Earlier quoted context omitted.
Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depe…
The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.
The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
481–490 of 520 posts
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry for you, but your country's democratic process is probably broken. In my country covid measures were always just the bare minimum to keep things running and lifted/alliveated as soon as possible.
You’re the exception. Out of curiosity, what country is that ?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Switzerla...
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#483I wish they would address real problems like arbitrary enforcement of TOS that damages users with no recourse. There’s no regulation for what happens when Google or Facebook or whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides no support. Child abuse is serious, but not that common and this law will do little to change that. The lack of a UCC-style law for big tech platforms affects way more people. This seems like…
> There’s no regulation for what happens when Google or Facebook or whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides no support. Yes there is, per the trade regulations you're entitled to a refund . Wait I'm only partly sarcastic. If you think you're entitled to anything provided as a free service then the problem starts there. Do I miss the days when ISPs provided email as part of your subscription? Then made you…
I'm gonna argue that government shouldn't force anyone to provide services for free, but they should mandate that if you provide a service, you also take responsibility for the customer's property in context of that service, whether that service is free or not.
If I take my car to be serviced and they accept it, they can't just tow it to a junkyard and tell me to bugger off when I come back for it. Why can Google effectively put my private correspondence through the shredder and tell me to bugger off?
Likewise, offering to hold your grocery bag for a minute for free while you go to the restroom doesn't entitle me to destroy everything in the bag and throw it away.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m surprised you’re happy about the pass. the only thing the pass does is insure the minority of people who didn’t want the vaccine are forced to be vaccinated. I suppose you didn’t have to be forced, so why do you care ?
so why do you care ? Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries. E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1] [1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab).
1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people
2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if peo…
My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my wishes or wellbeing. Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a…
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe those people absolutely understand the implications for free society. What if there was a power transfer on the background, over many years, unnoticed, and the winning group now doesn't want any disruptions coming from encrypted communication in the future?
It’s truly amazing how many people are conspiracy theorists these days.
For example, the push for deregulation that befenits corporates does not require a conspiring sect of CEOs to secretly infect the law making process, but the general thought frame that is pervasive among the boards of those companies will affect their actions and what think tanks they affiliate with. All the separate lobbies, think tanks (which by the way might be just operating under such disguise, but are funded by external state actors), external corporate consultancy agencies on which governments rely on -- all those might create a current that brings down democratic institutions with no one deliberately doing that, except for a few fascistoid nuts perhaps.
What is no surprise is that all those corporates and those deep state instutions work to further their own interest. The issue is that democracy has lost control of it, and now they are running wild.
Add in corporate media (that are from the same school of thought like those boards of giant corporates) in this mix and you have got a really nasty dynamic, where democracy is just something you need to manage with Public Relations and marketing.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#487Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But we all know Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN is littered with comments about how we need more regulation and laws to solve X or Y or Z. Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier- including before I had signed up for an account- when HN was much more libertarian,…
> Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. The alternative to giving a democratic government power isn't 'nobody has power'. The alternative to giving a democratic government power is ceding it to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs. When a democratic government has it, you get some say in how it is used.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%. Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.
With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes). If I were being uncharitable…
My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed.
A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all.
Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
The gov isnt worried about criminals or terrorists: those guys are easy to deal with. The gov is worried about organised protests, like those canadian truckers, because protesters are protected by laws. Encrypted communications is an obvious enabler of such protests.
> like those canadian truckers, I thought the protestors turned out to, by the numbers, prove to be not Canadian and not Truckers. Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that example. There seem to be more relevant protests in the US you only have to go back a short while. Meanwhile, it's difficult to assess if the US government has a great track record at dealing with terrorists. We're unsure of how many inciden…