"Baselessly" - I'm sorry but realpolitik is plenty of basis. China is a geopolitical adversary of both the EU and the US. And China will be the first to admit this, btw.
The EU isn’t a state and has no military or police. As such the EU’s existence is an anecdotal answer to your question in itself: Reliance on (in particular maritime) trade. And yes, China also benefits from trade, but as opposed to democracies (in which the general populace to a greater extent are keys to power) the state does not require trade to sustain itself in the same way.
This makes EU countries more reliable partners for cooperation than China. The same goes for the US from an European perspective, and even with everything going on over there it is still not remotely close.
All states are fundamentally adversaries because they have conflicting interests. To your point however, adversaries do indeed cooperate all the time.
sorry, is your contention here "spurious accusations don't require evidence when aimed at designated state enemies"? because it feels uncharitably rude to infer that's what you meant to say here, but i struggle to parse this in a different way where you say something more reasonable.
> It is US warmongering ideology that tries to equate these concepts
Please don't engage in political battle here, including singling out a country for this kind of criticism. No matter how right you are or feel you are, it inevitably leads to geopolitical flamewar, which has happened here.
Please don't be snarky or condescending in HN comments. From the guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
That is just objectively incorrect, and fundamentally misunderstanding the basics of statehood. China, the US, and any other local monopoly on force would absolutely take any chance they could get to extend their influence and diminish the others. That is they are acting rationally to at minimum maximise the probability they are able to maintain their current monopolies on force.
Several of your comments in this subthread have broken the guidelines. The guidelines ask us not to use HN for political/ideological battle and to "assume good faith". They ask us to "be kind", "eschew flamebait", and ask that "comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less as a topic gets more divisive."
The topic itself, like any topic, is fine to discuss here, but care must be taken to discuss it in a de-escalatory way. The words you use and the way you use them matter.
Most importantly, it's not OK to write "it is however entirely reasonable to assume that the comment I replied to was made entirely in bad faith". That's a swipe and a personal attack that, as the guidelines ask, should be edited out.
Can you, by any chance, delete my account? I have tried to do so before but it is not possible through the GUI. And I see you are associated with HN.
Other than that let's be very clear that there was no personal attack. You left out the part where I explain why I think the comment was made in bad faith. I.e. the part that makes it not a personal attack. And a part which I, upon request, elaborated on in the same comment tree.
And yes I am a moderator and it's my role to prevent flamewars and to encourage everyone to raise the standard of discourse here. In my comment I was trying to convey that multiple comments of yours were crossing too far into political battle and personal attack, and here are the main instances:
> That is just objectively incorrect, and fundamentally misunderstanding the basics of statehood
This counts as a personal swipe, and as fulminating.
> It is however entirely reasonable to assume that the comment I replied to was made entirely in bad faith
People can be mistaken or wrong, or just of a different opinion/assessment, without acting “entirely in bad faith”.
> "Baselessly" - I'm sorry but realpolitik is plenty of basis. China is a geopolitical adversary of both the EU and the US. And China will be the first to admit this, btw.
This is phrased in a snarky way.
The points you've made are fine to make, but the way you make them matters. Snarkiness, swipes, put-downs, accusations of bad faith (giving your reason "why" you think it was in bad faith doesn't make it OK) are all clearly against the guidelines.
I can accept that you didn't mean to break the guidelines, which is why I've politely asked you to familiarise yourself with them and try harder to follow them in future. It's a request not a scolding. It's not necessary to announce you want to quit HN in protest. (Though of course, eventually we would rather people leave if they prefer not to follow the guidelines.) Just making an effort to respect the guidelines and the HN community would be great.
The deletion request was completely unrelated. I just don’t like the interaction gamification. Thanks!
I have not made a single personal swipe in this entire comment tree. I have stated (implied) that certain views are not consistent with a cursory introduction to the topic at hand.
I absolutely assumed a basic familiarity with the concept of a state from a comment on the relationship between states. That is good faith and basic respect for the human you are conversing with as I view it.
Overall, I have kept a tone I would prefer be kept towards myself; fake politeness is just condescending.
That being said: Your site, your rules, and your power to arbitrarily interpret and enforce said rules. I.e., message received, regardless of my thoughts on your interpretation of events.
> Overall, I have kept a tone I would prefer be kept towards myself; fake politeness is just condescending.
We don't want you to be fake. We just want you to make the effort to share your perspective in a way that is kind and is conducive to curious conversation, which is HN's primary objective. We know it can be hard to get this right when commenting on the internet. It's common for people to underestimate how hostile their words can come across to others, when they seem just like reasonable, matter-of-fact statements when formulated in one's own mind.
> That being said: Your site, your rules, and your power to arbitrarily interpret and enforce said rules
That's not really it. The community holds the power here; when we try to override broad community sentiment and expectations, the community pushes back forcefully.
Your comments got my attention because they were attracting flags and downvotes from the community, and from looking at these comments and earlier ones in your feed, my assessment is "yes, I can see why". (We don't let community sentiment, or "mob rule" win out all the time; we often override flags if we think they're unfair, but in your case, given the pattern we observe over time, we think the community's response is reasonable.)
Isn’t every country by definition a “local monopoly on force”? Sweden and Norway have their own militaries and police forces and neither would take kindly to an invasion from the other. By your definition this makes them adversaries or enemies.
Exactly. I am Norwegian myself, and I don’t even know how many wars we have had with Sweden and Denmark.
If you are getting at the fact that it is sometimes beneficial for adversaries to collaborate (e.g., the prisoner dilemma) then I agree. And indeed, both Norway and Sweden would be completely lost if they declared war on the other tomorrow. But it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the relationship.
Nothing is more permanent in politics than temporary solution. As a Norwegian, for example, I am still paying a temporary 25% on all spending that was enacted as a "temporary" measure over 100 years ago.
Control Theory does not work (in the general) for politics for the simple reason that incentives are misaligned. That is to say that control theory itself obviosuly works, but for it to be a good solution in some political context you must additionally prove the existance of some Nash equilibrium where it is being correctly applied.
The thesis argues that dictators regularly both harm groups clearly inside the winning coalition, and please groups clearly outside of it. A common, but not the only reason, is ideology.
One has to be careful when using game-theory models on messy human entities. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it's hard to determine just at what point the model breaks down. At least without empirical research.
(Another example is that actual negotiation outcomes rarely end up at the minimax or Nash product equilibria that game theory sequential negotiation concepts would suggest.)
What are you saying here? It is true that VS Code is less bad in terms of responsiveness in comparison to Atom. Zed, however, is written in Rust (i.e., not Electron), and I would guess it is at least an order of magnitude more responsive than VS Code across every possible scenario.
Web technologies are an unrivaled technological marvel for what they are, but it is disingenuous to imply they represent anything near the peak of what we are capable of in the context of performance.
It depends. It definitely opens faster and the general UI seems a bit faster, but open a largish file (a few MB) and VSCode will easily out-perform Zed because it doesn't have that fancy CDRT thing.
In my experience VSCode is plenty fast. Use it with no extensions and you will have zero problems with performance (though memory use isn't great). The real problems come when you have extensions, especially because it's often impossible to attribute performance issues to them because they can often do a lot of work all in the same "extension host" process.
> you will have zero problems with performance (though memory use isn't great)
Memory use is a part of performance, though, so I definitely would say VS Code has serious performance issues. It's why I no longer use it, in fact. It's inexcusable for something to eat as much RAM as VS Code does.
If you use vscode on a platform with limited resources you will see that vscode is absolutely NOT fastand zed outperforms vscose long way. Extensions or not. And electron is a pleague that needs to pass from this world
Based on this comment [0], they're building DeltaDB as a version control system which uses a CRDT, so I assume even in single player mode, the file will instantiate its own CRDT for fine grained tracking of changes.
This particular argument is a complete non-issue if we just do “nothing” and let the price mechanism work in the energy markets. There might be a long-term and permanent contraction that reflects the physical reality of energy becoming less available, but there will not be a proper collapse unless some well-meaning central planner tries to avoid it.
Except that by letting the market burn all available fossil fuels we'll get the worst possible case of climate change. And markets aren't known for thinking long-term; by the time we're going to be lacking fuels it will be a bit late to massively build nuclear power plants that takes years to build, massively install renewable and build / install massive storage, or adjust the entire world to less predictable electricity generation if using renewables without massive storage.
France has been doing well with electricity, thanks to central planning that pushed for nuclear. The problem is bad planning, regardless of whether it's public sector or private sector.
Guilt by association: If, e.g., violence is a problem, then one needs to deal with the violence. In general, law-abiding citizens are—and should—be free to congregate and partake in their bad habits wherever they please. And even though gambling is generally immoral, it does not infringe on anyone else's God-given rights and has no business being made illegal.
Gambling is emphasized above to emphasize we are talking about individuals who are not sufficiently skilled to argue they are not essentially partaking in pure games of chance.
Sports betting is not a game of pure chance, but bookmaking is arguably ethically quite problematic.
