otrahuevada (u/otrahuevada)

otrahuevada commented on Early ‘lab-grown’ Covid virus found in sample lends weight to Wuhan theory telegraph.co.uk/news/2022... · Posted by u/forthelose

dang · 4 years ago

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

Sorry for being this direct, I know it can be viewed as impolite but please bear with me for a second.

If you want curious conversations to occur, then please consider forcing downvotes to prompt a conversation by having to respond instead of perpetuating a situation where jingoism runs rampant and simple innocuous expressions of actual genuine curiosity get taken down for no real reason other than said jingoism then.

What you get otherwise is merely the appearance of a conversation, based around the 4 or so responses the invisible minority that as far as anyone knows astroturfed itself into your good graces can tolerate. This, coincidentally, is pretty much what you see on most topics here that are not strictly about some tech or another.

otrahuevada commented on People don't want to run their own bank shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/02/... · Posted by u/M2Ys4U

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

Once upon a time I became convinced I wanted to create the first 100% virtual bank of my country.

Not having the faintest idea of how to do such a thing I set out to at least collect a roadmap of the paperwork needed to do that, so I could glean some knowledge in the process.

Ended up consulting with a lawyer and gathering a grand total of 1700 distinct bits of paperwork I needed to fill and complete as a random person. Every one of those things would have to be accompanied by documentation, most of which had to be presented in person at least back then. Would have taken me about 5 years if I managed to file a paper a day every day. To this day I still have no idea how on earth do banks just pop up one day.

otrahuevada commented on · Posted by u/vhsdev

rbut · 4 years ago

Which is pretty much every current OS and device except Windows, but yes. Microsoft holding us back again.

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

No font in Google fonts does, for instance. At least from their own little demonstrator. There is https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji Noto Emoji which can render the flags but you need to build it yourself

otrahuevada commented on Nvidia prepares to abandon $40B Arm bid bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pseudolus

skissane · 4 years ago

I'm not in the US, I'm in Australia. My wife & I, we own a house. If you trace back the legal chain of title, eventually it originates in a land grant issued by the colonial Governor of New South Wales in the name of the British monarch – and the British monarch's claim of ownership is based on Captain James Cook claiming the east coast of Australia in 1770 in the name of King George III. But, it wasn't unoccupied land – the indigenous peoples lived here, and they saw the land as theirs. In some other places (such as New Zealand or parts of North America), the British negotiated treaties with the indigenous inhabitants to acquire land from them – the fairness of those treaties is often contested, and the British having acquired the land often ignored and violated the other provisions of the treaty – but, in Australia, there were never any treaties with the indigenous peoples, the British saw them as too uncivilised for that, the British Empire just moved in and took over. So, if legal title based on theft is invalid, and our own legal title ultimately originates in the British Empire's theft of land from the indigenous – does it follow that my wife & I don't actually own this house (or at least not the land it is built on), even though we've paid several hundred thousand dollars for it?

Wherever you are in South America, isn't it the same story? The Europeans (the Spanish or Portuguese or whoever) moved in, stole the land from the indigenous peoples, then divided it up and gave or sold it to European colonists, and it has been on-sold and repeatedly subdivided since – so if land titles founded on theft are invalid, land titles where you are must be just as invalid as those over here.

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

Different legal systems codify different mores differently.

In Argentina and Chile, mapuche people to this day continue to legally challenge the ownership of land that they claim is theirs even after hundreds of years of having lost it to the genocide of their people -and dozens of others- as part of the creation of our nations.

In Uruguay, where I now live, this is very rarely still the case, mostly because the people who would have a right to challenge those lands ownership were very thoroughly murdered and their descendents have long been stripped of that right.

We're just not ok with brutalizing people as a business strategy. Like I said, it's a cultural thing.

otrahuevada commented on Nvidia prepares to abandon $40B Arm bid bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pseudolus

skissane · 4 years ago

No doubt some treaties are bad treaties, in that they make the world a worse place. But whether a treaty is good or bad and whether it is legally valid or invalid are two separate questions.

The problem with "questioning transactions" is that if you happen to own any real estate, almost certainly it is land which was stolen from somebody at some point (from indigenous people, or by some invading army, or by some greedy feudal warlord, or whatever). You want to open that can of worms for other people, but do you want to open it for yourself?

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

Oh my. I just looked, and it turns out in the US there is apparently no such thing as voiding a sale due to it being forced, only 'fraud' understood as misrepresenting the value of the property or the origins of the money haha

So, here's the issue. In other countries, especially over here in South America, this kinds of transactions are heavily frowned upon, and criminal acts resulting in a sale are regularly cited as reasons for voiding some sale or another. This is a bit of a worldview issue, we're not used to thinking about inflicting misery on others as a legit business strategy.

otrahuevada commented on In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist nytimes.com/2022/01/24/sc... · Posted by u/bobbiechen

refurb · 4 years ago

Agreed. It seems like the details matter here.

Were the affiliations suspect but not reportable?

Or were the affiliations unremarkable and not reportable but prosecutors screwed up?

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

According to the article the State discovered, way late, that the kind of ties he had with China were not of the kind they assumed guilt of and heavily publicized when they went to destroy his professional life, but instead of the kind people have when they are born elsewhere.

When they did find out about this, they instead tried to make him admit to some other non criminal kind of ties to justify their ruining of his life, and when that failed they simply bailed out.

It's heartbreaking.

otrahuevada commented on Nvidia prepares to abandon $40B Arm bid bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pseudolus

skissane · 4 years ago

> The validity of treaties signed under duress on the other hand I think really deserves some questioning.

Historically, a huge number of treaties have been signed under some degree of duress – most peace treaties are only made when one side is clearly winning, but extracting concessions (however painful) from the losing side is more in the winning side's interests than the risk and expense (in blood and treasure) of continuing the war to a complete military victory.

If one took seriously the idea that treaties signed under duress are invalid, the national borders of Europe and North America (among other places) would have to be very different.

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

They aren't Automatically Awesome Tools Of Civility either.

An entire world war was fought as a direct consequence of one said peace treaty. Nazis wouldn't have been able to gather that much support if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't been specifically designed to aggravate the germans.

If torturing you into selling your assets makes the transaction worth questioning, why would we not question it when whole countries do this to each other?

otrahuevada commented on Nvidia prepares to abandon $40B Arm bid bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pseudolus

mc32 · 4 years ago

Perhaps you should remind China of this as they exercise their economic power with their 1B1R policies[1] in the Indian Ocean basin.

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepening-debt-crisis-in-sri-la...

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

Unless they have like a country-wide e-mail address or some kind of HN-exclusive PA system, I don't think this figure of speech really means much other than a childish retort that does not really further dialogue.

The validity of treaties signed under duress on the other hand I think really deserves some questioning.