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Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

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Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#391

Post by s1artibartfast »

usernew wrote: post #231
s1artibartfast wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reason for the oppression is, a large portion of every country actually wants to be oppressed. Nobody wants to be oppressed. A large portion of the population often wants to be oppressors themselves. They are addicted to controlling others. This might be raising tax on X group, or criminalizing Y minority. Many people don't like voluntary association and choice. They want compelled behavior that conforms to thei…

are you familiar with the lower middle-class rednecks who form the republican party, and elect people who at every turn scam them, screw them, and try to take away their medical benefits and social security? yes, they do want to be oppressed - but by their own people. not by your people. my wife is a chinese xpat who got her master's here and stayed. when we go to visit her old parents who have a picture of mao on th…

I think you are making the grave mistake of confusing cause and effect. Confusing a price willingly paid for motivation.

>yes, they do want to be oppressed - but by their own people. not by your people.

This is a half truth. Nobody wants to be oppressed, but they will choose the boot they think is lighter on them or heavier on others.

You may have been around a lot of different people, but I don't think you actually listened if this is the conclusion you are drawing. You can take that as a comment from someone who identifies more as a "middle class redneck" and then the equivalent alternative.

Nobody is clamoring to have their medical and retirement benefits taken away, but they have been sold on the idea that the alternative is to pay for both their own and that of other people. They are picking the less oppressive option as they understand them.

You can ask your in-laws what they think the alternative to Mao was. You can ask the Russians what they think the alternative to Putin is. Both will provide you an alternative that they think would be worse.

People will accept some oppression if they think it is the Lesser of two options. They don't actively seek it out

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#392

Post by Dopameaner »

windex wrote: post #83
anaganisk wrote: post #21

Contrary to popular belief, at least in my country (India). I feel bad for the citizens of Pakistan. There has not been a single stint of govt that has lasted peacefully since independence. A country can never grow without a peaceful transfer of power, and constant political imbalance will just not allow anything to advance. A shared history/culture with us and it's a shame our govts have differences. We fought toget…

Unfortunately, India today is not exactly a beacon of righteousness. The current government in India is taking the country on exactly the same path as Pakistan except that India has an oligarchy which is being setup by people in government which would make it more like Russia. I'll give the country 10 years to implode if it doesn't course correct to become more inclusive, social justice oriented, and less violent.

Thank god you havent been following the shootings of the US. Or else, the 10 year future prediction would be for the US as well?

Doing arm chair analysis on macro economics is quite hilariously ignorant. If you're so sure, why dont you short the indian markets with your life savings.

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#393

Post by JumpCrisscross »

yipbub wrote: post #273
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gujurat riots ethnic cleansing…Demonetization…only appears in staged interviews singing his praises or speeches None of this is corruption. Authoritarianism. Populism, perhaps. But not fraudulent, not bribery, and not corruption.

> None of this is corruption Even if that were true(which it's not), that's not a good defense of Modi. "Corruption is a form of dishonesty or a criminal offense which is undertaken by a person or an organization which is entrusted in a position of authority, in order to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one's personal gain."

> that's not a good defense of Modi

It’s not meant to be.

> in order to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one's personal gain

You’re quoting Wikipedia [1]; see the “definition and scales” section. Personal gain in this context is contrasted with political gain. Using state power to openly reward boosters is not corruption, though it might be an abuse of power. Using state power to illegally use violence as a political tactic, similarly, is not corruption. It’s authoritarianism, possibly fascism.

It’s important for the word to have meaning, particularly in India, where overexpanding corruption to mean anything one doesn’t like could be particularly corrosive.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#394

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rockyj wrote: post #301
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modi is corrupt Source? Part of his allure and political inertia comes from being squeaky clean as far as bribes go.

- Adani - BCCI (cricket) leadership - PM Cares Fund Just off the top of my head. I will leave you to reach your own conclusions after research.

He’s surrounded by corruption. There is no evidence he is corrupt. There is a difference there in terms of to whom the personal gains accrue. He seems to play India’s corrupt oligarchs for political, not personal, gain. That’s hugely problematic. But it does not make him corrupt per se.

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#395

Post by hutzlibu »

lynx23 wrote: post #387
phtrivier wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emergencies and wars are bad for démocraties. The question is how fast and bad you come out of them. Societies stood, jails are not flooded with opponents, I get the weekly interview of an antivax/covidsceptic/whatever on the radio because they're on the "right" political team, the governments are paying the political prices of their handling in the ballot boxes. This is not perfect and never was meant to. Sorry if y…

Thanks for this compassionate reply. Its about time that we start understanding eachother even if we are in disagreement. It is subtle, but it really makes a difference. Let me just reply to your last point: In fact, I am psat that, because this was exactly what happened to me. We had a coalition between center-right and the green party. Even the socialists turned up and everyone seemed to unite into a coalition to d…

"but the lesson I got, sadly, was that you really can not trust anyone to not corrupt and try to control you. "

Even if this would be absolutely true, it would not undermine democracy. It just would proof the need to have build in mechanisms to keep the people in power in check. Exactly because you cannot trust people 100%. And mechanisms like this exist and are in place, but I agree, they should be improved.

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#396

Post by ethbr0 »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #376
johntiger1 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? Hitler/Stalin/Mao also had 'good reasons' that they claimed for for doing the things they do. End of the day, the military is clinging to power

No, I’d say you’re completely wrong on that part. Hitler/ Stalin/ Mao is a very bad example of institutions clinging to power through pure force. Each of those examples, had grand visions of what was right and why they were justified to completely take over the government. I would even venture that in each of those cases there was broad popular support at the start which led to the complete overthrow of the governmen…

Slobodan Milošević in Yugoslavia

As near as I can tell, he started from "Take over the government" and surfed his way there by reading (and stoking populist energy)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xscsu_QGbLg

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#397

Post by MichaelZuo »

mlyle wrote: post #380
MichaelZuo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial to force all the registered satellite broadcasters servicing a country off-air, if your already willing to arrest the former prime minister in public view, so anyone left with a hot dish would be easily identifiable.

So, you turn off all the state TV coming by satellite... so that you hope that all the satellite receivers get unplugged from the wall (else, they're likely to be listening to reacquire and get program guide etc)... so that you can drive around in vans and look for the -remaining- satellite receivers as a conduit of information coming in. I mean, I guess it's possible. But probably not your top priority during a time…

Any non zero amount of incoming radio signal to a hot dish would be suspicious, and easily identifiable, if all the registered broadcasters are offline.

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#398

Post by nojonestownpls »

braindead_in wrote: post #210
screye wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But not the way you might think. Let me be clear. I am not a Bhakt, don't particularly love Modi and have complained quite often about bad policies during his regime. My goal is to help people build a representative view of India, not one that fawns over Modi. The BJP absolutely pushes for Hindutva, but 'Hindutva' is an umbrella term that can mean anything from 'places greater importance on cultural traditions t…

> I am not a Bhakt, I am a Bhakt. I became one after I voted for the first time in 2019. I had to choose between Congress and BJP at that time and I decided to go with Congress because I hated Modi for the 2002 riots. Afterwards, I had a nagging feeling that I had been conned. I am a 90s kid and am staunchly anti-Congress. I have seen first hand how they have ripped off millions in scams and destroyed India. It's alm…

> He's going to be the Deng Xioaping of India.

This is my one hope for India. I disagree with pretty much everything else you've said, but I'm not as worried for India's future as I was previously; because I've come to realize that economic development is probably the best way to actually accomplish social justice - there's a strong correlation between countries becoming poor and them becoming more authoritarian and less fair.

So, even if he squishes press under his thumb, even if Muslims feel 10 times less safe, even if the autonomy of states is being eradicated to centralize all the power in their hands... I hope all of this at least results in significant economic improvement, and makes things work out in the end.

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#399

Post by int_19h »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #310
int_19h wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't. The entirety of English Wikipedia (sans history) compressed with zstd is currently ~93 Gb from https://www.kiwix.org/ . If you exclude the images, it's ~13 Gb. It's a much better bang for the buck than any LLM storage-wise, and that's before we even consider the hardware requirements to actually run an LLM vs an offline wiki reader.

Storage is effectively free. I can fit the entire Vicuna LLM on a $5 (US retail) SD card right now, and in a decade that’ll be less than $.50. LLMs will also presumably get more efficient at storing fact data outside of the network parameters. People can download Wikipedia pages but weirdly they don’t . They prefer the interactive web to big downloads of static encyclopedia data, even though the latter is better and…

People in regions where Internet access is a problem to begin with do not download Wikipedia because they don't have the ability to do so. That's why Kiwix has side projects such as a Raspberry Pi based content server that can be set up in e.g. a school and used to serve content to all students using whatever cheap phones they might have, or a reader that runs on WinXP. And, yes, that stuff is actually deployed in various places in Africa.

Now imagine the hardware that you'll need to run that high-quality future LLM. How many Kiwix hotspots could you set up for the same money?

Mind you, I'm not saying that there aren't compelling use cases for LLMs. It's just that it's a thing that's nice to have after you have Wikipedia etc. Indeed, ideally you'd want to have Wikipedia indexed so that the LLM can query it as needed to construct its responses - otherwise you're going to have a lot of fun trying to figure out which parts are hallucinations and which aren't.

Re: Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

#400

Post by nojonestownpls »

lannisterstark wrote: post #60

I love when authoritarian nations just block internet. India did it in Kashmir for a fuckton of time, and it was practically unusable for a longer period (2G speeds). they also do it at even little bit of protests. How dare the citizens protest their own governments, no, no internet for you! ---- The world will be a better place without these govts.

> I love when authoritarian nations just block internet.

Much better to just have control over the popular platforms, have a revolving door between them and the government intelligence agencies, and do your communication control that way.

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