OI mate, you got a loicense for that operating system?
The only surprising thing about this story is that the user didn't get a visit by the police to be charged with a "non-crime cybersecurity incident". The UK has become such a shithole.
> Yep, police can simply ask anyone for their passwords and if you don't give it up they can put you in jail.
This is precisely the reason why I don't want to visit the US at the moment.
The USA immigration officers can ask me to forfeit my phone's password and look at all my photos, documents, messages, call logs etc, WITHOUT SUSPICION.
Some of that data can even stay on their servers for decades, and who knows if it ends up on a CIA/NSA server.
Of course, I can always refuse, but non-cooperation with CBP means immediate denial of entry and risks of lifelong headaches with future immigration checks.
Me too. I’m going to wait a few more years before I visit again.
I‘m also careful with what I say online. US CBP tracks what people post online, and has been known to deny entry to people for being critical critical of the current president. I don’t want to risk losing out on future opportunities in the land of the free.
I‘m also careful with what I say online. US CBP tracks what people post online, and has been known to deny entry to people for being critical critical of the current president. I don’t want to risk losing out on future opportunities in the land of the free.
I will rather choose not to visit the US for the foreseeable time, maybe never again (have been to the US more than 10 times). Freedom of speech is more important than tourist visits to the US. Well and working there was never an option for me, worker protection, universal healthcare, etc. make life much nicer.
Maybe the US will be free enough again in the future, but with its trajectory, I am not betting on it.
Be respectful of the tradition, culture and laws of the local country that you visit and you will be fine.
It's not your role to decide or interfere in the politics of other countries where you are not a permanent resident. Think of it like you being a guest.
The same way if I travel to US, Russia, China, Germany, Iran or wherever, if the rules say "no porno" or "do not criticize the royal family" (e.g. UAE or Thailand), then I will respect the rules.
In the US these border rules exist because they want to check phones of people who might pose a danger to the country and its institutions. If you insult the US, the police, their government, you increase your odds to be checked because you might represent an actual danger, that's fair enough.
If you write Glory to Ukraine everywhere, and the Russia checks your phone, this is fair as well.
The other way around too, if you write on the internet everywhere Glory to Russia, do not be surprised if you get an additional check or rejection.
if you’re denied at the border for expressing speech online at some historic point (non-violent) then how can “respecting the culture” work?
When I am in Saudi Arabia, I don’t wear shorts out of respect for their culture; but they don’t go through my instagram looking for pictures of me in shorts.
There is no culture there to respect. That is why I'd never visit at all. As for the US, probably 0.000001% or so had sad experiences at the border. Those are good odds for having a great vacation.
In fairness, all western democracies have an enormous number of laws, so most citizens are already in violation of some tiny law or paragraph somewhere.
Is this right? No, not at all. But that should not lead us to stop living our lives in search of some utopia that will never exist under democracy.
> As for the US, probably 0.000001% or so had sad experiences at the border.
Heh it’s a lot more than that. About 1/3rd of my Australian friends have a story to tell about unfortunate US border crossing experiences. I personally know two (white) people who were denied entry at the border - in both cases for allegedly ridiculous reasons.
My partner was arrested at the beach once in the US. The police wanted her to narc on someone she was travelling with and she refused. (The case was thrown out of court by a furious judge, but it was a whole thing).
in the US we have free speech for citizens (generally). People in foreign countries are not citizens of the US. they do not receive the benefit of our free speech protections (whatever those may be), since they are not, in fact, citizens of the US.
you replied with an article about the US Vice President decrying what happened. I thought that to be a non-sequitur, so i asked what you were trying to say.
You said you don't arrest people at your border for [speech].
i responded to that non-sequitur with two reports of people being arrested for speech, who cares if it's at the border? that's UK citizens being arrested for "speech", not foreigners! Like, thanks, i guess, for letting us have free speech when you don't?
and here we are.
* note: i don't think we arrest people at the border, just deny entry. i could be mistaken, though.
But I only hold guests responsible for what they say while in my home. Not what they have said to their friends in DMs 6 months beforehand.
But the analogy is imprecise because the border patrol isn’t inviting people and revoking invitations when they misbehave. They are granting access to public spaces or revoking that. And the idea that a public place should do anything more than gate on current activity in that place is insane (for speech!)
That’s why I said the analogy was imperfect. Because border guards (or the state) aren’t “inviting” anyone. It’s not an endorsement to let people in (unlike a friend to your house)
If I would push it further to the extreme, "you" are inviting yourself. You're not a guest yet, you're inviting yourself, showing up at a stranger's door asking to be let in.
Though I agree with you that analogies have limits.
I am not even sure of anything at this point, especially after reading the comments around, almost as if it was bigotry.
It could be a cultural / education difference too; I was taught that local cultures are equally legitimate as much as my personal culture.
In a world where people get canceled for things they said a decade ago, and for people whom they are friends with, and for what those friends said a decade ago, you are walking a fine line by not screening your guests’ past DMs
> Be respectful of the tradition, culture and laws of the local country that you visit and you will be fine.
> It's not your role to decide or interfere in the politics of other countries where you are not a permanent resident. Think of it like you being a guest.
> It's not your role to decide or interfere in the politics of other countries where you are not a permanent resident. Think of it like you being a guest.
Well, that's a pretty damned repulsive view.
Countries, governments, whatever, don't have a right to just do whatever they want to their citizens without anybody else noticing. All individuals morally outrank all institutions.
As a counterpoint: I lived in Melbourne, Australia during the pandemic. We were going for elimination. We tried some of the world’s strictest lockdown laws.
Apparently there were protests in NY of all places on our behalf. I don’t know what they were hoping would happen - would the state of NY ask our state to change our laws for them? How bizarre. Our local policies are up to us, thanks.
Surely NY had other things to worry about at the time? The news we were hearing of ambulances in NY queueing outside overpacked hospitals… though I suppose the media there was saying equally scary things about life in Melbourne.
Our lockdowns didn’t work, but we loved our state premier for trying. He was so popular that the following election, the other political parties didn’t really bother to show up. The opinion of New Yorkers was against the will of most locals here. It was sweet to protest for us. But it had very weird vibes.
I have really, really, really bad news for you about any modern SoC, including all those by Qualcomm. Their ROM private keys are widely available to the three letter agencies. Your OS, while cute, provides no protection at all to anyone who has physical access. Secure boot root keys give away the whole kingdom
There are no "ROM private keys" in Qualcomm or most other chips. The root of trust is fused in by the OEM. Apparently the exception is Apple.
They would have to individually steal keys from every OEM, in GraphenOS' case meaning Google. Then they'd have to do the right dance to fake the right stuff to satisfy the Secure Element(TM) and get it to let them use the data encryption keys. Which, by the way, I believe requires forking over a hash that may vary among individual phones; you have to know which version of the appropriate stage you want to fake.
... and you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical of your confident statements about what TLAs do or don't have access to, especially when you start talking about keys that don't exist.
Indeed, but the UK is in many ways words. At the least in the USA, often the constitution is upheld (give or take); in the UK you often don't even have such fundamental rights. The UK at present fits more to Russia than, e. g. European countries.
> At the least in the USA, often the constitution is upheld
Some of ICE’s detainees may have different opinions on that point.
The UK may endow her citizens with fewer rights. But I have a lot more trust in British due process. British civil servants seem much less … capricious than Americans.
I was almost denied entry to Hawaii once because I told the CBP agent I didn’t have any cash on me. (My money is in a bank account, obviously). He went on a big rant about how expensive Hawaii is. I think he was worried I’d end up homeless. (Even though my visit to hang out with my then employer.) Over the years I’ve heard so many stories from other Australian friends about wild and unfortunate encounters with US police and officials.
By comparison, the British government seems far more civilised. If something happened while visiting the UK, I have much more confidence that everything would be resolved in a fair and reasonable manner.
I had the same experience visiting the US - this was 15 years ago so I imagine it’s much worse now.
Got subjected to hour long questioning because I only had a little cash on me and told them truthfully that I would travel the country so I didn’t have one place to stay for the entirety of the trip (because I was TRAVELLING).
I since learned that my first mistake was to tell them the truth but alas.
After asking me about every single detail of my life they eventually let me in.
It’s a pity, such a great country being ruined by kleptocrats.
UK has (for now) the Human Rights Act and is a (for now) subject to the jurisdiction of (by being a founding member of) the European Court of Human Rights.
Which is not to excuse the errors, but to put it in context: it is a European country… albeit just like Turkey and Azerbaijan.
> In the UK I'd be worried about being arbitrarily arrested, deported, and banned from re-entry.
That's not going to happen unless you commit a serious crime, in which case it's not arbitrary. I can't think of a single case that's made the news.
Meanwhile across the pond in America you have the nightly news reporting on children and people in cages screaming. People being rounded up for not being white. Little to no due process at all until you've been through 6 rounds of hell.
By "commit a serious crime" I assume you mean "publicly state that I support Palestine Action" or maybe "hold a blank sign at a protest". Those are serious crimes in the UK now. But as I said, the worst they're going to do is kick me out, not kill me, and that makes the difference.
