Not at all, the Russian ban was an outright speech restriction (I'm originally from Russia). This only applies to schools taking federal money. This is much more similar to pressuring institutions taking federal money to do things, by both parties, like adding or removing diversity programs, mandating wage levels, curtailing due process for sexual assault investigations, investigating alleged fraud, etc. There are actually colleges that are very careful about not taking federal money where it would affect them.
The approach that most people in the US seem to favor is "this is totally fine that the right-thinking government can do this, the problem is that the other guys occasionally get to rule".
The real solution is to remove the levers, or the federal spending, so that neither side can do it.
> This only applies to schools taking federal money.
Which means all poor public school districts (free breakfast programs are funded with federal money) and most other public schools districts (special needs programs are funded with federal money). So the “only” here is basically “all” public school districts.
So? That is exactly how every other lever like this applies, by both parties. It has absolutely nothing in common with Russian arbitrary draconian speech repression and to suggest that it is insulting. It's like, technically wage tax is like forced labor so it's basically similar to slavery, right? Somehow very few people would make this argument.
Now, the reason the admin can do that is because every district in the country is yoked to federal funds. This gives them a massive power lever. As far as massive power goes, it's strange that HN understands this well with surveillance but not with anything else. Surveillance is really great, if you could magically make it only usable by people you agree with, say to find lost pets or catch armed robbers and nothing else.
However if you create a power, it will also be used by people you disagree with, for the purposes you abhor. The only solution is to remove the power.
If not, what is your other solution, never allow people who disagree with you to win elections?
I commented on just one thing — that this book ban effectively impacts all public school districts. My comment says nothing about Russia, elections, or anything else you mention. I’m only making the point that this ban is not just about “some” public schools; it’s virtually all of them.
I wonder about the downvotes? Do you really think people being personally muzzled by a dictatorship without due process and with draconian punishment is remotely comparable to having some strings attached when a large bureaucracy gets taxpayer money, in a manner that both parties have demonstrably, factually used for decades?
in that case, as much as I hate the current admin, a thin silver lining is that progressives, the most contemptible, even though less harmful, faction in American politics is even more upset :D
I feel like for me (a man) algorithm is super sensitive to engagement. If I er I mean my friend would look at these thirst traps, I er I mean my friend would have feed 90% full of them. On the other hand if I watch anything else I get none, and instead it's 90% epoxy table making, home inspection fails, rats solving puzzles, climbing videos or whatever it is I watched. Seems like mixing it up would be better, I can only watch so many rats solving puzzles.
The most frustrated people are those behind you, and if I was id soon be another person merging in front of you. If people are constantly merging in front of you, either everyone is going too fast or you are going too slow :)
For perspective I didn't even learn to drive till 30 so I know the pros and cons of walkability.
And since learning I shifted firmly into car dependent camp and regret that we bought a house with 60 walkscore and not say 20.
First of all convenience is overblown for everything except drinking and children (paradoxically - people go to the burbs for kids but it must be pretty bad for those who can't drive). Shopping for groceries on foot every other day is a waste of time. Local stores for hardware, clothes etc. are typically more expensive with worse quality and selection. Anything remotely specialized like a climbing gym or a bar that is a good place for dancing is unlikely to be walking distance unless you optimize for it, so you need a car or transit - slow and inconvenient. Restaurants in the US are expensive.. sure if I had a Tokyo style joint nearby maybe, otherwise going out is not a daily thing and if prefer variety, so the walking options quickly lose appeal. The only thing it's unquestionably better for is going to a local bar to drink a beer or eight. I lived blocks from Granville st in Vancouver when I was 25, that was great. Maybe a local park would be nice too, but suburbs do have those. Driving everywhere, as I found out, is just better for everything else.
The second, in the US it filters out the wrong kind of people to a large degree. Given non-existent law enforcement for property crime and disorder in many cities, this is why I suspect people protect their low density. Places where people have to drive, and places without services, will have many fewer people of the kind that cause crime and disorder. The economic lower middle gets caught in the crossfire - I have lived next to affordable housing and I believe 95% of the people there are probably great, but they didn't enforce the law on the other 5%, so if they tried to build anything affordable next to me i would fight it tooth and nail.
The difference is that North Korea is a place, with an organization that claims to be its government. You can point to it on a map.
Antifa is an adjective that people with no connection to one another self-apply. I'm antifa, and I imagine you are too, but it doesn't mean that we've ever met or coordinated with one another in any meaningful way.
The word "antifa" is basically meaningless altogether, since virtually every person since the end of WW2 claims to oppose fascism.
Wikipedia doesn't use the phrase "group of people", and cites a symposium as a source for the assessment that "it is a highly decentralized array of autonomous groups in the United States," so, I'm not sure this advances the discussion.
It's obvious that the vast, overwhelming majority of people consider themselves anti-fascist. So I really don't think it possible for this term to ever actually describe a particular group of people, excluding other groups of people.
These attempts to shoehorn the word "antifa" into some kind of distinct organization seem like they are just a lingual change to make it more difficult to use this phrase, or more difficult to advance critiques of fascist tendencies wherever they may appear.
This would be a great point if antifa was some official org with fascist views.
It's not. Antifa is just a shortened form of the word anti-fascist. Anyone can call themselves antifa. And typically, only people who view themselves as fighting fascism call themselves antifa.
In short, saying "antifa are the real fascists" is like saying "vegetarians are the real meat eaters". It doesn't make sense.
I didn't say anything of that sort. North Korea calls itself "democratic people republic" and people who call themselves antifa claim they fight "fascists". In both cases, the claim is either completely made up or occasionally somewhat technically correct as they fight anything from corporations to corner store glass windows to journalists who happen to disagree with them and happen to find some fascist
Which often leads to this point, as in Lord of War:
> Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
Again, the DPRK is a singular entity. We can look at the behavior of the DPRK and analyze what its stance towards democracy is. We can see that it doesn't seem remotely committed to democracy, so being against the DPRK says nothing about one's views of democracy. Or even if the DPRK was truly committed to democracy, one could be against the DPRK for reasons completely unrelated to its democracy, and it would still not say anything about one's view of democracy.
Antifascism is just a political stance. It's shared by a wide range of disparate people who have nothing to do with each other. Just like vegetarianism is just the practice of not eating meat.
What does being anti-vegetarianism say about one's stance towards meat eating? Sure, you can look at any one guy or specific group of people who call themselves vegetarian, be against them for reasons unrelated to vegetarianism, and that doesn't say anything about your stance towards meat-eating. But being broadly anti-vegetarian?
...What does being broadly anti-antifascism say about one's stance towards fascism?
> Being anti-antifascist just make you a fascist, or a fascist-adjacent supporter.
If a loose-knit ideology/movement called "Anti-Rapists" emerged that evolved into a cohort of various disconnected thugs who targeted homosexuals for violence, would being Anti-"Anti-Rapist" make you a supporter of rapists or rapist-adjacent supporter?
Obviously, in the scenario you describe, people will continue describe themselves as "anti-rapist" and everybody will understand that they mean that they are opposed to rape.
There is no "loose-knit ideology/movement" called "antifa" - there are groups like SDS and Don't Shoot PDX and a zillion others who describe themselves as "antifa", using it as an adjective. I'm aware of no person or organization who has attempted to proclaim that they are the one true antifa org.
What has people who claimed to be antifacists done besides oppose facists? Because I have yet to see anybody except the the government and MAGA supporters claiming antifa has done anything else.
Well, some people who call themselves antifa also use slogans like "liberals get the bullet, too".
The right's play wasn't to invent antifa from the whole close, but to imply that those kinds of views are universal or nearly so among people who call themselves that.
(To be fair, it doesn't help that the historical antifa, i.e. KPD's Antifaschistische Aktion, considered social democrats to be its enemies, calling them "social fascists". It boggles my mind that anyone on the left who isn't a hardline Marxist-Leninist would adopt the name for themselves given its history.)
The modern alarmist environmentalist projections have even less plausible basis in any kind of science (compared to e.g. IPCC ones [1]) than the Population Bomb et al. Let's hope their moral panic doesn't inspire genocidal policies like Indian forced sterilizations and One Child policy.
We live in the age of unparalleled prosperity, as displayed in part on one of the first slides, human vs wild biomass. Just like with their forebears, framing it as a bad thing in the very beginning really betrays the fundamentally anti-human nature of the modern environmentalists.
"Corporate capitalism" is part of the package that delivered said prosperity; "social media", "surveillance" is just people making choices that old man yelling at cloud disagrees with - like, I am totally with him on privacy, but most people don't care about privacy, and unlike him I do not think I have the right to decide for them.
Just like Paul Ehrlich et al, these people are delusional and truly evil.
I think this makes total sense, when I was 15 there was no social media and we socialized just fine over beers at an unattended construction site (ok also playing soccer but I do fondly remember opening bottles on rebar). Kids these days! /s
Not sure how scalable this is but a similar format was popular in Russia when I went to college long before AI. Typically in a large group with 2-5 examiners; everyone gets a slip with problems or theory questions with enough variation between people, and works on it. You're still not supposed to cheat, but it's more relaxed because of the next part, and some professors would say they don't even care if people copied as long as they can handle part 2.
Part 2 is that when you are ready, an examiner sits with you, looks over your stuff and asks questions about it, like clarifications, errors to see if you can fix them, fake errors to see if you can defend your solution, sometimes even variations or unrelated questions if they are on the fence as to the grade. Typically that takes 3-10 minutes per person.
Works great to catch cheating between students, textbook copying and such.
Given that people finish asynchronously you don't need that many examiners.
As to being more stressful for students I never understood this argument. So is real life.. being free from challenge based stress is for kindergarteners
New business idea: can they mine crypto in my kitchen, it's an old house and the heating is uneven. Also there are whole countries that run on central heating where hot water is pumped from a central power plant like facility to houses and apartments. Probably inefficient, but something they could do.
How is it different in terms of breach of professional ethics than practice interviews many in tech do, never intending to take the offer? I personally have never done them (part laziness, part ethics, part lucky to have little experience of job insecurity), but have been told a few times by people that do that is stupid that I should stay sharp (and waste 5 people's time to help me for free :))
I see the parallel, but there’s a key difference in intent and scale.
A candidate doing a practice interview is often a defensive reaction to a volatile market—a way to maintain a personal skill. A company posting 'ghost jobs' is a systematic corporate strategy that pollutes market data and wastes thousands of collective hours.
One is an individual trying to survive the system; the other is the system itself failing to act in good faith.
The approach that most people in the US seem to favor is "this is totally fine that the right-thinking government can do this, the problem is that the other guys occasionally get to rule".
The real solution is to remove the levers, or the federal spending, so that neither side can do it.
reply