They may well be using the term much as it has been used in Australia to refer to the visible public actions of the Trump Administration as a clown show.
By which we refer to the frequent mentions of Finland instead of Greenland, the Mixed and ALL CAPS rants on twitter, contradiction riddled statements, waffling, 10 years of Trump sounding very much like a drunken brother in law, etc.
We do concede it may well be part of some deeper multi dimensional chess strategy to confound, confuse, unbalance and grift and applaud such genius... but it does veer toward what one expects from a gerontocracy.
Not an especially wise move if unintended, and a precarious risk if intended fpr the drama.
I'm thinking my personal best time getting grilled over a suspected security issue runs to 36 hours or so .. hard to tell in retrospect, the US TLA bods do like their blinken lights and screeching music to mess with peoples internal clocks.
You are absolutely right about the optics (and the blinkin' lights). The forensic expert made the same point—unintended drama is still drama. I definitely didn't aim for this (just wanted to demo the hardware), but once the process started, I had to respect the thoroughness. Their protocols are no joke.
I travelled globally a lot for work, many borders and often laden with many trunks of equipment - getting stopped for inspections, often driven by curiousity, was par for the course.
The grilling by US security types was a "feature" of crossing any US controlled border space for a number of years after this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597539 in 1998.
You spend one month at ground zero for 11 nuclear tests that caught most of the five eyes by suprise and that's all they ever seem to ask about forever.
11 nuclear tests? I officially surrender the title. My 13 hours over a breadboard feels very quaint by comparison.
It is fascinating to see the evolution of the 'threat signature,' though. You were flagged for proximity to literal nuclear physics in 1998; I was flagged for a vibe-coded prototype that just looked like physics in 2026.
I have a sinking feeling that, like you, I've just unlocked the 'secondary screening' achievement for the next decade. I’ll take the permanent Swiss police record over the Five Eyes watchlist any day. You win.
The world's an interesting place, bang in the middle of the period of getting routinely stopped crossing US spaces I was seperately contracted to them (US DoD) to do similar work in other parts of the world.
Seperately again some nice people in Finland gave us some really nice SAKO TRG's and spotting scopes in return for being the fastest to find some drums of waste they hid in a forest.
My father (still alive) is a few years older than M.J., they grew up together, being from the same part of the same state .. so it was handy having them going to bat for us when faecal matter contacted propellers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jeffery ).
So what, that's just a single curated view of a wealth of submissions and comments. There are many people who rarely look at "the front page" and suffer not from frontophilia.
> and fall into oblivion.
Hardly. the /newcomments and /active pages clearly show where the actions at, if that's your thing. Many [flagged] and not-the-front-page submissions have huge comment conts and go back and forth for days.
You can see an alternative listing at https://hckrnews.com/ , you can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
It's a common way in native English speaking countries to disparage someone, to compare them as a small failed version of something worse.
It's also confusing to non native english speakers, and even to people from "mismatched" english speaking cultures (an Englishman, a Scotsman, an Australian, and a central North American enter a bar; Oscar Wilde tells them they're separated by a common language).
The HN guidelines suggest people refrain from hyperbole, sarcasm, idiomatic metaphors, and generally having fun with language :( <- sad face
> There's absolutely nothing to prevent me from filling out all eight of them as I see fit and mailing them. Nothing.
Just as there is nothing to prevent a person threatening or physically coercing 8 members of their household to vote as they direct.
This is hard to scale up into the hundreds.
WRT mail-in ballots, these are common place in Australia.
You post in a provided envelope to the AEC address, that outer envelope indentifies you against the voter rolls, just as you are identified when you attend a physical voting location.
The inner sealed envelope contains your voing slip - this is removed and passed on to the "votes from district" counting bucket .. just as all the voting slips from physical voting locations are.
In the checksumming of the election the same person being marked down as having voted multiple times, whether at various locations or by multiple mail in ballots, gets caught and investigated.
At this point voters are marked off against registration rolls and actual votes are anonymous.
This is important in an Australian election as no one should know that someone drew a crude suggestive image of their local member and submitted that.
The real downside of mail in voting is missing out on a sausage sizzle with others in your district at a voting location on voting day.
You arguing with the wrong person. I am saying that we need to go to in-person paper ballots.
The comment you responded to was about the scenario of someone getting a bunch of ballots and filling them out at home or making their household fill them out at home the way he or she might want to.
With all the deepest respect toward the US citizens I know, have talked to, and those that don't support the current administration ...
Theres's now _zero_ respect for the US.
Yours sincerely, long time five eyes allies.
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