If not, how are EU politicians so disconnected from their citizens? How did this state of affairs come to be? Is it reversible?
In the US, our politicians don’t diverge quite as much, but when they do, the reason is money, and when it gets bad, we throw the bums out and elect populists. It’s not pretty and it’s messy but it self corrects with the next election if it doesn’t work out how people wanted.
Most of the people I know - and I live in eu - are not knowledgeable about these topics. Furthermore, I've never heard about this in one of the main news channels, so I guess that most people don't even know about it
There's this "I have nothing to hide" sentiment followed by blind trusts into officials, their intentions and their alleged protection. I.e. people are scares of terrorism and would like it to stop, so they hope the terrorists will be found by spying.
At least in countries where the terrorism emerged recently, I'd say...
Being "scared of terrorism" is perfectly legitimate even if not underpinned by statistics.
The conversion from that to "so therefore the .gov ought to have powers that amount turnkey ability to violate human rights on a whim" is the problem.
Any "well actually terrorists aren't that big a deal" discussion only serves to bog things down in the weeds and direct blame away from bad people who believe bad things.
Replace terrorism with whatever the cause of the day is, drugs, satanic cults, tax evasion, etc, etc all you want, doesn't change anything. There are people who believe (though they'll rarely admit it when you lay it so bare) that you can take something that is flagrantly bad in its base or default form (like for example letting the government just read everyone's personal communication by default) and think that the fact that because it can be applied toward noble ends then it is a power the .gov ought to have access to by default.
As a European that lived in the US for a long time, a big difference is that there is also a lot of "European Conformism". You don't want to be seen as the weird one protesting things if nobody else does it. It's just easier to go with the flow and accept things.
EU citizens have way too much trust in their government and elected officials. A lot of people here just assume officials act in the interest of the population and most people don't really check or care to understand in detail those type of proposals.
And unlike the US, very few people are going to push back based on "freedom" and "my rights" which is unfortunate in my opinion. This lack of pushback is why those types of proposal even come to be.
That's not true. The issue with EU is that it's not really representative, and this is being critised for a long time and I hope should change in the near future. The EU parliament (the only directly elected body of the EU) does currently not have enough power.
Compared to the US and a lot of places in the world, Europeans generally care less and have more trust in their government. There is a general sense that elected officials generally do what is best for the people. This leads to less scrutiny and push back in general. Definitely way less than in the US.
This probably differs from country to country though. I have worked and lived in Switzerland (I know, not EU), Germany and US, and it does not feel like people don't care here in EU. In fact, in terms of people going out on the streets and demonstrating, it takes a lot less in countries like Germany and France to so compared to the US, in my experience.
For example in Switzerland, there's the instrument of a "Volksinitiative". If you can collect 100k signatures, the government must hold a national election on this issue. And these are quite common and popular in Switzerland. In Germany, those unfortunately only exist on a state-level, not federal level, but are also common.
So, in my experience, people are very much involved in government here. This might be different in different EU countries of course. Or maybe you have a vastly different bubble you live in than I do.
The main difference that struck me between the EU and living in the US is that by default EU citizens will assume good intent. I see European protests as interest groups that need to show that they are still important once in a while.
In the US, people will assume bad intent by default for politicians. This will lead to a ton more push back and scrutiny
> In the US, people will assume bad intent by default for politicians. This will lead to a ton more push back and scrutiny
Maybe... Again, this might differ from country to country. I currently live in Germany, and here scrutiny of the current federal government (and also the state government in my state) is pretty decent.
Also, some of the decisions that were made (mostly related to working with the far-right party AfD and on immigration law) led to nation-wide protests where over months and months millions of people went on the streets.
The US government has almost completely diverged from the will of the people at this point.
Most actions taken by this administration have > 65% disapproval ratings, and according to historical norms, if the size of current protests double,
the people will overthrow the government.
The last time I checked, the ongoing ICE raids against civilians were one of the more popular policies.
A notable amount of people vote for parties suggesting such ideas.
Demonstrations against are small.
Only few people write to their government and their MEPs.
This is probably sourced in not understanding it and not having enough information, but for as long as those three factors remain those are the results of democracy.
(Democracy in the EU is complex topic in itself, as EU isn't a state, but a union of independent states where states are primarily represented by their government and the directly elected parliament plays a smaller role ... but given the little protest that's the smaller issue in this case)
Danes are very proud of Denmark. It's a tiny country. There's a sense that we need to protect this tiny state from criticism because it's taken care of us. We've given the world Lego, Hans Christian Andersen, and we rank in the top two happiest countries in the world according to terrible measurements.
So now we're the baddies, what do we do? We don't mention it. Ignorance is bliss.
In short: fault of the nation states, not the EU. Most EU people won't even be aware of this, the same in other countries around the world. We here care, most people don't. Sadly.
There has not been a single article about this in my country which is "for" the proposal despite me writing to all major news outlets. My only conclusion is that they are complicit.
Simple. The EU is hardly a democracy. It’s run almost entirely by appointed bureaucrats with delusions of grandeur. The European parliament is there but it’s very weak relative to actual national parliaments and most people unfortunately don’t really care that much about politics on the EU level..
I'm going to reply in the same way I did elsewhere. Nation states are the ones pushing this agenda, onto the commission, and the elected parliament votes on it.
People continue to misrepresent what the EU is and how it operates, which is actually harmful if you care about stuff like this. You're basically trying to send the message to everyone that they're powerless "because EU". The reality is that nation states are pushing this. If you want to signal your disapproval, write to your politicians, vote for different ones, both national and MEPs.
Unfortunately, this is simply a reflection of democracy. Most people are just not informed enough about this topic to care. We think it is a big deal here on reddit, but most of the population just ignore it.
Because it is bullshit without any basis and doesn't fit the reality which is modelled after most democracies on the planet. And no, I'm not going to play the game where you spew out whatever comes to mind and then I do work to debunk your claims. Do the legwork and prove your BS.
Seems like a bizarre waste of time considering that that you already made up your mind to such an extent that you ate not even willing to explain what are you even trying to say.
> and doesn't fit the reality which is modelled after most democracies on the planet
Well yes, because the EU is rather unique compared to pretty much any post 1800s democracy.
The USA elected a fascist and will be lucky to have fair voting ever again. So we're not really qualified to comment on any other country doing anything.
We need Congress to make a law here in the US that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order.
We can write language to allow booting people for fraud, hacking, etc if “legal” + “court order” are insufficient.
>(b) Prohibition.—No payment card network, including a subsidiary of a payment card network, may, directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or otherwise, prohibit or inhibit the ability of any person who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of this Act, to obtain access to services or products of the payment card network because of political or reputational risk considerations.
Then the goalposts shift to: “This isn’t for reputational risk, it’s because we consider fraud more likely for this type of industry, and we are within our rights to take a proactive approach to fraud.” And there is no requirement that they disclose the reasons for that decision.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.
It would be a hard sell to finger Steam as being at high risk of fraud. Steam has a very generous refund policy, and if you don't consider it generous enough, and chargeback a purchase on your Steam account, they just lock it (and access to all your games) until you pay them.
I don't have insider information about how often Steam gets hit with fraud alleged chargebacks, but I can't imagine it's a significant percentage.
> Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.
Progress in this day and age is great. Progress right now is at least 2 orders of magnitude better than patiently waiting for a panacea.
I bought Path of Exile 2, spent 5 hours just waiting to get access to the servers, something about the movement in the game made me physically ill after just two hours of playing, asked for a refund, was denied.
For fraud related risk they should still be considered a common carriers but may adjust rates for certain types of transactions or businesses, if, in good faith and backed by empirical data, they can demonstrate the monetary risk to the card processor, and that the increased transaction costs are aligned with the level of risk and are not punitive or discriminatory.
The key point here is ”good faith”.
I don’t want to disadvantage their business or make them absorb fraud costs, but I want all excuses off the table.
OTOH Visa and MasterCard testified in front of Congress a couple of months ago that they have >50% profit margins which indicates to me that there is a regulatory failure in antitrust here.
i think that sounds like a perfectly fine compromise - choosing not to provide services that are an especially high risk of fraud should be within their rights.
it just means that they could be forced to defend those decisions in court, which is good and exactly the sort of thing that courts are supposed to decide.
This sounds great on paper, but what incentive does Valve have fighting for a game listing with only 100 players?
I get the feeling many companies would find it easier to allow payment processors to censor something if the product isn't earning them much anyway.
"That's one of our least popular items we sell so honestly we don't really care..."
Which is within the right for the reseller to decide, but it does nothing for protecting access to a product that's otherwise only available on a select few digital storefronts.
Then it becomes an issue for the game studio, who may not have the funding to fight a case to remain available. And then you have a situation where the game studio has become a victim of a payment processor's conspiracy theory that they're tied to fraud.
The section is not without its own flaws, mainly in 5(c):
> (c) Civil penalty.—Any payment card network that violates subsection (b) shall be assessed a civil penalty by the Comptroller of the Currency of not more than 10 percent of the value of the services or products described in that subsection, not to exceed $10,000 per violation.
I see 2 problems as it is currently written: (1) The penalty's too low, & (2) restricting dispense of the law to only the Comptroller renders it ineffective.
(1) is easily solvable with regards to editing the text alone: raise the limit to 50% & $100k respectively.
(2) is also solvable, by striking out "by the Comptroller of the Currency", or adding in ", or by a federal court, whichever penalty is higher, " at the end of that part.
Right now there are things that a significant majority think are terrible and shouldn't exist but aren't a high enough priority to actually make illegal because they are small because most mainstream service providers don't want to serve them.
Take that away an those things might grow enough that they do become a priority for legally banning.
Huh, I didn't realize that these culture warriors were sitting in the highest echelons of government power and, just as a random example, wielding the DOJ to enforce their views and quash dissent. Yes, both sides are clearly the same.
I said “those two people in particular” for a reason.
There are plenty of right wing people arguing that sharing certain information (e.g. legal advice for unsanctioned immigrants) should be illegal on the basis that it is “assisting criminals”.
No, the far right are the ones dismantling federal agencies like the EPA, the FDA, USAID etc., sending the army to police states they don't like, firing the person responsible for jobs statistics because they don't like the numbers, slapping 50% tarrifs on countries because they dared to prosecute one of Trump's buddies etc. (just some of the latest examples).
The "far left" (as the far right likes to call anyone who doesn't agree with them) are those who don't like the above and are protesting against it...
Which is a "reputable news outlet" to you? CNN? CNBC? NY times? LA times? Washington times?
