501–510 of 936 posts
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No chance I'd go to America, as they definitely check that sort of thing at the border now. Not sure how often that happens coming to the UK, yet.
It happens to citizens of the UK everyday, so I'm not really into finding out how tourists are treated.
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This is an entirely delusional twitter-brain take. Despite its problems, the UK is still a sixth largest economy, a cultural powerhouse (how many Hollywood actors are British?), with a lot of soft power, a capable and currently renewed nuclear arsenal (Astraea and Dreadnought are on track), a globe-spanning network of alliances (from AUKUS to Japan deploying to the UK first time in their history to being one of the c…
The UK used to be the 4th largest economy [0] so being 6th is still indicative of decline. [0] https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...
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Not so slowly. They've gone from a more or less respectable smaller country to more or less politically, culturally, and economically irrelevant in less than 10 years. I even question whether it's rational to allow them to have nukes; they should probably be required to give them up to some country that has a shot at remaining a stable and predictable geopolitical entity over the next century.
It's irrational to allow anyone other than yourself to have nukes. That's the whole point of having them, and the reason why nobody is going to bother asking for permission. No country with any self respect wants to end up becoming another Venezuela.
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You'd be amazed at the times I've argued with people on HN that free speech infringement by the UK government has grown rampant, only for them to enact the next draconian law a month later.
UK is trying to be like Russia and China, where a minder will show up at your door if you post something the government doesn't like. Then people online will defend it because the investigation didn't turn into a full criminal charge or they say the people simply deserved it. The reality is this will seriously chill speech broadly across the country regardless of either of those outcomes, and the technical costs of e…
The UK government has been openly doing this for a couple of years by now.
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Zero difference. If someone is selling children's toys, and 30% of her customers are in the US, and then it turns out her toys are made entirely of lead and asbestos, should she not face US criminal penalties? You choose to do business in a jurisdiction, you bind yourself to their laws. That means all laws, not just ones you like, or think that are relevant to your business. Laws are not a buffet. Don't do business i…
I agree with you, but you keep missing that: 1. This isn't about business but charges. There's no way in hell US can e.g. prosecute non us citizens from trading with Cuba e.g. the embargo applies to US individuals and companies. The rest of the world, e.g. European countries, have normal relations with Cuba and nobody gives two damns about the embargo. 2. The same thing happens in reverse and applies to US companies…
Anyone who sells to my enemies is my enemy. You yourself can be subject to embargoes.
Francesca Albanese cannot do banking with banks from her own country because the US said so. Read: third parties that have relations with the US are barred from doing business with you or else risk being blacklisted too.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-28/the-comp...
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It's not "knocking the US", it's an example of the (likely, projected) decline. The size of the economy is an example of why "irrelevant" is delusional. Two different points. The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives in London, despite constantly starring in Hollywood films. It's an example of the UK culturally punching way above its weight in proportion to its population.
> it's an example of the (likely, projected) decline Again, you just used the present size of a nation's economy to argue that a nation isn't in decline when someone was talking about the ongoing decline of a nations politics, economy, and culture. It seems odd to me you're able to, for other countries, understand that the present moment can be viewed with both historical and likely future context. >The "prominent UK…
I feel like we're reading different posts.
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Given how the situations w.r.t Ukraine & Iran escalated, the US is the only country that has specifically and publicly demonstrated it's inability on both counts. We can't give Ukraine their nukes back because they were decommissioned (and they were rotting at the time), but there'd be no nation more deserving. Corollary: no individual nation is able to shoulder such responsibilities.
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Surrendered.
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Oddly that's Zuck doing that. And weirdly, the law would only apply to app stores. I think that's a separate movement from what the UK is doing though. That US law is designed to hamstring Meta's competition not restrict political speech but it can be abused the same way I think.
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I mean the US have nukes and they’re hardly stable and predictable. Allow them to have nukes, who are you lol
Given that the nukes that the UK has is Trident, which is a US system that the UK cannot use without US cooperation [0], it seems entirely appropriate that the USA gets to decide if the UK has nukes. [0] Yes, the UK can fire them without US approval, but the actual hardware is maintained and supported by the USA, and they have to be shipped to the USA regularly for maintenance. If the USA decided that the UK should n…
So yes, if the US withdrew support then the existing nuclear program would be pretty fucked for a while, but the US couldn't unilaterally de-nuclearise the UK.
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But if a Brit comes to your country and buys cocaine from you, in person, you wouldn't expect to be convicted as a dealer in the UK. Ofcom has a bad handle on web requests . Clients connect out. 4chan et al aren't pushing their services in anyone in the UK.
It is easier than that: in Germany for example swastikas are forbidden. But they don't prosecute or fine web pages served in other countries. Or books for that matter. In some countries communist symbology is prohibited, yet they don't fine US web pages for having them. And don't forget the Great Firewall: China blocks pages, and get along with some webs to tune what they serve. But you can publish Tiananmen massacre…
It's kinda voluntary, though, there's no international agreement about this.