Are you kidding me? One is a nuclear nation state currently committing genocide with a long history of "disappearing" wrong-thinkers. The other sells ads based on your online behavior. Seriously, what motivates your claim?
HN has long been infiltrated by CCP-backed commenters, and they come out in force for the expected title keywords.
I don't live in China. The Chinese are many miles away. I am not worth nuking, and I am not at risk of being involved in a genocide.
I live in a surveillance state. I don't really like being surveilled. Big companies share data between each other, and it influences my ability to do things like obtaining a house, or getting insurance.
The Chinese have nothing to do with my data. Western companies, on the other hand, can make a good deal of profit from data in aggregate, and don't care if it harms other people.
The Chinese stick to their own people (and what they believe to be China). Western companies, on the other hand, will track everyone on the globe, without any consent at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI
I don't use Chinese software; it's just that the person's claim isn't nearly as insane as you're making it out to be. They're acting more rationally than you are, here. It's not Chinese scaremongering or anti-anti-Chinese scaremongering to acknowledge that China can't really do much to the average Western citizen in aggregate.
Short term thinking at its worse. China isn't going to stop at its borders. Their tech companies not only answer to their government, they are just as greedy western big tech, if not more. Your info is going to be sold to the highest bidder, plus shared with the Chinese government.
"You're thinking short-term and you're bad for it. Here's a bunch of unfounded speculation, and I'm going to throw in "plus shared with the government," despite your information already being shared with the United States government, which isn't at risk of collapsing any time soon, and will never be part of China, nullifying the risk of your data being taken by the Chinese government."
The CCP has long been building a database on people in all countries of strategic interest (U.S., UK, Austrlia, India, etc etc). And not just the prominent people. All the people. [1][2][3][4][5]
But hey, tell us again how China is only interested in the Chinese.
(2) routinely breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.
Those things are not what HN is for, and destroy what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> HN has long been infiltrated by CCP-backed commenters
I suspect this is true to some degree but I also think there is no shortage of Chinese nationalists and anti-Americans (including Americans) who by default, upvote anything that has a pro-China agenda and downvote anything that has anti-China agenda.
On average, students of color come from poorer families, who are less able to support a remotely learning student. The schools they go to tend to also be less well equipped to teach remotely. I forget which school, but I saw one not too long ago that was still teaching remotely, but the school itself was open so that students had access to computers to attend lessons.
As a blanket statement, yes, it is wrong. It is, however, more right than wrong when you look at the statistics.
So I went to school in a recently desegregated school district in the 70's- those who could afford to sent their kids to private schools, then voted against the public school budget at every turn. I don't think you can argue that this would not be in danger of happening again.
Expanding the term POC to include Asians is yet another example of white liberals undermining Black and Latino causes to try to convince themselves that they're not racist, only those nasty conservatives are.
He broke the law. He fled the country to avoid the rule of law. He sought refuge in a country run by a criminal syndicate that is presided over by a madman ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." — Not Thomas Jefferson
Snowden would have been complicit in his employer's malicious activities if he had not blown the whistle. I wish more people in his position (in the US, Russia, and everywhere else) would be as brave as he was. Nobody should just obey the law or follow orders. That's what made all the greatest atrocities in our history possible.
Regardless, there is no 'rule of law' when the government sees you as its enemy.
He didn't want to stay in Russia at all. He was enroute to Ecuador, which had issued him an emergency safe travel document, when the US canceled his passport and stranded him in Moscow.
makes you wonder how bad a country has to be in order to force one to go to "another country run by a criminal syndicate" just to expose shit that should never happen. It's the spiderman triple meme all along.
As disgusting and insane as this invasion of Ukraine is, the current state of European treaties would not necessitate a world war as an outcome.
Putin, the evil war making scum that he is, has been explicit for DECADES that the armament and NATO flirtation with Ukraine is completely unacceptable to Russia, Russia sees Ukraine as a buffer zone against the West, and that Ukraine belongs in the Russian sphere of influence. History does not disagree with him. Ukraine was for centuries part of the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union. Ukraine has a large population of ethnically and/or culturally Russian peoples. All of these facts have been known and communicated for many years. In fact, these are some of the reasons Ukraine has never been on the path to NATO membership.
In other words, while we can and should condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it does not, per se, set us on a deterministic path to a world war.
Quoting Obama circa 2016:
"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do."
Also, could be a way to tell their customers that JetBrains is not a Russian cyberwar asset. A supply chain attack using JetBrains products would be scary, given their penetration.
It could be a deceptive signal, then. Condemning this invasion is cheap if it allows Putin to hold onto such a strategic espionage/supply chain attack vector.
Hi, could you please stop marketing here? You've posted a bunch of replies in this thread linking to your employer. It's nice that you're (sort of) disclosing your biases, but we really don't want HN to turn into marketing spam.
Yep, Dang already pointed out how my comments might come across as spammy, so I acknowledge that and apologize! No spam intended, just hoping to be helpful. I'll tone things down.
From my recollection of the 2008/09 financial crisis, systemic risks were those in which entities were deeply intertwined with one another on a massive scale, such that there failure would potentially bring down the entire system of finance. We're talking: retail banking (payments, savings, lending), commercial banking (idk?), public debt markets (bigco and gov funding), but most especially short term commercial funding. Again, going on memory, failure of short term funding (repo (?)) markets would have caused real, non-finance companies to become insolvent or at the very least massively impair their working capital positions. This has the knock on effect of reducing demand throughout their supply chains and major cost cutting (job loss). Etc etc. In other words, massive recession or even deep depression.
Crypto, on the other hand, seems to be mostly a casino, a big one, yes. But one that is not deeply intertwined with other parts of the financial system. Coinbase, for instance, is not systemically important. It doesn't (yet) have tendrils in so many important lines of business as did the megabanks of yesteryear.
When that much money goes “poof”, it’s going to have real world consequences. And the people who are going to get burned are the last ones on the bus - the least technical, the ones who think it will make them rich, the ones who can’t afford it.
Yes, but the parent's point (and my concern as well) is that "market crash" does not necessarily mean widespread fallout (e.g. Black Monday in '87); that only happens when the losers are tightly coupled to other critical parts of the economy, which isn't necessarily the case here: GS/JP Morgan won't have to default on loans to critical counterparties in a crypto crash, for example.
Any time a big group loses wealth all at once, there's some consequence, but that's not the same as "systemic risk" where it causes catastrophe in areas not directly related.
It’s becoming widespread with all of the apps, super bowl ads, and reduced friction in getting into crypto “investing”.
It used to be people who purchased crypto had to know what they were doing (and know the risk). Now anyone can buy crypto without any understanding of anything after seeing a 30 second commercial about smart investing.
Again: being widespread is not the same as being a systemic risk. That just means it's a casino everyone wastes money in. Who is defaulting on critically important obligations because of a crypto crash? What creditworthy business isn't getting a loan to cover cash flows for the quarter because BTC fell to 10k?
likely not, the dotcom bubble was a big deal but it wasn't catastrophic like 2008 was and that's because of the greater coupling with financial institutions.
Look at the percentage of retail investors in the dotcom bubble. It’s much easier to make very stupid plays with money today than it was then, and a lot of “average” people are going to get burned.
I think you're not understanding. While a bunch of people losing money is bad, it wouldn't create another Great Depression, per se. A huge investment bank with millions of counterparties going under absolutely could cause massive, long term damage to both the financial markets and the real economy. For example, people losing their hats in crypto wouldn't cause commercial paper markets to dry up. A big IB going down almost did in 2008. That would have resulted in huge businesses that employed, collectively, millions of people becoming effectively insolvent. Now you're talking about a Great Depression. Big difference. This is where the keyword "systemic" comes into play–as in, this entity is a critical node in the system. Its collapse could jeopardize the system.
Anyone with a smart phone can now spend their life savings on crypto or sports betting with almost zero friction.
We have a trillion each in student loans, auto, and credit card debt. Those (besides student loans) have requirements for credit worthiness. So those people were screened and some weren’t allowed to take on debt.
Not handled well (or ignored because it’s not viewed as a systemic risk), it’s a non-negligible portion of the population that is financially wrecked and unable to meet their debt obligations. And we can’t just make policy that says the idiots that blew their money on gambling and crypto don’t need to pay back their debt… it gets ugly fast.
If the Tether people are to be believed, there is $80bn of "cash" that's held "somewhere" (neither investors nor investigators are clear where). That may turn out to evaporate. Allegedly it has come from "institutional investors" (which ones?)
On the other hand, it's still not up to the size of Lehman ($600bn!). It's heading there.
The difference (systemic vs non-systemic) is not just about magnitude, but also in who Lehman's counterparties were and the effects when those counterparties (those who were exposed to Lehman) could not get their expected capital (and the chain reaction of events that sets off throughout the capital markets and then the real economy). I remember reading some stat that claimed Lehman had derivative contracts with total notional value in the 10s of trillions.
> you can't seriously be saying it's justified to kill 200k Japanese civilians to save a small handful of allied lives
I absolutely would argue in favor of this. In fact, I would argue that it would have been morally just to kill every last Japanese person, military or not, if Japan refused surrender (which was part of the Emperor’s plan for self preservation). Remember the context: 1) Japan attacked the U.S. to initiate hostilities and 2) Japanese resistance became more fierce, fanatical, and deadly (ex: suicide bombings by both military and civilians) as the U.S. approached mainland Japan.
You would trade off 200k Japanese civilians for, say, 1000 allied lives? What ratio is morally justified?
If you are arguing that a 200:1 ratio is acceptable, I believe this is a morally bankrupt perspective, given that the consequence of this is a genocide of a people who are otherwise perfectly normal without the broken software that was running in their minds and their society at the time, and given that it is a collectivistic perspective that assigns moral guilt to an entire civilian population (including children) instead of the specific individual bad actors that caused the situation.
Regarding the latter point - on this premise that every single Japanese person shared moral culpability for what Japan was doing - it can't be squared with an understanding of what actually happened. I mean, the existence of children is a QED against it. But even just talking adults - At that stage the country was a fascist dictatorship, with multiple democratically elected leaders assassinated by the military (which was taken over by a fanatical fascist contingent in the 1930s) and a tremendous propaganda effort by the military to control all information and brainwash the general public into thinking they were doing good and just work overseas. Combine this with a poor, ignorant farmer population, and I don't think the simple moral prism that you're applying works.
What ratio are you arguing is morally acceptable? Please give us a specific number with justification.
It's easy to act morally superior decades later. We're not the ones who were forced to make a hard decision in extreme circumstances. How could President Truman possibly morally justify telling Americans that even one more of their sons had to die in order to protect enemy civilians?
If it's 10:1, then that's basically saying that Japanese adult civilian lives are worth absolutely nothing and can be killed without any moral concern, but Japanese children are worth the same as allied lives.
Going any further (e.g 200:1) is unjustifible unless we adopt the collectivistic moral guilt framework where one has moral guilt (including children) simply for existing in that country at that time, irrespective of individual culpability.
"How could President Truman possibly morally justify telling Americans that even one more of their sons had to die in order to protect enemy civilians?"
Just because the general public would find it difficult to put moral worth into civilian lives of an enemy doesn't make those lives worthless.
I also don't like the language of calling them enemy civilians. They are civilians who live in a country that's currently an enemy.
You're engaging in pseudo-intellectual quantification that is meaningless and unbound by anything objective. But that's besides the point.
The point is, the U.S. was pulled into war by Japan and did not have had any obligation to lose even one more person to end the conflict. And yet the calculus was clear: the loss of life by the U.S. was going to significantly increase per unit of effort/victory as it approached mainland Japan.
> doesn't make those lives worthless
No one is arguing this. But when it comes to the life of my son or brother vs. the life of someone I don't know, I know what my choice will be every single time. And I would bet my entire net worth that 999 out of 1,000 people would choose similarly in that situation. The instinct to stay alive completely outstrips armchair intellectualism and 20/20 hindsight.
I am offering my opinion, but you already knew that and were just being sarcastic.
It is also not meaningless, you simply totally ignored the rationale I provided for the 10:1 figure. It's the ratio that roughly equalizes the moral worth of allied troops with Japanese children.
Admittedly this is all subjective, but that also applies to your opinions.
"The point is, the U.S. was pulled into war by Japan and did not have had any obligation to lose even one more person to end the conflict."
The US wasn't pulled into war by Japanese children, though, and you seem to be perfectly fine with their extermination under your perverse doctrine of collective guilt.
"No one is arguing this. But when it comes to the life of my son or brother vs. the life of someone I don't know, I know what my choice will be every single time. And I would bet my entire net worth that 999 out of 1,000 people would choose similarly in that situation. The instinct to stay alive completely outstrips armchair intellectualism and 20/20 hindsight"
People decide to do lots of shitty things for all sorts of reasons. The mere act of deciding to do said shitty thing and the fact that that shitty thing is a popular choice doesn't make it less shitty and doesn't serve as a moral justification.
Not if the Japanese person was running at you with a weapon in-hand:
> In addition, the Japanese had organized the Volunteer Fighting Corps, which included all healthy men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people, for combat support and, later, combat jobs. Weapons, training and uniforms were generally lacking: many were armed with nothing better than antiquated firearms, molotov cocktails, longbows, swords, knives, bamboo or wooden spears, and even clubs and truncheons: they were expected to make do with what they had.[63][64] One mobilized high school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do. ... You must aim for the abdomen."[65] They were expected to serve as a "second defense line" during the Allied invasion, and to conduct guerrilla warfare in urban areas and mountains.
The entire concept of "war crime" is a post hoc rationalization for killing one's enemies after the conclusion of hostilities (see Nuremberg trials). It is also semantically redundant. It's like saying "candy chocolate" or "dirty mud".
Further, for much of human history, genocide (or the attempt thereof) was standard practice in warfare. In other words, this is a 20th century neologism and not some kind of timeless truth.
How many people would you kill to stay alive? Or to keep your loved ones alive? The truth is, you can't know as it is impossible to simulate that scenario unless you're actually in it. But if I had to guess, for the average person, the number would be much greater than 1.
> The entire concept of "war crime" is a post hoc rationalization for killing one's enemies after the conclusion of hostilities (see Nuremberg trials.)
The concept of universal laws of war to which all participants are bound and in principal accountable long predates the Nuremberg trials.
> Further, for much of human history, genocide (or the attempt thereof) was standard practice in warfare
For most of human history, slavery was a standard practice, both in and out of warfare, that doesn't make it right.
You seem to misunderstand me. I don't make an argument for its "rightness".
Rather, war crimes will always occur in war. And the primitive instinct to stay alive, at almost any price, is programmed into us. When faced with existential threats to our loved ones, these ivory tower questions about the relative worths of lives (100:1? 10:1?) are exposed for the nonsense they always were. Our biological programming kicks in: "survive at any cost - protect your own – eradicate the threat". It is only subsequent generations, from upon high in their ivory towers and far removed from the threat, who are able to condemn the savagery of the survivors.
In other words, it is always best to not enter a war. Perhaps even if attacked. 9/11 and the U.S.'s insane and disastrous responses in Afghanistan and Iraq being the latest demonstrations.
Which makes me wonder, what do others think is the most beautiful video of all?