Remember, he’s ending mail-in ballots…
Which is good, as that is easier to fraud/tamper with. If you can’t be arsed to move your pistruie to a voting section come Election Day then you shouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway.
Readit Newspaganel commented on Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States post.japanpost.jp/int/inf... · Posted by u/Kye
paganel commented on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network? · Posted by u/mbix77
That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no.
It actually makes sense to have a paid service that makes this abomination less painful. Though they work with VFS Global for collecting the applications and relevant documents, the VFS Global itself is an abomination and doesn't help with the handling of the form filling anyway.
Recently EU streamlined the Schengen visa application process for Turkish citizens as those "visa agencies" that are the official agencies and the only way to apply for a visa for many countries don't actually help with anything and are scamming people by selling the "good hours" for the visa appointment on the black market. An agency was dropped for this and the scams by agencies were listed among the reasons to streamline the application process.
Both with US and EU people are losing scholarships etc. due to outrageous wait times that are sometimes are years ahead or there's an issue with the systems handling the applications.
I guess there must be an opportunity there to fix all this together with smaller stuff like handling transliteration and character encodings, I wonder if some of those scam site are not scams and actually help with it. An AI agent can be useful here.
The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.
paganel commented on What does Palantir actually do? wired.com/story/palantir-... · Posted by u/mudil
> destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way
Hamas doesn't have an air force, and they're facing an enemy with a good air force and good intelligence. They can't have nice things like "zoning", if they stored rockets away from civilians they would all get destroyed.
So, in order to have rockets, they must be stored under targets that would cause political trouble if they were to be hit: hospitals, churches, mosques and schools.
I’m sure the Nazis were saying the same thing about the Jewish storing bad things in different ghettos in Eastern Europe.
Dead Comment
It will not work out over the long run. This is corruption; it breeds corruption, and corruption creates victims. Victims don't put up with it forever and as the old cold case appeal spiel goes, "alliances shift over time".
More prosaically, in the short term: TSMC are now effectively compelled to acquire Intel entirely or at least a controlling share, right?
Unless Trump's shakedown requires them to own 49% but then bans them from owning more than 50%, which would be the end of the USA as any sort of free market -- and I concede that is possible, because the USA now has a leader who acts more and more like an autocrat -- aren't TSMC essentially compelled by their own interests to find the just-greater-than 1% somewhere?
If you're blackmailing me into owning almost all of something but not getting control of what I owned, I think the logical next step is to forcibly gain control, yes? Because it turns the tables.
Not least because acquiescing even to buying 49% paints a target on my back.
Trump is not saving Intel: he is guaranteeing it is going to get broken up and sold off. He is destroying it. (More to the point he is immediately tying its existence to the success or failure of his own Asia-facing foreign policy, which means he is effectively asserting control over it)
TSMC is not going to get over the 50% threshold because it has no free will in this whole matter, as the very existence of Taiwan, and hence of TSMC, depends on the political will of the US.
Otherwise I fully agree with you, this will definitely not work out in the long run, but who cares about the long run anymore in this day and age?
paganel commented on We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/defo10
> Also, drinking in public is not allowed in much of Europe. Don’t go there and assume it is.
I live and have traveled a lot around Europe, and have never ran into that rule, but have almost always seen people drinking alcohol in public parks. From what I could find online it's only Norway, Ireland, and perhaps Poland, plus a few places in cities in other countries (Vienna, Milan, Barcelona, Riga...) which is far from "much of Europe".
Drinking in public here in Romania might get you fined, and for sure you’ll be viewed by those around you on the street as either a known-nothing tourist or a degenerate drunkard, or both.
Deleted Comment
paganel commented on “No tax on tips” is an industry plant newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee
Having just come back to the States from a trip to Europe — sheesh, I hope not. The service at restaurants everywhere in Europe was at best mediocre, and typically god-awful. Incentivizing good service is good.
Yes, yes, "but the price on the menu says..." Whatever. If you're in the U.S., it's normalized that the price you actually pay is 20% higher, assuming they treat you well. Restaurants don't typically print the tax on their menus either, and yet no one tears their hair out over having to pay sales tax, and various city taxes, etc etc.
The service is so, so much better in the U.S. because of tipping. Tipping culture is good.
Service is quite good in Europe if you ignore the touristy areas. We’re also not into that fake-smiling thing, so maybe that can be seen by an American as “bad service”.
paganel commented on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/Y... · Posted by u/cft
That's a common misconception. The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R... and is legally binding in all member states.
Sure, there are exceptions but in the USA too freedom of speech is not absolute either.
Moreover, in practice, there is more freedom of speech in most EU countries than in the USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...:
USA: 0.89 France: 0.96 Germany: 0.94 Czechia: 0.96 etc.
It may do so in some of their written papers, but in practice I risk going to prison if I dare say some things. Soon enough it will be illegal for me, the grandkid of a devout communist party member, to say that I agree with what my grandad believed in, it is already illegal to do that in the Czech Republic.
It's labeled 'renewable energy' (not electricity), if wood pellets are sourced from sustainable renewable forest growth.
What is your argument?
Because is bs, pure and simple. Typical Brussels re-inventing the definition of words in order to push their political objectives.