The US despite everything still runs a popular vote driven democracy that is clearly capable of implementing on short notice, sweeping changes to policy.
The problem remains that the US voter consistently demonstrates they don't actually care about these problems though, compared to using the state to intentionally inflict misery on subgroups they don't like.
The most radical thing the current administration proves is how unimportant taxes and cost of living actually were to its voters, given the broad support it retains despite overtly and continuously raising or making both those problems worse (read cares as: "understands" - for a group which wouldn't shut up about it, apparently significant changes aren't crippling enough to get them to change their vote in many cases).
I think this administration truly puts paid to the idea that billionaires control the US. Trump was _broke_ now he’s making billionaires the world over kiss the ring.
This happened because he’s consistently harnessed the power of the popular vote. Just today he flexed that muscle in Indiana.
I’m distraught that my fellow Americans keep falling for his circus barking and he’s made it clear that norms don’t matter and gerrymandering may be the end of the republic. But you can’t deny the power of the regular persons vote after him.
Trump was never actually broke, but his popularity comes from the fact that he took a bunch of public political stances that his political opponents refused to take because they genuinely thought those stances were immoral; and then won elections based on those stances because a lot of the electorate also liked them.
There isn't actually one monolithic class of billionaires that all share the same interests and want the same things; and even though an individual billionaire can be personally influential, they simply do not have the power to unilaterally determine the political direction of a country. But regardless of what political direction a country does go in, there's probably some billionaire who is more or less aligned with that direction. So anyone who dislikes that political direction can point to the nearest-ideologically-aligned billionaire and blame them for influencing politics in that way, despite the fact that if the tables were turned and their side was winning, someone else would point to whatever billionaire aligned with them as an evil influencer.
“Trump was never actually broke, but his popularity comes from the fact that he took a bunch of public political stances that his political opponents refused to take because they genuinely thought those stances were immoral”
Um, no. His popularity comes from a willingness to actually do the things that many other politicians said they were going to do, often while campaigning, and never did.
> clearly capable of implementing on short notice, sweeping changes to policy
well, as long as the policy changes in question can be implemented by executive order. good luck doing anything that requires actual legislation.
> The problem remains that the US voter consistently demonstrates they don't actually care about these problems though, compared to using the state to intentionally inflict misery on subgroups they don't like.
what does this mean, exactly? it sounds like you're trying to say that things would have been different, if only those pesky voters hadn't voted for Trump. but they _did_ vote for someone other than Trump in 2020, and that did very little to affect the issues mentioned in the article
If you’re trying to make the case that “sometimes violence is the only answer”, please stop.
It’s the responsibility of thoughtful people in a civilized society to find ways of solving problems, even very large and deep ones, without violence.
As soon as we think “there’s no alternative other than violence”, we need to think harder. All the worst atrocities in history happened because enough people allowed themselves to think “violence is the only answer”.
Please don't, in one comment, call me “naive and childish” then try this kind of switcheroo the next. The topic of “guillotines” relates to performative violence against fellow citizens over political/economic disagreement. National defense is a different topic. They're both important topics and if they’re going to be discussed they deserve to be discussed earnestly. Glorification of violence has never been within the guidelines or norms on HN.
This is a site for curious people who want to have intelligent discussions about interesting topics. My job here is to uphold the guidelines, not engage in political arguments. If your response to my moderation effort is to invoke a whole lot of topics that are unrelated to the HN guidelines, descending even to my own nationality, you’re showing some strong signals that you’re not interested in participating here in a way that’s aligned with the site’s purpose. Other commenters were trying to discuss the topic curiously and explore nonviolent ways of resolving political disputes and you kept trying to drag the topic back to violence. That style of discussion, and the rhetorical trickery you keep trying to deploy against me, do not belong on HN. This is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards.
You're the one who inserted yourself in the discussion when I clarified my question. I wasn't dragging the discussion away from your preferred path any more than others were dragging it away from mine.
If you don't want to engage in political arguments then don't involve yourself in a subthread that wasn't even flagged.
In either case i'll leave and let you keep your echo chamber.
What we need is a capabilities based security system. It could write all the python, asm, whatever it wants and it wouldn't matter at all if it was never given a reference to use something it shouldn't.
Unix permissions is not a capability system though. Capabilities are more like "here is a file descriptor pointing to a directory, you are not capable of referring to anything outside it". So closer to chroot, except you can have several such directory references at the same time.
You can always narrow down a capability (get a new capability pointing to a subdirectory or file, or remove the writing capability so it is read only) but never make it more broad.
In a system designed for this it will be used for everything, not just file system. You might have capabilities related to network connections, or IPC to other processes, etc. The latter is especially attractive in microkernel based OSes. (Speaking of which, Redox OS seems to be experimenting with this, just saw an article today about that.)
I have been putting my agents on their own, restricted OS-level user accounts for a while. It works really well for everything I do.
Admittedly, there’s a little more friction and agent confusion sometimes with this setup, but it’s worth the benefit of having zero worries about permissions and security.
There exist restricted Shells. But honestly, I don't feel capable of assessing all attack vectors and security measures in sufficient detail. For example, do the rbash restrictions also apply when Python is called with it? Or can the agent somehow bypass rbash to call Python?
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