Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more megapolitics's commentslogin

It’s a flawed democracy, but it’s on a consistent upward trajectory.


Unfortunately not, they're mostly on a downward trend (I'm sure the war and Russian interference doesn't help, but it is what it is).

Still better now (5.42) than Russia today (2.28) or even back in 2006 (Russia was 5.02, though back then Ukraine was 6.94).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index


>consumer rights only kicks in when you "take ownership" of something

No they don’t. Consumer rights law in the UK applies to services too.


>NSDAP were in power for over a decade before the first concentration camp was ever built.

The first concentration camp, Nohra, opened in 1933, the year the Nazis took power. The more well known Dachau was also opened that year.


I think GP was mixing up concentration camps (Konzentrationslager), an umbrella term for both work/prison camps (never really secret, killing prisoners was a side effect but not the ostensible purpose, initially targeted German citizens with leftish politics who were vocal against the new regime) with extermination camps (subtype of concentration camp, not publicized, engineered for mass murder, where most of the Jews and a lot of the Roma/Sinti in Nazi-occupied Europe still there by 1942 were sent)

Dachau was a concentration camp located in a Munich suburb that a large number of prisoners survived (but a lot did not) and were even sometimes (but not often) released from. Really bad, but nothing that awful governments hadn’t done before - in fact, was being done by our eventual allies to the East at the same time.

Auschwitz was an extermination camp (Vernichtungslager), located in a distant corner of Poland that only a tiny fraction of people sent there survived. These camps and system were a new horror for the world, and the center of the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Those were planned at the beginning of 1941 (Wannsee Conference), so yes, put into operation about a decade after the Nazis came to power.

Some places that were initially set up as work (to death) camps were later turned into outright extermination camps.


>if someone saw my laptop and a mac laptop left alone in the same room, they would try to steal the Mac, making my laptop even safer by virtue of not being from Apple.

That might be true now, but it might not be as time goes on and this bricking functionality becomes common knowledge.


That’s more of a problem of a lack of cases brought by the government than a problem with the courts. The courts have generally seen through such things quite well when the government actually brings forward cases.


I think the parent comment was saying that Iraq was invading a sovereign country in the Gulf War. I can see how the comment could be parsed as saying America invaded the sovereign country of Kuwait, but given the third example is Ukraine I think the parent was just giving 3 examples of invasions of sovereign countries in general and not just invasions by the US.


>I'll stop you right there because the major producers of greenhouse gasses aren't third world countries. Historically, the majority of greenhouse gasses emitted comes from industrialized nations.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't tackle emissions in third world countries.


I'm pointing out that reality is far more complex and fraught, and that it's naive and, yes, even presumptuous to assume that so-called "third world countries" are simply going to go along with an amorphous "we" group trying to "tackle emissions" just because "we say so".

There's a stark difference between having the facts right, and having enough credibility to be believed by everyone else that you're right.


The consent form situation did not get this bad until GDPR was passed. Prior to GDPR cookie-consent forms were simple "Yes" or "No" buttons without all the insane pages of toggles.


GDPR did mandate defaulting all of those toggles to "decline" though, even though some are trying to get clever and add additional toggles for "legitimate interest" (which isn't how that works legally but AFAIK nobody has been sued over that yet).

The follow-up privacy legislation also bans the current dark pattern of making the "accept all" button more prominent and obvious than "decline all" at least requiring both to be equally prominent. The flow of having to go through "manage" or "see options" or other shenanigans as links in order to decline all has always been in violation of the GDPR and could theoretically open you up to the fines as it demonstrates intent.


Legitimate Interest is a separate Legal Basis.


Yeah but providing an opt-out toggle for "legitimate interest" is a good indicator that the interest is actually not legitimate enough to require manual opt-out. And in practice I've seen it mostly used as a gotcha to make it harder to opt out of every single advertising partner individually.

"But we want to show you ads to finance our website and our advertising partners want to abuse your privacy" is not a legitimate interest.


This gets back to GP's point about GDPR vs ePrivacy Directive. Legitimate Interest is a separate Legal Basis under GDPR (and does in fact allow opt-out). But the ePrivacy Directive does not recognize Legitimate Interest. You cannot use Legitimate Interest as a basis for making a cookie opt-out.


Just because that correlated in time doesn't mean it's what the law actually implies.

Informed consent about cookies was a law that predated the GDPR.

The consent boxes only got worse because, with GDPR, you suddenly have regulators who care about these things and are empowered to impose hefty fines. So people stopped ignoring the whole space of privacy, as they had been before.

One of the declared goals of GDPR is to reign in "profiling". So the industry started trying to desparately weave a narrative on the grounds of consent: they wanted to create an electronic paper trail that would somehow support their claim that people were consenting under the rules of the GDPR to being profiled.

But consent under the definition of the old cookie directive does not meet the standard required under the GDPR for consenting to profiling [1]. People like Max Schrems are actively engaged in trying to get the industry to turn away from their noncompliant ways [2]. Especially the use of certain UI dark patterns has already lead to hefty fines [3].

My hope is that, when this has all played out through the legal system, it will become clear to the industry that the stuff they are trying to get you to consent for them to do, is just outlawed altogether, thus scoring a victory for privacy on the web and rendering that consent-stuff moot.

If not, regulators may need to get involved to make it more clear, that this is the intended outcome, which I have no doubt they eventually will.

I also have high hopes that, eventually, GPC will become enshrined in law [4]

[1] https://academic.oup.com/idpl/article/5/3/163/730611?login=f...

[2] https://www.dataprotectionreport.com/2021/06/max-schrems-pri...

[3] https://www.cnil.fr/en/cookies-cnil-fines-google-total-150-m...

[4] https://globalprivacycontrol.org/


Dead simple solution: provide a GDPR consent form with "yes, I accept being tracked" or "no I refuse being tracked in any way".

Or even better, make the form automatically recognizable by your browser and a setting in the browser so that it says yes or no for you.

Have you ever notices that the "yes I agree" button is most of the time MUCH easier to click on than to tell "no I don't" ?


> Have you ever notices that the "yes I agree" button is most of the time MUCH easier to click on than to tell "no I don't"?

That's illegal under GDPR. Yet here we are.


>one of whom was the Chief of Staff the army

Vitaly Gerasimov was the Chief of Staff of an army (41st Combined Arms), rather than the Army. The similarly-named Valery Gerasimov is the Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.


>Same UK that said it would back Ukraine if Russia invaded?

The UK was always very clear that the backing to Ukraine would be in the form of the supply of weapons to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. Nothing more was ever promised.


Direct combat involvement would lead to WW3. As bad as things are for Ukraine a nuclear wasteland is worse.

Nuclear armed states don't fight eachother directly.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: