forapurpose

It was not pointed at you or at anyone; it was a comment about my general experience as an HN user. I didn't realize that your account existed before you replied. My motives and knowledge, including about Africa (a word I personally wouldn't use for a very large and diverse area), are not what you assume; please don't attribute things to me.

FWIW, Western analysts have talked about the problems of Sub-Saharan African infrastructure extensively and for a long time, and the West has attempted to fund it. IIRC, generally it has been found that foreign-built and -funded infrastructure projects fail, due to problems like corruption, rule of law issues, lack of involvement by local communities, lack of understanding by foreign funders, and lack of capacity for maintenance. As an analogy, you can't just drop an infrastructure project on a country any more than you can just drop an ERP system on a company; the company has to be ready, have capabilities, and needs a lot of highly effective consulting if you want a chance of success. The West's prior attempts at funding led to a massive 'debt trap' for many poor countries, making debt relief a major priority (and one that was resolved to a large extent). As I understand it, the predominant view now is that developing local capabilities, including building institutions and functioning government, is a necessary precursor to things like infrastructure. Kenya's problem with the port, on its surface, would seem to be a repeat of the old development pitfalls.

Thanks. I still think you're thinking of someone else; please see my edit.

To be clear, I also think those remarks (accusing people of being shills) are a problem; I didn't think I made one, though I'll stay even further away from them.

> In the last few months this class of posts have all migrated from "You're a Russian spy" and "how much did Putin pay you to post that" to "You're a Chinese shill".

You are confusing me with someone else. I posted none of those things.

> We've warned you about this before.

I don't think so, but maybe a long time ago. Again, I think you're confusing me with another user.

You mischaracterize my comment in many ways; specifically, I didn't ask you to address astroturfing in this discussion, but instead was making a point about my user experience; I wouldn't have a reason to follow the guideline about emailing you as I understood it (though I'm not an HN lawyer and don't want to be one). But more than that, I spoke politely and tried to address problems I have as a user, and tried to avoid violating any guidelines by not accusing anyone. I don't think I deserve attacks and unfounded personal accusations about my motivations introduced into my day; I don't see how the latter is ever appropriate or necessary. Just say, 'that's not allowed here, here is why, please don't do it.' If I make a mistake, I'll apologize and try not to do it again.

Happy holidays.

P.S. I'll edit my other recent comment, which in this context might be inflammatory.

I did this search at Startpage.com:

  brazil attitudes toward china poll

The amount of propaganda is damaging my experience here. Not unlike Facebook and other platforms, HN seems to resist discussing how its platform is being abused and how it damages user experience; users are forbidden from discussing it publicly (in fact, I hope this comment is on the ok side of the guidelines, as I'm not accusing anyone in particular). I'm confident that HN works on the issue, so perhaps my difficulty is with a lack of transparency (again, similar to Facebook) - we have no idea what is being done; we're in the dark. We can't trust that the content we see is in good faith; it's a constant frustration and struggle to read, and most of my time is spent on noise. Propaganda is the worst content; it's noise to the signal and it's worse than noise because it manipulates HN users; we also now know, if it wasn't clear before, that it's a danger to free, democratic society - which is not something abstract, but something that happens right here on HN.

The pattern I see, so often that it's predictable and a source of frustration: 1. It's easy to stay beneath the moderators' radar by sounding 'reasonable' (in fact, on other topics, that's an explicitly taught strategy to white supremacists [0], it's a well-established technique of propaganda going back decades if not centuries, and I expect that professional astroturfers in any domain have the same skills); 2. the astroturfers almost always appear; I expected to see many pro-China comments appear here, including from purported Kenyans / East Africans (I certainly wouldn't say all are propaganda, but the pattern over many discussions seems clear enough that it's predictable); 3. on issues about which few HN users have knowledge or expertise, such as this one, there aren't even many people who can rebut the astroturfers; it's one-sided.

EDIT: Major revisions; apologies to anyone who read an earlier draft.

[0] ... he presented himself as polite, articulate and interested in cultural politics, and though his views are abhorrent, he stated them all so laconically you might forget that he actually believes in the concept of a white ethnostate. And that’s the point: The genius of the new far right, if we could call it “genius,” has been their steadfast determination to blend into the larger fabric of society to such an extent that perhaps the only way you might see them as a problem is if you actually want to see them at all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/magazine/FBI-charlottesvi...

> Here in Brazil people are starting to open up for the Chinese loans.

I read the opposite. What is that based on?

EDIT: In response to the reply below, a search shows plenty of research out there on this topic. (Sorry, I don't have time to read it myself right now.)

Can you back up this claim? My understanding is that, speaking very generally about a large continent, most African countries did not implement the economic fundamentals preached by the World Bank and IMF, but failed to due to corruption and institutional problems, including a lack of the rule of law. What African country adopted the rule of law, open markets, stable monetary policies, a significant reduction in corruption, and failed to prosper?

> the countries that did ignore its orthodoxy, from China in the late 1970s to then India in the early 1990s, prospered

China and India did not at all ignore the 'orthodoxy', but enacted it and that is credited with their economic expansion. China and India adopted capitalism, opened their markets, and adopted economic fundamentals such as stable monetary policy.

I think simplifying the issue distracts us from the real issues, which are complex. The U.S. uses its military for good purposes and for bad. Sometimes war is due to other country's actions, sometimes due to the U.S.'s (e.g., Iraq), and probably usually due to both.

For example, the immediate causes of many U.S. wars later turn out to be false, such as the destruction of the Maine which precipitated the Spanish-American War, the Gulf of Tonkin which began full-scale intervention in Vietnam, and the WMD in Iraq.

But even wars that are justified lead to bad outcomes, as the author states: What war hasn't had the consequences you quoted? Unfortunately, sometimes, those are the best outcomes available, but it's quite a moral decision to inflict that on others.

> No US military leader wants to fight a war; that notion is absurd.

I think your general point is good, but there are people, including people in government, who see war as a low-cost, acceptable means of achieving ends, including rallying domestic political support.

For example, at one point I noticed that over a short time hawkish Republican leaders in the U.S., including John McCain, favored increasing involvement in Afghanistan, attacking Iran (rather than negotiating), increasing involvement in Iraq, intervening in Syria, intervening in Egypt (IIRC), intervening in Sudan (in Darfur, though that might not have been contemporaneous), and intervening in Libya. If you look at a map, that's war in most countries from central Asia to near the middle of Africa's Mediterranean coast.

The GOP, starting before Trump, often vocally disdains the alternative to war, diplomacy. The Trump administration has taken it to a policy level worked to undermine the United States' relations with other countries and openly advocated, including in written op-eds from administration members, 'a return to geopolitical competition' - i.e., the state of things before WWII, which led to centuries of wars. They've abandoned treaty after treaty, and damaged the U.S.'s reputation so that they can't be trusted to adhere to future agreements (which I think is intentional, an attempt make the move away from diplomacy irreversible). The Trump administration openly works against the rule-based international order and openly opposes international law; the alternative to law and order is anarchy; the alternative to those mechanisms is war.

The Trump administration also has gutted State Department; they've attempted to gut its budget (Congress hasn't always agreed), they've cut and obstructed many programs, forced out a large proportion of talent (my vague memory is that they forced or urged out over a third of the most senior officers, who are, as I understand it, irreplaceable), and disrupted hiring.

Why would you destroy the means of diplomacy if you don't seek war?

Hasn't Austin always been the liberal bastion of Texas, an island in a red sea? It seems odd to blame newcomers.

> Given that that could be used to describe quite a lot of pulp sci-fi from that era

Now that is useful context that I didn't know. Could you provide other examples?

> Writers, then as now, knew what their audience wanted.

Wasn't their audience mostly younger guys? Wouldn't their audience want younger guys getting laid?

> that’s not the Stranger I remember

IIRC, it happened in the martian's commune.

> you’d have a different conclusion if you read Job to the end

Thanks for the tip. Someone else posted the spoiler. While it does change things, it still is a stereotypical middle-aged guy's fantasy - she is throwing herself at him, whatever her motive.

It happened in the Martian's commune (sorry, it's been awhile and I'm having a hard time remembering names).

Nor do any other relationships of any kind ...

Note the developer, grugq.

In the two Heinlein books I remember, Stranger in a Strange Land and Job, the protagonist is a middle-aged man who has beautiful young women throw themselves at him. The women have no needs or agendas of their own; their only motivation is to please this man. Job seemed so much like the author's personal fantasy that I had to put it down.

Could some of the situation be due to differences between German and American conceptions and assumptions about journalism? I mean on a nuanced level; obviously German journalists don't think they should publish falsehoods. Purely as examples of differences that could have an impact: Maybe fact-checking is more the responsibility of the journalist; maybe 'news' is perceived more the way American journalism perceives opinion pieces, with their accompanying lower standards of accuracy (something I still don't understand - outright deception is commonly accepted in opinion pieces, in the most serious publications). It would be a mistake to assume all journalism is conceived of and operates in the same way, in all countries.

Also, Der Spiegel has long had an extraordinary reputation; my impression is that, of publications outside English-speaking countries, Der Spiegel has the best reputation among Americans. I'm not sure that many do their own evaluation, though Der Speigel looks like what we expect serious journalism to look like. Taking a longer view than just this immediate problem, do they deserve the reputation? If not, I'd be interested in who others recommend (outside English-speaking countries).

The original article, with the same title, researched and written by two residents of the town, is here:

https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...

I think that's a better link than the one above, which is to a partisan political website.

Mods: Would you fix the link? Currently it is the following (410 characters; you'll have to find a way to read it):

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Intern...

I'm not going to try to parse and decode that, but it's mostly unnecessary and my security software thinks it's an XSS attack (a false positive, I would guess). This link works:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Intern...

In case people want to read the original story and discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18712382

While content has always been assumed to be outside the purview of security, I think there are at least two ways to look at it:

1. Of recently developed Internet technologies, disinformation is seems undoubtedly the most world-changing. Democratic government is literally falling in some places, fascism is rising, as well as hate and oppression. That's orders of magnitude more impact than AI, for example, which gives us facial recognition and, potentially, self-driving cars.

2. In other contexts, such as some business databases, the accuracy (completeness, correctness, consistency) is taken very seriously. We thought it wasn't a serious issue with unstructured data and non-commercial communication, but clearly we were wrong.

The article goes deep into the differing perspectives and cultures in Washington and SV, and talks about solutions too.

> I think the aggressive trade stance and hard line politics by China might have played a major role.

It's a nice distraction to attack China when the source of such things, in this tale, is a U.S. that has taken those stances to extremes unimagined before Trump took office. The U.S. fetishizes "hard line" and "aggressive", and has underminedh norms stretching back generations and has destroyed the U.S.'s reputation on trade and international relations. And all those consequences are intentional, a nationalist goal.

> China wanting to get away with pretty blatant violations of fair trade

I don't know that they have done more than other countries similarly situated, beyond allegations by the current U.S. administration as a justification for nationalist policies. Some things on this list of allegations are insubstantial, and we could make a similar lists for other countries. Is there any independent basis that China is worse than other developing countries or than other economic powers (they are both)?

> they’ve taken their “build junk make bank” mentality to the world and it can’t last much longer

This is just an empty stereotype unless you can back it up. Many high quality goods are made in China, including some that you may be using. There is nothing wrong with making cheaper, low-quality goods either.

One might say that U.S. financial industry is the leading proponent of "build junk make bank", with by far the most serious consequences.

> Every economy has a plateau then a fall, then a pull back up again

That's not actually how economics works at all. In the real world, perhaps outside the wealthy country you live in that has had good economic management (though the U.S. and others seem to be losing their way), countries do fall and never recover.

Remember that this is not an accident or byproduct, but a goal of nationalists in the U.S. government (and probably in China too). They seek division and a breakdown of international relations and activities.

The word "culture" is often used as a euphemism when stereotyping - unsupported generalizations. What exactly does it mean here, and how can you back it up? Based on my experience in the world, it couldn't be said for anyone.