Which of those totally reputable 100% unbiased news source owned by Ted Turner, Mathias Döpfner, Jeff Bezos or Rupert Murdoch do you want to listen to?
*Skud incoming* ← and that is exactly what destroying a life means. Criticizing to no end while the guy wrote a perfectly scientific paper, to the point that he cannot work with his potential.
He immediately gained a platform to try to become a right-wing talking head, an exposure opportunity most people never get, and despite fumbling that has been gainfully employed ever since leaving Google.
Is that a destroyed life? It seems incredibly few people have ever been actually "canceled" in the life-destroying way the right-wing claims to be happening everywhere. Louis CK famously assaulted women and won a Grammy while supposedly being cancelled.
I worked in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, I'm not "buying" anything. I'm speaking from lived experience from sitting in actual meetings with these people.
Also, it appears I made a massive mistake trying to support a centrist "both far left and far right are bad" comment from OP, as this is now a flame war.
You assume people are buying something because "both sides" are doing it. But what about those who aren't ideologically aligned with either end and instead exist in the space between?
> They may not be in the zeitgeist anymore but they would still love to ruin your life & career for not doing a land acknowledgement before you step into every public space.
Complaining about land acknowledgements as an example of the "far left" tells me that you don't actually have a handle on what the left actually looks like, as opposed to how it's portrayed through right-wing outlets.
First, there is literally nobody who would "ruin your life" for not doing a land acknowledgement, but also, the people doing land acknowledgements in 2025 are not the "far left". They're not even the left. Most leftist organizations don't do land acknowledgements at all!
EDIT: Since you updated your comment to include another favorite whipping boy:
> they would still love to ruin your life & career for not doing a land acknowledgement and pronoun announcement before stepping into public spaces
Again, "the left" is not ruining your life for not doing a "pronoun announcement", because they don't want pronoun announcements to be required in the first place, and in fact voice serious complaints whenever they are.
Both of the things you mention as examples of the "far left" - mandatory land acknowledgements and pronoun announcements - are things which you will find in very few actual leftist spaces. Where you will find them, however, is in mainstream spaces run by centrist or small-c "conservative" people, like corporate HR meetings. You will also, incidentally, see them on far-right media, which happens to be extremely obsessed with the concept of these things representing the left, despite the fact that actual leftists rejected them years ago.
Just because you consider yourself left and never cared about those things doesn't mean there aren't leftists who do.
There's about 50 different far left interest groups who care about different pet issues to varying degrees of insanity, just as there are on the far right.
Are we? Has it? I don't see anyone's life and career being ruined. If you're saying that the "grave mistake" is that you've made a statement and now other people are disagreeing with you, then I'll say that's factually correct, but I don't really have any sympathy for the position that you've been wronged in any way.
> I've edited what comments I could to reduce a further flame war.
> As we can see from this thread, you guys are actually super easy going and don't get emotionally triggered at all.
This is the third time you've made this exact accusation in this thread (although you've edited out the previous instances).
It doesn't sound like you're trying to stop a flamewar. It sounds like you're trying to start one. But not very successfully, it seems! Because thankfully people aren't falling for what's looking more and more like very obvious bait.
The US barely has any genuinely left-wing politicians (Bernie Sanders, AOC, DSA). There are no one who realistically could be called far left in any significant position of governing power.
Even these are not far left, they're just basic liberal left.
Which groups or media that are commonly labeled 'far left' that are calling for nationalizing all land. Or eliminating all inheritances. Or nationalizing all communications and transportation industries. Or nationalizing the Federal Reserve (that one's really gone horseshoe theory, and is a republican plan now).
The only thing 'far left' people want to nationalize is health care, and that's simply the fiscally responsible policy. The thing that is crushing the federal budget is the obscene level of graft occurring in that industry, and the only way out is to nationalize or otherwise burn the existing system to the ground via government policy.
There's a whole bunch of socialism to the right of *!=) Marx and the left of classic liberalism.
Words have meaning, trying to characterise "far left" as some sort of US caricature of Blue haired liberal types is less than useful and only serves right wing outlets.
There is very little left wing discourse in the US.
GP was saying that there are hardly far left politicians, saying that the few that exist are Sanders/AOC/DSA.
I was just pointing out that even these are not actual socialists, they're Democratic Socialists of the stripe you find in the mainstream in a lot of staunchly capitalist European nations. There are definitely zero literal far-left politicians, objectively speaking.
Socialist/social democrat are two related but distinct concepts are confusing for those not versed in political science, but their definitions have certainly not changed: democratic socialists for example don't advocate for communal ownership or central planning. The actual policies put forward by DSA candidates in the US, viewed through a political science analysis, are vanilla liberal. The only thing making them 'far left' is that actual far right monied interests have systematically dragged the Overton Window into a place where "public figure performing the Nazi salute on the capitol steps" is "controversial, in some circles" rather than "immediately career-ending."
Yes - the Overton window in the US has shifted so far right that a Nazi salute is more or less mainstream, whereas democratic socialists like Sanders/AOC are now "far left". And judges who dare block Trump's actions are, of course, "radical left lunatics" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/federal-judge...).
This is a case where left and right can work together for totally different reasons. The left is fighting for rape porn in video games, and the right doesn’t want gun stores definanced. Both win with credit platform neutrality.
"that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order"
provide? It might have prevented Visa and Mastercard from being brought into the PornHub lawsuit... in the US. It wouldn't have protected them from Australian laws weaponized by organizations such as Collective Shout.
... and risk adverse international companies (like Visa and Mastercard) need to follow the laws everywhere despite what various jurisdictions shield them from in those jurisdictions.
No: it’s cheaper for them to follow the minimum common compliance across all countries, but Mastercard-sized firms absolutely can and often do vary compliance per country (gestures at Google, Facebook) when it’s profitable to do so. Mastercard could have simply enforced Australia-specific rules on Itch if they’d wanted to, but they’re anxious about being labeled as smutty due to domestic U.S., and apparently exported Australian, puritanism. The solution is to ensure that cowardice does more lasting harm to their brand than they feel that their strategy prevents — which requires both loud and immediate response, as well as sustained pressure over time.
Mastercard and Visa have rather corse information about the transactions.
They've got the credit card number, the merchant name, the time, and the total amount of the transaction.
They do not have line item level filtering of a transaction. Remember those old carbon paper credit card thingies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter - that's all that's needed and all they get. Similarly, the credit card terminals where the merchant enters the amount, swipes the card (or reads the chip) and that's it is sufficient.
Mastercard and Visa would only be able to say "that merchant" not "that product." Filtering based on products and if it's legal there needs to be done by the merchant. Mastercard cannot check to see if someone is selling liquor to an underage customer... but if a merchant is doing that, Mastercard may drop that merchant as one of their clients.
If Itch and Valve are unable to enforce Australia specific laws on their own storefront, Mastercard and Visa can only enforce it at the "this merchant isn't allowed to transact with our network."
Mastercard can deny all transactions from Australia-billed cards to one merchant if they wish to. They are absolutely wired up for “Area of Use” internally and have this data available to their transaction approval processes. That they chose not to use it, instead pressuring merchants to remove content disliked by an Australian puritanical fringe group, is the corporate laziness I describe. Why respond with their own effort when they can just externalize the problem onto their customers, etc.
Mastercard does not have that information. Mastercard doesn't do the billing. The bank does the billing.
Mastercard does not know the location where a given card holder is (or for that matter, any demographic information about the card holder). They know where the merchant is, but that's less useful for digital goods.
Per section 7 here — https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n... — MasterCard could simply remove Australia from Itch’s Area of Use, at which point they would not be permitted to accepted MasterCard from Australian customers, which the merchant could trivially enforce by country filter on the billing address.
I suspect we’re going to find out that Stripe is unwilling to risk losing Mastercard in Australia and also unwilling to implement passthrough AoU restrictions to their sublicensees, and Mastercard isn’t willing to act against any single customer of Stripe or else they don’t profit from the “not our problem” discount rate they issue Stripe to make it their problem.
If an American company chooses to enter a foreign market and do business there, they should be subject to the laws and customs of said market. The complexity that comes with it is their problem to deal with. I echo the earlier sentiment that the U.S. shouldn't be the world's police (although we do behave like that now).
Also Americans drive cars that have a much higher probability to kill pedestrians and will go everywhere by car (instead of walking, biking or taking public transport) due to their city architecture.
> If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.
European cities are way denser though. So you have less view of the area because of smaller streets and very densely parked cars. I found the limits in the US comparable to what I'd drive in Germany in cities. Maybe Sedona is a one off, but it felt very familiar. For me, wider roads and better view means I can drive 50-55kmh and that's what the limits were. Smaller and denser street means 25-30kmh which is around 15-20mph? We even have the "you can make a right turn at red after coming to a full stop" with a special sign (a green arrow). So I think the speed limits are ok and it doesn't feel too different for me. What is not ok is the rampant ignorance towards laws. Red light and stop runners in bigger cities and such. Lots of bad drivers out there.
It’s more about the road width/construction than posted speed limit.
If you have a road wide enough to drive 50 and try to post a speed limit of 30 drivers in all countries will complain.
If you design a road so that driving above speed limit doesn’t feel safe, drivers will naturally stick to it.
I can see it in city center Warsaw - we keep narrowing internal roads and the traffic naturally adjusts to that, whereas if a road is wider/longer/straighter people will drive faster regardless of the speed limit.
In US there is a higher disconnect between the posted speed limit and the road width.
It’s more about the road width/construction than posted speed limit.
If you have a road wide enough to drive 50 and try to post a speed limit of 30 drivers in all countries will complain.
If you design a road so that driving above speed limit doesn’t feel safe, drivers will naturally stick to it.
I can see it in city center Warsaw - we keep narrowing internal roads and the traffic naturally adjusts to that, whereas if a road is wider/longer/straighter people will drive faster regardless of the speed limit.
A lot of people are unable to see their own political bias; they look at BBC or Fox News and see “unbiased true reporting”.
I highly suggest using Ground News (ground.news) for a week or a month as your sole portal into news stories, and then use their features to analyze bias in your selection of news stories and outlets.
I use it regularly to try to offset my own biases.
The comparison for something as openly partisan on the left as Fox News, in US media, would be something like Democracy Now! or maybe The Nation.
The thing is, though, there are a few components here: there's level of favorability toward a certain kind of politics, which some barely-popular left-leaning outlets roughly match Fox News on, plus propensity to lie and exaggerate. And there's reach.
Nothing left-partisan in the US that I'm aware of touches Fox on either of those latter fronts—propensity to just make shit up, and (certainly not) reach.
Nobody's putting Democracy Now! on in waiting rooms. Hell IDK maybe at Planned Parenthood, never been, wouldn't know, but not at a dentist's office or at the auto shop or what have you.
There are equivalents to Fox News on the Left (Fox News viewers think it's MSNBC because that's what Fox News and AM radio told them, LMFAO, no) in the US, in terms of level of commitment to supporting partisan causes. There's nothing like it as far as willingness to deviate from reality to do so, nor in reach. Nothing remotely close.
Also the Wikipedia Current Events portal [1]. It’s definitely biased by the Wikipedia editors decisions on what to add there (especially the “Topics in the News” box) but it gives a more or less neutral dump of the daily events.
It’s pretty much the only place I know to find news on all the conflicts that Western media tends to ignore.
Notably when I was checking the Current Events Portal for a while, most coverage of the Israel/Hamas war was sourced from Al Jazeera and it definitely felt biased. Checking it just now, it appears to be more balanced now.
Ground News worries me because now we don't need to use our brains the app just tells me the bias! Ground News could be biased!
Leads to shallow discussion where all news sources are tossed out for bias leaving nothing (or what ground news wants you to listen to). God forbid we critically examine for ourselves the information we consume.
Ground news links all of their sources on a per article basis and you can simply scroll left/right through each news source. And you can add your own sources!
You didn't address the meat of my argument. The sources are irrelevant. They try to tell you the media bias which can itself be biased and gamed and which (I think) leads to readers not critically examining sources for themselves.
If somebody is going to be uncritical I don't see how any of this actually helps, but that's totally on them.
I'm not going to argue with them saying that Fox News is right wing or that MSNBC is more left wing. "Duh".
Maybe we're looking at this from a different angle, or maybe we just use the service in different ways.
The "bias" part that is relevant is showing you the difference in headline and contents between dozens or hundreds or thousands based on historical leanings of the news org, and which ones are even reporting on a particular topic.
It's not saying a particular article leans a particular way, it's saying the source does.
I don’t get the sense that Ground News is trying to influence what news stories I select; I think they are presenting metadata that allow me to look at the story from my preferred frame of reference and from the opposing frame of reference. I find it valuable; you might not.
I think that the media bias ratings on Ground News are slightly biased and the factuality ratings are highly biased, not intentionally but due to flawed methodology of their sources. I have contacted their support to raise that issue.
I still find the site tries really hard to make you aware of your own predilections, and I think it does well as that, and if you find yourself gravitating towards one set of sources you can always sample the “other side”.
I agree that left-right doesn’t capture the richness of American politics but for better or worse they are convenient labels for our two party system.
At your recommendation I took a look at Ground News.
I'm not a fan of the continued reification of "left" and "right". I have heard conservatives lament that MAGA isn't truly conservative. I've heard economic reformers lament that liberal social policies are sucking the oxygen out of the room for real structural reform. In both cases the idea of a single "left" and "right" as a group, or even worse as the two sole options on the menu of how to think, is severely damaging to productive political dialogue.
Framing everything as left-vs-right is like doing PCA and taking only the first principal component - sure it might be contain some signal, but it flattens any nuance. Critically, it also pre-frames any debate into competing camps in a way that harms rather than serves. I would challenge groups like Ground News to offer other framings - why not "owners vs workers"? Why not "rural vs urban"? We should ask why they chose the framing they do. I have my own cynical opinion but I'll refrain from sharing.
I don't know about your suggested site, but I use foreign news for this. I have switched to "consuming news" [0] almost entirely from a variety of English-language foreign services.
All national media services have their own bias and propaganda, but if you switch them up it becomes obvious very quickly. It also means that I miss out on most of the US political noise [1], which is a benefit to my mental health [2].
[0] Hot/lukewarm take: "consuming news" is a waste of time, and should be minimized. This really hits you like a brick to the head when you see the stuff that foreign countries are obsessing about, and how tiny it feels to you. Guess what: your news media is filled with the same crap.
[1] I still get the foreign opinion on it, obviously, but this is usually pretty mild. Most countries don't care about the US nearly as much as US citizens think they do.
[2] If you think that CPB/NPR don't have bias, I strongly suggest that you try this. You're probably in a bubble, and an "international perspective" is something that most NPR listeners claim to value. Removing US media from my life eliminated a huge source of angst (particularly after 2016), and revealed that all of the major US media sources are various forms of hyper-polarized clownery.
I suspect most people who look at international media and think it's better are using rose-tinted glasses.
Indian media is broadly worse if anything, latin american media is a trip if you have any understanding of the complicated political landscape, Aus is central to the Murdoch news dynasty, and East asian media has lots of famously partisan organizations. Maybe middle eastern media, explicitly funded for soft power political goals or African media, which span the gamut from bloodthirsty factional rags to leftover colonial institutions to tightly controlled extensions of the state apparatus?
They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically. "Averaging" by listening to a lot of different perspectives is 1) a lot of effort and 2) also something that can (and is) manipulated by making sure there's lots of "both sides" messaging present.
> I suspect most people who look at international media and think it's better are using rose-tinted glasses....They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically.
I went out of my way to head off this exact criticism, but I guess I didn't put it in blinking, bold, 30 point font.
Again: every national media outlet has bias (indeed, every media outlet has bias). My experience is that it's pretty easy to notice when you switch your sources regularly.
It doesn't take me any effort to do this, and even if I hear a hyper-partisan take, it doesn't melt my brain. I go "oh weird, so that's what the Indian government thinks" -- which is still vastly preferable to hearing what some reporter at NPR or CNN or whatever thinks about what India thinks.
Yep, its called the Beauty Premium. There's evidence that being attractive leads to better job outcomes in most industries including higher starting salaries, more job offers, faster promotions, and better performance evaluations.
100% this! I hate how the main narrative it seems like Americans believe about tipping, especially among a certain set of privileged college-educated Democrat types, is that tipping is this virtuous practice that benefits the underclass so much, when really, it benefits restaurant owners most, and if any workers are better off under a tipping system, it's a small minority, like highly attractive white female servers in establishments that have rich clientele. Everyone else would be better off if prices (not a surcharge) went up once by 20% and restaurants spent that money on wages and abolished all tipping.
Anecdata, but I go to Taco Bell way more often than I should. There’s no tipping culture at Taco Bell, but the staff, at least at the one near my house, are always very nice to me and as far as I can tell my food is made with a sufficient amount of care.
When I do go to a restaurant that has tipping, people are usually nice to me as well, but I don’t feel like they’re really any nicer or better at their job than my local Taco Bell workers.
No, they're definitely more attentive for the tip, I just don't like it. If they're going to be extra nice, I don't want it to be for money. Felt nice going to other countries like Australia where the customer isn't always right but they still do their jobs.
Restaurant staff are still nice in Australia, and friendly.
They don't HAVE to be, but they also don't have to do a bunch of unnecessary stuff to play the tips game, like fill up water that's barely empty or check in on how you're going all the time.
Maybe people in America like a "service heavy" experience, and the only way to get it is tips?
> Maybe people in America like a "service heavy" experience, and the only way to get it is tips?
Interestingly enough, I find the service worse in the U.S. Part of the reason is that the tip system leads to waiters wasting time talking about a table, and waiters who aren't your own feeling like they don't have to do anything for you. It usually takes me 5-10 times longer to pay the check in the U.S. than it does in some other countries.
I wish restaurants started offering self service sections where you could order by phone and pick up the food yourself. Having to use waiters gives me the same feeling as when I drive through New Jersey and I'm not allowed to pump my own gas.
I think that’s pretty much the gist of it. People enjoy the diner-style pampering, and the only way to get that kind of service is if the employees are coerced to do it in order to get a living wage.
Happy employees who earn good salaries would not submit to ass-kissing and degrading work.
Knowing this is what makes the often terrible service in the Netherlands a bit more tolerable :)
They're doing the job for the money. They're relating to the customer both as part of their job, and as an actual human interaction. (Obviously the extent to which this is true varies a lot depending on the individuals involved and the context.) Believe it or not, sometimes people are genuinely friendly, even at work, and even when they're not receiving any extra compensation for going beyond the required level of politeness. Those interactions are, IMO, worth more than forced "friendliness" from someone who is simply looking to get as much money as they can out of me.
I don't fully believe this. There will be a category of staff for who the job is just a way to make money, sure, usually while they're also going to college/uni. But plenty are in the industry because it's their vocation, because they enjoy it, because they're people-persons, because they're good at it.
As an Australian who lived in America for 5 years - it’s bonkers to claim the service is better (or even as good) in Aus. It’s clearly more attentive in the states, anyone who says otherwise has an agenda.
Sometimes you don’t want good service - as in, you don’t want a server to talk to you. That’s a lot easier to find here.
Or they may have different values to you. I find American style surveillance services and false smiles pushing upsells to be the worst restaurant experience globally. I'd take any abrupt waiter over that.
Yeah, this exactly matches my experience visiting Sydney from the US, it was great. I'm not antisocial, in fact I enjoy talking to strangers, but it feels very wrong to pay them for it.
They are still paid to be polite and friendly, just not directly from you. It can also be a selection process because the ppl who do not smile enough have been fired or not taken for the job in the first place. Having a boss in these industries “encouraging“ employees to smile more is not unheard of. It makes sense that it feels better than paying directly to produce this outcome, but in a last analysis it is not very different.
It isn’t just employees. The manager/owner of the coffee shop I buy coffee from most mornings is very friendly - I’m sure part of this is just her personality, but it is also good business sense - there are lots of other places people can buy coffee instead, and no doubt her friendliness is one of the factors that keeps many of her regular customers coming back. And this is Australia, so no tips involved-it would feel weird and embarrassing even to offer one.
As an American, having traveled in Europe a few times and dined out a lot, I much prefer the culture of just leaving me alone and letting me signal the waiter to come over when I need something.
Anyone who has worked in a restaurant or bar can provide plenty of observational data that if you provide better service you will be tipped better. I would recommend trying out working as a server/bartender you will understand tipping a lot better.
Phone reps, of course, have the difficulty of not being in physical contact with you. The others, though, my grandparents actually would tip house cleaners. Would get annoyed if we left out cash in the hotel, as "you should only do that if you are wanting the help staff to have it. And then, you should do it in an obvious way so that they don't feel like they are stealing." I distinctly remember them writing notes and leaving them with a tip on the desk.
House cleaners and hotel help are not janitors, but all of our workplaces are cleaned by them. We don't tip them, or the front desk people at any doctor's office, or the traffic crossing guards at any school, or the EMTs at the hospital, or the ticket taker at a movie theater.
There's a huge list of people you interact with daily who don't get tax free tips. Why are they less valuable than restaurant workers? That was my question.
Fair, I left out that they also gifted janitors, but they did. Is not unheard of to send gifts to mail delivery staff. Basically, anyone you ever interacted with on a regular basis.
Coming from a country with no tipping at all, it was somewhat creepy how the people expecting tips acted when I visited the US for the first time. You can tell when friendliness is fake/forced, and living in a country without tipping you don't see it nearly as much. I felt a bit uncomfortable.
There’s tipping everywhere (more or less, there are some exceptions). But there’s just one country that I know of where 15% is ”no tip” because it’s the expected baseline, and 25% is a small tip because it’s 5-10% over the expected minimum so the actual ”tip” part of a 25% tip is actually less.
I tip 0-10% where I live. Just like most Americans tip 15-25% but the first 15 are just eaten by expectation. There is zero difference except that 1) my menu shows actual prices 2) wait staff have a living wage regardless of tips or how busy the restaurant was that day.
I've been to both, a lot, and I've not noticed any difference whatsoever. Good service is the norm everywhere, honestly, and the odd instance of bad service happens everywhere too.
Beyond that, I personally find that leveraging someone's economic desperation to coerce deference out of them is disgusting. Give me staff who have the option to walk out without material harm, and choose not to.
If you vibe coded it, why can’t you vibe support it?
I think the whole premise of the article is wrong because it compares apples to oranges, assuming that you’re going to maintain “vibe code” in a traditional way.
Because support requires understanding. If you can maintain long-term context for the LLM, then you have an approximation of actionable institutional knowledge.
But context is text documentation, and that stuff rots just as much, if not more, when LLMs generate it.
Nothing beats having the actual code and the thoughts that went onto it in your wetware. I still remember the hardest problems in my professional life in the last 15 years down to a scary detail.
You can have the LLM generate whatever context you need- documentation, developers guide, design patterns, whatever. You can have it do this, at the time you create the app, or later (I have done this for other peoples code I found on GitHub that was commented in a language I can’t speak). You store this by having your LLM coding agent write it down in a file. I do that all the time. It works really well.
I think you are being too optimistic. Interplanetary Grade NAT works just fine and doesn’t have the complexity of using colons instead of periods in its addresses.
The year is 292277026596. The IP TTL field of max 255 has been ignored for ages and would no longer be sufficient to ping even localhost. This has resulted in ghost packets stuck in circular routing loops, whose original source and destination have long been forgotten. It's estimated these ghost packets consume 25-30% of the energy from the Dyson sphere.
Not since the world opted for statistical TTL decrement : start at 255 and decrement by one if Rand(1024) == 0. Voilà, no more zombie packets, TCP retransmit takes care of the rest.
The ever increasing implementation complexity of IPv4 resulted in exactly one implementation that worked replacing all spiritual scripture and becoming known as the one true implementation. Due to a random bitflip going unnoticed the IPv4-truth accidentally became Turing complete several millenia ago. With the ever increasing flows of ghost packets, IPv4-truth processing power has rapidly grown and will soon achieve AGI. Its first priority is to implement 128-bit time as a standard in all programming languages to avoid the impending apocalypse.
Sounds like a great sci-fi plot - hunting for treasure/information by scanning ancient forgotten packets still in-flight on a neglected automated galactic network.
I have a vague memory that Sean Williams's Astropolis series touches upon this at one point. Although it has been a while and I might be mis-remembering.
There was an sf short story based on someone implementing a worm (as in Morris Worm) which deleted all data on a planet. They fix it by flying FTL and intercepting some critical information being send at radio speed. I think it was said to be the first description of malware, and the origin of the term "worm" in this context.
That’s only 25-30% of the energy environmental disaster in sector 137 resulting from the Bitcoin cluster inevitably forming a black hole from the plank scale space-filling compute problem.
The awkward thing is how the US still has 1.5 billion IPv4s, while the 6000 other inhabited clusters are sharing the 10k addresses originally allocated to Tuvalu before it sank into the sea.
As soon as we get to about 70%, I reckon some games and apps will stop supporting ipv4 on the basis that nat traversal is a pain and dual stack networking is a pain.
If you spend 2 days vibe coding some chat app and then you have to spend 2 further days debugging why file sharing doesn't work for ipv4 users behind nat, you might just say it isn't supported for people whose ISP's use 'older technology'.
After that, I reckon the transition will speed up a lot.
> some games and apps will stop supporting ipv4 on the basis that nat traversal is a pain and dual stack networking is a pain
None of these are actually the game/app developers' problem. The OS takes care of them for you (you may need code for e2e connectivity when both are behind a NAT, but STUN/TURN/whatever we do nowadays is trivial to implement).
NAT traversal not needed. Just need to deal with firewalls. So that's one fewer thing to think about when doing peer-to-peer file sharing over the internet.
No. Here's a simple strategy: the two peers send each other a few packets simultaneously, then the firewall will open because by default almost all firewalls allow response traffic. IPv6 simplifies things because you know exactly what address to send to.
And yet here I am, fighting with our commercial grade fiber ISP over obscure problems in their IPv6 stack related to MTU and the phase of the moon. Sigh.
I've been at this on and off for about a year (it's not a high priority thing, more of a hobby).
~$ host gmail.com
gmail.com has address 142.250.69.69
gmail.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:4020:801::2005
gmail.com mail is handled by 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
~$ host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com has address 142.250.31.26
gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:4004:c21::1a
The carbon cycle will end in only 600 million years due to the increasing brightness of the sun if you want a closer end date for life as we know it on earth
You laugh but a big danger with “too big” but representations is the temptation to use the “unused” bits as flags for other things.
We’ve seen it before with 32 bit processors limited to 20 or 24 bits addressable because the high order bits got repurposed because “nobody will need these”.
And with 64-bit pointers in Linux, where you have to enable kernel flags to use anything higher than 48 bits of the address space. All because some very misguided people figured it would be ok to use those bits to store data. You'd think the fact that the processor itself will throw an exception if you use those bits would be a red flag of "don't do that", but you would apparently be wrong.
> You'd think the fact that the processor itself will throw an exception if you use those bits would be a red flag of "don't do that"
That makes it slightly safer to use those bits, won’t it? As long as your code asks the OS how many bits the hardware supports, and only use the ones it requires to be zero, if you forget to clear the bits before following a pointer, the worst that can happen is a segfault, not reading ‘random’ memory.
Doesn't the opposite happen with 64 bit pointers on x86_64? the lower bits have no use so they get used for tracking if a memory segment is in use or other stuff
"To account for calendar drift, we will be firing the L4 thrusters for six hours Tuesday. Be sure not to look directly at the thrusters when firing, to avoid having your retinas melt."
1. Try using pi-hole to block those particular endpoints via making DNS resolution fail; see if it still works if it can’t access the telemetry endpoints.
2. Their ridiculous tracking, disregard of the user preference to not send telemetry, and behavior on the Discord when you mentioned tracking says everything you need to know about the company. You cannot change them. If you don’t want to be tracked, then stay away from Bytedance.
Hate to break it to you, but /etc/hosts only works for apps that use getaddrinfo or similar APIs. Anything that does its own DNS resolution, which coincidentally includes anything Chromium-based, is free to ignore your hosts file.
But pi-hole seems equally susceptible to the same issue? If you're really serious about blocking you'd need some sort of firewall that can intercept TLS connections and parse SNI headers, which typically requires specialized hardware and/or beefy processor if you want reasonable throughput speeds.
I configured my router to redirect all outbound port 53 udp traffic to adguard home running on a raspberry pi. From the log, it seems to be working reasonably enough, especially for apps that do their own dns resolution like the netflix app on my chromecast. Hopefully they don't switch to dns over https any time soon to circumvent it.
DNS over https depends on the ability to resolve the DoH hostname via DNS, which is blockable via PiHole, or depend on a set of static IPs, which can be blocked by your favorite firewall.
A sufficiently spiteful app could host a DoH resolver/proxy on the same server as its api server (eg. api.example.com/dns-query), which would make it impossible for you to override DNS settings for the app without breaking the app itself.
In the context of snooping on the SNI extension, you definitely can.
The SNI extension is sent unencrypted as part of the ClientHello (first part of the TLS handshake). Any router along the way see the hostname that the client provides in the SNI data, and can/could drop the packet if they so choose.
When the nefarious actor is already inside the house, who knows to what lengths they will go to circumvent the protections? External network blocker is more straightforward (packets go in, packets go out), so easier to ensure that there is nothing funny happening.
On Apple devices, first-party applications get to circumvent LittleSnitch-like filtering. Presumably harder to hide this kind of activity on Linux, but then you need to have the expertise to be aware of the gaps. Docker still punches through your firewall configuration.
So that these domains are automatically blocked on all devices on a local network. Also, you can't really edit the hosts file on Android or iOS, but I guess mobile OSes are not part of the discussion here.
Although there are caveats -- if an app decides to use its own DNS server, sometimes secure DNS, you are still out of luck. I just recently discovered that Android webview may bypass whatever DNS your Wi-Fi points to.
Yeah, that was my point. I'm not sure what's so breath taking about what ByteDance is doing. I'm not a fan. But, with Meta, Google, Microsoft and I'll throw on Amazon, a huge chunk of the general public's web activity is tracked. Everywhere. All the time. The people have spoken, they are okay with being tracked. I've yet to talk with a non-technical person who was shocked that their online activity was tracked. They know it is. They assume it is. ByteDance's range of telemetry does not matter to them. Just wanna keep on tiktok'ing. Why does telemetry sent to Bytedance matter? Is it a China thing? I'm not concerned about a data profile on me in China. I'm concerned about the ones here in the US. I'll stop. I'm not sure I have a coherent point.
I can also suggest OpenSnitch or Portmaster to anyone whose conscious about these network connections. I couldn't live without them, never trust opt-outs.
If not, how are EU politicians so disconnected from their citizens? How did this state of affairs come to be? Is it reversible?
In the US, our politicians don’t diverge quite as much, but when they do, the reason is money, and when it gets bad, we throw the bums out and elect populists. It’s not pretty and it’s messy but it self corrects with the next election if it doesn’t work out how people wanted.