791–800 of 902 posts
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Streetcars and public transport in general should never be run on a for profit basis.
> public transport in general should never be run on a for profit basis Japan seems to do fine [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan
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Yes, communist never had troubles with nationalism. And communism is by definition a populist ideology. The legendary elusive communist who shapeshift the moment one points a finger at one (no true communism), is more of an idea of western leftists. Unfortunately the communist ideals are very much alive and well, especially in those countries where communism arose from within, without an external force.
Well, "communism" in the Eastern Bloc is more appropriately called State Capitalism, it has nothing really to do with the left, socialism or communism.
Disclaimer: I am a data analyst. I consult companies in regards to ethical data collection. But I also know of black sheep. I don't have a problem with websites measuring what I view, click, add to cart or buy. I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. And if they do marketing I even want them to be able to see from which source of traffic (aka marketing effort) how many conversions…
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Well, "communism" in the Eastern Bloc is more appropriately called State Capitalism, it has nothing really to do with the left, socialism or communism.
Maybe you'll get it right next time. Then you'll have true communism, at least until it fails again. Then the kids from the last round of red nobility will call it "capitalism something" and agitate for new true communism again.
Socialism, by definition, is democratic workers' control of the means of production. A socialist dictatorial state is therefore an oxymoron.
If the state itself is controlled by a violent maniac (Stalin, Mao, etc.), and the state owns and controls every aspect of society, including the means of production of course, then there is simply no logical connection to socialism.
The USSR and China claim(ed) they are are democratic and socialist states. The "democratic" part is obviously a lie, and was ever since the beginning, since Lenin stole the revolution - and everyone of course knows this. Why then do people believe the "socialist" part?
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Yeah, read HN! There are stacks and stacks of them here on HN that are of excellent quality - I use HN as my 'quality' filter (and I reckon I'm not alone). Moreover, if one doesn't run JS like me then it's dead easy to avoid problematic sites as HN lists them (Twitter, etc. - and it doesn't take long to get to know the main offenders, thus avoid them). :-) BTW, I agree with you it is hard to find good sites these day…
A pedantic note that follows from this particular thread: HackerNews’s search capabilities are powered by Algolia and require JavaScript to work (turn off all JS and the HN branded Algolia page will not load). The reason I bring this up is that even good websites sometimes lean on free or free-ish services to provide extra functionality (such as calendars, discussion boards, issue tracking, or search) without realizi…
OK, here's the scenario: I log on to HN with JavaScript disabled, do all the things I do, read articles, submit posts all without JS. At some point I want to search HN so I hit the 'toggle JS' button on my browser, it then goes from red to green to tell me JS is now active. I then refresh the page and start searching HN. When I've finished I hit the JS toggle and the button goes back to red - JS is now kaput.
I really can't think of anything simpler - JS is off until I really need it and when I do it's immediately available without digging deep down into menus etc.
I'd add HN uses JS as it was originally intended and does so responsibly. I have nothing against JS per se, the problem comes from websites that abuse webpages and thus the user by sending megabytes of JS gumph and so on.
Running without JS and only turning it on when really necessary I reckon is a reasonable compromise.
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How can it be legal for a government to make increasingly core services depend on these amoral, for profit monsters?
I’m not sure if this is a serious question, but what would this imaginary law say? The government can only do business with companies who aren’t in it for the money?
IANAL, but how about something like, "Government services offered via WWW must not contact commercial servers and must be fully usable with non-JS browsers."
This kind of data collection abuse is why I think we need more addons like AdNauseam [1]. Unlike uBlock Origin, it's not available from the Chrome web store anymore, which is a good sign that Google hates these types of addons more than they hate simple blockers. Blocking A/AAAA domains with custom URLs to prevent tracking is almost impossible, so instead let's flood the trackers with useless, incorrect data that's n…
I worked for a agency a couple of years ago, when, out of the blue, tracked data contained tons of random data instead of the expected UTM parameters. It took us a while to figure out what was happening. It was some kind of obfuscating plugin that was messing up well known tracking parameters. What I want to say is: stuff like that could actually cause a lot of fun on the other side.
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I'm not convinced yet that it isn't a net positive, given that a lot of what you described is illegal according to it, and said illegal behavior is being punished
"a lot of what I describe" - you mean big players collecting even more data? Not really illegal, you just have to get the users to consent somehow. Which most do anyway.
No.
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> even most ardent EU supporters would admit that the institution was terribly dysfunctional That's a mischaracterization. "Most" would have accepted that there was (and is) room for improvement, but "terribly disfunctional" is an extreme term. The view that the whole institution had to be reinvented has always been a very English idea, based on the fact that some key policies (like agricultural support) benefited ot…
> Britain benefited hugely from infrastructure support programs, for example. how, exactly? compared to UK government expenditure: the funding from EU programs are a rounding error
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> In conclusion, contrary to your JS experience, I'd say that I spend over 90% of my time browsing w/o JS and am happy with my experience. Things are lightning fast and I see few or no ads. I don't need an ad blocker since 99% of ads just don't happen w/o JS. Well, you still have lots of tracking stuff loaded probably, unless you got something extra for blocking trackers. A tracking pixels does not need JS. A font lo…
Well, you still have lots of tracking stuff loaded probably, unless you got something extra for blocking trackers. Yes I'm sure I have that stuff loaded. But I don't care because it's quite ephemeral: I exit Firefox multiple times a day, there's really no performance cost to doing that after every group of websites. E.g. if, while reading HN, I look up something on Wikipedia, or I search with Bing or Google, everythi…
Caught me. Tab hoarder here : )
> I don't see those annoying week-long pleas for money. Do they still do those?
They still do those. At least I have seen them less than a year ago.