This would trade AI regulation for the Kids Online Safety Act, the No Fakes Act, and a federal age verification mandate. Basically every bad bill people have been fighting against, all at once. A horrible deal.
IIRC the only way to keep who owns a home truly anonymous (short of a court getting involved) is to create a shell company (not an LLC) and have your attorney sign off on the deed as a representative of the company. Problem is you have to pay a lot more tax if/when you sell (I believe it's considered income, instead of capital gains). LLC's, and I believe, trusts, are fairly easy to sort out the ownership of -- they obscure your name from people finding out where you live, but if somebody is curious who lives at your address, they just have to pull up docs on the legal entity. This probably wouldn't even cause an inconvenience for somebody with access to LexisNexis or whatever.
(Don't quote me on this, if somebody knows better please fill me in)
From what I’ve investigated as a recipient of spam calls, I’ve been called from legitimate mobile numbers from my own mobile telco. The only thing that explains that are SIM card banks.
Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to report abuse to the telcos (and regulators).
I don’t understand the problem? If you’re not doing anything wrong, there shouldn’t be anything to hide, right? What’s the big deal? Besides, it’s not like you have any privacy anyway.
Like the runup to COVID, everyone is just shambling along pretending that nothing’s happening. Even if the strait is opened tomorrow, inventories will continue to fall for some time. This is going to be a serious crisis.
I am really not looking forward to whatever bullshit laws they try to force through during the crisis.
And just like Covid, where I recall almost everyone on HN believed it'd be the end of the world, the world will adjust and will get through this just fine.
“Getting through” a crisis is almost guaranteed short of a planet killing asteroid. We also “got through” WWII, although it was an extremely unpleasant time.
Covid (and the response to it) caused the deepest global recession since the Great Depression. It was a big deal, very damaging to the global economy, and generally a miserable time for most.
It was absolutely the end of the world for many folks not as privileged by sheer chance of birth place. And getting through this "just fine" will mean hundreds of thousands of starvations in addition to the "default rate" of ~10k just children dying of malnutration each day. So yeah, congratulations to your luck that you can just shrug it off as insignificant for you personally..
Your recollection is incorrect, and besides that, Covid had a serious impact on the world that's still being felt today. We didn't simply "get through it just fine."
Spam calls are a different issue (spam is usually VOIP). Spammers also often use spoofed numbers since STIR/SHAKEN is somehow still not properly implemented.
Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7.
There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures.
Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?
True, the USSR just had Lysenkoism (quite mainstream!), abiotic oil, deep research into psychics and telepathy, ufology, and Pamyat.
You can’t escape fringe beliefs, but admittedly it seems like there were fewer of them in the USSR. Or maybe they were just ignored, poorly documented, or still untranslated.
Ok yes, true. I guess Lysenkoism qualifies at best as 'pseudoscience'.
I'm talking mostly from a East German perspective in the late 70s and 80s (so quite late). I actually need to find out whether Lysenkoism was taken seriously in 1950's East Germany or whether it was silently ignored (open rebellion wouldn't have gone well with the 'Big Brother' in the East).
> Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly
But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants.
Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2].
> but nobody believed in communism either
I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause.
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