Not that I'm a fan of this administration, but inflating away remaining our only option is not related to Trump. It was the only choice for the past administrations since at least the subprime crisis; probably even since the Iraq war. My 2c.

> the right to accurate information from public officials, I thought that was indeed an absolute and basic right in a democracy

In many countries, both democratic and not, police can lie (e.g. to try to get a suspect make a mistake and expose some information).

In the USA the police can lie to you, but you can not lie back to them. To do that is a crime.

But even police in interrogation mode may not lie that will result in lead poisening.

Sure they can. Jails (run by the local police or sheriff) lie about the safety of the food they serve, the facilities they run, the outcomes of the policies they implement all the time.

Yes police can break the law, but they may not officially do so normally. At least not in my world.

I read the main objection as being with an airline exploring option to put a traveler on a no-fly list. Not due to anything related to security, but purely as a punishment for exploring compensation options. This, in my book, is VERY bad and and deserves public shaming of the airline, complaints to regulators, etc. etc.

Everything else IMO is just fine. The airline landed the plane safely, made some promises (including a single room), could not keep all of those promises, the passenger pushed for more compensation than what airline offered, etc. That happens thousands of times every day all over the world. But this does not remove the big black mark of exploring putting a passenger on a no-fly list. My 2c.

Read his comment again. He says he rejected the $100 and then started arguing and threatening to go to court. That's when they started exploring banning him from the airline.

> Read his comment again. He says he rejected the $100 and then started arguing and threatening to go to court.

Going to court is the standard, and usually the only, path for resolving disagreements that parties cannot easily resolve between themselves. Retaliating by putting the passenger on a no fly list deserves public shaming and pushback.

For example, a major grocery store can put people on a "do not come here again" list. But this is an easy way for a big business to hurt a person and should not be used for minor issues. I might see this "the business bans whoever it wants for any reason" as a legitimate defense, but not in a regulated business with high barrier to entry.

If the govvies (any govvies; there is nothing specific to EU here) drive that process of forking a large, powerful, universally used system you will end up with more surveillance, not less.

Because kids, because pornography, because terrorism, whatever. This is too powerful an option for control freaks to resist.

And this is why everyone gives up on doing anything while standing around complaining that no one does the right thing.

What is so pernicious about the EU approach is the enthusiasm and efficiency with which it stops anyone from doing anything, while simultaneously attempting to regulate what everyone else in the world can do. If they put even a small part of that energy into encouraging the right thing to happen they would be in such a better place it is insane.

Not really. They weren't saying if it existed in the EU it'd have to surveil. They were saying if the EU government created it it'd have to surveil.

Honestly your reading comprehension is not good today.

They said if the government “drive the process of forking” which could mean encourage a group of academics to do it, or a commercial consortium. It does not mean the EU government take on the task themselves. *

It is self evident from actual EU behaviour that any mobile os that gets to users will be legally required to be a surveillance disaster area, regardless of origin, and the only people that have prevented this already are evil US corporations.

* edit to add, the EU did encourage many technical efforts vital to the mobile phone industry at different times with a mix of funding, political support etc. The Arm people would tell you AMBA (a standard relating to SoC component integration) wouldn’t exist without this, and yet no one would classify this as “a creation of the EU” but very much enabled by them. For whatever reason since about 2005 their strategic ability in this area has not merely disappeared but become actively wrong.

If the EU government told a group of academics "hey, go make a phone" it wouldn't have mass surveillance. If it insisted on being closely involved in the process, then it would.

Do you think you would be allowed to sell such a phone to normal people in any serious quantity? (I know HN people get delusional about using laptops as mobile phones, but here is a hint: you wouldn’t. You would be hauled up for enabling distribution of CSAM etc until you stopped).

Look at how they treat Graphene, and that is an afternarket mod niche.

Yes, I do think you'd be allowed to sell a phone to normal people in serious quantity. The kerfuffle with Graphene was about whether or not they specifically targeted organised criminals, Anom-style. No charges were made - some idiot politician just assumed Graphene==Encrochat and made a public statement based on that.

You are factually wrong here almost completely.

Wrt Graohene the problem isn’t the politicians making announcements, the police assume you are a criminal if you have Graohene and are profiling you on this basis.

Okay? That doesn't mean it's illegal to sell the phones.

I'm not 100% sure about surveillance but you will definitely end up with the most milquetoast risk-averse bland corporate system ever, complete with 6 months of paperwork and KYC to get a certificate to sign any executable with your real name, so it will be allowed to run.

> There's now a gargantuan amount of documentation about their impact: - insane noise levels 24/7, you can hear them even at miles away

Can you share a link or two to this? Hearing a data center from miles away sounds suspicious.

The linked article claims that sound can be heard "hundreds of feet from the data center". That is a very short range.

As much as I doubt that spreading of the data centers is a good thing, noise is not the weapon to wield. Unless we are talking the center of a quaint town. And possibly not even then.

This. Linux is my primary OS for both work and home, but I have a Mac laptop for travel as the battery life of any Linux laptop I tried is very bad. And this includes a modern System 76, supposedly Linux-friendly with drivers, which drains the battery on fairly light workloads in about 2 hours. My 2c.

While the fully burdened cost of an engineer being double his salary sounds suspicious, this is indeed broadly the case. It has been (sometimes significantly) more than double in the case in every US employer where I worked and where I saw both numbers. In one case it was a hair under 3x.

My experience was not with pure software houses; we had some labs, measurement and RF equipment, but even without the hardware component the offices, insurance, admin expenses, HR, janitors, conference travel and so on would easily bump the total employee cost to double the salary. My 2c.

The fact that 1 in 4 white collar workers are not getting raises or promotions might not be a bad thing. As white collar workers get older they frequently stop optimizing for money and start optimizing for time, flexibility and other things and be totally OK with no promotions as the trade-off.

I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange. Even when those oldest folks are clearly past their prime and themselves admit so.

There are always exceptions. I worked with a fantastic colleague who was a highly knowledgeable technical expert and a capable PM, always punching above his weight at work. One day in a chance conversation with him I was shocked to hear that he wants to retire soon because, now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore. My jaw dropped -- I never paid attention to his age. But I suspect many folks in the last quarter of their productive life will be happy to slow down. My 2c.

> I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange.

Isn't the US significantly more meritocratic in this regard than other large economies? I.e. compared to Europe or Asia it would seem that Europe has much more rigid comp rules, Japan has formal mechanisms to ensure that older people are paid more. And this is a tech forum obviously where i.e. the right ML engineers are making 7 figures + right now in their late 20s.

On US being more meritocratic in tech -- completely agree. US tech space is very dynamic and very competitive which gives many younger folks a leg up.

But pure tech is a small part of all white collar jobs (the linked article references "white collar jobs", not "professionals" which the title substituded for it). And many non-tech white collar jobs are not nearly as meritocratic as those in the pure tech (I also agree that in Asia or Western Europe those jobs might be even less meritocratic, but this does not change the point above). My 2c.

> now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore

I'm going to be 70 in November, and I can't wait to retire ... hopefully in 6 months, but chances are I'll keep working until I'm put out to pasture by the company I'm currently working for.

Throwing code hasn't lost its appeal, and I'm still learning new stuff every day, but the landscape has changed too much for my tastes since the early 2010's.

Nowadays we're doing "devops" instead of actual programming, the cloud has become the new mainframe, web browsers are just thin clients, buy-once-use-forever is long gone and replaced by monthly rent-seeking services and forced updates, and the sixth (seventh? eighth?) iteration of spicy autocomplete (as in "You no longer have to know how to write code!") is pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I started writing code in the early 70's, and became a paid developer in 1975. I still love programming, but I'm completely fed up with everything else that has ruined the experience in the past 10 to 15 years. I'm sure I'll still be throwing code after I retire, but it will be for my own enjoyment, and it won't be using any of the latest fads and dead ends (pretty sure we're on the eighth iteration) from the past couple of years.

> So just give up because something is hard?

No, but a good first step would be to widely acknowledge that the problem is hard. And thus is not solvable by a quick fix of a type "let's ban <something>". Otherwise we will keep trying quick fixes and local optimizations that will be just as quickly subverted by the deep pocketed incumbents.