Seriously, stop with this crap. The people on this forums are some of the people who have the know-how to actually DO something about the internet. If they can't discuss these things, we get the situation that your company seems to like - SV decides what's allowed on the internet and what's not. Those of us outside of the US don't like it very much, and we'd prefer to - you know - talk about it.
Obviously when people with know-how want to discuss what they know-how about, that's on topic on HN. But you're underestimating the quantity of plain old internet slag, which is what repetitive flamewars (especially on classic flamewar topics) quickly turn into. "You are a pedo sympathiser and apologist" and similar dreck repels the users who actually know things and who make HN a worthwhile place, so your argument ends in a contradiction.
If you'd like to offer advice about HN moderation, breaking the site guidelines while doing so is unlikely to persuade.
Serious question. When are laws too many? (According to some history, 10 laws were too many and most people were ignoring them.)
Are a trillion laws too many? A billion? A million? A thousand? What if we had a thousand laws, but each law had a million pages?
(I'm pretty sure we're at over a billion pages of laws if we take into account all the laws in the world - as multinational companies are supposed to do.)
Never? Counting laws is an exercise of futility. Content, not numbers should matter. If it takes a billion small laws to cover everything needed, so be it, who cares?
And yet, the number of otherwise informed, intelligent people I've talked to who believe that the frequently-used image of the Covid virus is an actual picture is astonishing.
All blackmail involves exposing something that someone doesn't want exposed - usually because the "something" is illegal. And yet, blackmail itself is illegal.
Most countries have a culture against whistleblowers, starting from childhood ("don't be a tattletale", "don't be a rat").
Most of the time, consensus exists for a reason. The obviously troubled panhandler at the stop light also technically goes against the consensus, as do anti-vaccers and flat earthers.
There are a lot of use cases. For example, I have 17 applications running on a system that need a connection string. When I need to change that connection string, I can 1) change 17 config files; 2) change 17 shortcuts containing command-line arguments; 3) change one env variable.
> I can 1) change 17 config files; 2) change 17 shortcuts containing command-line arguments; 3) change one env variable.
This seems like forcing the application to take the burden of your configuration system having shortcomings (like not being able to freely convert from a single source of truth into multiple generated files/command lines/...).
The US government sends people to prison for owning the wrong plant or the wrong type of lobster. It assassinates political opponents - definitely foreign, likely domestic. It snoops on, disrupts and if necessary curtails any serious efforts at political organizing (they actually called Zuckerberg in front of Congress because Facebook was not censoring enough people! Facebook! That was freaking mind-blowing.)
If you're Chinese or Russian, ignore my comment. But if you're an American, you need a bit of perspective. Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US. And literally no other country has an egalitarian setup where anyone can potentially succeed. The countries that are objectively better than US in terms of human rights for own citizens, are very few (Switzerland, Nordic countries, few others which are either small/or have homogeneous population). I am stunned when I read comments suggesting that US is as bad or Russia or China.
> If you're Chinese or Russian, ignore my comment. But if you're an American, you need a bit of perspective. Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US. And literally no other country has an egalitarian setup where anyone can potentially succeed. The countries that are objectively better than US in terms of human rights for own citizens, are very few (Switzerland, Nordic countries, few others which are either small/or have homogeneous population). I am stunned when I read comments suggesting that US is as bad or Russia or China.
Your critique misses the vastness of the violent capitalist system that exists and operates today:
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." [1]
Can you show me a critique that is more clear and true than this? I have quoted it a million times and that's because I just haven't heard a better explanation.
An area where capitalist firms are doing a lot of damage using their IP system is in the global south:
"The possibility of a handful corporations monopolizing healthcare and agriculture in the developing world is a very real risk today. Closely associated with these corporations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) - the richest and the most powerful philanthropic foundation shaping these sectors globally - aids them in the process of monopolization by granting huge funds to its network of NGOs to carry out activities which mainly benefit these selected corporations, in many of which the foundation has considerable financial stakes.
Apart from making such grants, through the vehicle of Public Private Partnerships (PPP), the foundation also has been facilitating the flow of millions of dollars of taxpayer money into what are essentially private projects.
The foundation also plays a crucial role in lobbying for stronger IPR regimes which oblige developing countries to grant long patent periods for drugs which are only minor alterations of already existing, off-patent drugs. In Africa, this foundation is one of the most powerful forces that is arm-twisting governments to gradually rewrite seed laws to provide patent protection for commercial seeds, which would eventually require criminalization of all non-certified seeds.
