BjoernKW

Because that particular article is biased in framing the pager attacks as a "terrorist attack" while, actually, those attacks were precisely targeted at Hezbollah personnel.

Those weren't devices for personal - or civilian - use, after all.

The WHO hardly is a reliable, neutral source. It's a political organization that's subject to all sorts of outside influences.

How would you suggest to improve it? In my opinion, for its purpose, UI - and UX - of Hacker News are pretty much close to perfect.

> Every medication can have severe and permanent side effects

SSRIs are by an order of a magnitude worse than any other common medication in that respect.

Moreover, like I said there's little evidence these drugs actually achieve any quality-of-life improvement beyond a placebo effect.

> "This person must have extraordinary grit and determination!" Because when a criminal gets out of prison, the entire system and the entire society is set up to try to oppose his rehabilitation and get him back into prison. Overcoming this active hostility must take a remarkable person.

This is precisely the story of Les Misérables - that remarkable person being Jean Valjean.

The rationale is that most sexually active people have already been infected with HPV anyway, so the largest benefit of administering the vaccine is at a young age.

One rarely talked about aspect of this is that doctors - generally speaking - only trust other doctors. They won't buy an EMR system from someone without the necessary "street cred" - however well-designed that system is.

I know of a large EMR software provider that went as far as to hire physicians as salespeople because having doctors talk to other doctors made sales a lot easier for them.

Quite to the contrary, the C64 instantly booting into what was both an operating system and a readily accessible programming environment to start creating with right away already was an immensely powerful concept - an empty canvas to fill with your own creations.

I wrote about this subject in more detail here: https://bjoernkw.com/2016/03/13/load81/

The title is a likely nod to The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html

I suppose they meant to say "espouses".

Switzerland is one of the few examples where such collective large-scale (i.e. state-run) endeavours still work.

In many other countries it’s rather crumbling infrastructure and massive public spending and bureaucracy with little to show for.

What's the benefit here (other than the usual nebulous 'because data protection and politics', that is)?

Where do you want to move previously cloud-based applications to?

Who is going to maintain that non-cloud infrastructure?

How do you address and mitigate the risks involved (e.g., security, resilience)?

Unless you can answer those questions, no business will even consider migrating from their existing cloud systems.

That said, there are companies such as VMware that sell "local cloud" setups. Their customers seem like your likely customers.

That's not true. At least not based on their R&D locations back then. Most of those were in Russia. They quickly - and rightfully so - closed these locations down when the war started and moved their activities elsewhere.

It might be relatively easy to read, but for SMBs it's hard to actually implement in real life, because GDPR and the EU's stance so far often doesn't take economic reality into account. For small businesses, GDPR in many regards created a legal limbo while large corporations scoff at that regulation and have their legal departments deal with it however they see fit.

For instance, there's this tiny, gnarly aspect of where you are allowed to store your customer data.

Hosting data on servers located in the EU isn't required by GDPR in and of itself, as long as you have a valid data processing agreement with the provider stating how and according to which provisions customer data is protected on their machines.

However, according to a 2020 European Court of Justice ruling you're not allowed to transfer any personally identifiable information to companies that are in any way affiliated with a US-based entity (e.g., by virtue of having a US-based parent company) anymore. Just being physically located in the EU isn't sufficient according to this ruling.

The reason for this is that with FISA US law enforcement can force US-based companies to hand over any data, even if that data is stored with an international subsidiary under a completely different jurisdiction.

This basically invalidates all of the provisions and legal frameworks for interacting with non-EU entities that used to be acceptable under GDPR before (e.g., Privacy Shield).

However, not interacting with any US-based or US-related entities at all anymore would be tantamount to ceasing almost all economic activity. So, until (or more pessimistically: unless) the US and the EU come to terms on a new agreement regarding privacy rules, there probably isn't anything a business can do on its own to completely address this issue. At this point, merely hosting data on servers physically located in the EU perhaps amounts to little more than window dressing.

As soon as a business has dealings with a US-based company or an EU-based company owned by a US-based company that potentially might have access to user data that business technically is in violation of GDPR. As of now, as a business you essentially have three alternatives:

1. Run the entire infrastructure you need yourself or have it run by EU-based companies guaranteed to have no relations with US-based entities whatsoever (Good luck with finding those ...). This, for example, includes payment systems and banking infrastructure, because guess where many EU-based banks host their infrastructure? That's right, AWS.

2. Go out of business.

3. Ignore this aspect of GDPR for now, document everything, continue to do your own due diligence, and hope for the best.

> You can't take the GDPR, and conclude that regulations as an idea is bad.

Though I didn't make that claim, in fact I precisely think that more often than not that's indeed the case. Regulations often serve no other purpose than to create yet more red tape procedures and self-serving structures.

> Regulations like the GDPR precisely try to give incentives for competitors.

It failed miserably at that, too. Apart from Plausible there's hardly any business worth mentioning that used GDPR as a competitive advantage. GDPR for the most part has been a stimulus program for lawyers and government busybodies.

> That's quite opinionated.

That's just a perspective from reality, where people are doing business rather than contriving impractical regulations out of thin air .

> GDPR is not that bad. It has downsides but it is not overly complex.

It might seem simple to consumers or politicians who claim they could implement it in a day, but it is highly complex once you have to implement it as a small or medium-sized business.

> Companies (including cloud services) have to comply if they want to have business in Europe

Large corporations - i.e. the supposed target of that regulation - scoff at GDPR. They have legal departments and the funds necessary to deal with GDPR however they see fit, while small and medium-sized business bear the brunt.

No, whiskey might be. Whisky, on the other hand, of course isn't affected by US tariffs.

> Canada, Australia, India, Vietnam, South Africa... there's a whole world of nominally friendly and economically viable suppliers out there

Where generally EU-based businesses aren't allowed to move their cloud infrastructure either.

With the US and Privacy Shield there at least used to be an agreement in place. While that agreement was frivolously nullified by EU courts, at least so far authorities haven't been overly eager to enforce that, probably because they know that'd put pretty much every EU-based company out of business.

Have fun trying to convince zealous bureaucrats and lawyers that hosting your customer data in Vietnam is fine for an EU-based business, though.

Funny thing is, due to overly complex regulations such as GDPR, there are no EU-based alternatives to speak of and as an EU-based company moving your cloud-based business to other countries mentioned in this thread often isn't legal according to GDPR either.

With the US and Privacy Shield there at least was an attempt to come to some sort of reasonable real-life solution (which of course was shot down by EU courts, so as of 2020 pretty much every EU-based business is in a legal limbo).

Moving towards a "European cloud" remains an eternal pipe dream, simply because such a thing doesn't exist, the reason being the EU actively regulating against businesses trying to innovate in this and other seminal areas.

While this might sound reasonable on the surface, here's the thing: Not only are there hardly any homegrown options in the EU, but the EU is actively regulating against such homegrown alternatives.

At the same time, people regularly call for the authorities to pitch in and provide such alternatives.

There are numerous ridiculously expensive - and now defunct - projects (e.g., Quaero and Theseus, just to mention two of those) that have tried to achieve something to that effect already, with little - if anything - to show for.

Why people seem to think this is going to work this time around is beyond me.

Because the EU seems to think it can just regulate such things into existence.

I find it baffling that people seem to attribute miracle superpowers to an entity whose prime achievement these days is tethered caps.

> The EU is going to be thinking long and hard about the future of NATO now.

Thinking long and hard apparently is all the EU is capable of.

Trump's first term should have been more than enough to make the EU come to their senses. Now, we have tethered caps and the AI Act, but the EU still has no coherent vision or just even the slightest idea of how to move the continent forward instead of keeping it in the past.

> Schlesisches Tor

Quite a few years ago I saw this translated as Sileasian Gate on Google Maps (IIRC), which - for some reason - reason just brought up "Tannhäuser Gate" in my mind right now.

> Buddy, you're doing something called Source Bombing.

You're doing something called "Moving the goalposts" by first asking for sources and then complaining because those sources don't support the very narrow construal you seem to be applying to my argument.

Those sources are scientific studies, which by the very nature of the scientific processes of course are open-ended.

> You said most symptoms were permanent, don't back down now. Sexual Dysfunction is a pretty broad term, how would you even link it to being affected by an SSRI?

There you go: https://www.tga.gov.au/news/safety-updates/updated-warnings-...

https://annals-general-psychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8061302/

https://rxisk.org/post-ssri-sexual-dysfunction-pssd/

> Where are you getting this number?

There you go (for instance): "Cohen suggests a low rate of prolonged psychotic reactions in LSD users (1.8 per 1000) [19]"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02800-5#Sec35

> Are you aware people are just taking whatever amount of Ketamine they feel like?

Ketamine is a totally different type of drug. Deriving anything about psychedelics from the amount of Ketamine people take is entirely nonsensical.

> Almost none of these would be permanent

Sexual dysfunction caused by SSRIs in many cases persists for the rest of the patient's life.

> and you certainly don't have a 1 in 3 chance of them being permanent. Where did you get that number?

Those are actual numbers from scientific studies: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2719451/

> in the same breath, claiming psychedelics are 100x safer, is beyond irresponsible.

Stating mere facts isn't irresponsible and those are the facts:

When taking SSRIs you have a one in three chance to permanently and severely change your life for the worse.

When taking LSD you have a 1 in 1,000 chance of suffering a psychotic break.

What's irresponsible - and unethical - is twisting and misrepresenting these facts - to the extent of outright lying about the purported innocuousness of SSRI, as is wont in the psychiatric community.

With SSRIs you have a one in three chance for any number of the following side effects; many of them permanent, even after discontinuing medication (if you actually manage to do so, since SSRI come with severe withdrawal symptoms):

- sexual dysfunction

- loss of emotion and creativity

- drowsiness

- insomnia (including real fun stuff like night terrors)

- fatigue

- nausea

- tremors

I'd hardly call that safe or manageable.

With even the most potent psychedelics such as LSD, on the other hand, there's merely a one in thousand chance for severe side effects.

I'd go as far as prohibiting the prescription of SSRIs for all but the most severe cases (such as a severe depression where the patient is actually suicidal). For everything else these drugs are commonly used for, e.g., mild depression, OCD, or IBS, there are other - in many cases better - options with far less devastating (if any) adverse effects.

In London, that's called Cockfosters.

Other than that, there's an intriguing Clive Barker short story on how lonely passengers on those late-night trains actually end up ...