wyattpeak

Foreign nations and companies dictating laws to a country has historically led to much the same things.

Many people in the countries Britain colonised lived under autocracies without even a veneer of freedom. How many of those countries today appreciate Britain's actions?

I'm not going to speak for Nigerians. If you want Nigerian opinions, ask Nigerians.

I am going to say that I don't see how laws imposed by an unelected foreign company are better than laws imposed by an unelected local government. And when we're talking about companies creating unbannable sites, we're absolutely talking about companies dictating law.

Edit: Please stop editing your comment after I've responded.

Self-determination. Always.

Why on Earth would this be a good thing? I'm all for freedom of information, but I'm even more for foreign companies not ignoring the laws set by the government I elected.

Things get murkier when governments don't come to power in kosher ways, but I'm absolutely certain that the solution is not to have a bunch of profit-motivated companies from a completely different country and culture decide what's best for a nation. What happens when they get together and decide to make an unbannable advertising network instead?

Given that I wasn't responding to your question, but to a follow up comment you made, I don't see why you would have expected me to be answering your original question.

Nevertheless, the organisation tasked with protecting the environment in China is called the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. To quote Wikipedia:

> The Center for American Progress has described China's environmental policy as similar to that of the United States before 1970. That is, the central government issues fairly strict regulations, but the actual monitoring and enforcement are largely undertaken by local governments that have a greater interest in economic growth.

I've bought cups of coffee that were bad enough to throw away for $4. Not often, but it's happened. It doesn't stop me from buying coffees from new cafes.

I reckon trying to solve this as though it's rationally thought-out is wrongheaded. I didn't consider and decide that I didn't like paying for apps, I just got used to not paying for apps. And indeed, once I got used to paying for apps again,* I stopped worrying about whether the $1 app would actually do what I wanted.

* Since we're sort of discussing what would prompt people to spend money, for me it was games. Free-to-play games are so reliably so annoying that I eventually swore off downloading them.

The distinction you're applying seem to be arbitrary. What makes Chinese efforts nascent but American efforts (where species also continue to go extinct) developed?

Most efforts to preserve animals come after the damage is done. That's why we maintain an endangered species list.

I'm not going to argue that China is as committed to, or as successful at, the goal as say the US is, but "not as good" is very different from claiming they fundamentally lack something the West possesses.

Fair enough, I'm sorry to have implied otherwise.

I agree with you about the frontline rep, that's not the person I have a problem with. I don't expect a low-level customer support rep to be able to approve such a thing. I expect Amazon to, in the event that a rep can't handle a complaint, proactively solve it in a different way, not try to fob the claimant off.

It would be just as easy to, say, bump any refund claim over 1k to someone who is paid enough to make such a decision. Amazon have decided they don't want to. And I don't really think that's acceptable. Just look at the comments in this thread of people self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of the algorithm.

This is a situation Amazon has engineered, because it's cheaper to run these things through automated systems, or only frontline workers. I'm not inclined to accept what I think is pretty bare minimum as good enough on account of their size. If anything, I think their size allows them to afford and amortize better systems than a small company.

Edit: cooled it a little

I think it's an extremely generous assumption towards Amazon that all they did was fail to refund "in the first customer support call".

I don't know about you, but I've never filed a police report because someone made me call twice to resolve something.

> At the end of the day most big companies have found its a better strategy to trust/not dispute customers in these situations.

The article we're responding to, not to mention the comments, is evidence that that is at minimum an unreliable assumption.

Re your second point, the seemingly standard way of resolving these issues after the company refuses to comply is to make it a PR problem for the company. Videos are going to help for that.

> Arguably this part of GDPR failed miserably.

I'd definitely argue against that. For a hot minute they were truly terrible, with occasionally hundreds of tickboxes (Looking at you Techcrunch). Now 80% of sites I go to seem to use the same provider, which has a primary "Accept all", but rejecting all is usually a matter of clicking 3-4 radio buttons and a secondary "Confirm choices" button.

That's still pretty damned dark pattern-y, no doubt, but it's light years better than my previous options of either accepting or accepting.

Huh, I didn't know that, I'd wondered why so many sites defaulted them all to unchecked.

Fastly's one seems a pretty dark-patterned in general, throwing up a primary-styled "allow all" button (and simultaneously pushing the switches out of view) if you disable one of the options.

Why?

I want politicians to post on whatever people are using to get information. Almost nobody I know my age is regularly watching the news on TV, or checking the local paper's website. They might have other channels, but they certainly don't have other channels with the same reach.

What specifically are you waiting on? It's not hard to find information on the recyclability on PV cells (e.g. [1]). They're eminently recyclable, although they're mostly made of glass which isn't exactly high-value.

Particular policy isn't going to be a global discussion, it's going to be jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction, and will likely follow similar lines to all recycling discussion. PV cells aren't made of especially rare minerals, so it's not likely to be a high-priority issue. That's perhaps disappointing, but given that's our default for pretty much all recycling, it's no great reason to worry about one particular technology.

[1] https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2017/10/the-opportunities-...

