Exposure time is less important than exposure type. Phones and tablets encourage mindless consumption and discourage creativity and interaction by the limiting apps and input methods.
<old man> I spent every available minute on a desktop from age 7 to 17 but that time was split between games that require 100% of your attention, and message boards where you need to backread a thread for context. </old man>
Activities that require full attention and active participation make you feel better than scrolling for an hour, whether it's an challenging game, a longform discussion, or reading a book.
And yet this is still the dominant workstation and home desktop OS. Between bricking machines and handing encryption keys over to government agencies Microsoft continues to erode its own reputation.
It could be a different story if OEMs would finally start selling properly supported laptops with GNU/Linux pre-installed on computer stores, those that normies visit, not the online ones HN members know where to find, or build themselves from PC parts.
And on the Apple side it isn't going much better, given that new devices come with Tahoe.
It is an overall failure of the system, and wrong incentives for computer companies.
Oh my god, actual dimensions on a drawing, part numbers, AND service instructions!?! I work on industrial equipment with 1/10th the documentation presented here.
No wonder our grandparents generation were good with mechanical things. If they were looking at materials like that all the time - I feel like you'd build an intuitive sense of how common household devices work pretty easily if it were so clear and accessible.
Literature on doing things was much more practical. There was a culture of things being repairable. There was a pride in one’s work. Check this out if you don’t believe me: http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/1617/30720.pdf
The rise of the publicly traded corporation run by fiduciary duty has, in my opinion, squeezed out repairability, pride, and workmanship for marginal financial gains.
I fear it won’t have been worth it in the long run. Shame short term incentives run the show.
Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes. I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone. Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.
The reason our grandparents generation was good at fixing things is because they had to be. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and worked difficult manual labor jobs. Contrary to the Reddit memes about how past generations lived like kings on trivial jobs, they worked extremely hard for everything and made it last.
It’s really easy to get service manuals and do basic maintenance on simple things like faucets these days. I think the only reason it’s becoming common for people to not know how to do basic repairs or even find basic service information is that many people grew up never having to think about it. I still have adult friends who went from living with their parents to dorms to rented apartments who never learned the first thing about maintaining or fixing things around the house because they’ve never had to and they don’t want to - and they can keep going that way without really losing anything. It’s a choice at this point, but it works for them.
> Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes.
You mean minutes to find the right bootleg manual site with PDF for an adjacent product category, then some more minutes to realize you cannot safely (if at all) get at the manual, some more minutes to find a different bootleg PDF site, realize that it's actually not close enough to the model you have, and 1h later, finally find the good enough PDF... only to realize that "service manuals" today are often useless, and decide to repeat this process on YouTube?
> I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone.
Overnight is often too long. Also good luck finding the right parts and reconciling conflicting IDs between manuals, manufacturers and vendors.
> Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.
Except when 90% of the faucets are uncommon, and support for them gets effectively discontinued after a few years.
Now contrast that with our grandparents, who usually had repair manuals included with the product, most parts were universal (and probably on-hand or extractable from something else at home), and you could actually go to a local hardware store where the clerk would be able to figure out what parts you needed on the spot, and with luck had them in stock.
I'm not claiming our grandparents had it better in general, but let's also not pretend there are no downsides to ongoing specialization and market competition. We may have more stuff, prettier stuff, better stuff[0], but nothing is ever compatible with anything, it's that way on purpose, and people are no longer supposed to repair anything themselves.
I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.
My generation learned how to plug computer components together and install operating systems and drivers.
The reason people did that is because they (more or less) had to.
The generation being born today will need neither of those skill sets.
Cars, by and large, stay working for as long as people care to keep them and the things that do go wrong are, mostly, uneconomical to fix at home.
It's likewise rare for, dunno, uninstalling a video game to accidentally delete some crucial OS dependency that causes the thing to need to be reformatted.
It's hard to say what skills the next generation will learn, but I can guarantee there will be something that they need that their children will not. And that they'll complain about their children being useless for not knowing whatever that is.
No, we just outsourced car maintenance to professional shop services. Both because mechanical aspects have become reliable enough to last a year without maintenance and because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated.
> because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated
And because it's software, it happens to be a perfect way for the manufacturer to extract rent (er, "recurring revenue") from car repair business. It's not complexity that's shaping how end-user repair experience looks like, but the fact that you often need proprietary connector, proprietary software, and a valid license key to interface with the car's computer.
And because plenty of engineering goes into designing subsystems with the explicit but unstated purpose of making them close to impossible to repair without ultimately resorting to help from the manufacturer.
Software is just the latest layer on the cake. Non-repairable designs, special tools, unavailable parts, unavailable instructions, fragile and error prone procedures, encryption, and more. They're all occasionally used to with the main purpose of blocking any attempt to easily repair without generating revenue for the manufacturer and their network.
Source: I have family working for two large car manufacturers both in engineering and management, who have personally experienced explicit demands to make things hard to repair by the owner but make them in a way where a reasonable explanation can be used for plausible deniability.
Is this a US thing? We renovated the apartment in Germany in the last year and every faucet and piece of equipment that we got has a manual including a table with list of parts and technical drawings and how to take it apart. We also got from the original owner all the manuals of the existing things, and this helped a lot in finding the proper part to replace and fix the bathtub drain. None of this is old stuff, the building is 15 years old.
I work at a plant with a site wide SCADA/HMI (Siemens WinCC) system, every alarm is displayed on every HMI regardless of its proximity to the machine or even its ability to address the issue. And any given minute a hundred or more alarms can be generated, the majority being nuisance messages like "air pressure almost low" or my favorite " " (no message set) but scattered among those is the occasional "no cooling water - explosion risk".
This plant is operated and deigned to the spec of an international corp with more than 20 factories, it's not a mom-and-pop operation. No one seems to think the excessive, useless, alarms are an issue and that any damage caused by missed warnings is the fault of the operator. When approaching management and engineering about this the responses range from "it's not in the budget" to " you're maintenance, fix all the problems and the alarms will go away".
The only way for this kind of issue to be resolved is with regulation and safety standards. An operator can't safely operate equipment when alarms are not filtered or sorted in some way. It's like forcing your IT guy to watch web server access logs live to spot vulnerabilities being exploited.
This is a fundamental organizational and societal problem. An engineer would look at the situation and think "what is the best way to get the failure rate below a tolerable limit?" But a lawyer looks at the situation and thinks "how do I minimize liability and bad PR?" and a bureaucrat thinks "how can I be sure the blame doesn't land on me when something goes wrong?" And the answer to both of those questions is to throw an alarm on absolutely everything. So if there is a problem they can always say "our system detected the anomaly in advance and threw an alarm." Overall the system will be less safe and more expensive, but the lawyer's and bureaucrat's problems are solved. Our society is run by lawyers and bureaucrats, so their approach will win out over the engineer's. (And China's society is run by engineers, so it will win out over ours.)
Up to a certain point society is run by actuaries. Finding someone at your insurance company who both understands the problem with excess errors and appreciates how easily enumerable they are would be an interesting "whistleblowing" target.
But the actuaries too are constrained by the same societal constructs. Let's say you work for a large car company and invent a self driving system that is 10x safer than the average human driver, and the cost is minimal. This system would likely save 36,000 lives annually in the US. The actuary will calculate that with human drivers, the accident liability for your car company is $0, but then with the self driving system, the liability is potentially in the billions, and it doesn't make sense to include this system in your vehicles. You can argue that since the error rate is 10x safer than the average human driver, that clearly this is an acceptable safety level. But your argument will fall on deaf ears because there is no such legal concept of an acceptable level of death. You could also say, well then the company can buy insurance. The cost will be minimal since there will only be 10% the rate of accidents as a normal car. The societal calculation for liability in a death is based mainly on:
1. How much money does the responsible party have
2. How much media attention and outrage does it generate
And since now instead of a single human driver, the liability will rest on a massive corporation, and the media attention will be massive vs nonexistent for a normal human crash, the liability will be massive. The accident rate may be 10x less, but the cost per death may be 1000x of a normal human driver crash.
