IAmEveryone

They called three different experts and incorporated their answers. I don't remember any instance of, say, some blogger actually calling someone. The tactic seems to be completely unknown outside of traditional media.

So, yeah, it's a style people here don't like. It doesn't quite get the bit-per-sentence ratio of, say, a phone book. But there's more effort in there than meets the (strained) eye.

Maybe this article isn't supposed to be a review of a specific product with a sidebar giving you tech specs.

Go crush it!

“Europeans” is doing a lot of work in that sentence… Subjectively, criticism of Israel seems to be more widespread in the US and Britain than Germany? I don’t doubt the continuing existence here in Germany (and called it the “seedy underbelly” of local politics just a few hours ago right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29977132). But my impression is that these are very distinct groups.

I doubt these dare-I-say-conspiracy theories.

Among other reasons, just consider that media suffered as much, financially, from monster.com and eBay, which devastated classifieds. For many local papers, that was the single largest change in the last two decades.

And I don’t remember any campaigns against those companies.

The individual journalist and editor actually writing and deciding on a story also doesn’t hold the grudges you assign to all of “media”. They don’t have the power to affect any change that could ever make the sort of difference needed to come back to them in any meaningful way. And they are unlikely to experience the strong emotions “media’ might have, because they haven’t experienced much of the loss that the industry has: they still have a job, for example. And by now, they are likely too young to know better times pre-internet.

Facebook tends towards people you know in real life, so it’d be closer to the echo chamber that is your immediate social circle, but possibly a bit more open because it doesn’t concentrate your attention as much as you probably do offline, i. e. 50 % with spouse and only seeing your high school buddy every two years.

I guess a lot depends on your job: if you work in healthcare or retail, you‘lo have pretty diverse interactions. Software developer in their home office? Not so much.

Your justification is fully compatible with the observed phenomenon as described. The comment didn’t criticize Israel, although the possible criticism so obviously follows from the description that your mind added it all by itself.

That, in a way, is also quite telling.

I’m not sure if the definition of democracy is flexible enough to include non-democracies as long as they bring a note to class giving a good reason. If Israel’s situation does really require essentially doing away with democratic norms, it’s somewhat delusional to still afford it that label, as a sort of temporarily-but-forever-slightly-embarrassed-democracy that protects its citizens’ rights as long as it’s convenient to do so.

But I doubt that state is actually necessary. There has just been too much Austrian-style corruption in the last decade not to suspect some of that to be also in play here.

Let’s wait and see how many politicians of the opposition were targeted in these programs. Because that would be the immediate end to any claims of justification.

Edit: and just to be sure: nobody doubts that Israel is far better than the usual comparisons, i. e. its neighbors and China. It’s just because Israel is considered to be among “the good ones” that it gets criticized more readily. Both because the distance b/w expectations and reality is larger than elsewhere, and because criticism among peers is usually more effective than it is among strangers.

Yeah, no, this is bullshit. People don’t just have agencies (Mossad, CIA), they also have agency as in: the power to change reality. And the vast majority of democratic countries are run by people who have a decent appreciation of the rule of law, which is what stands between your actual freedom and your gloomy fantasies.

Then, there’s also a group of countries that simply cannot afford / don’t have the people to do these things.

How do I know? Consider the usual suspects for these operations: the US, Israel, Russia, and China. For every single one of them, we also have examples of their work that got leaked or otherwise exposed.

What are the chances that Belgium happens to be the country that manages to run such a program and keep it secret? Or Equatorial Guinea?

Then, there’s also the growing list of known customers of NSO: if two dozens of them decided to buy this software, chances are they do not have homegrown solutions with similar capabilities. Nor does it seem as if there were any other sellers at NSO’s scale. Meaning: if we successively learn about all of NSO’s business, we might be getting close to knowing everything there is to know about the sector, with the exception of the large countries mentioned above.

It’s a local copy of England retained for emergencies: The people of Hamburg are seafaring, somewhat arrogant (but not without cause), used to bad weather, proud of the Beatles, envious of Berlin, and really wrong about libel law.

Nobody "blindly" supports democracy. It happens to be a system with an obvious mechanism for continuous improvement or at least self-correction. It's also empirically quite successful at avoiding war and fostering prosperity.

The protests in Germany regularly include all sorts of other conspiracy subcommunities, including the seedy underbelly of it all, anti-semitism, but also 9/11 truthers and weird esoteric believes. Anyone really into astral healing five years ago is busy these days proving viruses don't exist.

Stupid performance art is, tautologically, stupidity. So I guess it depends? Flat earth isn't especially harmful, except in undermining trust in science, institutions, and your fellow citizen with absolutely no discernible purpose.

The term for "culture jamming" when it is only disruptive is "trolling".

You can also watch any sailing vessel on its way towards (or away from) you.

If you mean some government should fund arXiv, specifically, then I don't disagree but would guess the government's default position of "it exists without public money, and we think that's rather excellent".

If you're suggesting it as alternative for academic publishing in general, it would cost a lot more.

Arxiv isn't a "publication platform" in the sense that peer-reviewed journals are. The cost of hosting and distributing PDFs is close to zero, obviously. What does cost money is the copyediting and running the peer review process.

People think Elsevier are the worst people in the world (not entirely wrong) and taking in millions while exploiting the free labor of authors and reviewers. But it's relatively easy to quantify the value they do add: their financials are public and, last I checked, they have operating margins of about 30 %.

Let's say we could do without their marketing and billing departments and that gets us to a margin of 50 %. That's pretty good, but it isn't quite the rip-off people sometimes suggest it is. Replacing the commercial publishers with government-funded open-access journals would be a billion-dollar endeavor, not a few million for servers and a bit of software.

I miss the times when idiots were really into ideas that had absolutely no chance of causing any meaningful harm.

People are extremely bad at making decisions involving small probabilities. Plus, of course, the same people tend not to believe the data on deaths. There are even stories of people using their last breaths to again state that they do not believe viruses (or this virus, specifically) exists.

The payment wasn't an argument that money is the only valid objective in decision-making. OP used it to illustrate that these believes are weakly held, "virtue signaling" for a crowd with different virtues, so to speak.

I believe unvaccinated people seeking medical treatment from the same "elitist establishment" they had nothing but scorn for is a somewhat more obvious demonstration of the same principle.

I once created a dataset of X-hooked-up-with-Y for my circle of friends. About 50 nodes and a few hundred connections (after I asked around a bit for additions).

It became a wedding present for one rather central "node" with the title "drosophila neural regulation network" or something like it. No names, just lines and circles. It's still the centerpiece in his home office.

Their coverage is well within the range of opinion of every political party except far-right AfD. As such, it represents >90% of the voters in last year‘s election. They are not neutral when it comes to values such as democracy itself, and expecting them to be is silly.

It works by setting a license fee by law and making it hard enough / take long enough to change to make it impossible to punish or reward journalists for their work.

This could mean requiring 2/3 majorities for anything but a default adjustment for inflation. Or a 10-year lag for any budget changes, etc.

I don't even think anyone is interested in the POV that nothing is happening. Russia itself certainly wants to at least appear as if they are preparing for an invasion, or the whole thing makes even less sense.

The pipelines, and other trade, operated without a glitch during the later years of the cold war. It's not unrealistic for that to continue, as both parties would probably prefer.

I'm also getting the sense that the reliance on Russian natural gas is somewhat overstated at times. Only about 1/3 of the gas supplies of Europe come from Russia. That's a lot, but it is not unthinkable to compensate for in case it is lost. Between increasing local production, replacement with other fuels, or improvements in energy efficiency, it would be annoying but doable. For Russia, however, it would be financially devastating both in the short term as well as into the future, since Europe as a market would be lost for good once they achieve independence of this fuel source.

I was given a Sony camera to take photos at an event recently.

After two days, I noticed that the viewfinder would be dark when I turned the camera off. This was different than my usual Canon, so I wondered why.

Turns out it was a mirrorless camera, where the viewfinder is a screen. And I didn't notice that I was looking at a screen the whole time.

Edit: this was a Sony Alpha 7c. I really enjoyed using it. It's comfortably small and has the silver retro design of something from the 1930s.

I have no earthly idea how "identity politics" is related to the demise of the arab spring. In as far as it may relate to the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe (Poland and Hungary), it is by being easy foil for Victor Orban and his ilk (cf. "LGBTQ-free zones"). Even if one were to believe these neo-fascists wouldn't just find some other scapegoat, I don't see how it would morally justify a return to 1950s social policies. Throwing some people under a train in support of human rights seems to be the quickest way to defeat your stated purpose.

It isn't even obvious that "identity politics" is tethered exclusively to left-wing politics. Plenty has been written about the group of people that invaded the Capitol last year, and the only consistent characteristic of that group was being white. No, it has nothing to do with economics. It included a doctor making $ 650,000 p. a. as well as a group that traveled to DC on a private jet.

Hell, the major group of young reactionaries in Europe (until recently) had "Identity" in their name.

This text just seems entirely out of place, and I was wondering if I missed the (2008) in the title while reading it. There's nothing new in it, and it wouldn't get much attention if it weren't for the name.

It’s all civil law right now. It’s doubtful that criminal law would be very useful. First, because the standard of proof would make criminal charges much harder to sustain. Second, because, judging from all those emails, it’s much more of a group effort between and inside these organizations.

Heating a home with electricity is simply immoral. It's all the emissions of burning coal, multiplied by 3 due to generator and transmission losses.

Besides, energy prices saw a steep rise in all of Europe, so it doesn't make much sense to blame the end of nuclear energy for it.

Also, just a single reactor has shut down so far, 11 days ago. A single plant shutting down isn't enough to influence prices to such a degree. Besides, prices were at current levels well before that.

The slower phaseout of coal is about employment and, to a lesser degree, regional "identity" issues far more than energy.

The coal industry was at some point the country's largest. It's also older than all other in the industrial sector, since coal was the raw material fueling the industrial revolution.

As such, it became the raison d'etre for whole regions. The Ruhr area in west Germany grew from Iowa-level population density to New York State levels on coal. Unions, as a concept, got started in the coal mines. I recently saw a bunch of news broadcasts from the late 80s/early 90s and among 10 of them, eight or so featured labor issues in the sector. Until reunification, it was the most salient issue in politics.

And if the German way to run a secure nuclear facility is to shut it down, that may also tell you something.

This thread is a shitshow of cynicism, everyone outdoing the others to come up with even more convoluted conspiracy stories how this isn't going to help or why it must be motivated by the data protection agency apparently being criminals themselves trying to erase evidence against them. It's quite a sad state of affairs, really.

Another conclusion one could draw from the story as reported is that, contrary to an untold number of assertions I've seen made on HN, GDPR does apply to governments and their institutions. It's a point made in just about every single other thread on the law, and one would expect someone noticing they were wrong, which would seem to be perfect basis for a useful comment. Alas, they all missed this story. I'm sure they'll be back.

A close cousin is, of course, the sense that such institutions will choose to ignore the law, as in any law, anyway, and without any risk of blowback or even chance of becoming a matter of public interest. The story itself would seem to contradict that notion to a certain degree, but that doesn't seem to diminish the opportunity of updating one's belief system with even more evidence supporting everything one has always known to be true.

The EU has majority approval in every single member country and even the UK. In many cases, it gets 2/3 majorities.

Apart from survey data, there have been many referenda on EU membership or aspects of it over the years, with similar results.

Even for the most critical of countries, at the high point of anti-EU propaganda, opposition reached just a hair over 50%, which has turned out to be very unfortunate timing for the UK.

Edit: I had looked for, but forgot to include, the data: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/11/17/majorities-in-...

Facebook doesn't allow nudity anyway. The system could just serve to prioritize complaints and they wouldn't need to verify the identity of the person in the photo.