They cannot be bullied into surveillance if they have nothing worthwhile to provide. As long as surveillance capitalism exists, there will at best be a risk that the government could abuse the surveillance data. Laws and regulations can help, but even the best laws and regulations could be skirted, amended, or simply repealed by a future administration.
It's not difficult, however it does violate privacy. It is one more brick in the wall for requiring that all citizens own smartphones. And smartphones themselves are quite bad for privacy. When I frequent a business and they tell me use their smartphone app, my response varies from "no," to "I'm not downloading your fucking app." (depending on how polite the business has been)
100% of smart phone apps are bad. There are NO exceptions to this, by virtue of the fact that you must own and use the smartphone to access them. We stand to lose a lot when we finally lose this fight. (and I'm sure we will)
It's difficult to imagine the US diplomats themselves have any real levers to pull here. The bridges have already been quite burned, and any attempt at a carrot or a stick may just speed up countries' data sovereignty initiates.
I've always felt that the different aspects of the mind have been very loosely defined. We've lacked the science to really define them specifically. ("What is consciousness?" remains a philosophical question, which is a strong queue that we don't understand the science of the question yet) And until recently, we've lacked a lot of basis for comparison. (animal intelligence and consciousness _should_ have been a basis for comparison, but I think for cultural reasons we've been quite late to make peace with that fact.)
In any case, intelligence, consciousness, sapience, ego, etc. will probably need more strict fact-based definitions before we can agree on whether or not artificial consciousness can exist.
My personal theory is that consciousness is a specific biological adaptation, and it exists primarily to manage the care of young, and to manage status & relationships in kin groups. A theory of mind can benefit the care of young, which is a good argument for why it appears that only mammals and birds (two classes of animals which do a lot of caring for young) appear to either have a prefrontal cortex (mammals) or appear to have developed something which performs the same functions. (birds) In my opinion, consciousness as people experience it is also necessary for developing a theory of mind for other people, which is beneficial with regard to understand status & hierarchy in a group, and for cultivating and maintaining status.
This is partially why you can be a mystery to yourself; the same skills you'd use to try to understand someone else must actually be used to understand yourself. eg: "was I secretly jealous when I cut down my coworker?" Why don't you just know with 100% certainty? I'd argue that it's because the maintenance of ego does not require this certainty, because ego is tacked onto an already developed brain and lacks perfect insight into the brain's processes. I'd also argue this is why there can be such a gap between who someone believes themselves to be, and who they actually are. You're maintaining a personal identity which ties directly to status. It's not super relevant whether you're consistent over time or 100% internally consistent. You must meet the threshold to maintain your status, but really no more is needed.
It's also why you talk yourself in inane ways. You're walking through your house and you finally found your lost car keys. "I found them!" you might say to yourself. But who are you telling? Certainly "you" already know. I'd argue that the "you" in your head is an abstract identity that you have imperfect access to -- just the same as you have imperfect access and knowledge to other people. Your mind builds a model of your own mind using the same tools it uses to build a model of other people's minds. You have _more_ information about your own mind, but you certainly do not have omniscience about your own mind. The models are always imperfect.
I could go on, but I'd also argue this is sort of the basis for religion. Just like we see faces in the clouds, we try to find a theory of mind in places where it doesn't actually exist. (eg: "We must have upset an ego out there, and that's why it's not raining.") I also think it's why people have moral intuitions but not mathematical intuitions. Or why moral intuitions fail at scale. (eg: Peter Singer's famous child drowning in a small pond thought experiment.)
> "I found them!" you might say to yourself. But who are you telling?
I don't, personally, have this internal monologue. My interior world is a roiling foam of images, feelings and intuitions, memories and imagined possibilities that slosh around solid concepts and facts like boulders in the surf. I have no trouble thinking of words when I need to but I must first conjure up an audience or sit down to journal.
Before these kinds of interpretive posts, I thought the idea of talking to one's self was just a metaphor.
I would expect LLMs to develop some similar non-verbal structure deep within their black boxes, but I know from my own experience that there's more to cogitation than language.
Marijuana legalization arguments were my first introduction to motivated reasoning. I was pretty inclined to agree that locking up non-violent drug offenders was a net-harm to society. But, the pro-legalization folks would argue patently crazy things: it cures cancer, the smoke isn't bad for you at all, there are no downsides! etc.
It seemed obvious to me that you could make a more realistic argument and just stick to an argument which states that due to drunk driving and domestic abuse, marijuana is less harmful overall than alcohol, but is treated as more dangerous. (and yes, the other side was a bit crazy too. "When you buy weed you're supporting the same terrorism that happened on 9/11")
Later research (such as this) has suggested a link between marijuana and psychosis, however the actual risk factors do seem difficult to nail down. (however, this is still a far cry from the claim that it's totally harmless)
What I ultimately learned is that in a pitched political battle, people actually damage their credibility because they're afraid to cede _any_ ground to the opposition, even when that means making unrealistic claims. A centrist (or just someone who is undecided) is not really taken in as much by these extremist argument, and to their eyes it damages the credibility of one or both sides.
Probably worth clarifying that when you say "But, the pro-legalization folks would..." you mean some stoners you met in college.
Because there are plenty of proponents who are not that... in fact 64% of Americans support making weed legal (2025), so it'd be really unfair to judge that movement based on those old experiences.
> But, the pro-legalization folks would argue patently crazy things: it cures cancer, the smoke isn't bad for you at all, there are no downsides! etc.
Who seriously claimed that it “cures cancer”? There have been some claims that it helps alleviate nausea associated with chemotherapy, which is quite reasonable and will likely be proved out by evidence over time.
I've heard people who clearly had psychological issues claim things like this, but nobody actually credible. Problem is that people fall down rabbit holes that perpetually reinforce their own spiral.
The combination of actual drugs and grief and real underlying mental disorders is a powerful and scary mix.
all legalization frameworks in the US already limit legal age of purchasing possession and consumption to 21 and over, specifically as a form of seeding ground to the opposition, specifically for the previously only anecdotal link to psychosis and underdeveloped minds of minors
It's weird to frame regulating cannabis the same way we regulate other recreational drugs as some kind of compromise. Is the ideal pro-cannabis situation that anyone can buy it at any age?
> all legalization frameworks in the US already limit legal age of purchasing possession and consumption to 21 and over, specifically as a form of seeding ground to the opposition
This plainly says that legal frameworks limit the age of consumption as a way of ceding ground to the opposition (implicitly the opposition to legalization). So I'm questioning, if there was no opposition to legalization, what would the legalization frameworks look like? Legal for anyone at any age?
Edit: To put it another way, what's the ground that has been ceded here?
This seems like a lot of different people voicing different opinions and talking past each other. Roughly, I think you're jumping into the middle of a hypothetical conversation that went like this:
Person A: "It's bad that we throw people in prison for pot, and use possession of pot as a subtext under which to harass people, perform warrantless searches, etc. We should just legalize it."
Person B: "But it might be bad for children and teenagers if they get access to it"
Person A: "Okay fine, we legalize it for people over the age of 21, happy now?"
Person A could be said to have compromised or ceded-ground to person B here, even though they themselves might actually not even disagree.
>But, the pro-legalization folks would argue patently crazy things: it cures cancer, the smoke isn't bad for you at all, there are no downsides! etc.
Using the most anecdotally crazy people you met to suggest that the pro-legalization movement is crazy, is frankly, crazy. I'm very involved in legalization and I don't know anyone that is for legalization that thinks any of those things, never even heard anyone say such garbage. I think you may be cherry-picking the crazy here.
I don't think you can frame some of these arguments as belonging to a fringe minority. I remember watching an episode of "Penn & Teller's Bullshit"[1](2004) where they featured several pro-legalization advocates. These folks said or implied similar things (it's not bad for you, it helps cancer patients). These were not marginal "crazy" voices.
"it helps cancer patients" is vastly different than "it cures cancer" which is what OP claimed he heard. And yes, it does help cancer patients as well as anyone else in pain. And the smoke is far less harmful than cigarette smoke, it has no additives at all (when grown in a controlled environment without pesticides). And you don't even need to smoke it, it can be ingested in an edible/pill, making most of the arguments against ingesting marijuana completely bogus.
>Using the most anecdotally crazy people you met to suggest that the pro-legalization movement is crazy, is frankly, crazy.
This was over 20 years ago, long before "nut-picking" became impossible to avoid. This is what I was hearing from my peers on my college campus. They may have had had extreme views, but this was long before modern social media surfaced only the craziest people for any given position.
>Using the most anecdotally crazy people you met to suggest that the pro-legalization movement is crazy, is frankly, crazy.
Also, I disagree with this characterization. I am not crazy, it was unnecessarily rude to suggest otherwise. I'm repeating the arguments I heard from my actual peers. I'm not just finding extremists on the internet and painting the whole group by its worst members.
>Also, I disagree with this characterization. I am not crazy, it was unnecessarily rude to suggest otherwise.
You suggested the legalization movement is "crazy", without context. We are far from it. But you used the craziest shit to paint us as "crazy", so you get what you give.
Your original comment stated:
>"But, the pro-legalization folks would argue patently crazy things:"
Nowhere did you mention your peers, you specifically said "the pro-legalization folks", meaning the whole group, up to the most prominent people. That's the only way we can take your original comment, so if you don't like being called out like this, then be a lot more specific and say it was only your crazy friend group that was crazy, making it very anecdotal and not overly broad.
That's not fringe at all. That was a claim made by anti-drug commercials that ran on TV across the US so frequently that it was satirized by South Park in 2002.
I am firmly against marijuana legalization. This is partially because of this insanity of the pro-legalization arguments. When I would see friends/family that started smoking regularly become noticeably less intelligent while pro-legalization proponents would argue there are no negative side-effects, or people who were obviously compelled to smoke every day or as often as they could.... like some sort of addiction, while pro-legalization proponents argued it was totally not-addictive.
The anti-legalization side had a few odd arguments as well, and some old claims that were unfounded. So no hands were totally clean.
> I am firmly against marijuana legalization. This is partially because of this insanity of the pro-legalization arguments.
this is also just motivated reasoning
The insanity of the fringe pro-legalization arguments has no bearing on whether legalization is a good idea or not.
> When I would see friends/family that started smoking regularly become noticeably less intelligent while pro-legalization proponents would argue there are no negative side-effects
This is also just ripe for cognitive bias which is why we should use science to understand these types of claims.
It's anecdotal - you have no way to know what would happen otherwise. I have seen plenty of young people smoke weed in their teens while gradually stoppping later and leading completely 'normal' lives, while a few didn't stop and went to heavy polydrug abuse etc. What exactly does that say about weed? Not much I'm afraid.
Similarly, I know of several persons that went schizophrenic after car accidents, but were the car accidents the cause?
Not suggesting people should smoke weed when they're young etc, but there's a reason that we do these gigantic, extremely complex, extremely failure-prone things called clinical trials to actually ascertain the effects of drugs in the body.
It's because we've found over and over and over and over and over that the "I know N people who X then Y" claims were wrong.
For example: Why did those two people start smoking weed so young? Were their lives, families, and personalities otherwise the same as everyone else? Probably not!
Did the people you notice becoming less intelligent ever recover? I'm genuinely interested. My biggest regret in life is early years drug use, smoked my first joint at 13. Mdma 18. Cocaine late tewnties. I personally think marijuana might be worse than mdma but not by much. And cocaine is really bad for cardio vascular system, probably physically worst of all of them that I tried.
I think both mdma and marijuana cause anxiety and they mess with short term memory.
There doesn't seem to be a good answer to protecting kids from drugs. Heavily regulated legalisation might help or it might normalise drug use.
As an aside I personally think alcohol in very moderate use isn't really as harmful as other drugs. And is probably a net benefit for many. Even moderate use of illegal drugs seems to have bad affects on people.
Edit: added my thoughts on alcohol and something on cocaine use.
> I think both mdma and marijuana cause anxiety and they mess with short term memory.
OTOH MDMA never caused anxiety (and I had plenty of anxiety issues at the time) or memory issues for me, but of course drug effects are very individual.
I am firmly in favor of legalizing all drugs, except maybe antibiotics where overuse is causing harm for everyone.
The thing is, I 100% agree with your reasons for why it should be outlawed. I just think those are reasons to discourage using it, especially chronically.
However, I wholeheartedly believe the government should not have any say in how anyone lives their life, and treats their own body.
I'm curious, do you also think alcohol and tobacco should be banned? I definitely believe that marijuana use can lead to negative consequences, but I still think it is less dangerous than either of those 2 substances.
They will say yes, but you will never see most of them defending that in any news about alcohol or tobacco. For some, it's just a way to ignore the hypocrisy corner.
Do you hold this position for everything or only some things?
If it's some things, how do you determine which things can have some level of risk that's acceptable and which things can have no acceptable risk? And if there is an acceptable risk for some things, how do you set that level?
I think prohibition was the correct move as well, the US was unwilling to truly punish people and make it illegal. You can't slap people on the wrists.
> What I ultimately learned is that in a pitched political battle, people actually damage their credibility because they're afraid to cede _any_ ground to the opposition
This could be a person making a bad argument, or it could be that the individual is the opposition trying to poison the well. Cf COINTELPRO. Largely any movement has people with insane takes, and it's impossible to tell the difference between good and bad faith actors.
That, and sometimes people just aren't trying to be persuasive at all. It's extremely rare to actually see someone persuaded about anything political without enormous amount of effort, or more realistically a change in material interests.
Yes, what you observed is people making unrealistic and disingenuous responses in reply to equally unrealistic and disingenuous reefer madness type propaganda.
What happened is that the people making these disengenuous comments in bad faith did not realize that so many others would watch them and without understanding hte context woudl pick up those same disingenuous arguments and take them as truth.
This is all the long term consequences of allowing Reefer Madness tier propaganda be published and not repudiated immediately.
TBF, if your paraphrasing others as "curing cancer" but what they claimed is "treats cancer" then the issue may be comprehension or activite listening.
Honestly, I consider myself a "centrist", but I'm always frustrated how that means "do not take sides" for some people (not saying that is your case). In this case, not taking sides means that weed is illegal and people go to jail if they dare to use it. In the country that I was born, it's still illegal. I know stoners there and it's crazy how they could spent years in prison if someone told the police that they cultivate cannabis in their house. They do not sell and do not share with anyone, but they are one call away to be jailed.
I get it when people talk about society effects, but how are my friends dangerous while buying and drinking a lot of alcohol is totally okay? Taking no sides in this case is just maintaining status quo, which is not a "centrist position" when one side can be jailed for using weed.
Indeed. What an asinine result. Let’s see the same study with alcohol, tobacco, and prescription medications before putting out words that have meanings.
Completely agree. The internet works differently than how people want it to, and filtering services are notoriously easy to bypass. Even if these age-verification laws passed with resounding scope and support, what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws. The leads to run down would be legion. I think you could seriously degrade the porn industry (which I wouldn't necessarily mind) but it would be more or less impossible to prevent unauthorized internet users from accessing pornography. And of course that's the say nothing of the blast radius that would come with age-verification becoming entrenched on the internet.
> what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws
A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people. The main problem I suspect is that it would be widely unpopular in the US or Europe, because (especially younger) people have become addicted to porn and brainrot, and these governments are still democracies.
That isn’t necessary because porn companies don’t exist to gift orgasms, but to make money. They need US citizens to pay them for premium content and subscriptions, and that dependency means they’ll have to comply with US laws.
The words of someone who does not actually look at pornography. The vast majority of pornography-by-consumption is free / ad-supported. Customers are not "paying" and those ads are usually the bottom of the barrel with regard to sleaziness or legality.
Plenty of porn exists for free, posted online by models or digital artists. It's archived in places that circumvent copyright, don't require payment or accounts, and are easily accessible.
pornography is not a profitable industry. even famous participants like 'mia khalifa' only made GBP9.5k (USD 12.8k) lifetime earnings. The average onlyfans has about 21 fans, with an average subscription price of $7.20.
the future of the industry is probably ai slop, personalised ai, and so on
one of the purposes of the porn industry in 00s was money laundering: cash only, large stores with no CCTV, very sparse records, not possible to objectively value why a dvd was being sold for $85
> A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people.
Porn is not just political information about human right abuses, government overreach or heavily censored overview of concentration camps for "group X". People can live just fine with government censorship buying into any kind of propaganda.
Kids would find a way to access porn though. Whatever it VPNs, tor or USB stick black market. Government cant even win war on drugs and you expect them to successfully ban porn. What a joke.
It's as easy as parents keeping the default router password, a kid logging in and then setting up port forwarding to a device on a port that they're running a server on, tied to their current residential ip, and then pinging their friends that ip and allowing them all to connect and download whatever files or upload whatever files. The peer-to-peer network could really start establishing itself in ephemeral and very hard to track ways. All you need is one kid with access to a vpn to torrent without copyright concerns to seed the network. Or one kid to get its parents to buy a domain and use that as an anchor so that the dns to ip is set behind the scenes for the peers.
eh... they are more like `dumbocracies` with these measures. None of this is to protect children. Except to satisfy rabid parents who think the world needs to serve them.
"The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax."
We might also have our aquifers depleted and our electricity prices skyrocket. But at least we see really great benefits, such as being able to script some side-project while unemployed due to AI.
I just can't believe how HN turned into disinformation / propaganda machine over last few years. Pretty much every topic is politics and disconnected from reality.
Data centers consume...a lot...of water by design, recirculated water, does not means no water consumption.
Water must be continuously added in evaporative cooling systems used by many data centers.
[1] - Cooling towers reject heat through evaporation, which uses water, not just recirculates it. Evaporated water is lost to the atmosphere and must be replaced with "make-up" water. As a result, recirculating cooling loops still require new water input to make up evaporation and blowdown losses.
Anyone who thinks that modern data centers don't evaporate their "recirculated FRESH water" straight into the ocean can safely have their opinions summarily discarded.
What if there were a cooler that somehow didn't evaporate water, you might even call it a "dry cooler" - that would be a sweet invention. This might even be required in areas where adiabatic cooling isn't effective (humid climates)!
The most obvious outcome possible.I was never able to load the website myself, but if you centralize things to a specific website, it's trivial to block it. Since I could never load the site, I don't know if they had any plans outside of just putting up a website. If not, this was incredibly stupid.
It failed. The outcome was europeans see “yet another nonsense” coming from the US. Also, it barely made the news because of other nonsense coming from the US and generally that’s limited to “international news”.
Also, we don’t actually have censorship in Europe, not in the way the US is trying to suggest.
Yet, your ISPs don't give you access to the full Internet. First it's porn (age verification), then it's soccer, then it's social media (ID verification), then it's libraries. Soon, you even stuff that you take for granted, such as playing an online game, may require age/ID verification. At this rate, all you will be able to access soon will be center-left Euro propaganda.
Are you forgetting how the Americans blocked Stormfront and Silk Road? They don't have full access to the Internet either, they're just not so obviously totalitarian about it as the Europeans.
It's only UK that does that, and they're not in the EU. Many us states do the same, and the administration wants to ban porn completely and jail those who make it.
The ISPs do what our elected governments direct them to do. It’s how democracy works. If you don’t like what people are voting for, get into politics and talk to your community. Or at least email your MEP. There is no conspiracy here.
Cute that you think that's how it works. I guess you're also thinking everyone that voted for the current administration agrees with them on everything they do and voted them in exactly for that. I am at least glad you didn't say if you don't like how it works, move elsewhere.
I know that’s how it works and I also know it’s not a zero sum game. That’s why every law or policy gets time for comments and debate and sometimes policy gets revised. It’s how governance works.
But if you feel you have the perfect solutions, then by all means get yourself on the ballot so we can finally see the light.
What websites a person is allowed to access should not be a matter of debate, it is for the individual to decide. Other people's opinions are not relevant. Even if 99% of people think a person should not be able to access a website, it is still their right to do so and they have no need to justify it.
Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.
Does that apply to websites full of CSAM, or that sell for-hire animal torture real-time streaming services, or that provide hitman hiring services, or...
I think your view on how government and the internet works is somewhat outdated. Social media is not just "what websites a person is allowed access to" and government is so much more than what we do with taxpayer money.
The US is evidently a poor example of what a fully formed government is so I wouldn't use that as a basis for one's world view.
I read through this drivel and it's nothing more than conjecture and anecdotes from someone who seems never to have been to Europe. Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK, not Europe as a whole, and each of them has plenty of counterexamples of the same thing happening in the US.
In short: nonsense. Completely made up narrative filled with quotes from same-belief people, claiming moral outrage about issues they either don't understand or wilfully misrepresent.
I'm pretty sure the President and CEO of the leading free expression organization today understands what he's talking about and is fully aware that there are bad things happening in this vein in the US.
Do you have any specific disagreements you can share with the criticism of the actual content that the parent comment gave, or do you think that the author's job title is more important than whether what they said is actually correct?
Well, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that when someone claims that the author is "claiming moral outrage about issues they either don't understand or wilfully misrepresent" then what he does for a living matters.
Sure, but if I'm trying to verify the accuracy of their claims, their job both giving them potential subject expertise but also potential bias towards making the exact claims that are being criticized, it doesn't really clear anything up, so I'm back to trying to understand if there's any counterargument to the criticism other than their pedigree.
The parent comment in question has essentially zero in the way of supporting evidence. The author's first claim happened to be verifiable. I attempted to verify it, and it was pretty clearly false.
What's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I guess I might not have been clear. I'm specifically wondering about this part, which is what I was referring to about the critique they gave of the actual content:
> Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK, not Europe as a whole, and each of them has plenty of counterexamples of the same thing happening in the US.
Separated from the ad hominems on both sides, it seems like a pretty reasonable criticism to me. It doesn't seem obvious to me that it should be dismissed as irrelevant.
The guy who literally actively helped to create the current USA situation? Yeah. All the while he pointificated about free speech, he had clear favorites whose speech mattered and who should shut up.
When the left is censoring more (as was true in the run-up to Trump's election), of course a free speech organization will be opposing left-wing censorship more frequently.
Trump's election was a reaction to left-wing cancel culture. If people had listened to FIRE, and refuted bad ideas instead of censoring them, maybe Trump wouldn't have been elected: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
>Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK
I just used a word count tool to sanity-check this claim. It said there are 1061 words about the UK and 1684 words about non-UK countries.
You appear to be fibbing about easy-to-check facts. Anyone who trusts you on your harder-to-verify claims is a fool.
There seems to be a bit of a pattern I've noticed with Europeans on HN. They criticize the US constantly, yet flip out instantly when their countries are criticized, to the point of reflexively lying about stuff which is easily checkable.
I can sorta understand lying about claims which are hard to verify. It's distasteful, but I can understand why a certain type of person would do it. But, why lie about stuff which takes under 60 seconds to check? What are you trying to accomplish?
BTW, I hope you aren't in Germany. It's a crime to insult someone or spread malicious gossip online in Germany. Your usage of "drivel" might be considered an insult which could get your phone confiscated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc#t=3m
There was a comma, after which it said "not in the way the US is trying to suggest." You evidently missed that part, or are you saying that it is in exactly the way the US is trying to suggest?
I do not see it succeeding. I genuinely see it as an attempt to make child porn more available and to promote nazi. And considering the latter is basically official usa policy, europe still keeps high moral ground ... despite its own actual faults which are not this.
No it isn't. For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com. I can also say/post whatever I want in social media except stalk and harass individual people. There is no "censorship" at all compared to virtually anywhere else in the world, US included.
You link to a comment which lists a number of russian-paid propaganda actors spreading lies and hate. They have not been censored by a government but by courts which based on evidence identified breaches of law. It's something very different from censorship.
Blocking someone who's sole purpose is to destabilise your region is wrong? You are an idiot if you think that one should let them spread their lies and anti EU propaganda freely.
Imagine what the Russian government tells its citizens about (blocked) European and American foreign news, and then you will see why this is a terrible argument. The mark of a free country is that nothing is blocked, because the citizens can be trusted to think.
And y64 can see where that th5n25ng br64ght the us.
Rampant Russian disinfo helped push them into the mess they are in.
No thanks, I still stand by that some things needs to be banned, be it foreign disinformation campaigns or nazis eg.
> all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting
Does that include all of the sites that share the same IP addresses as those sites?
For that matter, you're posting a reply to an article about a European country blocking the website of a generic US government VPN service, and the service isn't even operating yet. So not only have they graduated to censoring VPNs, they're now censoring a website whose only content is political criticism of their other censorship.
Well apparently there are, because huge swaths of CDN PoP IPs are getting banned/blocked in Europe especially during La Liga matches. How are we explaining this?
They explain it by plugging their ears, chanting "LA LA LA LA", rocking back and forth, and telling themselves (and everyone else) that the US is worse.
Good lord. Your response only proved his statement. Blocking rt.com glaringly showcases the eye-rolling, ridiculous and "moving to dangerous-territory" censorship that the EU is performing - my opinion as a citizen of an Asian nation.
How much dangerous censorship does your Asian nation carry out? India, for example, blocks thousands of websites - no sex work for them - and regularly shuts down the Internet entirely.
Ah yes, there is a foreign government sponsored campaign to deligitimise and spread lies about your country and government. And because you are a democracy you should just accept it and let lies and propaganda flood your country? Can't even make these entities follow the law as they operate outside your legal framework. So let them lie and manipulate people while claiming to be "news.l".
This is how democracy dies - when we stop caring about truth. This is how fox ruined the US, when lies becomes fine just because they are "opinion" or "entertainment".
Hate to break it to you, but European countries have equivalent foreign news propaganda services: Deutsche Welle & France24, for example. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If European countries weren't such nanny states, they would trust in their populations' critical thinking skills.
> For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com.
You provided a counter-example that disproves your claim in the next sentence. I'm just flabbergasted.
Blocking a propaganda outlet by a hostile foreign government is not censorship and certainly not "general censorship that is normalised."
If you know that a foreign actor intentionally tries to undermine your government you honestly think the right course of action is to just relax and let it happen? Absurd.
Europe has seen it's share of dictators and knows that a democracy needs to also protect itself.
Let's be real, this is just protectionism. The most popular prediction market in the world is DNS-blocked, in the hopes of redirecting you to some crappy online casinos instead.
Not true. Going to assume you are from Spain. Try posting a recording of the police. Try posting something praising terrorism. Try a joke about victims of terrorism. A humour magazine called Mongolia has been fined with 40,000€ for publishing a joke about Ortega Cano. Try offending religion publicly. All of that is allowed in the US.
Every country in Europe has some restraint to freedom of expression (lots of them ban either nazi or communist symbols, for starters). US has none.
US is infinitely worse than EU but selectively based on what ruling party wants you to both see and post. try to get some coverage from gaza or west bank and/or post something slightly critical of israel and see how that works out for you. EU, China… are at least up front about what they want to censor and why, US censors every fucking imaginable thing while people are too stupid to see it and go “oh my, look how bad EU/China are…”
I mean there are an increasing number of states that are requiring age gating for pornography access for sites like PornHub. It's only a matter of time before that age gating expands to non-pornographic entities, which is the ultimate goal of the plan.
Another lie. The government has the same right to politely request sites to remove disinformation as you and I do. No one "made sure" of any such thing.
Eh. Asking sites to remove information while concurrently litigating against them is very "nice site you have there, shame if something were to happen to it."
The real issue here is that accusations of hypocrisy are misdirection. Two wrongs don't make a right and it's not a competition to see which government can screw people worse.
If your murder rate is up 300% and your defense is "well what about the murder rate in <other country>", the most conspicuous thing about that response is that it contains zero absolution from your murder rate being up 300%. The same is true of the censorship rate.
The problem is any mechanism you put into place to fight "disinformation" will be used to suppress information the government doesn't like.
Covid is a great example, since most of the disinformation was coming from public health authorities, and people who were skeptical about vaccine safety and effectiveness were ruthlessly suppressed online. People who turned out to be right.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. You're confidently calling Ivermectin, a drug that's been used in human medicine for decades, "horse paste". You're just ingesting propaganda without putting any thought into it.
If you're not in the US, you probably don't understand how our system of federalism works. We have 50 different states, some of which are basically run by the Christian equivalent of the Taliban or the Shiite mullahs of Iran. These state governments often come up with goofy, performative laws such as age verification that are normally set aside by higher courts as First Amendment violations.
I say "normally" because the same religious factions are rapidly expanding their dominance over those very courts. Absolutely no historical freedoms can be taken for granted in the US right now. Nevertheless, the fact is, there is no national Internet censorship regime including age verification. No such laws are currently under consideration at the national level.
(Yes, you can be prosecuted for downloading or distributing child pornography, but that is not an Internet-specific issue, and there is no other country I'm aware of where such laws are not also on the books.)
Edit: if you are willing to move the goalposts that far, there is probably no way to convince you that the facts are as stated. Nevertheless... those are the facts. For further reading, look up the term "prior restraint." That's what's actually different in the US versus other countries that use technical means to enforce legal restrictions on Internet speech.
What are you smoking? Access to porn has been legally restricted in every state to 18+ for decades. Adding the Internet only made things easier because nobody enforced it the same way they were already enforcing brick and mortar stores that had the exact same materials.
Likewise, there are plenty of rules and regulations around adult content on broadcast airwaves managed by the FCC.
Challenging adult content as "free speech" has happened and already settled precedent at the Supreme Court.
Yes, individual states are still trying to figure out how to actually best enforce the laws on the books at the Internet level, but there's no pretending that it is just a few states that actually have those laws.
I AM in the USA. And yes, we are heavily censored, but not simply in content. Its a financial censorship, or cut off from banking, or payment processing. And being the "Home of the (everything costs so damned much) Free", starves all initiatives that threaten companies or government.
Wikileaks is one such. Operation chokepoint, another. OFAC sanctions. Holder v Humanitarian Law Project. Knight First Amendment Institute.
But thats the point - USA speech says you can say "Hitler did nothing wrong" and its legal. But you infringe on Powers that Be, and money is involved, your speech via money will quickly be eliminated.
It is hard to discuss these things with people that post such comments as the one you replying to... off the deep ledge where there is no coming back from
(Shrug) If you're not already posting from some Eastern European or Russian hellhole, you need to spend some time in places such as those to gain some perspective.
Or, in general, any other country that people die trying to get out of, as opposed to trying to get into.
keep shrugging but your mind has been totally polluted to think you live in some "free" society where you have "rights and shit" and oh other countries don't have that. but this is good training you went through, you have been told these lies all your life and you believe in them strongly - and that is fine, it is what it is.
the truth of course is much harsher and hopefully you'll never run into it but you absolutely do not live in a free society, the censorship is all around you (if you care to look deeper), the freedoms you think you have are daily being taken away, you can't carry a bottle of water or a f'ing toothpaste onto the airplane (and apparently we have 4th amendment?)... - this is all normalized in the US but we still think we are "free" and your best is "see how many people are flocking to come here, we must be great..."!!!! :) quite something...
I think it looks stupid on the surface. But maybe it is a purposeful way to goad European countries into taking increasingly authoritarian policy changes like banning VPNs. They will use it to generate outrage among Europeans and undermine the leadership, and try to either split the EU along these lines or place friendly leaders.
Maybe this is conspiracy theory. But I feel like the aggression they’ve shown - even people like Marco Rubio - suggests they’re acting with a purpose.
I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.
Alcohol is bad health wise but probably is used to reduce the harm of social imposed stress between people.
So, If I think about it "like alcohol", it would mean "what is the root cause of not being able to keep contact with people". It might be that common social mixing places are probably much fewer than hundred of years ago - be it the local bar, gathering after a day of work in the field, public bathhouse, etc. Many of activities in the modern world seem very individual - maybe that is the problem, and people being social try to replace it and get tricked into worse things.
The difference is the "algorithmic" timeline (meaning ads) you get with Facebook, Insta, and co compared to the strictly chronological timeline you get on the Fediverse equivalents (Mastodon, Pixelfed). That it's less addictive, or at least not in the doom scrolling type of way, is more a consequence. Aka the enshitification argument.
Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.
For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.
But here's the thing I don't get. I can see the argument for AI endangering our jobs. But why does this also mean that rapid adoption of AI on a personal level of is so important? In an AI world, there could be a new bell curve of talent and a fight to stay ahead. So ... adopt early so you're the one not left behind. (and implicitly, most other people are left behind?)
If AI tightens down the job market I just don't see why there would need to be this frantic urgency to adopt it. Getting a small head start might not mean very much once the dust has settled. Employers will still be cutting, and there will still be new blood who will adapt to new technology faster than you can.
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