Huge numbers are for political speech. It's not just prosecutions. Child protection is abused to force far left wing beliefs on the population.
A former Marine was charged with inciting racial hatred after describing some migrants as “scumbags” and “psychopaths” in a 12-minute video posted on Facebook following the murders of three children in Southport, which sparked riots around the country. He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
There are lots of cases like this. Especially if you expand to Europe. The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him. Merkel established a general rule against insulting politicians so now people get police visits and their devices confiscated for saying things like such and such a politician is a dumbass.
> He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
Who is the "they" in this? The football club? If the situation is essentially that he called certain groups scumbags, but the footbal club has members of that group, its not surprising he would be banned.
Being rude gets you banned from things. I don't see a problem with that. He wasn't thrown in jail, he said something that offended some people and as a result they decided they didn't like him anymore. Freedom of association is also freedom to chose not to associate with people you don't like.
> In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
I mean, that sounds like a dick thing to say to a child or to anyone. And not particularly true (yes there are some vestiges with the church of england, but you are allowed to be any religion in england)
Was that person prosecuted or just fired?
> The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him.
Yes because self-organizing communities have never appeared anywhere in history.
Just because you are afraid you can't win arguments doesn't mean you should get to impose your view by violence. Which is what you advocate for, when you say the government should impose your views on the population.
Quite an abrasive / overly defensive response, sorry you feel that way.
Not trying to win an argument, I just haven't really got a solid answer. People just get passionate about how they should have a right to secret communications online, why all the burden should be on parents to protect kids from harmful substances, yet can't really give a good reason as to why that is. Yet on the other hand, those same people probably want to live in a world that is relatively safe from terrorism, sexual abuse etc.
I just said I can understand why to some people, wanting to stop children having access to a VPN doesn't necessarily have to be this big secret government overreach conspiracy?
Do I think we should have to have government surveillance software running on everyone's computer? No. I just understand more than a single perspective and I think those who seem to shoot these proposals down rarely give good arguments expect, basically, the government is out to get us, or it suits me the way it is now.
YouGov panel always returns huge numbers for any 'safety' question that doesn't match data collected from other sources. It's a panel poll, the people being polled are weird and unrepresentative.
This post shouldn't have been dead. It's right. There's an American meme that sidearms create freedom. When has that actually been true in practice in the past 100 years?
For HNers who just automatically flag anything right wing and want left wing examples instead, right now leftists are outraged by deportations. And a tiny number have tried to assassinate ICE agents using sniper rifles, indeed. But it's making no difference, not even when they're protected by corrupt local prosecutors and juries. They have even accidentally shot migrants instead of ICE.
Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it? Whether it's COVID or ICE, there's been no meaningful armed resistance.
The reason the US seems to be less totalitarian is purely because the constitution and the culture that supports it stops Congress from passing the same kind of restrictive speech laws the rest of the world has. If it weren't for the Constitution the Democrats would have already passed lots of speech laws under Obama and Biden, then used them to harass and illegalize the Republicans to maintain a majority. For example they'd have banned Trump's campaign on the basis that it encouraged "hate" against immigrants, and then they'd have forced big tech to do what Europe is now trying already, to strip all anonymity from the internet so they can harass random individual voters who disagree with government policy online, Germany style.
What protects America isn't guns, it's respect for the voting thresholds in the constitution and a right-leaning SCOTUS.
In the end, effectiveness is irrelevant. Basic human dignity requires that you always have the option to resist.
> Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it?
Drug gangs in latin america.
In my country, drug traffickers have become so organized they have established control over a quarter of Brazil's continental territory. They have armies, laws, tribunals, even taxes. They have essentially pulled off a stealthy unannounced secession. It's theorized that they control politicians, judges.
All thanks to the fact they were willing to arm themselves and die in order to achieve their own ends. The rest of the brazilians constantly prove unwilling to do either, and as a result they are dominated by the people with guns. Police state, military dictatorship, drug gangs, makes no difference.
The obvious answer (that HN hates) is that the right can stop them. The only party in the UK against the Online Safety Act is Reform. The only party that wants to shrink the state is Reform. Every other party is supportive of this kind of thing. This makes sense because every other party in the UK is left wing.
This isn't a problem of one country's specific culture. Australia and Canada are doing the exact same thing, the Democrats would absolutely do the same thing if the libertarian Constitution weren't in their way. The rest of the EU is doing the same thing. It's a left vs right thing.
In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn.
> This makes sense because every other party in the UK is left wing.
Definitionally not. Left and right are always relative to the local average, "left wing" and "right wing" are nothing more than a seating arrangement turned into a badge.
The Conservatives are, famously, right wing by British standards. If you think the Tories are lefties, you're so far to the right you can't even see the UK's Overton Window from where you are.
> In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn.
It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation.
The OP was correct. The Tories were left wing and authoritarian. They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.
Only Reform have made a stand against the Online Safety Act and other creeping dystopian measures.
I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.
The next General Election cannot come soon enough.
> It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation.
Read enough of my old comments, and you'll know that the Investigatory Powers Act is a big part of why I left the UK. The other half was how I expected Brexit would be used as an excuse to leave things like the European Court of Human Rights and thereby make it harder to fight such things.
Pleasant surprise that the UK is still bound to the human rights stuff, especially given Theresa May's opinion of such things and prior reputation the Home Office.
> The Tories were left wing and authoritarian.
No, they're right wing and authoritarian. Or at least, there's enough of an authoritarian streak in it to be a problem.
> They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.
You didn't notice all the austerity policies, I take it? Their approach to the civil service was basically a government self-lobotomy, reducing state capacity to be competent.
Not that size of government is hugely important to the left-right split in the UK; that seems to be a much more American dividing line, from what I see in the American stories that make it across.
> I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.
The other things Reform (or, given that it's owned by the leader, he) have called for include, to quote the Wikipedia page:
leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 and replacing it with a new law; disapplying the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT); creating detention powers without Hardial Singh constraints;
To be against these things is not the indication of someone who dislikes authoritarianism.
The only thing I see him calling for that I actually agree with is basically an example of "left wing" by UK standards: the nationalisation of the steel plant in Scunthorpe.
Not that I expect him to succeed. His experience of politics combines is much the same as Jeremy Corbyn: to be the one who opposes everything, not the one who has to take responsibility. Look how bad Corbyn was for Labour, that's my median for how bad Farage would be for the UK.
Your obvious solution is wrong, though. The right wing is just as eager to implement a police state.
The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population.
> The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population.
Sufficiently well educated and also willing to read carefully and without partisan (or other) fear of favour.
How many of us read the terms and conditions before clicking "I agree"? How many support a side only because it's their own side?
I don't know how to fix this. The "obvious" solutions (seen in various government systems over the world and the centuries) all have demonstrable problems.
Yes. Like I said, this works well in Switzerland, where stupid decisions are at least made jointly, not by some career politicians. Makes it easier to slowly make changes. The key point is to keep things local - what works in Zürich doesn’t necessarily work in Appenzeller.
You would notice that X responded to concerns over such accounts directly, without being forced to do anything by the EU and in a much more sensible way than what the EU is demanding.
It's probably a wise move and not so different to what many other companies have experienced in the past.
Netscape tried to remake Navigator whilst halting development on the old codebase, and it killed them.
Microsoft tried to remake Word, the rewrite failed. Luckily they had continued to develop the old codebase in parallel.
Google tried to remake Gmail multiple times. Every attempt failed.
Apple tried for years to remake MacOS Classic and failed every time. Eventually they had to buy and reskin NeXTStep.
Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up.
I kinda expected Fleet to die from the day it was first announced. IntelliJ is an extremely mature product that's hard to compete with. They've continually managed big changes to it to keep up with changing fashions and trends in the IDE space, most recently with their new Islands theme that launched yesterday, with integrated coding agents and so on. It's outlasted continuous competition from free IDEs that are always abandoned after enough years pass and whichever executive was championing subsidies moves on or retires (see: NetBeans, Eclipse, VS Express, MonoDevelop...). VS Code isn't so different. Fleet was clearly a reaction to that but the concept was not innovative and focused on reinventing wheels that users wouldn't be able to tell the difference for and which would consume most of their budget, like writing a new UI toolkit, or using a split frontend/backend architecture. Same mistake Mozilla made. Meanwhile IntelliJ was continuously refactored and improved, so Fleet chased a moving target even when they reused a lot of code.
Although people will hate to hear it, the history of the IDE market suggests that eventually MS will get tired of funding VS Code without a big revenue stream to justify its existence. Executives like making new projects and being able to present growth because it represents glittering future potential, but they hate being landed with the maintenance of loss making legacy projects when the originators move on. There's no glory there. For all their problems, JetBrains aren't going to lose interest in their core products due to random executive churn, and that has given their core IDEs a remarkable staying power.
"Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up."
Most of the time it's a question of trying to apply "death by a thousand cuts" to their codebase, which works well enough as long as you're in the periphery, but eventually they start moving into "core business", you know that entangled mess that has 60 years old code that still runs today, and they realize they need to rewrite all of it, which will take a long time, and cost a lot of money, and they forget about it again for a few years.
It's the same problem everywhere with large and old codebases. You can easily amputate a tentacle here and there, but as soon as you get to the core of it, it is basically one giant monolith, and with age there has been added loads of "integrations" or "shortcuts" between various subsystems, and nobody in the company today has any idea why it is like it is, it just is and it works.
A bank I used to work for had somewhere around 50000 batch programs running nightly. Some were the same program running multiple times, but at least 20000 were "unique" programs. All of those programs had to fit like pearls on a string, each working off of the output of the previous program in the chain.
Untangling that mess is like peeling an onion one layer at a time, with the added bonus that the output of one program might be the final result for some report, and at the same time the input for some other program that needs to do something else.
Add to that, that there's no inherent problem with the mainframe or COBOL. They both work, and reliably as well. Both can push some serious IO through the system, loads that many x86/x64 builds would struggle with.
The conventional answer to IO problems is eventual consistency, which doesn't really work well with finance, at least not if applied broadly. You can get some of the way with slicing / partitioning, but you will still have to deal with a lot of traffic between partitions.
Eclipse is pretty much alive in many Fortune 500, too cheap to pay for InteliJ licenses.
Also Netbeans is my favourite Java editor for hobby coding at home.
The history of IDE market is also about the IDEs that come from OS vendors, and are a much have to target their platforms, at least for those that don't enjoy to yak shaving their favourite tools into the official development workflows from said platforms.
There JetBrains already has scored big time, getting into bed with Google for Android Studio and Kotlin, so much that it wouldn't surprise me if some day Google acquires JetBrains.
By link you mean correlate, which doesn't mean anything.
Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.
Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
They want to reduce censorship, not force people to "coddle" them. Anyone on the left can still criticize the current US administration if the censors give up. The only difference is, people on the right will be able to do the same to the next Democrat administration. If you don't think that's fair, you're the one who needs coddling.
Auditors are hired by the company being audited, have a very narrow and fixed mission justified by previous financial blowups that caused a lot of concrete damage to specific people, and there are strict standards defining what they are looking for and how. Audits don't tend to suck up personal data of customers.
"Researchers" here means self-selecting academics going on arbitrary fishing expeditions with full access to everyone's data. It's not narrowly defined, not justified by prior unambiguous harm to anyone, and given the maxed out ideological bias in academia is clearly just setting up universities to be an ideological police force on the general public.
It's not clear what "full access to everyone's data" actually means, isn't it limited to things that are already publicly available? So for example, I don't think researchers would get access to someone's Likes because that feature is now considered private, but they could access things like Posts and Retweets. My expectation is that researchers would be allowed to run queries against publicly available data as part of their research, but they wouldn't be allowed to do a huge download with a copy of everything posted during the last 5 years.
Facebook / Meta is compliant with these laws, and the way that they handle researcher access is by providing carefully controlled remote environments with sandboxed access to user data, which forms the basis for my understanding of how researchers are typically provided access to social media data.
It means what it says. A lot of these academics want to access people's IP addresses because they're trying to map out social networks and bot accounts, by which they mean any account they don't like the views of. So it means stripping people's anonymity under the guise of "research" and of course those academics can be trusted to immediately report everyone posting conservative views to the police, who will then arrest them and prosecute them.
But please understand that the EU is not a part of the world that has the rule of law. It has rule by law. Law in the EU is a vague thing, discovered as often as written, in which people who advance the EU's social plan are legal and people who oppose it are illegal. It's a system in which the EU Commission is judge, jury and executioner, and the courts are merely rubber stamps to which you can appeal if you feel like wasting money arguing in front of judges chosen for loyalty to the project over loyalty to high minded judicial principle.
A former Marine was charged with inciting racial hatred after describing some migrants as “scumbags” and “psychopaths” in a 12-minute video posted on Facebook following the murders of three children in Southport, which sparked riots around the country. He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
There are lots of cases like this. Especially if you expand to Europe. The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him. Merkel established a general rule against insulting politicians so now people get police visits and their devices confiscated for saying things like such and such a politician is a dumbass.
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