Just by reading the first paragraph I can see how unbiased this article will be.
The gplv3 has been an utter failure. Trying to rewrite history so the gplv2 works like the gplv3 is pathetic and will be the last nail in the coffin of the GPL.
"Male" and "female" sound clinical; they're terms you apply to animals. When applied to humans, not only does it sound demeaning, but it sounds deliberate -- as if trying to present a false objectivity.
If nothing else, note that words do have shades of meaning. Even if you don't know what they are, you should assume that people "making a big deal" out of it are being honest about it. If you start with the assumption that they're doing so just to hurt you, then that relationship is in a dangerous place before you've even begun it.
They may not even be able to explain why they think the word is a problem. They mostly just know that they've heard the word before in unpleasant contexts. Look up any incel group and you'll hear them talk about "females" in a derogatory way, presenting them as the enemy -- as a separate group to be treated with distance. People know what words are used by people who dislike them, and that taints those words in other contexts.
So whether you get it or not, just trust that they do. Use the words they prefer, and avoid the ones they don't. It's just friendly and polite. If corrected say, "Oops, I didn't mean to do that," and then move on with the word they've asked for. It doesn't have to be a big deal if you don't make it a big deal; it can be over with just a quick change. It becomes hostile if you assume it's hostile.
Why would I want to vaccinate if I'm still going to get restricted?
I mean the whole deal here was that if we got vaccinated we'd be back to normal life. If that wasn't the case they should've been sincere up front and most of us wouldn't have gotten vaccinated.
Same reason I want to wear a seatbelt even though I’m still restricted by the speed limit: demonstrably lower chances of not merely death but also sub-fatal harm.
Even if all of the VAERS reports were both causal (they’re not) and fatal (not even remotely) the vaccine would still be seven times better than the illness.
As the reports are overwhelming not about surprise deaths and not causal, the vaccines are somewhere between 170 times better and infinitely better than the disease.
> Not a day goes by where I don't hear about somebody dying shortly after getting the vaccine, often in novel ways like described here
And how many do you expect by coincidence in an ideal case where there are exactly zero side effects? Because it isn’t going to be zero coincidental deaths when there are 3.79 billion vaccination events. Not even zero per day.
Would you want to wear a seatbelt if it also injected you with a novel gene therapy vaccine, which is basically a russian-roulette with rare harmful health effects and your family can't sue the state nor the pharma?
Would you rather play Russian roulette with one live round somewhere in 200,000 chambers, or one round in 100 chambers?
You don’t get to opt out and attempting to do so gets you the 100 chambers. Neither you nor your family get to sue anyone in either case. If you opt for 100 either directly or by failing to make a choice fast enough, anyone around you who hasn’t faced the 200,000 yet — even if they wanted to — faces the 100 a few days later.
You can't compare getting vaccinated with getting bad COVID in this way. Getting vaccine is like a Russian roulette, because you do not know whether you are in the group of poor people who get maimed or killed by it. But not getting a vaccine is not like going to meet all people in town and hoping for the best. There are alternative strategies that reduce your risk of getting COVID and risk of severe health results from COVID immensely, for some people even below that of vaccine.
In other words, I have lots of information to help me efficiently avoid bad COVID impact; but I have no information to help me efficiently prevent bad vaccine impact.
> But not getting a vaccine is not like going to meet all people in town and hoping for the best.
Absent vaccines the disease only goes away when too many people have caught the illness; that means you can only avoid catching it with your approach (regardless of what it is!) if you are an unusual and exceptional case.
> There are alternative strategies that reduce your risk of getting COVID and risk of severe health results from COVID immensely
The best way to reduce the of risk of severe health results from COVID is literally take one of the twenty different vaccines with a variety of different operating principles behind them.
> The best way to reduce the of risk of severe health results from COVID is literally take one of the twenty different vaccines
I don't disagree with that, although I am not sure either, it's too early to tell regarding unknown long-term efficacy and side-effects.
The point is, many people don't need to risk the (hypothetical) best way (TM) when there are proven different ways of reducing COVID impact of similar efficacy (those who care know about them, often posted for discussion here on HN). Especially given the censorship, one-sided expertology and disinformation about vaccines and available treatments from the governments, institutions and media.
These groups really f-d up the vaccination program with their despicable tactics and large masses of people are not going to vaccinate precisely because of that - the main vaccine pushers quickly became completely untrustworthy.
To prevent yourself and others from getting (the severe form of) the virus. I can assure you that most people would still have gotten vaccinated.
Personally what I would like is roughly what we've had in the UK for the previous few months. The ability to do mostly normal life, but with restrictions on large events and mandated precautions such as masks. Along with vaccinations that would probably have been a sustainable state. Unfortunately I strongly suspect that the complete opening up that we're currently seeing will only lead to further lockdowns in a few month's time. I would love to be proved wrong on this, but that's what it's looking like to me at the moment.
"what I would like is roughly ... the ability to do mostly normal life, but with restrictions on large events and mandated precautions such as masks. Along with vaccinations that would probably have been a sustainable state."
To be clear, are you stating you would like all large events to be permanently banned forever.
A lot of people (mostly older people in my experience) seem to think that people who work in the events industry should just curl up in an alleyway and die at this point. According to the more authoritarian-inclined, COVID means we can never ever have festivals, clubs, or anything like that again in the name of biosecurity. Personally I'd rather chew on razor wire than inhabit the mind-numbingly beige world of dull conventionality these people so clearly have never left in their lives.
I really don't like this new orthodoxy of "safetyism" which to me is a slavish adherence to the precautionary principle, a general approach of authoritarianism, and excessive influence of technocratic institutions which aren't subject to the usual political processes. This kind of ideology existed long before COVID but the pandemic has massively increased its influence. If people like authoritarianism and technocracy I'd rather they argued for them openly and in good faith than trying to use the pandemic as a smokescreen. There's nothing wrong with arguing for these things but I cannot stand people who dress their political opinions in lab coats and try to pass them off as science. There's no one true approach here, and pretending there is has caused a lot of avoidable strife in my opinion.
Politics is so much more than "follow the science", I think we'll regret in the future that we only gave seats at the table to epidemiologists and bureaucrats when it came to this pandemic rather than including a far wider range of scientific disciplines, experts in philosophy (especially ethics), and broader industry representation. The events industry has been done dirty in my opinion for example.
Okay, I agree with everything you said, BUT we were lied to when we were promised that we'd be back to normal life if we got vaccinated.
We should have had all the information when we made the choice of getting vaccinated or not. You say most people would've gotten vaccinated, I say they wouldn't have. We'll never know, since we were lied to.
I don't rationalise it as a good thing. I think there are many things to consider when buying a phone and this is just one of them.
Lately Apple started mandating that apps like telegram or discord must make it impossible for iPhone users to see nsfw content, which has tipped the balance towards android for me. For the first time in many years I'm using an Android phone. But as I said, one of all the factors to consider.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that - NSFW content can still be shown but the app needs to express a 17+ age rating on the App Store. That’s why apps like the Reddit client Apollo[1] and Google Chrome[2] are 17+.
"The payment in cash between individuals (purchase of a car or a painting for example) is not limited. A writing is necessary beyond 1,500 € to prove the payments ."
In fact, even below it, where it mentions the 1000 euro limit for professional transactions:
"Note: this limit does not apply to people who have no other means of payment or no deposit account."
Yes there are exceptions, but the general rule is that payment in cash are limited in amount. I was just illustrating parents comments that having cash payments limited in amount is not science fiction.
I'm not really sure your comment was criticizing anything though, just stating fact. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. Personally I'm more than happy to see cash disappear since I think it's mostly useful for laundering money and tax avoidance.
Financial sovereignty? I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but cash has value just because the states says so. If they ever said it's just paper, the next day it's worth 0. And I don't use cash already so I'm not giving anything away :)
In my country, privacy doesn't include hiding financial transactions from the state. I think they have the right to know everything on this topic, even though cash obviously makes it harder for them (and more expensive for them, so for the tax payer). I don't really see how I benefit from that except that I need to pay more taxes to make up for those who use cash to hide their taxable transactions.
Absolutely agree on the fallback in case of downtime from the payment systems. We'll have to find a good solution to that probably before dropping cash completely. (Note that I never said that cash can/should be dropped right now. They are other missing things, like garantying that anyone can get a payment mean for free)
No, it doesn't. The value of cash is decided by an open market. Crypto is proof enough that all you need is liquidity and a market for something to be exchangeable like cash.
Privacy is a universal human right. Your ignorance of that fact and your state's refusal to accept that is another issue entirely. But history is quite clear about what happens to countries and citizens thereof that continually encroach on private human rights.
This kind of attitude usually comes from people who have not been prosecuted by their government or have not had a family history of it happening to their parents or grandparents. They probably trust their governments to an implicit degree. If you are escaping a 3rd world or 1st world shit hole and you are a target of an authoritarian, murderous regime, cash might be your only life line to get smuggled out of a country and retain your families life.
You don't necessarily want everything under the control of government because government has a repeated history of going really bad, very fast.
