chmod775

> I do believe that.

If we're starting out from different axioms, there's really no point for us to argue about about policy and outcomes. We'll have to align our assumptions first.

> At least if you burned it, it would offset inflation for a few days.

Yes. And keeping it in Meta's coffers might ultimately redirect economic output towards maintenance of Zuck's yachts.

> Again, interesting to suggest that this is the other fair outcome here for advertising shenanigans, but not for the many corporations who outright kill people every day like health insurers.

You're conflating moral and legal arguments and read things into people's comments that were never said - only as a setup for some whataboutism. For your second post in a row.

There's an interesting discussion here, but this is not how to have it.

Often I get a lot more out of some YouTuber/streamers's slightly scuffed cover of a song than the original studio recording. "Perfect" music often makes me feel nothing. It's the tiny individual mistakes and flourishes that make it easier to relate to the performer and music as a human - and that's what puts a smile on my face listening to it.

I'm trying to puzzle together the belief system that makes your comment coherent.

You seem to assume that money being transferred from Meta's into New Mexico state coffers is worse than burning it. Also did the people of New Mexico not elect their government?

Additionally, what instance of "giving people cancer" is not being pursued because resources were allocated to this instead?

Finally, fines must be high enough to have the intended effect of deterrence. If only absurdly high fines work, which appears to be the case in Meta's instance, then absurdly high they must be. If they continue that pattern of behavior while ignoring every fine, then the only alternatives would be either shutting Meta down for being a criminal enterprise and putting people behind bars, or throwing the idea of "rule of law" out the window. A high fine is doing them a favor.

> In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?

No. Fines are punitive and intended for deterrence. You're thinking of reimbursements (cost recovery and damages). The latter is intended to be proportional to real world harm/costs, the former need not be.

A traffic law violation could cause no harm, but you'll still get fined for it.

Some jurisdictions even impose fines based on how deep the defendants' wallet is, calculating the amount that might serve as appropriate deterrent/punishment based on their financial situation. Fining a billionare $50,000 for literring will still not serve as a deterrent, but doing the same to a minimum wage worker would unfairly financially ruin them.

> Where's the proof? How do you know it didn't search, find, and discard?

They found their page being cited in various AI generated slop around the internet, including an acedemic paper, investment research, an Indian publication, etc.

Brimstone meets none of the criteria, not for self-guidance, nor for range (especially not when launched surface-to-surface). Plus you'd have to bring a launch platform within range of Russian air-defense/frontlines to even use it.

I'd be curious to learn what advanced self-guided missile can accurately strike targets just a measly 70km away for $200k, and what the supporting infrastructure and hardware costs to buy and run.

Also you're still not remotely competetive with drones that can be carried and operated by infantry at that price point. Who's going to do reconaissance so you even know where to strike before you fire that missile? A drone provides all of that in a package that'd still be less than 1/10th the cost.

The difference is that those missiles are expensive multi-million dollar munitions, while these drones are mass produced for less than $20k/unit and yet are still capable of taking out heavy armor.

Ukraine is already using drones that can autonomously identify and seek out even moving targets, without any operator required during the terminal phase.

Drones with that sort of capability started appearing on the battlefield more than a year ago, and it has only been refined since.

Examples are the RAM-2X, the Helsing HX2, and whatever drones they use that automatically identify and seek out stationary aircraft on Russian airfields.

Models have proclivities, and many people use the same model.

Imagine all books on earth were written by just 5 people - and worse, they could not remember what they had written yesterday. You would quickly get tired of reading the same flourishes and patterns over and over.

Whatever style models currently in use have, that's what people are going to be tired of, and it's what they're going to recognize as "AI".

And in the EU I get a label with both on Google Maps: "Lake Ontario (Lake America)"

Same for the Gulf of Mexico.

Language is another dimension on top of location when it comes to maps. At least the German maps pretty much translate that label 1:1.

> My objection to the Trolley problem is that it assumes that people are interchangeable like ants and that the only thing that matters is "lifes saved".

The problem statement contains no such thing.

Expressing yourself succinctly takes both intelligence and courage.

The idiot rambles on and the coward hides behind a wall of text that would be exhausting to refute.

We are all one or the other occasionally.

If I work for someone else it's not my problem. I should point the problem out to them, but since it will hurt them first and foremost, it's no major concern of mine.

This is why the adverse reaction must be proportional to the effort required to counter the destructive behavior. It must be strongly discouraged.