[...]
Far from aiding the production of cheap drugs by generic pharma through means such as technology transfers, the corporate giants, including Bill Gates’ Microsoft, “lobbied vociferously” for acceptance of TRIPS agreement, which obliged member countries to agree to grant patents to pharmaceutical companies for a minimum period of 20 years. Microsoft again lobbied the G8 in 2007 to strengthen the protection of global Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), which, Oxfam warned, is bound to “worsen the health crisis in developing countries”, the New Internationalist reported.
Stifling the development of generic pharma by lobbying for stronger Intellectual Property Rights regime (which, contrary to incentivizing innovation as is widely claimed, has the opposite effect as demonstrated by many empirical studies including one by U.S government ); facilitating a flow of enormous subsidies into private projects of closely associated pharmaceutical companies, not only by making philanthropic grants but also by channelizing through GAVI alliance the public money granted by various states; and protecting selected corporations from potential competition in the market by locking countries receiving assistance through this programme into long-term commitments to buy vaccinations they manufacture - all appear to be a multi-pronged strategy to monopolize the global healthcare industry. And being “the single most influential voice in global health”, Bill Gates is more than well-qualified to be at the helm of this machine." [2]
People like Gates grew up with access to an immense amount of privileged high quality knowledge, theories and pedagogical material available to them - access to the immense inheritance of humanity's scientific explorations. Yet what makes them powerful is that they have kicked away the ladders they themselves used to climb up in the first place.
The US and it's capitalist allies are powerful because they have created one big corrupt intellectual property system that favors the already powerful capitalists. There is no opting out of it. Through IP laws this system criminalizes sharing and turns inventions and science into commodities to be bought and sold. Helping ourselves and other humans is criminalized.
If the boy geniuses of Silicon Valley are so genius, why do they need to turn something that is not scarce (knowledge/science/inventions) into something scarce, and lock it away as a trade secret? How can we speak about egalitarianism when this system is so clearly the opposite of that? This system is not democratic, it's a bourgeois run prison.
> Literally most countries on Earth do orders of magnitude of worse stuff on a daily basis than US.
The reason there is violence in other countries is exactly because people in these countries are deeply implicated and entangled in the global capitalist production system, which is being led and directed by global north capitalists.
As a general rule, the entire medical profession has the incentives set up the wrong way - the more problems you have, the more they benefit.
I have read that there was a time, in the distant past, where you paid a doctor only as long as you were healthy. I can come up with some problems even in that case, but I can't help but think it might still be an improvement over the current situation...
Except that it is simply not true - the world is not that simple.
There are several incentives at play for a doctor.
Obviously there are different fields, and dental is slightly weird compared to the others, but first of all, doctors are trained to help and learn cures.
A doctor that keeps you sick instead of healthy is quickly out of a job (or out of patients, if you prefer). There are other doctors you know, and there is word-of-mouth, and ratings etc. There is no world-wide conspiracy of dental workers to keep you from getting a specific cure. Aka: Game Theory.
And an easy way to get rid of this would be if the doctors would be paid to keep you healthy:
So you pay as long as you are healthy, e.g. a valuable work-force. Hmmm, I wonder if you could just use income tax to fuel this...? Oh, we just invented universal health care, didn't we?
Or even private insurance. There is a reason many insurance plans send you exercise right reminders all the time: healthy people cost less to ensure and so make more money.
There's overwhelming evidence against such a broad statement.
There are good mechanics, cars are getting safer, cops do fight crime, soldiers do fight wars and so on, social workers so do their jobs, teachers usually teach and so on.
You can say the same for every kind of work -- that you are incentivized to do a poor work so that there's more demand for the work, but the counter incentive is the free market.
If others can do a better job than you and eat your lunch, they will.
Lol, how do you manage to keep your sanity on HN?
Everyone else thinks that medicine/police/education/judiciary is so special that the free market cannot deal with it.
> There are good mechanics, cars are getting safer, cops do fight crime, soldiers do fight wars and so on, social workers so do their jobs, teachers usually teach and so on.
But there also exist many mechanics who try to get you to pay for unnecessary services, which mechanics are incentivized for.
Cars are getting safer for their human passengers by increasing the energy absorbed by the car body, which coincidentally increases the odds of a car being totaled in an accident, which increases demand for cars, which is what car manufacturers are incentivized for.
Cops are incentivized to make lots of arrests - which means they mostly fight crime which doesn't require extensive investigation nor poses high risk, ie lots of low level non-violent crimes.
Soldiers are not incentivized to prolong wars (they get paid in peace time, which also has much lower risks of death and disability). Major defense contractors and some politicians though do have an incentive to prolong wars, and coincidentally the US has been continuously at war for nearly 20 years.
How many major cities have had a serious social problem eliminated by the efforts of social workers? That's not their job, which is why it doesn't get done.
Teachers have no perverse incentive not to teach, they don't get paid more if their students don't pass. In fact it's a real problem where schools that have poor performance for unrelated reasons get punished with reduced funding, leading to a downward spiral that has destroyed lots of inner city schools. Even if the government doesn't formally have such punitive measures in place, the fact is wealthy families move away from mediocre school districts, which reduces the funding available for them, which quickly leads to the school district becoming even worse.
Perverse incentives don't mean you're incentivized to do your job poorly, it means the job you're incentivized to do well isn't necessarily the one people would want you to do.
I think I’ve read somewhere about this being an old Chinese tradition. They would pay doctors for the amount pf people he is looking after, and he has the incentive to keep his “flock” healthy as that would mean much less work for him.
As a general rule doctors always do what they believe is best for their patients. I don't think I've ever seen one intentionally harm patients in order to keep them coming back. There are so many people in need that doing such a thing would be pointless anyway.
there was a time, in the distant past, where you paid a doctor only as long as you were healthy
This sounds implausible, and even if it were true it would not be very fair: it's usually not the doctor's fault when you've got some medical issue, so why should s/he suffer from that financially?
Right. I think I remember it used to be normal in some societies to pay the doctor only if he managed to cure you. That sounds much more plausible.
Paying for the state transition from sick to okay should work just fine.
The problem is if you can't be cured but can be helped. Diabetes is an example of something where with medical care you can live a long life, even though we can't cure you; but without help you are dead quickly.
It's worse than saying we should only pay devs the days there's no bugs in production, doctors can't decide to magically prevent diseases from existing or accidents to happen.
"An accountable care organization (ACO) is a healthcare organization that ties provider reimbursements to quality metrics and reductions in the cost of care"
Huh. Would it be possible for someone to hijack the SIM card in such a device and use it to get free calls all over the world, including long-distance? Would that be illegal? Would anyone care? :)
There was a case in the news a few years or so ago where someone did that with the SIM that was in their electric meter, which was used once a day by the electric company to send a report of cumulative usage.
What they did not count on was that many cellular carriers have data plans specifically for devices like that electric meter that just need to send a very small amount of data every hour or day or so.
Those plans have a very small monthly fixed fee, a small data allowance, and astronomical overage fees. Typical data allowances for the cheapest plans are maybe 50 KB, which is plenty for sending "<meter-id> <timestamp> <cumulative kWh> <checksum>" once a day.
The person used the SIM for their calls and data, including downloading a bunch of movies. They ended up incurring around $150k overage charges.
The electric company cared very much, and the person ended up with a short jail sentence.
There's an old (10 years?) case about smart traffic lights that included SIM cards for connectivity - which were taken out of the traffic lights and abused. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12135841
Another case (for which I don't have a link) some years ago was that ornithologists were doing tracking of large migratory birds using ankle bracelets w. embedded radios - until people "underneath" the birds found out that they contain a SIM provisioned for international roaming, which resulted in birds with such bracelets being shot down to obtain these SIMs as they could be used to extract and sell a few thousand dollars in comms services to locals.
> Would it be possible for someone to hijack the SIM card in such a device
Depends if it's using a physical SIM card or an eSIM module like Apple does that's entirely provisioned from the device's userland.
> and use it to get free calls all over the world, including long-distance?
Depends on the plan assigned by the vendor / phone company. If it's a data only plan, then no.
> Would that be illegal? Would anyone care? :)
Depends on which jurisdiction you are and what you're doing. A couple of dollars worth of charges on a company that sells millions of "smart" devices? Probably won't even get flagged. A couple hundred dollars for calling a phone sex line or someone on a satellite phone however? That will cause someone to have a look.
Because you literally cannot buy those TV here. I didn't check all of them, but the Samsung one seemed like a good candidate, it's not for sale in Denmark apparently. Maybe you could special order it.
But you're right, apparently the TV makers aren't the issue, the stores are.
I love that "non-smart-tv" is a category on that Romanian site.
