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Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. In an $82.7B Deal (about.netflix.com)
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Teen shows with 30 year olds by the fourth season... so that Steve Buscemi bit in 30 Rock will now be the norm.
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“The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” - Ted Sarandos in 2013 Seems Netflix won that race.
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I don't like this. Netflix rarely creates excellent content; instead, it frequently produces mediocre or worse content. Will the same happen for Warner? Are cinemas now second behind streaming?
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[delayed]
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"Who acquires Warner Bros. Wtf" - comments heard over my shoulder as I mention the title of this post.
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Oh cool, knock-on price hikes across not just the streaming industry, but all the other industries that decided they needed to bundle streaming subscriptions with their products. Can't wait to pay even more for my cell bill because they give me "free" Netflix!
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Aaah the race to the bottom accelerates. I haven't been a Netflix user for years, the quality of their stuff went past a level I was no longer comfortable supporting. It became a platform that is designed to keep you watching (literally anything) as opposed to a platform to find interesting/relevant entertainment. So much low quality, low effort content. Wonder which of AI wrong-but-instant answers or Netflix' empty entertainment will contribute more to genpop enshitification.
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I never imagined that a service that ships DVD via mail would one day buy Warner Brothers. It is amazing how innovation and focus can change the game. Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.
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I hope that this means that the Netflix app on AppleTV will finally become a “first class citizen.” The Netflix app has always been treated badly by Apple. No idea why, but it means that I can’t have Netflix content in the “What’s Next” queue (among other things, like Netflix actors’ work not showing up in show information).
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This is on Netflix not Apple. They enabled it this by accident and reverted it back https://www.theverge.com/news/613307/netflix-apple-tv-app-support-mistake
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that is _purely_ netflix's decision; they have decided not to integrate. in fact, earlier this year netflix accidentally rolled out their internal version which has full integration with the APIs and then said "oopsie" and removed it again.
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Oh you think Apple is treating Netflix bad? No no no. Netflix refuses to play game, because they want to keep their data to themselves. Apple would LOVE Netflix to integrate into the app.
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It’s interesting that the stock market has no reaction to this news, after hours. As of writing this, Netflix is -0.6%
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"Priced in" I guess. I mean look at Warner Bros stock, steadily climbing the last couple months until it hit basically exactly the price shareholders will get in exchange for their shares as part of this deal. Whenever one of my friends says they're thinking about getting into daytrading, all I can think is good luck beating the funds... they either can predict the future or just write it themselves.
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I wonder what the US administration will demand from Netflix for approving this.
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As someone who has recently begun exploring physical media, I find this quite disappointing. The volume on 4K Blu-Rays is often low, prices are high, and Netflix isn't doing much to support physical media. When you're just unwinding in front of a 65-inch screen, you might not notice the quality loss from compression. However, if you're actively watching on a 110-inch projector with an excellent sound system, every little detail becomes clear. And that doesn't even address the most frustrating part: owning less and less. I mean, no one needs to become a physical distributor, but it's disheartening that we lack consumer-friendly ownership of entertainment media when it comes to movies. I would love to see something like Bandcamp, but specifically for studios to release their movies to.
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I'm curious, because I've had an interest in physical media, especially videogames, but what I keep coming back to is, "why would I bother when I can just pirate it?" What's the attraction to the physical media given the availability of these versions online?
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> When you're just unwinding in front of a 65-inch screen, you might not notice the quality loss from compression. this has little to do with the resolution, though. maybe 4k just gets the benefit of being compressed with better codecs. for me at least, watching shows/movies at typical viewing distance, a well-encoded 4k->1080p mkv is only very slightly less sharp and is vastly smaller to store on the media server.
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I can hardly blame a company for not supporting a product almost nobody wants to go back to.
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Placidly uncaring since long ago I stopped consuming media from either party.
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Too big to fail?
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Couldn't care less, sailing the high sea is peaceful!
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What a weird thing to say
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Not sure how many of you have WBD shares with its rather tumultuous past (spin off from ATT, the Bill Hwang mess), but if you've picked up shares on the cheap in the past few years sub $10, congratulations. "Under the terms of the agreement, each WBD shareholder will receive $23.25 in cash and $4.501 in shares of Netflix common stock for each share of WBD common stock outstanding at the closing of the transaction. "
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$82.7BILLION no wonder my subscription keeps going up
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I wonder when the ads will come. There probably already is a enshittification roadmap that they’re working against.
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Netflix added ad-supported plans in 2022.
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Netflix already has a cheap subscription with ads.
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Does anyone who's participated in M&A know how they come up with a breakup fee? I believe this one is $5 Billion (per Bloomberg), and Adobe <-> Figma was $1 Billion. Interested to understand the modeling that goes into it.
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Based on some experience, it's like a bond to appear in court. The number is mostly an arbitrary calculation designed to discourage you from not following through.
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This wasn’t on my radar at all. Was this kept quiet or did I just not hear about it?
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It's been talked about for like a month now
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Buy those blu-rays while you still can (:
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Plenty of blu-rays thrive in the high seas.
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Yeah, as a physical media collector, this is pretty devastating.
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So they can raise the prices again in a few months?
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Interesting, that will bring a big production house capabilities within Netflix itself
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Netflix is already the sole client of a huge studio outside Madrid.
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> Combination Will Offer More Choice and Greater Value for Consumers, Create More Opportunities for the Creative Community and Generate Shareholder Value No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"? I know corporate double-speak is already out of control and I know they're writing whatever they can do avoid regulators who surely are looking into the acquisition, but surely these executives cannot believe acquisitions lead to more choice, right?
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More choice for users of Netflix
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I think that wording is targeted at anti-trust regulators.
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Adding Warner Bros. catalog will naturally lead to more titles to choose from for Netflix users. The choice of streaming services will be slimmer though. It will be interesting to see how regulators see it.
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I guess you are in the US. For you, WB content was already available. But you see, they never bothered to make that content available for most of the rest of the world. Netflix, on the other hand, is available most anywhere. This is exactly what it says on the can - more choice and greater value for me.
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But Netflix content breadth and quality varies a lot from country to country. There's not one Netflix.
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What's written on the can reads "please don't sue us, we're not a monopoly, and we will not gouge users". On the other hand Netflix will make its subscribers fund everything without reducing their income, and will not give these subscribers at least half of that content, because, why not?
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Your Netflix bill is about to skyrocket and there's no guarantee you'll have access to those titles.
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Well if I can cancel my HBO Max it will probably be a zero-sum thing (all the crappy "discovery" content they tacked on was just annoying and I have little interest in their "sports" offerings)
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I always smile at these situations. Yahrrr!
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More choice as in more content available to choose from on Netflix?
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I think it will. Now they don't have to go negotiate for every WB content item. As it stands, subscribers might or might not get WB things, same as all the other IP holders that are playing hard to get. Otherwise, they might have to contract some seasons of a show from one holder and some from another, and maybe not at all sometimes.
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Maybe they mean more content will be produced, which I believe. But I'd also argue that we really don't need more content on Netflix, we need higher quality. Netflix is drowning in a sea of mediocrity to the point where I have almost given up on investing in a new show because almost all of them reek of lazy writing and good-enough-but-not-outstanding direction. There are exceptions, but they are damn hard to find.
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So when they say "Consumers", it should really have been "Netflix Customers", as for everyone else there is less choice, only already paying Netflix users get more content.
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... don't paying Netflix customers already have access to the whole HBO back-catalogue?
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Not here (Germany). HBO isn't available at all on it's own. It's exclusively sublicensed (until the end of this year) to Sky which has a terrible terrible user experience and of course is another subscription. Two days ago there was an announcement that HBO Max is to start in Germany in January. Let's see how that develops after the acquisition.
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As a Netflix subscriber, that would be news to me.
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Already paying Netflix users will get to either agree with a price increase or leave :) After all, there is more "content" now.
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There’s even more content on “gentlemen of fortune”-type sites. Just saying.
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That’s their competition. I wonder if they realize it. > I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix. There was recently some link on HN about Netflix and using “AI” for “content creation”. Not that Netflix scripts didn’t sound like an “AI” wrote them even before “AI”.
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I'd really prefer better quality over quantity. Everything just feels like slop now and I find myself mostly only enjoying older movies. I find it's incredibly rare when I can actually find something half decent that's new on Netflix. Edit: Btw I find Max is like a better quality version of Netflix. But after a while I have the same problem there too. I find myself just watching something on YouTube instead most times
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I cancelled my NetFlix subscription already, what, 7 years ago, for that reason... However, it is not just NetFlix. Most newish movies don't do anything for me. I prefer a movie from the 90s (or even earlier) over almost anything produced in the last 5 to 10 years. It is likely a generational thing, and a case of old man yelling at clouds. If studios think effects are more important then the actual story, well then, so be it.
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Didn't they just buy HBO? Nice shopping spree!
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HBO is part of Warner Bros.
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Where's Brendan Carr when you need him?
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I wonder if an antitrust suit will be filed, this seems like a pretty significant acquisition.
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How is this any bigger than Disney and all the media channels they own?
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It isn’t. They should have been stopped, too.
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With the current administration, anything can be legal. Besides, they still have plans to spin off the cable networks, so this would mostly concern the streaming assets, movie studio, and the IP.
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Considering the words they're using across the announcement, it seems they're well aware what this will trigger, everything seems carefully chosen so someone can later point at this announcement and say "See, we think this will add MORE user choice, not less, which is good for competition!".
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Every major merger announcement includes this obvious lie.
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It is not a lie though. WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is. I for one, welcome access to stuff that WB has been sitting on without letting me pay them for it.
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It is a lie. You are holding on a possible short time gain while ignoring history proven long-term harm of reduced competition, which will lead to higher prices, less innovation, and fewer choices for consumers. USA anti-trust process is a joke, it is shame that so many company with global footprint relies on that.
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You keep posting this without any idea whether Netflix will relicense anything at all or if you're going to get the movies you want. It's just copium fueled corporate bootlicking at this point.
Why we can’t quit Excel (bloomberg.com)
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And I think it is actually one of the reasons that linux adoption is slow. No real way to run Excel natively. I would switch today but my life in finance is all Excel and Powerpoint.
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Excel is where it is due to a kind of mild bait and switch. In the DOS and OS/2 days before Windows 95, Microsoft told Lotus and other software companies OS2 was the future, not windows. So Lotus when all in on OS/2 with its spreadsheet. Then came 1995, M/S released windows 95 and at the same time they had a full software suit running on W95. It took Lotus a while to get a W95 version out. I think the same happened to Word Perfect. So here we are, too bad Libreoffice was unable to do the same with Linux. But now people are so entrenched I doubt they will only change if forced. Also, years ago IBM tried to get people on LibreOffice and off M/S, it failed miserably. Many Orgs. in Europe is trying now, I hope they succeed. BTW I wonder if we are heading down the same path with github ? I hope not but seems we could be.
When we write programs in a conventional programming language, what we're doing with the data is shown front and centre, and the data itself is sidelined or often not even present. In a spreadsheet, this is reversed: the data is prioritised, and the formulae are hidden. There's an immediacy to a spreadsheet: the user can start with very literal actions on data, and slowly introduce abstractions like formulae. In conventional programming, the programmer has nothing but abstractions with which to work. It's reminiscent of one of Fred Brooks' remarks about how showing the data structures makes the algorithms obvious, but showing the algorithms reveals little about the data structures.
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I think similar remarks can be made in regard to Jupyter notebooks and their popularity among scientist, engineers and data people. Yes, they are still more in the conventional programming realm, where the code is in the foreground, yet to some extent they bring more immediacy. The fact that you can look and investigate at the data you are dealing with at every step (print the table, make a plot etc) is powerful. Another thing would be of course powerful REPL environments. And there are also visual environments like Matlab's Simulink and Modelica. Can you write control algorithm or a bunch of differential equations in any language? Yes. But control engineer can just take a quick look at screenshot of a Simulink model and already have a good idea on what is going on there. This cannot be said about the code. This may be rather unpopular among hackers , where TTY clones and vi emulation rules everything, but computers and software seems to me most powerful and enabling outside the usual coding context of putting streams of characters into the source file using a keyboard.
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“There's an immediacy to a spreadsheet…” The immediacy is you are looking at the data. What you’re going to do with it may not yet be known Is it the right data? What are the values? What are the features? I write scripts at work and tell colleagues if they want my help they should first work it out in Excel and write an outline of the details. If they can’t do that, then the problem may not be a candidate for _script automation_. Our pipeline is not fully automated, but that’s how I describe it. The rest is Excel Carpentry.
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that fred brookes quote description hit me on a molecular level. what are his most important writings that i should read?
That is an interesting take on spreadsheets. I wonder if it is possible to establish some way to switch back and forth between 'programming view' vs 'spreadsheet view'.
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I think the best we have at the moment debugger view; in other words a snapshot of the state of the system. Maybe with a dashboard you can see some progression over time ? (I somehow though of the videogame Factorio and of that thing called Labview, but I cannot form a coherent thought about it)
The US polluters that are rewriting the EU's human rights and climate law (somo.nl)
Both Europe and North America have outsourced much of their pollution to China, Bangladesh and other countries where manufacturing processes receive far less scrutiny.
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Nevertheless CO2 emissions are going down in the western world, even after you account for trade: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
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Source? All data I'm aware of shows the contrary. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
Just imagine what we will find the day where the truth will leak about who and why things like "Chat Control" are pushed down our throat despite going against citizens will.
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Every piece of anti-consumer, anti-user, moat carving policy - has been a result of lobbyists getting to grease the skids of aspiring politicians whose traditional fund raising strategies have run dry. Be wary of any politician that does not have the mob of the people on their side.
There's really not much else to leak, a lot was already being published. I've prepared a uni exam of ethics in it about chat control and I was so angry and felt so disempowered when writing it https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start-up-makes-millions-from-fighting-child-abuse-online https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutcher-s-anti-childabuse-software-below-par https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/ https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimited-data-access-in-online-child-sexual-abuse-regulation/ https://balkaninsight.com/2024/10/11/europol-revising-conflict-of-interest-screening-after-birn-investigation/
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Damn, I did not have "Ashton Kutcher destroys European liberty" on my bingo card
I might be wrong, but I think that what these articles are showing is just the tip of the Iceberg. Like that "children protection" associations would vouch for such a ruling or something like that would look like a no-brainer. But the real question is who lead them, who created or fund them, who is driving the coordination in the back. If we compare with the current "US polluters" case, if you were the target of their lobbying, you would just see a big number of different groups lobbying you (in one case it will be Total, another time "small startups" that appears unconnected together, another time an economic celebrity or rich person, another time that would be the topics at conference you attend, ...). It will look like that it is a global trend of disconnected entities. But, in the back, there is a single interest group that is pulling strings in the shadow in an unified way. Same as what Russia is often doing at big scale to try to shape opinion in its favor.
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Let's say I have no evidence, but I wouldn't be surprised
This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force. EU regulators are paid out of EU taxpayers' money, taken by an actual unstoppable force, on the sole promise that they will do a good job of writing some words down on paper. If they can't even do that then you need to blame them. Not people who talk to them.
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I don't agree with this. I think the article does a good job at pointing out the problematic aspects of this particular lobbying campaign, and even how/why to stop it. A lot of people view lobbyism as basically exchangeable with nepotism and bribery (strictly negative), but this is not the case. The "happy path" with lobbyism is that local industry gives input on new laws/regulation to prevent unintended negative side-effects. Politicians have typically a much more cursory understanding of how a new law is going to affect any particular industry than people in that industry (obviously). If you lock down any mechanism like this, you are invariably going to end up with numerous laws that are highly detrimental to local industry in a way that achieves very little (compared to laws designed with input from lobbies). The article points out exactly how this fossil lobbying case deviated from this ideal (foreign influence instead of domestic, obfuscation and lack of transparency on originators/funding, use of methods to directly affect/manipulate the outputs of lawmaking instead of providing inputs ).
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>EU regulators are paid out of EU taxpayers As stepping stone to well paid jobs (i.e. think thanks) funded by atlanticist influenced lobbyist. Blame captured regulators all you want, they know where their bread is actually going to be buttered, and the more you don't blame the source the more intractble the problem is.
America has been funding right wing Christians for decades and guess what? Dutch people voted for a gay guy from a liberal party. It is true that the US wants to destroy our way of life but we are not defenceless.
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I remember going to Rotterdam as a small child in the 1980s and seeing VHS tapes on open display in a shop window promoting bestiality and incest. In fact, well into the 1990s, bestiality was legal and the Dutch age of consent was only twelve, so they had no qualms about public display of such things. I'm aware this has since changed within the last generation... When sex has to be between consenting adult humans (preferably not closely related.) It doesn't sound like right wing Christians are dictating your way of life much even in areas which are downright questionable and unhygienic.
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> Dutch people voted for a gay guy from a liberal party. 16.94% did.
> This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force. The issue here is that the line between lobbying and corruption is very thin and blurry. For instance, the relation between Nellie Kroes and Uber is not an easy one to classify in a judicial context. Who officially pays you has little value in corruption cases. Whether the main culprit is the bribing corporation or the bribed official is also not very interesting. And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
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The line is not thin, it doesn't exist. All lobbying is corruption. If it were not none of the parties would object to all of the proceedings and data being public.
> And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups. That's what I'm saying. Why is that? For example: nepotists hire family members over other people. Would you describe that as "And while being a family member is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the hiring chances of other people." Or would you say "nepotist bad"? And doubly so when you're forced by law to fund the nepotist's salary?
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> Why is that? Well, if I'm very motivated, I might write a letter to my MP once or twice in my life. I could do more, but I simply have other stuff to do with my life, including my own work. A corporation, on the other hand, may hire people to pester my MP eight hours a day. These people may have enough money to treat my MP to a lunch, etc. And when my MP stops being elected, that corporation may offer them a job. Why isn't really an enigma here.
"Another three meetings the Roundtable held were not found in the EU Transparency Register(opens in new window) at all." That's illegal behavior by foreign interests. And yes, in practice, lobbying is kind of an unstoppable force. Those companies have people that its only work is to influence the people in charge. They have personal relationship with those people and they are all friends. It's a good thing to have friends, you never know where you will find yourself when your politics work finish. If something doesn't work, they will try again next week or next year. It's their work, after all.
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That kind of sounds like they should be put in jail to stop this.
It's not fundamentalist Islam that made US oil interests invade. > This is by far the most fancy description of Ostrava that I have read. Well, ask people in Kabul how they feel about Ostrava compared to where they live.
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History does not begin in 2001. There were a lot of invasions which devastated the region, and they went both ways. The Hindu Kush mountains are often described as "Hindu killer" in India, because of how many Indian slaves lost their lives when being forcibly transported over them. Maybe the whole region would have been better off if it stayed Buddhist. "Well, ask people in Kabul how they feel about Ostrava compared to where they live." If "being visibly more developed than Kabul" is the same as "Capitol of global capitalism", then global capitalism did a good job lifting people out of poverty. Because at least a few billion people live in a way that, from Kabul, will look attractive. Even most of India is now developed well beyond Kabul standards.
> The world is pretty brutal. Agreed. Issue is we’re at risk of making it more brutal if everyone goes all in on pollution in the name of competition.
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The trend has been away from local pollution, especially in the richer parts of the world, and our differences seem to lie firmly in the "how fast or slow this process can realistically be" territory.
Wealth inequality is not inherently undemocratic, WTF. There's way more poor people than rich people, meaning poor people have more votes and say in democracy. Lobbying is undemocratic since it bypasses democracy.
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Trying to get millions to agree on things is hard, that’s why they focus on bs. They have us fighting a culture war so we won’t fight a class war. That’s why controlling media and other propaganda is so important
In my experience, it’s almost always the right wing parties who harm working class while supporting their own. They just do a fabulous job of convincing the working and lower classes that they’re “one of the people” while shifting the blame onto other people (immigrants, disabled, anyone who wants a living wage from their 40+ hour job, etc).
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Left and right are just sides of the same cleptocratic coin, catering to different audiences but ultimately doing the same thing. Because wealth inequality and housing unaffordability has increased regardless if left or right wing were in power. There's no good and bad one here, they're both just cosplaying.
I'm atheist, yet the behavior of Big Oil over these past decades is strong evidence that demonic possession may in fact be real.
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Nope. That's the divine invisible hand of market.
Welp, it has worked ok for most of us. It’s below zero outside my house is at 22C and I have strawberries and avocados on the kitchen counter. This weekend I’ll drive with my family to a wedding 500km away and will spend $40 in transportation. With all I hate O&G can’t deny it has made my life easier in many ways.
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In 200 years time Ken Burns the 6th is going to make a documentary about climate change, and quotes like this will be read out to illustrate just how short-sighted, selfish, and hyper-nihilistic people were.
But these shouldn't be in contradiction. Oil and gas will end when they will be unprofitable, priced out by much cheaper renewables. Of course this will result in more and cheaper stuff and energy, boost economic growth rates not suppress them.
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It's hard to compete with something that is allowed to externalize the majority of its costs.
That’s the theory. What’s happening is the complete opposite. Thank the government for it.
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Well, regardless of what government does, renewables will eventually price out oil and gas. And the government and the megacorps will be on their side because that way they will be making more money. Not before. No one is trying to limit renewables just for the sake of it. They are trying to do so because so far renewables don't allow to make much money while oil and gas does. There won't be any reason for the powers that be, to resist them once this situation reverses.
Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes. The market does work, but it’s a giant paper clip AI and needs regulation in order to not turn everything into paper clips.
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All great achievements were result of economic planning. The moon landing (and the necessary R&D and buildup) wasn't based on market-based economic incentives. There are multiple examples of advanced high-tech economies built up with the help of central planning married to market forces - basically every East Asian country followed this blueprint. The USSR was a much more powerful economy than it capitalist successor, even though it wasn't run especially effectively. City supported housing initiatives produce with extensive public planning and infrastructure investments produce much better results than for-profit developers building the least amount of stuff for the most amount of money. There are 3 main methods of economic control: profit motive, central planning, and intrinsic incentives. Purist approaches that rely on just one or reject the other tend to have bad outcomes.
> Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes. This is a categorically false statement. The Soviets turned the Russian empire from an agricultural backwater with a minority literate populace, into an advanced industrialised state, scientific leader and economic superpower that was on par with the US for decades, a transformation that took place within a span of merely 20~30 years. Planned economies have been demonstrated to have extremely strong potential. Of course, a planned economy is only as good as its planning, and humans are fallible; we have yet to work out a solution to that particular issue.
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The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US. They managed to be relatively competitive in some endeavours by concentrated massive percentages of their national people and resources on certain endeavours (industrialization, space, the military), often with brutal violence. The US was militarily competitive, often with more advanced equipment, at a fraction the economic resources - and did it at the same time as having one of the highest living standards in the world. Magnitogorsk, a massive soviet city built around a steel mill, was essentially built with American expertise (this whole documentary is extremely fascinating on how central planning got to sophisticated and how the USSR ground to a halt): https://youtu.be/h3gwyHNo7MI?t=1023 This is not to say that any planning is bad, but having a central state trying to control everything from how many belt buckles to make down to how far cab drivers should drive each year, and you're going to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Central planning everything becomes a logarithmic planning nightmare, especially when trying to innovate at the same time. You can't plan around output of innovation because the planners are often far removed from everything. A planner would probably try and "plan" on how to breed a faster horse instead of a car, for example. I'm reminded of an interview I once saw with Gorbachev. He was talking about how he was just promoted into the central committee, essentially the highest ring of the Soviet state. He had just made it to the top and one of his first meetings was having dealing with the issue of persistent shortages of women's panty hose. He was flabbergasted that he was at the top rung of a country that can blast people into space, but can't deal with basic consumer goods availability. Also, many countries have industrialized just as fast without central planning, particularly several asian ones. True, then did centrally set goals and use various carrot and stick initiatives, but otherwise let the market dictate most of the rest.
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Just had to break a few eggs[1] to make that omelette. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Virtually any country that achieves political stability and effective institutions experiences rapid development in the modern world with open knowledge and trade networks. There is nothing special about central planning in that manner that a laissez-faire economy would also achieve at that low development.
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That's quite a misattribution of success. The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially. The Soviet revolution, of course, ushered in a famously politically unstable era with regular, massive purges. Meanwhile, there are many relatively politically stable countries that never managed to become especially industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico. There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks, and it was superior to both. That is a ridiculous feat, and it happened in the middle of a massive invasion that forced the relocation of huge swathes of industry to boot. The USSR was also the first to most space achievements, and it was second to develop nuclear weapons. The USSR did not just catch up to "any industrialised nation", it surpassed them all completely other than the US.
> No market means a Stalinist society. It doesn't. That's just ideological propaganda. > They'd rather the poor be poorer provided that the rich were less rich. That is an absolutely reasonable stance? Wealth isn't absolute, it's relative. If the rich are less rich, more resources are available for everyone else.
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Richness is about available resources. The poor being poorer means that they have even less resources, so it precludes that there would be "more resources available for everyone else". What you propose is the rich getting less rich and the poor getting less poor.
Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional (apnews.com)
You failed to explain why seeds that might fail to make the "best crop possible" would be banned, while leading with a promise to do so. Instead, you explained the concept of "hybrid vigor." Then you talked about the counterfeiting of seeds by imitating a coating, a concept completely unrelated to a law banning sharing seeds, and unlikely to be hindered by it at all. Unless I am missing something.
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Also, are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources in Kenya? I assume there is some sort of farmer seed-shop in most places which has been around for more than a year, known to be reputable. If they buy below-market priced seeds then those are going to be dodgy. That is why they are below market price. These people are poor not stupid. It'd be like my buying a cheap Rolex from a street vendor - I might buy it, I might not but I'm not going to be confused if it turns out to be a fake. It isn't hard to find a reputable seller of something and if you go to the unreputable sellers the reason it is cheap is because it might be bad quality. Don't go to a community seed store that lets in random seeds if the quality matters. I assumed that there was unwritten context where some seed vendor with genetically enhanced seeds was corrupting the legal process to try and protect their IP.
For anyone else: it's not about that kind of seed
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Why would anybody come to the conclusion that it was?
It is sad that the law was enacted in the first place (lobbying by 'the usual suspects') and others had to fight to repeal what is violating common law, common sense and natural justice.
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Usual suspects: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1d/The_Happy_Merchant.jpg
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto (dineshpandiyan.com)
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Even if `--update-refs` didn't exist, my experience is that git can identify duplicate commits produced by rebase, and knows to skip them when rebasing the same commits to the same place again. Am I imagining that?
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It definitely fast-forwards unchanged commits.
For the example given, would merging branch 2 into branch 1 then branch 1 into main achieve the same effect? Perhaps not an option if you need to release the work in branch 1 before the work in branch 2 is ready/reviewed/etc.
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The point of this technique is to keep them separate. See the other comments about `--update-refs`.
That particular case can be solved much easier by rebasing outer-most branch with `--update-refs` flag.
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I'm guilty lol. I wrote a helper to do rebase chains like this
Jujutsu comes in handy here for the same usecase: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj https://www.stavros.io/posts/switch-to-jujutsu-already-a-tutorial/ Also found https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/gitbutler
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Half my team switched to JJ this year, and I do find stacking PRs to be much more pleasant now. We had previously tried out Graphite but it didn't really stick. I wrote up a little way to use JJ's revsets to make it easy to push an entire stack of branches in one command: https://crabmusket.net/2025/jj-bough-a-useful-alias-for-stacked-branches/
There's a very common alias `jj tug` for this case: tug = ["bookmark", "move", "--from", "heads(::@- & bookmarks())", "--to", "@-"] It moves the nearest bookmark to the commit before the current one (which should be your working commit).
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Thanks, I replaced my Frankenstein's monster of a parsing pipeline with this, very useful!
Cloudflare Down Again – and DownDetector Is Also Down
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I have a tentative take, and I kind of feel stupid for even claiming this, since I don't work in Cloud-ops, or whatever, but it's fun to try to participate, and I spent some time articulating what i think is a good perspective on Cloudflare now a days, and as psychologist, I am primary interested in the psychology of things. Basically, my take is: It’s not a technical monoculture; it’s a billing psychology + inertia culture. I dont think the internet is fragile simply because Cloudflare is so ubiquitous, because that view ignores the economic factor of why people choose them. The situation is really a perfect bi-modal distribution: at the low end, you have hobbyists and personal sites who use Cloudflare because it is the only viable free option, and at the extreme high end, you have massive enterprises that truly need that specific global capacity to scrub terabits of attack traffic. However, I think the following perspective is important: For the vast middle ground of the internet—most standard businesses and SaaS platforms—Cloudflare could be viewed as redundant. If you are hosting on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, you are already sitting behind world-class infrastructure protection that rivals anything Cloudflare offers. The reason this feels like a dangerous monoculture isn't because Google or Amazon can't protect you, but rather because Cloudflare wins on the psychology of billing. They sell a flat-rate insurance policy against attacks, whereas the cloud giants charge for usage, which scares people. Ultimately, the internet isn't suffering from a lack of technical alternatives to DDoS protection, nor is Cloudflare a NECESSARY single point of failure; it is just suffering from a market preference for predictable invoices over technical redundancy, and inertia, leading to an extremely high usage of Cloudflare. So basically: Even though we are currently relying a lot on Cloudflare, we are far from vendor lock-in, and there is a clear path to live without them, given that there are many alternatives. Maybe we could view this as a good thing, since basically medium to large-scale enterprises efficiently subsidize small and hobby-level actors? So to summerize: The 2018-era "just use Cloudflare for everything" advice is outdated, and the following is a better philosopy: If you're tiny: Cloudflare free tier is still a no-brainer. If you're huge and actually get attacked: pay for Cloudflare Enterprise or equivalent. If you're anywhere in between: seriously consider whether you need it at all. The hyperscalers are good enough, and removing Cloudflare can actually improve your availability (fewer moving parts). I think Cloudflare thinks this way too, which is why they've been pushing Zero Trust, Workers, WARP, Access, and Magic Transit, to become the default network stack for companies, not just the default firewall. /wall-of-text
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There are too many of that recently. Cloudflare is starting to look amateurish. Can't they test their stuff properly before deploying it to production?
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Maybe they test with shopify.com before the deploy it to their important customers ;)
It could always be worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed They haven't had an incident that bad since they switched from C to Rust.
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The linked article is precisely about how in 2024 they started rewriting their proxy layer from nginx (a C app). While "They haven't had an incident that bad since they switched from C to Rust." might be true, it has also been almost 9 years since cloudbleed, of which 8 were in C world.
In the chain of events that led to Cloudflare's largest ever outage, code they'd rewritten from C to Rust was significant factor. There are, of course, other factors that meant the Rust-based problem was not mitigated. They expected a maximum config size but an upstream error meant it was much larger than normal. Their Rust code parsed a fraction of the config, then did ".unwrap()" and panicked, crashing the entire program. This validated a number of things that programmers say in response to Rust advocates who relentlessly badger people in pursuit of mindshare and adoption: * memory errors are not the only category of errors, or security flaws. A language claiming magic bullets for one thing might be nonetheless be worse at another thing. * there is no guarantee that if you write in <latest hyped language> your code will have fewer errors. If anything, you'll add new errors during the rewrite * Rust has footguns like any other language. If it gains common adoption, there will be doofus programmers using it too, just like the other languages. What will the errors of Rust doofuses look like, compared to C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc. doofuses? * availability is orthagonal to security. While there is a huge interest in remaining secure, if you design for "and it remains secure because it stops as soon as there's an error", have you considered what negative effects a widespread outage would cause?
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This is generally BS apologetics for C. If that was in C this would have just been overrunning the statically allocated memory amount and would have resulted in a segfault. Rust did its job and forced them to return an error from the lower function. They explicitly called a function to crash if that returned an error. That’s not a rust problem.
> How are these clowns deploying stuff on a Friday, it is unbelievable to me I have stopped fighting this battle at work. Despite Friday being one of the most important days of the week for our customers, people still deploy the latest commit 10 minutes before they leave in the afternoon. Going on a weekend trip home to your family? No problem, just deploy and be offline for hours while you are traveling... The response was that my way of thinking is "old school". Modern development is "fail fast" and that CI/CD with good tests and rollback fixes everything. Being afraid of deploys is "so last decade"... The problem is that our tests don't cover everything, it may not fail fast, and not all deploys can be rolled back quickly and the person who knows what their huge commit that touches multiple files actually does is unavailable! We have had multiple issues with late afternoon deploys, but somehow we keep doing this. Funnily enough, I have noticed a pattern. Most experienced devs stops doing this after causing a couple of major downtimes, due to the massive backlash from customers while they are scrambling to fix the bug. So gradually they learn to deploy at less busy times and monitor the logs to be able to catch potential bugs early. The problem is that not enough has learned this lesson because they have been lucky that their bugs have not been critical, or because they are too invested in their point of view to change. It seems that some individuals learn the hard way, but the organization has not learned or is reluctant to push for a change due to office politics. I decided to keep my head low and let things play out, as I simply no longer care as long as the management don't care either.
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Yes. Especially they do the full checklist: - Friday - Christmas time - Affecting both shopify.com and claude.ai, so no phased deployment - Takes 30 minutes to remediate If they would've just deployed to a single of their high-value customers at once, they could've spared shopify.com an hour of downtime and maybe millions in abandoned shopping carts.
Cloudflare's entire WAF depending on React is an issue in itself IMO.
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good point, the bigger picture is even worse :)
The old guard has left as they we too much of an expense in this cost-cutting age... without mentors, crap creeps in and now we are seeing what happens when people don't know how things work, are in charge...
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It may not be true everywhere, but at my company we 100% had more SEVs after two rounds of RIFs. We are talking simple statistics of SEVs per month plotted against RIFs.
Aren't botnet targeting cheap and unsecured consumer devices specifically in the residential IP ranges ?
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Of course they are, but these botnets are actively combated by the ISPs. The main bad traffic that I receive comes from server IP ranges all over the world and several rogue countries who think it makes sense to wage hybrid war against us. But residential IP ranges are not the majority of bad traffic. I would even say that residential IP ranges are most of the paying customers for companies, and if you just block everything else you most likely wouldn't need to use cloudflare. Unfortunately firewall technology is not there yet. It's quite hard to block entire countries, even harder to block any non-residential ASN. And then you can still add some open source "i am human" captcha solution before you need to use cloudflare.
Cloudflare hosts websites for free?
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Yes, they have free plans.
Edinburgh Airport is also down, suspending all flights after an "IT issue with our air traffic control provider". Not sure if this is coincidental, but the timing is rather suspicious!
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That's odd. Why would you want to rely on Cloudflare for airport stuffs?
In my experience, the communication problems stem from the Americans who expect perfect English from all others. English is spoken across the entire business world between people for whom it is not their first language. The accents and broken English is epic in many organizations. Yet they work through it and get things done together. If you work harder at taking the burden upon yourself to understand others, you might be surprised how well people can learn to communicate despite differing backgrounds.
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That’s just saying the same thing. American companies have engineering quality loss when they try to collaborate with people they can’t communicate well with. Whether it’s dumb Americans or poor ESL, it’s not really relevant to the outcome because it’s the same.
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I have the same experience as you. I have been working with many non-native English speakers from different countries, and Americans (and to some degree Brits) are usually the ones who can't follow what is said. This improves over time as they get used to different accents, but it seems it is easier for non-native speakers to understand foreign accents than native speakers in general. I'm not saying I always understand 100% of what is said. When someone from some parts of the world speaks fast and is on a poor line with lots of street traffic in the background, it can be hard to follow. But usually I catch enough of it to be able to communicate.
Already being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158191
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If that was a better discussion, it would be at the top.
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/ reports that https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/ is down, guessing downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector runs via cloudflare!
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Right now the order is reversed. Look, i think we need a resilient system that routes packets via multiple possible pathways, preferably all of them, so that ideally nothing is ever fully down. We can name that system the undownnet
It's downdetectors all the way down
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The open question is if there is a sufficient number of down detectors where the system becomes turing complete
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Hot take: this is a byproduct of monolithic detector ecosystems. We need diversification of detectors. I propose: sidewaysdetector.com
Cloudflare was down (cloudflare.com)
And so it seems that the cause is close to RSC vulnerability from yesterday: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/lfrm31y6sw9q So much for the react being just a frontend library, amirite
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React server components initially came out 5ish years ago, for whatever that's worth.
Not only they make my browsing experience a LOT worse (seconds per site for bot detection and additional "are you human" clicks even without VPNs), now they are bringing the entire Internet down. They don't deserve the position they currently have.
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> Not only they make my browsing experience a LOT worse No, I did (metaphorically, for the websites I control). And I did it because otherwise those sites are fully offline or unusable thanks to the modern floods of unfilterable scrapers. Months of piecemeal mitigations, but Attack Mode is the only thing that worked. Blame the LLM gold rush and the many, many software engineers with no ethics and zero qualms about racing to find the bottom of the Internet.
You make it sound like the DDoS and Bots are their fault.
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They make gazillions. I'm sure they can do better than that. How many awful things in tech can be rationalized away by "sorry, but this is for you/our protection"?
I’m really curious what their rollout procedure is, because it seems like many of their past outages should have been uncovered if they released these configuration changes to 1% of global traffic first.
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The update they describe should never bring down all services. I agree with other posters that they must lack a rollout strategy yet they sent spam emails mocking the reliability of other clouds
They don't appear to have a rollout procedure for some of their globally replicated application state. They had a number of major outages over the past years which all had the same root cause of "a global config change exposed a bug in our code and everything blew up". I guess it's an organizational consequence of mitigating attacks in real time, where rollout delays can be risky as well. But if you're going to do that, it would appear that the code has to be written much more defensively than what they're doing it right now.
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You can selectively bypass many roll out procedures in a properly designed system.
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If there is a rollout procedure and they bypass it for a routine WAF configuration change, then their process sucks. Either way it's a bad look.
What was the AI slop part?
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When something goes wrong, people are starting to immediately assume it's because of the thing they don't like.
Apparently somehow this had never been how Cloudflare did this. I expressed incredulity about this to one of their employees, but yeah, seems like their attitude was "We never make mistakes so it's fastest to just deploy every change across the entire system immediately" and as we've seen repeatedly in the past short while that means it sometimes blows up. They have blameless post mortems, but maybe "We actually do make mistakes so this practice is not good" wasn't a lesson anybody wanted to hear.
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> They have blameless post mortems, but maybe "We actually do make mistakes so this practice is not good" wasn't a lesson anybody wanted to hear. Or they could say, "we want to continue to prioritise speed of security rollouts over stability, and despite our best efforts, we do make mistakes, so sometimes we expect things will blow up". I guess it depends what you're optimising for... If the rollout speed of security patches is the priority then maybe increased downtime is a price worth paying (in their eyes anyway)... I don't agree with that, but at least it's an honest position to take. That said, if this was to address the React CVE then it was hardly a speedy patch anyway... You'd think they could have afforded to stagger the rollout over a few hours at least.
Blameless post mortems should be similar to air accident investigations. I.e. don't blame the people involved (unless they are acting maliciously), but identify and fix the issues to ensure this particular incident is unlikely to recur. The intent of the postmortems is to learn what the issues are and prevent or mitigate similar issues happening in the future. If you don't make changes as a result of a postmortem then there's no point in conducting them.
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>don't blame the people involved (unless they are acting maliciously) Or negligently.
Agree 100%, however using your example, there is no regulatory agency that investigate the issue and demand changes to avoid related future problems. Should the industry move towards this way?
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However, one of the things you see (if you read enough of them) in accident investigation reports for regulated industries is a recurring pattern 1. Accident happens 2. Investigators conclude Accident would not happen if people did X. Recommend regulator requires that people do X, citing previous such recommendations each iteration 3. Regulator declined this recommendation, arguing it's too expensive to do X, or people already do X, or even (hilariously) both 4. Go to 1. Too often, what happens is that eventually 5. Extremely Famous Accident Happens, e.g. killing loved celebrity Space Cowboy 6. Investigators conclude Accident would not happen if people did X, remind regulator that they have previously recommended requiring X 7. Press finally reads dozens of previous reports and so News Story says: Regulator killed Space Cowboy! 8. Regulator decides actually they always meant to require X after all
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Tacopy – Tail Call Optimization for Python (github.com/raaidrt)
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Can someone give some real world examples for TCO? Every time I see this I only see fibonacci and gcd and I really want to encounter this one in the wild on something real and applicable
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A really simple one is traversing a linked list (or any naturally recursive data structure, such as a dictionary or tree). It is very natural to traverse a recursive data structure recursively.
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For tco to be really useful you need to think in a non procedural way. Imagine that you don't have loops in your language so you need recursion to do stuff multiple times. Also even in procedural languages there are some problems that are easier to understand and model if you use recursion, for example tree or graph like structures.
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Tail calls can be used for parsing very efficiently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41289114
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Fun fact: In Scheme, TCO is required by the spec
Yes, Clojure doesn't have TCO either. You get `(loop ... (recur ...))` or `trampoline`. Naive recursion will consume the stack. https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/loop https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/recur https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/trampoline
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Nor can you count on Common Lisp to have TCO. People who are new to CL and treat it like Scheme run into this constantly. Basically never recur down a list, since the list could be long.
State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship' (npr.org)
Similar observations here in Germany. Those fact checkers pick the facts that supports their agenda and leave out others. Framing is in place just the same. And it does not matter if you look at left or right journalists or left or right fact checkers, it is all the same.
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Do you have any proof of this?May be it’s just the matter of they don’t have resources to fact-check everything?
As usual, what looks great on paper often falls short in reality because humans are involved. Who could argue that the concept of fact checkers is inherently bad? After all, they're supposed to chase down all the "disinformation" you mention, and they're there to ensure "factual discourse" to prevent "malicious intent." But if someone opposes fact checkers , they must be a pesky leftie/rightie/whatever label fits, and surely they're against the truth... because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts ! In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Oh, right... some are fact checkers , and others are just fakers. Because only organization X does real fact-checking , why cannot everybody agree with me ? You see, the whole system starts to fall apart the more you reason about it. To me, it was just journalism in disguise, pretending to be more neutral, but it's really business as usual.
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> In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Perhaps there's so much lying being spread on modern social media that one organization would be end up drowning in work: > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
@grok is this true?
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I keep seeing this post on HN. Does this trigger some grok workflow only for the user or is it a joke?
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It's a joke. @ doesn't do anything on HN.
The first would be being honest enough to say that many statements are not hard and fast facts, but opinions. If we say ice is frozen water, then that is a solid fact (leaving aside dry ice etc). But if we say such-and-such is a good/bad leader that is often mostly based on one's opinion of what good/bad leadership entails. In many cases, one person's good leader is another's bad leader.
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While technically true, you have censored and suppressed the truth. Almost all ice has mineral impurities in it, and is therefore a mineral. Therefore water is actually lava (molten ice) and should be referred to as such. Your depiction of ice being merely "frozen water" as a fact, and not emphasizing it's equality with lava is classist and clearly agenda driven. /s
The most ironic thing to me is the amount of coddling these self-purported “strong men” need. The idea that someone wouldn’t blindly accept what they say is enough to throw their egos into self-protection mode. Sad
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What ever happened to the marketplace of ideas? When you have to rely on indoctrination and censorship your beliefs lack merit.
> taking the knee Taking the knee to say what though? 1. Before: People warning about a problem of corrupt police forces of power-tripping fools and bullies that routinely get away with murder. 2. After: A corrupt police state has metastasized onto the national state age, with its own fools and bullies, including illegally imprisoning and murdering people. I wouldn't label that a "pendulum swing" between opposite situations.
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Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure. Remember the soccer matches in places like the UK, where some continental teams or players were booed for not doing so? Political theatre by people who wouldn't be able to tell you who was the Prime Minister, how much does milk cost etc. Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
This did not happen fast though, but over decades. On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many. Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, because instead of fixing the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work") people are fixated on that right wing party itself. When I did some skydiving in my youth I was fascinated by watching sooo many skydivers barely avoiding the lone single tree near the landing zone. Turns out, if you concentrate on something ("I must avoid that tree I must avoid that tree...") you end up steering towards it. The winning move is to instead concentrate on where you do want to go. There are precious little positive ideas in our politics, it's mostly about what we don't want, or distractions on things that while it sounds nice and it's definitely okay when it gets done should never be the main focus.
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The reality is that Northern Europe is the safest, most free and wealthiest part of this godforsaken planet. People don't know how good they have it. It is understandable that Germans voted for the Nazis in 1933. In 2025 they have no excuse. When Germans get grand ideas inside their heads everything always goes bad.
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The economic difference between rural former GDR and, say, Denmark, is pretty huge, and AfD mostly dominates in the former GDR regions, where local industries collapsed almost overnight and all talents got picked off by West German employers. I traveled around most of Europe with a backpack. Former GDR is a dying country, and no amount of subsidies into fixing roads will help it. You cross the border to Poland, nominally you entered a poorer country, but everything is so much more lively there. Poles are so much more optimistic about their future than Germans in general, and East Germans extra. This psychological difference cannot be appreciated if you only look at GDP per capita tables.
People are tribal, and the clash of values between Islam and postmodern secular Europeans is very real.
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again, that clash is not the cause for the problems we are facing.
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Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo weren't killed by capitalism or global climate change. Personally, I consider the chilling effect of such events on freedom of speech and art quite a huge problem. This freedom was crucial to European prosperity.
I think you underestimate the complexity of the right. It is not just secular nationalists all the way down. First, there are still religious people there, and this very wing is splintered among several groups at least. Famously, many Catholics including JDVance were in a value conflict with their own late Pope Francis. The actual religiously educated people tend to be very good at writing, because the schools that they graduated from are good at teaching persuasion. Second, there are libertarians, not very numerous but somewhat influential, especially in tech circles. Then, there still are some trigger-happy neocons, nowadays marginalized, but they may yet come to the fore in case of a bigger war that directly involves the US. Then, there are reactionary types like Curtis Yarvin, who dismiss any nationalist ideas as blind alley of "demotism". Even the practical question of "how many people from which country should get a visa yearly and under what conditions" will hit enormous ideological differences in the right-wing tent.
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To me, religious people, simple racist and libertarians all suffer from a identity-based cognitive bias. "Our groups or my well being is the ideal to project onto the nation/world." (Neocons dont fit in here, i have to admit. Maybe its abuse of power pleasing the monkey brain, but resulting wealth certainly too.) I think self-withdrawal is more frequent in left leaning individuals for this exact, more unbiased/intelligent/educated reason. But you are correct again. There is a lot of complexity on the right, if you look deep enough. But this depth does not cause as much infighting compared to the left.
>I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement. That's a different and much more difficult problem, though. Why do we keep electing fascists to power with an explicit mandate to undermine our freedoms, out of a categorical rejection of post Enlightenment values and democracy and a desire for ethnic cleansing and race war? Why are we accelerating the normalization of theocracy and conspiracy theory while rejecting the validity of science, secularism and critical thought? Why is the only truly inalienable right in the US the right to keep and bear arms, and why is it still so vigorously defended despite failing spectacularly at its one stated purpose? There will always exist people who want to change that status quo. Unfortunately you can't force fascists to not be fascists, and the best answer I'm aware of is to not allow them to gain a foothold anywhere. But we've regressed culturally so far that fascism, racism, antisemitism and other formerly extremist right-wing ideals are now considered legitimate and credible points of view. We can't even agree on the existence of a consensus reality where facts even exist, much less that the Nazis are actually wrong. I do think part of the solution is to preserve the right of anonymity on the internet and the right of private platforms to moderate content as they see fit, although that obviously has its own externalities and issues. I don't think that, say, repealing Section 230 and forcing all platforms to allow any legal content or requiring a license and legal ID to post online or any of the other "solutions" to the "problem" of free speech online would help more than they would harm. Beyond that, I don't know. How do we get people to stop electing fascists and stop treating groypers and incels like intellectual sophonts and cultural leaders? How do we get people to take things seriously again?
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[delayed]
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