"No it's not sad, ." really just proving GP's point imo. Imagine if you couldn't post a thread about Microsoft products on HN without republicans feeling the need to jump in to talk about how much they hate Bill Gates for his donations to Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024. It's really tiresome.
We also weren't discussing GoDaddy as a registrar without mentioning it's CEO killing elephants and being an all around douchebag. Or Oracle without the lawnmower.
It's tough to ask people to dissociate the CEO from the company, especially when he's doing all the PR by himself.
Its the character. Buying a global media platform to "promote free speech" and then shunt the entire thing and himself behind a particular political party. This guy uses his money and his twitter account to support neo-nazi hate groups in my country (Britain First, Patriotic Alternative, Hundred Handers, Tommy Tennames). He has no self-restraint. Its abhorrent. Its not "about politics" when the politics is about racial superiority and ethnic cleansing.
> Imagine if you couldn't post a thread about Microsoft products on HN without republicans feeling the need to jump in to talk about how much they hate Bill Gates for his donations to Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024. It's really tiresome.
and if Bill Gate was literally campaigning for the Dems, getting up on stage, handing voters cheques and THEN being employed by the government to run a department then you'd have a point.
He repeatedly crosses the line of what is appropriate. People with that level of wealth should stay the fuck away from politics and respect democracy instead of using their money and business to have excessive influence on democratic outcomes. Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
> People with that level of wealth should stay the fuck away from politics and respect democracy instead of using their money and business to have excessive influence on democratic outcomes.
People with that level of power — because it is power — will do what they will. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”.
> Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
We have transitioned, it would seem, from the pretence of “goodness” to naked displays of power. Unseemly, definitely.
Justice. Righteousness. Old fashioned words and old fashioned ideas. Oh for a good and righteous king!
The "pin to a wall" part uses fans, not the cold gas thrusters. It can probably stay there until the battery runs out. The gas thrusters are only needed if you want to go 0-60 in .8s (with the Thrust version), or if you want to fly (with the Rocket version). Probably those only last a few seconds before the air tanks need to recharge.
I'm not sure that logic is solid. Expats move to Saudi Arabia because they can make huge amounts of money in a short time. Is, therefore, Saudi Arabia "a great country"?
Not necessarily in the industries that employ Western expats. After all, expats come because specialized labor is required, and specialized labor can command a higher salary. There are also perks like supplied accommodation (and sometimes a car) that lets one direct so much more money to savings.
The important part is the trend. US is a great country today but it was greater a decade ago.
As someone who worked in US and left it long time back, last year was the first time I could hear ambivalent views on US from my friends who work there. They are still in US as they make a lot of money but have started to consider the alternatives.
I don't think it works like that. I can't just write "By reading this comment, you have agreed to pay me $100." and expect that to be legally enforceable unless you explicitly agreed to a contract to that effect in advance before reading the comment.
I could write "If you don't agree to pay me $100, I reserve the right to block your future access to my comments." (Which is what a ToS is.) But that's not a license agreement.
Yeah, but you can have one page where people agree to a certain license and if they agree are allowed to download another document.
TOS agreements often have terms concerning things like in which venues disputes about them are to be handled etc., and often have penalties other than the service simply being ended, and if those are valid, then this kind of thing is too.
I guess the point is that when combined with a source of dispatchable base load power like a combined cycle gas turbine or nuclear, batteries are now cheaper than open cycle gas peaker plants for bridging short (4 hours or less) spikes in demand.
This is exactly what they are going for. To not have to build and run expensive gas plants just for a few hours in the evening. It also allows you to run the few gas plants that you do build for longer to better amortize their build costs, making them less expensive overall.
Ideally you would pair these 4-hour batteries with CHEAP sources of electricity. Fill the battery when electricity is cheap, empty the battery when electricity is expensive (ie, when demand spikes or when other sources of generation drop off the grid).
The cheapest source of electricity today is noontime solar. Batteries can fill up on noontime solar and discharge into the evening peak. They could also charge on wind or traditional baseload sources overnight, and discharge into the morning peak.
Banning harmful behavior (like secretly recording someone) is pretty defensible and not all that controversial. Banning the mere possession of generic tools that could potentially be used to engage in harmful behavior is a lot more dubious. It requires infringing the rights of a bunch of innocent people merely because they might use that freedom to do something wrong.
I agree in part. Rather than a full ban, it makes more sense to require manufacturers to implement obnoxiously obvious “tells” (blinding LED plus sound perhaps), and to ban commercial businesses that remove these features. No need to ban possession. For DIY creepers a ban on the behavior is enough, they will get caught eventually.
The point is to ban widespread normalization of tools that make invasion of privacy easy. You can go find a shirt button spy cam on Aliexpress, but if you get caught wearing it then everyone knows what you’re up to. Wearing one in certain places could be taken as criminal intent.
