You can easily buy stars in bulk, like you can buy social media “likes” so they are kind of measuring the wrong thing and incentivizing the wrong behaviors.
Their brand has been associated with hacking-around and gaining advantage via rule breaking for a while. Didn't their founder application at one point ask "Tell us about a time where you hacked some system for your advantage?" At this point, I think everyone knows they're signing up for dark patterns and questionable practices when they get involved.
The concept of "grandfathering" rule breakers has always seemed like naked corruption to me. OK, we think this thing is so bad, that we're passing a law to ban it, BUT everyone who was already doing this bad thing can keep doing it forever because... because... because putting an existing company out of business is apparently the worst thing in the world. If our elected officials think something is bad enough to ban outright, then it should go whole hog and actually ban it. Not just prevent upstart competitors to existing legacy industry.
It's not just for politics but fairness. You can't just one day up and decide to make something illegal that others depending on for livelyhood. It's good enough that it limits growth of the banned thing.
Sure you can. It just takes backbone, which is rarely found in the political class.
If I, as a voter, voted for a politician who promised to ban dumping mercury in the local river, I don't expect them to say "Oh, but any company already dumping mercury in the river can keep doing so, because we don't want to hurt people's livelihood." That's not what I voted for.
Ok, but if you are investing capital in some sort of production line or industrialization you are not going to want to do that in an area where you might just lose your entire investment instantly; instead, you're just going to invest it in Texas or China. Of course with more extreme examples like yours you do have to put some cost on the existing companies to get it fixed, but it would be something with a smaller cost like having to dispose of the mercury properly (whereas in this article's examples they just flat out ban these things, which you can't do to existing factories).
For sure there would be a disincentive to "invest" in the area where you might lose the investment. That would be intentional. As a voter, I specifically don't want companies to be making those kinds of "investments" in my region. Go "invest" your dirty industry in China. If California's reputation for harshly regulating these things prevents these kinds of businesses from opening here in the first place, I consider that Working As Intended. We could make that reputation even stronger by not grandfathering things.
Putting an existing company out of business means putting thousands of people out of work. That's the kind of thing that gets your party thrown out of office.
There have always been a handful of Internet Tough Guys saying things on forums like "LOL Nuke them! hur hur hur hur!" Totally disregardable vibes and memes. Now, we have an actual US government administration that is run on the same Tough Guy vibes and memes. I don't think it matters what most people think. The people in power might just do it for the lulz.
Critically, Slashdot also had a meta-moderation system, where users were asked to judge moderation activity to confirm whether it was sensible, fair, and so on. I'd like to believe that system played a vital role in stopping abuse of the moderation system. It was way ahead of its time.
I've been advocating for a while now that HN could use meta-moderation at least on flagging activity, so it can stop giving flagging powers to users who are using it for reasons other than flagging rulebreaking.
Whenever I see an article, and the top comment is StudMan69 saying "Uh, no, the article's conclusions are all wrong!" I think to myself: "Gosh! If only the article's author had consulted StudMan69 before writing the article, he could have avoided making such a grave mistake!
The government doesn't seem to be forcing them to do anything. They're saying that doing business with them is contingent upon changing the policy. So, they could simply stop doing business with the government.
Hegseth could come to my house today and tell me that I need to start kicking puppies in order to do business with him, and I could just say no. No coercion happening.
"Unsafe" is just a terribly vague word, too. As a layman, I wouldn't even know what that means with respect to a web site. What's "unsafe" about it? Is it going to shoot my dog? Is it going to drain my bank account? Is it going to give my computer a virus? Saying a web site is "unsafe" really isn't providing any interesting information, and it shouldn't be acted upon by pretty much anyone.
It's like a renowned newspaper saying the restaurant is unsafe, and then also the restaurant's landlord taking it at face value and locking the doors without further investigation. Both can be wrong.
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