But in China, the CCP literally determines which candidates can run for office. The TN GOP does not determine whether Democratic candidates can even run.
Interesting. I had been interpreting "it's too dangerous; make us slow down" as hype to get more investment and/or customers. "We don't have the money to build out" is an interesting alternate interpretation.
Both are reasonable, but the recent hype around all the cyberattacks seems far more aggressive and specifically them arguing that they need to slow down for safety sounds very suspiciously like trying to come up with a reason for slowing progress.
I see it as "make regulation that will throttle our competition (especially foreign one)" mixed with "look at us, our AI so advanced" pre-IPO advertising
It's easier to pay back the loans if they don't spend the money in the first place. This sounds like they can't spend the money, so paying it back should be easy, not hard.
A reasonably-written contract would have weasel words in it - something like "subject to zoning approval, and approval of the needed power and water and etcetera". Oracle has very expensive lawyers; they should have had those clauses in there.
Still, you write those for the known possible obstacles. Having the state government change the ground rules may not have been one of your known possibles. So, yeah, I could see force majeure being at least possibly reasonable.
> I managed to convince my parents to get AOL when I was 12. I made a Geocities site at 14.
> they get to feel creative for possibly the first time ever.
They're experiencing what you experienced at 14. And, no offense, your Geocities site that you made at 14 was probably not very good.
Now, there is still a difference, because people had to deliberately go to your site, and what this guy is doing is more like polluting a commons. That is a problem. AI makes it much more of a problem, because it becomes much easier to spew lies (or just slop).
I think what's going to happen is that we're going to develop better slop senses (eventually). There will be a return of gatekeepers, because keeping slop and lies out will be more valuable than letting new things in.
> They're experiencing what you experienced at 14. And, no offense, your Geocities site that you made at 14 was probably not very good.
Disagree. Not about the site being not very good part, that much was obvious. What I disagree about is that they're experiencing what I did. I think the equivalent would be someone who's never programmed anything, making it through their first 3 weeks of coding bootcamp and seeing something they made appearing in their web browser for the first time.
Privately-owned companies would become worth less. The value can't be high enough that the income stream is more than the taxes on the value. (That's a change because, at zero interest rates, a steady income stream is worth a lot. But we're leaving that era, so the future value of a steady income stream is going down anyway.)
> And why do these other topics never result in substantive engagement?
US politics has become so polarized, so trench-warfare-without-ever-giving-a-single-INCH-of-ground, that few people will actually listen to a point by the other side, no matter how valid. They will instead argue to the ends of the earth that the other side does not actually have a point, they have never had a point, on any subject, ever.
This leads to lousy conversations - both sides shouting at each other, and nobody listening.
Around the start of Trump's second term, HN reduced the degree to which politics was considered off topic. I think that's made HN more political, more shouty, less having actual conversations. And I think it has hurt the character of the site, and the community around it.
> Around the start of Trump's second term, HN reduced the degree to which politics was considered off topic.
That is inaccurate. The standard has remained the same ever since pg changed the name of this site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News", and its focus to intellectual curiosity, coming up on 20 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. You can see there the original language: most stories about politics are off topic (note that the word is "most", not "all"), which is still in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Arguments about HN having gotten-too-political go back many years, long before the time you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that there are swings and fluctuations, some of which last for quite a while and give the misimpression that the site has permanently changed. Such swings are inevitable—they are caused by macro trends, which HN is not immune to: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
The other is that when people see a series of threads they don't like, or even a single thread they don't like—for example because it offends them politically—they rush to overgeneralize. This applies to all of us and has to do with how our emotions affect our perceptions and thinking.
The one exception to all this was when we tried a "no-politics week" as an experiment back in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. That experiment failed quickly—its actual effect was to make HN more politicized, so we canceled it after a couple days (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), and reverted to the original tried-and-true (albeit unsatisfactory, in the sense that no one is really satisfied by it—there's something for everyone to dislike) standard.
At first I thought this experiment was what you were referencing, since to this day there are people who occasionally get confused by the fact that we briefly tried it. But when I read more closely I see that you were talking about 8 years later!
I seem to recall, at the time of the start of Trump's second term, some posts that were purely politics, and people flagging them as off topic, and you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics.
Now that you mention it, I remember the "no politics" week, and it's possible that I'm conflating the end of that experiment and "allowing more politics" and getting the time messed up. But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?
> But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?
Yes in the sense that we didn't change HN's standard or moderate differently. But of course there was a surge of that sort of content - this is what I mean by "macro trends" above.
> you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics
I don't think so! but if you can track down any post that sounded like that, it would be interesting to take a look.
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