Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | gpt5's commentslogin

Especially since every GLP-1 study shows almost complete regain to original weight after stopping.

It’s like stopping a blood pressure medicine and then being surprised that people have more heart attacks afterwards.


There is a recent one, which shows that the weight was generally stable after 1 year of discontinuation of GLP-1.

> In this cohort study of adults with overweight or obesity who initiated treatment with injectable semaglutide or tirzepatide and discontinued the index medication between 3 and 12 months after initiation, 19.6% restarted the index medication and 35.2% received an alternative treatment in the year after initial treatment discontinuation. The average weight change 1 year after index medication discontinuation was relatively small; however, there was considerable individual-level variability.

https://dom-pubs.pericles-prod.literatumonline.com/doi/10.11...


Thanks for sharing. Note that the data quality from this study is quite low because 54.8% of the cohort eventually restarted their medication or transitioned to an alternative therapy (mostly a different weight loss medication).

I don't know why a study that focuses on discontinuation didn't split the groups that restarted or transitioned against the group that actually just stopped.


The discontinued and paused groups in the actual study had lower BMI than the continuing groups - so it seems like this is at least partially independent of any weight regain.

Which makes sense since we have strong evidence for the GLP-1s providing significant protective benefit even without weight loss.


In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.

> In that scenario the 'joy of creation' would just shift to the 'joy of discovery'. Both of which are innate to humans.

They may be innate, but that doesn't mean they are related or that one is a good substitute for the other.


I agree. Thinking about it a little more, I've realized that people create things today even if unnecessary (e.g. grow their own food), a lot of it for the satisfaction of it.

So we would still build stuff, but it would not be out of necessity.


Trust me, the two are not the same, and are orders of magnitude different in terms of human satisfaction.

When I walk down a street, I get 10 people stopping me to ask "Where did you get that?". When I tell them I made it, their heads explode. I know which side of that interaction is more satisfying.

We also go all-out for Halloween, and at the big Halloween festival there is literally a line down the street of people waiting to take photos with us. We created something amazing.

People aren't going to line up for slop.


In media there was a rule 1-9-90. One creates, 9 comment, 90 use or are silent/don’t care.

Richard Branson realized that a company starts to behave differently when it reaches more than stuff of 135 people that coincides with average number of people you can consider as personally known to you.

Context switching is a bitch. You cannot do it for a long time. Abundance brought by AI will somehow consolidate as people cannot digest everything created by it.

There are more than 45,000 models avail at HF (if I remember it right). Choose wisely :)


One potential solution to this is AI summarization. Imagine coming home, and while preparing dinner your AI assistant recounts what happened in all your favourite tv shows that day. Then while you're doing the laundry, it tells you about all the new games it found and tested for you.

These are just thought starters, but something like this could significantly raise the ceiling on what one person is able to consume in a 24 hour period.


Nah. These would be pseudo calories.

Adults tend to forget that they gained their powers of reasoning by exercising them.

Getting a summary, the way you described it, will be minus the effort required to think about it. This is great for information that you are already informed.

This is related to the illusion of explanatory depth. Most of us “know” how something works, until we have to actually explain it. Like drawing a bi-cycle, or explaining how a flush works.

People in general are not aware of how their brain works, and how much mental exercise they used get with the way the world is set up.

I suppose we can set up brain gyms, where people can practice using mental skills so that they don’t atrophy?


"AI" is just more evidence that we're headed straight towards the world of Idiocracy.

Do you think that creation only comes with hard work?

Who said it was hard work?

The satisfaction comes from actually doing a thing that improves your own skill, instead of having a thing done for you.


One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free. I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this, but it was surprising enough to me that my international WiFi was not only fast, but completely free that I researched it.

I think this approach gets the whole industry to adopt it.

Consider the opposite approach. If they let airlines charge any amount for it, the airlines that installed it would make it expensive. No one would use it. Other airlines would feel no pressure to offer it.

By making it free, it gets used, and eventually depended upon. SpaceX are making free wifi the expectation from consumers on flights.


Correct, I’ve had Starlink in several long haul flights over the past 6 months and it’s already becoming an expectation, ie makes the flights without it noticeably worse. I’m not sure whether everyone gets it for free, though, it was my understanding that it’s complementary for business class but a paid add on for economy. But once you have it, it’s fast and stable.

> I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this

One word: marketing.


A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.

>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives

pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.

even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.

had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.


In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.

He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.

There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.


Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").

I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.

I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.

I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).

So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.


You couldn't get cable internet in Houston?

To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.

Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.

Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.


> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...

You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.

You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.

You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.

Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.

Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.

There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.


Profitable vs unprofitable is not black and white. No doubt there are some places where it's simply not profitable to run the fiber today.

However, there are a TON of places where the business strategy you outline is a great idea, and would be profitable.

..... until the incumbents lower their outrageous prices in the face of the competition, and bam, now your business model is no longer profitable.


I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.

We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.

Sure, subsidies are potentially an option to increase broadband availability. But that's not really a regulatory capture issue.

Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).

It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.

I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.

And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.

And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.


Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.

I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it


Australia we just turned 3G off now there are large black spots everywhere for hours.

Some trades now use them in there cars, they can use it for mobile service/internet nearly anywhere


RV is a great use case but a tiny market. For fixed broadband the others are cheaper most everywhere in the U.S. that people actually live.

The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.

Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.


If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.

This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.

But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.


I live in a city. Like a large number of Americans, I had one broadband provider available for 20 years. (Something like 75% of us have 1 or 2).

The price was high and the service was bad. I struggled to reliably achieve 20mbs at $80/mo.

Starlink is better than that, and it’s millions of people. 5g home internet is slow to spread here too.

Their market is large.


Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.

Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.

Or maybe it'll just implode. I hope not.


That math doesn't need to mask sense, it's always been about Golden Dome.

Residential prices:

100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.

200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.

400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.

A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.


I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.

In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).


They have several niches where the alternatives are more expensive and worse. Half the RVers in any park have it now. RVing teaches you how much of the country is not covered by cell signal. Boats.

Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.


In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.

> their ungodly expensive product

Do you have any idea how much other satellite operators charge per megabyte or Mbit/s?


Their competitors isn’t other satellite in most cases. It’s fiber, 5G and so on.

It's cheaper then fibre here in Australia. Especially rural.

Wow that sucks that Starlink is cheaper than Fiber at the same speed.

Starlink isn't expensive by those standards either.

Probably depends where. It is for sure more expensive than fiber with the same speed where I live.

Starlink's main goal isn't consumer internet, it's being the backbone for Golden Dome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

> Of course that's terrifying...

Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.


For trillions of dollars, Golden Dome is unlikely to be effective at interception, but it destabilizes MAD and can be used as a global prompt strike offense weapon.

So, worth it?


Man this dumb conspiracy again ...

This is widely reported and documented, including by Reuters,

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musks-spa...


This article in now way what so ever proves your point.

$39/month for 100Mbps in the middle of nowhere is spectacularly cheap.

Starlink costs around the same as business mobile Internet.

Or see T-Mobile away


Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.

Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink.

I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.


Airplanes are one of the places I feel happily disconnected from being online. Never used in-flight WiFi even when my company would have paid for it.

It's probably what the UA CEO was talking about, trying to get competitors to sign contracts with other providers. Viasat was hot stuff for a long time, wouldn't be surprised if there's a noncompete preventing the change.

Delta uses Viasat and has been rolling out free wi-fi on more and more of their planes. Is it not usable?

It’s pretty good, but the latency is inherently high since Viasat is in GEO.

~600ms ping times vs ~40ms on Starlink

Delta has had high speed internet for years on their flights. I’m Platinum Medallion

Starlink failed it's Delta Demo.

The article is online.


> Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals

The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.


Nobody had a problem with flip phones that play snake or Blackberry physical keyboards until the iPhone was demonstrated, and then nobody could conceive of ever going back (except in niche cases, e.g. journalists loved those keyboards)

T-Mobile also offers free Wifi on airplanes.

Only if the airplane uses much slower ground based Gogo (?). I use it every now and then when taking the 45 minute flight from ATL to my parents home in South GA

It could just be the ESPN/gym membership/AAA business model. $ from every single passenger is more revenue than $$ from just those who click buy.

United gives you free access only if you are a mileageplus member I think?

Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.


Joining United MileagePlus is completely free, you just sign up.

About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.


Completely free as in you don't have to give them money.

But you need to give personal information which also has value.


More personal information than you provide them to purchase the ticket to use the free starlink?

Regardless one of the conditions surely is giving them permissions to sell this to starlink as and everyone else. So whether the information is the same is probably irrelevant, how they are using it is.

Probably, because you are now associating your internet browsing with your personal information. (I don't know if they have the sophistication to actually do this, but it is very possible.)

The people concerned with that hypothetical can use a VPN.

At most they could see domains, ip addresses, timestamps, and http-only sites (are there any left?)

But the person sitting next to you can see everything.


> But the person sitting next to you can see everything.

Privacy filters are a thing.


you're literally an inch away from someone.

they are essentially looking head on at it.

that may work for business class, but not economy.

privacy filters aren't magic.


You realize you have to give them the same informaron to even step foot on the plane?

That's why I exclusively pay cash and don't show an ID when I fly /s

On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals.

There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).

https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d...


What sucks is that normal "for fun" prop pilots used to be able to use the basic $50 roaming plan, and then Starlink pulled the rug out from under them by taking it away, instead offering the new plan 5X the cost with 1/5 the bandwidth limit. Total scumbags. Even your hated local cable company doesn't have the balls to 5X your monthly bill suddenly out of the blue.

Delta has had free high speed satellite internet for years. I’m going to start flying Southwest more this year but they also advertise free internet. I don’t know how fast it is.

Really ironic given that they pulled the rug on general aviation usage.

It’s too difficult to distinguish between a terminal in small GA aircraft and something with destructive payload. Commercial aircraft are few and controllable.

give the customers the complete experience and they will subscribe.

IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.


Free (for now). Introducing or raising costs for a previously free or cheap service is normal practice for start ups.

And show ads for it on the inflight entertainment

The built in entertainment systems are so full of ads, that I much prefer the planes with no seat back screens. I've always already got my own devices which I use to entertain myself, whether the airline is providing advertainment or not.

And no one interrupts the movie I fell asleep watching on my iPad in order to push a credit card application at max PA volume.

Most of the airlines I have been on charge per megabyte. Having internet for the whole trip is a huge value add for the airline.

> One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free

There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.


The reason it is hard is not due to a power balance. Both of those countries could have sent nukes with minimal efforts.

But their goal is targeted and precise attacks, that effectively destroy targets based on specific, and high quality intelligence.

The other part is that defense against missiles is significantly harder and more expensive than sending missiles. Iran, while relatively poor, has dedicated a significant part of its economy for missile development and production.


> their goal is targeted and precise attacks

Day one and they've already bombed a school and killed dozens of children. The goals, strategy and tactics have not been clearly communicated. You can pray they are using high quality intelligence, but history tells us they are not at all concerned with collateral damage. They likely want to degrade Iran's military capabilities, but they also want them cowed and bleeding.


Israel is interested in the fall of the Iranian regime, a thing that can only happen if the Iranian people will rebel against it. The last thing Israel wants is to have the Iranians rally behind the state’s flag.

Based on this cold calculation, bombing a school full of children would be counter productive, even if you believe the Israelis are just collecting children's blood to make matzahs (passover is just around the corner!).

On a more serious note, do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.


> Israel is interested in the fall of the Iranian regime, a thing that can only happen if the Iranian people will rebel against it.

I personally don't believe in such appeals to rationality of parties waging wars. The issue is: if you wage a war, you can't control precisely what is going on. No one can. Like MH17 was shot down by pro-Russian separatists: who was interested in it? No one was, but still MH17 was shot down.

Israel bombed schools, it probably did it without clear intent to bomb them, but at the same time it means it is not very concerned about a couple of hundred of underage causalities. Like it was (and it is) not at all concerned about Palestinian causalities in Gaza. Moreover to my mind, it is the strategic stance of Israel: to be as brutal as possible to make neighbors to fear Israel. Israel does it for decades, it does it every time it wages a war. It means that now it just cannot wage a war without demonstrations of brutality. Even if it wanted to it just cannot, because on all levels of command people were taught to demonstrate brutality, and they were not taught how to wage war surgically. You can't overcome such a training on so many levels with a carefully crafted prompt.

> do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/israel-strikes-two-...

"Mizan News Agency, the judiciary’s official news agency, reported the death toll..."

"Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi shared a photo of the attack, which..."


Ok, so the Iranian regime itself published this news? And you don’t even question it?

Seems like we’re on such polar ends, there’s no hope in discussion.


> Ok, so the Iranian regime itself published this news? And you don’t even question it?

I question everything, and in this case I'm choosing to believe it. Such fakes are hard to forge, and as recent history shows such news are not fakes. Look at Russia which claimed that it did nothing wrong for how many times? Russia all the time tried to declare that everything is a fake forged by Ukraine. And if we look at what Ukraine did to Russia, we can't find a single example of a fake news forged by Russia.

A priori probability of this being a fake is low, and if you look into it, it is a pretty good "fake". No one still questioned it, while you can see some news from Iran that are clearly anti-regime news.

So, no, without clear evidence for this being a fake, I believe it is not a fake.


It's all over. NY Times writeup points to multiple sources and videos of destruction that they have authenticated. I don't think any body count has been independently verified.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/world/middleeast/iran-sch...


Why would you doubt this? Have you not seen what Israel has done in Palestine and Lebanon?


You are relying on unreliable news sources, the strikes are incredibly precise. See the aerial photo of Khamenei's residence that was bombed [1]. You can see how the surrounding area remains surprisingly clean in face of the utter destruction in the middle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/1rh2f41/the_residence_...


So in your mind a picture post from a 6 day old Reddit account is a reliable news source?


One nice thing about Reddit, is that if someone posts fake news, people refute it (which is not the case in this post). So there is active fact checking in place.

That photo is taken directly from AP news reporting, taken by Airbus.


Why not link to the AP then? https://apnews.com/live/live-updates-israel-iran-february-28...

Reddit is a shithole, even more so after it went public a year ago..

Anyway, I don't think the AP pictures are too convincing. Sure it might look like smoke in there, but it looks more like the entire right side of the image was carpetbombed - not just the building complex in the middle


The US didn’t declare war since WW2 because such a declaration would give the president disruptive powers (such as the power to seize factories).

In fact, after Vietnam war congress specifically created a law to restrict hostilities without congress approval to up to 60 days, which is what the current (and prior) administrations are acting on.


Looks like the rumor was incorrect. Both jointly attacked (NYtimes - https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/28/world/iran-strikes-t...)


But Israel announced it first, which they maybe hoped would amount to the same thing PR wise.


The rumor above specifically talks about letting Iran retaliate against Israel which would then lead US to attack.

I'm not sure what's the logic behind that PR-wise, but regardless, it didn't happen.


As I recall Iran said quite openly, in response to the US troop buildup, that they would see an attack by Israel as an attack by the US, suggesting that they could target e.g. carriers instead of Israel if Israel attacked them.


> I'm not sure what's the logic behind that PR-wise

Part of it is the stated idea that Israel still has public support. That such an exchange, even if Israel launches the first strike, would get more support. This is probably misjudging the actual public support for Israel, which is much lower amongst the general public than amongst (esp. Republican) political circles.

The other part of it is that Trump has surrounded himself with card-carrying nazis, who have not at all been subtle about their desires to harm jews.

> but regardless, it didn't happen.

That Israel didn't launch the first strike and instead insisting on a joint strike (despite otherwise being constantly warmongering), suggests to me that it's the latter 'part' of the reason that had a lot of weight here.


Ironically, crypto has developed something significantly better for these use cases called stablecoin, which isn't really decentralized.


A currency peg is a double-edged sword in and of itself, to say nothing of the risk brought into the equation by having to trust a stablecoin issuer.


Interestingly, the most cloned animal in the world are horses [1].

Given how popular (and expensive) it is for horses, it likely delivers on the results people are looking for. Note that current cloning techniques don't clone the mitochondria, which represents 1%-2% of the genome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_cloning


Horses are also orders of magnitude more valuable (financially) than cats. Nobody is paying $70 million for a cat for their breeding program...


Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media. In Italy, people have faced criminal charges for simply criticizing the prime minister.

When the government does not allow its population to freely speak against it, it's just waiting to be abused by one bad leader.


> Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media.

You're not allowed to insult anyone, https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__185.html , though the term "insult" is not nearly as broadly defined as in everyday speech. The law dates back to the 18th century, and has largely been unchanged for 150 years. I really don't understand the recent outrage over these and other laws. We have been fine.

More background: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beleidigung_(Deutschland)


> has largely been unchanged for 150 years. I really don't understand the recent outrage over these and other laws. We have been fine

The last 150 years of Germany have...ahem...not been what I would call "fine."

It would be interesting to have a replay of history without this law and similar ones related to it. Could be nothing different happens.

On the other hand, any law regulating speech is going to have a reverberating effect on the marketplace of ideas with 2nd and 3rd order outcomes that are impossible to disentangle after the fact.


> The last 150 years of Germany have...ahem...not been what I would call "fine."

But it's certainly not been because of that law…

At the very least I'm sure you'll agree we've been fine the last 80 or so years. Again, I'm just saying I don't understand the outrage right now.


almost all communication was oral 20 years ago, now-- especially since covid -- it's almost all, even casual comments, through text messages which can easily be used in evidence


That's a good point. Though I wouldn't say text as a medium is the critical factor, it's that more communication is taking place in the open (over social media) and being recorded for everyone to see.

However, I don't see how this would imply the law that's been in place for 150 years would suddenly be bad. In fact, one might argue that precisely because so much communication is happening in public now, more regulation is needed.


> Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media.

Germany restricts insulting individuals / your neighbour, police officer, a pastor or a minister. There’s no special law for politicians. Political criticism is protected under the Basic Law (constitution). Go ahead and be crucial about a politician’s actions but don’t insult their person’s honour or use a slur. That’s not your freedom of speech, that’s the dignity. In fact, you can even insult the government! You can say German government as the government is not a person.


Free speech in America is specifically about protecting you against the government. Your neighbor is still not allowed to defame you.


>Your neighbor is still not allowed to defame you.

Anyone can defame anyone else on the US. The only time the libel or slander laws apply is when the defamed person can prove real harm in court. Not harm to dignity, but monetary loss, personal loss, or physical injury. These are very high bars to clear.

If people could sue and win just for proving willful or negligent defamation of character, a lot of extremist influencers would be in the poor house.


There is a special law for politicians.


According to Reuters, it will essentially be a free VPN.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...


Free ... as in they'll spy on everything you do.


They already record as much global traffic as possible.


Sure but now suckers probably using their DNS, or if not they still got a human name to IP / time / duration map.


So you're not paying for it? In corporate america how is that going to be moneytized?


it would be extremely naive to believe that certain corporations allied with the regime wouldn’t have complete, entire, total access to all of the traffic to feed their data collction.


VPNs are in no way secure. I'm sure they will be taking all your data and using it.


With end-to-end encryptions, https etc.., how can they collect any data besides IP addresses and SNI?


It's a government program. The tax payer pays the service provider, a company owned by some government official's cousin. Monetization happened just before your employer paid you this week.


Money is the smallest concern here. It could easily replace the content with state-approved versions and the majority would never know, or at the least redirect to other sites/pages as needed. After all, it's being described as a 'portal' not a simple service.


Are you implying that paying does in any way reduce chance of your data being further monetized in the same way?


I'm sure Palantir will volunteer


Let the NSA deal with that…


You are the product


That may be pretty useful for torrenting, actually.


Oh they’re definitely going to be watching for that. You can have the propaganda but if you start stealing from rich people they’ll be after you.


So nothing new. We can just use cloudflare warp


Can people use it for sailing the high seas?


Free Trump VPN to go with one's Trump Phone?


can we use it for, erm, other 'freedoms' ?


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

Search: