Yes and no. The optimizations made for battery life are a combination of software and hardware. You'll get bad battery life on an M1 with Linux when watching youtube without hardware acceleration, but if you're just idling (and if Linux idles properly) then it should be similar to macOS.
Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.
On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.
I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
Traditionally in the west, censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
> I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks.
The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
I’m in the U.S. and am not aligned with what’s happening to freedom.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
I doubt a lot of the individuals doing these actions, like police or ICE, don’t believe in this. They signed up for these jobs, and votes last year show many of them heartily endorse and believe in these policies.
The national guard, though, probably didn’t sign up to be the backdrop for political ads and a lot of FBI, DEA, etc. agents signed up to work on major crimes rather than busting someone’s landscaper.
Folks doing those duties and jobs should know that these organizations are parts of the executive role and remit of the president. They signed up to do whatever the president orders them to do. Officers have a somewhat different oath, but the chain of command is still abundantly clear to all involved.
Yes, they should know that now, in 2025. But last year, or 10, 20, 30 years ago? Nobody joined a federal law enforcement agency expecting the president to utilize them for political goals. And for sure nobody joining the national guard was expecting that.
I hope that someday we will put this genie back in the bottle and return to the previous normal.
> Nobody joined a federal law enforcement agency expecting the president to utilize them for political goals. And for sure nobody joining the national guard was expecting that.
I don't buy this. These folks literally swear an oath. National Guard troops are literally flag bearers. Those US flag patches on their uniforms mean that they don't get to decide that an order that is otherwise lawful is "political" in nature and therefore invalid. If they don't want to do their jobs, as ordered, they should resign. These are not private employees, they are public servants.
I agree with you that they swore to uphold lawful orders. Yes, that is drilled into us from the first day of bootcamp, over and over and over and over. But you were saying they signed up with the expectation of being political pawns. That is not the argument you seem to be making now.
> But you were saying they signed up with the expectation of being political pawns. That is not the argument you seem to be making now.
I am still making that argument. They don’t have the authority to decide if they’re pawns, political or otherwise. They’re part of an unbroken chain of command. I don’t see the contradiction that you are implying, as I’m not trying to change my position to my reading.
I can’t speak to realities perhaps as you can if you have served, as I have not served, though I am seeking to do so. No disrespect to you or to any service member intended by anything I have written.
I'll take one last shot at clarifying my viewpoint, but then we'll just have to let this one rest ;-).
I think people who joined the military, or the FBI, or some other federal agency, expected to be serving their country, not the whims of the sitting president. They went in to catch criminals, or defend the nation in combat, etc. Of course they know that orders are orders, but it's perfectly reasonable, before 2025, to assume that the commander-in-chief is generally working in the best interests of the country, and what you will be ordered to do will therefore be serving that interest.
I don't get how knowing that they could be ordered to do something legal-but-blatantly-political means that they should have expected that eventuality. That has not been broadly true in the recent history of this country; the military I was in considered itself a professional organization and we hated politics.
I agree with your post, but this part is kind of wishy-washy.
> I don't get how knowing that they could be ordered to do something legal-but-blatantly-political means that they should have expected that eventuality.
Most folks who are in the military or are considering it have heard of the honor guard. This is the most obviously political post one can have, but it is arguably one of the most important, due to the virtues such a post embodies, and the highly visible, public nature of the post.
Many folks would leap out of their seat to have such a post, though I can see how some would rather decline if given the option, due to the importance of the job and perhaps their own feelings of unsuitability, or desire to not interact with the public, or whatever.
I think it's an inherently political job, and everyone should know that going in. What you do in uniform reflects directly on the nation whose flag your uniform is emblazoned with.
> I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
It's not well-regarded, but I think that one thing the book tries to bring to light is the context and valence of values of the times, and the political furor of that era which directly contributed to the hatred and violence. I'm not sure that it's fair to say that they were just following orders without looking at the broader social context that people were living in up to the point that those orders were given.
I think that his concept of "eliminationist racism" is somewhat accurate, as I have known race-based supremacists in real life, and have had them protest/counter-protest public events I have been involved with providing security for.
I don't support racial supremacy or hatred in any way, in case that was ambiguous or unclear from context.
I’d caution against taking simplistic views and recommend peaking behind the veil.
Id start by looking into the deportees, people like Abreco Garcia — working men and women who contributed to their society, and all those who received pardons — between rapists, violent criminals, and abusers, you’d have a hard time replacing many of the deportees.
