pavelludiq

> Ad blockers today also try to fool the site and work around anti-adblock, which I think isn't fair to the sites.

You're right, it's not fair, but there is no fair in war, and make no mistake, this is what it is, a war for humanities freedom and dignity and you're on the wrong side of it. My country spend decades and a significant amount of its resources building a giant surveillance network meant to oppress and terrorize it's people but because it was 20th century tech, it was orders of magnitude less powerful than what you do(it relied on human informants, usually extorted into cooperating because somebody informed on them). We dismantled that machine because it was extremely dangerous to the free society we decided to build and we will eventually dismantle your bigger badder machine as well. Make sure you save enough for retirement.

> Why? Why can't we ask whether "privacy" is so precious that we should preserve it at any cost?

I would suggest opening up one of the many books that deal with the history of various police states of central, eastern and southern Europe of the last 100 years or so. This continent is scarred to the bone by authoritarianism, millions of nameless graves and all that, if that's not a good enough reason I don't know what to say more. Ignorance of the past is deadly.

China is a genocidal state, and the supposedly hundreds of millions of supporters of that state policy in China are also genocidal by definition. I see no reason not to disrespect them. This is not "a difference of opinion" it's an ethnic cleansing, not something you brush off to polite disagreement. Yes, absolutely ostracize them, that's what you do to people who support genocide. 100% of the time any civilized person should resist them in any way they can.

Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany. It's not like this is any kind of surprise, it's the only logical thing that could've happened. I am still extremely bitter about the dirty way this law was passed, the lies, the deliberate lies by the commission, the nasty response EU politicians had at protesters and the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things. I watched the debates in parliament and there were MEPs who actually said that. The horsetrading France and Germany did over Russian gas in order to get a deal on this law. That disgusting blog post the EU commission published calling people who disagreed with them bots and brainwashed and positioning themselves literally as knights out to slay the google dragon. It's all horribly corrupt and cynical. I'm sure many young people got the message that their leaders view them with such absolute contempt and open hatred and I fear the consequences for Europe.

Common Lisp code tends to be very stable long term. Occasionally people dig out some old code from the 60s or from really old books and papers and it will just run on modern systems. Maybe with slight modifications since the standard was finalized in 1994 and there were some changes to the way scope works in common lisp compared to say the older mac lisp, but anything written since that is written in portable standard compliant common lisp is pretty much guaranteed to continue working while there are still people willing to maintain common lisp compilers for whatever hardware exists in the future. It's actually extremely comforting to be able to come back to a project after not touching it in a few years and have every test pass even if I upgraded all the dependencies(as long as I picked the right dependencies that is :), lispers tend to be pretty conservative about breaking changes in mature and popular libraries.

> we should make sure that non-smokers do not take up vaping

How about we let adults do as they please instead.

The most anybody should ever do about vaping is warn people that maybe it's not the safest thing in the world.

Instead in the EU we have a ridiculous law that makes it illegal to sell nicotine liquid in container bigger than 10ml, which means that if I don't want to spend twice what I used on cigarettes, I have to buy non-nicotine 100ml bottles of liquid and then buy separate 10ml bottles of nicotine concentrate and mix them myself, doing the math myself to get the proportion I used to be able to just order and generating a small pile of empty small plastic bottles every month because people who can't sleep at night unless somebody does something about everything!!!OHGODSTHECHILBREN!!! keep coming up with stupid ideas like that.

Please we should not be making sure of anything! We don't need to be sure that every body is absolutely safe all the time, put a warning label and let us do as we wish with our health.

> Individual liberties cannot be realized without sanctions and foreign policy.

What kind of jingo non-sense is that?

We now have over a century of data on how effective US foreign policy is at promoting democracy around the world and if you read the history even badly, you can't help but notice that it's much better at killing people in monstrous numbers than at promoting individual liberty.

The holocaust was in many ways enabled by mass surveillance. How about we start there. It was done mostly manually, but even something as trivial as census data from an occupied country likely killed an unimaginable amount of people. Then of course you had the eastern block where the authorities would've been wetting their pants at the surveillance capability of a modern private individual, let alone a corp or government. These are not theoretical questions, we've played this game before and now we have really big toys.

"Our service is where we make sure only good guys are, our competition is only used by literal child eating nazis"

No cartel in mankinds history has enjoyed this type of competitive advantage, good job SV :)

Your phone doesn't just contain private data about you, it contains private data about people you know. Selling them out like this is a scumbag thing to do, not to mention it's probably a TOS violation of every service you interact with. FB basically solicited people unwittingly commit crimes on their behalf.

I know multiple minimum wage workers who nonetheless spend a significant portion of their income on tobacco products, all of them taxed at enormous percentages. Taxation is literally the worst addiction cure in existence with 0 evidence that it works(and quite a bit of evidence that it does not and disproportionately hurts the poor).

"hey I don't really need this" is such a naive westie hipster take at it's not even funny. People do actually need social media, poor people and underprivileged communities especially. Your relative is working abroad? You need social media, your community suffers from serious corruption, you need social media. Natural disasters happen in your area often? You need social media. You need to find someone to barter with for old used items because you have no credit card access? social media can help you. You work in the city and need to make your way back home to the country on weekends? Car pooling groups are a life saver.

Social media globally is a tremendous net benefit to humanity. Just because the biggest ones are run by horrible SV oligarchs and infested with state security unscrupulous spammers and that some users can't seem to keep their face out of their phone doesn't mean the thing is bad, just that it has costs.

This is such a blatantly obvious social control and fund raising scheme not meant to actually help anyone, I'm confused how supposedly well educated thinking people can think it's a good idea in the benefit of it's victims.

No matter how dangerous free speech may be in your mind, censorship is 1000x more dangerous. I see evidence of this all around me as the remnants of an inhumane regime still stand in every city here and in the cities of most of our neighbors. If no such evidence is present in your environment, consider yourself extremely fortunate and please don't take it for granted. Pick up a history book and consider the implications of what you are saying very carefully.

Simply put, the way to fight the abuse of free speech is with more free speech, not less, more access to information, not less, more freedom of assembly and association, not less. This principle has been the foundation of the least repressive societies in human history and it has a definite and proven track record, unlike limiting speech, which simply does not.

> still don't really see anything wrong with supporting the government or military

As a non-American(but citizen of an allied nation), the fact that the US is currently involved in something like 12 regional conflicts(that we know of), some of which could be considered illegal wars of aggression if the US wasn't on the UN security council, in places who's combined wealth is a fraction of just one US state is very worrying to me, and the fact that few, if any Americans share that concern is certainly very disappointing. I had thought Americans better than that in my younger years, apparently not.

I'm not saying that it is inherently evil, I'm saying that you as a member of the public must assume that it at least has that potential at all times for it to function as intended.