Just because conservatives hate kids and don't want to be teachers/educators/work at universities doesn't mean it's biased or bad.
It's like if you wanted a diversity of opinions designing a rocket so you decided to pull in flat earth's as well as new earth creationist. You're not getting a better rocket. Perhaps a better fireworks show, though.
Yeah, because hiring qualified female, black, and queer people is exactly the same as hiring someone who hates what the job and what it's trying to accomplish.
Before the Nazi's invaded the main guy who advocated for the civil registry which allowed the Nazi's to easily find jewish people went to his grave believing he did nothing wrong in advocating for such a database.
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
I think the hard counterpoint is
- some ways that American government function are patently insane compared to other industrialized countries. Having moved from US to Nl just having one single source of truth about where I live and who I am for all sources of government is much less of a headache in day-to-day life. Mail forwarding, authentication for municipal governments, health insurance, etc, just takes 0% of my life (compared to the pain of authenticating myself separately to every part of the government, sometimes by answering questions about my life trawled from _private_ data aggregation companies
- the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens. Gathering this data for everyone is certainly more tedious but i think avoiding the dragnet completely for the average member of society is functionally impossible.
This administration went in and just flagged people on Social Security as deceased. They said 'those people can just get it fixed'. They also said people that complain are cheats.
There are many people on fixed social security that can't afford missing a payment, let alone the 3 it would take at a minimum if it all works out to get this fixed. By that point they could be homeless, their credit could be ruined. These aren't easy things to fix if you are 80+ and depend on Social Security and renting.
Concentrated power even for the best on intentions (in this case deciding in the 1930s 'old people shouldn't have to eat dog food') is extremely easy to abuse.
These kind of systems work perfectly and smoothly as long as the human in question lives his life within the box decided by the government. If not, these systems are hell.
In some hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your individual tax number. In other hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your bank account.
It can also be tied to a postal adress in some nations, which makes it hell for people like sailors, seasonal workers, or other very mobile citizens. You're basically dependent on having to know somebody which you can completely trust to make sure they relay your mail to you. One of the "boxes" the government wants to put people in is that they reside at one adress, but many people do not live like that.
> the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens.
What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?
Because they DO have whatever data they want: From Palintir.
Preventing the government from accumulating a database is meaningless. But it doesn't matter anyway. Even if they didn't have any data, that's not an impediment, because there is zero pushback to literally blackbagging people off the street and sending them to another country. They just want to harass brown people and you don't need a damn database for that. Bootlickers have eyes.
This bullshit about government databases has always been a meaningless distraction. Oppression doesn't want to be precise or efficient, it's counterproductive to the goal of scaring people into compliance.
Tell me, how do you believe they are stymied at all? They've arrested anyone they want.
So I'm in general agreement, especially as things stand. But there is one hell of a counterargument that says if the US govt had an authoritative database of all citizens+residents, and effectively enforced that database, then there wouldn't be so much energy based around demands to remove "the illegals" in the first place.
Once again I do generally agree with the desire to limit the abilities of the government, especially pragmatically in the context of the current situation. And politically I'd say that the general topic is being used in bad faith to drive support for fascism rather than earnest policy fixes (eg killing bipartisan immigration bill, in favor of this).
But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
> But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
One of the big ones is the calling to naively eliminate government regulation, imagining that will always make things "more free", while ignoring that corpos are perfectly willing to create private regulations on their own. This often ends up amounting to facilitating de facto government, despite some epsilon of choice.
There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward and less-partisan one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of uses, and do so basically in lock step, despite those uses not actually being illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable by fooling people with narratives of "avoiding regulation".
What can we even change? It's likely HN will also go to the grave demanding deregulation amidst a maelstrom of consumer protection malfunctions. We're already there in many respects; the DOJ's case against Google and Apple both seem to have stalled-out while the EU, Japan and South Korea all push forward with their investigations.
In many respects, the attitude of "we'll fix this one day" is exactly why we don't think deeply about these issues. Client-side scanning was proposed only a short while ago, and you can still read the insane amount of apologists on this site who think that unmitigated data collection can be a good thing if you trust the good Samaritan doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
It will take an utter catastrophe before the deregulation bloc sees what's at stake. This is far from over, despite the unanimous desire to put security in the rearview mirror.
That has never been convincing to them because they are fundamentally incapable of putting themselves in the shoe of an "other" like that. Look at all the people who voted for Trump literally to deport all the illegals and cry foul when he arrests their significant other or parent.
This phenomenon is well documented, from "the only moral abortion is my abortion" to suddenly accepting gay people when your child comes out to a huge quantity of Americans only being accepting of gay marriage rights after watching a damn sitcom, to "deregulate everything" types suddenly screaming for the government to do something after they get scammed/screwed/used as expected like most of the crypto community.
True, but there is a large fraction of people who are not like this, but haven't given the dangers of data collection enough thought. You can reach those. Are that enough people? Let's hope so.
I really fear for our older generations and those who are less tech-affine. What chance do they have to not be scammed by AI generated videos, fed by exfiltrated private data of them and their family. Grandparent scam on steroids.
The Nazis didn't actually need the pre-occupation data from the civil registry to easily find Jewish people.
In January of 1941, the Nazis ordered all Jews in the Netherlands to register themselves and virtually all of them, some 160,000, provided their name, address and information on any Jewish grandparents to the government.
If the lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that one shouldn't collect data just in case some genocidal group comes to power, then I fear one has learned the wrong lesson.
The simple counterpoint is that lack of data didn't stop the nazis a single fucking bit, and ICE has no problem breaking down random doors and harassing legal establishments.
This absurd idea that all we have to do is "defang" the government and we can safely ignore it, as if the problems that these data sets are built to work towards fixing would magically go away, or magically mean that people who experience those problems wouldn't still try to get something done about them, except now outside of a legal framework of any sort.
Do you actually think people with broken governments are more free in their world of arbitrary penalties and non-existent solutions?
A blinded government isn't less dangerous when it gets hostile. It just makes it more random and less well targeted. But that won't STOP it.
The holocaust would have happened just the same even if we never made counting machines. The main difference with IBM helping the Nazis is that we have good data about who died in the camps and good documentation. Funny that doesn't seem to matter to morons who think it's a hoax though.
Or do you honestly believe Jews faced no oppression and extermination in the areas without good data on them?
The actual answer is, as always, the hard one: Suck it up and pay attention to your government, participate in democracy, advocate for good politicians, understand how our system is somewhat broken and non-representative, and vote for people who will make it more representative.
There's no option to disregard politics and stay safe. If enough people in your country want you dead, no government can protect you of that if you stay disengaged. Ask the native americans how safe they ended up without a comprehensive database of their existence. We nearly exterminated the buffalo to solve that "problem". Because it was popular. No IBM needed.
Not having the data readily available slows it down. Having more random and less well targeted actions hit the supporters, so weakens the support. Is that enough? No. But I still lock my door, even if this will only slow down a determined thief.
Additionally, data collected by the government can also be misused by others. So it's still better to not collect unnecessary.
It’s a pro business anti consumer supreme court which knows it’d be dangerous to appear that way. Government and court will hamstring their ability to help consumers.
My favorite comment on HN was some law student saying his prof said “Scalia is the most complicated supreme court member whose views are always unpredictable” and the commenter said “he’s just a corporate hack who always votes for corporations and backs it up” and sure enough he guessed every ruling correctly.
> they rightly commented that if this was allowed to stand, the FTC and every government agency would just always estimate low in these cases.
I think you missed this — it isn’t some arbitrary reason to rule in an anti-consumer way. There is good reason to do so. Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong, and this is one small action that does that.
Do you consider the Microsoft-managed plug-in marketplace and infrastructure to be a private or public resource? From my understanding Microsoft has never been vague on the position that the plugin marketplace is exclusive to the official VS Code distribution, and the TOS specifically forbids forks from doing so.
Cursor and other forks have decided to circumvent this, some even going so far as to use proxies to bypass restrictions.
I'm not convinced Microsoft owes other billion dollar companies free access to a product they've built, curated, and supported for over a decade. Plug-in authors are not restricted from publishing their products on competing marketplaces.
If a company can align it's business model with user goals, then it can work in the long run. Apple has somewhat aligned it's integrated hardware sales business model with user privacy. Google and Meta are advertising companies and capturing user data and attention will always drive the business.
Yes, but it's not a meaningful part of their revenue unlike Google where it's' their entire revenue.
They are very different companies in structure and it certainly is a "pick your poison" but it's completely stupid to act like they're the same on this front. Apple is better on user privacy
...unless you care about state actors, which you should, in which case your data is the US government's either way.
Satya's talked about how some acquired companies such as LinkedIn and Github are allowed to operate independently for the most part and keep their culture. Or else we'd all be using Teams instead of the LinkedIn messaging feature!
I believe you can protest whatever, even things that are not real (like the so called genocide, where the population actually grows). There should of course be limits to your protest: violence against people you disagree with should never be an option.
PS: if you can stop the war by returning all the hostages, it's not a genocide.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Most people dislike Trump, Musk, and Vance. Musk is by far the least liked of the three.
People in the country very much dislike the status-quo, hence the dislike of the Democratic Party and voters going for ape-shit change over Biden.
I sincerely doubt working people will see their lives improves this term and change their mind on Trump; there wasn't a liberal shift to the right and we'll likely see a major reaction of everyone going to the left when they realize dismantling everything hurt everyone.
> Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it.
Google has a long history of "accidentally" breaking gmail on firefox and funneling users to Chrome back in the day. It's beyond stupid to argue they should be able to do whatever they want with their vertically integrated monopoly.
Like, if you want to dig holes in your own driveway sure whatever, but if you own all the roads in Detroit and you want to dig holes in them, then make a killing selling new tires and suspension repair a fair society wouldn't move out of Detroit, they'd fucking run you out of town.
Why be bitter at the people dealing with the shit, why not be angry at the people making the world shit? My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.
How is your company forcing you to use gmail any worse than your company forcing you to use outlook? Is it your company that is making the world shit, or google.
Indeed. I'd like to. Except Google also make it nigh impossible for anyone hosting their own email (the original-internet ideal) to get email into gmail reliably enough to be useful. I have my own address on my own domain, but can't rely on it (yes, DKIM and DMARC and SPF are properly set up) not to be marked "spam" for opaque reasons, so gmail remains my "main" address. It's a network-effect problem: once enough people are "captured", then everyone else is forced to join - or else be unable to participate.
It's a collective action problem: you'll have to persuade millions and millions of "normies", who have no idea what's going on, or what internet privacy is, or what's broken about the system, and who don't care to learn, and won't listen to us - or you'll have to impose regulation. Those are the choices. The second seems more possible than the first. Us nerds saying "walk away" is idealistic; we will, and always will, get squished, because the corps have the power and most folks won't (ever) care.
GP Post:
> My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.
Your post:
> Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.
No, it's clear that not everyone dealing with Gmail is doing so because they chose to. Repeating your incorrect statement does not make it correct.
Further, everyone has to deal with its impacts on the email ecosystem as it's practically impossible for somebody who works a 9-5 to run their own mail server that Gmail will deign to not only accept mail from but also successfully deliver it to its intended recipient.
So even if I never use Gmail I still have to deal with replies going to / coming from it.
GSuite/Workspace and consumer GMail is not the same thing in the slightest. They may use the same mail servers but that is about where the similarity ends.
I would recommend Google Workspace to any company because it gives them a ton of business productivity tools.
I would probably not recommend gmail as a users default personal email because frankly it's not that good.
The reality is most users have a Google account ans just use their Gmail account which is bundled.
Most of my circle which cares effectively use their Gmail account for sites that insist on it and never open that e-mail if they can get away with it.
True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.
Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.
Except for anyone whose employer requires them to use Google services, since Google Apps (or whatever they call it these days) is a hugely popular offering for central company email/contacts/calendar/office suite. And frankly, it's better than dealing with Outlook and its unrelenting AI slop machine advertising.
You don't own the roads in Detroit; the government owns most of them.
Gmail is not a government service. Google is free to make that work with only one browser, if they want.
You can't assert that Google must make Gmail work with any browser whatsoever, because that means supporting someone using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 5.5.
I'm not going to waste my time explaining to you what a metaphor is, but I will say this Firefox was the dominant player in the 00's 2010's when they did this, not the 2% market share it is now.
Steve Jobs said something to the effect that he made maybe three CEO decisions a year. I mean, I think these are decisions like, "We're going to open our own line of Apple retail stores", but, still.
Being a CEO isn’t all that different from being a parent of a child from the POV of impactful decisions.
How many critical “parental decisions” have you made in the past week? Probably very few (if any), but surely you did a lot of reinforcement of prior decisions that had already been made, enforcing rules that were already set, making sure things that were scheduled were completed, etc.
Important jobs don’t always mean constantly making important decisions. Following through and executing on things after they’re decided is the hard part.
The banter is actually quite easy to automate. You can hire a human to play golf for a small fraction of what the CEOs get paid, and then it's best of both worlds.
Is it? Take a look at the bot accounts filling up social media (the non-obvious ones). It wouldn't seem to hard to make one that makes 2am posts about '[next product] feels like real AGI' or tells stock analysts that their questions are boring on an earnings call, which is apparently what rockstar CEOs do.
Sneers aside, I think one common mis-assumption is that the difficulty of automating a task depends on how difficult it feels to humans. My hinge is that it mostly depends on the availability of training data. That would mean that all the public-facing aspects of being a CEO should by definition be easy to automate, while all the non-public stuff (also a pretty important part of being a CEO, I'd assume) should be hard.
It's like if you wanted a diversity of opinions designing a rocket so you decided to pull in flat earth's as well as new earth creationist. You're not getting a better rocket. Perhaps a better fireworks show, though.
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