That’s a very tired position… the irony of it all is that this view is also simplistic and unworthy of HN.
How about we do better and say trying to steel man the claim and then refute? Of course one has to understand the claims before they can steelman the argument.
Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
I don't think that there's difference, just implementation details differ. Youtube was blocked in Turkey for many years because someone from Germany uploaded defamatory videos about Ataturk(illegal in TR) and it was considered protected speech and Germany & Google refused deleting those. The situation was resolved when someone copyrighted Ataturk in Germany and made Youtube remove these videos.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
This is a myth: in Germany, as in many other countries, copyright covers only specific expression; you cannot copyright either the name of a historical person or a topic of discourse. The videos were briefly taken down as an automatic response to a complaint, but it seems the complaint was not upheld and the videos were restored.
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
Okay, how this changes the core argument? The videos were not taken down briefly because they did not comply with the Turkish law that protects Ataturk from defamation but for the claim that they violated someones commercial interests.
The video wasn't taken down over commercial interests. They were taken down because some old law prohibited insults at representatives of other nations, with whom Germany has diplomatic relationships.
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
So then let me ask you, do you feel like arbitrarily banning sites worked? Are we having less of a propaganda and misinformation as we are going ahead with the bans? Because if it's not actually working it sounds a lot like "it's not helping but at least it looks like we're doing something".
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
> "Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom"
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
I think that freedom includes, for example, the right not to be shot dead. When someone is using speech to cause people to be shot dead then we have to weigh which freedom is more important and I happen to think that not being shot is more important. If there not also your opinion, fine, you can go to America where speech is considered more important.
You don't want to live in America because it's dystopic and collapsing? Strange. Strange that there's a correlation between countries that hold your opinions and dystopia and collapse. One might even be lead to think that principles held by dystopic countries that collapse might be bad principles to build a country on. But those who promoter those principles told me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears.
For one it runs into paradox of tolerance problems, for another it fallaciously relies on a "marketplace of ideas" to resolve friction which, despite the bumper sticker term, is not a real mechanism.
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
We have to stop rejecting the evidence of our eyes and ears. Propaganda is everywhere. That is a fact. Some of it is destroying the country. That is a fact. We either deal with it or accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact. Your choice is to accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact.
Blocking RT is a very light reach. If you believe the lightest of reaches is already a severe overreach then you are making it binary and polarized, not me.
The fact that some kids will still find ways to get them would be at least partially addressed by the "education" part of GP's comment. Even then, of course, some kids will still start smoking. Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
> Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
We do accept „censorship“ if it follows due process based on clear and well-intended laws. Think taking down piracy sites, child porn, slander.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet.
IMO that’s the issue.
I see no way to have censorship and freedom and common good at the same time, so good of society is out of question - unless you don't value freedom at all.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
If you believe nothing should be censored, then you believe child porn shouldn't be censored, so please either square that circle, or weaken the argument to "I believe this thing shouldn't be censored"
Child abuse is already illegal.
Law enforcement tracks down creator? Good.
Court orders website owner to take down material? Good.
ISP preemptively decides what to block? Bad.
CP is often used as an "I win" card in this kind of arguments, as it can stir up emotions in the general public, in favor of ever expanding scope of surveillance and censorship. We should be extra aware of this.
You still haven't answered the question that I actually asked.
I didn't say "should child abuse be illegal?". I said "should child porn be illegal?".
You said it's good if a court orders the website owner to block the material, i.e. censors it, so I assume you're pro-censorship for child porn and likely also support jail time for those who possess it.
In which case, please do not claim to oppose all censorship.
imho that is just silly ... I can see various ways censorship and freedom and common good at the same time. Actually, I can imagine different set ups where this could work...
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
the issue is how do you prove the content was written by AI?
> But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
even worse - how do you make sure the definition of such terms stays up to date with changing times?
> So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
I don't know if there are particular good ground-level solutions to infrastructure (mesh networks can have their application but are difficult to drive critical mass adoption and every square inch of mesh network has "last mile" problems).
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
>Traditionally in the west censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
Copyright is definitely not censorship, Copyright is the framework implemented to create intellectual properties to allow for commercial exploitation of text, sound, images and some other intellectual output(details depend on jurisdiction).
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term, and broadening the scope of the word to that level removes much of its usefulness.
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
> Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
Yes it is censorship. A 3rd party decides what you can consume, the only difference between instances is that you may or may not agree with that.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
Yes, and yes. Property is theft. Monopoly on objects which have virtually zero cost to be duplicated can't be justified by any moral ground, so it's basically only possible with corrupted mind enforcing this as social policy using psychological manipulation since garden, and every brutal means that can impose them in the obey or suffer dichotomy mindset.
You believing all property is theft is very avant-garde of you, but at the same time it is not a stance the vast majority of the world agrees with (including Germany), so it hardly seems relevant to a constructive conversation centered around the behavior of German ISPs.
It's not avant-garde, the expression in this form for what I know was coined by the 19th century German philosopher Max Stirner.
The nub of the issue though is not really if something is theft on a legal definitional level. Laws themselves are extremely rarely enacted by direct decisions of those who are commanded to follow them. so they don't reflect what the vast majority of people would consider moral, which often include reciprocity, fairness, and staying beneficial to the society as a whole rather than benefit a tiny minority with highly detrimental consequences for the rest of people.
Not sure I follow. Weapons don't protect the military-industrial complex in the same way. Guns do protect random individuals in the same way they protect military soldiers though.
Which of these definitions do you think supports your case?
The most relevant Merriam Webster definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
Something that annoys me is that OONI (which collects internet censorship data) only considers censorship of things like Twitter, Wikipedia, opposition political parties, Tiananmen Square, etc and Tor. It doesn't consider copyright censorship as censorship.
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
> If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states
The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.
You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
You appear to be acknowledging that voting does matter, contrary to the previous sweeping claim.
Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
I kind of agree but think the upshot is exactly the reverse. First, swing states do matter as you acknowledge, which has exactly the opposite implication. Second, yes, by all means let's move beyond the Electoral college. There are organizations working to get a majority to sign the popular vote interstate compact. Check if your state is signed on and if not, I promise there's an org working on it that needs your help.
See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
I am not. I just don't see a difference between Trump and Biden. Or Merz and Scholz. Or Lepen and Macron. All these people serve Capital, and you'd be very wrong to believe I stand with capitalists.
Calling someone who buys a platform and amplifies nazis, white nationalists and groups while sequestering marginalized groups of people free speech is basically 1984 double speak.
Calling people from other countries "savages from primitive cultures" is textbook hardcore racism.
Would you like people who think raping 12-year-olds is fine because their prophet did it, living in your neighborhood, and going from 10% to 90% of the local population?
Some cultures are just better than others. Some are downright evil.
These two comments are basically verbatim textbook lines from what white supremacists say as well as people who champion separating races and encourage racially segregated states.
If “racially segregated white supremacy” means we accept any race and nationality as long as they respect and are aligned with our cultural and moral norms… then 100% sign me up!
Culture is essentially always a nonsense purity test to rationalize things that have no other arguments. No one needs to respect whatever idea of culture you have in your head and based on your comments I hope they don't.
People need to obey laws, not whatever morals you want to pick and choose for others to accept.
Also when someone says you are repeating white nationalist talking points verbatim, your response should be 'I didn't realize that', not 'sign me up'.
Trump appears to have particular hatred for the wind farms, not necessarily for all the renewables. He was talking about it, he brings it up when visiting European countries. What's up with that is it like a NIMBY thing?
They mention things like wind farms killing birds other says it's making noise or looking ugly but even though I never lived around a wind farm, I have came close to some large wind farms and they looked futuristic to me I didn't hear any noise. I'm not convinced that is uglier or noisier than any other modern infrastructure, like roads or planes.
Is this about money? is this ideological? what is this, what's going on?
The MAGA types on the US East Coart have glommed into the anti windmill fervor claiming offshore wind will destroy their view and somehow it hurts whales.
It's for the sake of his demented ego, to validate the fading-relevance entitled ramblings of all the boomers who see themselves in him. This administration is a most potent result of our festering gerontocracy.
The infantile 20-somethings and "tech" billionaires bought into their hallucinations, reckoning that we don't need any "government" and a great way to destroy it was to support this incompetent moron who was sure to royally fuck things up somehow. Everything that he destroys gets interpreted as some kind of success, ignorant to the fact that the growing chorus of opposition is not merely from progressives being "owned".
Note the quotes around "government" because we've got a huge preexisting corporate government that will happy step into the power vacuum. The 20-somethings are naive. The tech-surveillance billionaires are sanguine.
From nihilistic point of view, it makes perfect sense.
Old man gave people what they wanted and now he is taking what he wants. He’s old, his offsprings are wealthy beyond comprehension and they will be fine.
I never understood this talking point either. There are many small wind farms erected in key hillstations near my city - and the scenery looks even more beautiful with them! Most people I know agree that wind farms are rather picturesque, I never understood this peculiar American distaste for them.
It's because they're anti-fossil-fuels, which, in America, means they're automatically a Liberal Plot to a certain breed of low-information voter. I've seen signs—like, full-on billboards—along the rural highway I live near saying things like "WINDMILLS KILL Families, Friendships, Wildlife, Property Values".
You've got to perversely love when the self-owns seep through. "My friends stopped talking to me because I wouldn't stop starting arguments about windmills. So now I've got this sign"
> Is this about money? is this ideological? what is this, what's going on?
The proximate cause is that the fossil fuel lobby went all-in on getting Trump elected. They paid big miney [1] and they expect a payback for that. Moves against renewables, electric vehicles, regulation, etc. are part of the transaction.
More widely, renewables occupy an adjacent space in the conservative worldview to environmentalists and the liberal left. Being seen to destroy them reinforces Trump's leadership of his base. And emphasising use of traditional, domestic, fossil-based energy sources appeals to nationalist/traditionalist sentiment.
>Trump appears to have particular hatred for the wind farms,
You'd think a "drill baby drill" attitude would be more in line with his platform but a tiger can't change its stripes. Waspy east coast democrats all hate wind farms because they and their buddies all own waterfront property.
Personally, I think he's missing a great opportunity to really stick it to people who deserve to have it stuck to them (for a variety of reasons somewhat tangential to red/blue politics) while furthering the energy, economic and industrial goals of the nation.
Wind farms have been the subject of a long running disinformation campaign from fossil fuel interests.
They got cheaper earlier than solar, and while both are still declining in cost solar is now pulling ahead and is likely to be the majority threat to fossil fuels going forward.
He's mostly just repeating half remembered lies from Fox News and allied media.
Considering that macOS is popular among even actual tech-illiterates, it is safe to say that their system is probably pretty logical and easy but since you are a power user on something else you will have to unlearn you previous ways of doing things. At some point it will click and you'll be fine.
I wonder what people these days think about the song "Imagine" by John Lennon. Free travel, world peace and equality is so out of fashion that a strong majority seems to think that it is OK to restrict people's movement around the world and feel so terrified of foreigners and yet without seeing the irony the same people would talk about becoming interplanetary species. I wouldn't be surprised if the totalitarians drop the "think of the children" line and just doi everything for "national security".
I'm not fan of the trend, I'm open about it I despise travel restrictions and the security theater but I really want to hear from people who like the new way the world is headed for.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the totalitarians drop the "think of the children" line and just doi everything for "national security".
Republicans are planning to ban all pornography under the guise of "national health crisis". It's in their Project 2025 playbook which they have been following very closely.
Is it the same people who just made the Epstein files go away? I can't believe people keep falling for the same stuff all the time. Thanks god EU is incapable of acting together, some of the members still keep trying anyway.
I mean, of course, we all would like to be able to travel without restrictions ourselves. The concern for people in developed nations is what would happen to their quality of life if people from poorer nations could freely migrate.
Europe has ~750 million people, and even with current policies (where migrants might drown when their boat sinks while the Greek Coast Guard looks on and laughs) millions of migrants try to enter Europe each year.
The US has ~340 million people, and even with current policies (where children might be separated from parents and placed into cruel detention centers) millions of migrants try to enter the US each year.
If movement was free, how many hundreds of millions would pour from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia into Europe and the US? The 3+ billion who live in the tropics are only going to become more likely to try to migrate as the climate continues to warm.
What makes you think that everyone wants to come to Europe? Have you considered that instead of geofencing the non-millionaire population like cattle, maybe not bombing or couping the poor countries is a better option?
People don't actually leave the places they grow up or their families and friends to live on European food stamps.
Also, Europe tends to receive the worst people because the legal routes are closed. We end up with people who dare to go to the illegal routes for other reasons than running for their lives.
US a similar thing, instead of relying on illegal workforce just let in people from the main gates and watch out for shady types.
There are so many things that can be done to address the issues instead of dividing the world limited travel areas.
It's where Reddit's userbase came from but it isn't exactly like reddit. It was more like HN until they ruined it to make the investors happy and instead investors got their investment killed in one day.
That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no.
It actually makes sense to have a paid service that makes this abomination less painful. Though they work with VFS Global for collecting the applications and relevant documents, the VFS Global itself is an abomination and doesn't help with the handling of the form filling anyway.
Recently EU streamlined the Schengen visa application process for Turkish citizens as those "visa agencies" that are the official agencies and the only way to apply for a visa for many countries don't actually help with anything and are scamming people by selling the "good hours" for the visa appointment on the black market. An agency was dropped for this and the scams by agencies were listed among the reasons to streamline the application process.
Both with US and EU people are losing scholarships etc. due to outrageous wait times that are sometimes are years ahead or there's an issue with the systems handling the applications.
I guess there must be an opportunity there to fix all this together with smaller stuff like handling transliteration and character encodings, I wonder if some of those scam site are not scams and actually help with it. An AI agent can be useful here.
I had to deal with the DS-160 multiple times over the year. I don't think you give justice to how bad this website really is. I have started to notice that these "timeouts" are very random. At the worst times, the session "times out" immediately after login.
These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to system load in some way.
Also, the site's HTML and JavaScript are bloated beyond hope for what should be a fairly simple set of web forms. And itnhas been thisnway since at least 2018 with exactly zero improvements.
One thing a developer sat in DC or SV with a 5G iPhone 16 doesn't realize too, is that if you are visiting these web sites with a phone plan that has a tiny monthly data allowance then this bloat can blow out an entire month in one sitting.
I worked with people on parole that were given free phones to use for job applications, finding their way around etc, and they would only get 3GB data a month. Some of the sites they visited were dropping 250MB of payload on the home page. You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.
> You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.
Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun.
With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update.
Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that?
I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections.
Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...
The paper stats on 2G would make it seem like it should work in theory, especially if it's using EDGE or something, but it just consistently fails in the field. You'll get partial renders and then it will jam up. It's super, super frustrating to use. Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something and that just cancels all the async downloads and restarts them.
There are probably a host of other telemetry things going on in your standard $20 Android handset in the background too, eating up all that bandwidth and causing all sorts of bottlenecks.
Agree it would be really nice to have some sane minimum speed.
Well it's not ever going to be actual 2G. It's a throttle. I'm not sure how much worse it could get when you have a reasonably solid signal, but I guess nothing stops network engineers from doing something awful.
> Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something
At a certain point it's the user's fault. And once it gets to the point where you can swipe around, the tile loading should be pretty visible.
And to add more emphasis to the app being usable, I can get driving directions fully offline, then click bus and now it needs one tiny server request to tell me.
It's so bad that I used to have a DS-160.txt file with most of my responses so I could speed run a copy-paste session before something went wrong. The 5yr travel section was awful to fill.
Not to defend the US immigration system, but my experience is that this user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites - including those that nominally want to serve you, those that are at the state level instead of the federal level (such as the DMV sites), and those that are even internal for use by government employees only.
It's bad enough that in some cases I believe the designers should be threatened with legal penalties.
> user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites
I discovered this when it was late at night and I was procrastinating going to bed and I was curious what my estimated Social Security benefit would be at retirement so I tried to log into mySSA and it said the website is closed from like 11 PM to 5 AM or something like that.
I couldn't believe it. I could understand a weekly several-hour maintenance/batch processing window, but DAILY?
That e-filing web site for taxes has never worked for my son because he can’t complete the id.me process, it might be as simple as you are an unperson if you use an android phone or maybe because he’s just started in the workforce he does not have a long history of tax filing and credit history to match up with.
Two years in a row we’ve been able to fill out a 1040 and the NY state equivalent and make a paper submission in less time than it takes to reach an operator on hold.
These identity verification services look like a scam to me. LinkedIn incessantly hassles me to verify with CLEAR and it always fails without a clear error message, either “it just doesn’t work” or my hair has grown too much since I got my driver’s license or it is making me take my glasses off and comparing to a driver’s license photo where I am wearing glasses.
>These identity verification services look like a scam to me.
Even if their intent is to run an 'honest' business, the method of bouncing a user around to god knows how many domains during the process becomes effectively indistinguishable from a compromised service, and the alternative of having each site host their own id verification system screams, HACK US.