Some recent examples: Nazi Germany, Islamic Iran, Communist China, Vietnam, Pol Pot & Cambodia, Soviet USSR, Burma, etc
Absolutely, state trust is obviously a cultural thing and probably depends a lot on your current and past relationships with the state. And yes I trust state were I live. When I compare to the US, one explanation is that in my country, the state pays for security, health and education for example, so it's a win-win relationship (I pay quite a lot of taxes now, but given my family history, I would probably be hard working in the fields for a very low income hadn't the state paid for my education, so I'm happy to pay). In this context it's easier to befriend the state, than when it would happily let you die if you cannot afford a hospital.
As I said in another comment, I think cash is also controlled by the state, so a totalitarian regime which would have issues with it could probably make it worthless anyway, don't you think? (You could smuggle cash from other countries, but cash from your own country wouldn't help too much). Also I'm pretty sure totalitarian dictators are some of the main benefictors (is that a word?) from the lack of traceability of cash.
No it doesn't work that way, because a re-monetization takes a long time and a lot of resources. Why re-monetize when you can use the system already in place?
In Iran, cash still worked and people used it to get smuggled out of the country, even when you were given 5 minutes to get out of your house and see it burn in front of your eyes, or neighbors would steal everything without consequence because you were now parted of a hated minority, you could still get cash via the minority community and family and get out.
If the revolution happened in 2040 vs 1979 iran or 1930s germany, and all finances were controlled by the centralized state via digital accounts, with your minority affiliation tags matched fairly well through a vast adtech apparatus, would those people really have that much to stand on? No, not nearly as much.
In germany during bismarck's time, they created the first welfare state in the 1880s. 30-50 years later the weimar republic, hitler and the holocaust happened. Just because the state is giving you something of value for your money TODAY, does not mean they will continue to do so TOMORROW in your lifetime.
I feel like you don't need %100 total financial surveillance to properly fund a welfare state about honestly minor amounts of cash, but governments are slowly trying to get there. It's very dangerous, and governments are always at risk to go full genocide. The rich use other methods and frauds and almost never use actual cash, other than businesses with a lot of small cash transactions (drugs). I don't think the current surveillance regime is very good for that purpose either.
Large scale criminal behavior is usually enabled by some other governmental policy. The US war of drugs basically funding the narco gang states of northern mexico and creating instability there is a great example of this.
Of course any state can go bad. It's the collective duty of the citizens to make sure that doesn't happen.
I'd be curious to know how cash helps people in china for example. Is it common to have people flee the country with bags of cash? Are there things that you can only buy with cash in order to avoid problems with authorities?
My point is: nowadays, do they need to monitor every financial transactions to be able to control everything you do? If they can know everything you do anyway, what is cash protecting you from?
Cash helps marginalized people in the society everywhere, not just in china. But China specifically has a (large?) number of North Korean defectors, all of whom really need to avoid being found out or they will be sent back to NK. I imagine those people rely on cash to survive.
It's the same elsewhere, be it UK, US or Germany - illegal immigrants rely on cash to survive, as they usually can't just open a bank account with a card. And yeah, some people will always say that it's actually great that illegal immigrants can't access those facilities, after all they are illegal. But I think that's a very cruel view of the world, people in various hardships will always exist and cash is the only fallback that exist if the official banking system rejects you or is inaccessible for you. And it's not just illegal immigrants - people have had their bank accounts closed and placed on some kind of black list by mistake before, how is that going to work if cash is removed entirely? It's already a big problem in most societies, as for instance employers in a lot of places aren't allowed to pay you in cash - so even if you are 100% legit and work a normal job, you suddenly can't be paid legally, even though cash itself still exists and is legal.
Because any country that joins the EU agrees with the European Union Treaties in a legally binding way, and among other things these guarantee certain minimal democratic standards and human rights in the European Convention on Human Rights. The government of a country cannot just pick those parts of signed and ratified treaties they happen to like at one time or another and reap the benefits of membership without also fulfilling corresponding requirements and duties.
They would have to leave the EU first, which they are free to do at any time. Of course, then they would also not get any membership benefits.
The EU shouldn't be above that. But when Hungary doesn't like the rules of the EU it should leave. Of course it never will, as it is depending on the 3.000.000.000 Euro yearly support.
Those 3b are such a simplistic narrative. How much money do Western companies make in Hungary due to EU? The reality is that EU is mostly a neo-colonial project where the East Europe is depleted of resources (especially human capital) and treated as nothing more than a marketplace for W European products.
Hungary benefits much more of the EU. That's how it works in the short term. In the long term it's hoping to level up Hungary as a whole so we can have more trade with it.
where are the profits going? if a German company opens a factory in Hungary where it produces let's sau Automotive parts of course Hungary develops a trade surplus. they sell automotive parts to Germany. however the profits of the German HU subsidiary will all go back to Germany. that trade surplus means nothing.
What a load of bullcrap to be polite. I hear this from various eastern far right wing supporters quite a bit, and it isn't based on any facts, just some wishful thinking.
Hungary is a net receiver of direct money subsidies. The fact is most of it is stolen by government-aligned forces within economy, this is a well-oiled machine in place for a long time. Western companies come to Hungary because its cheap force, despite being generally lower quality than west, many of which would be rather unemployed otherwise and probably migrate west or live miserable life on social support.
The simple problem is, and that's not just Hungary but all countries in the east, there aren't enough big domestic companies that would be successful and employ people. Most failed long time ago, most really skilled people went west since life is simply so much better elsewhere. Why bother with corrupt semi-dictators, when you can thrive in fair and just society not so far.
If you have kids/plan them, its a no brainer - all parents want the best for their kids, and giving them such a bad starting position in life in a fucked up corrupt primitive environment like eastern Europe is really just selfish acting at best. I know what I am talking about, I am coming from one of those places. Its not about how many good things are still there, but the amount of bad, and not just some top politics. Society is rotten on many, if not all levels. And there is no hope for change, not for the better for sure.
Eastern Europe, like many other poor places in the world, is depleted of human capital because its simply such a crappy place to live. Its not a conspiracy, rather result of people wanting better lives for themselves and their children.
Poland's top universities - both of them - are at the very end of international rankings. As for law enforcement - it's just horribly ineffective. A trivial open and shut software piracy case can last a decade.
>Poland's top universities - both of them - are at the very end of international rankings.
It's hard to compare universities, unless you have attended both of them
Innovation output != Quality of teaching
Polish "computer-related" people are very often in top when it comes to e.g security (src: https://ctftime.org/) and top universities grads tends to have open doors to faang
I've seen people from both of those groups speaking very good about the schools they attended
Polish "computer-related people" can come out well even without graduating. This doesn't say much about universities.
Let me put this way: I know people who graduated in Computer Science, in Poland, who can't program. Not in some particular language; they can't write programs, they just don't quite get the idea.
>Let me put this way: I know people who graduated in Computer Science, in Poland, who can't program. Not in some particular language; they can't write programs, they just don't quite get the idea.
>Western companies come to Hungary because its cheap force, despite being generally lower quality than west
I doubt the average Hungarian is of "lower quality" than the average Belgian (I live in Belgium and I lived in Romania and UK as well) - when it comes to people doing manufacturing jobs you refer to I'd say that E Europe has a more solid and reliable human capital.
>in the east, there aren't enough big domestic companies that would be successful and employ people
Before the collapse of communism E Europe was perfectly capable to keep all their population in employment. Sure those companies were not prepared to compete in an open market and were decimated by their Western counter-parts. Today E Europe cannot strong competitors (although that is changing in sectors like IT) primarily due to the open market (impossible to compete with somebody that has 10x your capital; even when some promising E European actor appears, gets acquired by some W European company before it manages to pass a certain size)
But besides the point, check the unemployment rate in any E European country and most fair way better than their Wester coutner-parts.
> Eastern Europe, like many other poor places in the world, is depleted of human capital because its simply such a crappy place to live.
Quite a broad unsubstantiated statement. What is crappy? The fact that most people are able to own a house while in countries like Belgium is getting impossible to buy anything for young people? The nature? The job opportunities that are plenty due to continuous and fast growth? I don't recall last time a new large corporation entered Brussels in the past 10 years.
The main issue is that there is a salary gap. A middle class salary in Hungary gives you a similar standard of living and lifestyle as a middle class salary in Belgium. But working in Belgium temporarily and planning a return to let's say Hungary... gives you an even better potential lifestyle. That is the issue. The gaps were too big to have an open market and there's little focus on closing the gaps.
Actually, the laws of elections have been "fixed" by Orban as a very first step - and media completely taken over to stream 100% propaganda 24/7 as a second step - so the "support" behind Orban is just like behind any other modern dictatorship - that uses mass media manipulation and election system upgrades instead of tortures and prisons.
I'm not sure the premise is certain - in the last election his party received slightly less than half of the votes, however voting laws were altered in their own favor (managed to get super majority with <50% votes).
My feeling is that even most of his voters don't like him, they just hate change more.
The gplv3 has been an utter failure. Trying to rewrite history so the gplv2 works like the gplv3 is pathetic and will be the last nail in the coffin of the GPL.