One of the worst things you can do is pull punches when you get "contributions" that are net-negative because they waste everyone's time.

> 1Tbps

That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.

The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).

If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.

In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.

> I don't really think there's a need to be so hostile.

There was no hostile intent or ill feelings. Some things were meant to be humorous, but in good spirits. If anything came across otherwise, that's a communication failure on my part. I'm sorry.

> Right and you can imagine how much authority the average Russian lends to an American arrest warrant.

I have to applaud coming up with a sentence like that. The same sort of beauty one might find in an Escher piece.

Let me address the point underlying that contortion by asking a question: In the alternate semantic universe we're constructing, if that Russian later passes through a US-friendly country and is arrested, did the US court turn out to retroactively have had the authority to issue the warrant, and we pretend it always had it, or is it supposed to work some other way?

National courts routinely issue arrest warrants and rulings for persons of other nationalities, who could currently be located anywhere in the world. The ICC is not special in that regard.

This is exactly the kind of discussion where the difference is important. Your reading of the point they were trying to make is impressively charitable. I shall try to learn from it.

"authority" is an overloaded term in English, but "having authority" isn't. The latter implies a set of rules.

You appear to be confused. Anyone can decide anything, the question is whether it is in their power to enforce their decisions.

Saying that they don't have authority to make a decision implies that there's some universal set of rules that internationally lays down what anyone's authority is - precisely the kind of thing you appear to be opposed to, because such a set of rules would likely need a court!

There's little difference between 1 hour and 48 hours when it comes to the amount of data in question here.

If that's the real wage, it should be used when comparing wages internationally. It's however not used as such, because trying to figure out what should and shouldn't be included in that number for each country will result in an even bigger headache. Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?

In any case, the resulting individual "burden" is meaningless if you don't also quantify individual benefit. As an extreme example, imagine a country in which your income taxes pay for things such as transportation credits usable on gas, public transport and roads, while the neighboring country has mostly private toll roads and low taxes. Another example is health insurance. In Germany it is pretty nearly mandatory with most having some form of insurance, and total spending per citizen is around $9,000. In the US more than 90% are insured and spending is higher, but within the same ballpark.

What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison? Fuck all. It's at best usable as a prompt for a philosophical discussion about autonomy, but often merely used for masturbation or making dishonest arguments designed to go over well in establishments specializing in alcoholic beverages - like those of a certain interest group.

> https://www.steuerzahler.de/belastungs-check/?L=0

The link you provided is the web page of the interest group I mentioned. They will literally try any trick in the book to get that number up, including adding a bunch of things that aren't even taxes, a boatload of things they call "quasi-taxes" with numbers presumably pulled from their ass, and adding expenses your employer incurs only to subtract them again immediately. Anything to get that percentage number up.

But even they don't even call the resulting number "tax burden" - that'd be transparently stupid. They more generally call it a "burden ratio" (Belastungsquote).

Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous their calculations are: If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf). Does this still sound like something you can easily compare one country to the next and draw useful conclusions from? Of course not. In the next country it might come from an interest group with a different goal, a government calculation, or a Fox News writer.

> You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.

What you're trying to get at - hopefully because the alternative is a nonsense number with no purpose other than being a fun fact supporting a discussion about degrees of individual autonomy in modern societies - is called discretionary income, and it's only meaningful when adjusted for cost of living and compared across similar living situations.

I just gave you the actual numbers. The same numbers you will quickly get by using any of the many available net income calculators for Germany[0].

If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.

But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.

What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?

[0] First Google result: https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...

I can spend that in whichever tax jurisdiction I want and the VAT rate might be whatever depending on what one buys. If you want to go that route you'd then also have to adjust for cost/quality of living to stay intellectually honest, which means you'd then have to come up with some statistical consumer basket. It's a stupid idea to even start down that route in what fits into HN comments.

If you make 90k in Germany, you pay around 36k to mandatory (varying degrees) insurance/pension plus taxes if you're single. About 19.5k of that are actual taxes. If you're married/have children that total can drop to ~30k and will include health insurance for your entire family unit.

You however have to admire getting things that wrong in the same paragraph that tells one to not trust what one sees in Google searches. Though I suppose HN comments would show in Google searches... maybe their humor just went over my head.

No, we're quite happy doing that. However on behalf of the German people I wish to thank everyone involved for the thoughtful suggestions and intelligent way to approach a possibly interesting topic. I can tell your hearts and minds are in the right place.

The downvotes are puzzling.