I have seen same from my relatives who went/born in the us. They think the rest of the family is beneath them. I guess its a human thing and not Asian issue.
COVID mostly. Disruptions in supply and demand caused imbalances, and in places where there is not enough buffer space to handle the imbalances (like container storage in California) the buffers filled up and the whole thing stalled.
4.5 Millions deaths looking at the excess deaths.
And this was until a while ago, now that figure is probably much higher.
What more proof than this do you need?
Is it me or is there a clear pattern here. Seems like the major governments in the world are creating China-like surveillance under the guise of the trojan horse called CSAM.
The default state (and almost universal state) of human societies throughout history has been authoritarianism.
Authoritarian's universally believe individuals left to themselves make bad decisions either because they're too stupid or too cruel so we need benevolent leaders like themselves to order society.
Only in the last few hundred years countries in Western Europe began to reject this and accept while some individuals may make bad decisions the cost of "benevolent" leaders is too great.
Today in the West we seem to be forgetting that freedom comes with costs and this can only lead in one direction. We should understand China isn't the exception, they are the norm. It was in fact the West who was always more likely to revert to the mean than for China to embrace freedom. People like Orwell understood this very well.
The more freedom individuals have the more likely individuals will say and do things leaders don't like and if our leaders no longer celebrate this disagreement as progress they will seek to restrict freedom. Of course, some actions are almost universally seen as bad and in these cases it's worth carefully restricting freedoms, but this clearly isn't one of those cases. And most attempts to limit freedom of speech also aren't.
No one ever had Facebook or iCloud before, though. The damage an individual could do was somewhat limited. If they wanted to produce child porn, they had to go through a complicated printing process. If they wanted to denounce vaccines or immigrants, they could stand on a box and yell about Jesus or something, but at most they might reach a few hundred people. The framework we have created has given them the ability to reach audiences that they frankly shouldn't be able to reach, because their own intelligence doesn't warrant it. To the degree that we can stripmine those platforms and shut down the bad actors, moderate the fuck out of them, send them into a black hole, I'm all for it.
But personal devices? Secure files you maintain for your business? No - this is a move on the part of the 0.1% to enlist the technical priesthood in spying on the 1-5%. It's a means to try to force fear on the functionaries closer to the apex of the system. Like some other reactionary revolutions, it draws support from a lower base, but its targets are exactly the people who carry out the sensitive functions of the state. That's somewhat scary. However, it's also a bit toothless because clearly it will force anyone who needs to keep their communications private to use other channels. Until or unless that becomes prohibited, as in China.
Then again, I'd never underestimate the spinelessness of the western bureaucrat when it comes to conforming to rules and regulations.
Surprise surprise, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists were right all along, but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor.
Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity, and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government.
>> and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government
> How does it matter if it's open-source?
You (and many other respondents) are responding to "Tor is supplied by the government, and therefore is an evil trap". What the OP seems to be saying is "Tor is an anarchist stand against the man, it's actually funded by the man".
There are literally hundreds of cryptocurrencies. The term does not imply anonymity nor privacy, just the concept of a somewhat decentralized ledger that relies on cryptography to ensure the authenticity and integrity of transactions. In those hundreds, certainly there are different goals with different currencies. The question remains though - are those who focus on privacy and anonimity field-tested? Are there cases of demonstrable attacks on the anonymity characteristics of a given implementation that can attest for their robustness? AFAIK no, but feel free to add any independent analysis or incident I may have missed.
> How does it matter if it's open-source?
OpenSSL is also open-source and every year there is a new vector of bad news. Being open source in some projects - specially crypto projects - means that motivated attackers can identify potential vulnerabilities quite easier, instead of "more people will look at it, ergo it will have fewer bugs". There is a huge potential for planned defects to go unnoticed on a complex cryptography product.
Open-source means independent audit is possible, and the developers can't be coerced in the dark to add backdoors. This is in theory of course. In reality, it just makes it much less probable.
Yeah well as long as the people allow you the internet. Without us all financing the internet, the anarchists using it for anonymous banking might find themselves a bit naked... I find it horribly suspicious crypto, depending on public electricity grids and state-funded internet infrastructure, is being sold as an anti control measure when really, it sounds a lot like a cash grab and a criminal money laundering system.
Why not use banknotes, they re well less susceptible to government control of spending but oh surprise a lot more to control of the cash grab speculative aspect - and hard to carry $600M of them in a hurry after a heist, unlike recent defi exemples.
>How can you exchange bank notes electronically?
They are called "transfers" and you can do them at a bank or on a licensed broker.
The first question is why would you want to transfer money from A to B electronically without any kind of reasonable guarantee or safeguard? The major use case is to avoid paying taxes. Feel free to add any other usage scenario that isn't skipping taxes directly or indirectly.
No, they don't. They may be a method of censorship resistance, but they weren't designed that way.
Audited for backdoors? Wishful thinking. Someone some years ago said they've added (some years before) backdoors to the OpenBSD IPSec implementation. The consensus is "its probably bullshit" and not "no, we checked and we can guarantee there is no backdoor". The lesson (in case you missed it) is that for crypto code, there are a hand full of guys that actually understand what is going on and how to implement and bypass something, and half of them work for the government. OpenBSD is too obscure for someone to care? See the TrueCrypt case.
Snowden reported that the CIA use it to anonomynise their research activity. Previously they used proxy servers but spooks would sign into social media or personal email, thus compromising the location as being CIA. Thus, The Onion Router was born. They prefer that their online activity is lost amidst the noise.
> That is not a problem for open source that has been audited.
Big leap of faith. You probably won't need both hands to enumerate people capable of correctly audit a piece of modern crypto software in the hole world, and probably half of them work or have worked for governments. Even using those resources, one thing are obvious flaws, other are weakening of the robustness of the protocol in certain conditions. Even with your top 5 (first hand), no one would guarantee the protocol and implementation is free of backdoors.
> We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries.
I'm not a tor expert by far, and even I know that if you have enough entry and exit nodes under your control, you can identify both source and target of traffic. It makes sense for the USA to use a communist/Iran(terrorists!) excuse to pursue that goal. So, it makes sense to create a layered secure communication channel that only you can reverse, and pitch it worldwide as a safe means of communication for "dissidents".
>It's not about privacy but governmental control and freedom.
You say that like its a separate concept from privacy and anonymity. Its not. The government is (should be) just a non-profit corporation. Other than that, those concepts are fundamentally equivalent.
Traveling, communication, rights - everything is a degraded experience because of 9/11 and the governments have made it a habit.
Obviously, Terrorists have won. I don't know how aware the American public is, but Afghanistan is being overrun by Taliban as we speak, causing another refugee crisis in Turkey that could easily spill into the continental Europe and the UK. Just before the pandemic, the Turkish govt was blackmailing EU with letting the refugees go wherever they want, you can expect this to repeat as the Turkish public is overwhelmingly against(polls show %80 want the refugees go) hosting refugees as many as %10 of its population. EU almost went bust with only 1M, Turkey alone hosts 5M to 8M at the moment and the Afghans are arriving in thousands everyday.
You can expect the governments to try to manage the situation by increasing their toolset. You can expect increased surveillance and decreased rights trend to continue. You can expect people with different aspirations to try to take advantage of it.
Speaking specifically of 9/11, no, not really. Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit such a crime on American soil that every average American will have to look up Al Queda, find out why they attacked America, and in the process discover all the attrocities comitted by American military and then finally and hopefully turn against their own government.
Obviously, none of the above happened - American government used the attacks as a pretext to spend another trillion dollars on a pointless war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and then used them again at home to remove private liberties and introduce laws that would have had no chance otherwise. I'd argue the average American never bothered looking up why US was attacked beyond a "brown people hate freedom brrrrrrrrrr" nonsense.
So no, terrorists didn't win. They failed at their stated goals miserably, but the world's population still lost as the noose of global surveilence is getting tighter and tighter every year.
> American soil that every average American will have to look up Al Queda, find out why they attacked America, and in the process discover all the attrocities comitted by American military
The way you put it, It looks like Al Queda had a noble goal. It's a shame that they did not win then.
But I am more cynical than that, I don't believe in the idealistic goals of these organisations. In my opinion, all local warlords fight for power, glory and spreading their influence.
Looking at the final situation, I would say that they achieved exactly that. Globalism is dead, the liberal culture of the west is significantly degraded thus cementing their influence in the region. Their power is now much less contested and they can rule happily thereafter.
The thing is, I have absolutely no idea how you can read my comment and think I'm defending the group or even that their goals were noble. It's bending the intepretation of what I said so much it hurts.
Maybe let me try again - terrorist group says their goal is X. Terrorist group fails to achieve goal X. Therefore, terrorists didn't "win", by their own definition of winning.
I'm not trying to misread you. On reflection, "letting the terrorists win" is a really loaded phrase. So loaded you might be on the same side of an issue and still misunderstand where someone's coming from. As a guy who participated in sometimes violent protests against the Patriot Act, and our initial lockdown and our invasion of Iraq and the general warlike stance in NYC after 9/11, our interpretation of the terrorists "winning" was that they could put America into a posture where we lost our civil liberties as a result of the fear they were able to inculcate in in the populace. Now, at the time, Bush said if we stopped shopping or you know, otherwise engaging in mass capitalist idiocy, that would mean the terrorists won. To me, they won, because they saw a weakness in our free society where by a careful application of very directed force they could open the dam for totalitarian control and a breakdown of open, free, liberal democracy. By that measure, they succeeded remarkably well, but they really only had to use our own inertia against us.
So I don't mean to misread you. I think our society as it stood was a lot more noble than the Taliban. In some ways it still is. They have brought us down a bit toward their level, and that's something worth fighting against.
The terrorists have - on a shoestring budget no less - done more harm to the USA, it's standing in the world and its ability to do business than many years of cold war between the USA and the USSR have done. They succeeded wildly beyond their - and probably anybody else's - imagination and the damage they did is felt every day, including the increased polarization in the United States which is having its effect as we speak.
Denying this is closing your eyes to some major problems and as long as you deny something you are categorically unable to fix it.
> including the increased polarization in the United States which is having its effect as we speak.
The increased polarization in the United States is a product of the end in the mid-1990s of the overlapping pair of partisan realignments starting just before WWII and a return to the normal condition encouraged by the US electoral structure of a strong, stable, sharp partisan divide, combined with modern mass media technology.
The 2001 terror attacks are coincidental, not a cause.
Denying this is closing your eyes to major structural problems with the political system in the United States and, as long as you deny something, you are categorically unable to fix it.
You are completely entitled to your own opinion, but personally I believe that the 2001 attacks accelerated the divide to the point that it may have made the difference between Trump getting elected or not. Without the Iraq war a whole pile of stuff that laid the ground for Trump would not have happened.
We agree that this was already happening prior to 2001, but I simply doubt it would have resulted in the extreme situation that we have today. Social media, similarly is an accelerator, not a cause.
So they'll win when Hollywood makes a movie that portrays them as noble savages? I'd say they certainly did a great deal of damage to our basic freedoms, not to mention sense of self. We were right to go into Afghanistan. And right to kill Bin Laden. We weren't right to use it as a pretext to degrade our own democracy.
We are pretty aware of what’s going on in Afghanistan. It’s been on the front page of every major news site for the last however many weeks.
But I’m not sure why. Are they trying to make me think that leaving Afghanistan is bad for America? I think it’s good. Time to stop spending money there. Trump and Biden are right to leave.
Surprising that even media outlets like the NYT seem to be writing doom and gloom about leaving. Biden just not be making globalists very happy with this.
The US is leaving the Afghan government without means to defend itself, after spending two decades there de facto in control.
So it's a huge mess, where they've been in control more or less, but they've failed to make the transition into a local civilian state into a stable one.
The offshoot of this is a wave of refugees that will engulf the neighboring countries, decreasing political stability in the Eurasian area.
This is a clear message to all governments - "Washington can no longer be trusted, it's a game of each for his own sovereignty now on".
I'm not saying US should be the guarantor of world piece, but this unmitigated disaster of immediate retreat is causing diminishing of political capital for Washington. It won't be considered as a dependable party from now on.
> So it's a huge mess, where they've been in control more or less, but they've failed to make the transition into a local civilian state into a stable one.
I think Afghanistan has failed itself. U.S. put a trillion dollars and 20 years into it and it collapsed within a month (at best). At some point you admit failure and move on.
I think the rest of your messaging is confusing. Washington can't be trusted, but we shouldn't be the guarantor of world peace? Should I stay or should I go?
What do you want us to do? Stay in Afghanistan forever? Where and when does it end?
"What do you want us to do? Stay in Afghanistan forever? Where and when does it end?"
Like I said, I don't want Washington to do anything. I'm a disinterested observer.
I can be a disinterested observer while saying something is an objective failure. It does not mean necessarily that there might have been any other outcome, or that I was rooting for some other particular policy.
It's either that or don't go there in the first place. Afghanistan has been cynically used by world powers over and over again to get at each other and as a convenient battle field. Leaving it to the Taliban will only guarantee another chapter in that series.
I mean it seems like it's just returning back to 2000 before the U.S. and NATO allies invaded. The Taliban ruled then, and they're going to rule again in the future because after 20 years and over a trillion dollars it just didn't work.
And what good does staying do? If we stay we're bad, awful imperialists and playing global police. If we leave we're bad too for letting Afghanistan return to the year 2000. If you're damned either way might as well save money. Maybe the EU can step up and commit resources and money and prevent this outcome you're describing. Why does America have to do it?
I think most Americans hold this viewpoint too. If you don't like it, I think it might be beneficial to go back and look at the years of "America in Afghanistan bad" international press. No wonder Americans said "fuck it we're done".
Funny enough the more controversial war (Iraq) seems to have brought about the more successful long-term change. U.S. forces are effectively out and the Iraqi government is running Iraq. Would be great if the Iranians would stop meddling but is what it is.
No, this is much worse because now the Taliban will end up much more powerful than they ever were prior to 2000. This will have no end of consequences and all of them negative.
The populace has learned that the Taliban are the winners, when before they were just another contender, besides that they are now better armed and are able to claim victory over the United States which serves as a tremendous recruiting poster.
Well they did win. They beat the U.S. just as they beat others. We spent too much money and time. 20 years and a trillion dollars. Iraq was able to form a government. The Afghani people just didn’t have the ability to do it with our help (or we failed at helping enough). We lost. Time to go home.
>> Are they trying to make me think that leaving Afghanistan is bad for America?
No man, this is what's wrong with Americans who believe in Trump. "They" are not "trying to make" you "think" something. It's just the fucking news. Turn on France24 or Al Jazeera or BBC - you're not their audience. They're covering the fall of a new city in Afghanistan every day.
There is some psychosis among Americans who spend too much time online where you think every piece of news must be slanted bullshit trying to win an infowar on your brain. It's not. This is pure fucking cause and effect. America pulled out, which we wanted, and now the Taliban is going to massacre a lot of women and children, which America doesn't give a rat's ass about. That's the situation.
No one cares if they convince you or Joe Biden or America. This is just what's happening. For my 2 cents, I don't think we should have left before we eliminated the Taliban.
> No man, this is what's wrong with Americans who believe in Trump.
Don't want to do a back and forth here, but do want to make it clear I don't "believe" in any president. I certainly didn't vote for Trump in either election. He can be right about some things even if he's almost universally wrong on policies according to my own views.
> "They" are not "trying to make" you "think" something. It's just the fucking news. Turn on France24 or Al Jazeera or BBC - you're not their audience. They're covering the fall of a new city in Afghanistan every day.
But they're covering it with an opinion "America should do something", "this is bad", etc. Which is fine to have I guess, but that's the same spirit that got us in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place. Which is the point of my comment.
I mean, I think they're covering it with the opinion of "why the fuck would you fight a 20 year war and just drop the ball completely now," which is fair, considering that when we invaded they were uniformly like "why the fuck is America invading." I want to strongly separate Iraq from Afghanistan in this, because there was absolutely no reason for us to invade Iraq or to promote the Arab Spring or any of the other absurd things we did post-9/11. These were actually all distractions from and drains upon the mission in Afghanistan. We have an obligation to prevent the Taliban from taking hold there again. And any renewal of their power directly impacts our security. We had no moral right to withdraw, and Biden did it as fast as he could just because it was popular. I understand why it was popular, but that doesn't make it right for us or the people who are trapped there. It makes us look weak and it destroys the hope that people around the world place in us. For better or worse, we are the only power capable of holding back the forces of chaos around the world, and that is where we put our footprint because these specific people, the Taliban aided and abetted an attack on our civilian population. We should never make peace with them, because they have no concept of peace. They will attack us at the first opportunity.
I predict within a couple months they will execute American hostages and we will have to return to Afghanistan. It may be something like Carter's self-immolation in Iran. If so it will only lead to a more isolationist right-wing regime under Trump or someone else in the US. Isolationism does not work. America is a global power and needs to act as one. Globalism is the future and it shouldn't be controlled by China and Russia while we retreat from it. I'm no neocon or fan of Bush-style pre-emptive strikes. But we're the only ones who have some accountability and the capacity to prevent genocide, and we should do it.
Agreed. But America is still an idea. Many other countries have massacred their indigenous population. Many other countries have enslaved people. Many other countries have fought unjust wars. There's a lot America has to be ashamed of.
And yet America is still a great idea. That's what gives us accountability. That's why we can't retreat from the world into isolationism.
[edit] Just to expand on this, I'm from the immigrant side of America, and the working class side. In other words, I'm not a rich white guy whose family sailed here on the Mayflower, and I'm not someone with "white privilege" or whatever. This is the place you go if you have something you want to build, make, say, do, create, or a freedom you wish to exercise that you cannot exercise in your home country. Now. A lot of old-school right wing Americans think they don't want more immigrants. But without immigrants, America is nothing. The force of change and justice and creative power in America, in my mind, has always been about immigration and the freedom it unleashes in people who were repressed elsewhere in the world. And that is why we have a responsibility to help people, like the people in Kabul right now, who are being crushed by horrific violent forces like the Taliban.
Simplified, there are several groups of people in the United States: immigrants, people that forgot they once were immigrants themselves that want to close the door on others now that they have theirs, people and their descendants that were brought there against their will and Native Americans.
All of these groups have their own idea of what America should stand for and their lack of agreement is materializing in a societal schism that I don't believe can be bridged under a single political system.
And yes, America has a responsibility to Afghanistan, but mostly because they are one of the major forces behind the current mess in the first place.
I live in Sweden. There are clear problems with gang violence. But non-immigrant Swedish people don’t encounter that at all in their live; crime mostly stays in the migrant communities. For a long time, crime in migrant communities wasn’t even reported of, because of a wrong idea of political correctness. Now you can see it in the news regularly, but I have yet to know a single Swedish person who is actually affected by any of this.
Sweden surely has a very difficult immigration problem to tackle. But it’s worth noting that it’s the migrants who suffer from this, not the existing Swedish residents.
That article underlines my point. There is a significant rise in gang violence. But the people being shot are from the migrant communities, too. I think you may make the mistake of reading “Swedish person killed” and assuming that Swedish person was not an immigrant.
Which isn’t to say it’s not a problem. It’s a huge problem. But it’s also important to keep in mind who’s actually suffering here.
>>EU should not allow migrants, it should be the Arab countries that should take them.
Even though it's the EU countries that have contributed to the plight of people in places like Afganistan and Syria? That's super convenient point of view - very nice way to wash your hands of any responsibility.
And I'm saying this as an EU citizen - every country, including my own, that has participated in military excurisions in the middle east in the last 30 years has created this crisis for themselves. Saying that "oh, arab countries should take them" is beyond brutal, it's barbaric.
> Saying that "oh, arab countries should take them" is beyond brutal, it's barbaric.
It's really not, so it's quite irrational to include that level of hyperbole to make your point emotionally loaded rather than factual.
Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan and Iran - both countries which are a helluva lot more culturally and religiously aligned with the majority of Afghans.
> every country, including my own, that has participated in military excurisions in the middle east in the last 30 years has created this crisis for themselves
This is nonsense. Religious fundamentalism & oppression of the populace has created this situation - both of which were aided & abetted by (you guessed it) Iran & Pakistan. Both countries are the biggest funders of the religious fundamentalists as well as offering state level support and safety for those leaders.
Apparently it can. Likely many more. And many more will come. Climate change and all that. If you're looking for static times then you should probably go and invent a time machine, you are headed straight for a period of upheaval, whether you like it or not.
Turkey is not an Arab country and has more than an order of magnitude more refugees per capita(and 5x-8X in absolute terms) than EU. Why would Turkey bear the burden?
Unless you find a way to make UAE etc. take the refugees to achieve the "Arabs take the migrants" goal, prepare for a dramatic increase in immigrants. If it happens that EU decides to fight it back, they will need all the surveillance power and get the rights removed to be able to enforce the restrictions on the movement of millions.
Spot on. GP is completely unrealistic in both worldview and proposed solutions, the EU will quite simply have to learn how to deal with this in a decent manner or it will cease to exist. The ultra-right fringe that uses every opportunity to protect their precious all-white genepool is in for a rough ride.
I think you're being very generous by considering anything that happened in the past 10 years a swing towards greater privacy.
Sure the EU gave FAANG a slap on the wrist, but I know of now government that rolled back the increased surveillance that terrorist legislation gave them.
User sebow, your account is shadow-banned since 2017. I am unable to reply directly. (HN readers, enable "showdead" in your profile page to see what's going on.)
> in the entire EU there have been _only_ 800, let's say 1k such violations?
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Not all violations with fines/punishment are made public, and a vast majority of non-egregious violations will not result in a fine/punishment in the first place because the competent DPA will send a letter outlining what's wrong, how to fix it, and what the consequences will be if it's not fixed.
Those transgressors will simply very quickly come into compliance to avoid the trouble and the affair will not be made public.
There is some enforcement, but the GDPR is widely flouted, most conspicuously with the cookie "consent" banners - they're supposed to give equal choices (to meet the standard of informed consent and not "consent bundling") but they're riddled with dark patterns.
Then there's the Irish who "oversee" Facebook and Google and do SFA.
So the GDPR is not enforced [to a level anywhere near what the legislation is supposed to do].
If I understand it correctly, the recent CJEU ruling on GDPR [0] should improve the Irish DPC limitations by allowing enforcement in other member states where violations have occurred (under certain specific conditions).
Yeah it's an odd claim since the Snowden revalations came out in IIRC 2011 and the government viciously attacked him in the press as they built a massive data center for surveillance on a scale never seen in history. The programs that Snowden exposed never got ended, no laws were ever passed preventing them from happening. All we got was some encrypted chat apps and I think it would be naive to believe the government can't read and search any facebook chat it wants, for example.
Others are pointing out the 2021 "Gang violence in Europe" claim doesn't make sense either soo...
>2021: Gang violence increases in Europe, swing pendulum to mass surveillance.
Many Western Europeans on HN and reddit will deny this problem even though it is an actual problem and unfortunately our governments are already using it as an excuse for mass surveillance.
Military SIGINT planes flying over Copenhagen in 2017 to stop gang shootings should have triggered global outrage about mass surveillance:
Swedish police used FBI-provided data to arrest 155 indiviuals. Weirdly, the Swedish police cannot collect such data themselves, but need to act if they "stubble" across information indicating imminent crime.
We are heading the road of China and Russia where people try to get out because they don't want to live there anymore. No place for privacy or diverse opinions.
If you look at the current EU commission, this is clearly something where they think the can build a profile. I hoped more people could see this as the insecurity of leadership that it is.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, but you are are right. I belong to one of those diverse groups and I find it insulting to say the least. It seems like the least effort to tick the checkbox. The character doesnt have to be my color for me to relate to him/her