No, perhaps you're right. I was originally responding specifically to the argument that politicians shouldn't be treated differently from other people, but I've let my point drift.

I don't know whether the rule is necessary. But if it becomes so, I do believe a special rule for political candidates, as opposed to requiring all platforms to host all people, is the right choice.

So long as it's not criminal, yes.

I'm not saying I like the idea, but it's vastly better to me than to have the Overton window chosen by the platform provider. If you can propose a way to stop bad-faith candidates from abusing it, that'd be a great thing, but it's secondary to preserving the ability for political candidates to state their positions, whatever they are.

To be honest, I like this rule.

I'm glad that social media platforms remove people violating community guidelines, whatever they are. I don't want people here on HN who do nothing but post flamebait, and I don't want people on Twitter who do nothing but post hate speech. I don't want platforms to be required to host any and all people.

But it's critical that politicians can reach us by whatever means we're using. They are a special class of people, because they're the people we're choosing to represent us. If a political candidate can't reach an audience because they don't agree politically with the platform providers, that's a big fucking problem for democracy.

Yes, though it throws up a "sign up to read more" notice if I have JS turned on.

You can read it here: https://archive.is/6PfeI

From a social good perspective, if they're all good your product shouldn't stand out.

The argument here isn't that ads aren't good for the business doing the advertising, it's that they're bad for the community at large.

I think what's gained is a visceral appreciation for such events which prompts further action.

There's a reason why, when spruiking for donations, organisations like UNICEF like to show pictures of suffering children, and read first-hand accounts. These are the things that motivate people to act. We're not perfectly rational beings. We're all well aware that there are poor and starving people in the world, and mostly we do nothing about it. It's that emotional reaction that prompts us to act.

Reflecting on it instead might be sufficient, but if so then it's demonstrably not what people do, or else those pitches wouldn't be as successful as they are.

That action, to me, is the point, and it comes in many forms. Some active, like for instance donating to a cause. Some passive, like changing opinions on an ongoing war that your country is party to.

Sure, some people are watching it for entertainment value. Is that a big problem, if it changes opinions nevertheless? And from reading the other comments on this thread, I think it's apparent that it changes opinions.

On the contrary, I don't find it entertaining at all. In fact I generally can't bring myself to watch LiveLeak videos, those text descriptions are my limit. But I do think my understanding of such situations is poorer for not doing so.

I think the very fact that reading those descriptions is confronting, if it is to you as it is to me, is evidence that you do need exposure to understand that horrible things happen in the world.

I understand it academically, but every time I see or read something like this I realise that I don't really understand it.

I'm a bit late, but I suspect the poster is referring to a theoretical city type called a charter city[1], much pushed by the economist Paul Romer.

None have been built, although both Madagascar and Honduras briefly considered the idea. The theory is presumably inspired by Hong Kong, but obviously Hong Kong wasn't set up with any such purpose.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_city_(economic_develop...

You'd have to be doing something extremely small to make a $5 Linode more expensive. AWS might be cheaper for a static site, but as soon as you involve a database you're probably paying more.

AWS is not cheap. A lot of people seem get bitten by this.

Is that really the problem? When in history did people get their news and information from a large and diverse set of sources?

For as long as there's been national news, it's been dominated by a few headline sources. Before that there were lots of local sources, but nobody was reading the local news from both Connecticut and Colorado.

I don't know what the difference is today. Maybe there isn't a difference, we just prioritise modern problems over the same problems in ages past. But I really don't think the answer is a narrowing of sources, unless your point of comparison is something like fifteen years ago, for the small subset of the population who were mostly getting their news online at that point.

I was vegetarian for a while, and stopped because it turned out I wasn't willing to go without meat. Had really good meat substitutes existed at the time, things might very well have panned out differently, and I'd still be a vegetarian to this day.

Lots of people try and fail to become vegetarians because they don't find the substitutes acceptable. If you consider it a purely personal issue it probably doesn't matter, but if you're interested in lowering global animal product consumption, then I think ideological purity is the more morally questionable position than trying to develop a product that can convince the world to take up veganism.

The ISS has run many hundreds[1] of experiments, and more are sent up with every launch. It's an invaluable resource, because it's the only (relatively) cheap resource we have for running microgravity experiments which require human input.

They're not the sort of headline-grabbing experiments that most people seem to associate with space (I don't know why they do, most science isn't very exciting), but it's facilitating a lot of science which couldn't reasonably be done without it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_Int...

Having to write 40k submissions to find one with 6 8s more than qualifies as rare to my mind.

Automatically incrementing a string might satisfy the requirements, but for an artistic project it's not what I'd base the metrics on, and indeed I don't think the author did.

This is one case though where that lack of understanding leads to the right conclusion. The average user is giving up nothing by losing the right to run arbitrary code, because they never were running arbitrary code.

I don't think we are particularly individualistic, at least in the cities. Moreso as you head out into the bush, but that's true everywhere.

I suspect it's a hangover from our earlier days, which were recent enough they still live on in popular culture. Also it's not an image we've exactly tried to suppress, since outside of an event like covid it's generally seen as a positive thing.