hangphyr

Entirely true. I'm a Canadian who now lives in the US working in tech, working in Canada again just isn't on the table since I'd be slicing my pay in half. For the big cities in Canada such as Vancouver and Toronto, you're looking at all the big problems of living in cities such as San Francisco but without the salary to compensate. Crime, sanitation, high housing costs.

It's definitely true that it's easier to work in Canada if you're not Canadian, but for Canadians, the US is simply the place to be. Besides, I really don't miss the -40 winter weather :)

I've always been puzzled by accredited investor regulations. For an over-simplified explanation for most countries such as the US and Canada it means one has at least $1,000,000 of investable assets. Accredited investors can invest in things that governments prohibit non-accredited investors from touching, such as most forms of private equity. The rules are there to protect amateur investors, however governments still allow anyone to participate in shockingly risky investment vehicles.

Our regulations are not built for purpose, and I don't think it's possible for there to be an effective way for governments to tell individual investors what is "too risky" for them.

A lot of it just comes down to individuals being responsible for educating themselves or preferably hiring a financial advisor.

The timing of the release of this tool seems a bit innapropriate, given the state of rioting in a few US cities now. It's going to be incredibly draining on law enforcement in the US for a few years to identify and prosecute criminals involved in riots. Most victims already who have lost their homes, their businesses, and even their loved ones will mostly likely never see the criminals brought to justice given the scale of the violence.

It could be useful to protect people from relatiation under an authoritarian government, such as in Hong Kong. I dislike the idea of a government using mass automatic identification, that could be used again by authoritarians for terrible goals. I also dislike the idea of the opposite and using automatic anonymizing to protect criminals during riots. We're probably going to keep seeing an arms race in this, with good and bad actors on all sides.

Depends on how it's used. For example it could be useful for people protesting authoritarian governments, such as in Hong Kong. For blurring rioters during a crime spree, I don't think there's anything moral to be gained from protecting criminals.

Another one: "I hate onions". Now, replace onions with a derogatory name for another group. We can't prohibit negative words on account they can be used to express negative opinions about other groups of humans.

In the case of communist bandits, it's a criticism of a political ideology, and in particular here one party. Criticism of political parties and ideologies is completely fine, even when expressing insults to them. Expressing threats of violence or other crimes isn't permitted or moral, but expressing dislike or disrespect is perfectly valid. Can anyone say they've never expressed disrespect to any ideology or political party in their life?

That's one of the many core dangers of disrespecting free speech for the sake of prohibiting "hate speech". It's a very, very short step for a government to persecute criticism of themselves on the basis of "hate speech".

It could be an action from a rogue employee. Possibly not a management decision or specific company policy, just a filter added by an employee with access to it. There might be some 'lively' discussion internally in Google right now over this specific issue. In the past some Google employees have taken actions against individuals based on their personal political beliefs or other personal grudges. A good example of that was when Jordan Peterson was temporarily locked out of all Google services, including his Gmail, insiders said it sparked a lot of internal arguments at the company (eventually his accounts were reinstated with no official explanation or apology, though some employees did apologize to him privately for their coworkers behavior).

It's likely at its core a problem with poor employee screening, insufficient training and supervision, and vague/over-reaching policies given to employees that they sometimes interpret as legitimizing them to censor or ban based on their personal political beliefs.

Some employee there likely is a communist sympathizer, or has other connections to China's authoritarian ruling party.

This is a bit of a tangent, but one should be careful with that path. Not all employers are 'evil' and have negative intentions for their employees. Think of an example such as the independently owned restaurant that cannot afford to pay employees high wages and their owners are not wealthy. Just as not all employees can be painted as untrustworthy and hostile, not all employers should be painted as untrustworthy and hostile.

I'd say it's not really their responsibility to do that, and could lead to something dangerous. Universality is important, so if they did that, the door would be wide open to them adding annotations to everyone's posts with an 'official' narrative. Sharing a post that you disapprove of a government policy or law? People reading your opinion may need to view a video from the ruling party on why they think they're right first.

Probably this. No atrocities committed by any government were done because the government viewed itself as 'evil' so it must do evil things, the perpetrators always view their crimes as justified for some form of greater good. If one believes a single lie is just a single stepping stone on the path to some grand utopia, or if that lie would prevent some chaos (social disorder, rebellion, etc), some will have no problems telling that lie as many times as they need to.

Many news media companies have been engaging in just that, trying to point out (hypocritically) where their competitors attempted to downplay the threat of the virus. It's not so much a problem with news media being wrong, it's a problem with most of them skewing towards pundit commentary and OP/ED's on the news, rather than just reporting the news.

If the news media blankly reports what is happening, and avoided adding layers of interpretation on top of it, their reputations would be in better shape right now.

That's true. While yes the WHO is following regulations, they're following regulations that were created to exclude the Republic of China from it in order to entice the PRC to join it. The PRC gave multinational organizations such as the WHO this condition for accepting the invitation to join, and multinationals greatly desired the membership of the PRC.

The WHO had the choice: accept the Chinese Communist Party's demand to exclude Taiwan, or be shunned by the PRC. The problem isn't necessarily with the WHO, it's with the CCP.

Countries are finding out that most government institutions for viral disaster preparedness were completely unprepared for this pandemic. Little to supplies stored, no plans ready before it hit, extremely slow responses.

I think Twitter's motivation isn't to reduce the impact of the virus, or that their management trusts governments this much. They're anticipating politicians looking for scapegoats, they're ensuring they can't take the blame from governments following any negative outcomes.

From Twitter's standpoint, if as a business their primary goal is to continue to at bare minimum exist, this is actually their most conservative and lowest risk option. We could debate all day on what sources of information have been the best, government or non-government, but I don't think Twitter is interested at all in considering that side of it.

From what I've observed in the US, both major political parties are advocates of socializing the downside. The current Canadian federal government, though very left-leaning, is also a strong advocate of this policy.

I think often people frame this issue incorrectly. As much as I have my own opinions of what 'isms' or parties are superior, we should be discussing the incentives we've built into our political systems that encourage politicians of all stripes to make decisions like this. Politicians avoid a very visible event with high damage to a single entity (major bank or airline going bankrupt), compared to difficult to trace moderate damage spread across everyone over a long period of time. It's very low cost to the politicians to impose a bail-out, they don't face the long-term slow moving economic and social damage.

I feel confident large businesses would behave far more sensibly with a long-term vision if they knew there wasn't a taxpayer below them ready to catch them when they fail performing financial stunts.

Are you requesting people confirm that Spiked is approved by a specific orthodoxy before reading the article and judging for themselves?

Youtube has been doing that for a long time now, manually adjusting specific search results, basing it sometimes on geography. I don't know if they are still manually adjusting results in this example, but one example a couple months ago was if someone searched for "Louder with Crowder change my mind" in the US, Crowder's videos were buried several pages in. If you hop onto a VPN and try another country, the expected natural search result came up instead.

One could possibly blame it on poor engineering and bugs, but given Google's talent pool, that seems unlikely.

If you speak to anyone who works in supply chain, they're all experiencing massive disruptions. Traffic from Chinese ports has slowed significantly, these things take some time before they start affecting our store shelves. Some people will be quite surprised to see how many things rely on Chinese supply, such as pharmaceuticals. Even if a product isn't exported in a finished form from China, vast amounts of our low-level supply chains rely on China.

China's social credit score system would be an easy place for them to look for "undesirables" to use for livestock, create an ever shifting minimal level of political servitude to avoid execution.