But no less deserving of being executed. His decisions led to the deaths of thousands. Justice — in the true sense of the word — demands an answer for this. If the systems we have in place won’t do it, then extrajudicial means are justified. And encouraging to see, frankly.
Just because his crimes were legal does not mean he should not face punishment.
I’m not entirely sure if I understand the point you’re making, but let me try an analogy.
We are all forced to buy a car. There is no one with a gun to our head forcing such a purchase, or a law specifically requiring you to buy a car. But nevertheless the laws are structured so that everyone realistically must buy a car, whether they want to or not.
If you chose not to buy a car then your life will be dramatically more expensive and difficult to live, because of the network effects of this requirement.
So while you are technically free to not buy a car, realistically you are forced to do so.
> If you chose not to buy a car then your life will be dramatically more expensive and difficult to live, because of the network effects of this requirement.
That depends where you live. In Chicago, for example, your life will be simpler and less expensive if you don't own a car.
I don't understand this as a blanket rule either. My life is dramatically less expensive because of not having a car. I don't have to fill it with gas. I don't have to carry insurance. I choose not to have a car, and while somethings are less convenient it does not prevent me from existing. I have an ebike and it suffices for everything thing that is a necessity for me. For the other things, rental for a weekend away is very much a thing.
Now, for people that choose to live in the further reaches of suburbia where things are not nearly as close, then cars become more of a need. But that is a decision when location to suburbia or further was made.
Eh, eventually there is a network effect and much of everything needs a car.
If you happen to live in one of the numerous cities in the US that has a hollowed out core, you need a car even if you live downtown. And often the cities that have vibrant walkable downtowns are expensive to move to.
Any city with a "downtown" is in 2024 going to have uber/lyft, probably bus services of some sort, and there's always cycling. Groceries and supplies can be delivered to your door. There is less need for a car today than there has been in a long time.
You’re still forced to participate in car culture if you use Lyft/Uber/Instacart, you’ve just added middlemen and increased the cost even further.
This comment comes across as incredibly privileged, to be honest. Most people must drive to work. Asking them to use Uber for such a purpose is just… it’s kind of infuriating.
Eh, I lived for 7 years without a car in suburbs. Granted the local market, and I specifically mean market vs supermarket, was a 5 minute walk from me, the supermarket was a 30 minute walk if I felt fancy that night, and Amazon delivered.
I will grant that I was within walking distance of the last stop on the local metros subway system so maybe some people wouldn’t consider that the suburbs, but it was considered so for the city.
Also just broke 20k miles last week on my vehicle I bought in 2021 after moving to the countryside so it’s not like ive
this sounds like not the US. in the vast majority of the US traditional markets/small groceries are effectively extinct and illegal to build new in a financially sensible way.
I don’t have enough data to give you an answer one way or another but this was New England and we have a lot of things that are common for us but weird for the rest of the country by dint of being where colonization efforts were good enough to be started and built up, but not so bad that they are worth replacing.
Examples include individual shops that used to be called markets which are not farmers markets or supermarkets, basements in all/most homes, and town halls being an expectation of normal governance rather than a newsworthy event
Ironically, outside the US I managed to live until the age of 41, before I caved in and got a driver's license. Instead, I got around by train, tram, bus, bicycle, feet and taxi. I would argue, that in a society not designed to require a car, you are not really forced to.
The car industry has been lobbying congress and locales for 50+ years. Laws like jaywalking were at the behest of car companies, and that alone makes walking legally very difficult in nearly any area with a downtown.
The lack of subsidies certainly don't help. Neither does the insatiable appetite for new cars.
It's more like, you think you are free, because from birth society and CorpGov condition you to operate within an accepted status quo, and incentives are structured in order to support that.
But the moment you question the status quo, or try to go against it, you find yourself targeted by corporate and social violence. You might lose your job, the respect of your peers, your family, house, car or more.
Here is an easy example:
A portion of your tax money is funding genocide and anti-democratic military coups in Israel and other countries.
If you decide (as any rational citizen should) to no longer pay income tax knowing that you lack any discretion over how it is spent, and you decide to demand a more transparent and restricted tax system, then the government will threaten you with economic hardship and even prison. They will surveil and discredit you if you receive any modicum of notoriety, just as they do to sociopolitical activists and protestors.
You won't be able to operate a business while opposing income tax laws, and thus conscious political action is relegated to the elite, who don't need to work, and the poor, who already don't significantly benefit from the system. The rest of the working class is forced to play ball, or lose everything.
That's not freedom, even if it looks like Freedom™ to a certain class of bootlickers who are conditioned to maintain the status quo, even if it means turning on their neighbor.
