This comment is devoid of data. There have been less stoppages and detentions than you can count on one hand of scientists and mathematicians. There are hundreds of thousands classified via various levels of visa. None have been arrested in some unlawful manner, and the onus is on you to define "asshattery" in a way that is defensible. Foreign adversaries have been embedded within the US academic institutions before the Cold War. Just because the current US president is a divisive convicted felon doesn't suddenly mean we shouldn't care about controlling our own borders.
The US (and many nations for that matter) monitor, track, and protect their borders by foreigners and of a group of mathematicians cannot fathom why this may be the case amidst all-time high mistrust, spying, and academic and corporate espionage and then they should've studied harder.
But it is not just about the numbers, you are probably right that statistically, mathematicians don't have much to fear at the border, but the current administration seems to go out of its way make the US unwelcoming. All countries will protect their borders in some way but they usually don't make a show out of it like the US does.
If you go to a hotel and are greeted by a grumpy guy who asks how how you dare book a room on their property, it is a natural reaction to move to the hotel next door where the staff is hopefully more friendly.
These are just cases that make the news. There is a very real possibility of being detained, having devices confiscated, or being refused entry if you are an outspoken critic of the president.
What an utter piece of shit comment. I have had friends (research mathematicians) who were harassed at the border and you have the temerity to do the "cite your sources" shitcrap for "data" which is available with a single click of the mouse -- as the very gracious sibling comment showed, doing your work for you.
when i consider traveling to any country i don't care about statistics. i care about feeling safe. unless you can prove and guarantee that i will not be bothered when crossing the border then i'll stay away.
This is just wrong and frankly naive. While Israel has always been crying wolf over them having nuclear weapons, they had facilities purifying uranium to weapons grade up and running.
We can debate whether they were close to a nuke or not, or whether they'd strike as far as the West, but Iran wasn't stopping trying to create a warhead.
They resumed after it went away, and had most of a decade to get the previous stuff out of mothballs and continue.
No one seriously suggests that Iran had continued working on their nuclear weapons program while the Obama deal was in place.
Edit: The IAEA had 24/7 access to the sites and constently verified they were abiding by the deal. Trump himself testified twice they were abiding by the deal. They had dismantled their heavy-water reactor and could not produce plutonium, had gotten rid of 97% of it's enriched uranium, turned off 2/3rds of their centrifuges, and was not producing weapons grade enriched uranium.
Under the deal they did not have any uranium enriched beyond 4%. After we withdrew, they had since been able to get up to 60% enriched.
"The main responsibility of every Soviet citizen was to facilitate the arrival of Communism, where people would contribute to society according to their abilities, and receive from society according to their needs -- has there ever been a nobler sounding goal? And yet historians cannot agree on an estimate of many millions of people were starved to death, tortured to death, or worked to death, all in the name of that goal."
And yet millions of people starve, are tortured and are worked to death in the name of Capitalism. How many die or are made destitute due to lack of affordable healthcare in the US alone?
Not to mention the trillions of dollars (and lives) given up in the pursuit of halting what we're told is a fragile, prone-to-collapse form of government for a hundred years now.
I'm not sure where or by whom you you were told it's a fragile, prone-to-collapse form of government, but I wasn't. Communism has a stranglehold on the societies it spawns within because the elite keep it that way.
Show me a country that espouses true Communist principles and I'll show you ten successful Capitalist ones. Don't confuse corporatism with capitalism, the latter which is the free exchange of ideas and goods mutually beneficial to both parties in an open market.
The US's enemies keep Cuba on life support for one reason.
Work a day in the gulag for your pithy apple ration and you'll be begging to sit in an air conditioned office and choose from ten apple varieties at different prices at your local Corporate Grocer.
Could you please list these ten countries even if I cannot show you a country that espouses true Communist principles?
Please do keep in mind though:
> Don't confuse corporatism with capitalism, the latter which is the free exchange of ideas and goods mutually beneficial to both parties in an open market.
Directly stated: the problem I see is that term Capitalism is basically used as a Motte and Bailey. It seems to be the least worst option, and it certainly has benefited us greatly. But that doesn't mean it should escape criticism - especially as it lists further and further into what you're calling "corporatism"
Yes. The country is led by extremists akin to the Taliban. They don’t represent the rest of Iran which suffers because they have little freedom to decide their future and they live in increasing poverty because of the mismanagement of the government that uses their resources to fund terrorism. It’s sad because there’s still a highly educated populace that comes from a rich history of art and engineering. The government slaughter tens of thousands of civilians merely for protesting because conditions got so miserable they risked walking into a firing squad. I’m in favor of anything that reduces the population of their parasitic government or increasing the chances of dislodging it. They have a degenerate anti-women, anti-freedom and anti-Jew/American culture that the earth would be better off without.
Most of this land was low-utility anyway. You should realise it is good for the land owners to convert it to high yield output, which in turn the government can tax and return some of the gains to the people.
Only because the U.S. and U.K. conspired against them. The French did everything they could to keep the fire burning, by hosting people from various countries to teach them about revolution. Organizing globally against the rich parasites was hard and expensive back then. Now the only hold back, is that the rich parasites own most of the internet.
But WE BUILT IT, and can take back the internet when we finally realize it's not dems vs reps, but rich vs poor. It's always been a class war, they just are much better at keeping us distracted.
I think we need reforms and I’m very much against the accumulation of power that we’ve allowed the billionaire class.
But the French Revolution is nothing to emulate. If you’ve read the history of the French Revolution you know that it quickly moved on from rich parasites to murdering and imprisoning people over minor philosophical differences and real or lack of perceived lack of enthusiasm for continued murder. And it eventually led to global war and attempted global conquest.
My original (admittedly tongue in cheek) comment is less of a value judgement, and more an observation that if the ruling class doesn't effectively walk the tightrope of exploiting while subduing people, then they stand to lose a whole lot.
This sentiment, branded differently but functionally the same, is punished in the US currently, because the hordes are upset their Shein costs more in the short term.
We've entered a new era where every nation is walling up its industries (tariffs and fines), its demographics (via immigration), and it's culture (internet and social media control).
A customs duty and a tariff are functionally the same, raising the cost of foreign goods to protect local industries.
Hyperbolic drivel: : “The people sitting in that building (Google HQ in London) are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”
Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization."
- Google doesn't serve Huel
- Google has maybe two total pong pong tables in the London office and staff here are some of the most diligent coworkers I know.
- Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain.
- No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize.
- People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
If the so called professional being cited here cannot avoid use hyperbolic drivel and unfounded fantasy to substantiate the claim, it's difficult to give credence to the case.
The US has a large cobalt mine in Idaho. It's closed.[1] They got all the way to startup, and then the price of cobalt dropped.[2] Peaked at $37, dropped to $10.
Right now about $22, but that's a recent spike. Break-even for that mine is around $20.
Similar to the rare earths situation, which I've mentioned before.
This is why we have raw material shortages. The materials exist, but prices are too volatile for the capital required.
The Mountain Pass mine is running again. There are deals with DoD and General Motors to establish a price floor, so they don't go bankrupt yet again when the price drops.
The current bottleneck in rare earths is separation. There are four steps - mining, beneficiation (mechanically sorting the good stuff from lots of unwanted rock, done at the mine), separation (sorting out the different rare earths chemically, can be done anywhere), and conversion to metals (smelting). The US doesn't have anywhere near enough separation capacity and Mountain Pass has been shipping ore after beneficiation to China for further processing. That's being fixed, but not fast enough.
Market price and availability swing wildly over about a 4:1 range, resulting in repeated gluts, shutdowns, and bankruptcies. Last big rare earth glut was in 2015, and most non-China production shut down.
- Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain.
That's good, but doesn't change the fact that the supply chain for tech exemplifies "the hub exploiting the periphery".
- No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize.
"Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley" is likely referring to the CEO/founder/VC class.
- People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
That's patently untrue. A bunch of them post here.
And when one of the parties is a group of men with guns who abuse their neighbors in order to produce the something they're selling to the other party, it becomes exploitation in a quick hurry.
I use any number of professionals’ knowledge or skills or supplies just the same as I use natural gas to heat the home or water to hydrate myself or clean whatever.
Maybe something about the seller (or buyer) being under duress would be a start to defining exploitation.
> Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule.
I'd like to point that that mantra on its own can go in two wildly-different directions, depending on whether you believe "innovation" comes from:
1. An incremental process of millions of contributors doing small unsung pieces of work until eventually some threshold of opportunity, motive, preliminary ideas, and luck is reached which makes for a visible shift and simple story.
2. A magical threshold only broken through by Great Men, who were not lucky at all and deserve Great Wealth for their Greatness.
As you might guess, I subscribe to (1). Humans are wired to dislike randomness and broad causes, so we dramatically underestimate (and undervalue) all the people making innovations of higher-precision parts, or a chemical reaction that can use a cheaper reagent that's also waste from another process, or basic research like "these proteins are highly conserved in the virus."
It's both. Individuals are also constrained by perverse incentivzes that sometimes you do need someone unconstrained from it all to make the critical push.
I dream of those things as I believe a lot of others do on HN. I also provide for my family and achieve more in my career but those aren’t dreams, that’s just what I do everyday.
Dreams of the singularity and interplanetary civilizations are actually achievable at some point in the future. Random god king paychobabble isn’t.
I’m not for this Luddite bullshit and you’re severely harming any legitimate opposition to the billionaire class by undermining yourself.
The name alone tells you everything you need to know about her.
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