Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | stein1946's commentslogin

What if educating people takes decades and lies can be prompted in a few minutes?

Then you failed at education if a prompt can undo decades of education.

And the failure of education was an intentional feature, not a bug, since the government wants obedient tax cattle that will easily accept their propaganda at elections, not freethinkers that question everything because then they might notice your lies and corruption.

It's like building a backdoor into your system thinking you're the only one who gets to use it for the upper hand, but then throw fits when everyone else is using your backdoors to defeat you.


What if it's easier to call opposing viewpoints "lies" than it is to defend yours.

While I understand that once one attains those short of connections, certain intelligence agencies will reach out offering lucrative opportunities for your co-operation.

Disgusting nature aside, I can't help but be amazed as to how someone can be so well connected. What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial?

How do you get in a position to correspond with presidents, royals, celebrities and getting them all hooked on you?

Amazing indeed.


A few years ago there was some news articles about “group chats that rule the world”, and for some reason people didn’t take it seriously enough. Closer to the top, it feels like it’s “everyone knows everyone” game. Playing against those groups just leads to a perma-loss, so you’re incentivized to partake.

This is/was one of such groups.


Some people would love to play against those groups with the goal of not winning but costing their opponents dearly.

They never get the opportunity though because those groups are intentionally protected from those kinds of players.


Anyone who tried has failed. It’s in the interest of the group to actively silence the dissidents as well. And it’s pretty easy when you already have the power.


Isn't part of it that he had leverage on many people, given the amount of evidence there seems to be? I guess that would be one way to further the network via 'favours'.


Wealth and the party scene (drugs and sex) as a carrot and then a stick. It is not amazing, it is vile.


He was a talented con artist. While I don't have the link offhand, I recall reading an in-depth article the New York Times published on Epstein's rise. He gained connections first by exaggerating his own credentials, and later by exaggerating the depth and nature of his other connections. He was very good at convincing people that he was someone they needed to know.



But less about personal brilliance and more about how social power actually works when money, status, and weak accountability intersect


Being omniconnected was his job, if you think he was being managed, and his business, to the extent he was freelancing and trading on his own account.

How do you become omniconnected? You offer people a good time. How do you have repeat customers? You offer them a too good time. Why the disgusting acts? Because mere sex isn't scandalous enough.

Sometimes you do it because you've been commissioned to do it to a specific person. Sometimes you do it on spec because you think you can sell it. There is no one goal or ideology or theme to it other than it's gotta be nasty enough to blackmail a target.


> What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial?

The answer may be disturbing.


If one stops seeing Epstein as only a blackmailer and instead see him as both a blackmailer and a fixer I think things falls into place.

There are after all multiple people being "given" girlfriends or contacts for social networking, shown in the Epstein files.

Most obvious example is of course Donald Trump with Melania.


[flagged]


I think it’s an oversimplification. Epstein isn’t the only “connecting big people to other big people” person. It just happened to be on top of all the shady stuff, he also trafficked kids. I believe there are more people like him, just flying under the radar.


Well, it’s not a crime to connect big people to other big people. If you are not trafficking underage people or smuggling drugs and weapons, chances are no one cares. Doesn’t mean you’re under the radar.


What triggered Mossad to toss their best informant?


The fact he got locked up?


Him being in jail awaiting trial, which risked him exposing the details of the operation if he felt it could help him get a lighter sentence.

If the choice for Mossad was either risk Epstein exposing that Israel was essentially running a state-sponsored underage sex trafficking ring, or kill him before he can do that, you know what they'd choose.


Right, so pretty much every rich person was implicated by and at risk because of Epstein, including the sitting U.S. President at the time, but it was actually Mossad…


How do you run a crime organization that big and that out in the open (communicating openly via email, which not even the biggest drug cartels dare to do) without getting taken down by the various intelligence agencies of the world, even avoiding the U.S. federal law enforcement for the longest time?

There is one answer: Epstein was protected by state forces, not that of U.S. but of its closest "ally" (more like master at this point).

Not that they need it that much today, anyway. AIPAC sponsors almost all of U.S. congress, check out how much your congressmen and women received from AIPAC here: https://www.trackaipac.com/congress


> There is one answer: Epstein was protected by state forces, not that of U.S. but of its closest "ally" (more like master at this point).

This is a bog-standard white nationalist trope (“ZOG”), gussied up with current affairs.

Epstein avoided the consequences of his actions because he was a wealthy, powerful man surrounded by other wealthy, powerful men (who in turn stand to lose a great deal by having their behavior exposed). Not because the Jews secretly run the world.


Where in their comment did they claim Jews secretly run the world?

The implication that the nation state of Israel has a lot of influence on US politicians is pretty clear and obvious at this point, and is not the same thing as “Jews run the world”.

If we replaced Israel with India, pointing out that India has immense influence on US politicians wouldn’t be the same as saying “Hindus run the world”. Nation states are not proxies for their ethnic groups like that.


It’s quite obvious from the tropey language used in both your comments and wild claims you are making about Israel because Epstein was Jewish that you do link Jews with Israel when it comes to hating on them.

Just because a bad group of people also believe the same thing doesn't make that thing false. Nice attempt.


