The US is currently using the immigration system to target brown people for abduction and transport to foreign death camps without any due process. It's monitoring social media to see who says mean things about Dear Leader. It's taking steps to control campuses, the media, and even lawyers.

It's not a lot of people, yet. Regardless, the US has no moral high ground here.

And ultimately, at any given scale, it's all about control.

Everything that is fundamental to a group's survival should be under that group's control. A viable, stable country needs to be able to defend its borders, maintain order, and keep its people housed, clothed, and fed. There's a lot more to making a NICE country and happy citizens, but those three things are the bare minimum.

These days, that means you need to keep the computers humming because they're controlling everything. If your nation can afford to make its own chips, it absolutely should, even if they're not as good as ones you can easily source from a trustworthy ally. Just like a country should always have enough food produced locally to keep people from malnutrition or starvation if its borders are blockaded.

International trade and interdependence should be for everything beyond the survival needs, because ultimately it's more efficient. But the survival-level stuff has to be under domestic control or you're existing at the whim of whoever actually controls it.

>Genuine question: is it any different from us calling Deutschland âoeGermanyâ on our maps?

Renaming the Gulf on American maps was done to incite domestic racist/nationalist fervor. But, in terms of international relations, it's America's right to do so.

Every nation serious about its communications infrastructure should have its own OS and business applications. Even just maintaining a fork of something open source.

Windows and Azure are waiting to be abused by the US government to hurt a perceived foe.

While Trump demanding the name change was the act of a stupid petulant man-baby... the US can use whatever names they want on their maps.

Laugh at Americans for this? Yes. Keep calling things whatever you were already calling them? Yeah, of course. Sue a company because you don't like the labels on another country's maps? Stupid.

> the browser certificate problem is easily solved by having a public key DNS entry.

As secure as your DNS server, I suppose. I'm no encryption expert, but it seems it'd be easier to take control of your domain if all I had to do was get a registrar to repoint your DNS instead of having to also compromise a separate entity that provides encryption certificates.

Depends on his goals. If his goal was to kill an evil healthcare exec, he succeeded. If he intended to remain free afterwards, not so much.

I don't know that I can agree that his vigilante action was justified - he killed a man not involved in his personal suffering - but overlooking that part, some goals require sacrifice to achieve. Maybe he feels his freedom was a price worth paying.

Luigi killed a man who needed killing, but A) it wasn't a guy involved in Luigi's healthcare issues and B) he's only one person.

Ideally, the threat of violence gets the job done, and you're going to need a big mob ready to take on a lot of targets. One vigilante isn't fixing your problems, you need a big cultural movement. One where everyone understands what's at stake and is ready to sacrifice their finances, freedoms, and lives. It's a big ask, but the outcome is worse if it doesn't get done.

>Every now and then one of the lefties realizes how fuck they are and does a screed about how we're going to all use violence to get back democracy.

It'll happen... Eventually, when things are bad enough they can no longer fool themselves into thinking there is a choice, the sheep will fight back.

The US isn't Russia. It has a long cultural history of prosperity and resentment and selfishness, and you can't just rip that away and put a boot on its neck without pushback. There's a whole generation of angry young men having their futures torn away, only unlike the MAGAs they're not ignorant and gullible. But they will grow up with an intense burning hatred of the right wing and nothing to lose...

We laughed at them for choosing ignorance and hatred and poverty even though we offered education and cooperation and prosperity.

Wow, they showed us, didn't they? Are their lives improving? No? Seems we were right to laugh at them, but probably wrong in being mostly compassionate and trying to help. We should have let them fail themselves into extinction long ago.

I just read an article that was 'hopeful', pointing out Trump is losing more cases than winning that are brought against him because of the government's actions. Show me the parts of his agenda that are good for Americans, where a win for him isn't a loss for everyone else.

Free press, an impartial adversarial judicial system, due process... pretty much everything Americans have held as necessary to their pursuit of happiness is being destroyed while those who aren't cheering it on sit idly by.

You're less than a couple of years away from being in a Russian oligarchy. Maybe far less. The market pain is going to start hitting hard in a few weeks, and it's not going to let up. They're going to try and blame others to solidify their grip on power. New groups will be chosen as the scapegoat and persecuted.

This is the future of the US, because nobody wants to pay the price of fighting tyranny if they still have hope somebody else will do the bleeding for them. I can't fight for you, I'm busy worrying my country will be selected as your next external 'enemy' and then I'm going to have to fight and it won't be FOR you.

Seek and transfer rates aren't what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about being flooded with so much data you don't know where to look for the particular byte you want in the first place.

Being an AGI assigned to watching someone else live so you can index their life for them to relive at their whim... that's a special hell.

Hopefully we don't figure out how to make an actual intelligence until we're no longer likely to do such things with it.

They're not worried about effective oversight and they're dirty.

All the cops I ever worked with had the same story - resisted until they were forced, a bit of 'accidental' non-compliance and equipment damage, and then they notice the change and became converts as they had far fewer hostile interactions and harassment by suspects who knew they were being recorded. Complaints DROP when body cams come in.

Cops who want to get rid of body cams want to hurt people without getting caught. They shouldn't be watched, they should be beaten and left in a ditch.

When I can afford enough storage to record my life from start to finish in 8K, it's time to worry more about indicies and search.

There is a point at which more storage starts to make it impossible to find anything.