The ICC recognizes Netanyahu as a war criminal. The UN recognizes and denounces the genocide taking place in Gaza.
Just because you want to be ignorant to reality doesn't make you correct or worth listening to. There is nothing to allege. The genocide is happening, it's well-documented, no matter what you choose to believe. Take your bootlicking drivel somewhere else.
And no, you're missing the point. Thanks to our Bill of Rights, we currently are able to publicly denounce the genocide. That doesn't mean I'm free to disentangle myself from the economic pipeline fueling it.
Just because you can point to some amount of freedom doesn't invalid the fact that going against the status quo opens you up to state and social violence. Reread my post.
> “less taxes, no wars!” party just won the US election
Surely you have an ounce of intelligence to recognize that it is purely lip service, and both parties are considered far right by any progressive standards.
Trump, like those before him, works for the elite, and gives them tax breaks, while letting the middle class take on the brunt of the taxes. He is also pro-war, just like his opposing candidate Kamala Harris was.
I think your comment would be much more effective if it didn’t attack another person. It’s an emotional topic but we should assume the best in people we talk to. Maybe they just aren’t aware of everything you are, in which case showing them can be very effective.
You're correct, and usually I try to be extremely measured in how I interact here, avoiding appeals, fallacies and insults.
However, I have an understandably short fuse for anyone with the audacity to not just claim ignorance, but actively put forth a narrative that no genocide is taking place. I've spent too long being nice and understanding to these people.
There is little hope in connecting with them via fair argument, because they only understand appeals to authority (thus my invocation of the ICC and UN), but selectively reject them as well. They reject sound arguments in favor of feelgood statements. It takes that caliber of person to arrogantly proclaim in December, 2024 that there is no genocide.
The most effective option for dealing with this kind of person would actually be to disengage and not respond. However, that opens up the possibility that someone else reads their comment, and when not presented with a counterargument, takes their argument in good faith.
I mean, look at his yet unanswered reply to my statement. How do you even begin to engage fruitfully with something like that? They set up a system of biases and then try to frontrun you by invoking the words "bias" and "projection" before you can use them, engaging in a preemptive tu quoque [0].
You don't even get a chance to attack their core arguments, because they're shielded by a continuously growing pile of weaker arguments, and you'll get lost in a meta-argument about semantics or some other trapdoor.
Sometimes ignorant people are just ignorant, and they need to hear it. But I do generally agree with you, and thanks for the criticism!
The best thing to do is absolutely to disengage from your extremely toxic and ignorant style of communication. You have no intention of having a fair discussion or establishing any common ground. You came into my thread looking to start shit, not to consider and share new ideas.
Your arguments are steeped in bias, conservative talking points, and after reviewing your comment history, I just see a cesspool of ignorant, bigoted takes and projection.
I've already argued against your talking points a thousand times with others who share your exact same spoonfed worldview. There is no need to do it again.
Hacker News is not the place for this kind of behavior, and I hope one day you lose some ego and grow up.
The burden of evidence is not on me, at some point there is enough overwhelming public evidence for something that the burden of evidence shifts to you to disprove general consensus.
I think it's better to leave the exercise of Googling "evidence of genocide in Gaza" and "history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict" to you, the reader. It will teach you some basic research and inference skills.
Certainly, if I try to link to government and NGO press releases, Wikipedia articles, social media accounts of field press and Palestinians, or news articles, I run a very high risk of you conveniently denouncing my sources as biased before you even try to critically engage with them. It's better that you encounter sources on your own, corroborate them and follow hyperlinks, taking time to really understand the heart of this conflict. There is a lot of geopolitical and economic history coming into play here.
> You’re literally going against the status quo right now — you just aren’t allowed to arbitrarily not pay your taxes
You have a narrow definition of "going against the status quo" which conveniently suits your argument. However, that is clearly not the definition which I used when laying out my argument. It is disingenuous to purport a straw man argument derived from manufactured ambiguity. You know what I mean, do not deflect and devolve into a meta-argument about the meaning of my words.
laws are structured? or just the cumulative impact of societies decisions.
humans are social creatures, of course if everyone else has a car it is going to be inconvenient for you to not have one. this is not a solvable problem
The problem is that corporate interests pushed for a car-centric society. You can't point to consumer choice as a justification for the current system, when we were given little choice to begin with.
It might seem like a moot point in San Francisco where there is free public transit, but in cities like mine, there is an intentional lack of alternatives, in order for cars to be leveraged as a self-reinforcing socioeconomic class boundary.
> The problem is that corporate interests pushed for a car-centric society
I'd say it's more NIMBY interests than corporate interests.
