- This needs teeth and they should inform you of what to do if you find out they ignored the request and what penalties they will receive. Tell people they can aid in the enforcement and I bet they will.
- I understand why the residency requirement is there but it just bums me out.
- The language is wrong. People are people, not 'consumers': "...In addition, the consumer must first have their residency verified as described in the Use of DROP section above..."
I think part of this is that software is new. I mean really new. If we all just landed on a new continent and started a new civilization we would probably see a lot of 'free' happening as the community built the essentials. Slowly over time new community would come together less to help each other build houses and more and more a robust economy of services and goods would take over. This metaphor doesn't totally explain the opensource world, but I think it is a major driver for a lot of it.
I wonder if this would apply to backs/back injuries. This is super exciting, if it pans out. I can't wait for the follow up research. A pill that 'just works' is an amazing thing. Loosing mobility later in life leads to a lot of problems so directly attacking the cause of (a lot) of mobility loss is really great to see.
I have followed this off and on. For those wondering, TMC [1] is one of the primary companies on the forefront of this. Similarly, the main body in charge of regulation here is the International Seabed Authority [2].
I'll be honest, I don't know how I feel about it. TMC has taken the position that it is potentially better to destroy seabed ecosystems than land based ones with strip mining. (at least that is my take on their position) There is truth in the idea that picking the least bad solution is the responsible thing to do. We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it? The problem is the unknowns. Effectively, I believe, they are arguing that the unknown dangers are still better than the known damage we do with traditional mining. The sea is a big place after all. Of course they are clearly biased in their thinking since the potential profits here are just staggering so staying objective with hundreds of billions of dollars staring at you is very hard.
A major change in the arguments about impact came with the study that showed the potential for oxygen generation by the nodules being mined. This so called 'dark oxygen' [3] could be a major part of the ecosystem at those depths. Oxygen is really scarce so anything that produces it is likely crucial. I personally don't have a background anywhere close to that required to critique the science around this but it looks interesting and is definitely worth following up on.
The chemistry of these nodules is also interesting but the bottom line is that once they are mined they won't come back. They take a long, long time to form. Like 2-5 mm per million years [4] slow.
Up until the dark oxygen research the main concern was the plume that mining created and what effects it would create on the ecosystem as a whole [5]. There were, and still are, a lot of unknowns about how big it could be, how long it will stick around and the impacts it could have.
Basically, there are a lot of ecosystem unknowns here so weighing the potential impact to the ecosystem from this vs the real, and devastating, impacts from mining on land is a very hard thing.
> TMC has taken the position that it is potentially better to destroy seabed ecosystems than land based ones with strip mining.
I would feel better about this argument if we could point to a specific land based mine operation that was shut down in favor of seabed mining, but of course that won't happen and we'll just allow companies to destroy both.
This is utterly ridiculous. When has the last time been when we humans did a process in an ecosystem at industrial scale and it _didn't_ make life worse for the local co-op players? We don't know _how_ it will mess things up, but we know that it _will_ mess things up.
> We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it?
We don't have to keep mining, yes our lifestyle is incompatible with reducing mining output. But why is our lifestyle - or modernity in a more general sense - taken as non-negotiable? The trolley problem has a solution, stop the train.
This is illegal, immoral and not supported by the vast majority of the country. Every us citizen and every elected official needs to act, now, to stop this.
At this very moment I am likely a lot of things, but at the top of the list is mad. Very, very mad. I don't have words for this anymore or the patience to debate the intricacies of the broken system that has gotten us here. I am just viscerally, exceptionally, mad. Something will change.
Technically ~49.8% of voters, ~31.6% of eligible voters, or ~22.7% of the US population. Or at least those were the numbers when I looked it up 10 months ago.
This is muddying with jargon. You're insisting on nuance where there is none: Trump won emphatically, and the campaign couldn't have been clearer about what MAGA intended to do in power.
The combined margin in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (which could combine to flip the election) was about 250,000 votes. That's not all that emphatic.
> 60% of Americans oppose sending US troops into Venezuela to remove Maduro from power. Support is heavily concentrated among Republicans, with 58% in favor, compared to just 21% of independents and 14% of Democrats.
Now that Trump has reported that Maduro was removed from power, it will be interesting to run this poll again and see the support given the success of the operation.
He asked why he can't use nukes in 2016. Trump is pro raw power, pro war, always was, always will be. "We didn't vote for this" - all Germans 1945. SPOILER ALERT: They did, it was all in "Mein Kampf".
I hate it when everyone says "Nazi Germany" instead of just "Germany".
Trump asked why the US can't nuke other countries when it has so many nukes. Trump loves war ("department of war") loves bombing other countries - always has. That he is so eager to use nukes should frighten everyone.
I agree with the rest of your point but I dont think its factual to say the majority of the country voted for trump. 77m/343m or ~20% of the country voted for trump, though I'm sure this is what you meant to say.
1. The majority of voters voted for Trump
2. People who don't vote are like fine with whoever wins like "What pizza? I'm fine with every pizza you bring"
False. Comment demonstrates ignorance of the electoral college and disregard for fact. Even among eligible voters who did vote, Trump got less than 50% of votes.
Majority means > 50%. Perhaps you meant plurality.
Regardless, US presidential elections do not depend on getting a majority or even a plurality of popular votes, but rather on a majority of electoral votes. And Trump did not get a majority of popular votes as claimed.
This being HN, the fact-check seemed appropriate and I stand by it.
Especially in the US, this is a strawman. There is simply not enough granularity of choice that you can make voters accountable for every action Trump does.
The US only has two parties because people only want two parties. The "our team vs. other team" is so ingrained in US all thinking, people can't stop. Football is not played with three teams. The election system doesn't help, but there is nothing in the constitution that says "Only two parties".
The polling indicates that the US is desperate for an alternative for something other than the two incumbent parties. They're wildly unpopular and there actually seems to be a political consensus that the US is sliding into ruin which reflects badly on the mainstream policy consensus the majors have been pushing over last few decades.
Just a post ago you identified that Mr. "Why do we have nukes if we don't use them?" was the best available option. That doesn't mean he's a good option, it means there were two choices and the other one was generally seen as the same or worse than Trump. Which given all the stuff that got thrown at Trump is an impressive level of failure.
The two party nature is a part of it - historically it might have worked. I currently it seems like oligarchic structures are what's ruining the democracy.
Regardless, If allowed intellectual hoolahop, then most systems of governance can be argued to be democratic.
I believe the problem with democracy is that it's affected by various problems analogous to the ones of markets, but often amplified.
In this case, to me, it really seems a matter of extreme information asymmetry as you'd never see in a regular market.
Does he actually mean those things, or is that some sort of joke? How do you even know? BTW, he didn't actually use Nukes, and I don't believe he will. On the other hand, he said he wanted to end wars and sounded like he was against starting new ones.
I've seen people regretting voting for Trump because of tariffs, even though they supported tariffs in the first place.
They had no idea that Trump's "tariff" would mean some blanket tariffs at those rates. They thought it was some small tariffs on "key industries".
A further confirmation of the information asymmetry is that after a year, support for Trump is far below what would be needed to elect him.
This is illegal, immoral, unsupported by the vast majority of the US population and requiring immediate action by every US citizen and elected official.
Election polls were only ever off a couple percentage points. US elections are hard to predict because they are so close. And because of the electoral system. So missing by a bit can mean making a wildly wrong prediction.
This does not apply to opinion questions that show huge differences (not single digit percentage point differences), though there validity, not reliability is a bigger concern, especially since there exists no voting benchmark you can measure against.
Still: I think it’s awfully convenient to just wholly discount actual empirical evidence whenever you feel like it because it might not be perfect. Why exactly do you think your gut feeling is better?
Unlike popular opinion before other US actions like this, opinion polls show any military action in Venezuela as being very unpopular, like half the popularity of Trump, 20% popular.
That can change after the action, especially depending on how the media covers it, so we will see. The past few years have greatly lessened my faith in the inherent goodness of Americans, and I believe that we have let ourselves abandon our traditional ideals.
Trump got 77 million votes in 2024, which is 44% of the eligible voting population and a mere 32% of the US adult population. Trump's current approval rating is 39%. Even among those who support Trump overall, presumably a non-trivial portion don't support this particular action.
HN seems to mostly lean right...maybe not most users, but certainly the mods. It's not really surprising since it's a VC backed forum and concern for maximizing profit dwarfs everything else, even/especially moral issues.
Just look at how often relevant stories get suppressed.
Risking being downvoted to oblivion but as a South American this is a way more complex situation morally speaking.
Law-wise I agree and it has set an awful precedent.
But in the other hand Venezuelans all over the world (certainly the Venezuelans here that I know) are celebrating. I myself am in some way relieved. This is a dictator that did unspeakable things to their own population, set proxy criminal organizations, sent hitmen to kill dissidents in my country, highly decreasing our perceived safety.
So one part of my heart is glad. Plenty of Venezuelans are. I just hope they are quick to either put Corina Machado in charge or call for elections and at last bring true freedom to that country.
The Venezuelan diaspora is of approximately 8 million people. The current Venezuelan population is around 28 million. That’s a huge percentage of the population you a disregarding. And note that most still have relatives in their country of origin and they are also supportive of US intervention. At the end the oil is the least of their concerns. It’s easy to disregard them from a moral and legal point of view, but the suffering of this whole continent because of that dictator is very real.
The administration that has been saber rattling about "Tren de Aragua" and has had dozens of deportation flights of venezuelan refugees...
let me get this clear: you think this administration is somehow simultaneously raiding and deporting people to a place they are so empathetic to the refugee and asylum claim of that they are bombing it for humanity while also rejecting the asylum claims?
The administration that is pardoning major drug traffickers but bombs boats on a theory of importing a drug that they do not make. Then they destroy all the evidence that could support their claim?
This has nothing to do with the fact that this country has more proven oil than Saudi Arabia? Or their chosen successor María Corina Machado wants to privatize oil on day 1, that's just you know, random noise?
You can solve all Trump foreign policy mysteries with one weird trick.
People like to say "no, this is all very nuanced". I mean come on... Is Trump quoting Frantz Fanon and Hedley Bull? I mean what planet do you live on. This is a man with a golden toilet that eats at mcdonalds.
It is. Members of the imperial core will always find a way to rationalize their imperial brutality.
I mean I'd like to imagine that expats see through it but actually maybe they are less likely since they took great sacrifice to come to the US while I am merely an american because of the geography of my birth.
Willing to completely give up domestic control of your energy sector in exchange for this regime change?
Because that's what has actually happened here.
It's not like there will be peaceful and organized elections now. The template from US actions in Latin America in the past is: A puppet regime will be installed and it will be involved in heavy domestic oppression of its own.
> Willing to completely give up domestic control of your energy sector in exchange for this regime change?
You're saying this as if they (the people) had any control before.
A military intervention should always be the last resort. Two examples of military intervention / occupation working out in the long run are Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe even South Korea (stabilization of a dictatorship and economic development lead to a democratic revolution later). One can be hopeful that this starts a better chapter for the Venezuelians as well.
> Two examples of military intervention / occupation working out in the long run are Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe even South Korea (stabilization of a dictatorship and economic development lead to a democratic revolution later). One can be hopeful that this starts a better chapter for the Venezuelians as well.
Ignoring the fact that we have been using these examples for decades now as reasoning for going to war, these were all done after years of war. What makes you so convinced that this is "over" and the Venezuelean people can live happily ever after? History says it's far from over.
As an American, I’m outraged at this blatant disregard for international norms.
As a person living in the Americas… I’m surprised at how good this outcome is? Did we just remove a terrible regime in a comparably bloodless way?
This appears to be a prisoner’s dilemma. What just happened is probably a utilitarian win. But the president it sets could enable horrible abuses in the future.
That's also how it seemed after the Iraq invasion and the removal of Saddam Hussein. “Once we get rid of the bad guy at the top, everything in Iraq will get better.”
It didn't turn out well. I hope this one turns out better.
> Did we just remove a terrible regime in a comparably bloodless way?
You captured Maduro in an blatantly illegal act of war and until now the Regime is still there.
I hope for the people in Venezuela that this will end without a bloodshed. AFAIK Maduro has still support, especially in the poorer part of the population.
Exactly this, as a Colombian with many friends who fled Venezuela, the consensus is that the means aren't good but it's looking like a great outcome for democracy (might be too early to tell)
Same as you. This piece of shit needed to be gone.
I've seen Venezuelans begging for food, money and shelter in geographic areas where you wouldn't even imagine due the exodus.
I've seen South American communities orbiting xenophobia on Venezuelans because the lack of opportunities of immigrants where almost impossible in countries where there weren't any for many of the current residents.
>So one part of my heart is glad. Plenty of Venezuelans are. I just hope they are quick to either put Corina Machado in charge or call for elections and at last bring true freedom to that country.
Putting her in charge just means that the country will get looted by the Western Parasite Capitalist class instead of the South American Socialist Mobster class.
Let's say best case scenario, zero innocent casualties and a democratic government takes over and Venezuela prospers - would you still consider it immoral?
That isn’t how morality works. It’s expressly the opposite, a restating of “end justifies the means”. It’s a defensible position to hold, but not a moral one.
> The end does justify the means. This is obvious with even a few seconds' thought, and the fact that the phrase has become a byword for evil is a historical oddity rather than a philosophical truth.
> Hollywood has decided that this should be the phrase Persian-cat-stroking villains announce just before they activate their superlaser or something. But the means that these villains usually employ is killing millions of people, and the end is subjugating Earth beneath an iron-fisted dictatorship. Those are terrible means to a terrible end, so of course it doesn't end up justified.
> Next time you hear that phrase, instead of thinking of a villain activating a superlaser, think of a doctor giving a vaccination to a baby. Yes, you're causing pain to a baby and making her cry, which is kinda sad. But you're also preventing that baby from one day getting a terrible disease, so the end justifies the means. If it didn't, you could never give any vaccinations.
> If you have a really important end and only mildly unpleasant means, then the end justifies the means. If you have horrible means that don't even lead to any sort of good end but just make some Bond villain supreme dictator of Earth, then you're in trouble - but that's hardly the fault of the end never justifying the means.
Hang on you’re asking me to consider a philosophy that is explicitly aligned with the concept as a counterpoint?
Admittedly I was raised Catholic and it was pretty much the opposite of that. I’m not holding to any one point I guess. I just feel like I “know” regardless of outcome, the current administration did what they did for all the wrong reasons.
USA invaded a country. It was unprovoked, Venezuela did not pose any immediate threat to the safety of USA. There is no moral justification for any of this no matter how you try to spin it. Now Putin can gleefully say: "See? I told you that the West is full of warmongering fascists!"
I actually think globalism has nothing to do with the decline. Or maybe the gains it brought us has indirectly contributed. In general US quality of life has risen. Japanese quality of life isn't bad either. I think the keys are just simple apathy, ignorance and fear of loosing what you have when you have it easy. It is like the silly anti-vax stuff now. People don't see the huge infant mortality rate that used to be there so their value signal for vaccines is completely un-tuned. They didn't have to go through the hardship so they don't know the value. Similarly, by most measures, life is actually pretty good compared to the time we are trying to make great again, but because people now weren't alive then and didn't see the impacts of unregulated stocks, weak health institutions, etc etc, they don't understand the value of the institutions and can't adequately judge the importance of people that are trying to keep those institutions strong. Instead they see a report that has dramatic music and footage from a different time/country with no context and a headline saying 'inconsequential thing X will destroy you and take your home and I will protect you' so they vote out of fear and ignorance or don't vote at all because they can't be bothered to learn as a way to inform instead of experience. Until it happens to them it isn't real. I think fear, ignorance and apathy are the real keys here.
I have a windows laptop (and a mac) for work. The windows laptop gets turned on, connected to my limited guest network, only when work yells at me that it hasn't had its security patches recently and in the extremely rare times I need it to do a full build (I'm trying to get our build process away from windows specific. I got the parts I work on away at least). I used MS DOS v2.0. I knew every setting inside and out and had all the tricks down through windows XP. I grudgingly used it up until 5 years ago when I couldn't take MS destroying the OS and user experience any more. Since I switched I have never looked back. Not once have I thought 'Gee, I wish I had a windows box'. Even for gaming. Especially for 'productivity' apps like word and the like. MS used to be THE OS for developers. You built apps for windows because the best tools to build apps were there and the best experience developing was there. Now I have no idea who they are building an OS for other than corporations. It is painful. It is bloated. It is invasive. It isn't intuitive. It can't be trusted. Every time I see windows I cringe and am thankful there are actual alternatives. Good luck MS. You are only being used by people that have to or don't understand they have another option. Lock-in is their only advantage.
Absolutely completely off the topic at hand here, but it seems like the bot and troll level goes up a lot on topics like this. A lot of people use HN data for training data, stats analysis, etc. Anyone out there figure out some good tools for trying to detect the bots in a thread like this? There are probably some good tells with throw-away accounts, account age, etc etc. In a world where misinformation is algorithmically generated and comments are a prime way that happens getting tools that can detect it is important. Hmm if there are good tools I wonder if they could be built into a plugin somehow.
I'm at the point where I want a pop-up for every time my phone wants to use location/camera/mic/contacts. Or at least more options to require this for individual system services/apps.
Also, while we are at it, why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps? If I have a game that doesn't need the internet then it doesn't need the internet and I don't want it to have access to the internet, ever. I have been putting my phone in airplane mode just to use some of the apps and not have them phone home. This is a clearly missing (intentionally not added?) privacy feature.
> why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps
Agreed, the only reason we don’t have a streamlined version of Little Snitch (very flexible network monitor) built in to the OS is that it’d destroy billions of revenue for the advertising industry.
I avoid ad supported apps, so if those devs move to companies that I support, it might actually help me?
If it damages the the OS, that’s a problem for me on a Mac/ios but not so much with Ubuntu.
It’s not that long ago that I was paying for OS updates (that seems wild, I had to go and check). If it went back to that and I had no ads, it would be a straight win.
About 5 years ago I purged as many apps as I could. I still have some I need for my job, especially on my work-issued iPhone, but excluding those apps I have exactly 5 apps on my phone. Everything has a website.
I've heard that native apps are more secure than webapps, but in my experience Firefox is a more reliable steward of security, and App permissions are too obscure to really understand: it is harder to make a malicious webapp than it is to make a malicious native app. Is that a fair statement?
> Also, while we are at it, why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps?
This is possible in GrapheneOS and is super nice. I use a keyboard app that I like but disable network access to ensure that it doesn't send private data anywhere.
It's also possible in LineageOS and its derivatives.
But it's not very useful in practice: if an application doesn't need networking for its core functionality, then there usually is an open-source equivalent that does not use the network in the first place. The few applications that lack a good open-source equivalent (public transportation, proprietary messaging protocols, banking) don't do anything useful without network access.
Being able to block network access gives me peace of mind regardless if the app is proprietary or open source. Humans are fallible and life can get in the way (maybe the app has old dependecies with vulnerabilities, or any other random thing that I don't want). Being able to set the permissions I want only has upsides.
What would be more useful, however, would be the ability to selectively block network connections: for example, to allow the public transportation app to access its API endpoint, but not the advertising and tracking endpoints. I don't think LineageOS allows that, and I don't know if Graphene does.
> why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps
Apple kind of do this in China. Each app on Chinese iPhone needs to ask for permission when they access WiFi for the first time. Combine with cellular blocking, you can effectively block internet access for an app.
> I'm at the point where I want a pop-up for every time my phone wants to use
I’m in the EU on holiday. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to the damn cookie popup that appears on every single site. Having it for apps wouldn’t seem likely to be more intrusive.
FWIW: Me too. I want 100% transparency and I have no problem clicking a dialog every single time. My credit card company sends me a lot of alerts and I have no issue spending 5 seconds skimming an email if it means not getting scammed.
- This needs teeth and they should inform you of what to do if you find out they ignored the request and what penalties they will receive. Tell people they can aid in the enforcement and I bet they will.
- I understand why the residency requirement is there but it just bums me out.
- The language is wrong. People are people, not 'consumers': "...In addition, the consumer must first have their residency verified as described in the Use of DROP section above..."
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