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Time for Japanese laws - like the Act Against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations: https://boingboing.net/2026/04/08/japans-truth-in-packaging-...


Zuckerberg: They "trust me"

Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg



Technical solutions are insufficient for such disregard, the company needs to be sued out of existence, and laws made to prohibit and punish such behavior


It's ironic that the US might currently do better with a (constitutional monarchy) king, to serve as an ethical example of living and governance, and change the role of the president to more of a serving bureaucrat


In the UK we've been lucky with our royalty recently, but with a different roll of the genetic dice we'd have Randy Andy as king instead of Charles.

Anyway, you have kings, you just elect them and call the presidents, but they have basically the same political role and powers as George III did in the 1790s cut-and-pasted across. The USA needs to get itself a decent parliamentary system.


> decent parliamentary system.

Isn't that an oxymoron? Parliaments have their democratic shortcomings compared to powerful presidents. And vice-versa. Nations with parliamentary rule are plagued by having heads of state and ministers which weren't in any way, shape, or form elected by the population. A president is at least a democratically elected ruler to represent the people.


Parliaments are democratically elected to represent the people, and every member of parliament is equal before it. The UK prime minister is answerable to the people via parliament at all times, must face questions from MPs regularly, and can lose power from a majority vote at any time. We can all see that the impeachment process in the USA is fatally flawed, it just can’t function as intended.

The kind of powers Kinge George III had and exercised in the 1780s and 90s were a quirky historical accident of a constitutional system in flux. Freezing that structure in place in the US, even with a democratic mandate and other admitted improvement, is another historical accident.

Who today would look to Britain in 1790 as a template for constructing a modern constitution?


Yes, I think everybody here knows how a parliamentary system works.

But the head of state selected by parliament is not elected by the people. A president is.


Parliamentary democracy has a far better track record than presidential systems. Basically all presidential democracies are shit have had had huge problems, except maybe the USA, which is of course no longer even really a western country any more.


> Parliamentary democracy has a far better track record than presidential systems.

Yes, if you make an exception for Germany.


Even if you don't make an exception for Germany. Nobody is claiming parliamentary systems are completely immune to instability or overthrow, or moral hazard, and the holocaust didn't occur under a parliamentary system. Presidential systems invest too much power in one person, and that's a severe risk of overconcentration.


I'd argue almost the opposite: America's governing system (and the political culture of rejecting hereditary rule) is a big part of why it became so successful.

There's arguably a straight line from the Commonwealth's greater deference to inherited authority to today's tolerance of weak borders, stagnant growth, and declining economic mobility. A king seems like more of the thing that caused the problem, not the solution.


Look at all the presidential systems in the rest of the Americas, they're all mega fucked and third world. Of course the USA Empire is also currently collapsing.

Parliamentary democracy has a better track record, for sure.


Have you read John Steinbeck's "The Short Reign of Pippin IV?" [0] All political sides in France frustrated decide to create a constitutional monarchy. The Communists supported the idea because it would give everyone something to revolt against.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Reign_of_Pippin_IV


Closed source software could apply too, if the execution model supports it (e.g. WebAssembly). Just because the format is binary and "unreadable", its permissions (accessible functions) don't have to be


That's why languages need sandboxing at runtime as well


Yes, or the compile time equivalents. Rust’s safety gets you most of the way there. We just need a capability model in the language, a more limited std and a way to ban untrusted 3rd party libraries from using unsafe code without explicit permission. I dream of a world where a function with the signature of add(u32, u32) -> u32 can’t burn my house down and steal my wife.

Functions should only have access to their arguments. Nothing more. We need to end ambient authority.


You have just reinvented "Safe Haskell" from 2012.

It guarantees that pure functions are pure.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/safe-ha...

https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/latest/docs/users_guide/ex...


Oooh I didn't know that was a thing!

Yes, I want this but in a fast, compiled systems language like rust.


Haskell is a fast, compiled systems language like Rust (or rather, Rust is like Haskell).


Are you sure about that? My understanding is that Haskell programs generally run much more slowly than their C counterparts because of all of Haskell’s magic. Like lazy evaluation and memoisation and however Haskell manages memory.

Rust certainly borrows from Haskell. Like all good languages. But I’m not aware of Haskell beating rust in program performance & memory usage benchmarks.

SeL4 was first written in Haskell and proven correct in Haskell. Then, with a great many years of effort, ported to C and proven correct there. If Haskell were a viable systems language, I suspect the kernel would not have been converted to C.


Yes, I'm sure about that. I said that it is a systems language, not that it is as fast as C! I don't mind if your terminology excludes Haskell from being a systems language, as long as it also excludes Go. They are both managed, garbage collected, fast languages.

> Like lazy evaluation and memoisation

Yes, that causes performance impact. If you don't want the performance impact then don't write code that uses those behaviors. Sure, that rules out large parts of the ecosystem, but I said Haskell was a systems language not that its ecosystem was generally suitable for systems programming.

> however Haskell manages memory

No, Haskell's memory manager is world class, with two (at least) tunable garbage collectors.

> But I’m not aware of Haskell beating rust in program performance & memory usage benchmarks

Nor am I!

> If Haskell were a viable systems language, I suspect the kernel would not have been converted to C.

I suspect they converted it to C because you can't write a kernel in a managed language with a garbage collector.


It's incredibly brainless and disrespectful


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