Roughly half of the country, give or take.

Roughly 40% supports Trump, but they are often quite loud about putting other things above the rule of law.

Not sure why you think roughly 50% give him the benefit of the doubt on dedication to the rule of law.

“Registered voters” is not the same group as “people”.

Winning by 5% (even assuming no third party votes) is 52.5% (with 47.5% for the opponent) not 55%, if there are any third-party votes, that gets even lower.

A piece written in March 2025 discussing a hypothetical for the November 2024 election is not describing the state of the world in October 2025.

Unless the 40% number in your previous post was from October 2025, that's plainly moving the goalposts. And registered voters are the only people who matter since anyone else can't cast a ballot.

Beyond that, the August 2025 (since October's aren't available yet) poll numbers don't seem that much better. That the Democratic Party approval is neck and neck with the Republicans despite the Republicans' blatant corruption and incompetence speaks volumes about how unpopular the Democratic Party is. They need to reform drastically before the midterms next year.

> registered voters are the only people who matter

This right here is moving the goalposts.

*Roughly 40% of the country, give or take. Don't be complacent.

A civil suit is exactly the government sticking their dick in the problem. You're having a government employee (the judge) either decide the case themselves in a government building at taxpayer expense, or impanel a jury in a government building at taxpayer expense. Either way you're going to be using laws and rules of civil procedure decided upon by the government in order to try the case. Then the trial hands down a verdict that the government has the ability to enforce through seizure of things of value or by curtailing a person's rights.

There are plenty of 150-year-old laws that we don't ignore, too.

I went to Iceland for a trip in very late December. It's decidedly not green in winter.

Tomorrow is going to be the first snowy day in Reykjavik this year.

Honestly, I almost wish there was a push to get Apple to be more open on their OS code instead of trying to get Linux to support Apple Silicon. MacOS is a BSD of sorts, after all.

While it'd be nice to be able to run Linux on my M2 MBP someday when Apple stops supporting it, ultimately, the reason many (but not all) power users buy Macs is because they want the UNIX/UNIX-like work done for them and for it to run on fast hardware. If I want something more customizable, I'm barking up the wrong hardware tree.

Does that solve the question of "what do I do with this Mac that no longer gets updates?"? No, but most people either list theirs for sale to someone who isn't as bothered by that, or trade it in at an Apple Store for credit towards the new shiny.

Not happening—at least not under the current leadership— apple is not in it from the tech side, they're a design company, they make appliances not computers. Your macbook is like a fridge with certain restricted interfaces. The mindset and tradition is different from purely unix hacking, despite the userbase having an overlap. If you can convince your fridge manufacturer to be more open with their code in a competitive market, then maybe you can convince apple with similar sort of reasoning, probably involving some benefit in terms of profit.

There really aren't that many companies that respect users and support Linux well that need this sort of work done on them.

Then again, the hardware that those companies release isn't quite as good as Apple Silicon, IMHO.

Video games shouldn't have economies.

Unless it's MMOs, then those having economies is unavoidable.

I think the previous commenter meant real-life economies, not in-game ones so much. Although with any MMO or any multiplayer game with trading for that matter, there will be a grey market of trading items, gold, or characters for real money, and a bot market to go with it.

> IMO it’s no wonder companies keep getting hacked when doing the right thing is made so painful and the rewards are so meagre.

Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes.

We really need to make security liabilities to be just that: liabilities. If you are running 20+ year-old code, and you get hacked, you need to be fined in a way that will make you reconsider security as a priority.

Also, you need to be liable for all of the disruption that the security breach caused for customers. No, free credit monitoring does not count as recompense.

I love this idea, but I feel like it just devolves into ways to classify that 'specific exploit' is/isn't technically a 0-day, so they can/can't be held liable

Why?

Why is it inherently desirable that society penalize companies that get hacked above and beyond people choosing not to use their services, or selling off their shares, etc?

Because they were placed in a position of trust and failed. Typically, the failure stems from a lack of willingness to expend the resources necessary to prevent the failure.

It'd be one thing if these were isolated incidents, but they're not.

Furthermore, the methods you mention simply aren't effective. Our economy is now so consolidated that many markets only have a handful of participants offering goods or services, and these players often all have data and computer security issues. As for divestiture, most people don't own shares, and those who do typically don't know they own shares of a specific company. Most shareholders in the US are retirement or pension funds, and they are run by people who would rather make it impossible for the average person to bring real consequences to their holdings for data breaches, than cause the company to spend money on fixing the issues that allow for the breaches to begin with. After all, it's "cheaper".

I feel like this kind of justification comes up every time this topic is on HN: that the reason companies aren't being organically penalized for bad IT/infosec/privacy behavior is because the average person doesn't have leverage or alternatives.

It's never made sense to me.

I can see that being true in specific instances: many people in the US don't have great mobility for residential ISPs, or utility companies. And there's large network effects for social media platforms. But if any significant plurality of users cared about the impact of service breaches, or bad privacy policies, surely we'd see the impact somewhere in the market? We do in some related areas: Apple puts a ton of money into marketing about keeping people's data and messages private. WhatsApp does the same. But there are so many companies out there, lots of them have garbage security practices, lots of them get compromised, and I'm struggling to remember any example of a consumer company that had a breach and saw any significant impact.

To pick an example: in 2014 Home Depot had a breach of payment data. Basically everywhere that has Home Depots also has Lowes and other options that sell the same stuff. In most places, if you're pissed at Home Depot for losing your card information, you can literally drive across the street to Lowes. But it doesn't seem like that happened.

Is it possible that outside of tech circles where we care about The Principle Of The Thing, the market is actually correct in its assessment of the value for the average consumer business of putting more money into security?

People give up on getting companies to be good actors because ultimately they're just a single person with a job and maybe a small savings account, looking at suing a company with absolutely no guarantee of ever recovering a cent on all of the trouble that their lax security policies cost them. Oh, and litigation is a rich man's sport.

> To pick an example: in 2014 Home Depot had a breach of payment data. Basically everywhere that has Home Depots also has Lowes and other options that sell the same stuff. In most places, if you're pissed at Home Depot for losing your card information, you can literally drive across the street to Lowes. But it doesn't seem like that happened.

No one considers these things when they're buying plumbing tape. Really, you shouldn't have to consider that. You should be able to do commerce without having to wonder if some guy on the other side of the transaction is going to get his yearly bonus by cutting the necessary resources to keep you from having to deal with identity theft.

> Is it possible that outside of tech circles where we care about The Principle Of The Thing, the market is actually correct in its assessment of the value for the average consumer business of putting more money into security?

Let's try with a company that has your data and see how correct "the market" is. Principles are the things you build a functioning society upon, not quarterly returns.

> Let's try with a company that has your data and see how correct "the market" is.

What do you mean? Tons of companies with my data have been breached.

I think it's more simple in the Home Depot example. Even if you care about the breach what are you gonna do? Home Depot got hacked so they'll now probably get some more security staff. Funding for the quarter is secured. Lowes has not been hacked. Does that mean they won't be hacked? Not really... For cheap smart home shit it doesn't even matter since the company will go bankrupt and change hands 3 times in the next 5 years and again, they are all garbage. Either they'll get hacked or they'll sell your data anyway.

Plenty of my normie friends don't want new cars for example due to all the tracking and subscription garbage, but realistically, what can you do when the old ones slowly get outlawed/impossible to maintain due to part shortages.

It wouldn't surprise me if Google's plans to force developer verification on Android is, in part, a response to applications like the one that kept track of ICE. The government would like to go after people who are creating tools that make their lives harder, and to do that, they need names.

> Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust.

It's never just Teams or SharePoint or a wiki. It's almost always some abomination created by putting various bits of knowledge on all three. Also, corporate wikis suck because how your team classifies data is almost invariably different from how someone else wants to see it.

SharePoint, for all of its flaws, typically gets used by the major announcement-and-policy makers at a company, because they just want to use MS stuff (primarily out of ignorance of alternatives), so at least it's somewhat coherent for everyone in the company.