I'm 80% finished moving all of my servers from NixOS to Debian. I used NixOS for 3 years (even wrote some custom flakes) before finally giving up (for the final year I was just too scared to touch it, and then said "I shouldn't be scared of my OS"). I should know what "derivation" means, but I can't for the life of me remember...
I don’t know Nix, but I’ll describe how Guix works, and hopefully it will be obvious what the corresponding Nix concepts are.
A “package” is a high-level description (written in scheme) of how to build something, like: “using the GNU build system with inputs a, b, c, and configure flags x, y, z, build the source available at https://github.com/foo/bar”
The actual builder daemon doesn’t know about the GNU build system, or how to fetch things from GitHub, or how to compute nested dependencies, etc.; it is very simple. All it knows is how to build derivations, which are low-level descriptions of how to build something: “create a container that can see paths a, b, and c (which are themselves other derivations or files stored in the store and addressed by their hash), then invoke the builder script x.”
So when you ask guix to build something, it reads the package definition, finds the source and stores it in the store, generates the builder script (which is by convention usually also written in scheme, though theoretically nothing stops you from defining a package whose builder was written in some other language), computes the input derivation paths, etc., and ultimately generates a derivation which it then asks the daemon to build.
I believe in Nix, rather than scheme, packages are written in nix lang and builder scripts can be written in any language but by convention are usually bash.
So basically long story short, the package is the higher-level representation on the guix side, and the derivation is the lower-level representation on the guix-daemon side.
Yeah I ended up with the same issue. While I’m technically inclined, I’m not nearly to the point where I can handle the fire hose of (badly named) abstraction at all levels like some people.
I could never have pulled off what this guy did https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2021/03/07/qubes-lite-with-kv..., though ironically his journal is probably one of the best “how nix actually works” tutorials I’ve ever seen, even though it isn’t intended for that or complete for such a purpose. He’s the only reason I know that a derivation is basically an intermediate build object.
"Derivation" refers to the nix intermediate build artifact, a .drv file, which contains the instructions to perform the build itself. Basically a nix program compiles to a derivation file which gets run to produce the build outputs. The hash in the /nix/store for a dependency is the hash of the derivation. Conveniently if the hash is already in a build cache, you can download the cached build outputs instead of building it yourself.
Ah OK, then I'd actually never actually understood what a derivation is. But then again, the name "derivation" doesn't at all lead to guessing at such a definition, either.
That's literally true, and I don't mean that in a snarky way. Everyone who ever had a history class should know this.
I'm disappointed that this thread has devolved into an angry and pointless political debate, when it could instead have been a cool technical exploration of how Mossad pulled it off. Come on, Hacker News!
But when there is war - well, I've picked my side.
You're probably American, as am I, and you're definitely from a country that has attacked and militarily dominated other countries. (Because they almost all have.) Get off your high horse.
TLDR: Little endian is better for most data situations (and incidentally is a more natural ordering for humans), so it's good that it won out in the end.
The writeup does not convey a consistent message on "naturalness"... The normal way numbers are written in most or all of the world is big-endian so obviously that is the one that would be found "natural" to most people, regardless of whatever perceived advantages going little-endian has. Furthermore, number names in every language I know of start with the biggest units. The direction of writing does not matter so much as the direction of reading. Anything other than big-endian would require readers to skip around in text to actually say the name of a number in a sentence.
What we consider "natural" now is not what was originally considered "natural" during the early centuries of the Hindu-Arabic numerals' journey.
In fact, we can still see the vestiges of the "low order digits first" convention in some languages even today (for example, in German). Even Greek numbers underwent reversals in the early years (earliest known evidence circa 4th century BC).
That still doesn't imply "naturalness". Quite the opposite. It implies that both are natural since both are adopted and both have been switched to after previously adopting the other.
Remember, too, that most people consider every system that they learn first as "natural". Like it's equally true that historically people did not select base 10 very often. Base 12 and base 60 were both popular as well if they're even using positional numbering at all. Nevermind how long we went in positional numbering without a zero. Is zero then unnatural? I think it must be. Is "naturalness" even virtuous then?
"naturalness" is a rather pointless thing to argue over. I only mentioned it in response to the parent (and I only mentioned it in the article to highlight how arbitrary it is).
My point in the article was that the numbering system was originally little endian because it made things easier when multidigit numbers grow in magnitude in the same direction as you write (least significant digit to the right in this case as it was a right-to-left writing system at the time). This written ordering was then maintained for compatibility reasons in the parts of the world that eventually settled on left-to-right. And the vocalizations ultimately followed those of the dominant cultures of the times - which used left-to-right (with some vestigial exceptions - see my sister comment).
If I remember correctly, I believe French’s vigesimal system is a vestige from the non-Romance language spoken in France before Latin was introduced there. French isn’t the only language with vigesimal elements; English has the word “score,” made most famous by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (“four score and seven years ago…”).
I forgot about that one and also the English numbers less than twenty. But in any case, if you consider bigger numbers, the most significant units invariably come first.
Yes, because by the time that the bigger numbers were in common usage, the world had settled upon "big endian" reading of numbers. But it's hard to kill an already entrenched system, thus vier-tausend-neun-hundert-acht-und-dreißig (four-thousand-nine-hundred-eight-and-thirty)
It's not mere convention. Reading the most significant digits first lets you abbreviate in an ad-hoc fashion and it also supports adding more precision as the number is being written. "Most significant digit" is a clue that those are the figures people consider most important in general. They want to hear those digits first, abbreviate or round to those higher place values, etc. So, big-endian makes a lot of sense for writing and speaking. Little-endian really offers no advantages for speaking or writing. And in doing arithmetic, decimal answers expand in either direction (multiplication to the more significant, division and roots to the less significant), so you can't say one form is universally preferable there either. So big-endian wins!
I always thought eleven and twelve were remnants from when the system was more base twelveish.
It was never actually base 12, that would have required inventing 0, But sometimes I wonder if we would not have been better off sticking with base 12.
And before someone chimes in with "base 10 is natural because we have 10 fingers" no we have 8 fingers, by that logic we should be using base 8, but the real winner in using base 12 is count using your finger bones(there are twelve of them) and use your thumb to keep your count, use both hands and you can get to 100(144 in base 10). this is probably why base twelveish was so common, shepards counting sheep. try counting to 100 in base 10 on your fingers, not so natural now is it.
> I always thought eleven and twelve were remnants from when the system was more base twelveish.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=eleven disagrees. It says eleven means “one left” and twelve “two left”, with an implicit “over ten”. That, to me, doesn’t look like base twelve was leading.
Do you have any evidence that, say, "three million, one hundred twenty-five thousand, two hundred sixty-nine" would have ever been spoken starting with "nine" and ending with "three million"? I guess that wouldn't be the dumbest thing humans have ever done, but it sure sounds impractical.
The "dumbness" depends entirely on what you're used to. There's no actual need to lead off with the most significant digit other than convention.
"three million, one hundred twenty-five thousand, two hundred sixty-nine"
"nine, sixty, two hundred, thousands five, twenty, one hundred, millions three"
It could work either way.
And in fact, in the early days of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system's penetration into Europe, they actually DID lead off with the least significant digit (although numbers larger than thousands were rarely used, and the archaic wordings have only survived in the ones and tens digits - if at all for a particular language).
Yes but one of those ways does not support abbreviation or interruption, or fractions. If you see a 9 digit number for example, you might want to just round off to one or two significant digits while reading it. Having the smallest components first presents obstacles to speech in much the same way Roman numerals do.
That's also convention talking. Looking at the number 443937215, it's trivial to identify the first two or the last two digits. And for counting digits to get an idea of the magnitude, we use separators like so: 443,937,215 (or 443.937.215 depending on what country you're in).
The only difference is whether you estimate this number as "about four hundred and forty million" or "about ten and five hundred million"
It's not just the convention talking. People chose the convention over time to be the most convenient overall. But whatever, I don't care enough to keep arguing. Look at my other comments in this thread for more explanation if you want.
> What we consider "natural" now is not what was originally considered "natural" during the early centuries of the Hindu-Arabic numerals' journey.
Which no doubt affected the byte order that the early Hindus and Arabs used for their processors. For processors made in the 20th and 21st centuries, however, the numeral order used by people in those centuries is a more relevant data point.
By raw human nature, humans can do it either way. For the humans we have now, with their background, one way is definitely more "natural" than the other. That is, it's more natural to them, because they come with a cultural background.
Well, the bits jump around.. bytes are ordered, but the bits aren't, with LE (between bytes) so there's always room for a never-ending discussion about what's best ("Are you a bit person? Or a byte person? Then your preferences may differ"). The best argument for LE would be that a processor like e.g. the 6502 could start processing the least significant byte while fetching the most significant byte, and that on a VAX you could pass a 4-byte integer to a Fortran function expecting a 2-byte integer and it would actually work (as long as the value was > 65536). That was actually done a lot back in the day.. and created problems when recompiling the Fortran code for a BE architecture.
I had another look at the actual article/RFC: This is more than just the little endian/big endian byte order, it's about the bit order of serial messages, where, unlike bytes, the bit order could actually be different (for bytes stored in memory the bits of each individual byte in modern / semi-modern computers are always stored in the same order whether it's a LE or a BE memory architecture). In a serial protocol you could send the most significant bit of the stream first, or the least significant bit first, and that's what's at first discussed in that RFC.
Yes, that's right. Since CPUs abstract away the bit ordering, it only starts to matter when dealing with bit-oriented communications. And since it is abstracted away, there's no real benefit to be gained by BE or LE at the bit-level.
At the circuit level (where the performance is determined) it doesn't matter if your half-adder combines its left and right inputs or its right and left inputs.
So no, there is no difference in efficiency or performance when it comes to endianness. The only time it would make a difference is if your memory bus width is less than your wordsize and you lack any kind of caching.
I wonder if you're thinking of the efficiency penalty for dealing with big-endian values on a little-endian architecture. As the sister comment says, there's nothing inherently more efficient about either byte order when it comes to the processor performing arithmetic operations in on values in its native byte order.
Unless you have a bit-serial machine (close to extinct), LE vs BE matters not for ALU so long as you don't have to run the computation through multiple rounds (like having 32bit ALU but doing 64bit arithmetic)
[...] so long as you don't have to run the computation through multiple rounds (like having 32bit ALU but doing 64bit arithmetic)
That does not sound right, your byte ordering should not affect the ALU, it will always perform the same operations. If you are doing a multi-word add, you have to add from least significant to most significant word because of the carry. And the ALU has no idea what you are adding, whether the numbers are independent or part of a multi-word integer. At best I could imagine that there might be some impact when fetching operands as in big-endian you have to fetch from decreasing addresses which might be less efficient then fetching from increasing addresses.
.. or a 6502 microprocessor doing 16-bit arithmetic with an 8-bit ALU. The 6502 was designed by a team who used to work with the big endian 6800, and chose little endian for their 6502 for a slight performance improvement.
I do not really understand the "Sorting unknown uint-struct blobs" point.
Could you give an example or explain in more detail, what a "unknown uint-struct blob" is?
The odd/even advantage could be put even stronger, because every additional bit you know from the little end gives additional information about the number's divisibility. For example, one bit tells divisibility by two (aka ofd/even), two bits tell divisibility by four, and so on.
Even if you didn't know that a collection of files were structured this way, you could still read, say, the first 128 bits as an unsigned integer and compare them, and they'd just happen to be naturally ordered because the timestamp field grows from right to left, and would have precedence over the "lower 64 bits" of the checksum field.
It's a very minor benefit (of dubious real-world utility), but I wanted to be comprehensive :P
Mentally, I would put this in the "conventional" advantage category, because it relies on comparing fixed length chunks of memory and computationally it should not make a difference if `timestamp` is stored LE or BE for sorting.
A simpler case is reading only a fraction of a field. For example, suppose that you have a 8 byte key and you read the first four bytes of it. On a big-endian architecture, those are the high bytes and you can sort with them just fine (up to some level of detail). On a little-endian architecture, you'll be sorting by the lower bytes and the results will be meaningless. So the big-endian architecture allows you to sort by the first n bytes of a struct without caring what fields it contains. While there is obviously no guarantee that the results of this will be meaningful in the general case, it is far more likely than for a little-endian architecture.
My counter argument to this would be that it is as expensive to compare LE k[4]s with each other as it is BE k[0]s.
As long as you deal with fixed length chunks of data accessing it from either end should be equal effort (in first approximation[1]).
This is qualitatively different from the odd/even case, because for a number of unknown length you can tell odd/even in O(1) for LE but need O(n) only for BE (you have to find the LSB in n steps).
Mathematically there is more information you get from just having the LSBs than just having the MSBs without knowing the whole number and its length. I think this the only reason, why LE is marginally better, everything else boils down to convention.
[1] I know that on modern architectures it can be faster to read memory upwards than downwards, because of the pre-fetcher, but this is what I meant with the advantage is because of convention. If we had a symmetric pre-fetcher the point would be moot.
True. There is a significant asymmetry, though, in that you are more likely to be in a situation where you know the starting address of an object and a minimum size than you are to be in a situation where you know the end address of an object and a minimum size. Strictly speaking that's also an arbitrary convention (as I guess the address of a struct could be defined as the address of its last byte), but it's a near-universal one.
- Compare timestamp and checksum, in the sense that files with the same
timestamp are ordered by checksum, in effect grouping equal checksum
files together under their respective date.
In the first case you could just compare the first 64-bit, so I don't
think that's it.
The second case would be an advantage for little-endian, so it doesn't
support your argument.
Third case supports the argument for BE, but is an unusual thing to want.
In other words:
Is the checksum crucial for your line of argumentation, or could you
make your point with just a timestamp?
If not, why not compare just 64-bit.
If yes, I don't follow why BE is better in this case.
Basically, (and this is getting really esoteric at this point), if you use big endian byte ordering in your data structures when saving to disk, then you can place items in order of descending "sorting order" importance at the beginning of your file. Anyone wishing to sort such files wouldn't need to know anything about the actual structure of the file, or what is stored where. They could simply choose an arbitrary number of bits to read (say, 512 bits), do a big endian sort based on that, and it will always come out right (even though they're technically reading more than they have to).
Reading the first 64 bytes from this file will give year, then month, then day, then seconds, then my_custom_ordering, then some_flags, then a_checksum_or_something, then the first few bytes of name (assuming we used big endian byte ordering). The extra bytes won't hurt anything because they're lower order when we compare.
To do this with little endian ordered data, you would have to:
1) Reverse the ordering of the "sortable" fields to: my_custom_ordering, seconds, day, month, year
2) Know in advance that you have to read exactly 12 bytes (no more, no less) from any file using this structure. If you read any more, you'll get random ordering based on the reverse of what's in the "name", "a_checksum_or_something", and "some_flags" fields (because they comprise the "higher order" bytes when reading little endian).
3) If you were to add another field "my_extra_custom_ordering", you'd have to adjust the number of bytes you read. With big endian ordering, you can still read 64 bytes and not care. You'd only care once your "sortable fields" exceeds 64 bytes - at which point you'd read, say, 100 bytes to be completely arbitrary... It doesn't matter because with BE everything just sorts itself out.
The comparator function is also much simpler with BE: Just do a byte-by-byte compare until you find a difference. With LE, you have to start at a specific offset (in the above case, 11) and decrement towards 0.
This comes in really really handy in lexicographical ordering.
For example, if storing in the keys of a KV store a pattern of:
[u32, String, u32, String, …]
If you want those arrays to be sorted lexicographically, you’ll want to store those u32 instances in big endian, so that both those and the strings sort from left-to-right.
I'm dealing with this right now. My wife was killed by a Russian tank in January while rescuing two wounded soldiers, and she left behind a whole trove of her writings. I've compiled everything into a book, and everyone who takes the time to read it agrees that what she wrote is amazing, moving, heartbreaking - but I cannot for love nor money get the damn thing published.
Here's an example:
=== May 26, 2023 20:33
I worked in Dnipro last year in October and November as first responder for missile strikes (kamikaze drones weren’t a big issue yet in Dnipro at that time, missiles were the main threat), and therefore any news and pictures of an attack there feel very personal to me. They’re not just another headline about another strike to me, but bring back memories from the strikes that I responded to myself and the experiences I made.
Coming from these experiences, let me remind you, or make you aware, that these attacks cause much more harm than what you see on the news pictures or that the numbers show of how many people died or are hospitalized or how many buildings got destroyed.
For example, last year I rescued (‘found cowering on the ground’ would be more fitting in this case actually) a young woman who was close-ish to a half collapsed and burning gas station that was hit by a missile. She had a wound from a piece of shrapnel on her hand, that was all. It wasn’t serious, no bones, nerves, ligaments etc. were damaged, a case for a bandage as first aid and later a few stitches in the hospital. She didn’t even have a serious concussion as far as I could tell on the spot, apparently, luckily, she was still far enough away from the impact for it to cause her any serious physical damage. But she was severely in shock, I mean psychological shock. She looked at me like… I don’t even know how to describe this but I’ll never forget this look in her eyes… like in complete disbelief of what just happened or confusion about what happened, mixed with deep sadness, mixed with fear for her life. Something like this. She was traumatized, and the same applied to everybody who was there when it happened, no matter whether or not they had physical injuries.
Another time we were searching a damaged building right next to a partially destroyed building (from a missile strike). It was basically still intact, 'only’ blown out windows and smaller damage like that from the shockwave and from shrapnel /secondary shrapnel flying around, but no collapsed walls or other visible damage that would affect the building’s structural integrity. “Searching” in this case means we had to check on every single person living there if they need medical help, and/or enter every single apartment, if necessary by force, to see if anybody is there who needs assistance. Everybody in this building was 'fine’, there were no dead, no injured (beyond a few scratches or minor cuts from window glass), no unattended frightened children or elderly, nobody who would’ve needed our help, aside from a bandaid or a piece of candy (for the kids) here and there. These people wouldn’t show up in any statistics that you see on the news, they’re the 'lucky’ ones, but if you talk to them in person there’s no doubt that they’re also direct victims of this missile strike. - If you talk to people later who have experienced something like this, they’ll tell you that their children are deadly afraid of all kinds of banging sounds and of the air raid alert sirens, they run to the hallway (if you don’t have a basement, or one that can’t be reached quickly, that’s where you would go, away from the windows and outer parts of the building but some windowless hallway deeper inside preferably in a doorframe) if they sense the slightest sign of danger, or what they interpret as danger. Everybody gets paranoid of the sky, and people don’t feel safe in their own homes, their own beds, anymore.
Then there are of course the people who lose their homes because of these strikes, some of them might be unharmed themselves if they weren’t home, but they’ve lost everything.
And that’s only the people who are directly affected. Then you have all the secondary damage (or tertiary, or where are we now..) that comes from destroyed infrastructure. A strike might have been relatively far away from you, but you can’t get to work anymore because your train can’t drive (destroyed railroads), you don’t have warm water to bathe your baby because the water boiler doesn’t work without electricity (destroyed power stations, or lines), or you have no water at all anymore (destroyed water facilities, or pipes), or your grampa has a heart attack but it takes an eternity for the ambulance to arrive (destroyed hospitals or ambulances), or you can’t go to work because nobody can take care of your kids anymore (destroyed kindergartens), and so on.
And on top you have a whole neighborhood, city, a whole country, who, even if they’ve never been near any missile strikes and aren’t affected at all (yet), who live in constant fear that the next missile could have their name on it, or their family’s or friend’s. And the people who are grieving because they’ve lost somebody in a missile strike. And the loss of buildings and cities that have a decades or centuries old history and have become part of the culture of a district or region. The list is endless, but you get the idea.
Russia has launched _thousands_ of missiles on Ukraine since Feb 2022, the vast majority of them targeted at civilians. This air strike terror that Ukraine is going through - and it really is a form of terrorism, it meets all the defining characteristics - has effects far beyond the immediate casualties from the actual missile strikes, that you can’t even imagine.
Even for me it felt 'special’, in a bad way, when a missile hit very close to my building while I was standing on the balcony having a smoke, last year in October in Dnipro. And I had just come back from months of daily bombardments with almost everything, short of missiles, that the Russian military has to offer, so at that point I was pretty much as used to this experience as anybody can possibly get. But there’s a difference between daily life airstrikes in the context of frontline work, where you don’t expect anything else, and getting hit by a missile in a big city far away from the front that suddenly out of the blue, literally out of the blue, disrupts your normal life. At the front you never feel safe by default, but in the middle of Dnipro going to the gas station, or having a smoke, you don’t expect this. Even right now in Ukraine you don’t, because your brain protects you from constantly being afraid as good as it can. Even I was in shock there for a moment before I grabbed my medic bag and gear (rescuers here wear body armor because Russians like to hit the same spot twice exactly to get the rescuers too) to go downstairs and help, and i can only imagine how much worse it must be for people who are completely unprepared for this.
This airstrike terror is a_ huge_ part of this war, that Westerners aren’t really aware of in this form. If you compare the numbers of soldiers dying in Bakhmut alone, let alone the whole frontline, versus civilians who died from missile strikes, or kamikaze drones, it looks like it’s a minor issue, in the bigger picture. But it isn’t, because it’s not just about the dead and injured.
Those of you who have grandparents who experienced some kind of bombardment during WW2 might now, that some of them are still not over it after decades, after decades of living in a safe place in a peaceful country. My grandmother had a friend who made this experience _once_, for _one_ day, as a kid, and as an 80 something year old woman looked like a frightened little girl stuck in the past when she told me about it. That’s how deep the wounds can be that people suffer from being victim of this kind of terror. And Ukraine is experiencing this for over a _year_ now, with no end in sight. I know it’s not the exact same kind of thing, but the effects on people are similar.
I really hope that the generational trauma that this will cause can be turned into something good eventually and will make Ukrainians stronger in the end. But that might be naive, honestly… I hope it’s not.
Maybe be careful how much you post, there's been problems with people trying to professionally publish something they've posted on Internet forums before (Internet/Web fiction).
I'll second the asciidoc approach. After my wife was killed by a Russian tank in Ukraine, I collected up everything she wrote (she wrote a LOT - I've collected 250,000 words so far) and needed to compile it into a book in a way that allowed easy edits and arrangements.
Asciidoctor was a godsend in this regard, able to output in PDF, EPUB, MS Word, whatever you want.
With Asciidoctor, ImageMagick, FFMpeg, LibreTranslate, and about 800 lines of Python code I'm now able to generate any part of the book draft in any language (this is mainly to build excerpts for publishers).
... Until you drop your phone and it breaks. And now you can't set up a new phone because you need to tap the notification sent to your old (now broken) phone in order to set up your new phone.
I've already had this happen, which is why I use hardware keys now, and a backup phone.
Do you mean, you don't print these rescue codes which every 2FA thing keeps nagging you about? You don't have a printout in your wallet, or in your folder with important papers? Not even as a secure not in your password manager?..
Nope, because I was grandfathered into it when Google switched it on for everyone without saying anything. You can still access gmail and such; you just can't set up any more devices without having some kind of 2fa.
Now I have a hardware key. I wouldn't dare keep rescue key codes (which can't be revoked) in my wallet.
You can't revoke them if the paper is in the wrong hands, and you don't have a normal access to your account. (Well, they are much like a password in this regard.)
It's just different risk profiles. Your biggest risk might be to drop your phone and lose all the 2FAs in a Google Auth app. Or your biggest risk might be losing your wallet to a thief or robber who is going to hijack your accounts.
I think the chances of the kind of person who steals your wallet also being able to leverage pilfered two-factor authentication codes to hijack your accounts is almost zero.
I second this, Kobo is still easy to hack on and make good products. It does seem that they are pushing their new colour models and are 'Out of Stock' for many months on their cheapest model B&W model (the Nio).
I got the color one. Unless you REALLY need color, get the black&white one. The color technology requires going through filters, which reduces brightness and resolution a LOT.
It's partisan/political because Musk is partisan/political. And it's not just Musk.
We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades, and now that the age of the hyper-rich has come once again, they are realizing the benefits of using the power they wield to shape the worlds they live in.
So now in the early stages of this century's great fight, we'll see our beloved tech giants join the political fray in full force, dragging their follower armies along for the ride.
And it works, too. Just look at the comments here.
Looking at the responses, I can see that people are still viewing this through the limited lens of left vs right.
This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I'm specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitations of governments by forming their own rich-people-only worlds.
As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.
It happens in multiparty systems as well. All it takes is a significant portion of the population feeling like their voices are not heard, and then one of the parties taking up their banner as one part of the overall campaign (which doesn't even have to be in their new constituents' interests).
This is happening all over Europe as we speak. And even though it happens to be extreme-right atm, it doesn't have to be. We've seen extreme-left revivals in the past as well.
And Europe is actually resisting better than US due to election system. Here in best case scenario they are number 2, and took them a long time to get there after Trump
In the US, a populist just needs to win a primary, ie 50% of 50% of the American votes, and he is immediately at least nr2 in the run, and they get the support of one of the major parties.
Saying that populists / extremists also exist in Europe is just a bad comparison.
The extreme right won the Dutch elections though - and they’re not the only country - so your argument that “best case (...) number 2” isn’t true. They can and do win elections.
What did winning mean, though? Is it Republican-style minority rule where they can work the system push through policies which a majority of Americans oppose, or a coalition government where half of his coalition is pledged to rein in his more extreme positions?
The UK system has a much less powerful Executive though.
To be clear: FPTP is terrible, but the reason the UK system isn't as broken as the US one is because the correct functioning of the Legislature is much more vital to the overall system - i.e. 3 viable parties can exist because they're fighting over hundreds of seats, and then it's by the Legislature that the Prime Minister is chosen - rather then by direct vote.
The French system, with its two rounds system has a built-in protection against extremism and to encourage compromise.
The UK is also a FPTP system, but has strong parties outside of the two main, for instance in the last general election over 42% of people voted for a party other than Labour or the Conservatives.
[admittedly that’s an outlier, but looking over the last few elections at least around 20% went to parties outside of the big two]
No country that I know of adopted US election system. Its beyond obscure, unfair and set to be rigged for anybody looking from outside, with no normal way out. Its just not resilient enough to everchanging society. I know the historical reasons, but only fools get stuck in the past ways at all costs 'because, you know, in the past, XYZ so we are where we are so suck it up' when its clearly not beneficial to general population.
One reasons out of ocean of reasons - number of actual votes for X or Y is irrelevant, its all about blocks based on some old history nobody should care about much anymore that decide winner. Freedom of choice is very limited, strong populists like trump have much bigger and long lasting effect than in more multipolar elections.
But for sure its a spectacle for masses for a good year and polarizes society for whatever bad reasons there are, that should be concerned about more serious topics than this.
> As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.
I don't think that the American election system holds any relevance to the problem.
The problem is fueling divisiveness to manipulate people with a "us vs them" mentality.
How else can you force working class people to vote against their best interests, such as taxing the rich fairly, ensuring access to affordable health care, uphold basic workers rights, without resorting to blatant fearmongering and moral outrage with bullshit like "they want post-birth abortions, impose sexual abuse in schools, import scary criminal gangs from distant foreign lands, etc"?
Not to mention the industrial level of propaganda dumped by foreign actors to destabilize democratic nations.
My wife is a nationally recognized expert in elections in the US. The combination of FPTP and politically controlled district geometry (gerrymandering) explicitly creates a brittle system that engenders extremism. It's well understood to be both the cause and a reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism we have now was left in place in the early 19th c. explicitly to allow a small minority to be able to control their individual states. The main change since then has been cross-state unification of the party system. To give an example: here, in Texas, the most volatile Federal district was won by a representative who received only 10% of the votes in his district. Some districts were won by reps with as few as 1% of the total votes (that's total turnout). (This is due to the primary mechanism and gerrymandering.) If you can win by harnessing just 10% of the electorate, you're shopping around for the ironclad voters, and they tend to have weird views (left or right).
I quite like charter cities, at least in theory, and I'm a little annoyed that everyone sees them as an attempt at world domination. They could let us A/B test legal frameworks, and I think that's neat.
Hopefully someone who isn't a hard libertarian bankrolls one soon so they don't get pigeonholed as places for exactly one ideology.
> So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
The problem is that there seems to be a large overlap between that enemy⁰ and certain arguments on the right side of left/right political debates, so it is very difficult to separate the two even on those matters where that overlap isn't actually present.
The matter is made worse because right-leaning political groups are less ideologically opposed to being influenced by that enemy's main power: being able to buy stuff/opinions/people.
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[0] I assume you are meaning the arsehole rich¹ here
[1] There are some nice hyper-rich out there, but they aren't as vocal as the others so we don't hear much from/about them – much like the more moderate people with right-leaning views, who aren't heard over the yelling of others.
You got to be kidding me... Prospera / Honduras is nothing. It doesn't register. Libertarians, sadly I'd add, shall never ever have an ounce of success: all the powers that be in this world are out there to crush liberties, everywhere, worldwide.
Meanwhile The New York Times is titling an article: "The constitution is scared, but is it dangerous?"
There's nothing more belonging to the rich than the mainstream media, including the NYT. They were the people selling you the FTX scam and explaining you SBF was the second coming of Christ.
Now that Harris wants to "force congress to ban guns in her 100 days, or take executive orders if congress doesn't do it", of course that the NYT is publishing about the constitution being potentially dangerous.
And the problem is... Prospera in Honduras?
As long as you keep reading The NYT, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
Free speech is all that matters. Musk is not perfect by any means here but he is better than the rest. He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms. Which is what Twitter should have been doing, instead of kowtowing to the likes of the German and Saudi govts among others...
Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.
> He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms.
This is particularly absurd. “The first amendment” isn’t a paragon of freedom unique to the US. And it only applies to government censorship. You can’t “export it” to other countries by means of a social network.
>Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.
I am paying attention to what he does. I use Twitter for hours every day.
The point is less about "free speech", because of course you're right, this is Musk's version of free speech.
But the real issue to the left is that he's allowing speech that, in recent history, has been considered "dissenting" or restricted. The fact that in the past week we have had Zuck come out and say Facebook was pressured to censor COVID19 materials and that we have mainstream politicians and bureaucrats calling to THROW MUSK IN JAIL is insane. Utterly insane.
The people behind this are getting found out, and there will be political consequences.
According to its own statistics, Musk's Twitter complied with 83% of government takedown requests compared with 50% in the year before it was taken over, and he's found plenty of novel grounds for kicking people off Twitter for things which annoy him.
Obviously for people whose idea of freedom of speech begins and ends at actively promoting vice signalling in regimes which have some degree of speech protection whilst doing exactly what an autocrat like Erdogan asks because "you can't go beyond the laws of a country", Musk represents an improvement, but that doesn't have anything to do with promoting First Amendment ideology overseas.
> His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.
So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction to what the other tribe have been doing for ages?
He didn't fundamentally change Twitter. He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.
(I suppose he's also using it as his own personal megaphone, whereas the previous owners would merely ensure that chosen voices were amplified/suppressed rather than using their own voices directly)
Not sure how we start to approach some sort of disarmament process when it comes to these propaganda weapons, though.
> He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.
I'd say not. I don't think twitter itself wasn't aimed directly in any direction before Musk, other than “away from where firing may cause twitter problems”. They operated from a position of cowardice rather than political bias.
Sometimes this was towards the right because there was a fairly centrist or centre-left¹ bias online, but it often very much wasn't. For a clear case of them not aiming at the right, look at them leaving Trump and many like him alone at a time when they were flagrantly going against twitter policies, but slapping them for that would have caused too much grief back at them. It may be a complete coincidence², but Musk first started getting really serious about taking over around the time twitter started cracking down on that group (having joked about it prior to that IIRC, though it did take over a full year for his first actual takeover bid to happen).
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[1] These definitions are difficult. Often what America seems to see as centre-left or even actually moderate left, is things that many over this side of the big pond would see as more centrist.
Those unfair tactics, assuming I accept they existed⁰, were not twitter's by my understanding, but reactions to the whims (or perceived possible whims) of advertisers, or the bulk of users that advertisers were there to claim the eyeballs of.
I'll caveat this by saying I've never had a twitter account or any desire for one¹ meaning my views are those of an outsider and occasionally a passive reader – but from what I can see twitter acted from a position of cowardice² rather than any political machinations.
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[0] One man's fair slapping of an arsehole, is another man's unfair restriction of speech.
[1] At first it was a daft novelty, then a novelty that had perhaps outstayed its welcome, then just a place far too full of people who thought twitter was a good idea, then the famous got hold of it and it became a tribal shit-show & soon after a political shit-show – all before Musk jumped in with both feet and a lot of other people's money.
[2] Hence not kicking Trump (and a few others close to him or relevant rhetoric) despite flagrant breaches of their stated policies, until such time as he was a lesser threat due to not getting a second term, and before that kicking people not because of any internal moral code but because of what advertisers might think.
Not sure X posture against censure is to be taken seriously though. From Al Jazeera:
> In India, he agreed with an order imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take down accounts and posts related to a farmers’ protest that swept through the country in February, their demands including guaranteed prices for their produce and debt waivers.
Free speech is a dog whistle. We can't have actual "free speech" in the pure sense of the term (just like we can't have pure democracy) because it would erode public confidence and destroy our democratic nations in the process.
And there are outside actors currently working hard to ensure that this happens, because they want a return to the old imperial world order (where powerful nations capture territory and expand, and weaker nations die at their hands and are colonized).
The Soviet Union supported anti war, peace protests and free speech in leftist groups, but most of it was organic.
Russia purportedly supports free speech right wing groups, though I think the problem is vastly overstated in order to discredit them. Most of this is organic,too.
Whatever is the case, left or right, we cannot let our own beliefs be dictated by whatever Russia supports or co-opts at any given time. Similarly, vegetarians should not abolish their beliefs just because a notorious 20th century dictator was also a vegetarian.
It is sad that free speech became a dog whistle. Post WW2 up to at least 2000 free speech was a strong position of the left, Noam Chomsky being one of the most prominent examples.
Musk isn't hard right. There is a lot of overlap positions between him and Bill Clinton (the original one from the 1990s, I do not know what he says now), except that Musk is anti-war and obviously talks like he was on Usenet.
I can't understand that software engineers, who vigorously defended free speech and also the somewhat trollish communication style up to at least 2010, came to be assimilated and reprogrammed by their employers.
Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.
> Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.
It's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight what was a mistake and what was not. Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been. The question, of course, is WHAT needs to be censored, HOW MUCH it needs to be censored, HOW it should be censored, and WHO decides.
In the old days, it was easy: If it wasn't on prime time (TV, major newspapers, syndicated radio), it didn't exist. And this cabal served us well, providing a small number of voices to tell people who they were and what to believe.
Now with a potentially unlimited number of voices going up and down in popularity with unprecedented speed and across nations, we're headed into unknown territory, so there are going to be a lot of mistakes, and nobody can know for sure if our nations can even survive it.
> Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been.
No. There are very few things that 'need to be censored' by the government (or corporations with almost government-level power), and it's hard to think of any beyond CSAM or legitimate threats to national security.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that children should be protected from. But we're failing miserably at that. They're watching extreme porn and gore while the censors are focusing on silencing adults with the wrong political views.
Because they are old and have families now. Metoo and toxic behaviours did the rest. And, it is just not that important.
For me, Musk/Trump is indeed fresh trollish air in all this seriousness and iam astounded, that no one else enjoys it. But i also have the feeling, it is a last breath before police state takes over. Because a state can not allow its citizen to go rogue.
> Free speech is a dog whistle. We can't have actual "free speech" in the pure sense of the term
If you are in the U.S I am sorry you have this take on free speech, because it is distorted.
Free speech is defined by law and the law is clear. Freedom of speech means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government.
That is untrue and a very frustrating error (because it's so common). Freedom of speech is an ideal that one should be able to speak their mind without retaliation. The First Amendment is the law which guarantees freedom of speech with respect to the government. The two are not the same, and private actors can (and often do) violate freedom of speech.
You are definitely correct there. Twitter was a shit-show in this regard long before Musk came along and made it worse. They did far too little to enforce their own policies (let alone common decency) on things like bullying and hate content for far too long, for fear of losing users and therefore advertising money or being punished because some of those openly breaking those rules were in high power at the time, and this led to an “open season” feeling for all sides.
[for the avoidance of doubt: I've never had a twitter account, after the initial novelty stage it has always been far too full of the sort of people that think twitter is a good idea]
> Twitter was already super partisan long before he took it over
Sure. But Elon changed teams. He used to be bipartisan. But he chose a champion in the aftermath of Covid and--by the looks of it--he's chosen a bad one.
(In an alternate universe where Musk stuck to what he's good at, I could see the entire Artemis programme being delegated to SpaceX and a bipartisan adoption of Tesla as America's EV standard bearer. Instead, there is real political capital in creating a rival to SpaceX. And Tesla is going to have to constantly be on the defence against cheap Chinese imports from the Democrats and establishment Republicans.)
I really effing hate the idea that competition is created not because people with entrepreneurial spirit think they can do what SpaceX does cheaper and better, but because the guy running the show is politically undesirable and untrustworthy.
But that's not the issue: the issue is that Musk alienated almost the entire core demographic who wanted to buy Tesla's, wanted to support electric cars and were more or less completely primed to freely promote the entire brand.
He is a man who owns an electric car company but has been pushing climate change denialism as his political position and supporting politicians who do.
There's competition because Tesla is not the dominant prime mover it's valuation implies it should be, and people have sensed - correctly - a market opening. No one I know recommends "buy a Tesla" anymore for your first electric car - they say buy a Hydundai Ioniq or wait for a Chinese brand to get cheaper.
People are actively embarrassed to drive Teslas, which in turn means there's a growing market for "anything but a Tesla...". And because of that all of the actual faults of a Tesla are paid that much more scrutiny.
Tbh, not sure what percentage of Tesla buyers are ideologically motivated, but having tried a couple electric cars, I still believe the Model 3 is the best EV outside the premium segment, period.
As for Musk, he's a weird one for sure. He made me realize that I don't know the politics of most CEOs (or even know who they are). Which is just as well, I don't want to ponder in the supermarket whether my bodywash is ideologically consistent with my shampoo.
I missed out on his climate change denialism - if true that seem strange from the head of one of the most successful EV companies and arguably the company that finally got the EV revolution started since all the others were dragging their feet. He further sells solar roofs and off grid power.
Just a single man representing single family in Switzerland but you are right - I'll never buy anything from Tesla, couldn't care less if they are best or not (no they are not in 2024, novelty wore off some time ago with tons of competition, at least in Europe).
He showed his true colors, there is no correction possible, people just don't rewrite their core personality. Support for puttin' and overall war in Ukraine, support for dictators, very bad stance on many societal topics, treats his employees like slaves, proper piece of shit as a parent, utterly childish reactions of an immature boy rather than Man - we haven't seen the worst yet.
Brilliance in some aspects means nothing if its dragged down into mud by rest of personality. I know some still worship him for the positives and ignore or even appreciate the rest, I can't and won't.
I think people see Musk differently from how he actually is. Or at least how he sees himself.
He has always said, for many years, that he got into SpaceX to work towards the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species, and he got into electric cars to work towards the goal of having a sustainable energy society.
I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society, and if that threat isn’t addressed then the other goals don’t matter because society will collapse before they can be realized.
From a near term business perspective his political actions are dumb, but from a personal motivation perspective they make total sense.
Or in other words, Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex, not greed (which is unfortunate for investors).
> I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society
Musk blames 'wokeness' for his daughter rejecting him after he didn't accept who she was. His entire conflict with the left and the 'woke' is centered around this one issue. He can't accept that he was rejected because of what he has done, so he needs someone else to blame and fight with.
He bought X as his propaganda tool, he doesn't care about the consequences of his actions on society—he only wants to win.
> Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex
I don't think that's correct, it seems more likely that he was always driven by an inferiority complex.
> I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society
The issue is that many people who feel this way (seemingly Musk included) swing to the other extreme and embrace policy positions that only serve to further support and entrench systemic racism.
I'm not always comfortable with the methods and rhetoric of some social justice advocates, but I'm not going to present that as evidence that the movement they support is dangerous and we should strive for social injustice instead.
> he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society
Sure. I don't think he's a hypocrite. He has, however, hyper fixated on a topic that's in vogue in tech circles but totally irrelevant elsewhere.
Unlike in technology, where one can credibly fail upwards, doing that in politics comes at the cost of influence. And in this block order we're seeing, tangibly, the consequences of Elon Musk's deteriorating influence.
I do agree that he is hyper fixated on specific things like gender
but – I do think that there are elements of the “woke mind virus” that are okay with censorship. I don’t think that censorship has any place in a democracy, and I do think it is a problem we need to address.
The executive branch asked Twitter to ban a NY Post story on the grounds that it was misinformation when it wasn’t. It was “malinformation”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinformation
I really don’t like Elon, but I fear the previous Twitter censors more. Media is supposed to keep the government in check and not the other way around.
“ I do think that there are elements of the “woke mind virus” that are okay with censorship”
Then let’s not focus on some made up boogeyman and ignore the fact that in 2020, the executive at the time was happily reaching out to Twitter and other platforms asking them to remove posts. The guy Musk is supporting was happily asking Twitter to remove posts.
But let’s be clear, they were asking Twitter to enforce its rules. And you can argue that the government asking like that is illegal, but I’ve yet to see a guilty verdict in court so, until that happens, Twitter enforcing its rules isn’t censorship. No one has been denied their first amendment rights.
More importantly, by Musks own yardstick, Twitter is no longer the bastion of Free Speech it was when he took control. So regardless of what you think, Twitter is worse off now.
Musk’s Twitter actively censors and promotes content based on the personal whims of the billionaire owner. Is that really better for democracy?
The Twitter/X experiment seems to have primarily succeeded in demonstrating that nobody has good solutions for this problem, and just repeating words like “misinformation” and “free speech” doesn’t get us any closer to a solution.
Props to Bluesky for trying something else, at least.
Musk censors mentions of his own daughter on X — the same person who he claimed was dead on a recent interview, but who is very much alive and posting on Threads.
That kind of monarch-like behavior didn’t exist on Twitter before Musk. Their protocols for hiding and removing content may have been very flawed, but at least there was a process.
> What is this topic that's only in vogue in tech circles? Wokeism?
Wokeism as it pertains to social media's discussion of the woke mind virus. Everyone has an opinion on it. But it's not of practical relevance to most people, certainly not most voters. Sort of like modern art.
> Considering a ton of podcasts talk about it and they're not in the tech bubble I'd say it's a pretty important topic especially in the US
Yes, like modern art. It’s talked about a lot, especially by a particular core who gain money and influence from it. But it’s an obsession of a few and irrelevant to most Americans. It certainly doesn’t build one a national platform.
I don't know man, I'm not even from the US and I meet a lot of people being concerned about wokeism being imported into our country, do you have any proof of your allegations?
The reason I don't move to the USA is because of woke people, scary numbers of mental health and crime.
The reason I moved country is because woke politics is making life worse. Crime is through the roof, kids can't go out in the cities by themselves because it's too dangerous.
They started doing mandatory "gender identity" education in school, teaching crap to my kids.
I'm still in Europe and observing a progressive decline so I'm ready to move to Asia, the Caribbean, South America (Argentina maybe?) or maybe switch to the enemy and go to Russia or China, depending on how the situation evolves.
Dictatorship for dictatorship, I just want a low tax, safe place and governments to bother me as little as possible.
Some countries in Eastern Europe actively opposes gender stuff (it is banned in education). I do not know why "gender" is being asked in the first place, it should be "sex", and that is biological. Why do we ask for gender on websites, for example? What is the purpose of it, really?
> Why do we ask for gender on websites, for example? What is the purpose of it, really?
I can only think of two reasons:
1) Localised messages to and from the user. Not every language supports gender-neutral singular "you/they".
2) Demographic tracking e.g. for advertising: I've been given unskippable ads on YouTube for sanitary pads, and have forgotten which ad network presented me with one for dick pills.
85% sure: the claim here was that there are some languages where "you" itself comes in masculine and feminine forms. I'm told this applies to Hebrew and Arabic — אתה and את — but my ability to confirm this is limited to googling wiktionary.
85% is mainly how much I trust the sources: my experience has been kind of factoid is often true, but sometimes turns out to be "this source sounds like it means X, but actually it means Y" or worse "we made it up and you'll never check".
That said, I ought to have written "I can only think of two *good* reasons", because the third reason is "whenever anyone makes a database of people, we automatically add gender without even thinking about it".
I remember when the Toyota Prius was a potent symbol of everything that was wrong with smug liberals. Lazy comedians still use the Prius as a punchline. Why doesn't a Tesla Model 3 carry the same sort of political baggage? Why don't right-wing conspiracy theorists consider Musk to be part of the "WHO/WEF globalist elite", despite the fact that he's a tech billionaire who is literally trying to plug people's brains into The Matrix and colonise space?
By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan. Maybe he does really believe all of that stuff about "the woke mind virus", or maybe he realised that he can buy a priceless amount of political capital amongst people who would instinctively hate the goals of his project just by uttering the right incantations.
> Why doesn't a Tesla Model 3 carry the same sort of political baggage?
When was the last time you were in a red state? Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.
> By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan
Not how partisan affiliation works--think of someone who flip flops from one side to the other. They aren't seen as above the fray or non-partisan. Just unreliable (albeit, usually, useful).
> Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.
This surprises me (I believe you though!). I've read lots of articles and fun facts lately about how places like Texas go fastest at installing solar panels, because solar is now the cheapest source of energy and all. I'd blatantly assume that those new solar field owners would be charging their cars with their own electricity, also purely for money reasons and not climate/ideological ones.
If you want an honest answer to Prius vs Tesla, it's because Prius was seen as a slower and lamer version of existing cars for people who didn't care about cars. While Tesla's could get from 0-60 faster than hypercars of the time.
Tesla's offered an experience in terms of pure acceleration off the line that actually made them cool, even people who might never buy one wouldn't mind experiencing one off the line.
Yep. And he could have effortlessly achieved tolerability in most right wing circles that reflexively dislike "smug liberals" simply by not saying "smug liberal" stuff whilst encouraging right wingers to talk up what a great capitalist innovator he was, running red state targeted ad campaigns and making a pickup truck that people that normally drive gas-guzzlers would actually want to drive. His aspirations for colonies on Mars were already at least as appealing to much of the right as they ever were to the left.
Buying Twitter and wading into political debates isn't a depoliticization strategy, and if he'd wanted to pick a colour of his politics to optimize his business success (surprisingly unimportant when your product line is as far ahead of competition as SpaceX/Tesla have been) the correct choice would have been beige.
> By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan.
There is a significant amount of people choosing to not purchase a Tesla because they don’t want to be associated with Mr. Musk.
SpaceX is more insulated because there is essentially no alternative. If Yspace existed, I’m sure a significant amount of people would choose to champion that instead.
I think you’re vastly underselling how much Mr Musk his communications and his association with the new hyperbigoted misinformation-hub Xitter has turned people to dislike him, powerful and influential one’s among them.
It's in full swing here in Sweden too. Me and a close colleague bought new cars a couple of months apart. My left-leaning teammates who are usually pretty climate aware only offered congratulations to my colleagues new gasgussler, but had some criticisms for me who bought a Tesla.
I found it weird tho, like fair, they were pissed about Twitter, but surely the planet is the bigger issue?
Musk has pissed off the left to the point where the left is not thinking clearly about him and his companies anymore. Regardless of what you think about Musk, Tesla is actually pretty great.
Yup - the hole turned me off so much I've switched my first EV buy to Hyundai ioniq 5 (N if my wife authorises it LOL) ... not saying they're any better but it's a branding thing ... I couldn't stand to be associated with anything to do with that hole.
In the late 1990s there were still medical scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS. This was at a time when effective drugs were already approved and saving lives.
Those scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies. But imagine you were an HIV positive patient in 1995 and you latched on to this scientific debate to conclude that probably you should just eat a lot of vitamins and things will work out fine, since the scientists can’t seemingly even agree on whether you’ll get AIDS…
This is not a theoretical example. AIDS denialism cost hundreds of thousands of lives during roughly 1995-2005. There was a Nobel prize winner (Kary Mullis) who supported the movement with his authority despite never having done any HIV research. The government of South Africa was also involved for their own political reasons.
It was a lot like today’s climate change denialism and needs to be remembered. The major difference is that the personal consequences of HIV denialism were felt within a few years on an individual level, so the matter was resolved within decades. With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.
> With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.
The thing that is so maddening is that we're already feeling the effects of climate change, but the denialists just claim those effects either aren't really happening, or are caused by something else (without bothering to define "something else").
I said as much in my comment, pointing out that these scientists with differing takes were not the bad guys: “These scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies.”
The bad guys were the people who took this receding debate within the field as evidence of conspiracies and worse, and convinced thousands of people to treat their AIDS condition with quackery instead of effective drugs derived from the HIV-AIDS theory. The organized denialism killed people. That’s not science.
Well with climate change we have no scientists saying otherwise because we see they get attacked and lose funding by the quackery of the public and governments. As evident by the idiots on HN.
Funding is a red herring. Powerful interests would love to fund serious climate science that could assure the status quo is fine. If only they could find serious climate scientists willing to claim that.
Fifty years ago, there was no shortage of funding for medical scientists who tried to prove that tobacco didn't cause cancer. (You can guess where that funding came from.)
> he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society
If “woke” involves an understanding that media is mostly filtered through large corporations and crafts narratives used to serve the interests of the ruling class, I’m not surprised a billionaire owner of a media company would consider that a problem.
Rather than identifying actual problems people are facing, media wastes our time with irrelevant distractions. Don’t worry about the opioid epidemic. Don’t worry about the fact that kids increasingly can’t even read after graduating high school. Don’t worry about corporate consolidation and monopolies. You should be worrying about “wokeism”.
He was able to find or buy people and companies smart and capable enough to deliver this for him, and he was often, but not always smart enough to listen to them (ie tesla autopilot fiasco - example of an ego playing with him). He was so successful with spacex because nobody really dared/bothered to enter that space and existing companies had 0 pressure to deliver better but that's more of government fail. He personally didn't come up with any of those impressive feats like electric cars of vertical rocket landings, thats a ridiculous proposition when all he is is a competent manager.
Now he is slowly rolling back some of those hard won achievements, and competition catching up and/or overtaking in many others.
Occasional well-thought-out, ambitious, and positive talking points combined with a whole lot of keeping his mouth shut seemed to work pretty well for him.
Oh so it is now "wise" to "keep mouth shut". No wonder the West is so screwed. It has a lot of "wise men". Very few, like Elon, who will put their money where their mouth is. What you consider "wise", in this context at least, is basically to just put your head down, accept the diktats of authority, entertain the crazed loonies in society and it is all sunshine and rainbows!
That’s been true since the dawn of communication. It’s called picking your battles. You don’t badmouth a judge while he’s considering your sentence or insult a robber while they have you tied up with a gun pointed at a loved one.
"while Musk is a proponent of free speech, he believes that moderation on Twitter should ‘hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates"
India has laws on content moderation, so does China, Turkey and other countries listed in the article. What Law in Brazil did X break? Or was it the whims and fancies of the Judge?
Quoting from X post below [1]:
“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts. Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.
We are absolutely not insisting that other countries have the same free speech laws as the United States. The fundamental issue at stake here is that Judge de Moraes demands we break Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that.
In the days to come, we will publish all of Judge de Moraes’ illegal demands and all related court filings in the interest of transparency.
Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders.”
You keep saying “we”. Do you work for X, formerly Twitter? If not, who exactly are you? If you’re in any way related to the case or the companies or governments involved, there’s a major conflict of interest in this conversation and your defences. It’s good form to disclose those so that potential biases can be properly taken into consideration.
If you don’t have anything intelligent to say, yes, nothing is usually best.
> accept the diktats of authority
Is this not what Musk is doing in China? Does he not believe the Chinese have a right to free speech? If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights, you might say that hurts the West.
> Is this not what Musk is doing in China? Does he not believe the Chinese have a right to free speech? If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights, you might say that hurts the West.
China has a unilateral ban on all non-Chinese apps. Not just Twitter/X. They have the Great Firewall for a reason. Now for Musk to accept "diktats of authority", X should have been operating in China in the first place. It is not since 2009 at least. Whereas X was operating in Brazil until few days ago.
> If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights
When he did he got reprimanded by the Chinese CCP. He did not give a fuck [1].
> you might say that hurts the West
The West does more trade with China than with any other country. And yes it does hurt the West considering it is so dependent on China for everything including medicines! And a lot of that has to do with "wise men" in politics who decided it was cool to establish trade relations with a Dictatorship in the 1970s and ensured that the entire World's supply chain relied on said Dictatorship. If not for these "wise men", none of us would have been dependent on China in the first place.
Free speech is a human right. Either Musk believes Chinese should enjoy free speech or he doesn’t. The fact that he seems to be more vocal about his business interests (Brazil) than actual human rights tells me he puts his mouth where his money is, not the other way around.
He has always said he believes everyone (which includes the Chinese too) should enjoy Free Speech (calling himself an absolutist) while at the same time saying that he will abide by Laws of the country. If the Chinese people want Free Speech it is for the Chinese people to revolt against the CCP. It is not Elon's decision as he is not operating X there. In the case of Brazil, the Judge wants X to break Brazilian laws, which X is not going to comply with. Simple as that. Free Speech became an issue only when the Judge banned X. It became an issue because Brazil has Free Speech Laws (or at least had in effect and not just on paper like China). If Brazil wants to go the CCP route then nothing can stop that from happening. Neither Elon, you or me.
I can’t believe people think that the FBI or the Biden and Trump campaigns asking for disinformation to be taken down during an election and the people at Twitter making a call on that request is somehow a smoking gun showing some kind of conspiracy. It’s ridiculous!
Firstly, Twitter took that down because it violated their long standing policy against doxxing/posting hacked materials, not for any political reason.
Secondly, Twitter leadership realized very quickly that their policy wasn't really designed for this specific event, and within a day they changed the policy and unblocked the posts that they had blocked.
And now it's 2 years later and uninformed people still bullshit here about election interference and this being a first amendment issue (Twitter is a private company and can block whatever posts it likes).
> Firstly, Twitter took that down because it violated their long standing policy against doxxing/posting hacked materials, not for any political reason.
That was a BS reason chosen by Twitter. Twitter Files exposed that already. You are late.
> Secondly, Twitter leadership realized very quickly that their policy wasn't really designed for this specific event, and within a day they changed the policy and unblocked the posts that they had blocked.
Yeah you clearly haven't read the Twitter Files. It shows.
> And now it's 2 years later and uninformed people still bullshit here about election interference and this being a first amendment issue.
Because it clearly was and now even Zuckerberg has come out admitting that it was interference.
> (Twitter is a private company and can block whatever posts it likes)
Sure. But if FBI is involved, it does not become a Twitter issue alone but it becomes Government censorship through a private company. That is election interference and a first amendment violation.
There is much more story that you’re either uninformed about or willfully ignoring. The correct move was to remove people from harms way for decisions they have no control over, hence their staff exit from the country.
The threats were themselves due to failing to follow a court order.
I'm not qualified to tell if the judge giving them is a partisan hack or not, just like I can't make that distinction with the judges that Musk appears to shop for in the US with what others describe as SLAPP lawsuits.
But obeying a judge isn't optional in either case.
There are various accounts on Twitter which were being investigated etc. for criminal misconduct, Twitter was given a court order to block those accounts. I have no idea if that order was itself justified (IANAL and I don't speak Brazilian) but the orders were given by someone with authority to give them.
Twitter refused the order, which means that Twitter is interfering with the legal process in Brazil. This sounds like "contempt of court" to me, which is a thing which results in a judge sending people to prison — no idea what it is in Brazil, but IIRC the maximum penalty in my country of birth is 2 years' imprisonment.
Brazil's legal system requires companies like Twitter to have an office in the country in order to receive such orders, which I think means it's literally her job to make those orders happen. Regardless, by closing the office Twitter was directly violating Brazilian law.
As companies cannot themselves be imprisoned, I do not see what alternative there would be than directing obligations onto a specific human. Buck has to stop somewhere, and while I know a lot of people who would celebrate if this judge decided that the correct somewhere was "international arrest warrant/request extradition of Elon Musk personally", I suspect this judge would have to go through a few more checkboxes before that doesn't get "major diplomatic incident" written all over it.
(Perhaps less of an incident if it's concurrent with the EU saying "We're issuing Twitter with a 6% fine on their global annual turnover for non-compliance with the Digital Services Act", which seems to be another battle Musk is Leeroy-Jenkins-ing himself into).
I can't think of any country I'd consider having a strong rule of law that would start arresting employees for the actions of their companies that they themselves have no say in.
Effectively, the judge makes it impossible for X to defend itself in court because he'll just have anyone arrested who tries. That's not something you'll find in the developed world these days.
> Effectively, the judge makes it impossible for X to defend itself in court because he'll just have anyone arrested who tries.
No, on two counts.
First, Twitter is free to seek out a lawyer to represent them in court. Most people hire lawyers for contract work rather than as a permanent employee, so this remains possible even with no assets within Brazil.
Second, there was nothing to be defended until they refused to comply with the lawfully given order within the required deadline.
That they chose to fire their staff member and close the office in order to prevent compliance with the lawfully given order, was an actual offence in its own right. To my limited understanding, it is also an offence in its own right to refuse a lawfully given court order. But in both cases, Twitter was not being punished until they actually broke the law.