Well I imagine CIA was in on it too of course, having blackmail material on these powerful figures across the world is useful for both of those intelligence agencies.


look up their email as ask them yourself


It's at a minimum extremely ignorant to believe or pretent that this begins and end at "Mossad" being a magical shady force that controls the world. Looking for tight little narrative misses the complexity of human sociery.


First time I hear about this Kuycon, the pricing seems phenomenal and the quality as well. I will probably buy one by the end of the week.

It's odd that we don't get to see a lot of high quality OEM monitors.


> the pricing seems phenomenal

I'm in Norway, and I wonder if I see different prices than people from elsewhere in the world? Here it says $1.7K, and I can get the LG UltraFine 6K 32" for $2K, with the benefit of being bought from a Norwegian retailer (think guarantees and shopping security).

To be clear; I have never tried either of these monitors, so I can't tell if either is any good. :D


Germany, also seeing $1699 on there...


How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped and the plan is to do another regime change via this route?

Isn't this "son of the late Shah" a guy from the US?


> How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped

It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.

For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.

There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.

The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.


Iran has a water crisis, and allegedly the economic situation is so bad that people are starting to wonder if it will soon affect their ability to buy food.

Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.


Very, but at the same time the Iranian leadership have been a really shitty government and ran the country into the gutter. People have genuine grievances.


The only way to believe this is if you're a Westerner being fed a purely US-centric media diet. Otherwise you'd know all the ways that the Iranian government has been failing their people recently and for a long time now, and how unhappy Iranians are with their government. You people act like people can't be upset at how they're being treated by their own government without being incited by an external actor. That's honestly quite the dehumanising and insulting way of looking at it.

Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.


I mean, Trump is talking about Iran nonstop.

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-01-10/ty-artic...


I don't see any tweets about how the protesters are working for the US. Like, Trump would literally say how involved they are right now, and he isn't doing it. He's a child who's incapable of being subtle or not talking about how great his "accomplishments" are. Your link doesn't show anything relevant.


...


I guess the people Israel is murdering on a massive scale are generally noncitizens, but it's still not really in a position to throw stones.


It is 100% that.


> Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.

No it's not.

Am I supposed to counter every action taken by a conglomerate against me every time?

Do all the consumers have to align to this as well?

a TV must be a TV, in the same sense that orange juice must be made from oranges.

Looking forward to EU reining in on them.


It's goddamn hilarious when during setup a device/software asks me if I live in the EU.

Makes me want to Spotify Beethoven.


Yes all hail the EU.

Soon we'll have a popup before every individual show on Netflix asking us if we accept the cookies before we watch, all in the name of consumer protection


Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers, most of which you don’t even notice because it’s hard to notice harm that did not happen.


That's fair. I live in the EU and I love it here, and I'm glad for those protections every day. Except the damn cookie popup.

I don't agree they're malicious compliance though. I think it's just regular compliance.


Regular compliance would be be to stop tracking users.

A ton of websites don’t even track users but have the cookie popup because they think that’s what you’re supposed to do.


> LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software

Can you elaborate on this one? Hopefully with some citations.


> A lot of the criticism is based on the concept that it won't be technically watertight

Those who do that, are not interested in this ban working, they are the individualists assaulting the community.

> a) normalising people uploading identification documents...

we have technical measures for which there is no need for the end user to upload anything. With oath you can basically have a simple age check; nothing more.

> (b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.

You can always minimize the fraction, but you can never make it go away.

> Because it's politically unattractive, I don't think enough attention has been given to the harms that will flow from these laws.

This was a politically bold move and there will be no harms that will come out of it; especially when compared to the status quo.

Those who feign concern about this usually have vested interests into stopping this bill; their "interest" is just another attempt in stopping it albeit with a more "nuanced" approach.


> To all the parents defending this: you are responsible for your children and what they do.

Stop delegating action to the individual.

Me and missus are full time employees, I do not have oversight to what my kid is doom-scrolling on his lunch break.

> Passing laws that affect all of us because you are too lazy and ineffectual to raise your children properly is unacceptable.

How does it affect you? Unless you are a corporate mouthpiece this does not affect you at all.

I do not want my kid to watch any degenerate pornography on his formative years just because some lobbyist wants to shove freemarketeering ideologies down our throats.


A quick glance on who Luis Garicano is tells me all I need to know about these pieces.

Economics @ University of Chicago Professor @ LSE

Various memberships at pro American institutions

Expect deregulation narratives, freemarketeering dogmas and how lobbying is actually good for democracy.


A quick glance on who Isaac Newton is tells me all I need to know about these pieces. Physics @ Trinity College @ Royal Society

Various memberships at pro Science institutions

Expect inertia narratives, gravity dogmas and... wait, do you believe economics science is pro lobbying?


You do realize that Luis Garicano was an MEP who was the vice-chair of the RenewEurope [0] coalition and is a member of the pro-EU think tanks CEPR [1] and Bruegel [2] right?

If there is an academic you want to listen to in order to understand how to better reform the EU's institutions, it's definitely Luis.

[0] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/197554/LUIS_GARICANO/...

[1] - https://cepr.org/about/people/luis-garicano

[2] - https://www.bruegel.org/people/luis-garicano


A person who chooses to evaluate all ideas by way of their source tells me all I need to know about their opinion.


What a small and dreary way to look at the world


The biography of the author is interesting and relevant, but hardly all that matters about this or any other writing.


Why do we even have 'private' train companies again?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: