P.S.: I've participated in a lot of political discussion on HN - topics including anti-trust, surveillance, patents and copyright, worker's rights, corporate corruption of science, law-enforcement overreach, etc. - and only immigration got me a warning and a ban. Perhaps you could lighten your mod load by updating the guidelines :)
> some fear it could spur wave of highly expensive drugs
While I absolutely believe pharma companies price-gouge to the best of their abilities (charge what desperate people are willing to pay, not what is required to recoup the investment), I don't see how this drug makes it any worse. Besides, it's new, and may yet come down in price.
Why not wait till we're (more) certain? What's the worst that could happen? Catastrophic, runaway climate-change? I say we risk it - at least the science will have been settled...
"orthogonal: Of two or more problems or subjects, independent of [..] each other."
..I guess you're right. I understood orthogonal a bit too mathematically, and since the 'dot product' of both concepts with election results is non-zero... and concepts cannot have negative dot-products (???)... well, that's where I realized I was holding the analogy wrong.
Data-gathering companies can and do co-operate, or someone wanting to learn something can just buy the data from several of them - price per bit of data should be the same. So breaking them up isn't really a solution to this problem.
As for why monopolies aren't getting broken up, I'd say a combination of increased corporate control of government, and global trade necessitating ever larger companies to compete, because tariffs are 'evil'.
> claiming that thanks to cryptography the world of intelligence was “going dark”. Quite the opposite was true [...] Twenty years ago it cost over a thousand pounds a day to follow a suspect around, and weeks of work to map his contacts; Ed Snowden told us how nowadays an officer can get your location history with one click and your address book with another. In fact, searches through the contact patterns of whole populations are now routine.
Funny how the massively increased surveillance never prompted cops and spy agencies to ask for more limited powers, but the smallest hint of encryption has them crying for even more invasive powers.
No 100% accurate license-plate reader exists - and that includes human eyesight. Showing license identification confidence levels, as the author's code does, is far better at dissuading the cops from over-reliance on the tool, than pretending no mistakes will ever be made.
Imagine if some non-US government voided Intel and AMD's patents as a self-defence measure against these probably-backdoored 'features'. Why should they protect the profits of hostile corporations?
History was not the argument - it was to illustrate that what you consider far right has been and is common.
> we live in a global market,
Treating local businesses preferentially does not mean abolishing international trade. Just look at China, or US agricultural subsidies, or tariffs, or countless other examples.
> Immigrants help Countries they move to
Countries, perhaps, but what about the local people? Don't they compete for the same jobs, driving down wages? Vote and take advantage of common resources (drinking water, arable land, existing infrastructure, etc.), reducing the political and economic capital of the locals? Encourage policies for more immigration, instead of policies that would encourage parenthood? Won't immigrants look out for their own interests more than for those of the local population?
Let me rephrase that last question - is racism real?
> Immigrants [...] are the only reason why the US does not have an aging population
It's a sick society indeed that can't even sustain its own population. And instead of improving itself, it makes up the shortfall with immigration. Do you really believe immigration is the only way to sustain population levels? Why can other countries manage without?
Is that what pointing out taboo facts is?
P.S.: I've participated in a lot of political discussion on HN - topics including anti-trust, surveillance, patents and copyright, worker's rights, corporate corruption of science, law-enforcement overreach, etc. - and only immigration got me a warning and a ban. Perhaps you could lighten your mod load by updating the guidelines :)