Courts do accept alarm fatigue and if there is an injury/death and there were many alarms you can bet that whatever lawyers' side benefits will bring in experts to explain the issue.
if there are a lot of issues the lawyers will also ask why they were not corrected first: using that to establish a pattern of bad maintenance.
> This is a fundamental organizational and societal problem
Absolutely, and we'd collectively be better served if we had tools to deal with it.
I think of it as "incentive ecology" -- as noted, everybody has their own incentives which shapes their behavior, which causes downstream issues that begin the process anew.
Obviously there's no simple one-shot solution to this, but what if we had ways to simplify and model this "web of responsibility" (some sort of game theory exposed as an easily consumed presentation, with computed outcomes that show the cost/ROI/risk/reward) that could be shared by all stakeholders?
Obscurity and deniability are the weapons wielded in most of these scenarios, so what if we could render them obsolete?
Sure, those in power would not want to yield their advantages, but the overall outcomes should reward everybody by minimizing risks and maximizing rewards for the enterprise and everybody wins.
Yes, I'm looking at it as a an engineer and a dreamer, but I think if such a tool existed that was open source and easily accessible that this work could be done by rogue participants that could put it out there so it's undeniable.
Is it though? Engineer can optimize on different manifold. Company can succeed/fail for different reasons. Getting destroyed for legal suit because didn’t place alarm is small peace when you did better engineering.
After all, read any post-mortem comments on HN. Many of those people can be hired as expert if you like. They will say “I would have put an alert on it and had testing”. You will lose the case.
“Oh but we are trying to keep error rate low”. Yes, but now your company is dead when high error rate company is alive.
In revealed preferences, most engineers prefer vendors who have CYA. This is obvious from online comments. This is not because they are engineer. It’s because most people want to believe that event is freak accident.
Building system for error budget is not actually easy. Even for engineer who say they want it. Because when error happens, they immediately say it should not have happened. Counterfactual other errors blocked, and business existing are not considered. Every engineer is genius in hindsight. Every person is genius in hindsight.
Why these genius never make failure proof company? They do not. Who would not pay same price for 100% reliable tech?
> Getting destroyed for legal suit because didn’t place alarm is small peace when you did better engineering.
Indeed it is. That's why I said it's a larger societal problem in how we manage risk and react to failures.
> Why these genius never make failure proof company?
Because this is mostly a matter of unknown unknowns and predicting the future, so even a founder who makes zero mistakes is more likely than not to fail.
The first step in problem solving is to look in the mirror. It's not surprising that in an engineering community, the instinct is to blame outsiders - lawyers, bureaucrats, managers, finance, etc. - because those priorities are more likely to conflict with engineering, because it is harder to understand such different perspectives, and because it is easier to believe caricatures of people we don't know personally.
Those people have valuable input on issues the engineer may not understand and have little experience with. And engineers are just as likely to take the easy way out, like the caricature in the parent comment:
For example, for the manufacturer's engineering team it's much easier, faster and cheaper to slap an alarm on everything than to learn attention management and to think through and create an attention management system that is effective and reliable (and it had better be reliable - imagine if it omits the wrong alarms!). I think anyone with experience can imagine the decision to not delay the project and increase costs for that involved subproject - one that involves every component team, which is a priority for almost none of them, and which many engineers, such as the mechanical engineer working on the robotic arm, won't even understand the need for.
> And China's society is run by engineers, so it will win out over ours.
History has not been kind to engineers who do non-engineering, such as US President Herbert Hoover who built dams and but also had significant responsibility for the Great Depression. It's not that engineers can't acquire other skills and do well in those fields, but that other skills are needed - they aren't engineering. Those who accept as truth their natural egocentric bias and their professional community's bias toward engineering are unlikely to learn those skills.
Your own answer circles right back to the problem I'm talking about:
> and it had better be reliable - imagine if it omits the wrong alarms!
This is entirely based on the premise that an error due to omitting the wrong alarm is worse than an error based on including too many alarms. That right there is lawyerthink. Also, these priorities don't conflict as you say, they just take different sides of a tradeoff. Managers and finance people are balancing a tradeoff of delivery speed, cost, and quality to maximize business value. And the bureaucrats and lawyers are choosing more expensive and less reliable systems because they better manage the emotions of panicky anxious people looking for a scapegoat in a crisis. This has a cost.
Besides having bad luck in timing to be president when the stock market crashed, and therefore scapegoated for it, Herbert Hoover was well regarded in everything he did before and after his term, including many non engineering related things. So I think he is a particularly poor example of this. Public blame for things like that tends to be exactly as rational as thinking a hangover has nothing to do with last night.
To your larger point I don't think engineering logic is necessarily superior to financial logic, or manager logic. The problem is that because of the way we have built our society, engineering (and all other fields) must comply with and be subservient to bureaucrat and lawyer logic. The legal defense against an engineering failure is not to prove that your overall failure rate is low and within acceptable limits, but rather to come up with as long a list as possible of safety measures and policies that you followed without any regard to whether they actually have any effect at all.
What you are saying is that lawyers sometimes respond to problems by just throwing meaningless solutions at it. Sure, but every other profession sometimes does the same; see the example in my prior-prior comment.
It's the person, not the profession. There are good, bad, incompetent, committed, etc. in every profession - heck, in every person, to varying degrees.
The criticality of the alerts should be classified, and presented with the alert. Users should have the ability to filter non-critical messages on certain platforms.
Unfortunately, some systems either don't track criticality, or some of the alerts are tagged with the wrong level.
(One example of the latter is the Ruckus WAP, which has a warning message tagged at the highest level of criticality, so about two or three times a month, I see the critical alert: "wmi_unified_mgmt_rx_event_handler-1864 : MGMT frame, ia_action 0x0 ia_catageory 0x3 status 0x0", which should be just an informational level alert, with nothing to be done about it. I've reported this bug to Ruckus a few times over the past five years, but they don't seem to care.)
THe more of them you have, the more likely it is that there's a warning if something happens. Whether the warning is ever noticed is secondary, what matters is the fact that there was a warning and the operator didn't react to it appropriately, which makes the situation the fault of the operator.
In the eyes of the regulators and courts individual low level employees can not take responsibility. This is the logic by which they fine the company when someone does something you shouldn't need to be told not to do on a step ladder or whatever.
What this means is that low level employees become liability sinks. Show them all the warnings and make them figure it out. Give them all sorts of conflicting rules and let them sort out which ones to follow. Etc, etc.
I think it's regulated in places, as it was certainly an HMI concern ever since Three Mile Island. Our customer is really grilling vendors for generating excessive alarms. Generally for a system to pass commissioning it has to be all green, and if it starts event bombing after you're going to be chewed.
I have never seen a piece of new equipment that ever gets to an All Green state, before, during or after commissioning. I frequently recommend that we do not allow the commissioning team to leave until they can get it to that state but it has yet to happen.
I wonder if you could calculate a "probability of response to major alert" and make it the inverse of the total or irrelevant alerts. Then you get to ask "our probability of major alert saliency is onlt 6%. Why have the providers set it at this level, and what can we do to raise it?"
The only way for this kind of issue to be resolved is with regulation and safety standards.
Are you sure that's not what caused the problem in the first place? Unqualified and/or captured regulators who come up with safety standards that are out of touch with how the system needs to work in the real world?
Do regulators come up with SCADA safety standards? I would have assumed it was IEC.
Regulators coming up with engineering standards is pretty rare in general. Usually they incorporate existing professional standards from organizations like SAE, IEEE, IEC, or ISO.
The Three Mile Island disaster had similar problems with notifications.
The problem at TMI was that the teletypewriter delivering the alerts wasn't fast enough to finish typing before new alerts came in. As time went on, the information it was emitting got further and further behind. Even if the operators wanted to make intelligent decisions, they were operating on hours old data that no longer applied.
And software engineers can't design cars that they don't drive. As evidenced by the millions of tons od e-waste rolling around on city streets these days.
they are still optional for the ISPs though. But if they don't implement them, they will have dozens of lawsuits to handle, that is why many ISPs say "fuck it" and just implement the blocks, to save money on their legal team
The frequently repeated keystone lie that Europeans have equivalent or greater rights, freedoms, and protection from authoritarianism than Americans, which is and has always been objectively and completely false.
Citation? Every democracy index I've ever heard of rates most of Europe as more democratic than the US. (Eastern Europe will typically be rated lower, all of the former USSR states seem to be struggling with various degrees of corruption or similar problems)
Well according to press freedom indices many European countries and the US are quite similarly ranked. Some countries better some countries worse.
Some countries have stronger institutions against dictatorships than others but unfortunately we have seen that even the US isn't immune and that slides auch as in Poland and Hungary are possible.
There is always hope that things can turn around (as in Poland even though the road is hard and there are setbacks)
As an european living and feeding of mostly US sources online, I completely agree. In the US people do really have freedom of speech. This doesn't exist in the EU. Just try to say 1/10th of what you can say in the US and you'll be thrown behind bars in the EU.
The biggest one being that most newspapers in the EU are state-controlled, Pravda-style, propagandist outlet pushing pro-EU narratives. Once you live across several EU countries and speak several languages, you can see how all the topics are synched and pushing the exact same narrative.
Basically: the EU is very good at producing people repeating that the EU is great.
To me the biggest problem is that the EU Commission is way too busy turning the EU into a totalitarian nightmare instead of trying to compete economically with the US and China. As a result in 17 years China's GDP went from $4 trillion to $20 trillion, surpassing the GDP of the eurozone (which only grew 25%: 25% vs 400%).
That's an abysmal failure and the EU is sinking and it shows anywhere you go to in the EU: cities are becoming shitholes at an alarming speed. And everything is done to try to damage control and prevent people from talking about what is ongoing.
The EU is heading straight into a wall (actually it already hit it).
Well, when fascists are in power, paper won't help anyone. But at this point, as a European I enjoy enumerated human and civil rights from multiple constitutions and several international treaties, which are directly enforceable by courts at the state, national, and European level.
The human and civil rights guaranteed by the US constitution are a complete joke in comparison, and most of them are not guaranteed directly constitution, but by Supreme Court interpretation of vague 18th century law that can change at any time.
You seem to have missed the Bill of Rights. Which is odd, because whenever we tell you during online arguments that our rights are guaranteed, you all say that absolute rights are dumb and it's actually more sophisticated and European to not have them.
Not that courts, legislators, and administrations haven't tried and succeeded in abridging them somewhat in any number of different ways for shorter or longer periods, but the text remains, and can always be referred to in the end. They have to abuse the language in order to abridge the Bill of Rights, and eventually that passes the point of absurdity.
No such challenge in Europe. Every "right" is the right to do something unless it is not allowed.
Is it draconian that piracy sites aren't resolved by some ISPs' DNS?
Is it draconian if no Government entity is involved? And the penalty is unavailability?
I thought draconian implies that the punishment is much too high in relationship to the crime.
Maybe the whole affair is more dystopian rather than draconian: ISPs block access to media even though no law or government asked them to just so they have less hassle with rightholders.
They are considering banning the largest opposition party, are using wiretaps and informants against it [1], have banned (ban since lifted) a magazine [2], and opened a criminal investigation into someone calling a fat politician fat online [3]. They are openly planning even worse [4] (if you dislike the author, keep in mind every claim is sourced, so take it up with the sources).
[4] Germany announces wide-ranging plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents, in order to better control the "thought and speech patterns" of its own people - https://www.eugyppius.com/p/germany-announces-wide-ranging-p...
Edit as reply to nosianu, because I am "posting too fast":
> Liar. Some demand it - but it is not considered by those with the power to actually do it, not even close.
On Monday, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is currently serving as the junior coalition partner in Berlin’s conservative-led government, voted unanimously to begin efforts to outlaw [AfD]. - https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/06/europe/germany-afd-ban-po...
> He also had connections to the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) parties.
Following the source wikipedia gives [1], we see the extent of that "connection" was that the killer donated €150 to the AfD, and that the AfD had previously criticized the victim (by sharing the victim's exact own words online).
Let's apply your standard evenly then, shall we? A writer for the state-funded left-wing Amadeu Antonio Foundation, armed with hammers and pepper spray, attacked a right-wing activist [2]. This attack was one of many [3]. So by your standard the German state sponsors and endorses terrorists. The US Democrat party wants to create an ICE tracker [4]. ICE agents have been the targets of attacks and ambushes [5,6,6a]. And of course it was hateful rhetoric [7] against Trump and Kirk that led to their (attempted) assassinations by the left. By your standard, the Democrat party engages in stochastic terrorism.
Of course that's just guilt by (vague) association. Enough for you, but I have higher standards. Bill Clinton pardoned a terrorist who (among other things) bombed the Senate. She now sits on the board of BLM [8,9]. An axe-wielding maniac attacked a Republican senator's home. Democrat politicians then donated money to the attacker [10]. The founder of the terrorist group Weather Underground [11], Bill Ayers, is now a distinguished professor at the state-funded University of Illinois [12], so we can add them to terrorists as well. As well as the University of California, where the terrorist Angela Davis is also a distinguished professor. "Terrorist" can be a vague term, so let me be specific: she bought the shotgun seen here taped to the neck of Judge Harold Haley, and helped plan the attack that killed him [13].
"In an op-ed piece after the election, Ayers denied any close association with Obama, and criticized the Republican campaign for its use of guilt by association tactics." - perhaps you should reflect on this.
So now what? Will you reconsider calling AfD terrorists? Will you instead also call the US Democratic and the German CDU parties terrorists? Maybe even apply more skepticism to the news sources that have so deceived you by cherry-picking what they show you?
Or will you reconsider nothing, and just hope the next person you lie to is less informed? Rhetorical question.
[7] That some of this rhetoric was true makes no difference - the charge of "stochastic terrorism" had no exceptions for truth when used against the right. And indeed the AfD's statements about the victim in the case you linked are not even alleged to be untrue.
[11] At one point, the Weathermen adopted the belief that all white babies were "tainted with the original sin of "skin privilege", declaring "all white babies are pigs" with one Weatherwoman telling feminist poet Robin Morgan "You have no right to that pig male baby" after she saw Morgan breastfeeding her son and told Morgan to put the baby in the garbage. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
These statements are meaningless without considering who is being targeted by these rules. For context, Germany has a long-standing constitutional ban on Nazis. This isn't anything new; what is new is that one party (the AfD) is trying to find ways around the ban.
If you're arguing that the AfD aren't Nazis, I'm not sure I agree. They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
If you are arguing that banning a political party[0] is inherently wrong... sure. I'll agree with you, with one caveat. How do you meaningfully stop people from doing that? Just saying "Well, that would be illegal, so just disobey the illegal order" is not good enough. That's what you do for otherwise normal politicians that fuck up drafting the law[1]. But the people who are doing this shit are malicious. They need to be removed from power or they will just keep trying until they get their way. And that effectively means banning the political party trying to ban everyone else. Only a stand user can beat another stand user. Hence, the constitutional ban on Nazis.
[0] I should not have to explain to people that the Nazis banned other political parties.
[1] see also, the US 1st Amendment, which prohibits laws that restrict speech without specifying any meaningful punishment for politicians that attempt to restrict speech.
