Holy moly. This lead me down a quick read to this gem[0]:
> Aladdin (Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network)[1] is an electronic system built by BlackRock Solutions, the risk management division of the largest investment management corporation, BlackRock, Inc. In 2013, it handled about $11 trillion in assets (including BlackRock's $4.1 trillion assets), which was about 7% of the world's financial assets, and kept track of about 30,000 investment portfolios.
For any one firm to have this much director and/or indirect assertion over the world’s financial assets is ripe for problems of all sorts.
Seems rather indicative of the general consolidation of power and decline of social equality across the west
Because being a whataboutism makes it not relevant.
Implictly making solving the Russia/Ukraine situation (which, again, is basically as simple as Russians just going home) require peace in the Middle East first seems like you just want to delay it for the next just about 5000 years?
But it does. At the very least, you need to keep paying off the people in power and do everything within the framework of their rules, otherwise you’re in trouble
there is no "off grid", and even then those homesteaders aren't building houses themselves with tools they crafted themselves -- they're 100% dependent on tools and skills they learned in society.
even remote and rural they're often still trucking into town weekly for gas and groceries.
source: in laws in rural AB tried homesteading off the grid. all it meant was that their kid was homeschooled and can't do multiplication and they learned how difficult farming is.
I'm fairly certain statistically you can't, because you need a place to go do that, the skills to pull it off, and have a family that's not only willing but actively supporting it, otherwise when the reality kicks in everything _will_ fall apart. Either that or some of you die. But hey, technically you'd be correct in that case.
Or maybe I just have a gloomy view of what "living off the grid" looks like :] I'll just leave this [1] here, regarding that.
Not really. It's just that people don't realize how much they rely on modern society. You could go all Primitive Technology and go live in a mud hut somewhere or whatever, nobody's forcing you to buy toothpaste and electricity and all that stuff.
The problem is that sucks, so people don't actually want to live off grid. They just want to not work but also get the benefits of modern society.
A human can't survive without somehow exploiting the resources in their environment, at minimum you need a certain amount of baseline calories from either harvesting or hunting food. Do you think there is a square inch of arable land, areas suitable for livestock, or regions with plentiful wild fruits and animals, which is not currently claimed by some existing power structure who already claims exclusive rights over the exploitation of those resources and with whom you would need to negotiate with in order to access?
The issue isn't merely that you give up the benefits of modernity, the issue is that industrialized states and corporations have spent the last 200 or so years claiming every resource in the world as their property- that's why you see living off the grid as being in a "mud hut" or something, the resources left unclaimed are the ones that weren't valuable enough for someone to snag them already!
I don't disagree with you on that, but the reason I said mud hut is because I was taking the off grid thing very literally - you don't have an axe to build a log cabin.
I imagine a motivated individual could find some remote place where they could live undisturbed for a long time but without owning the land there's no guarantee you won't be chased off eventually.
But my main point is that's all kind of irrelevant because no one really wants to live that way. They want a somewhat modern home and access to utilities and vehicles and fuel and medicine and so on. They just don't want to pay taxes. They want to have the cake and eat it too.
Incredibly thankful for Berlin bouncers for doing their job properly, and not letting people in who think that as long as they "give money" everything should spread open for them, and who don't even bother to know what the main theme and focus on the event (who's DJing). Exactly the kind of people I'd like to avoid when partying in a techno club.
Yes, my comment did not advocate for anyone to stop the clubs from their attempted suicide, in fact the opposite, it advocated for letting them succeed.
Very difficult to imagine you would notice in the middle of a night club who around you does and doesn't know the lineup for the night. Amusing to think about, though.
Next time try to enjoy the music and don't worry so much about what other people around you are up to!
I can enjoy music at home or at any private space. One of the main ideas behind clubbing is to enjoy the music in a community of like-minded people and fostering that sense of connection and belonging.
In the past it would occur naturally, because electronic music was a niche thing. With raising popularity, door policies had to be implemented to maintain this community. Now that it's mainstream, clueless outsiders start coming in telling people who built the scene what to do.
Quite similar to what happened to tech and the Internet in fact. The club scene is in its Eternal September now.
See the deafening silence of the media on Nazis in Ukraine, and the recent mind-blowing case of the heads of state of Canada, Ukraine, and the entire Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation to a literal SS officer, which has triggered discussions (even here on HN) in the vein of “actually some Nazis were good guys”, which would also be unthinkable just a few years ago.
I think the Canada thing was an honest oversight. The party in power isn’t even a right wing party. Pretty centrist. They don’t have any motivation to shift the overton window in the “maybe we’re okay with Nazis now?” direction.
I know what you mean but I think there is more context that enables such an oversight to happen.
It feels like a product of the "we have always been at war with Russia" political fluidity when the applause was triggered by claims of fighting Russia in 1940. Today we funnel guns to units wearing SS unit patches with no scandal. There is no international effort for peace. There is no widely held principle that we must turn enemies into allies. Instead there is glee at every Russian death and disinterest, unless useful, in every Ukrainian death. To be anti-war gets you treated as a crank. It makes me feel sick.
One can hope that every single one of the 200+ highly educated members of the elite ruling class of Canada made this “honest oversight”. At least they can claim it after some kind of apologies were made. Not so much for Zelensky who didn’t mention this incident at all, since honoring Nazis is business-as-usual in Ukraine.
Still, I can see how it can benefit the Canadian party too, because the original electorate would either not notice this or accept the apology and forget about it, thus not impacting the status quo, but now they also get the neo-Nazi vote after this wink and nod.
"Have no choice" is false. Fortunately, email still works. As does any messenger through a VPN. Using Wechat is simply being complicit with censorship out of laziness.
Keep in mind that most major domains outside of China are blocked. Chinese services aren't going to be any more lax with surveillance than WeChat and have the same registration requirements.
You could maybe try registering your own server, but do you want to have the possibility of questionable messages being saved on a server that you own when dealing with Chinese authorities? Any "oops, sorry" goes out the window when they think you're actively dodging filtering to that extent.
I don't think this is true; GFW works in a disallow-list fashion and domains have to be explicitly blocked (which is why people do keyword attacks[0]).
The parent is talking about communicating with friends and family. My point is not about evading surveillance, it's about not using one of the main tools of the CCP censorship apparatus.
If you're inside China and care about your safety, you would think twice about sending "questionable" messages even on the most secure channel because you're still physically vulnerable to rubber hose cryptanalysis.
If anybody messages you or your family/friends receives something suspicious something and the Party suspects you're intentionally avoiding their watchful eye with a custom mail server, I think you might end up worse off. All it takes is one goofball finding a vulnerability in your system and dropping a joke image or bit of text to royally screw you.
Furthermore, while it's nice in theory to deploy your own servers and get all of your friends and family to exclusively chat through your homemade application, it's very unlikely. WeChat is basically an OS all its own these days. It's a social network, chat app, payment app, shop, and more. People are incredibly reluctant to give up convenience unless they're very motivated and technologically inclined. And for people inside of China, getting a VPN or non-Chinese messenger is quite difficult thanks to locked down app stores and most people communicating only through phones.
I don't use Facebook and won't budge on that issue. My parents won't use anything that's not Facebook. If they won't take 10 seconds to register for anything else, then they certainly won't want to deal with anything I'd try to scrap together. The end result is that I make a VOIP call to their phone about once a month and they ask me to just give up and use Facebook at some point. It's probably a similar situation with most people wanting to leave XYZ terrible messenger.
How is "have no choice" false when you have to pretend to be from another country to be able to use messaging services? If the choice is bordering on illegal (I'm not familiar with the intricacies of Chinese law but I'd assume it's atleast frowned upon to bypass their barriers) then is it really a choice? To me a choice would be that you could use the state sanctioned communication apps OR another one in the same way.
My understanding is that VPNs are not hard to get and are silently tolerated. Obviously, using them to then do something illegal like plan your own protests might get you in trouble, but using it to access YouTube or chat to someone overseas via WhatsApp is allowed.
It's not as obvious as before, and they try to show their big arms to discourage most of the people, but there is always a way. I live in China since almost 8 years and I've seen so many articles with big titles like "VPN are going to be totally blocked next month".
Every time I'm scared, but every time not a lot change (hopefully, otherwise I would just leave).
On big CCP reunions (next one at the end of may), they somehow block most of the VPN for several days, so they have the capacity to do it. But it never last so long, I feel they use it a bit like a pressure cooker, to release pressure when people are getting upset.
hmm. I kinda disagree. For a lot of my relatives, WeChat == the internet. I honestly don't know if any of them have actual email addresses. So the alternative to WeChat is not talking to them at all.
There is no such thing as "the law" in China. You may be imprisoned or disappeared if you didn't do anything to circumvent "the law", there are always undisclosed "relevant rules and regulations" ready to be unleashed. You can also carry out brazen illegal activities as long as you are well-connected (until you start stepping on toes of someone more well-connected than you).
So what if email is insecure, neither is Wechat. And encrypted email is still a thing.
Just because there isn't "the party" making decisions in the US doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of flexibility in when and how the law is applied. It just gets left up to the local sheriff or prosecutors.
It is strictly true. The law states: "illegal to access foreign internet without government permission first."
The government opening up businesses to connect to services such as facebook or twitter to promote china businesses and so on is just the government giving permissions.
But for the every-day citizen, the use of a VPN is technically illegal as it circumvents the law.
Granted, but put quite simply, I have residency in HK but still need a visa to visit mainland China.
Also the capital controls are entirely different. It's naive to say they are the same country when they are demonstrably different in terms of culture and laws - despite their many similarities.
Yes it's already a part of China. However like Taiwan, the culture is different. While HK shares a lot of traits with the mainland, it's culturally still closer to the West. That said things change over time.
This is because they can't find jobs abroad and can't even speak a foreign language properly after spending their undergrad years in a Chinese international student bubble.
Quoting China Daily is irrelevant because it's a propaganda mouthpiece of the CCP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation