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Saddam Hussein did quite a bit more then just “challenge the bully”…

I suppose genocide of the Kurds is acceptable on the internet as long as your suitably anti-American while you do it. Those darn American imperialists!


The US is perfectly fine with Kurdish genocide as long as it's Turkey doing it.


The US was also fine with Iraq doing it.

When Iraq gassed a Kurdish village in 1988, the US actually blocked condemnation of Iraq in the UN Security Council and tried to redirect blame towards Iran.

The US only started making a big deal of Iraq's attacks on the Kurds years later, when Iraq had gone from being an ally to an enemy.


[flagged]


> I also checked your account and it's nothing but right wing propaganda. Damn, dude

That’s odd, as I generally vote Democrat and the only post here I’ve submitted is to a math blog post I enjoy.

At any rate, let’s try to avoid having this website turn into yet another Reddit or Twitter in terms of quality of comments and obsession about anything seen as not left leaning enough.

I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree about the merits of Saddam Hussein, here. Have a good weekend.


It does look like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. Please don't. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of their ideology, because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

More explanation on the "primarily for ideological battle" point can be found in past comments here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...


> let’s try to avoid having this website turn into yet another Reddit or Twitter in terms of quality of comments and obsession about anything seen as not left leaning enough

+1


> I also checked your account and it's nothing but right wing propaganda. Damn, dude

This has to be a difficult way to operate on a daily basis. Even if your charge were true (it's not) why are you so quick to draw this card?


Because dealing with bad faith arguments constantly gets tiring.


[flagged]


Mods never touched that comment or even saw it. Users flagged it.

It might be a good idea to read the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.


>>Almost 99% is attacking liberals, leftists, and the EU. Literally.

I see 26 posts in FreqSep's comment history. I see posts about relatively non-political topics like iPads, IoT, vaping, and surge pricing among those 26 posts.

I think you need to show your math. You might have misplaced a decimal point somewhere or something.


The first page of history totally supports the argument, though. Unless we are shown different results which I doubt


Well that’s just not true. And a webpage of “European Alternatives” that 99.99% of Europeans have never heard of, much less come even remotely close to adopting, means nothing.


Does America “represent the world”? No.

Does America represent the national security strategy of essentially all of Europe, most non-Chinese nations in Asia, and much of South America?

Absolutely, and to pretend otherwise is to be dreaming.

If you’re not in one of those areas then you are correct that your adversary is not our adversary. But it’s pretty statistically likely you are, and in that case the two are linked.

You’re welcome to return the trillions spent on your defense, of course, and set up your own naval strategy and naval supply chains to defend your trade routes.


> Yes western governments are totally full of shit too, the proof of this is that Julian Assange is still being crucified for leaking information, for being a whistle blower.

That’s just not true. Many leakers and whistle blowers aren’t prosecuted every year.

Julian Assange is a pretty transparent Russian asset and has been for a number of years. There’s a reason he never leaks anything that is negative of Putin. Meanwhile if it’s anti-American he leaks it in full without taking any standard journalist precautions.

Of course he can pull the “I’m just a journalist bro” card, but the act is over and his time is up.


> Meanwhile if it’s anti-American he leaks it in full without taking any standard journalist precautions.

If it's true, what does saying it's anti-American mean? Would you rather be in the dark about shady shit your government is doing?

It's entirely possible that he just has better access to US sources than Russian ones.


> If it's true, what does saying it's anti-American mean? Would you rather be in the dark about shady shit your government is doing?

Sure, as long as it’s accompanied by safe journalist practices (which it isn’t) and also calls out the shady shit of other, opposed, countries (which (which it doesn’t).

> It’s entirely possible that he just has better access to US sources than Russian ones.

That’s fine and possible, but even if that wasn’t the case - and he had access to Russian leaks but didn’t leak them - this is still exactly what he would say.

And it’s possible both are true - that he’s simply releasing what is given to him, and the Russian state saw this and took the opportunity to feed him information as a result. At that point, after he has continually irresponsibly released covert information from a hostile state, how is he any different in practice than an intentional hostile actor?


> we should toss out the Bill of Rights anytime it seems inconvenient to our short-term ends

We already do this. You have the right to bear arms - just not nuclear ones.

America has always had to place reasonable restrictions on rights to ensure the public good.


What makes leftist parties unviable is the majority of the population disapproving of socialism.

People online vastly overestimate the actual effect of money on political results, naturally disregarding all the donations made to candidates that lose and ignoring races where the lesser funded candidates win.

If Americans wanted a leftist government, they’d vote for it, simple as that. And yet even in the most left leaning states and cities in the nation , leftist principles have failed to gain much electoral ground.


This is correct and supported by statistical findings within Political Science.


Well, the notices were over a year.

Amazon has massive weekly turnover numbers so the real number of employees over that full year is likely well in excess of 5,000, putting it at least at 1.something per.

Then consider it’s almost certain a small number of employees rack up most of the notices, and I can see this happening.


The real question is, are there any examples of companies achieving what Amazon is achieving at its scale, *without* employing these techniques? And if so what are they doing differently?


I think the closest you’ll get is Costco, but obviously their distribution model isn’t super comparable. (They do have some similarities though, especially in how they make a lot of their profit from a yearly subscription)


That’s not the the real question. The real question is “what is the maximum amount of productivity that our culture will accept beyond which it considers the burden inhumane?”

For example, in antiquity, slavery was acceptable.


Even more recently, Taylorism. I mean, yeah, it's good for robots but not for people.

When people design systems they should consider the humanity of such systems despite the issue of people knowingly and maliciously short-circuiting things.


What do you want to achieve? Inhumane world for the sake of tiny productivity gain?


Even if the answer is a clear "no" that doesn't make this case acceptable.


I was going to say hopefully EU regulators back off some of the insane Taxi regulations that require you to have 100,000€ or more to…drive people around


Taxi companies are basically legalized mafias everywhere in the world.


If any industry deserved to be disrupted it was theirs.


Check New York City's taxi medallions...


NYC’s medallions did have a primary purpose; to control traffic.

Manhattan is tiny and taxis represent an outsize amount of traffic since they don’t park most of the day like a commuter car. Uber’s proliferation was associated with a general decline in traffic speeds.


But increasing throughput. Given how shitty US public transport is in general, maybe that's the right tradeoff. New York is one of the best, but still shitty by EU standards.


> New York is one of the best, but still shitty by EU standards.

If we're talking about concrete things like throughput, the MTA is one of only a few systems with round-the-clock operation, and I don't think anywhere else matches its scale and reach.

The filth of the stations are a legitimate complaint...but given that my primary interest is my transit system moving me from place to place, I'd take it over the majority of EU systems in a heartbeat.


The system is great, when all services are in good condition.

This is fairly rare, particularly on weekends or nights.


I just recently visited NYC for a week after a few years away. Got in mid-week and was taking the subway around during the day, and thought wow it's really made huge improvements in reliability recently. Trains were all coming quickly and all lines were running. Then the weekend came around and half the lines were being re-routed and waits were much longer with lots of announced delays.

The city does a good job, especially by US standards, of making public transit a reliable, affordable way for people to go to and from work. But as far as getting around in day to day life outside of rush hour it is much worse and there's still a big need for Taxis or Uber. And I think with the increase in remote work recently this is more of an issue now than ever.

I do have to say I'm impressed by the Apple pay/NFC payment rollout though. No more flimsy Metrocards to worry about swiping and refilling is a nice improvement.


In effect this is indentured servitude. Most people are not aware how common paying to be allowed to start a business is in Europe. For instance, I was told by a restaurant owner in Rome that you have to pay 500,000 euros to the landowning catholic church to open a tiny restaurant storefront there. This is structured as a loan.


How do you propose dispensing a limited number of drivers to a larger number of customers? There are really only two solutions: get more drivers or get fewer customers.

Surge pricing can incentivize more drivers to come online. I don’t see how you can reduce the customers in a short timeframe.


Drivers don't materialize out of thin air in a short time period.


Surge pricing also reduces your number of customers in that moment.


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