>They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
That's not specifically a Nazi policy.
In fact, remigration is an increasingly popular political idea in various Western countries that don't have any specific Nazi past (US, the UK, Australia, etc.)
(Remigration is also frequently done by non-Western countries as well.)
Citizenship has to be irreversible, or very close to it, for one simple reason: revoking citizenship is equivalent to stripping someone of their constitutionally-protected rights. Even if you have a well-defined and protected concept of free speech in the law, if the administration or government can just identify and deport people saying things they don't like, then their free speech is meaningless. Punishment and reprisal is an adequate substitute for silencing. You don't have freedoms anymore, you have franchise, a thing that can be taken away at the whim of the state[0].
Reversing a change to visa policy or not granting citizenship to migrants in the future is a different question. But it's far less problematic to not grant citizenship or visas than it is to revoke them after the fact.
As for "granting citizenship willy nilly", that wasn't done by "one side". The law is such that the choice of whether or not to admit an asylum seeker is a purely legalistic one with no political control afforded. The only thing Merkel (for better and for worse) did was smile and wave at the migrants you don't like. She had no power to stop them either. The reason why the law works this way is, again, because of WWII and Nazis. People fleeing Hitler were stopped by immigration policies at every turn. So we got every country to sign a bunch of international agreements that basically say "we will not attempt to stop people fleeing despotic regimes from entering our country".
Now, I get the feeling you want to shit on this policy, and I actually do think there's a valid critique of it. Specifically, only admitting immigrants during a time of crisis is almost guaranteed to generate resentment, both from the native-born and immigrant populations. You see, while Germany pledged to hand out passports like candy to asylum seekers, the rest of German immigration policy is rigidly inflexible and their society even more so[1].
The AfD getting banned under Germany's anti-Nazi policy is not at all unprecedented. Actually, they've had to use that same policy against the immigrants they're admitting. There's biker gangs run by Turkish immigrants that are illegal in Germany because they're too far-right. The case of Turkish immigrants to Germany is particularly illuminating. Turks in Germany have a higher rate of support for Erdogan than they do in Turkiye. Germany has managed to create a society that reliably turns poor immigrants into far-right stooges.
Do you want to know what country turns Turkish immigrants away from Islamist dictators? America.
Trump regime notwithstanding[2], the USA immigration system is unusually flexible and permissive for a rich country, and it has very generous family reunification visa programs. The family visas are, effectively, outsourcing the decision of what immigrants to admit to citizens that know the people they're sponsoring. It's an invite system. And since we've been doing this consistently for 50 years, we have immigrant communities from basically every country on the planet. So there's a very smooth gradient to integration. The "marginal cost" of an additional immigrant is basically zero. We imported the third world, but the third world became us.
> The bar for branding someone a Nazi is low, and ~80% or more of the allied forces that fought in WWII would be Nazis under today's definition:
This isn't related to the merits of the German constitutional ban on Nazis at all, but since I just spent a paragraph glazing modern American immigration policy, I feel obligated to completely dynamite America's moral foundations. I mean, even the family visas weren't intended to do what they're doing. Actually, they were created specifically to give white immigrants a fast lane through the system! The prior policy was basically "white immigrants only" and this was meant to appease people who opposed deracializing the immigration system.
To be frank, America's the country Hitler got all his worst ideas from. WWII happened right after the nadir of American race relations. The """liberal""" business establishment was planning assassinations and coups against the President. Hell, we were not that far off from joining the Axis. FDR had to bait Japan into attacking us to get the American people on board with fighting WWII. And even then he couldn't resist throwing shittons of Japanese immigrants into concentration camps in a blatant land grab.
There's a funny (in the "two nickels" sense) quirk of American history in that America will absolutely tolerate and engage in morally detestable bullshit until a war or other crisis makes it undeniably wrong. Lincoln ran on an abolitionist platform, but the actual moral opinion didn't change against slavery until Union soldiers were marching on plantations and actually seeing the horrors of slavery with their own eyes. Likewise, while we were nominally fighting an evil tyrant, that didn't hit home for a lot of soldiers until they were literally marching on Auschwitz and smelling dead bodies.
[0] The root word of "franchise" is "French", as in, the process of making one into a Frenchman. The linguistic association between France and temporary / revocable permission is because that's how freedom worked there at one point. Probably under a king named Louis.
[1] This is the same country where an announced rail detour becomes a passenger kidnapping because the driver couldn't be arsed to clear the extra stops up the chain.
[2] Part of the reason why the Trump regime is so polarizing in America is because European-style immigration enforcement is so alien to us.
>Citizenship has to be irreversible, or very close to it,
Australia at least states that expulsion is compatible with human rights.
"The Bill is compatible with human rights because, to the extent that it may limit some human rights, those limitations are reasonable, necessary and proportionate in achieving the legitimate objective of protecting the Australian community."
Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Repudiation) Bill 2023
Attachment A Statement of Compatibility with Human Rights
We're talking about the same Australia that decided to just blanket-ban kids off social media? Because they're basically a puppet of the Murdoch news empire?
Why should I trust anything they say about human rights?
> The law is such that the choice of whether or not to admit an asylum seeker is a purely legalistic one with no political control afforded.
Right, and laws are not the result of politics, but are handed to us by God on stone tablets.
Your framing is also misleading - admitting refugees [0], and granting them citizenship, are very different. Relaxing citizenship requirements to a mere 5 years of residing in Germany (or just 3 with German language proficiency) is also very much political, as was the admission of 3 million explicitly economic migrant Turks.
We're asked to believe immigration and immigration policy is something that just happens, like the tides, in response to economic and geopolitical events, and politics can do nothing about it. Meanwhile Iran has deported 1.3 million Afghans, and plans to deport 2 million more [2]. So they are "afforded political control". As is China, which, despite being a growing economy and with significantly below-replacement fertility, has a population of just 0.1% immigrants [3].
[0] I wouldn't even call them that, since they passed through many safe countries before even reaching the EU, let alone Germany.
> They are considering banning the largest opposition party
Liar. Some demand it - but it is not considered by those with the power to actually do it, not even close. The AfD happily participates in state and federal elections and is in the federal parliament (Bundestag).
Why are you against freedom of speech??
People saying what they want is allowed! No action of that kind was or is taken. AfD and its members continues to participate in normal political life and getting elected, and they continue to participate in TV and media interviews.
What exactly is your complaint? You complain about some people's speech - while claiming to be for freedom of speech! Very peculiar.
If I understand it right, then OP likely believes that Germany has a draconian regime when it comes to freedom of speech (which is objectively just ridiculous give or take some German nuances).
OP thus wants to make fun of those (such as me) who are puzzled by a statement that Germany could be considered a draconian state with regards to freedom of speech. It is hard to engage OP because he likely isn't German and has no personal knowledge and experience at all if any of his speech would be censored in Germany. Calling OP disinformed maybe isn't quite correct, maybe misinformed would fit better.
Windows is not a general purpose operating system. It's a platform for monetizing businesses via licensing and cloud services, and a platform for monetizing private users by way of advertising and data mining.
If they were ever to produce a Windows PowerUser edition, with absolutely no bloat, it would have to be priced like a CAD suite.
My problem with Microsoft is that they won't sell an un-enshittified version of Windows for any price (LTSC notwithstanding; it's not licensable for general use.) Owning our computing experience is that important to them.
"AI" is not a machine for improving the lives of people, it's a tool for consolidating power and wealth at the top. Declining welfare and access to basic human needs shows that decision makers are getting better at min/maxing the economy.
<old man> I spent every available minute on a desktop from age 7 to 17 but that time was split between games that require 100% of your attention, and message boards where you need to backread a thread for context. </old man>
Activities that require full attention and active participation make you feel better than scrolling for an hour, whether it's an challenging game, a longform discussion, or reading a book.
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