Arainach

Wages aren't the primary determination of slave labor, it's control. I suppose "indentured servant" would be even better, but there are an enormous number of restrictions on H1B holders in how they move (both between employers and countries).

(I don't love this analogy and consider it extreme and not overly accurate)

> Verizon battery backup units that run on small lead-acid batteries which seem to need frequent replacing, and require me to look up the details and order from a specialty vendor every time..

Have you? All of them I've encountered take a very standard 12V lead-acid battery - the same one that's inside consumer UPS units - and you can get replacements from a dozen brands on Amazon and other vendors.

I probably have to replace them every 2-3 years, though I imagine alkaline D-Cells would be far worse.

Most things are to some degree works of fiction. The public personas of the rich and powerful are generally curated representations of how they want you to see them, and that isn't a new phenomenon.

If tech company revenue is any indication, 3,650,000/yr to be able to access all your users' browsing history could be a bargain. The fine is a joke.

The Pakleds assembled a huge pile of technologies they didn't invent together into a powerful ship and social-engineered the Enterprise into giving them more valuable stuff to exploit.

This is Hacker News, replace "Pakleds" with "startup founder" and so long as it's profitable that's called being brilliant and innovative.

I appreciate this. The full text search is fairly crucial, as while I've seen the entire series more than once I cannot for the life of me remember "the name of the episode where the aliens pretending to be dumb kidnap Geordi", but the search is good enough to get there without being too obvious.

The challenge is not a technical one, and cannot be solved with technology.

The presence of token minorities doesn't change the intention or effect of their policies.

There aren't enough rich people out there for Republicans to win elections based on the votes of people their policies actually help. They use things like racism and transphobia to energize voters among groups they hurt (such as folks relying on medicaid, social security, farm subsidies, clean air and water, etc.)

It's not, as those policies allow those in power and currently benefiting from the status quo to abuse minorities. It's why rights and equal protections have to be codified.

> This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.

And you probably don't live in a dense urban area, or at least a minority-heavy part of one.

I grew up in Michigan. In the suburb where my parents lived, there were 8-10 voting machines for a not-large population and voting was a matter of pulling in, walking inside, casting our ballot, and leaving.

In the college town less than 20 miles away it was a very different story - far fewer machines per person, polling places far away from where students live so they have to find a ride to get there, and more - and this was an intentional tactic to discourage youth voting.

Allocation and staffing of DMV and similar offices where one has to go in order to get an ID are manipulated in the same way.

This isn't a "deep in your heart" excuse. It's a documented conservative strategy for decades.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...

https://adams.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/supreme-cou...

This DOES intentionally target black people. It's an intentional strategy to have "plausible" deniability dating back decades:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...

> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N$, n$, n$.” By 1968 you can’t say “n$”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N$, n$.”

The Voting Rights Act has been gutted, allowing southern states to gerrymander and reduce the voting power of minorities. Not even hypothetically, Texas did so moments after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA.

States are aggressively attacking minority voting rights through several angles - reducing sites you can vote and hours you can vote at them, especially in minority areas, ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax), and many other nefarious tactics.

> 250K trees sounds like a lot, but Finland has like 20B trees, so it would take 3 hours for Finland to grow this back

That's not how math.....or trees.....work.

Community moderator is a stressful thankless job, especially on a subreddit with a reasonable amount of (often political) content, PARTICULARLY on one regularly brigaded by trolls and antagonists from a competing subreddit, so I'm going to cut a lot of slack to the unpaid volunteers who put up with a lot of hate directed at them.

What's to be embarassed? These are busy community moderators, not whitehat hackers. They don't owe anyone a writeup of technical vulnerabilities. They owe the community clear communication of rule changes and most people expect explanation of why rules were changed, and they delivered both.

> I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades

Finance. Everything is a number to be optimized that must constantly grow. The US abandoned antitrust, worker protections, social safety nets, and more in the name of greed.

For workers to care you need to treat them as humans. People care about a team and a family that care about them back.

The mythical story of the person who started in the mailroom and worked their way up is gone. The mailroom, secretary, custodian, and as many roles as possible have been replaced with contractors without benefits or any future in the building they currently work in who will facelessly cycle out in a few months for another contractor.

Employees have been abused too much to believe the lies. If I work twice as hard, my reward is a sub-inflation raise and no realistic hope of promotion. Feedback employees give is ignored, so there's no motivation to push to improve things. The management class has a desperate dream of all people being fungible so they can throw them out and get cheaper ones, and fungible is what you get - if you want a generic interchangeable cog, that's what you get, but don't complain about how the cog doesn't "care enough".

> Why do we use a shovel instead of our hands?

AI is not a shovel. A shovel digs faster than hands, but it is still digging in the ground and cannot unearth anything that wasn't there.

Generative AI tooling creates things that weren't there. It is not deterministic and not compatible with the spirit or rules of creative competition.

It's cheap and reliable with predictable costs. It hasn't caused me any problems in a decade. Most of the websites I want to host don't need cloud anything, they're statically generated.

My point is that "the border with Mexico, which has a long history of abuse", with a particular emphasis on Mexico, makes it sound like you're stating that Mexico has a history of those things.

Your sentence is ambiguously phrased. Might I suggest "the border with Mexico, where US immigration officers have a long history of...."

I disagree. Plenty of privacy friendly things are not totally anonymous. The average reader has no such expectation, and if you think they do you really need to expand your social circle beyond a subset of tech workers.

> If you find a vuln, you might as well disclose to everyone immediately.

This still doesn't work, since attackers are much more motivated and able to pay attention to such things.

If your goal is finding vulnerabilities / stealing money / whatever, you focus all your energy looking for new exploits.

The rest of the world has other things to do (listen to users, run services, whatever) and by definition cannot spend as much of their time watching every social media in the world for the chance of an announcement.

That claim is meaningless without digging deeper. It's not the fault of any project that different people interpret terms like "privacy-friendly" differently. They don't say "anonymous".

> If the prosecutor so strongly feels that a weak case has a chance of getting a conviction

Who says that's the case? US courts are overloaded and public defenders are massively overloaded.

Most people can't afford to hire a good lawyer, and a (let's say) 10% chance of years in prison isn't worth gambling versus a plea deal to them. Prosecutors know this, file massive scary charges, and motivate people to settle regardless of innocence or guilt.

For a very long time they didn't. They still don't by default in the US, only in certain jurisdictions.

Because this way they can lie to you and offer low rates to pull you in until you go to check out.

You can still do that. The host just can't require you to do that - especially after charging a mandatory cleaning fee.

I mostly stopped using AirBnB due to the impact of their existence and lobbying on cities and affordable housing, but after my final few stays I was ready to quit over the huge fees, the fact those fees were hidden when searching, and the absurd rules BS.

It's reasonably hard to poison yourself (other than, you know, alcohol) with fermentation. We've been doing it for thousands of years without specialized equipment or training, and the first batches were probably accidental.

It is rather tricky to distill liquor and NOT poison whoever drinks it. Especially on home or poorly maintained equipment.

> An invite-only "Rocket" variant is a single-seat model with a "full flight system."

Tesla should be sued into oblivion over "full self driving", but after that, if you believe this nonsense and buy one that's on you.