Most individuals are going up against these very sophisticated statistical models created by teams of quants working with huge datasets that you have to pay substantial amounts to access. I think most bettors don't know what they're up against.
And the bookie business model is intrinsically anti-consumer: if you win too much then the bookies will ban you. Whereas bookies are quite happy to keep taking money from addicts even when said addicts have already lost their life savings.
And any active investment platforms are not different at all. A lot of matketing budget is spent to make people believe they can earn money by trading.
There are some differences: investment platforms wont kick you out if you manage to earn money. Gambling sites do that. If you are loosing a lot, gaming sites make your limits go up. If you are winning a lot, your limits go down. Investment sites dont do that.
They also assign "consigliere" to you if you loose a lot. He is supposed to create a personal relationship with you. If you try to stop playing, that person will try to get you back into gaming.
You are not betting against investment platform itself, you are betring against other people on it. That is major difference.
Yeah, the incentives are completely different between exchanges and bookmakers. Exchanges make money regardless of who wins or loses. Bookmakers make money from their users losing.
> Most individuals are going up against these very sophisticated statistical models created by teams of quants working with huge datasets that you have to pay substantial amounts to access.
There are two things you might do as a bookmaker:
(1) Perceive the truth of who is likely to do what, and set odds reflecting that perfect Platonic reality, but with a percentage taken off for yourself.
(2) Adjust the odds you offer over time such that, come the event, the amount you stand to collect on either side will cover the amount you owe to the other side.
You don't need to know the odds to use strategy (2). Nor do you need to reject bettors who are likely to be right.
I have worked in the betting industry for several years. And the reason I'm writing is to tell you that while (2) sound logical, it was not used during my time in the industry. Or to be more precise, of course the odds are adjusted all the time to balance the market, prevent arbitrage etc, but it was also very common to have a 'loss leader bet', usually on the favourite, where the betting company would take a loss or make very little money if the favourite wins (but if that happens the customers still don't make a lot, because the odds are already low, and betting on a favourite is not a winning strategy because the real fav loss probability is higher than the odds would suggest). OTOH what is also often done is when 'real odds' are very high (low probability), the odds that are offered are way lower than the probability would suggest. So if 'real odds' are 100:1, the company would offer 50:1, so, even taking into account the company margins, you as a customers are never offered anything close to the real probability and as a consequence unless you are exceptionally good can never make money (and if you do your are banned).
Strategy (2) doesn't tell you how to come up with the initial prices, and bookies can potentially lose a significant amount from giving "bad" initial prices. If an individual is winning a lot of money from a bookie repeatedly because of these bad initial prices, then it is a sign that they might have a better model than the bookie, and so it is in the bookie's interest to ban them, since sports betting is a zero-sum game: every dollar you win from a bookie is a dollar that the bookie loses.
I worked for a gambling syndicate. We often made money from bad initial prices. Many bookies tolerated us because they wanted to know what we thought was mispriced and rapidly adjusted their odds after we started betting.
It was a balancing act though. They really wanted to know what we were doing, but didn’t want to lose too much to us. So there was some give and take / bartering around the fair value of our information in the form of our accounts being banned and limited or bets being voided. But they definitely didn’t want to eradicate us.
> If an individual is winning a lot of money from a bookie repeatedly because of these bad initial prices, then it is a sign that they might have a better model than the bookie, and so it is in the bookie's interest to ban them
I don't think this follows. If an individual is winning a lot of money repeatedly in this way, it is a sign that the bookie should give their bets a lot of weight when adjusting prices. But that information is something the bookie might want.
If bookies want better prices they can pay for prices from places that have good models. Or they can buy / build their own models. What you're suggesting doesn't make sense from an economic perspective.
It is your right as a human to waste your life away. It is also by definition immoral regardless of moral system (so long as 'waste your life away' is an accurate assessment within said moral system), but they are completely separate matters.
A college fund your parents saved for you isn't your money unless the money is in your name (or possibly set up correctly at the bank). If they just save it in their name, they can spend away as they like. It is their money until it is actually in your name even if you were told it was there as a child.
Which is understandable in many cases if the family actually needs the money before someone goes to college.
Yes, they chose their genes and the structure of their brain after all, how irresponsible of them! /s
In general, something that happens at scale and consistently is not an individual problem.
You have whole armies of very well funded designers of things like processed food, or games, working to deliberate find the faults in human brains, and to make politicians make the laws that lets them do it legally, and you say it's the fault of the individual that falls for it?
Do you think people with a gambling addiction are enjoying it and making an informed choice to continue, and could therefore just choose not to do it instead?
But seriously, mental illness exists. Other sorts of things affect the brain - hormones, cancers, dementia, injuries, etc. Some things really are completely out of your control and no amount of "personal responsibility" is gonna get you out of them nor avoid them.
This argument doesn't account for the inherent, drastic power imbalance between the average participant of gambling and the average owner of a gambling center.
Gambling between people, a basement poker game, that's fine, that's no one's business.
Handing your money over to rich people operating black boxes that are designed from ground up to mesmerize and mind control you into emptying your wallet is a totally other story. On the individual level, it ruins the lives of anyone who is unable to resist or understand the psychological tricks employed on them. Zooming out, it destroys families, communities and in effect, societies.
If we are going to base the legality of gambling on consent and human rights, we have to recognize the limit where consent is no longer valid, due to sickening engagement tactics.
Someone's freedom to make money off of my ignorance or weakness does not supersede my right to self-determination and well-being, neither of which are possible when being hoodwinked by exploitative capitalists.
If we are to continue allowing corporate gambling operations and 24/7 mobile sports betting, we need to place serious restrictions on how these companies are allowed to operate.
I'm fairly okay with legalizing everything but absolutely banning advertising it.
Which is what we should be doing with gambling: no advertising, as opposed to now where everybody ad break has a celebrity endorsing the intelligence you clearly have when you choose (betting platform).
The emotional manipulation of paid celebrity endorsement of harmful, engagement-hacking products and services is downright sickening, just the thought of how normalized it's become makes me sick to the stomach.
I'm very pro gun, pro freedom of consumption, pro crypto, etc. but once emotional manipulation comes into play, self-determinism goes out the window and people are no longer making free choices.
> I'm very pro gun, pro freedom of consumption, pro crypto, etc. but once emotional manipulation comes into play, self-determinism goes out the window and people are no longer making free choices.
To me, this is a very mature response. The whole idea of you do what you want as an adult and you own all of the consequences. Why do you make an exception for "emotional manipulation"? To be clear: I am not trolling in this post. I want to know why you think these things can be legal, but advertising about them is "morally bad".
Well, advertising as a concept is fine, but the industry is steeped in advanced, refined yet old-as-time-itself psychological manipulation tactics.
When addiction is intentionally engineered at a high level and wrapped in the Trojan horse of self-sufficiency or emotion, deceit, or the power of suggestion, we have a problem. Imagine Taylor Swift doing an ad for crack cocaine.
The war on drugs should never have happened. It's been used a tool of foreign and domestic terror and control for a century. It was designed and popularized by corrupt people who stood to gain wealth from restricting the freedom of others.
To your implied point, drug addictions similarly ravish communities, destroy lives, and in the case of drugs like fentanyl, legalization effectively makes it easy to acquire extremely potent and discreet poisons, which has a huge potential impact for violence.
We can paint a similar story for gun violence. We can tie drugs, gambling and guns together even more tightly when we look into where cities approve permits for gambling centers, where most liquor stores pop up, selective enforcement and scandals like the Iran-Contra affair [0].
It's important to have a consistent position on all of these topics, so I thank you for raising this point. So all of that said, I think drug consumption/manufacturing/distribution, guns and gambling should generally all be legal at a high level, but we must dispense with the racist and classist implementations of these systems within our societies, and we should have sensible evaluation and certification programs in place for access to different stratifications.
You should be required to periodically prove medical and psychological fitness, as well as operational certification, for certain powerful substances. Similarly, we need sensible restrictions on gambling and guns [1].
The reality is that with freedom comes responsibility. Without responsibility, unrestricted freedom leads to anarchy or a post-capitalist nightmare. One of the main points of government is to balance these freedoms across individuals, communities and society at large, in order to maximize the well-being and self-determination of the people, while allowing for progress and innovation.
[1] To be clear, I am very pro 2nd amendment [1] and am not calling for a ban on anything or for the State to maintain a monopoly on violence and power.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" - Karl Marx
I asked because I noticed this strange cluster (for me) of people which want to ban some things like gambling or social media algorithms because they are exploitative and addictive, but who also want to legalize drugs. I had a feeling you might be in it.
Stranger, some of them want to ban/make it harder to distribute drugs "legally" through doctors (OxyContin, Sackler family scandal) because doctors might be monetarily incentivized, but then they also support complete drug legalization, including for the same drugs (fentanyl). This position is not even internally consistent, in this case fentanyl was "legalized" close to what they seem to demand, just gated by a doctor.
I don't have a clear position, but I don't think I would support legalization of "hard" drugs (anything above marijuana/MDMA). I can't see any positive, the negatives are clear, and it impacts the whole society (I will respect your freedom until it impinges on mine).
I am pro 2nd amendment, but I also believe the State should maintain it's monopoly on violence. Otherwise it's Mad Max world. The way the 2nd amendment is stated (prevent tirany) would not work anyway today, the military power of the State is vastly larger, the "militias" will never stand a chance against Police/Army/Cyber/... So I am pro guns just as far as personal protection requires (so no rocket launchers).
I was reading this chain of responses. They are great. The two of you are very thoughtful in your world view.
About your last paragraph: How do you feel about other OECD (highly developed) countries that do not allow personal gun ownership (except for hunting and sport shooting (clays, etc.)? Take Japan for example: Except for hunting and sport shooting, ownership of guns is not allowed. How do you feel about it?
The entire point of defense against tyranny is because today's well-behaved police can be tomorrow's racist State thugs. Authoritarianism is a ratchet.
It absolutely does account for that. Your entire comment is a strawman.
If that is not intentional (which I suspect it is not, so no offense intended), then I believe a quick search on “God-given rights” should help you make whatever case you want to in a logically consistent manner. It is a well-defined concept that has a specific meaning over a specific domain. I get the feeling “negative rights vs. positive rights” might be a useful search phrase as well.
The Judeo-Christian god does not exist, nor any other god, so I'm not sure what rights you're referring to. Are you referring to human rights? We don't need a religion to justify those.
Anyway, you said your argument accounts for it, but didn't actually follow through and demonstrate why that is. How does your argument take into account the aforementioned power imbalances?
No. Normally I would, but you are either being lazy or just plain acting in bad faith.
1. My answer is not vague. You are refusing to look up the critical definition.
2. Everything you have brought up (except for the theism bit, which is just completely off-topic) was preemptively addressed in my initial comment.
It’s not about the Gambling, it’s the fact these businesses are collecting a large number of easy victims in once place.
Imagine you’re a loan shark. Which of the following seems like a good place to look for customers: upscale restaurant, movie theater, random bar, theme park, baseball stadium, city park, or a sports betting venue.
Imagine you're a luxury watch thief. Which of the following seems like a good place to look for customers: upscale restaurant, ... or a sports betting venue.
By customers you mean "people to sell stolen watches to"? Cause if that is the question, neither of these is a good place. Affluent people wont buy obviously stolen watches directly in the restaurant, they will go through middleman that makes them look legit.
And people being there to bet wont be buying watches that much either.
Rights are merely a simplification of complex interactions. Societies are more focused on what benefits themselves than such simplification.
The minimal effectiveness of enhanced interrogation plus the desire of the population not to risk being so interrogated means people are generally apposed to such. Tracking down a nuclear threat is considered something of an exception to this stance by the average person.
Either you accept the definition of God-given rights, which is certainly not consistent with your opening statement.
Or you don’t, at which point any following argument regarding its proper usage is moot.
You seem to have gone with the latter, which makes your comment irrelevant. And that is regardless of its truthfulness. To be clear I disagree with it, but getting into that would contribute to derailing the conversation.
It’s not a rejection of the existence of God-given rights.
It’s a rejection of the idea that people’s list of them would be consistent through time. In 1,000 years people may come up with a list of God-given rights, but it won’t be the same list you use.
As such trying to come up with a list of God-given rights from a human perspective is inherently a flawed undertaking. God is beyond human comprehension.
Rights are not something you enumerate, i.e., they are not a “list.” The underlying idea of God-given rights is, simply put, that your freedom ends where mine begins and vice versa.
The idea, moreover, is the generalization of ethics to an environment with multiple actors, such as Earth. And it is, of course, inconsistent with many ethical systems: A competing idea in equally simple terms is “might makes right.”
And the idea, furthermore, does not change over time. So if you substitute it into my previous comment, you will see that the argument within holds.
Finally, and as a side note, I strongly agree that the state of possible actions, and as the “list” of possible infringements changes with, e.g., technology. An 1800s philosopher would, for example, never have considered the applicability of any theory of rights to the operation of a nuclear power plant.
Except it does “them’s fighting words” only died out very recently, but it provides a starkly different boundary between my rights and your rights.
Ritualized lethal combat was a thing for very long time, and took an incredibly long time to go away. Trial by combat and dueling grows out of a fundamentally different ethical framework not just a lack of technology. It seems antithetical to Christianity today, but that wasn’t always the case.
Books most definitely won’t let you win long term. They only want you as long as you’re losing and can ban you once you win too much. This sounds illegal and isn’t.
Irrelevant. I only bring up the stochastic element because of the implicit argument that people are being victimized by gambling against their will.
Since you would be extremely off-topic if you tried to extend this argument to, e.g., Daniel Negreanu engaging in a game of poker, I wanted to explicitly preclude individuals competently engaging in whatever activity is being deemed 'problematic.'
It was mostly to help the 'other side' stay on topic; otherwise, I could trivially refute their arguments by counterexamples, e.g., Daniel Negreanu.
What an absolute clown literally trying to outlaw math. Are people going to jail every time they apply Fermat's little theorem, or what exactly is the plan here?
If I possess, e.g., a certain quantity of U235, the government can act on the material, e.g., confiscate it because it is a physical entity. Meanwhile, I can arrive at the knowledge required for encryption, and even an encrypted message, a priori.
In other words, it is not even slightly comparable.
(1) Anyone who disseminates or makes publicly available content (§ 11 (3)) that is suitable for serving as instruction for an unlawful act referred to in § 126 (1) and is intended to promote or arouse the willingness of others to commit such an act shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine.
(2) The same penalty shall apply to anyone who
1. disseminates or makes available to the public content (§ 11 (3)) that is suitable for serving as instructions for an unlawful act referred to in § 126 (1), or
2. gives instructions in public or at a meeting for an unlawful act referred to in Section 126 (1)
in order to encourage or incite others to commit such an act.
"§ 126 Disturbance of public order by threatening to commit criminal offenses
(1) Anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb the public peace,
1. commits one of the cases of breach of the peace specified in § 125a sentence 2 nos. 1 to 4,
2. commits a criminal offense against sexual self-determination in the cases specified in § 177 paragraphs 4 to 8 or § 178,
3. murder (§ 211), manslaughter (§ 212) or genocide (§ 6 of the International Criminal Code) or a crime against humanity (§ 7 of the International Criminal Code) or a war crime (§§ 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12 of the International Criminal Code),
5. a criminal offense against personal freedom in the cases of Section 232 (3) sentence 2, Section 232a (3), (4) or (5), Section 232b (3) or (4), Section 233a (3) or (4), in each case insofar as these are crimes, Sections 234 to 234b, § 239a or § 239b,
6. robbery or extortion (§§ 249 to 251 or § 255),
7. a crime dangerous to the public in the cases of Sections 306 to 306c or 307 (1) to (3), Section 308 (1) to (3), Section 309 (1) to (4), Sections 313, 314 or 315 (3), § 315b (3), § 316a (1) or (3), § 316c (1) or (3) or § 318 (3) or (4), or
8. a dangerous offense in the cases of § 309 (6), § 311 (1), § 316b (1), § 317 (1) or § 318 (1)
shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine.
(2) Anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb public peace, knowingly falsely claims that one of the unlawful acts referred to in paragraph 1 is about to be committed shall also be punished.
High explosives are even less regulated than firearms in the US. You can buy them by the ton and explosives are very inexpensive. This does not circumvent compliance with regulations for safe transport and storage, which is the practical limitation.
I can store a ton of firearms in my garage but they can’t destroy the neighborhood by accident. High-explosives can.
People that buy high-explosives at scale just have some land outside of town where they can store them en masse. Problem solved. There are huge magazines of high-explosive just outside many major cities all over the US. Very infrequently, one of them goes “boom”, which kind of justifies forcing them to be on the outskirts.
You can own it, you just have to store it where it won’t wreck your neighbors if you are an idiot. Rural land is cheap.
Black powder, which is used (and at the time necessary) in the kind of firearms used when the 2A was conceived, has such limitations in any non-trivial (more than personal use) quantity.
Ackshually, when the NFA was passed to 'tax' explosives ('destructive devices'), it was considered unconstitutional infringement on the right to keep/bear arms to ban explosives, machine guns, etc so they 'taxed' them instead. You can still buy/manufacture them with a tax stamp.
Also when congress de-funded (outlawed) the process for felons to restore their firearm rights, they forgot to do it with explosives. So even a felon can have high-energy explosives legally.
All Australians now live with the Assistance and Access Act 2018, where yes in fact if you use the illegal math, receive a TCN and do not comply… straight to jail.
Australia is dystopic in more ways than one[1], so this unfortunately does not surprise me.
I probably do not have to point out the issue with the soundbite, but I am doing it anyway: The “laws” of mathematics are valid across all of existence. Last time I checked, that includes Australia. As a matter of fact, I have personally stored encrypted communications with an Australian vendor after the law went into effect (not that I knew about that law in particular). And I can confirm that the communications were indeed still encrypted.
This doesn't seem hard to do. Messaging apps exist in app stores, transmit data through one of a few ISPs often past national boundaries to a couple of data centers. It's not hard for a national government to see the communication and stop it or punish those attempting it.
It could be done by technical means, putting pressure of the stores, or anywhere along the chain.
Countries block all social media by fiat. It seems easy enough.
It is easy to ban what are currently the most popular apps for encrypted messaging. But the math is more or less trivial, to the point that this will simply kick off a cat-and-mouse game the government cannot win. And that is before steganography comes into play.
At the absolute worst, OTPs are trivially uncrackable and relatively foolproof, assuming you can exchange keys out of band. Furthermore, it is trivial to generate keys that decode captured ciphertext into decoy cleartext, should the government try to coerce the keys from you.
I'm not saying OTP is practical for regular people in everyday chats (though it certainly can be for text, in my opinion). However, it is apparent to me that if RSA+AES becomes unviable, for example, then it will have nearly no impact on any criminal operation that cares about security.
I agree with you in substance. But do these cute little word games—where we redefine commonly understood strings of words with idiosyncratic meanings to obscure what’s actually being disputed—work on anyone? It’s like saying that gun control is “literally trying to outlaw chemical reactions and kinetic energy.” Why not just clearly articulate what right you think society should protect?
To help you along, you basically have two alternatives:
1. Be intentionally vague, so the definition encapsulates just about anything and can then be applied and enforced at will. This is obviously what they are going for, by the way, and *that* is the word game being played here.
2. Some set of sets of mathematical functions, contingent on some properties pertaining to computational complexity. This is what cryptography is and, as such, is the correct way to go about it. Non-exhaustively, one property we are looking for is that some data can only be considered 'encrypted' if the computational complexity of decoding it without a secret/key is strictly higher than with said secret/key.
As I also said in another comment, I can derive an encrypted message a priori. That makes it fundamentally different from any analogies tied to physics or chemistry.
Denmark's constitution recognizes the right to freedom of speech. Moreover, the right to freedom of speech is a fundamental right that exists regardless of your government's ability to recognize it.
Thus, 'freedom of speech' is a perfectly legitimate and reasonable answer to 'what right you think society should protect', regardless of what country we are speaking about.
Yes. Because it will decrease the legitimate traffic online that is encrypted, which makes it easier to pick out encrypted channels from the noise. A few listeners at key nodes in the country's communications network to flag encrypted signals for investigation or simple disruption and you're G2G.
It's the "If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns" theory, except the other side of that coin is "It's real easy to see who the criminals are if guns are banned: they're the folks carrying guns."
How do you filter encrypted channels from the noise? For example, say the criminals now communicate by having a browser extension write e2ee encrypted todo items on a shared todo list app.
Now that you see how the government lies in the area you actually understand, try to extrapolate a little and think about what else the government might be lying about ;)
Unrelated with GP post: What's wrong with Java's Optional?
IIRC it doesn't fulfill monad axiom, but I don't think there's a huge problem with it. By the time you're using Option<>-like, I don't think you should use bare `null` at all in your project. Mixing Option<>-like and bare `null` sounds like playing with fire.
Also, if you're using Java 17+ (`record` in your example), you're probably better off writing your own Option<T> to support sum-type matching & product-type destructuring.
> IIRC it doesn't fulfill monad axiom, but I don't think there's a huge problem with it. By the time you're using Option<>-like, I don't think you should use bare `null` at all in your project. Mixing Option<>-like and bare `null` sounds like playing with fire.
That's completely backwards IME. The whole point of Option is to allow you to make precise distinctions, and not allowing null in it when null is allowed in regular variables is a recipe for disaster.
For example, the flagship use case of Optional is to make it possible to implement something like a safer Map#get(), where you can tell the difference between "value was not in the map" and "value was in the map, but null". A language that wanted to evolve positively could do something like: add Optional to the language, add Map#safeGet that returns Optional, deprecate Map#get, and then one chronic source of bugs would be gone from the language. (And yes, ideally no-one would ever put null in the map and you wouldn't have this problem in the first place - but people do, like it or not). Instead, Java introduced an Optional that you can't put nulls in, so you can't do this.
Removing null completely is a good end goal, but in order to get from there to here we need to migrate trillions of lines of code (and having an option type available is necessary to even get started), and if that option type can't accommodate all the values that are valid in the language and existing codebases (which currently includes null, like it or not) then we can't even get started.
