I am about to talk about "vibes" and "feelings" so please take this with a grain of salt:
Does anyone else get the impression that they feel like the nefarious surveillance state is now real and definitely not for their benefit?
It's been a long running trope of the men in black, and the state listening to your phone calls, etc. Even after Snowdon's leaks, where we learned that there are these massive dragnets scooping up personal information, it didn't feel real. It felt distant and possibly could have been a "probably good thing" that is it was needed to catch "the real bad guys".
It feels different now. Since last year, it feels like the walls are closing in a bit and that now the US is becoming... well, I can't find the words, but it's not good.
Rectangle (athletics-branch brands), Hourglass (most entire fashion brands), and what I believe is Spoon but could be another shape (e.g. Kardashian).
If I want to buy something I see in Vanity Fair magazine, and it fits me, then I will be buying:
- Rectangle: athleticwear or athletics-adjacent, OR ‘petite’ sizes only
- Spoon: bodycon stretch, primarily
- Hourglass: 95% of the page surface area of the magazine
Other magazines vary this formula, but VF is representing the same three body type divisions that are endemic in U.S. clothing. I think the article fails somewhat in this regard, but I honestly don’t consider it a flaw; they make a solid point and the limited niche exceptions are explicitly ‘niche only’ in the industry in favor of hourglass. I’m pretty certain I can find one niche retailer for any given triplet of { measurements, body shape, aesthetic style } — and it’s the introduction of that third component that reveals the problem. For any given style, say plaid or paisley or bodycon or flowy or “any color that isn’t red, gray, black, or white”, given a set of measurements and a body shape, there may only be one retailer known nationwide to serve that market. Torrid and Long Tall Sally both thrive in their respective triplets’ niches, but if you want clothes that fit you and are styled differently than the one retailer offers, it’s tailoring or nothing. (Incidentally, there’s a severe labor shortage of tailors in the tailoring industry as all the skilled workers are aging out of the workforce, same as CPAs in the accounting industry, so good luck finding one at a reasonable price!)
Yeah I've shopped for clothes enough for my wife to know that even with an hourglass shape, you're guaranteed to find lots of pieces that're like "OK none of these sizes will work on you". Her particular problem is a small waist paired with an hourglass. Plenty of "ruler"-shaped cuts out there on the small end of waist size, that won't work for her.
I wouldn't be surprised if women of every body shape believe that clothes must be targeting some other shape, except the ones who luck into a sizing-region in which multiple body types have a lot of overlap.
I'm a big fan of passkeys, but they are currently harder to manage/reason about than passwords (even autogenerated ones stored in a password manager).
My web browser wants to own the passkeys, my OS wants to own the passkeys, I have to deny them before I can get to my hardware key. Some providers will sync passkeys amongst devices, which at some point seemed to be against the spec.
It's all rather confusing. I wish there was a straight forward best practise that can be followed without the niggling worry that you're doing it wrong, or that you might get locked out of services.
Storing passkeys in password managers is the best option. It isn't as secure as hardware tokens, but it solves the problem of managing multiple keys and losing the tokens.
Passkeys are better passwords since not vulnerable to phishing, and it makes sense to store better passwords in password manager.
This fits the pattern of sabotage all across Europe. The obvious candidate is Russia who are using hybrid warfare against Europe/UK for a long time. Why does this post have so many... strange comments, mostly from new accounts? More hybrid warfare?
wild, and probably incorrect, assumption. as any moderately educated italian know, it’s not like italy lacks groups that push similar events on a semi-routine basis, perhaps even inspired by the “délégation inattendue” of french anarchists who carried out a comparable action in France around the olympics.
Now I wouldn’t call myself a student of European terrorism per-se, but haven’t virtually all of the countries listed had some form of domestic terror groups in the post WW2 era? Why am I not to believe this is domestic?
You can't self-fund more than very small terror groups. "Domestic" groups aren't. Note how all the Marxist groups withered away after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I mean, Italy had a big problem with this... in the 1980s. Occam's razor indicates that this is probably just Russia, and not some geriatric extremists abruptly coming out of retirement.