> I assume you mean "publicly state that I support Palestine Action"
They are currently a proscribed group, so yes, that is included in the list of things you probably shouldn't do. You're not going to get killed for it though. You're probably not even going to get arrested in most cases.
Whether or not they should be proscribed is a different issue. The best course of action is probably to wait for the courts to decide. Pressure groups damaging military assets probably aren't going to be well received by the public regardless of which cause they're for.
This confuses so many people - the Uk has a series of constitutions and a very strong and historical legal basis for rights. It’s not strictly codified in one purposely written document but it does exist. And it’s a mistake to say if there’s no constitution then you have no fundamental rights. The UKs system is a hodgepodge but so is having a written constitution that can be regularly amended or otherwise ignored.
The problem with that view is that when the "strong legal basis" is not codified, and codified in a way that nonspecialists can at least vaguely identify and understand, it gets a lot easier to get away with ignoring it. Which the UK has been going hog wild doing in the last 20 years or so.
I am not saying the US is better in practice. The bottom line is that authority worshippers will take whatever liberties they can get away with in any system.
I’m not really defending the system, just making the point about a form of constitution existing. Even if the things you mention were nailed down in a constitution, that constitution could be amended to undo them, same as every other form of law.
At least you can walk in with a phone reset to factory settings, and once you cross the border restore from the cloud (or home server like me). In UK you can be stopped walking on the sidewalk. It's much more dystopian in UK.
Sort of. It's also footway when denoting the no-carriages part of a road that also has a carriageway.
There's a whole complex terminology of footway, cycleway, bridleway, bridle path, footpath, cycle path, and carriageway. Even more fun: It's ever so slightly different in Scotland to England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
I haven't written up an article about it yet, but from a cursory look of the legal stuff this only affects private citizens and could be circumvented by setting up a shell company that owns your devices.
Legally, you can't surrender these devices, access to them or their passwords, as they are company property.
There's what's legal, and then there's what the border guard with a hemorrhoid flareup decides to do on the spot. One pain in the butt can cause you a lifetime of pain in the butt even if it wasn't the intent of any legislator.
Schengen borders and practically any country has such legal mechanisms, so not a reason to avoid the US. Technically you can refuse the search if they ask you, but then you will be sent back.
You are aware of the fact that you essentially have no rights at border crossings, right? Even if you are a US citizen entering the US.
This is why many companies have procedures for when employees visit certain countries, including the US. For instance that you are not allowed to bring your personal phone, your personal and work laptop or any medium that can hold sensitive or proprietary information.
Is this really the case? As far as I understand it, US citizens have an absolute right to enter the country. So they can sit you in a room and ask you questions all afternoon, but eventually they have to let you in.
Not sure if related but this is my story. I am Spanish. When leaving SF back to Europe from a Google IO, after control, waiting to scan my luggage, an officer stood besides me and started speaking in Spanish besides me.
The first minute my brain didn’t register because though Spanish is my mother tongue, I guess it was not ready for that. The police officer started to get irritated. Eventually my brain switched, I had a chat with him and he left.
I was totally freaked out the rest of the time, till the moment I boarded.
Only then I realized how frail our rights are when you are abroad.
I presume any journalist or competent protest organiser in the UK knows the details better than me, but they can't just stop you on the sidewalk (UK: pavement) and ask you to hand over your PIN on the spot.
I think the "put you in jail" thing is a misunderstanding of the general "police can detain someone suspected of a crime" principle, but then they still need to get a judge to approve them holding you longer than a few* days.
(*) The rules are slightly different for terrorism suspects.
The police can ask for your passwords. You're not required to give them anything until they apply for a Section 49 notice of RIPA. Which they must get from a Judge.
It seems to be recommended to refuse giving them the password before that notice is issued and seek a lawyer before complying.
If the judge agrees with them, you have to comply.
Yet swatting, making police kick in the doors and shoot the dogs of someone who was victim of anonymous slander, isn't really a thing here in europe compared to the US.
The very politicized US courts that collude with and are completely in the pocket of whomever's running the country? More developed countries have a clear separation between the judiciary and the executive powers.
Trying to imagine how, and the only thing I can think of is that technically you can write a contract on anything? And possibly a cheque, too, because a the cheques in a chequebook are just a standardised IOU form with exactly the same legal weight as if it was done by hand?
(Vague memory that someone used this to avoid paying a bill, because refusing a cheque when offered counted as discharging the debt it represents (if I have the right terminology), and as cheques could be written on anything they chose to write it on a car that physically would not fit through the door).
In this thread's context, the "constitution" is the kind of thing which is supposed to make that not happen.
Famously bereft of a written constitution, the closest single document along these lines which the UK had for a long time was ("the") Magna Carta, which basically exists because King John's lords were tired of King John directing the courts that King John personally owned to not hear cases against himself.
