jyscao

Exactly, calling it “illicit” is funny. Your ToS isn’t law.

I tried to clone a HTTP (not HTTPS) site, and it's giving me `navigation failed: net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED`. Even when I explicitly included the protocol with `http://<FQDN>`.

If positive correlations exist between people who do bad things, and their ethnic backgrounds, then it's a pattern worth looking into.

Now you're just talking out of your ideological a**.

Which is your right. Just know that that's what you're doing.

>Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.

And do tell how you distinguish "useful middlemen" from "parasitic middlemen". These are meaningless terms based on your own value judgements. In other words, they're completely useless in practice.

A universally recognized transaction-coordinating mechanism works much better. And guess what? We already have that: price.

>Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)

Except you have no idea if $10-100 charged by registrars should be the actual price of those domains. The only two factors that should determine the price of something is the lowest price the seller is willing to sell it at, and the highest price any single customer is willing to pay. That's it.

If some government policy existed that enforced domain names must be priced below $x, then that functions as an artificial price ceiling, which necessarily results in a misallocation of the resource in question. In this case, that would mean, domains going to people who are less incentivized to put them to the best possible use.

Take the very example of friendster.com: when Mike Carson bought the domain from his park.io customer, friendster.com went from a website that only generated ad revenue to now a new social networking app idea he's developing, which I'm sure even you'd agree is an improvement to its previous use. And that was only possible, because Carson believed the 30k he was being asked to pay in order to acquire ownership of friendster.com was worth it (to him).

If all domain prices were artificially capped to $100 (or whatever other arbitrary threshold) and below, then in all likelihood, you'd see the problem of malicious actors who bulk buy then squat domains become worse, not better. You might counter, why would they do that? Since on the surface, it'd appear that they cannot profit from those domains by re-selling them at a higher price later on. Sure, perhaps not directly (but even this is debatable, because what'll likely happen is you'll just create a black market for it); but maybe they'll just tell the people who want to take the domain off of him that whatever app idea they're building, he wants a x% stake in?

In economics, your intentions don't matter, it's all about the incentives your proposed policies create. And to that end, price caps never work, because they just shift the collateral damage elsewhere, while making the economy worse in net.

>I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.

Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.

Despite being full of arrogant intellectual superiority, evidently the majority of the HN crowd has little understanding of basic economics.

While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy.

Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain name re-sellers take on the risk that no one else are willing to bear at some particular time (that the domain they're "squatting" could be worth nothing in X years). If and when the domains they're "squatting" later on become more valuable, either through their own direct efforts, or by re-selling them to other parties that can make better use of them, then the profits they make from such transactions are justified for the aforementioned risks they bore.

IYKYK

Mao's cult as you call it, shares little similarities to the modern day Chinese government, which is arguably the most pragmatic government that exists in the world today, certainly amongst developed countries. So once again, wrong.

>That your point about support for Chinese democracy, could also be applied to Chinese communism

Incorrect - my point about Chinese democracy does not apply to the current governing body of China (whether you choose to view and harp on them as communist or not is irrelevant).

The Cultural Revolution, which the previous commenter presented as a gotcha, is widely regarded as a dark period and unequivocally a mistake by the majority of Chinese today. But Chinese communism today is both much more and much different than Chinese communism under Mao.

OTOH Tiananmen is much more emblematic of "Chinese democracy" than the Cultural Revolution was of Chinese communism. And as already stated, the way Tiananmen was handled is deemed to be correct by the majority of the Chinese populace today.

And so once again, this goes back to my original point: peoples of different nations choose their own government, including the form of that government, and not just in the narrow sense of who their next public-facing leader should be during the next several years. The Chinese already does exactly that.

Ironic then that most of the students throughout China who supported and even participated in the Tiananmen protests would later admit that Deng acted correctly in squashing it, and that China is better off today for that. This is a sentiment most Chinese living in China today share.

Could things eventually go south with the CCP in charge? Of course, and given long enough time, that's almost a certainty. But even when that day comes, it still does not directly imply a liberal democracy was the better governing system for the Chinese people, as your original comment strongly implied.

Yes, so what's your point?