Disrupting arms shipments is a realistic motive. You didn't really state one, just implied the person you're responsing to is a propagandist. I'd be interested to hear your reasoning, but respectfully, in the meantime I am glad that the HN crowd tends to downvote low effort comments. My own stupid comment in this thread being one example. We both felt our reasoning was self-evident but that's not enough on this topic.
It's news to me that the UK/Europe has killed millions of people. I think you mean Russia has killed hundreds of thousands and wounded millions.
I can only assume you are talking about Ukrainians in some conspiratorial way; I think it's strange that you remove all agency from a sovereign country and a people who want to protect their way of life. Very strange.
Mostly useful idiots. Many HN posters are tech people from US. They are mainly left leaning all the way into tankie territory. And those are a prime target for russians.
> For 1. it seems to breakdown if we look more broadly at how LLMs are used. e.g. as a coding agent. We're basically starting to treat LLMs as a higher level framework now. We don't hold vendors of programming languages or frameworks responsible if someone uses them to create CSAM. Yes LLM generated the content, but the user still provided the instructions to do so.
LLMs are completely different to programming languages or even Photoshop.
You can't type a sentence and within 10 seconds get images of CSAM with Photoshop. LLMs are also built on trained material, unlike the traditional tools in Photoshop. There have been plenty CSAM found in the training data sets, but shock-horror apparently not enough information to know "where it came from". There's a non-zero chance that this CSAM Grok is vomiting out is based on "real" CSAM of people being abused.
This must be the best example of why China will overtake the US as the world's number 1 super power before 2050. I would link you to a white house press briefing from Biden https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... but it has been taken down by Trumpists. Another irony.
It's a shame that the US is being actively sabotaged by Republicans and Trumpists and people will continue on because saying that is apparently a capital-p Politics and not an objective fact.
looking at wind as objectively as I can, it doesn't look like a good investment, and the environmental problems caused by putting these in the ocean are tragic to wildlife
GP was mocking you (not calling you names) because your comment was just a classic uninformed (some would even say stupid) opinion, and was presented as you "looking at wind as objectively as I can"
Maybe if you look at the comment context a little more objectively, you'll agree there's some thing quite funny about it.
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Putting that aside though, lets look at your claim:
> there's serious ecological problems with these turbines, the materials cant be recycled, and their uninstallation is incredibly costly
First of all, it's only one subset of the materials (the fiberglass in the blades) that are difficult to recycle, the vast majority of the actual material is highly recyclable steel. The blades in a modern offshore turbine usually weigh around 80 metric tons at the high end.
Your typical modern offshore wind turbine has rated output of around 15 MW of power, with a yearly capacity factor of around 40% at the lower end, so an average output of around 6 MW. Multiply that by the more or less standard 25 year rated lifetime of the turbine, that means you can expect the turbine to produce around 1300 GWh of electrical energy over the course of its life.
How much energy is 1300 GWh? Well, to get 1300 GWh of electricity out of a high-efficiency (i.e. 50% efficiency) natural gas power plant, you'd need to burn around 175,000 tons of natural gas, (dumping all of the waste product into the gigantic open sewer we call our atmosphere).
That's about 3 orders of magnitude more mass in natural gas that will need to be burned (and don't forget, natural gas is non-recyclable!!1!!1) than the blades weigh.
This means that you went and tossed a thousand wind turbine blades in an incinerator for every turbine you actually install, you'll still break even on the amount of non-recyclable material
So forgive me for not taking your complaints very seriously.
There's all the same waste products being dumped into the atmosphere during the production of the entire turbine itself, it's not entirely different.
And you didn't address the environmental damage to the oceans. this case is specifically greenlighting off-shore windfarms. Iif this was on land, i wouldn't care what people do with their own money and resources. But it's got serious implications for whales, of which there's a decreasing amount of. It's not foolish to care about endangering species that are important parts of underwater ecosystems.
You should take complaints seriously in general, I'm not mocking you for your point of view, those are nice details, and I take them seriously, so why are you mocking me? Mocking people over serious topics is just a display of insincerity. you seem to care a lot about the topic, so why not represent yourself better?
> There's all the same waste products being dumped into the atmosphere during the production of the entire turbine itself, it's not entirely different.
Those are also tiny marginal percentages relative to the amount of fossil fuels that are saved, even if everything is constructed from virgin materials instead of recycled.
> But it's got serious implications for whales, of which there's a decreasing amount of. It's not foolish to care about endangering species that are important parts of underwater ecosystems.
The largest threats to whale populations currently are
1. changing ocean temperatures and PH stressing them, and disrupting their food chains
2. overfishing disrupting their food supply and stressing them out
3. getting entangled in fishing nets, and being struck by boat propellers
Wind turbine installation may be a brief stressor when piles are driven into the seabed (but there are mitigation techniques), and operating noise from wind farms might be a mild irritant for them, but it's quite minor relative, and geographically constrained compared to other more significant day to day noise sources in the ocean such as a shipping, drilling, and fishing.
The impact of wind turbines on whales is inconsequential compared to other much more acute impacts (especially net entanglement and boat strikes). There's a pretty wide literature on this.
> You should take complaints seriously in general, I'm not mocking you for your point of view, those are nice details, and I take them seriously, so why are you mocking me? Mocking people over serious topics is just a display of insincerity. you seem to care a lot about the topic, so why not represent yourself better?
I don't take your complaints seriously because your complaints (whether by accident or by design) happen to very closely coincide with deliberate misinformation spread primarily by fossil fuel companies to try and limit threats to their business model.
claiming something is a tiny percentage while not providing numbers is just a failed argument
you've not properly accounted for anything in support of your own argument through anything other than anecdotes and insults
given i havent provided data, ive certainly not provided insults
there's the cement to hold the turbine in place, the production of the turbine, the making of the materials that go into it, and the transportation of everything in this chain of events
even the mining of the materials has environmental impacts that aren't easily quantifiable, you've simply peaked through a door that most people can't realistically walk through
i have a hard time believing you've somehow accounted for all of these things in privileged enough manner to go around calling other people stupid
there's all sorts of environmental impacts that are simply difficult to calculate
and whales are a big topic, as the same people making the wind turbines are the ones whose overfishing are hurting the population (the chinese). should providing money for their economy via the purchase of wind turbines effect the number of whales being hunted, then what's the difference? the changing pH isn't as big a deal as people make it out to be, and it's not widely consistent across the entire ocean either, none of this is simple enough to just brush off
How many laws has the Trump administration flat out ignored? You're cheerleading the introduction of a lawless society. Perhaps you should reconsider your frame of reference.
Their underlying point is that you're actually being very selective in which laws you want enforced.
For starters, I doubt you've brayed as loudly for the prosecution of business owners who employ illegal migrants, as you are for the migrants themselves. (You certainly didn't mention illegal biz owners in this comment chain.) Likewise, the crimes ICE commits already exceed the crimes of those they're hunting, but you haven't acknowledged that.
Which means you don't actually believe in the law as an impartial force of justice, despite what you might tell yourself. You believe in it as a tool of power, to be wielded strongly against those you dislike, and lightly or not at all, against those you favor.
You believe in power and order, not justice and fairness.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today."
Does anyone else get the impression that they feel like the nefarious surveillance state is now real and definitely not for their benefit?
It's been a long running trope of the men in black, and the state listening to your phone calls, etc. Even after Snowdon's leaks, where we learned that there are these massive dragnets scooping up personal information, it didn't feel real. It felt distant and possibly could have been a "probably good thing" that is it was needed to catch "the real bad guys".
It feels different now. Since last year, it feels like the walls are closing in a bit and that now the US is becoming... well, I can't find the words, but it's not good.
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