Courts in the UK and the USA may issue an injunction, both to prohibit and/or to compel an action, and this may bind on people not directly before the court:
Compare and contrast Twitter in Brazil with Lavabit in the USA: Lavabit was ordered to provide certain information in secret (with an injunction to not talk about it); they protested, they first provided that information in an obtuse form that was considered contempt, they provided it in a form which was acceptable, then they closed their business in response and took further legal action in response to what they — and, to be clear, I — consider to have been a manner incompatible with the public view of American Democracy:
"""Levison said that he could be arrested for closing the site instead of releasing the information, and it was reported that the federal prosecutor's office had sent Levison's lawyer an email to that effect."""
and
"""Levison wrote that after being contacted by the FBI, he was subpoenaed to appear in federal court, and was forced to appear without legal representation because it was served on such short notice; in addition, as a third party, he had no right to representation, and was not allowed to ask anyone who was not an attorney to help find him one. He also wrote that in addition to being denied a hearing about the warrant to obtain Lavabit's user information, he was held in contempt of court. The appellate court denied his appeal due to no objection, however, he wrote that because there had been no hearing, no objection could have been raised. His contempt of court charge was also upheld on the ground that it was not disputed; similarly, he was unable to dispute the charge because there had been no hearing to do it in."""
Musk and his people officially don’t have any control over political decisions taken in any country, be it Brazil, Germany, or even home in the US. And they shouldn’t but by virtue of a ton of money thrown towards politicians, and general US global influence, many times this happens.
So your explanation should be rewritten as “remove people from the way of legal consequences from breaking local laws they/Musk can’t control (buy) in their favor”.
It sounds like the same thing but it’s the difference between fleeing persecution and fleeing prosecution.
Better to stand strong in the principles of the 1st amendment than bend the knee to a foreign government. Free speech is the milk of the gods, the US constitution is something to be coveted...
From the Brazilian position, it's better for them not to bend to a foreign non-government organization which has been assisting people trying to overthrow the Brazilian Constitution.
But HN seems to think that Brazilians are NPCs without politics or constitution of their own.
Since Musk took ownership, the company has received 971 government demands, and fully complied with 808 of them.
Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.
To be honest with the current polarisation levels in politics it's no longer possible to be neutral. The conservative side is now even strongarming companies into abandoning their diversity programs! This is just really not ok, I'm part of the LGBTIQ+ support network in our company and this kind of thing is really making waves. People are worried, even though we're a Europe based company where this is not a contested topic (though we do have many offices in the US). See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.
Many US companies are now feeling forced to choose a side. At least I now know which to boycott..
DEI was a political statement—one that you agreed with and felt was necessary. Abandoning DEI is also a political statement—one that you disagree with and think is not okay.
You're welcome to disagree with the people who disagree with DEI, but I'd hesitate to claim that these companies were "strongarmed" into it—the programs always existed as a political tool for the company to curry favor, not as something that was added for its intrinsic practical or moral value. The political climate has changed, which means they no longer serve their true purpose.
The important takeaway from this reversal is that the progressive theory of change that's been leaned on for the past few decades was a bad one. We thought that a lot of progress had been made, but it turns out it was all surface level and easy to undo when the pressure to keep up appearances went away or reversed. "We need to do this because it will look bad if we don't" is a very fickle tool for motivating real change.
Well companies are by their very nature immoral. They don't care about any kind of morals, just making money. You even have to strongarm them into following the law (see Boeing, Volkswagen etc).
Yes. Which is why lasting change will never come from persuading the leadership of companies that your personal set of morals need to be followed if they want to be successful—they'll follow you for as long as you are powerful and bail as soon as you aren't.
You have to change hearts and minds within the broader population in order to bring lasting power towards change, but that's something that the modern crop of progressives entirely gave up on 10+ years ago in favor of racing to the finish line and declaring victory prematurely.
(Cue comments that the right can't be reasoned with so there's no point in trying.)
> You have to change hearts and minds within the broader population in order to bring lasting power towards change, but that's something that the modern crop of progressives entirely gave up on 10+ years ago in favor of racing to the finish line and declaring victory prematurely.
I can't speak for America as I've never been there, but here in Southern Europe it was pretty successful and at least LGBTIQ+ are really well accepted now <3 I know many clubs where people get banned if they make racial or gender slurs but in general it doesn't even happen.
I think part of the issue is that what is considered "left" in America (liberal/democratic party) is still very right-wing here in Europe, especially in economical terms, not as much in social ones. What the republican represent would be radical-right here.
Europe shifted culturally, but cultural changes in America take much more time because there's just so much diversity of people spread across such a large landmass. Real change was going to take a long time, and Progressive efforts here to push too far too fast created an equal and opposite reaction that directly led to the populist movement that has been exploited by Donald Trump.
I think that the fact that Europe leans further left than the US is actually part of the problem we have with moving at all— American progressives got impatient to join you and lost the discipline and patience that characterized previous generations' efforts towards change. The approach they've taken instead is entirely ineffective and, as bemoaned by the parent commenter, creates short-lived successes that quickly get rolled back.
>The conservative side is now even strongarming companies into abandoning their diversity programs! This is just really not ok, I'm part of the LGBTIQ+ support network in our company and this kind of thing is really making waves.
Sorry pal, you're going to have to make it on merits, not your gender or skin color.
>See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.
Racial quotas in the workplace is not progress.
>At least I now know which to boycott..
Oh, so your boycotts are fine? Classic leftist hypocrisy.
> Sorry pal, you're going to have to make it on merits, not your gender or skin color.
I'm not advocating for positive discrimination. Just no discrimination at all.
It's very important to have the proper procedures in place for when that does happen. That was part of the diversity programs. Programs against bullying, education for managers on gender identity and how to deal with the difficulties around them, how to pick up on bullying etc. It's this kind of thing that I do myself (not as a job but as a voluntary side assignment in my job). It's amazing what kind of sexism and racism you hear when you go on a company trip and have a few drinks with high-level managers. So clearly this work is still highly needed.
Don't forget these programs were started because things were going the wrong way, people who were different than the standard cishetero white male had less chance to a job and were making less money when they did get one. This is of course not acceptable.
I don't think quotas are the answer. But rather fines when a company goes too far askew. "We only hire white cristians here" just cannot be acceptable.
> Racial quotas in the workplace is not progress.
That was only one small part of the diversity programs, and not one I necessarily agree with.
> Oh, so your boycotts are fine? Classic leftist hypocrisy.
I never said boycotts are wrong anyway. If right wingers want to boycott companies like Apple, go ahead.
It's absolutely contested in Europe. "Why is the NHS spending so much money on diversity officials when they don't have enough doctors" is a long standing complaint by many people and politicians in the UK, for example.
True there's some exceptions. The UK has indeed fallen to American-style polarisation. As have the Netherlands where an extreme-right regime now reigns.
But most of Europe is still sane, luckily.
Ps rather than blaming transsexualism it might be smarter to blame the Tories who have been skimming (and selling off to their own companies) the NHS until there was nothing left.
> We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades
Which "we" are you speaking for? That doesn't sound like the tech world, we've had a lot of explicitly political tech movements over the years. Off the top of my head some of the more successful and major ones were:
- Cryptography.
- Free Software.
- Cryptocurrency.
The Silicon Valley based companies have been politically active since at least 2016, there have been a couple of political exoduses by various groups to alternative platforms. The non-Silicon-Valley companies have been worse and generally suspect to the point where nobody expected political apathy (is anyone going to claim that Chinese social media are not politically subordinate to the state?).
> Which "we" are you speaking for? That doesn't sound like the tech world...Silicon Valley based companies have been politically active since at least 2016
That was the tipping point. Before Trump, it was common to hear techies in the Bay Area proudly proclaim that they didn't concern themselves with politics. (Reminds me of the way aristocratic Europeans talk about commerce.)
Tech always had views on policy. But it wasn't outwardly opinionated on politics, certainly not partisan politics, in the overt (and influential) way that it is today.
If you figure out what that difference is, let me know. The tech scene has been decidedly liberal (old school liberal, nowadays people maybe call that libertarian) and as political as it can be since the start. There has been a trend where other political cultures are getting involved too since ... probably the Obama campaign was when politicians really started noticing that spreading messages through the internet was more effective than going through the corporate news. But that is just a change of affiliations (maybe more accurately a broadening), tech has always been affiliated with someone.
"Political" is anything related to inter-personal power in society, and can be anything from maintaining a homeowner's association bylaws to international spy-craft and assassinations, and is so broad as to be unavoidable in human behaviour.
"Political affiliation" is much narrower and comes with a specific named politician or political party — even if they're not going to get in, such as Lord Buckethead or the Green Party of America.
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