I ask this with sincere curiosity -
what does his current place of residence have to do with his message that programmers should avoid companies building infrastructure for the police state?
It’s not illegal to encrypt backups in the UK and the country does not come close to meeting any generally accepted definition of a “police state”. There is currently a lot of anti-UK hype in certain online spaces (including HN) which wildly exaggerates various real problems (such as the UK government’s attacks on data privacy) to the extent where people end up with a wholly false picture of what life in the UK is like.
Consider that PG could live more or less where he likes (leaving aside any private personal circumstances of his, which I know nothing about). If he chooses to live in the UK, that may suggest that it’s not actually as bad over here as you imagine.
Based on your other comments in this thread, you seem to be more annoyed by alarmist news stories about the UK than you are by ICE throwing people with no criminal records into Salvadorian jails without trial. I’d question your media consumption choices if ‘UK’ makes you think ‘police state’ and yet current events in the US appear wholly unconcerning. What’s that you were saying about flooding the zone?
The UK has real problems (as do many other countries), but these deserve substantive discussion, not repetitions of lazy tropes from the nameless one’s Twitter feed.
I don't understand your objections. It seems like if anything his place of residence would give him first hand experience of why you don't want to live under a police state.
What was that about gangs? Most of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador appear to have no criminal record. And Trump has explicitly said that citizens are next.
And what, pray tell, do you think that word means? Because I saw him say it in an interview. And in other venues, too.
> "I call them homegrown criminals," Mr. Trump told Fox Noticias. "I mean, the homegrowns that grew up and something went wrong and they hit people over the head with a baseball bat. We have — and push people into subways, just before the train gets there, like you see happening sometimes. We are looking into it, and we want to do it. I would love to do that."
I think you might be right. I think "flooding the zone with shit" might be the only effective response when the zone is already flooded with everyone else's shit (msm, social media etc)
He's also not the only one doing it. Every time the Deep State needs to sneak in something particularly vile and avoid public scrutiny, we get "UFOs", or "directed energy weapons", or "Russian/Iranian/North Korean hackers" or something like that. "UFOs" have been used for this since the 60s. "Directed energy weapons"/"Cuban syndrome" - since the 90s. "Hackers" are more recent. Works like a charm.