But if your point is that some constitutions may as well be toilet paper for how much the people with power care about their contents, then I agree.
Even if you take the European Union alone and ignore all the other European countries, the EU only legislates over a subset of things for member countries.
AFAIK, not even that. This topic came up in relation to Hungary (before Orban was gone). What I understood from the discussion is that a country can only be punished by not giving them EU funds, etc.
Kicking out is possible, but not established and everyone happy that Orban is gone for now and no immediate need to find out how that process works in reality.
Yes. The EU has no army, no legal sovereignty within each country, etc. It's an alliance of countries NOT a single federal government. The individual countries remain in charge of themselves and the alliance is supposed to be structured in a way that only paases things the countries actually want.
Americans perception of themselves always baffles me. You have police brutality regularly, ICE raids shooting protestors and deporting people (inc those with the right to be there) to El Salvador, people who write critical articles of Israel denied visas, servicemen dying in the Middle East, your president openly stealing from your government via slush funds and his sons, and so little accountability that the only people facing consequences for Epstein are in Britain. Your news is owned by oligarchs who openly buy it to divide you and push their agenda not yours, your views barely matter as your politics is bought and paid for, your elections are rigged by gerrymandering so few incumbents ever lose. Then call yourself a democracy.
Absolute Mickey Mouse country singing itself propaganda about building the future whilst having a healthcare system that lets people die regularly for being too poor. Not exactly freedom if you’re dead is it?
Then they come to London and realise it’s just a much cleaner, safer, nicer looking city than anywhere in the US and has more culture, food and diversity than all but a few American cities. But have to justify going back to a chicken coop country where they grind out the prime of their lives, get no maternity pay, and like 10 days of holiday.
That's all true, and I had a great time in London and many eu countries.
Do immigrants have the same full rights as British citizens?
Would I be willing to re evaluate my visa every X years? Will I be willing to be uprooted if it's denied?
And how will childcare work when my elders are all here?
I think your post was correct as far as the state of the US, but your final paragraph is reductive. It's not always easy for someone to drop everything and uproot their life, even if it's possible
An immigrant on a student visa was recently elected (or selected by the Green Party because of proportional representation) to be a member of the Scottish parliament. So it’s finally reached the point in the UK where citizenship confers almost no rights that can’t be obtained by anyone coming to the country, even temporarily.
It's all extrapolated from a few articles where someone in Germany or the UK is arrested, but if you go beyond the tabloids it turns out that the person threatened to harm or kill someone online (which is not free speech in most European countries for obvious reasons).
I have lived in European countries all my life (except for ~6 months in Australia) and let's say I'm opinionated, I have never feared that the country I lived in or its authorities would arrest me or harm me otherwise. Of course, there are certain boundaries - you don't threaten someone, etc. But once you cross those lines, you are not interested in free speech anyway, only intimidating people or inciting hate.
I am an atheist and any country were a leader claims their country to be Christian is a no go for me. Is the separation of church and state a joke to Americans?
It was pretty funny because right next to Trump they had a man/woman in a Easter bunny suit.
I am also an atheist. Our country has christian prime ministers in the past. It was not a problem, because virtually all the christians that are left in our country (the majority of people are atheists of agnostics these days) believe in a separation of church and state.
It is not about christianity. Authoritarian and populist leaders will always coopt/corrupt whatever is convenient for them. Christianity, socialism, capitalism, whatever works to rally a substantial portion of the population.
Hilarious comment. Every dumbass America bad trope is here. Our salaries are like four times higher so while you're yelling about healthcare our actual expenditure is lower as a percentage of our income. Our outcomes are better and while you're yelling about days off I can retire at like 45 and have three times your net worth. Plus I don't have to fly anywhere. I'm already in a warm destination.
I know plenty of people who immigrated from the UK and not one of them would ever go back.
I think you have your numbers backwards regarding health.
The US spends more (16% Vs 10 GDP), but preventable mortality, life expectancy, people living with chronic conditions etc are all worse than other developed nations: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2023/05/26/a-comparative-ana... Plus the risk of being a victim of violence is higher in the US - you are 400% to 600% more likely to be murdered in the US than the UK, 700% more likely to be raped, 400% more likely to be robbed etc (https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/internat...) so you're gonna need that hospital treatment more.
As for pay the legal minimum hourly rate in the UK is approx $16.90 Vs the US minimum of $7.25
Median annual salaries seems to be approx $62k US Vs $53k UK so it is 17% higher not 400%. When you adjust for purchasing parity (https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPEX@WEO/OEMDC) it's more like 62k Vs 58k, or approx 8% more in the US. There are plenty of high-tech jobs in London, especially in AI & biotech recently (e.g. as an example
I am quite "mid-to-senior" level (i.e. 2 to 3 promos away from "director" type levels, so more headroom.for sure) and my annual total comp is about 8-9 times the median UK salary for example, somewhere in the $450-500k range and I am not even an AI researcher, just an engineer writing web apps at a Big Co)
Can't deny that some parts of the US are warmer, but there are also colder places. UK is actually very mild climate-wise given it's latitude. I am married to a US citizen and our kids are dual national but there is zero zero zero chance of us ever living in the US for the above reasons. I work with loads of Americans who have permanently relocated to London, but it goes in both directions.
Because sure, if you look at the right parts of the US, you can find zero homicide rate due to there not being any residents. You can also do this in Europe. It tells you nothing.
What may give you a hint about relative safety is that the UK police don't bother with being regularly equipped with firearms, because they don't need to be.
Side note, UK police harass people for 'non-crime hate incidents' and put people on terror lists for being critical of protected ideologies.
Judges give longer sentences for mean tweets than hoarding child pornography or months long torture and rape of children.
More euros die of heat stroke than Americans die from gun violence.
Edit: NHS waitlists are double digit months to years. You have one of the worst birthing outcomes in the OECD. You have relatively poor cancer treatment outcomes
I won't take any lecturing on societal ills from such a perverted system.
> Side note, UK police harass people for 'non-crime hate incidents' and put people on terror lists for being critical of protected ideologies.
The US has recently declared being "anti-fascist" as a terror organisation. Bonus points: antifa isn't even an organisation.
> Judges give longer sentences for mean tweets than hoarding child pornography or months long torture and rape of children.
Citation needed.
> More euros die of heat stroke than Americans die from gun violence.
Yes, gun violence is grossly overrepresented in the fears of most people, compared to how big the risks actually are.
And yet, the life expectancy in the US (79.3) is younger than EU as a whole (81.7), and also in the UK (81.3).
> Edit: NHS waitlists are double digit months to years. You have one of the worst birthing outcomes in the OECD. You have relatively poor cancer treatment outcomes
Given the US has the lower life expectancy, this is unfortunate… for you, not for everyone else.
Also, for birthing outcomes, the phrase "throwing stones in glass houses" comes to mind:
Crime in the US is highly concentrated. A large share is committed by relatively small groups, in specific places, and follows a power-law pattern rather than being evenly spread across the country.
There are large, fully developed, highly populated parts of the US where you are very safe. Often moreso than places people assume are “safer” because they are outside America.
> Crime in the US is highly concentrated. A large share is committed by relatively small groups, in specific places, and follows a power-law pattern rather than being evenly spread across the country.
Do you think crime in Europe is evenly spread across the whole continent? Or even that it's a constant rate within any geographical division of any nation in Europe?
Small groups doing crimes mostly to each other is not a novel thing unique to the USA. The (approximately) power-law relation is the same in places where stats exist to study the question: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-017-0069-x/...
I used to live in the UK, and in my 35 years there I was victimised a total of twice, one of which was an unattended bike left outdoors overnight; the safe middle-class south of Havant just wasn't targeted by roving gangs from the "rough" estate of Leigh Park in north Havant, even though that was absolutely walking distance, and a short walk at that.
Why do people on HN throw these stats out comparing poor people to poor people? We are all tech workers on HN. I'm not living in Alabama. When I compare my living situation I'm comparing my premium healthcare in Los Angeles to whatever the fuck you guys are doing.
Pretty much all those stats are irrelevant.
Seriously 62k? Try 3.5 times that and then you're in the ballpark. My healthcare expenses for the past few years have been less than 2% of my salary.
Y'all don't realize just how intensily our poor rural areas bring down the average while our HCOL areas tend to set the world wide standard you're trying to catch up to.
Please read my comment - my London tech worker total comp is about 8 times that 62k and I am coasting mid-level. The poor folks in the UK are pulling the average down too.
Oh and healthcare costs in the UK are obviously zero percent, paid for out of general taxation (there is no dedicated "NHS tax"). So those unemployed poor people with literally nothing pulling down the averages get better-than-US health outcomes from the NHS, and the exact same level of treatment as anyone else using the NHS would get. I get additional private healthcare too through my employer and it is also zero cost to me. No co-payments or any other things like that at all - all zero cost to me.
Obviously, to the meanest intellect at least, it is because they are comparing an entire country to an entire country and not a few privileged here to a couple of elites there.
Fun fact: Americans pay more tax money towards healthcare than countries with universal tax-funded healthcare. How much healthcare does that spending get them? Zero. After overpaying tax for healthcare they also have to buy healthcare separately.
Yea cause we throw more money at it. Our facilities are far superior. In California where I live though folks with little money get very subsidized healthcare that is cheaper than NHS taxes.
You seem to be saying two opposite things here, that the US is better because you spend more money on it, and yet also that you don't spend more money on it. Both can't be true, but both can be wrong.
> Our facilities are far superior.
Then why is US life expectancy worse?
> In California where I live though folks with little money get very subsidized healthcare that is cheaper than NHS taxes.
Unless "very subsidized" means "by 100%", the UK's "folks with little money", or indeed significantly more than national average income, are still doing better. NHS care for citizens is zero upfront cost, except for dentistry and prescriptions which total to 1% of the UK's health costs.
The claim about taxes is just plain false, when considered over the whole USA and not cherrypicking the most favourable states within it: the US federal spending on Medicare + Medicaid is around $4,352/person, state-level spending added around $1,105/person on top of that for a total of around $5,457/person, and remember this is before personal insurance and co-pay costs which are on top of that: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2024_federal_budge...
So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
As a percentage of my paycheck what you cited as Medicare/Medicaid is again very low. State taxes are basically 2-3% and in some cases $0 and/or funded through real estate taxes rather than income tax. This is actually one of the arguments for American universal healthcare. We can bridge the final gap of uninsured with about 1-2% more in taxes. It would still be much less than what most countries pay by a substantial amount while still maintaining 90% of the level of care.
Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
Do not cite flat numbers as some sort of gotcha. Obviously we spend more money on our own healthcare. We have more of it with fewer hours of labor.
> If my salary is 150k and I spend 5k that's 3.3%.
> If my salary is 60k that same 5k is 8.3%.
So? The US federal taxes are not a constant dollar amount. Someone who earns $60k pays $5,020, someone who earns $150k pays $24,734, from the first tax calculator I found.
Same idea in the UK.
> So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
False.
The average person in the UK spends about half as many hours on health as the average person in the USA.
> The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
I know all of that. What's your argument here? Mine is that the NHS costs roughly the same as Americans spend on just this alone, and the UK doesn't then need other spending on top.
> Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
My argument is our basic NHS level care costs us less labor to reach and that the rest of that spend is a luxury on nicer facilities, equipment, rooms, food, nurses and other personal which we are happy to spend because it's a luxury we have that only the rich in the UK can afford while in the US at least the middle class can reach that level. We also classify these costs as healthcare when you might classify them in a different way as luxury add ons.
> My argument is our basic NHS level care costs us less labor to reach and that the rest of that spend is a luxury on nicer facilities, equipment, rooms, food, nurses and other personal which we are happy to spend because it's a luxury we have that only the rich in the UK can afford while in the US at least the middle class can reach that level. We also classify these costs as healthcare when you might classify them in a different way as luxury add ons.
Your argument is false.
Americans on average spend about as much per person as the average UK citizens spend on the NHS even though that care doesn't even reach all Americans because not all Americans are eligible for it.
You call an ambulance in the UK? Free*. You give birth in the UK? Free. When I was a kid and slipped into some ashes and burned an arm? Free care. When I was at university, hadn't gotten around to registering with a local doctor, had testicular torsion? Free surgery. Panic attack making me worried I was having a heart attack? Free both in the UK and again in Germany when I moved country. Accidentally peeled a finger on the inside of a tomato tin while making dinner (by this point in Germany)? Free treatment.
What do these things cost in practice in the US? I see the same viral bills as the rest of us, not lived experience, i.e. hundreds to tens of thousands for each of those things, and also reports claim the "average bill for a natural birth in the US comes in at $30,000": https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37555048
* to the user, obviously. "No bill at point of service, paid for by everyone's collective taxes" is functionally the same as "no bill at point of service, paid for by everyone's collective mandatory insurance". In fact, the UK calls it "National Insurance" though there's a whole argument about how correct the name is, while Germany it's literally a small list of mandatory-for-everyone-to-pick-one insurance corporations with so little room for manoeuvre between them they may as well be government owned.
> You don't seem to understand purchasing power what so ever.
I literally expressed it in terms of GDP.
I know I can be verbose at times, but US spends around 18.0% of GDP on health, UK 8.9%. Citations in previous comments.
> Anyway I was born in Europe so I know all this far better than you.
I also was born in Europe.
I still live in Europe, just a different country of Europe than where I started.
> Nothing about the NHS is free. They simply take it out of your paycheck.
As are the federal taxes covering Medicare and Medicaid and the state level stuff. Which. Sums. To. More. Than. The. UK. Spends. Per. Person.
(Aside: if you're going to insist it's "not free", back off about subsidised healthcare in the US: same applies).
Even when I then convert that to % of GDP, US government spending on healthcare is about the same as UK government spending on healthcare, but the US population then also spends more, as a percentage of GDP, on additional private healthcare, than the UK spends on just government healthcare, totalling just over twice as much as a percent of GDP.
The US spends around 18.0% of GDP on health, the UK 8.9%.
The UK population, spends less than half as much of its economic output, lives two years longer.
You should check out the stats broken down by ethnicity and household wealth. That gives you a clearer picture of what a typical person on HN actually experiences.
I can retire at like 45 and have three times your net worth
Yet Americans cannot protest, because they are living from paycheck to paycheck. This is not in jest, this is the reason Americans trump up (ahem) when non-US citizens ask why they don't protest ICE and whatever other nonsense is going on.
Did you ever consider that you are in a bubble and most Americans barely have savings and are a healthcare incident away from poverty?
"The median American has $8,000 in transaction accounts (savings, checking, money market). [...] Only 46% of U.S. adults have enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses"
A friend of mine visiting the US as a tourist with family was expected by immigration to provide lots of digital information and full access to every device at JFK.
They were held for more than 4 hours at the airport.
But, to counter balance, I had multiple other friends traveling to the US (both on work visas and tourist ones) and it was smooth sailing.
In any case, the story of my first friend is what made me cancel my US trip last summer and go to Japan instead.
This is not true – the police cannot "simply ask anyone for their passwords", and your oversimplification has resulted in this becoming a lie. I would really strongly recommend that you educate yourself first – by doing this, you contribute to the misinformation that is currently making much of the world an unpleasant place to be.
I think it’s true that declining to hand over a password in a criminal investigation is itself a criminal act in the UK. That said, I don’t know how often this actually occurs.
As an outsider, it seems to me (big talk on the Internet! Amazeballs) that UK laws are written to be illiberal and gradually watered down to an acceptable degree. I think that happened with RIPA and later with the whole nazi saluting dog mess. Whether they can survive the rise of free speech double talkers like Farage remains to be seen. But the Blair/Brown years made it clear that even supposedly intelligent middle of the road leadership is capable of imposing surprisingly illiberal legislation. I don’t much care for the Tories but I don’t think they have much interest in my personal life.
You need to be able to hand over encryption keys too.
Claiming to not know them is also not allowed, whether you actually know them or not.
I am reasonably convinced that if you wipe the key slots on an encrypted drive but leave encrypted blocks around, they might be able to argue that you are obligates to store all the block keys for such an occasion. So using any kind of multi-tier encryption in the UK might be a massive liability unless you permanently store all the material required to derive any key that is used to encrypt anything.
This also probably has impact on TLS now that I think about it.
Now, real world criminal cases are likely to proceed differently than how they proceed in the mind of a programmer interpreting the law as a program. But, I am not too convinced such a farcical thing wouldn't happen, the UK government and police have engaged in much dumber things.
Now that I think about it, storing randomness on a disk could probably be used to incriminate you in case that disk was seized. Since the police wouldn't be able to tell if it wasn't encrypted data.
Not yet, but for a long time nobody spent years in court because they were particularly rude to nobody in particular on the internet, and then it happened, and the law was there all along.
This is the real endgame, and my biggest fear of the war on privacy. That in the future, even trying to assert your right to privacy will be grounds for suspicion.
It's gaming communities too. There is a massive mindset overlap between gamers and average UK residents.
They both think that all the dystopia is for the greater good, is never abused, and if you fall victim to it, you must have been doing something dodgy to deserve it.
After having watched too many videos on Auditing Britain, I can not trust the UK cops. In some ways they are worse than US cops, except for shooting down people, where US cops still lead negatively here. Also, UK cops use many more words than US cops, without those words really meaning much at all. The amount of flabbergast-inflated text length is insane.
Non-crime hate incidents 1) never lead to people being charged, and 2) recording of them has been greatly reformed following a court ruling and new legislation
I agree there are a lot of problems (e.g. the online safety Act) but it look as though both the rest of Europe and the rest of the west is going the same way.
I also assume this incident was not in the UK as the details were shared on imgur which blocks the UK. The authorities also do not seem to have taken any action. Anyone can report anything they want.
Yep but they live with you for life on a DBS check, and you know that we brought up in a court of law if anything else happens to be against your favor
1. That is one reason why the rules were changed to reduce the level of recoding
2. It would only be disclosed on an enhanced DBS check, not basic or standard. This also applies to all other information the police have on you, not just NCHIs. This is just like the rules for disclosing something like a caution issued to someone in your household, an aquittal, allegations made against you, parking and speeding tickets etc.
"Non-crime information can be disclosed on an enhanced DBS check – which is limited to high-risk positions like teachers and carers – but only with the approval of a chief officer. The chief officer must have regard to statutory guidance issued by the Home Office and consider whether the applicant should be allowed to make representations before any information is disclosed."
If they're turning over all information the police have it makes sense this gets turned over... Or do you want the police to not have any record they spoke to you, so they'll come tomorrow and say the same thing again, and again, and again?
So what metadata would be appropriate? Just an incident regarding this person was reported? For a hate incident regarding this person was reported? That could easily make things worse as the risk is that people looking at the check would assume the worst.
Example H above is in my view a good example of something should be recorded. A single incident is not a crime, but repeating that conduct could constitute a criminal harassment.
No, the "rest of Europe" is not going the way of outlawing e2e encrypted iCloud backups and other bullshit your shitty government is pulling on you, stop deluding yourself.
Reference counting is a virtual function call + an integer operation. It doesn't happen that often either because objects in UI frameworks are very long lived. C++'s shared_ptr, Rust's Rc, and Swift, don't typically cause performance problems either.
I'm not disagreeing, but I will point out that COM reference counting is an atomic integer operation. That's expensive. boost::local_shared_ptr exists because std::shared_ptr does sometimes cause performance problems. std::shared_ptr must be used sparingly. It's unlikely to matter in a UI scenario with long-lived objects because it, indeed, does use reference counting sparingly.
Of course they cause problems as well, you not believing it doesn't change profiler facts.
I can also easily point you on CppCon, C++Now and WWDC talks, where presenters spend valuable time of their lifes speaking about matters you don't believe.
While I agree that shared pointer are problematic (I almost never use them in C++), I don't think they're ever really the reason for performance issues in GUI apps. I've been doing GUI programming for more than a decade now and the overwhelming majority GUI performance issues come down to issues like poor use of concurrency (blocking GUI thread), unoptimised algorithms (e.g. for layouts), overdrawing, GPU/CPU sync issues or inefficient input handling.
I have never encountered a performance issue that was to due to reference counting (in fact I'm a big user of the CoW idiom when it comes to UI).
I don’t believe it’s Limiting factor in UI frameworks. I’ve profiled a lot of c++ and a lot of UI code. UI problems tend to come from too much churn and object creation, or doing too much work in the UI thread so it gets laggy, not just doing some reference counting.
AWS Bedrock has DeepSeek models running on their infrastructure. That should be enough to prevent training on user data (there's a markup compared to DeepSeek's pricing though).
And unfortunately AWS doesn't have prepaid billing, so you can't just give the internet access to your API key without getting FinDDoS'd.
Blacklisting a kernel module only prevents modprobe from loading it automatically. modprobe by name still works, even if the module is blacklisted, and so does insmod and the syscalls they use.
The author is way above their head and thinks that because they can write Copilot prompts they can write security critical software.
# rmmod the module of concern first, then if that exits with the correct exit code:
sysctl -w kernel.modules_disabled = 1
sysctl -w kernel.kexec_load_disabled = 1
Once activated these settings will remain immutable until reboot. These settings can break OS updates among a myriad of other things. Calculating risk requires a dungeon leader, 4d20 dice and 12 magic 8-balls to form a quorum. Probably safer to just limit access based on role and then update the OS as soon as it is feasible to do so. Leave the role based access controls in place. If anyone complains add them to the on-call rotation.
Wouldn't manually loading a module require elevated privileges? Isn't the issue they are trying to solve that completely unprivileged users can exploit the module to elevate their privileges?
Let's consider a sysadmin who says "I blacklisted this module, so we shall never see it on this system."
And then, some random service or cronjob goes down a list and "modprobes" things. Such as a vulnerability scanner.
So the kernel module got loaded by name, until the next reboot.
Yeah, it's another coincidence and another narrowing of the conditions by which this can be exploited. But it's correct to say that blacklisting modules is not the panacea or a 100% airtight solution.
I just tried it on Ubuntu 24.04. Blacklisting algif_aead does not prevent the module from getting loaded by `nobody` using the unprivileged AF_ALG API.
So this project literally does nothing except spew some vibe coded slop across your cluster. Please just upgrade your kernel packages, it's way safer.
I don't know a good solution for this. 99% of websites asking for this hypothetical permission would not deserve it. Users (rightfully) don't expect that uploading a photo leaks their location.
Element (the matrix client) used to not strip geolocation metadata for the longest time. I don't know if they fixed that yet.
The only surprising thing about this story is that the user didn't get a visit by the police to be charged with a "non-crime cybersecurity incident". The UK has become such a shithole.
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