Middle powers should heed Cory Doctorow's advice [0] and start offering legal protection in their jurisdictions for precisely this type of projects.
America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
Middle powers should not be granting to America any goodwill whatsoever. There is nothing in it for them anymore, except irresponsible reliance on a bad faith actor.
>America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
In India, recently, a bill was passed that can permit banks and the government to add charges on UPI transactions. UPI is one of the biggest digital payment systems in the world, and it was free until now. Insider information from multiple news sources suggests that this was done because of pressure from the US.
Sounds bogus, there's free payment services in the US as well, that's nothing special. What makes more sense in the India context is low value of volume per customer where even the minimal operating costs are difficult to cover. I say that from some amount of experience in the micro-finance world, where even money provided at zero actual interest in terms of the loaned money itself still ended up having to have somewhat painful interest rates just to cover true costs in low income countries.
I do not know a single free payment service in the US outside Zelle and that is not really comparable to India's UPI.
Are you saying that there are services in the US that I can use to accept payments as easily as a credit card with no fees on me as a merchant?
UPI costs about $500 million per year to the Indian government while having a transaction volume of $3.4 trillion per year. That is < 0.001 % of the transaction volume.
I am not going to claim there is no subsidization to the cost to the government by the banks as they get to keep control over the flow of money and that might change in the future but for now the costs to the government vs benefit to the Indian economy is fairly clear to me.
Just the 18% GST returns on the 2.5% extra the merchants would receive when a user pays with UPI over VISA would more than make up for the cost to the government. Not to mention all the cash income that was impossible to track before is now tracked under UPI.
If even a few of the people freaking out here just recreated or rehosted nitter elsewhere out of their reach, we probably wouldn't have this problem. Be the change you wish to see
Exactly, what are we going to do? Impose sanctions? Tarriffs? We do that anyways without recourse. Bomb you? We might do that anyways without reasonable impetus. Y'all have no reason to temper your actions for fear of retribution; our President is threatening to rename a lake to Lake America because we "won't be doing business with Ontario anymore". Why? Does it matter? Could anyone have done anything that wasn't just abject groveling? No.
To hell with us. The rest of the world needs to move on from giving a crap what our government thinks of you.
The US is fighting wars with everyone on everything at the same time. They don't have the resources to do anything about it. Every country will develop their own independent payment networks.
China was right to block US tech companies to promote their own, most large and capable countries will do the same over time.
I wouldn't cite China as the example. If they had their way, every country would have its own firewall just like them, giving them significant control over information flow to their citizens. It works very well. That's why they have been pushing "internet sovereignty" for years.
Meanwhile the US who currently has their way will block European judges from using banks, credit cards and all online services after they investigate Israel for war crimes.
The direction the US is going under Trump is absolutely reprehensible.
But we're talking about _internet freedom_ here, and China has none of it. Just because Trump is an *hole doesn't mean we should embrace China's view of "freedom".
sure, but no one's forced to have FB, IG or Twitter accounts. I don't, my kids don't. If you do, that's on you.
if you think "USA has the same control over information flow", you either don't know much about information control in China , or maybe you're a bot defending the CCP
Doctorow's point is that the USA's trade policy is unilaterally capricious and malevolent toward the best of its allies, so other nations' actions ultimately cannot be said to have any mitigating causal effect. Might as well just go for it. F the DMCA.
Unfortunately, DMCA isn't just in the USA's interest and the copyright situation is actually worse in some other countries, notably Germany which, which means I wouldn't have too much hope on the EU moving in the right direction on that front.
i remember when, after 9/11, the US introduced webcams and fingerprint scanners, at airports to take pictures of incoming travellers and Brazil had a similar lo-fi response, with ink blots and cameras only for Americans. Something like this needs to happen more and everywhere now.
What would be your principal point to persuade someone Putin is worse than Trump?
Invading a country, pretending it's not a war of aggression, letting your own soldiers die, and killing many innocent people with no authority from your democratic houses... USA would not do that!!! /s
Trump stood to avoid prison, he's used the stock markets to steal from his own people. It looks like the wars against Venezuela, and against Iran were/are solely to enrich himself. Honestly, Putin looks more moral here (a phrase I thought I'd never even contemplate) unless he was also in a club of prolific paedophiles?
I guess Putin has perverted a super power into an oligarchic dictatorship...
> What would be your principal point to persuade someone Putin is worse than Trump?
They’re the same kind of nasty. What differentiates them is the constitutional system around them. Putin is in for life. Trump is about to lose, at the very least, the House.
If the midterms are perverted, yes, there is no difference.
Most middle powers have robust censorship regimes. As for America being a unique "hostile" phenomena in geopolitics, I believe you are either purveyour or a victim of propaganda.
> its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale
Like what exactly? Whatever harm US (software) tech has dished out, it has also dished out domestically. What is your nationality and what are your nation's contributions to the rest of the world?
> Whatever harm US (software) tech has dished out, it has also dished out domestically.
Are you saying that, because Big Tech is harming the mental health of American children, this is supposed to redeem the situation somehow?
Or are you saying it contradicts the observation that US has "caused harm at a global scale"? There is no contradiction.
> What is your nationality and what are your nation's contributions to the rest of the world?
Maybe this power posturing would have worked 20 years ago, before America's enshittification showed who its "contributions" were ultimately designed to benefit. I don't disagree that it's urgent for middle powers to contribute to the world. I believe ending their protection of America's value-extracting power is now a great way to do exactly that.
All due respect, but how would anyone survive, no less find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN, in a world that made not just some 'patents' free but removed property and invention such as the extremities Doctorow's fiction often espouses? America is sorta known for pretense of mutual benefit. We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice. Don't get me wrong, if you read my comments elsewhere you will see how I feel about people/companies claiming swathes of things for themselves too.
Everyone seems to think they either deserve more or they fall for believing people are inherently willing to remunerate fairly for what they use... Def. not my experience, at all... like what if people were all just assuming since your ideas exist, they were for sale or free, or 'offering' things you dont want or arent getting in return...? what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?
Doctorow is the furthest from a fair or good example, imho.
It's not just about big tech. It's about what enables highly productive societies in general. Without IP, I suppose everyone could share to some limited extent what is already known, but why would anyone ever sink big dollars or time into coming up with something new that'd immediately get stolen by people who did nothing to contribute to it? Indeed, it's part of the problem with manufacturing in the West, there's no robust enforcement of IP with China due to political sensitivities so manufacturers have to have strategies to protect themselves from the fact that if they release a new product they've got maybe 90 days before a copycat hits the market.
I can't help but wonder how much stronger the core of the EU economy would be with actual robust management of their trade relationship with China. The US too but I think the EU is suffering a bit more in real time.
No doubt it makes Doctorow the star of certain types of intellectual circles but the theories have never made a people or country actually well off and never will. But, things don't have to work in the real world to be popular, or even to become policy.
Maybe in the past, but who in the present who isn’t already rich is or would have the income hurt by eliminating IP laws? Keep in mind that most indie projects make barely any money, most of those that do are free + ads or Patreon, any software not under expensive DRM is easy to pirate, and AI companies pirate to train LLMs.
> what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?
What if you don’t like what somebody does with “your” ideas in their own personal bubble? Why care? Try to ignore them. I’d rather that than have somebody restrict what I can do with whatever ideas they claim are theirs.
cool. as long as we are clear people are free to commit mass genocide and i dunno peel peoples' skin back or i dunno, something out of a robin wiliams scifi movie or phosphorus bombing or something with what you have invented. just trying to get some clarity on the concept of 'belongings' and property law.
I believe OP is saying that the US has not been reliably sane in its public policy since ending WW II via nuclear warfare.
I don't know if I agree with the claim overall, but I certainly think nuking civilian populations was an execrable choice (even if the official targets were technically military ones).
The destruction of Tokyo, Dresden, and so many other cities were also unconscionable acts. The war was absolutely full of them (though I think the Axis was clearly aiming for unconscionable overall goals, such as the Final Solution, so I still argue the Allies were fighting a just war, even if they often carried it out through unjust means).
The nuclear bombings were what the OP brought up, so I was just registering my opinion of those.
With the nukes in particular, there were a lot of other options, as they were announcing weapons that would completely change the balance of warfare.
I think a good first step would have been to find an uninhabited island and explicitly tell Japan through diplomatic channels, "We are going to destroy this island entirely with a new weapon we have developed. Please observe, and surrender afterwards if you do not want your military force to be annihilated by these means."
Then Japan would have had a strong reason to back down that didn't involve the US destroying entire cities and civilian population.
Why single out the only two instances of nuclear weapons being used in anger in the entire history of their existence? Why single out the single largest escalation in force in the world's history? Why single out the two largest single bombs ever deployed against an enemy?
Surely you aren't nearly so naive that you think these aren't significantly different from other bombings...
I don't understand the naivety involved in thinking that this matters to the people dying from the bombs.
I haven't personally died from a bomb, but I find it super hard to imagine a scenario where I would be happier if I died from a regular bomb vs a nuclear bomb.
More people died from the single bombing raid on tokyo than died from the nuclear weapon being dropped on hiroshima. Yes, people also died from radiation poisoning during the days and months following, but people also died from all sorts of injuries sustained from the "regular bombs", burns, smoke inhalation, etc.
Comparing which type of agonizing death is worse is rarely a useful way to spend time.
> Surely you aren't nearly so naive that you think these aren't significantly different from other bombings...
This is the point I want to make. It really wasn't that different. Yes, a city was destroyed in a single night. Over seventy other cities were destroyed in a single night in Japan alone during the year of 1945.
It's not about two bombings. Yes, the Tokyo bombing was a ghoulish war crime. Obviously.
But nukes as a weapon are fundamentally different. A single airplane can level a city. A single submarine can destroy a country. I'm sorry, but they are a Pandora's box that was opened and changed the course of the world afterwards.
The difference being that it cost a lot more to destroy those two Japanese cities alone than it did in total to destroy 72 other Japanese cities to the same degree.
Later on, that type of weapon became cheaper and several thousands were created and became the basis for a long window of relative peace.
Strictly speaking, the first city cost a whole lot of money, the second was basically free, through the magic of not amortizing the cost of R&D to win an online argument.
The argument is that nuclear bombs made destroying entire cities dirt cheap, and it's one of the big atrocities of history that they were used on a civilian population. "Terrorists have hidden a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan" is one of the unthinkable nightmare scenarios routinely portrayed in US films, and yet that's exactly what the US did to Hiroshima.
I'm looking back several hours here and not seeing where this is laid out.
I'm also curious as to why what the US did to Hiroshima is an unthinkable nightmare scenarios whereas what the US did to Tokyo is not (and nor is what the US did to 71 other cities in Japan also not that).
Tokyo was bombed by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) ..
The strikes conducted by the USAAF on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history.[1] Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.
to be fair a link from september 2014 (almost twelve years ago) about things that occurred in 1945 (almost (relatively) a century ago), in the brains of people that were not even alive yet, and even if they were, unable to process the events through anything like a remotely similar scope or in a contextually contemporaneous way, or even relatively approaching the neurological pathways that someone from that time would have used, is...
Wow yes the USA and friends could have just surrendered. Brilliant insight. Very clever. I'm sure everyone being tortured to death by the various Japanese military units would super appreciate that.
I think you need to educate yourself a bit here. Japan's surrender was inevitable, largely due to Russia pressing them. The war was ending whether those bombs dropped or not.
The other awkward detail was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked from a conventional HE & incendiary bombing targeting list; had they not been destroyed with the first atomic weapons then they would have been destroyed to the same degree by a wave of heavy bombers overnight, just as Tokyo and 71 other cities were.
This is the point I keep trying to make, like, I don't want to downplay, you know, literally being nuked, but I also don't want to downplay the results of 1000+ heavy bombers dropping thousands and thousands of tons of "regular bombs" on a city during a single night.
That's a famous myth. Among other things, russia didn't have a navy, or a strategic bombing force, so they essentially posed no threat to the actual island of japan.
You are correct in the sense that Japan was going to surrender at some point, whether that was due to conventional bombings, starvation from naval blockades or an actual invasion by the USA, there's no scenario where they don't sign an unconditional surrender.
Most of those scenarios would have killed more people than the two nuclear weapons being dropped.
> The argument is that nuclear bombs made destroying entire cities dirt cheap, and it's one of the big atrocities of history that they were used on a civilian population
The cost of causing death isn't the atrocity. The atrocity is the death happening. If "terrorists" somehow managed to create 1000+ b52s and drop 10,000 tons of "regular bombs" on manhattan, it would be just as atrocious as a nuclear weapon going off. Obviously the single nuke is a slightly more realistic threat, but that's not the point.
If you want to argue that anybody dying ever is an atrocity, that is one thing. If you want to argue any civilian dying during a war is an atrocity, that is a different thing and, among other things, would require you to define civilian in a useful way.
actually my comment was not really about how america waited to get involved in ww2, then finally did, back almost a hunded years ago (that is, this is not a veiled reference to some other time or place); it was about the USA's quest for "empire" which ramped up once "d-day" occurred.
America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
Middle powers should not be granting to America any goodwill whatsoever. There is nothing in it for them anymore, except irresponsible reliance on a bad faith actor.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509019