>Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them.
I think we’re all just trying to come up with cool things and show it to people to see if they want it.
I don’t think what he said is whataboutism, the original claim was that this policy was related to the US becoming “most hated country”. But if it is just doing something that every other country is also doing, then it doesn’t seem like it’d move the needle much on “most hated country” status.
We're discussing this in the context of Altman's project, which is a project by a US company. You're welcome to find examples from other countries but the OP didn't mention any of them. The fact is that currently no other country has the same kind of techno-fascism, it's US-specific and mostly caused by the lack of education of your new tech elite. The new generation consist mostly of dropouts who barely read and talk about things they're not qualified to talk about at all. That wouldn't be a problem if they didn't have so much influence.
US companies used to do their business, now they're publishing fascist manifests (e.g. Alex Karp) and directly interfere in politics (e.g. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk). That's not even remotely comparable to what's going on in other countries.
You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way.
The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class.
Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating system. What was considered taboo in America was often at the same time considered to be fine in places like Europe, or vice versa. But we never had a coordinated international push for censorship when it came to TV/movies like we are seeing with social media.
I can remember how much people used to deride mass surveillance and censorship in places like Russia and China and now here we are very quickly catching up to them in every way.
>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country
there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial.
We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Chinese, we likely both consume media made in South Korea or Japan so the fact that legislation emerges kind of in tandem isn't "coordinated censorship", it's reflecting a reality of how information flows. Politics, economics, and media consumption is now horizontally intertwined, we don't live in vertical silo countries any more.
If you made a digital worldmap and connected each person you'd get something that doesn't look at all like the one on your physical globe and if you don't realize that the distances there are a bit different you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.
Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of politicians making laws to clamp down on social media use.
I think most people can intuitively see that the number of people who talk about this as an issue does not at all match the amount of attention that politicians are giving it. All at the same time, in most western countries simultaneously. It just does not pass the smell test.
>you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.
Nothing spooky about it, they are not coincidences, we can see that ideas are spreading between powerful politicians and the billionaire oligarchs across borders without any real input of the governed. Laws are being made, we are being given the "think of the children" line, and they are hoping that we will accept it.
Just because we can communicate across borders doesn't mean that countries should stop considering the needs of their citizens as their primary objective. The more we allow these efforts to cross borders without any objection or examination, the weaker the power of citizens becomes and the less effective democracy becomes.
> Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?
Yes?
Dear God, people have been begging for help for decades on these issues.
Right? What scientific study is showing awesome outcomes for screen addled kids, not to mention the behaviours it can encourage.
No teachers or doctors have been saying this is good, they’ve been warning it’s worse than we think consistently.
That does not have to mean draconian device validation per se.
My personal take is that we should have more than one ‘internet’ and keep the one full of porn and Chinese psyops up on the shelf with the titty mags and dick pills. Nintendo-ish style friend-code based messaging and online textbooks, until you’re old enough to buy an 18+ SIM card or internet connection. Same as how we handle booze, cigs, and porn: at point of sale with extra punishments for adults who provide. Not perfect, but doable.
>Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?
Yes, tons of them honestly, in particular in the English speaking world. NSPCC or the Molly Rose foundation in Britain, Collective Shout in Australia who recently made the news after approaching I think payment providers who processed sexually charged games on Steam, etc.
Child safety online is if anything the most heavily activist driven topic there is. The tech companies and the shadowy people visiting Epstein's island are not known for their efforts to reduce children's access to the internet, Mark Zuckerberg is not in favor of gettting viewer people on his platforms.
This is reflected in polls too. The Child Safety act in Britain had vast support from the population, seven in ten people I believe, about 80% among women. Insofar as pressure is put on regulators to not adopt legislation of that sort it's coming from the people who you seem to think are responsible for it. It's largely elites who are funding organizations to scrap internet regulation, which is understandable given that it makes financial sense for them.
Just look at any headline they put out about Tesla. They phrase every article in the most negative light possible and mostly seem to report only negative events about the company.
>Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ expansion looks like another stock pump before earnings
>Tesla’s California sales crash 24% as state’s EV market plunges to lowest since 2021
>Tesla’s head of customer experience leaves for Coinbase as talent exodus grows
Even benign announcements are phrased in a negative light:
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences
Going out of their way to say the initial area for Dallas is “tiny”. You can imagine that a few years ago when they still liked Tesla they would have reported this story much differently.
>Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ expansion looks like another stock pump before earnings - I believe thats fair, they love doing this but Im willing to concede its negative.
>Tesla’s California sales crash 24% as state’s EV market plunges to lowest since 2021 -> Thats just a fact, it also mentions in the headline that the entire EV industry is down a lot in Cali so of course Tesla is heavily affected. If they wanted to just bash tesla it would have been trival to cut that out instead they provide context.
>Tesla’s head of customer experience leaves for Coinbase as talent exodus grows -> Both statements( head of customer experince leaves && talent exodus ). I guess you could make a argument that "talent exodus" is negative but is it not warranted? Its not a good look when a bunch of people leave your company at the same time.
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences - The initial area IS tiny it would not be a fair article if that was not highlighted, its just a few neighbors in some of the most sprawling cities in the US. The total area they are operating is in not even 10% of the city, its 30-35sq miles out of 340. The entire metro is ~9,000. That IS tiny especially if we compare it to its competitors that operate throughout entire cities.
What has Tesla done positively lately? Optimus is hardware that exist in many other companies paired with remote people controlling it, the cybertruck is a disaster, the semi has had no news of note, the robotaxi currently does not exist and requires software that has been promised for years and years without actually being delivered so its only fair to be skeptical of it.
I feel like you are intentionally ignoring my point, this ofc doesn't feel like a good faith discussion but I will engage anyway.
Bias comes in many forms. We can choose to not report things at all, we can choose to take neutral things and present them negatively, we can even take positive things and represent them as negatives, or we can choose to highlight negatives.
Elektrek is doing all of these.
Compare their coverage of Waymo's launch in Dallas to Tesla's. Their testing areas have very similar footprints, Waymo's is slightly larger but not by much.
Waymo's headline:
>Waymo adds 4 more cities to its robotaxi service, now 10 total (Tesla: still 0)
Tesla's headline:
>Tesla launches ‘Robotaxi’ in Houston and Dallas with tiny geofences
I mean if you cannot see the bias here then I would say you're just deliberately being bad faith.
One highlights Waymo's expansion as a positive while taking a deliberate swipe at Tesla, the other for some reason always puts "Robotaxi" in quotes and makes sure to emphasize how small it is directly in the headline.
6 months ago when Tesla launched robotaxi in Austin the service area was like twice as big as Waymo's, but do you think Elektrek reported it that way?
Reading this site really does remind me of Fox News.
If you want to see some positive things that Tesla is doing you can read other sites that actually publish that information.
>What has Tesla done positively lately?
Off the top of my head positives: the fact that they started production on the cybercab, the fact that they're rolling it out in all their testing locations and people have sighted it on the street, the fact that they started construction on the Optimus robot manufacturing plant which will have the capacity to make 10M robots per year.
>the semi has had no news of note
There is definitely news on the semi, it's just not being reported by people like Elektrek.
>California-based freight brokerage and asset-based carrier AiLO Logistics has launched a three-week operational pilot using the Tesla Semi truck.
>Tesla has said it has a few hundred Semis on the road with 13.5 million miles logged.
The fact that you believe they have only done negative/evil things indicates that likely the news you are reading about them has some significant slant to it.
This is not an issue I care about at all, but even I can recognize that a voluntary abortion the day before a healthy birth would occur is truly a radical extreme that most people would object to.
Do you really think that someone will willingly go through 9 months of pregnancy to abort "the day before" just because???
If someone is aborting the day before they ate due after dealing with everything for 9 months, you can believe that it was the best decision no matter how you look at it.
Most -if not all- late term abortions are carried by people that WANT the baby but learn that is better (for the baby, the life of the mother...) to not carry it to the full end.
You can likely also realise that the UK expunging prosecution and conviction of women convicted of back street abortions isn't equivilant to legalising abortion the day before birth .. however much the hand wringing click bait press try and spin it.
How can you not care at all about the government forcing people to sacrifice their bodies in the most intimate way possible? To put one's sex organs to use against one's will? Disgusting.
You’re comparing a publicly traded company where the supply demand economics have established a price to a company whose financials are not public, and is valuing itself at $1.7T and forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it. Not the same thing.
> Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.
Drop a Monero address here and I'll send you a tiny amount for your first transaction.
I recommend CakeWallet, which is cross-platform, user friendly, and does a lot of good for the community, but any of the wallets recommended on the official[1] website are fine.
p.s. you or anyone can reach out via my contacts in bio if you have any questions about Monero.
I would actually recommend to just use a hardware wallet. The monero-cli or the Monero GUI-Wallet are sufficient. Just drop your wallet onto an USB stick with LUKS encryption. Get your recovery seed + wallet height written by hand and bury them somewhere in your garden, or your parents garden in safe box.
Drop me your address, and I will also send a little bit your way, to get you hooked!
KYC[1] methods are the easiest and what I recommend for everyone. I will only go into detail with KYC methods in this post.
A. Determine where you are. Are you in a jurisdiction that has CEXs[2] that allow you to purchase Monero with Fiat? If so, Continue to B; otheriwse, continue to C.
B. If you are in the USA/Country where you can buy Monero directly:
1. Open a Kraken[3] account. You will need to prove your identity through a service like Persona.
2. Send money into Kraken from your bank or credit card.
3. Purchase Monero on Kraken with your deposited funds.
4. 7-day hold and then you will be able to withdraw to your self-custody wallet.
Conclusion: You now own Monero. You have payed minimal fees. The government and entire financial system knows you have purchased Monero.
This may or may not be a concern depending on your threat model[4]. Many people overstate this threat—Monero is the 14th largest Cryptocurrency by market cap, it is not particularly suspicious to purchase it. It does not compromise your future Monero transactions—it is just like withdrawing cash from an ATM, the financial system and government know that you now hold cash, but what it is used for is opaque.
C. If you are not in the USA/are in a jurisdiction where you can't buy Monero directly:
1. Open an account on any KYC CEX, I recommend Kraken. You will need to prove your identity through a service like Persona.
2. Purchase any coin. I recommend Litecoin[5], but Bitcoin or anything works.
3. Create a self-custody wallet for Litecoin, I recommend CakeWallet.
4. Withdraw your Litecoin to CakeWallet.
5. Go to Trocador[6].
6. Create a swap from Litecoin to Monero.
7. Give Trocador one of your Monero addresses to send the converted Monero to.
8. Choose the exchange with the best fees/privacy to your liking (these change throughout the day).
9. Send your Litecoin from CakeWallet to the Litecoin address provided.
10. You will shortly receive Monero to the address you gave Trocador.
Conclusion: You now own Monero. You have payed a small amount of fees. Depending on the pervasiveness and intelligence of blockchain surveillance, the financial system and the government knows that you have purchased Monero, or has the ability to figure out that you have purchased Monero.
All your future transactions are anonymous. Remember, Monero is just patching one hole in making an anonymous transaction. It does not magically make you anonymous if any of these other things are not anonymous: OS, browser, IP address, identities, etc.
[1] Know-your-customer — they say it's to stop crime.
[2] Centralized Exchange
[3] As respected of a CEX as you will get. They support Monero while most other CEXs have removed it.
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When I saw that link it immediately reminded me of this: https://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html
>Monads are like burritos
And then a few links down is this link to monad tutorials.
Weird coincidence.
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