Optional::map returns an empty optional if the passed function returns null. This is incorrect and can be especially hurtful in intermediate operations. Allowing Optional::map to return an Optional<void> would have been correct.
Alternatively, just don't call it 'map'.
I agree implementing your Option<T> type is better. The problem is that people will use whatever is available in the standard library—I am not working in isolation.
> The problem is when implementations aren’t actually monads at all
Exactly, this was my point, it wasn't clear.
The original definition, and Haskell's implementation are good in itself. Monads in Haskell are not that difficult or too abstract.
It was Monad tutorials and partial implementations missed the mark, like in your example.
Myself, similarly, I've seen way too many Option<T> implementations in Typescript that are less safe than if (value !== null) {}, because they replace a static check with an exception in runtime.
Yes, monads are abstract, but the definition is also very precise. Specifically (using C++/Rust notation for parameterized types), if we have a type "M<T>", we also need:
...where the mapping creates an "extra" layer of M<...>, and then we flatten it away immediately.
(There are other rules than ones I listed above, but they tend to be easy to meet.)
Once you have flatMap, you can share one syntax for promises/futures, Rust-style Return and "?", the equivalent for "Option", and a few dozen other patterns.
Unfortunately, to really make this sing, you need to be able to write a type definition which includes all possible "M" types. Which Rust can't do. And it also really helps to be able to pick which version of a function to call based on the expected return type. Which Rust actually can do, but a lot of other low- and mid-level languages can't.
So monads have a very precise definition, and they appear in incomplete forms all over the place in modern languages (especially async/await). But it's hard to write the general version outside of languages like Haskell.
The main reason to know about monads in other languages is that if your design is about 90% of the way to being a monad, you should probably consider including the last 10% as well. JavaScript promises are almost monads, but they have a lot of weird edge cases that would go away if they included the last 10%. Of course, that might not always be possible (like in many Rust examples). But if you fall just barely short of real monads, you should at least know why you do.
(For example, Rust: "We can't have real monads because our trait system can't quite express higher-order types, and because ownership semantics mean our function types are frankly a mess.")
As long as the companies in question aren't monopolies on violence, it's a complete non-issue. So with that in mind, why would any sane person want to impose such an inefficient mechanism to allocate resources and make decisions within a company or corporation?
The only good thing about democracy in the context of a state, after all, is that every other alternative is worse. But that is strictly because of the fundamentally violent nature of the concept of a state, which does not apply to companies or corporations.
Violence is not always physical. The likes of Meta have subjected the world to unfathomable violence, but we give them a pass because we can't see the scars with our eyes.
Huh? Violence is defined as the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. If you mean "harm", please use that word instead of wrongly using another.
The guy who whispers in the king’s ear also has an effective monopoly on violence.
What we’ve learned over the last half century is that extreme wealth disparities lead to extreme power disparities. Coercion doesn’t just emanate from the state.
You should educate yourself about corporate violence both inside and outside the US - the use of intimidation and murder for strike breaking, the role the Pinkerton agency, the original meaning of "banana republic."
It's tragic - but not accidental - there's no mention of any of this in schools or any public memory of it.
Illegal things happen all the time. The current president has committed many crimes and suffered no punishment. Elon Musk is an illegal immigrant. Uber was completely illegal but they did it anyway. The law isn't actually the law - the real law is what gets enforced.
A company is quite literally the one of most violent environments you could find yourself in (especially when talking about the united states). Violence isn't just physical: a single person having the right to decide whether you live or die (because finding a new job isn't always easy, because they don't care if it's a tough time in your life, etc), whether you thrive or you're being miserable. A single person having the ability to make 8+ hours of your day hell, able to turn it into the most alienating thing you've ever done in your life.
You speak from a position of privilege, where you could reasonably expect to find a job quickly should anything happen. That's not the case for the vast, vast majority of people.
>But that is strictly because of the fundamentally violent nature of the concept of a state, which does not apply to companies or corporations.
Putting aside the fact that we've established you're wrong about companies: no, absolutely not ? Democracy isn't better because state violent. Would democracy be unneeded in a completely pacific, disarmed state ? Would democracy be the best political system if suddenly the majority decided that beating up brown people in the street is legal again ?
I'd encourage you to read a little bit more about political theory and how societies have formed. Your reading is that of a stereotypical tech bro, and that's just not good for anyone.
violence is defined specifically as the use of physical force, and I expect the other commentator you're replying to specifically chose that word for a reason.
No, it isn't. Every single definition of violence includes forms other than just physical.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation
