Interestingly this mechanism contributed a lot to Brexit in my opinion, whenever there was legislation the politicians wanted to enact but knew would be unpopular with the voters they'd blame the EU and wring their hands saying there was nothing to be done, while in the background gold-plating the legislation far beyond what the EU was even asking for. This also made it easy for populists to point to many absurd examples of the EU being comically bureaucratic, when a lot of the more nonsensical ones were literally domestic additions. When the referendum happened, the consequences were obvious to everyone.
While no Brexiteer myself, I personally would want to see the European Parliament get a lot more powers and influence before I threw my wholehearted support behind rejoining. Half the problem with the EU is that it's seen as not particularly democratic as a place for legislation to originate, and giving the elected organ more power (including the power to propose legislation in its own right, and dismiss legislation proposed by the Commission with much more prejudice) would go a long way to addressing that I think. The Parliament needs to be more, well, parliamentary in how it functions.
I can't speak for every country, but I feel the irresistible force of datacentre construction will eventually get mired in the the immovable objects of British NIMBYism and high electricity prices.
I've seen more local opposition to datacentres than anything else, and the fact we have discretionary planning (which can't be abolished for political reasons, despite it amounting to putting economic sanctions on ourselves) means there's a lot of stakeholder vetos in the system.
To be honest I have showdead on and while I see the things you see, I also see a lot of blatant AI slop getting killed off too. I'm sure most people on here are at least somewhat attuned to Claude's 'voice' by now.
If a LLM-voice comment has [dead] next to it, either the account was already banned in its entirety or HN's LLM text detector marked the comment auto-dead due to suspected LLM writing. If the comment has [flagged] [dead] next to it, the comment was killed by human flagging. You can see both kinds of comment if you browse https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
If you have enough karma to flag comments you can also flag them directly from the noobcomments feed, which is useful to help manage the abusive users who keep re-registering new accounts.
Point taken, I probably file a lot of that away under "generic HN spam" (or maybe I've gotten so good at skimming Claude output that my eyes glaze over automatically now in response :P)
> the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line
The US absolutely could coerce the rest of the West in the short term, but everything that's happened in the last decade calls the long-term future of Atlanticism into serious question and such action would accelerate this process I think. If coordination came as an order from Uncle Sam, it would be seen not as a legitimate act of ensuring collective safety but as mere technological imperialism on America's part.
The cross-border system fed from the Elan Valley in the UK is like this, Wales is famously very rainy due to its hills and the Victorians exploited this by damming the Elan Valley and gravity-feeding the water from the Cambrian Mountains all the way to Birmingham which was a rapidly growing industrial centre. There's no pumps, it was all calculated to drop 170 feet over 73 miles!
It's a really stunning place to visit as well, mid Wales in general is so pretty and the dams themselves are ornamented in a way nobody would bother with today. Of course the Victorians got away with things that would be unthinkable now, when Liverpool did the same approach of flooding Welsh valleys to water English cities in the mid 20th century it was very controversial because the scheme flooded a majority Welsh-speaking village and the language was in a fairly steep decline then; nowadays there's a lot more protections for Welsh.
I made this post and it died on its arse initially, didn't even get an upvote. The second chance pool meant that it turned into a useful discussion about a pretty niche element of frontend development.
I think it depends on the train journey personally. I'd never dream of striking up a conversation on the Tube or a busy commuter line; personally I'm the definition of 'not a morning person' so I've no social battery to spare in those circumstances. On the other hand I quite like a chat when I'm not in a hurry or it's not the morning, makes the time go faster.
Mind you most of the talk seems to be along the lines of 'GWR couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery' these days.
That book title and my vague memory the same author had a hand in naming Eris makes me think they've encountered the Principia Discordia at one time or another.
Interestingly this mechanism contributed a lot to Brexit in my opinion, whenever there was legislation the politicians wanted to enact but knew would be unpopular with the voters they'd blame the EU and wring their hands saying there was nothing to be done, while in the background gold-plating the legislation far beyond what the EU was even asking for. This also made it easy for populists to point to many absurd examples of the EU being comically bureaucratic, when a lot of the more nonsensical ones were literally domestic additions. When the referendum happened, the consequences were obvious to everyone.
While no Brexiteer myself, I personally would want to see the European Parliament get a lot more powers and influence before I threw my wholehearted support behind rejoining. Half the problem with the EU is that it's seen as not particularly democratic as a place for legislation to originate, and giving the elected organ more power (including the power to propose legislation in its own right, and dismiss legislation proposed by the Commission with much more prejudice) would go a long way to addressing that I think. The Parliament needs to be more, well, parliamentary in how it functions.
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