The US, in contrast to Asia and Europe, builds sprawling suburbs, consisting only of single-family houses, with no multi-story apartment complexes and no other services/infrastructure in walking distance.
Most people would tell you that they don't want things to be this way, but will actually complain about proposals to make things better.
If you build apartment complexes, you can fit more people in a smaller area, which makes public transit a lot more economical. Add the fact that you don't need to go anywhere far at all for a lot of things, like grocery shopping for example, and that makes you need a car a lot less.
It's also worth considering that the US has been constantly rich for the last century or so, it has been far less affected by the second world war, dictatorships and communism than Europe and Asia, which made cars a lot less of a luxury, and hence made public transit a lot less of a necessity.
Leveraging cars as a self-reinforcing socioeconomic class boundary is a direct consequence of all of this, but also one more (self-reinforcing) reason why people need cars. You just can't do that sort of thing in Europe, if there are well-off people without cars, you can't assume that well-off people have cars, so well-off people will keep not having cars, and so it goes.
Maybe in your specific case, that is cities with poor public transit, but the US is massive and has always required some form of long distance travel. One can make arguments for corporate interests in expensive gas-guzzlers, completely eliminating the small and medium sized automobiles, or for corporate-backed government decisions in new city infrastructure being less accessible without a car, but we have a car-centric society here because they are physically required for the majority of Americans to get from A to B, and there is literally no way of fixing that.
> but we have a car-centric society here because they are physically required for the majority of Americans to get from A to B, and there is literally no way of fixing that.
The majority of Americans trying to get from A to B are driving less than 60 km/day, a distance which trains can cover pretty damn fast.
For longer travel you could have high speed trains on both coasts' corridors, very few people are traveling NYC -> LA on a regular basis, most people will travel on their surroundings (500-1000 km).
You could have a multimodal system covering the most important urban corridors, rural places would almost always need cars due to the low density but it's a big fat lie that the USA is car-centric because it's the only solution for its size.
The only reason you are a car-centric country in 2024 is because of incentives for the car industry, the design of your cities being stuck in car-centric mindset from the 1950s-1960s.
You don't need to give up cars completely, you just need infrastructure to not require a car for people traveling around your major urban centres. High speed rail corridors between Seattle - Portland - San Francisco - Los Angeles - Las Vegas - Phoenix, another corridor from Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - Baltimore - DC branching out to Pittsburgh - Cleveland - Detroit - Chicago. With those you cover a lot of the major economic centres.
China is also massive and they've managed it.
Except for some new shiny skyscraper, the USA feels more backwards each time I visit, like the country is stuck in the 1980s-1990s and refuses to be updated to how a modern country can be in 2024.
What I said is obviously correct, especially historically, and you pointed out exactly why: medium travel, which is far more prevalent than simply modern suburbia. Have you even been outside a city? Take a quick glance at history and you will see just how crucial private transport for medium-long distance is in America. Horses and buggies have been a mainstay before the car. Rail is simply too inflexible to support medium travel in sparsely populated areas. And medium travel is what I would classify most rural Americans are from their nearest grocer. Long distance via train, that makes sense. A centralized rail system, such as subway, in a city also makes sense to cover medium distances. However, we already have the infrastructure to handle medium distances without new expensive rails, that being highways. The cost to fit rails across the entire US would be enormous, and that’s ignoring the long term costs such as staffing and maintenance.
In my small town, we have roughly 125 people. We are, roughly, 35 minutes away from the nearest grocery store, or about 40 miles. Too long to walk or bike in a reasonable time. You could use a motorized bike but the amount of food for a family would be unwieldy. The only viable solution is to drive via car, because you need the trunk space. And both options to get there require roads. Now, let’s suppose we magically replaced highways for rails. What happens is simple: either the government is bleeding immense amounts of money orchestrating train rides to places where no one is regularly using it, or certain less populated areas are underserved.
My experience has been different. Rails is good for everything from small internal projects to larger, enterprise level projects. Like all languages and frameworks, it requires discipline and good practices for the code to remain robust and maintainable, but functionally I’m not aware of anything that fits what you describe in your second paragraph.
Point I was trying to make was that low-code is a lock-in IMO, and I would pick Ruby, Django, or whatever any day for no other reason than being able to modify/maintain/own code.
That was 40 years ago. In the interim capitalism has won and democracy is failing. Agreements like Montreal will never happen again, at least not in our lifetimes.
Look no further than the failure of the Paris Agreement and the ascent of authoritarianism worldwide. No one cares about environmental agreements, certainly not those in the rarified airs of billionaires, oligarchs, and other captains 9f industry.
Montreal Protocol is Global. EU Agreements are EU-Only, and Europe is only a small part of the World, comparatively, and almost irrelevant manufacturing wise, compared to China/India/SE Asia/USA combined.
If we're talking about Global climate or pollution impact, the EU alone agreeing won't cut it.
> This and the Montreal Protocol wasn't achieved with a self-defeating attitude, though.
What's clear is that the attitudes of those of us in favour of such measures has only achieved the opposite is the last decade, as the user you're replying to has rightfully pointed out. Optimism has gotten us nowhere.
I personally doubt that the American government has the power to be able to do such things. Regardless, the incoming administration will under no circumstances impose such restrictions, or push for them to be created. I seem to recall that the previous Trump administration removed restrictions around asbestos, to give you an idea.
Libertarians gonna libertarian. Even if it kills everyone.
Yes, we're at the stage now where democracies need to become far more dictatorial, otherwise their populations will continue mindlessly along the path of 'Tragedy of the Commons'.
As someone who is coming to increasingly believe that 99% of the world problems are caused by powers seeking to intentionally divide us one from the other, I cannot tell you how much joy this brings me to see. I wish you great success in this effort, however small it might appear to be in the scheme of things.
I agree so much, but the pessimist in me says that this isn't _really_ free, and I don't want to plug in a cool person's info without knowing who the info is being sold to.
If this was publicly available document so I could fill in the missing bits, I'd send a dozen of these tomorrow.
> I don't want to plug in a cool person's info without knowing who the info is being sold to.
Have we reached peak data privacy paranoia? Harmless lil projects that harken back to the good ol' days of the internet are somehow actually devious PII honeypots?
Why do people think their data is so valuable on its own without being connected to their actual consumer related behavior? Truly, what is a name and address worth vs. anonymous user on smart TV id_8z6748dxzh watched 3 hours of Hoarders on Amazon Prime, skipped 85% of ads, but did not skip 50% of ads relating to early onset male pattern baldness, and resides in Ohio?
We somehow both overestimate and underestimate the value of our personal data. Which leads to unwarranted paranoia in inappropriate contexts and alarming indifference in the most common but mundane contexts.
The privacy policy on the website specifically states that they are collecting the PII and may use it to offer products or services, either by themselves or via a "business partner".
It isn't paranoia when the threat is real.
> We may share Your information with Our business partners to offer You certain products, services or promotions.
> To provide You with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about unless You have opted not to receive such information.
Currently: a letter choosing formal legal vocabulary (/s) to create social network metadata, endorse human activity ("you'd like the recipient to continue doing"), disclose someone else's physical address and record the interaction in the national postal system.
We may share Your personal information in the following situations:
For business transfers: We may share or transfer Your personal information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of Company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of Our business to another company.
With business partners: We may share Your information with Our business partners to offer You certain products, services or promotions.
The name and address is valuable because it can be matched to offline behavior through a bill you pay or rewards membership you are enrolled in to further enrich the data associated with id_8z6748dxzh and combine it with your shopping history at Macy's and Safeway, for instance. This is even more valuable when combined with your cellular bill.
I've work in ad tech,and with CDPs for nearly 20 years.
I have to agree with cootsnuck here. If you are one of the people that found it necessary to raise red flags in these comments about this web site, here’s why I think you got your level of paranoia wrong in this case:
1. The site was never going to scale. The guys are printing physical letters and hand-inserting them in envelopes with stamps, for free!
2. So some entrepreneurial folks on the internet have gathered a hundred physical addresses, and they know a self-reported name and IP address, and maybe some persistent cookie info about a human that might be the first person’s friend. So what? Go bring up https://www.beenverified.com
You can gather more info there in 15 minutes than the Continue and Persist guys will get over their whole project.
3. Learn to recognize a fun project that was done out of kindness and a spirit of adventure! Yeah maybe they should have not put up the language of “we get to sell your data if somebody offers to buy our web site”. But so what! The whole thing is just a kind adventure that brought a smile to the faces of some strangers, and will never be more than that. I appreciate it!
As insidious as data harvesting is, I am even less of a fan of the pearl clutching / performative cynicism that is so popular these days.
Why yes, when I say “good morning” to the barista who hands my my coffee, it is possible that the shop is recording me and will use my voice in an elaborate voice cloning scam to get grandma to transfer her life savings to Nigeria.
But breathlessly alerting me to this impending disaster and soberly advising me to never use my voice in public is not going to impress me.
There are so many apps there days that collect all your personal data with so many promises but after you've spent like half an hour signing up and giving them all of your data, they smack you in the face with a pay wall...
I find this so annoying and to a point even criminal, as it's basically a scam, but App Stores do nothing about it, even if you report the apps.
> Have we reached peak data privacy paranoia? Harmless lil projects that harken back to the good ol' days of the internet are somehow actually devious PII honeypots?
Safe assumptions with most any "tech" industry company or individual now are that they will behave completely like sociopaths when it comes to personal data.
It's so baked into "tech" culture now, even people who may be ethically inclined don't recognize it as a problem.
So I object to blaming the victim, or gaslighting, suggesting that people who are aware of this crisis of widespread antisocial behavior are being paranoid.
I’m old enough to remember the white pages, where essentially everyone’s name, phone number, and address were published and distributed.
But it’s hard to have a conversation about appropriate calibration of what is private, and what are reasonable expectations, when extremists from both pro-privacy and scorched-earth commerce are so strident.
It was a lot harder to SWAT people when the White Pages existed. American society was much higher-trust then; people didn't show up to pizza parlors with assault rifles because of something they read online.
You'll have to forgive those of us who simply want to remain safe.
Mafia Enforcer: "It's hard to have a conversation about what's an appropriate level of protection racket, when you're always screaming about your kneecaps being smashed. I'm reaching out to you to talk, but I just can't take you seriously when you're behaving like this."
It is not only the value of my personal data, but it is the fact that they are hiding their intent behind some feel good wishy washy do nothing campaign that will only lead to more pollution and CO2 being released for the sake of makeing money without actually producing anything.
it truly is free hahah we're using some free survey website plan and then Mark would fill in a template in google docs, print, and post the official letter. I think we hit our limit on the form though. We didn't expect it to blow up! Mark is gonna kill me when he checks his email
While true, it doesn't even have to be a pivot. It can be a sale of asset (volontary or necessary), an acquihire where the project and data just become some old vault to be disposed of and dozens other scenario.
I'm sure no one at Yahoo actually thought or had any plan for all of that personal data to be data mined wholesale by Verizon a decade later. And nobody at Google right now believes all that data could be sold to Comcast or whatever. But things happen and then...
send one to temp mail then copy it. if the privacy policy weren't so lax I'd not share the cynicism with you, but it state it'll be collected and shared
My job puts me on the receiving end of a lot of gratitude, and I absolutely adore it. It's one of the main perks of the job. After experiencing it, I have become a lot more lavish in my praise, and frequently email people to thank them for their work. Most of them are very appreciative of it, especially when they make their work freely available.
>> I’ll contact someone if I loved their book or music or work. I’ll find a way to contact the author or the creator and say, “Holy shit. That was brilliant. I loved it. This was amazing. Count me as a fan.”
>> I’ve done this about 20 times. I never got a response only once or twice, but the rest responded warmly. Many of these people have turned into friends. We actually call each other on the phone and shoot the shit. A couple of them have even turned into best friends.
Highly recommend any work that has a non-trivial creation/publishing threshold, regardless of medium or domain.
To tie the back to a HN context - this works great for academic papers. I've had some great email exchanges from original authors including a few people I've absolutely idolised. Turns out they're human too.
"karma farming" is just another way of saying "playing to the base" on any site. No one actually thinks the points here are worth anything or worth tracking.
karma is a term _used_ by reddit, but it definitely isn't exclusively used there. Outside of its hindu origin, it's used by quite a few forums that track user submission/comment votes as a user score, including hackernews.
HN user pg, aka Paul Graham, the (co-)founder of both this site, i.e. HN, and YC itself, the "parent" site, was probably the guy (or one of his early colleagues) who implemented the karma feature here on HN.
I am saying this because the feature has been there from pretty early on.
No need to believe me, go verify it yourself, by any means you choose.
Oh there is definitely something wrong with using Reddit after their API fiasco revealed how much disdain they have for their own users and moderators, but that’s besides the point
Plus, if you are going to claim the two aren't conflated in general, i.e. that most conversations about UFOs are also about ETs, then I'll peg you for a dishonest person and will have nothing further to discuss with you.
I know you find it impossible to believe, but not everyone needs is as closed minded as that. I believe there is something going on worthy of the investigation. People like yourself inevitably jump to “lol you believe in aliens lol let me mock you”, when no such claim is or has been made.
And then you call them a liar.
So you can conflate all you like, and will, but that’s your problem. There is no evidence as to the source for UAPs, interplanetary or otherwise.
I do not know what is going on, and make zero claims that I do. The one and only claim I make is that something is going on, but what that exactly is is now.
Just because his crimes were legal does not mean he should not face punishment.