Practically, ‘in theory’ might actually be doable - if there was a single, overarching regulatory environment. That was enforced.

Chances are, that would defacto make a bunch of people starve in poorer countries, and blow a lot of stuff up, so would also likely be worse than ‘the disease’. At least right now.

But maybe I’m just being a cynical bastard.

7MW is the amount of power you can get from a couple of diesel gensets, waaaay smaller than even a small power plant

[https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/power-systems/electri...]

You still need to feed them, clothe them, and house them.

You need to do basic medical care.

And now you have the problem that most of them would happily murder you in your sleep/if your back is turned, or run away never to be found. So the tend to be a pretty big security risk.

Oh, and also they’re slaves so good luck getting them to care about their work - way worse than a typical new hire retail employee even. So you need to do heavier supervision.

Oh, and you had to pay to acquire them - instead of give them an offer and pay them after they’ve worked for you successfully. So add that to the ‘risk’ pile.

Too capable (but also valuable!) slaves tend to be self sufficient and strong enough to throw you off.

Too weak (and therefore non-valuable!) slaves tend to be easy to control - but are a huge drain on the system, including ‘master’ management, which is often the most constrained resource anyway in any hierarchical system.

Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscription to that customer.

The incentives are different.

Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful".

Step 3: Charge a lot of money for "business verification" - which gives them a fancy badge somewhere and incidentally makes their website trustworthy in the eyes of your filter.

Step 4: Profit!

The Big Tech cartel has been doing this pretty successfully with email (see the weekly "Don't self-host your email" posts), why should we assume they are doing anything different with browser-based website blocking?

Yeah, sounds like a great cartel idea, if they actually did that. None of my domains ever got marked as potentially harmful, even the one that I bought as a joke because it would be so easy to turn it into a phishing site.

Not everything is a big conspiracy to oppress the population. We hear about the cases where it goes wrong because the HN front page is the fastest way to reach the single part-time support person Google seems to employ.

Indeed. I was going to register an account somewhere the other day, and the signup form had a list of acceptable email domains. Gmail, Protonmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Icloud... a few others. It's not the first time that's happened to me. Sad.

EDIT: Didn't even include Fastmail, who's pretty big after all. They host MX for my domain, so I could have "circumvented" it that way with their disposable address feature, but nope.

- They make almost all their money on advertising

- They have deep ties to the US intelligence agencies (To the point that a Google employee managed the appointment calendar for our Secretary of State a few years ago!)

So, how would these incentives apply to their Internet blacklist?

- If you are parking lots of Google ad spam, they are taking a cut of your revenue, so they have an incentive to take you off the list (evidence and testimony from the antitrust trial documented ongoing fraud in every layer of Google's vertical ad monopoly)

- If you are hosting something the intelligence agencies dislike / are neutral to / like, that'll impact your presence on the list.

There is also the headache of PR issues when they get a false NEGATIVE. “Google didn’t protect grandma from this scam website!”

There is no incentive for adding false positives to lists of malicious websites.

Chrome is big enough that a website owner can't afford a false positive on their malware list, just like they can't afford to have all their email end up in spam for all Gmail users.

Due to their near-monopoly Google also has no incentive to avoid adding false positives to their blocklist - provided they don't accidentally block high-profile targets. And if a CxO is screaming over your shoulder that your website has been blocked, arguments about "false positives" aren't very compelling: they'll just demand you move off the "shitty basement provider" and switch to "proper hosting, like the Google Cloud"...

that whiny bullshit about somebody elses website? you dont have to rely on a website or app. either you need their monopoly because you cant do it yourself, or you have options.... in both cases the whining is not needed

It doesn't really matter that it's Google. It could have been Microsoft, or PAN, or McAfee or some fly-by-night vendor. The problem was Radix taking the list as iron-clad truth and disabling the domain without any notification or way to resolve the issue.

I don’t know, this seems like the typical ‘insane last gasp’ of a bubble. petz.com superbowl ad?

If flying then you can bring up to 1000 USD of stuff tax-free every 30 days. On top of a personal phone and watch. Plus 1000 USD of stuff you can purchase at the duty-free shop once you land.

Of course, people will. It’s mostly the folks bringing back 5 new phones or whatever that get nailed. But mostly they only care if you’re obviously Brazilian of course hah