(I don’t think restrictions like this would work in the US without an amendment, but I think we’re long overdue for a privacy amendment to clarify some things.)
Single party consent empowers those who are underhanded in uneven situations. For instance, the ability to secretly record my employer, who has far more resources than me, benefits me. I personally benefited in being able to defend myself by using single-party consent for audio recording, which helped me both avoid legal trouble and would have allowed me to offer more evidence had it ever come to actual legal action.
There are two sides to privacy laws, and the downside is not often discussed.
Only issue with that is that enforcing it requires you to make open source smart glasses illegal, since open source software cannot be used to coerce users the way closed-source software can.
Perfect enforcement isn’t required, neither is a ban on DIY solutions. The intent is to prevent normalization. Laws against murder don’t prevent all murders either.
Someone wearing weird 3D printed camera glasses is going to be obvious. Someone with the skill to disassemble a tiny glued together smart glass frame, bypass any hardware protections, and flash a custom OS will be rare, and they’ll get caught anyway when they “accidentally” wander into the women’s locker for the third time.
I don't want people to have to know how to solder to install an open source OS on their personal computing device. That sort of thing should be normal and easy.
So yeah, I guess as long as you're okay with a law like that potentially becoming very easy to bypass then I don't have a problem with it. But I think once things start going down that path, most people aren't going to be satisfied with leaving it at that; they'll hear about a bypass and start pushing to restrict the freedoms that enabled it.
I suspect that in practice, the "or sell products that do" part of that has had a significant negative impact on the market for open source radio firmware. But I'm not an expert in this space. How difficult is it to flash the modem on a modern cell phone? Why has nobody built a garage door opener app for Fairphone?
That's what universal healthcare fundamentally is; everyone pays for it regardless of whether they use it or not, and regardless of the quality of service they receive in return.
What, did you think universal healthcare meant everything would be free? That's not possible; doctors and nurses don't work for free.
No it’s not. The universal healthcare is everyone contributing to it equally. That’s not the case in Germany. Private health insurance holders doesn’t contribute to it at all and a certain professions like government workers, doctors, etc. have their own health insurance schemes and doesn’t pay into the statutory health insurance.
Even the people that has to pay for the statutory health insurance pays different amounts and also there’s a group of people that benefits from it even without paying a single euro for it. So it’s not universal at all. Only a certain group pays for the majority and takes on the burden
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certain professions like government workers, doctors, etc. have their own health insurance schemes
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Completely WRONG:
you are mixing up "job-dedicated" pension schemes like for lawyers or doctors with the healthcare setup - in healthcare, there are only two parties: "public" healthcare ("GKV") and "private" healthcare ("PKV"), these two types are not anyhow related to the job dedicated pension schemes.
Correct is, mostly all politicians, high-earners, docs, lawyers etc. are chosing the "private" insurance version, for (at least until yet) several benefits compared to the ones using the "public" model.
You are allowed to enter the private model above a certain salary, but you are not forced. It may be cheaper for some time, but at least if kids arrive it gets fucking expensive, since in the public model your children are insured for free,while in private mode you have to pay for them.
Also handling private mode insurance is more work.
Sounds really complicated, but at the end of the day as long as everyone has health insurance that's still by definition universal health insurance, right? In particular, having "a group of people that benefits from it even without paying a single euro for it" seems mandatory for it to be truly universal.
It sounds to me like you're envisioning something different from universal healthcare, but it's not clear to me exactly what.
What I want to make it clear is that people outside of Germany/Europe, especially Americans have this idea that everyone in Europe has health care because money appears magically to take care of everyone.
But that’s not the case, it is true that everyone would get health care, but a group of people pays a significant portion to maintain that system (which is turning out to be unsustainable day-by-day) compared to majority of the people that truly benefit from it. For me universal healthcare would be something that everyone contributes equally and everyone benefits equally as well.
> For me universal healthcare would be something that everyone contributes equally and everyone benefits equally as well.
Your version of universal healthcare must not cover much, because equal contributions that everyone can afford is not very much.
Universal healthcare can only work if those with more ability to pay pay more or if you live in some utopia where everyone (including children, disabled people, and those too old to work) has the ability to pay for healthcare.
If you want equal contribution, equal benefit, maybe auto repair is a better model. You might get some limited warranty, then anyone can go to any mechanic to get their car fixed, rates are generally posted and you get a mostly binding estimate before the work starts. This is a nice system, but I don't think anyone would call it universal auto repair.
FWIW this is exactly how it works on OSM, and probably why OP is complaining people were being pedantic by telling him he "shouldn't mark a street as not walkable because there is no official sign that prohibits walking".
"Would an ordinary person want to walk here?" is pretty subjective. "Are people legally prohibited from walking here?" is pretty objective. Generally only the latter would be recorded in OSM.
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