approach where you sit tight, set up an impressive defensive perimeter and grow your economy until all your opponents bankrupt themselves in stupid wars.

> As sovereign citizens of their own country, Ukrainians have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity.

Much like Iran. And yet we took out their leadership just this year (again) because we think they picked the wrong flag.

Apparently such behaviour is tolerable. If it is tolerable, we should tolerate the Russians doing it too, even if it is on their own border instead of the other side of the world.

> since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border.

If your argument is preventing trouble on the Polish border, why is the strategy dumping billions and billions of dollars in weapons into the most corrupt country in Europe, who happens to be on the Polish border? Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now?

The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border. This strategy actually employed seems like the most direct way to trigger a humanitarian catastrophe on the Polish border. It looks very destabilising. It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked.

Can we please be honest about our motivations here? We're all more likely to get what we want. Ideally peace and prosperity.

On the other hand, we can't tell if the US has a goal or not in the middle east or if destabilising countries is the geostrategy unto itself.

People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given what acceptable US foreign policy looks like. One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic.

It is also difficult to see what the legal basis would be for allowing people to read books if Amazon's use isn't fair. If I read a textbook and come up with an algorithm based on it that gets used at scale, is that supposed to be a copyright violation?

The basic point of a book is for people to (a) read it and (b) synthesise it into a comprehensive world model. And people can burn their own books if they want to, they own the thing. The only possible complaint here seems to be the scale and it seems like a big challenge to say that is a problem given that knowledge from books is allowed to be used at scale.

The Australian government has probably learned from the Canadians and set the law up so the tax is more successful. Recall that the government has the power to levy unfair taxes and handouts in principle, so it doesn't matter all that much that their claimed reasoning is silly. This looks to be equivalent to a social media tax and an Australian news handout, just bundled together for rhetorical purposes (and with a bizarre negotiating element in a welfare transfer that really just looks like beating around the bush to me).

That is similar to saying someone who refrains from murdering random strangers is circumventing the law that would send them to prison if they did. Not triggering this sort of law is a totally acceptable response and there is no reason for anti-avoidance measures. The basic deal here is is if social media propagates the news then they must pay the news companies. Banning the news companies is reasonable. If they don't want to pay then they can disassociate from the news sites.

Frankly it would be a win for everyone. I don't know why anyone is reading Australian news media in the first place, the information density is low.

Well, yes. But the US launches fairly regular unprovoked invasions. We might be watching them ramping up to one in Iran even as we type, it is quite a delicate situation. So the author clearly isn't worried about Russia just because they launched an unprovoked invasion or they wouldn't be willing to deal with the US. She must have other reasons.

This article just seems a little bit unbelievable

> They ran roughshod over their new bosses. They went joyriding in the expensive cars in their care. Of course, they too skimmed their operations money, but they did so without the veneer of social decorum.

The word "roughshod" seems wholly unjustified unless it is some sort of pun on horses that I'm missing. I can imagine a chauffeur joyriding and skimming money, but to say that represents "run[ning] roughshod" seems a bit much. The employer obviously wasn't showing that much care to the money and how big a deal is it if the guy drives the car occasionally? The coachman was skimming money and could ride the horse around if he put his mind to it. The horse isn't going to dob him in.

> I spent years at the mercy of technical typists. They were underpaid, but they were in control.

Again, I don't see how "in control" can be used to describe an underpaid technical typist. It doesn't sound that hard to check what they typed and replace them with someone else. If they're underpaid then they're easy enough to replace.

I wouldn't usually jump at two word choices, but the article seems to hinge on some sort of power imbalance favouring employees that is not demonstrated.

It isn't just that I agree, but that I just wrote long - excessively verbose, I thought - posts upthread and downthread explaining how I expect the situation would play out, how it would affect me and how I'd respond to it. What more do you want from me?

It's a fact that, right now, the dude can use whatever amount of air he feels is appropriate for his circumstances. Even if I wanted to interfere I doubt I'm even on the same continent as he is, and it isn't my business anyway.

I recommend Amazon. You can buy a tanks of the stuff to call your own if you feel like paying someone something.

There'd be specialist companies that do bulk oxygen supplies too, a quick search found things like https://www.dswgascylinder.com/product/liquid-oxygen-trailer.... Not a market I'm familiar with.

I suppose I'll just add in postscript; your not going to get much out of the conversation if you don't take it seriously. There are people who make great money selling oxygen. It isn't automatically priced at $0. In some hypothetical world where quality oxygen wasn't just floating around in the atmosphere, people would pay for it in the same way they pay for other essentials like food or water. Paying for water is about as crazy as paying for oxygen, they both basically just turn up out of the atmosphere. And there is precedent for a commons essential good becoming more expensive, food used to be something people just picked up off the ground for free. Or hunted down on unclaimed land.

I'm sure you're just being silly, but ok. Take what you can. That is pretty much literally how it works. I'm not stopping you.

> I'm personally of the mind that, as long as I trade with certificates that bear Caesar's face (or trade with proxies for such certificates, like a MasterCard), he gets to make the rules in exchange for my being able to lean on his legal system to protect my interests, so I find that the equitable access angle is nice.

It is a minor point I suppose, but this is the other way round. Because Caesar makes the rules you trade certificates that bear his face. It takes vigour and energy on the part of law enforcement to stop people from moving to private currencies.

You pay market price for oxygen. It just happens to be 0 right now. There isn't any reason in principle that price can't change (eg, if you want to go underwater getting the oxygen will most certainly cost you something, if you want your air at a certain temperature or humidity that costs you too). If we set up a moonbase or something then it might well be that oxygen would cost something.

Much like how there isn't any reason you have to pay for food in principle. It could become so cheap and easy to produce, say, bread or cheese that it is available everywhere at no nominal cost.

So yes, you should. You already do, realistically.