`github-actions[bot]` was disabled for some time, if that's the actor which does the checkout in your setup it could be related. FWIW it's back to working now.
In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."
Every evil propaganda corp has a cutesy brand name like that. Names like Voice of the People, or Electoral Freedom Foundation, or Moms for Liberty, or Free America Foundation or First Amendment Recovery Temple (I definitely made that one up, and some of the others).
It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."
Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
That's why political parties were invented, so you don't need to create name recognition for every candidate.
Those signs aren't changing anyone's mind. But a party is something people can talk about and understand. It's unifying.
Giving a fuck means engaging with party politics and making it part of your day to day life (at least during election season).
Signs are the laziest and most inconsequential way of supporting a candidate. By far the best way is to convince everyone that you know in person to vote for a particular candidate.
In 2016, just 400 American families were the source of 50% of all election money that year. If your "candidate" is going to "rein in big tech," how the hell are they supposed to raise money from them? And if they aren't going to do that, where will that money go?
Your views seem to be rather ... idealistic. This TED lecture[0] is only 18 minutes long and it offers rather a chilling perspective on any sensible reform.
We can't solve the general problem of English syntax ambiguity in a HN headline, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be precise about the literal names of things
> the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.
I thought that children at any age can complain to the police. The filing side on the criminal case is "State" -- or "People", or "Rex/Regina" (and not the person complaining, regardless of the age.)
> It’s much harder to back into a cramped parking space than backing out into an open space.
With cramped parking spaces, your real options are (a) backing into it or (b) driving forward into it. When you need to have a 90 degree turn, option (a) gives you more control over the eventual position of your car, and is frequently the only option.
The flagging mechanism, as it exists, feels a little… cowardly (?) to me.
What if, instead of the existing mechanism, we posted in the comments, "Please Flag", and follow that with our rationale.
Mods could "read the room" (so to speak) and flag the article. You might still argue as to whether an article should have been flagged but at least the receipts exist to show why the mods acted.
America does have basically every characteristic of fascism on every important list of fascism characteristics ever made.
That's actually kind of important to the tech community, considering we are wildly complicit in this.
So, maybe consider that more than "politics junkies" might be interested in this, and that the tech billionaires might have a vested interest in making sure stories like this get flagged (very easily done).
> the tech billionaires might have a vested interest in making sure stories like this get flagged
Interestingly, this "anyone with an opinion different from mine must be a paid shill" argument doesn't pop quite as often in the discussions about Clovis Culture tools, Roman Empire letters, or pre-Linotype typesetting -- the fact that makes me think that maybe keeping politics out of HN is actually a good thing.
I don't live in the US so this doesn't quite enrage me, especially since I'm aware that every US president gets tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars in donations to their election campaigns, so a gold statue does not look like a big deal when compared to that.
> "anyone with an opinion different from mine must be a paid shill"
Not remotely what I said. One of the better HN guidelines here is to try and interpret comments you read in the best possible light. I recommend it.
What I actually said is simply correct - there are tech billionaires who do have strong reasons to flag certain topics on HN.
And there's no way to stop them from doing so. We rely solely on 100% opaque moderation to unflag stories.
There's no shortage of people who have complained about how often threads concerning Musk, DOGE, the Lawnmower guy, Thiel, certain genocidal countries etc get wiped from here...
Do you see those threads? Unless you have [showdead] on, and browse /active, almost certainly not... Because they get flagged, and they're not put back. Discussion of how HN's flagging system works - or doesn't - is explicitly banned at the post level. You can only talk about it in comments.
So, no, that isn't just my opinion, or paranoia. And the fact that you don't know how often those stories are unfairly flagged and never put back is actually evidence of the tightness of the blinkers here. It's been crazy this past year - just try looking at my favorites.
Your favourites have tons of "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" stuff. The fact that so much of it is flagged is a feature of this place, not a bug. This feature is why I keep coming here almost daily for the last 15 years or so.
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