I can see users becoming increasingly accustomed to getting out their cards several times during a sign-up and not having the foggiest idea of where their information went to.
It starts to make a lot more sense when you realise there is a huge group in the US actively trying to make the government fail.
It's pretty hard to make a good and user-friendly website when every few years some high-level people try to kneecap you.
These aren't unsolvable problems. The UK, for example, had invested a lot of time and effort into making their websites user-friendly. In most countries filing taxes online is something you can do during your lunch break - without paying the Turbotax maffia. Driver's license? You can order that online, and make an appointment for a 15-minute window to pick it up.
If interacting with the government is painful, it is almost always because someone benefits from it being painful.
Gaming of the procurement system. The websites are all written by big consulting outfits. Not to mention the disaster that is big corporate IT projects combined with government rules.
Obama had the Digital Service (that Trump shut down) which paid higher salaries. Those folks were sharp and everything they touched was actually decent.
As I noted this is not unique to government. Large corporate projects at the Fortune 500 are often the same sort of consultant-driven crap.
It wasn't temporarily retasked, it was reorganized and permanently repurposed and renamed the US DOGE Service, and then within that reorganized service, a subordinate temporary organization was created called the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization that was scheduled to sunset not later than July 4, 2026. (All but 65 of USDS's pre-reorg employees were also fired as part of the reorg, and 21 of those remaining 65 employees did a mass resignation.)
If you visit their website, you will notice that except for historical documents, there is no full name branding at all; mostly only the logo and the occasional "USDS", when prior to the reorg (as can be seen on the Wayback machine) the original full name was prominent.
This. The website for buying treasury products is straight out of the year 2002. The login is so bad I would never consider buying them there - the service fee charged by brokerages is absolutely worth it in this case.
Which brokerages charge fees for purchasing US Treasuries? Schwab definitely doesn't.
Really the only reason you need TreasuryDirect is for buying Series I bonds (and maybe a few other niche Treasury products), which are not available through brokerages.
Back when interest rates peaked around that period I bought a huge number of I bonds which were a great investment —- got fired by my broker because I interrupted a sales presentation with “why don’t I just buy I bonds?”
The web front ends are awful, but the back ends are even worse. The backlogs for some of these applications is insane. I was at a US embassy one time and got talking to a girl who had just had her application approved after an 18 year wait.
I don’t know if you’re US-based or not but in the US, government work has the stigma of attracting the bottom of the barrel. It is nearly impossible to get fired for performance reasons. Combine low pay and high job security, and you’re not going to attract the most innovative, motivated, or competent people.
Early in my career, I was warned that if I took a job with the state of California, I’d be stuck there for my whole career. I’d be unhirable in the private sector.
Not so much after DOGE fired entire departments for dubious reasons.
I don't know why anyone would work for the federal government now - pay still sucks, and job security has been demonstrated to no longer be guaranteed.
Recent events isn't going to change decades of stigma and reputation. People aren't saying, "Oh cool, they purged the low performers. I'll go work for the government!"
From 2014 until it was, in effect, obliterated by DOGE actions this year there was the "United States Digital Service", a crack team of programmers, a sort of skunkworks who worked to improve U.S. government websites of departments that wanted the help. So it seems to be partisan to want good websites, but there are countless people involved in politics with many agendas.
My wife, a green card holder, applied for citizenship in April and was naturalized yesterday (from an EU country). Not that I don’t believe it could be true but where are you getting the 3-4yr timeline? If that’s accurate she/we may have dodged a massive bullet.
Spouses always get better treatment as there is
a voter who would be mad otherwise. They check for scam marriages but otherwise hurry the process through - if they don't a voter contacts their congressman to push the process. That voter will also likely know a lot of other voters and thus influence the next election while someone not married is unlikely to have that local network to use.
This is patently false for one reason - once someone has a U.S. green card and has met the residency requirement to apply for citizenship, the application form and process are the same for everyone, regardless of how they got their green card (through work, marriage, asylum, investment, etc.).
Once you are eligible to apply, the whole process is basically form N400->biometrics->interview (just doublechecking your name and other paper info, takes 5 minutes)->civics test->ceremony.
However, the timelines and process for getting the green card itself is different depending on the nature of your visa, and they will indeed try to check for scam marriages before you get your green card (if you were applying for it through the marriage visa).
Not exactly, if you're married to a citizen the residence requirement is 3 years not 5, and the form clearly distinguishes the 3 and 5 year options (3 years requires extra evidence of marriage and spouse's US citizenship)
Yes, I am aware, which is why my grandparent comment said “[…] once someone […] has met the residency requirement to apply for citizenship.”
The amount of time one has to wait before meeting the residency requirement (aka before they can apply for the US citizenship) depends on other circumstances. With the default being 5 years (technically 4 years and 9 months, because by the time process finishes and you get your citizenship, you will hit the required 5y mark, so they officially let people apply at 4y9mo mark; there is even a first-party "early filing calculator" tool[0]), and the number going down depending on whether it was through marriage, whether you served in the US military and applied for the expedited process, etc.
However, my post explicitly mentioned that I was talking about the time one has to wait after they apply for the US citizenship, to which this has zero relevance.
I would love to see data that backs this up. While definitely plausible the pathway she followed to naturalization was based on time in country and not our marriage. I didn’t need to push but I’ve generally found my congressman (who is also almost our neighbor) to be pretty unresponsive on any other issue.
My understanding - which may not be correct - is the length of the process primarily depends on your country of origin and secondarily on how you are eligible. Very interested in any source showing that a relatively normal process has pushed out from months to years.
3-4 year timeline makes more sense for Greencard application to Naturalization, that was 4.5 years for my wife. But its not 3-4 years N400 to Naturalization, no way.
Timelines for USCIS depends heavily on where you are, since some offices just have more people to go through than others. So I have talked to people that one step might be 4 months for them and a year for another person.
Indeed, the real problem is a pervasive attitude that the USA is the best country in the world by far and everyone is clamoring to get in. We don't really care if foreigners come or not, and they'll come anyway, so why bother making the process friendly?
It's not new. Rabid ideologues on the other side blamed Obama for things that pre-dated his administration, as well. Some people just can't be rational when it comes to politicians they don't like.
I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.
Many federal web sites were very quickly altered or replaced by the new administration.
This is common. Work begins on some web sites immediately after the election. For example, when a new president is sworn in, the White House web site flips immediately.
More to the parent poster's point, it has been widely reported in the legitimate media repeatedly that many federal web sites have been replaced or significantly altered by the current administration. There's an entire pseudo-department for it that also makes headlines for its greater transgressions.
Add to that severe and sudden budget and staffing cuts, and like all government functions -- you get what you pay for.
People really really dislike when you point out that the democrats are also broadly anti immigration in practice. They forget Biden deported 4.6 million people vs Trump's 2 million.
I hadn't even considered that some right wing folks would be bothered by that statistic, as if deportations were good, actually. But no, I'm sure it does bother some folks in the right.
Elon Musk set out hundreds of very young and arrogant programmers to modify code throughout the federal government including to change decades old code used by Treasury, Social Security, etc. While this went on he would tweet idiotic statements like "Dead people are getting social security!" (because he didn't understand the deceased have beneficiaries) and "we're giving social security to people who are 150 years old!" (because he and we presume some subset of his young programmers didn't understand date fields being set to the epoch indicated the date of birth/death had not been recorded).
All this is to say we probably shouldn't assume any current US government website, especially ones that have to do with immigration, hasn't been completely modified by this team.
no, this is an entirely bad faith representation of my words as written
he most certainly did not understand that the vast majority of what he perceived as "dead people getting benefits" were completely legitimate cases where beneficiaries were receiving those benefits and/or the data was encoded without a real birth/death date
since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind, here's mainstream media reporting of the claims made by Trump and Musk (we can assume Trump was advised by Musk) and their extreme inaccuracy:
Musk wasn't criticizing COBOL he was criticizing a specific thing he misunderstood in social security code which people in that thread said as much. I think you're trying to see something you want to see there.
The VISA appointment scheduling site rate limits to a ridiculous degree these days. As in refresh your page within 10seconds and get a 429 error.
That's probably because of the fact that the appointments are near impossible to get, they only allow booking a few months out and it's always completely booked. So everyone was refreshing (or if clever botting) to get an appointment slot.
As I wrote elsewhere; they subcontract the bot protection to F5, an external company that I see for some reason a lot on old/horrible banking websites.
Hey, this is actually something I have a keen interest in as I'm fighting my government (as an MP) to drop those scammers where possible. Do you have any media links to send me about them selling the "good hours" on the black market?
Even if the US has a horrible visa system – as I can attest, despite only having to do it every 5 years – the EU countries could benefit from attracting talent by being more welcoming. So that is part of my mission as an MP and tech-entrepreneur. Any help and pointers is welcome.
Hi, about the Schengen visa situation in Turkey you can find articles like these that describe how the appointments are on the black market(In Turkish but I'm sure AI will do good job translating):
On the social media the anecdotes differ but some say they were able to get the visa appointments bots, others say it was agency personel selling it to them under the table. Maybe its really the agency personel, or maybe it's people running bots to snap appointments and sell those pretending to be from the agency - can't know for sure but there are multiple services where people purchase appointments unofficially.
In general the news situation in Turkey isn't very good as with the law enforcement but as you can see even BBC took notice.
Generally speaking, these visa agencies are very unfriendly and unreachable. They seem to just collect the money, provide no personalized help at all. My GF had some questions about her US visa application, we were not able to reach VFS Global. The phone numbers provided don't work, it's not even like taking long to speak with a human, the phone just gives you calling error.
She previously used the same company for her Schengen visa for a company event in Paris, of course unreachable again and no appointments available. Because she works at a French corporation, she was able to ask a high ranking French person in the company who has a contact with the French embassy and they arranged the appointment shortly.
Whenever I'm filling a long form on an official website, I feel like I'm racing against an invisible clock because of this session time out thing that happened to me countless times.
I had this problem too last year. I found, at the time, it was the website was poorly managing the session in some browsers causing the timeout countdown to not be reset on activity. I had to find a windows computer and use microsoft edge I think (maybe it was chrome). But no browser on my mac would not have that issue.
> According to Ablakwa, a locally recruited staff member and "collaborators" were allegedly involved in a "fraudulent" scheme whereby they extracted money from visa and passport applicants.
> It is alleged that the scheme consisted of creating an unauthorised link on the embassy's website to redirect visa and passport applicants to a private firm where they were "charged extra for multiple services" without the knowledge of the foreign ministry.
> Ablakwa added that the staff member "kept the entire proceeds" in their private account, and that the scheme had been going on for five years.
> Applicants seeking visas were charged unapproved fees ranging from almost $30 (£22) to $60 by the private firm.
The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.
Turkish tourist are desired, Turks love spending money on restaurants and activities especially since the prices in Turkey have become more expensive than most of the EU. Greeks even introduced special non-Schengen on-arrival visa valid on the Greek islands especially for the Turks. Besides that, EU has "green passport" exception for the Turkish nationals, where they can travel visa-free on this kind of passport that is provided to individuals that meet certain criteria and millions of such passports were issued.
The rejection rates are also not bad and EU has a "return agreement" with Turkey, which is designed to keep the middle eastern refugees in Turkey(essentially, if you come from Turkey EU can send you back to Turkey right away ).
Crime rates for Turks show up among the lowest ones, unlike others from the region. So I don't think that EU is trying to reduce visas for Turks.
I am EU citizen, I happen to know the Turkish perspective only because spent some years in Turkey and in fact it is the Turkish perspective that that EU doesn't want them and intentionally makes things harder but the moment you look at what's actually going on you see that this is not the case, just a Turkish fantasy about the "evil West and snobby Europeans". Considering that last year 50K Turks applied for asylum in EU and another 100K overstayed their visa, IMHO EU can be considered pretty generous actually with only 15% rejection rate since Turkey is the 2nd country with most applications after China.
>I'm Danish and we have lots of Turks. They are generally much nicer than the Danes but almost all of them are dunces
That's rich coming from someone who doesn't understand what the Schengen visa is about. FYI it's not about settling in Denmark, it's for up to 90 days stays in 180 periods for tourism and business purposes.
But hey, the inventors of of the mRNA vaccine are both Turkish immigrants to Germany and there are plenty of other quite successful Turkish immigrants in all kind of industries and the academia. Maybe the problem isn't Turks but you? Thank god your racism isn't shared by that many Europeans.
The "waterfall model" is a toxic way of thinking that pervades corporate management. Simplistic minds can't fathom any states other than "done" or "not done". Corporations are determined to crush the human soul. That is why it's not a progressive series of forms, saving your progress all along.
More-or-less agreed about the waterfall model, but you can't blame horrific US government website performance on "corporations" or "corporate management". This is precisely the sort of thing that would get you fired in any real-world corporation that wants to survive, and it's precisely the fact that you can't get fired by the federal government that allows this sort of thing to continue.
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