71–80 of 148 posts
Honestly a shame it has to come to this. Sure, people elected this administration and I guess with that comes with a bunch things I disagree with. But the removal of years of scientific research and data from the web (paid for by citizens with their taxes) is absolutely unacceptable. Ravaging CDC data, climate data, etc is horrendous and unforgivable.
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Theres something that about this that just rings second amendment. Personally I think the concept of civilians having weapons to be a check on a nation state is absurd, but in this case it feels pretty empowering.
Honestly a shame it has to come to this. Sure, people elected this administration and I guess with that comes with a bunch things I disagree with. But the removal of years of scientific research and data from the web (paid for by citizens with their taxes) is absolutely unacceptable. Ravaging CDC data, climate data, etc is horrendous and unforgivable.
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I find it assuming that the might of the American government -- in trying to take a bunch of data offline -- is being resisted by a digital "militia" of hobbyist archivers and non profits. Theres something that about this that just rings second amendment. Personally I think the concept of civilians having weapons to be a check on a nation state is absurd, but in this case it feels pretty empowering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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At face value I agree with everything USAID stands for, but it sounds like you have some examples in mind you want to provide.
If someone was truly looking to audit places to save money, it's always been odd to me that USAID was first. Now this story comes out...
https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am sure there will be elections. Question is how fair they will be. Have a look at Russia's recent presidential election. Putin "winning" it was a given from the start. US voters need to be mindful of all the ways an election can be rigged.
IMO US elections have already been less-than-fully-democratic for a while, what with the voting registration and ID nonsense, as well as obvious gerrymandering and voter intimidation. At the very least, significantly less democratic than a number of other western countries.
The Senate is 2 Senators per state regardless of the population and isn’t as susceptible to gerrymandering.
That being said, I don’t feel bad for anyone who voted for Trump and is having buyers remorse.
We are already seeing it with Arabs in Minnesota who thought Trump would be better for Arabs in Gaza and are now having regrets seeing how Trump wants to use US troops to “clear out Gaza” and Latin Americans who are appalled that he tried to remove birthright citizenship.
Next up will be all of the “rural American” voters who are going to bare the brunt of inflationary tariffs.
Great to see there's some resistance. What I'm missing from this announcement though is any mention of how they intend to secure this "vault" against the current government. I'm assuming good intentions on the part of Harvard, but keeping this data online against the express will of the government is gonna cost (political) capital. And from what I can see, the archive is hosted by US entities on US-controlled servers…
I think a fully distributed storage system must be the way here. There must be some IPFS type system where Harvard could say "we designated a set of data that we can add to as needed but only delete from with a critical mass of storage providers' consent, here are some instructions for you to add your spare capacity to become a storage provider".
Great to see there's some resistance. What I'm missing from this announcement though is any mention of how they intend to secure this "vault" against the current government. I'm assuming good intentions on the part of Harvard, but keeping this data online against the express will of the government is gonna cost (political) capital. And from what I can see, the archive is hosted by US entities on US-controlled servers…
Is there any risk of the government ordering them to take it down? That seems unlikely to me. The US has strong free speech protection, stronger than European free speech protection.
>keeping this data online against the express will of the government is gonna cost (political) capital.
Costing them political capital (aka the government is unhappy) is different from the government ordering them to take it down. Also, when you say "express will", are you saying the government has explicitly publicly stated that they don't like that Harvard is hosting this data?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly how fascism happens. https://archive.is/g6ElI
Same hyperboles were said in 2017 and we were fine, and in fact, economy was booming and there was world peace during his first term.
This is different. This time there's an explicit removal of the people and structures intended to say "no" to executive overreach.
We ignore this at our own peril, as a nation.
Great to see there's some resistance. What I'm missing from this announcement though is any mention of how they intend to secure this "vault" against the current government. I'm assuming good intentions on the part of Harvard, but keeping this data online against the express will of the government is gonna cost (political) capital. And from what I can see, the archive is hosted by US entities on US-controlled servers…
>how they intend to secure this "vault" against the current government Is there any risk of the government ordering them to take it down? That seems unlikely to me. The US has strong free speech protection, stronger than European free speech protection. >keeping this data online against the express will of the government is gonna cost (political) capital. Costing them political capital (aka the government is unhappy)…
The US literally just told (e.g., [0]) all scientists working for it they are not permitted to publish papers or speak at conferences or travel. What the US "has" is irrelevant when laws are being ignored.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/revised-and-extend...