In practice, Americans supported their own independence, and they support independence for eg. Taiwan, but they don't support independence for the Confederacy because that would entail weakening their own nation. To the extent that anyone will try to rationalise the American Civil War, they might reach for slavery, but a philosophical belief that political union is absolute and nobody can declare independence is not it; at most that's just a flimsy post-facto justification for the already-decided fact that states must not allowed to secede for power reasons, and this is evident from the fact they don't condemn their own revolution and advocate for return to British governance.

Very self-serving that you believe superintelligent AI is going to tell people your ideas are the best ones, incidentally.

It is sad that the world is hung up on enabling 2/3rds of the world population to read and write text! If only the entire world catered to America. Nobody should ever speak anything other than English, honestly.

> If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway.

They did not provide any meaningful insight into the field, they are simply insisting that e-mail addresses should be a tool for personal identification because it saves them money over doing real KYC. In other words, they believe KYC should be slanted further in favor of corporations and against customers, such that KYC is publicly available for free, because they value not doing the work of verification over humans having any privacy whatsoever.

As they are entitled to post their opinion on humans having no privacy rights, I am entitled to post mine and point out the hypocrisy of them choosing to participate in this forum privately while advocating for and boasting about denying service to other people who attempt to protect their privacy.

I'm curious, though:

> choosing to participate anonymously

Why are your name, e-mail address, and phone number not on your profile? Are you using HN with the intent to commit fraud?

A has 97% of the wealth.

B has 1% of the wealth.

C has 2% of the wealth.

Your argument is that because C > B, C is benefitting from the status quo.

In the US, the median age for first time homeownership increased from 29 to 40 since the 1980s when the stat began being tracked. That is reality, not an exceptional anecdote that is so out of the statistical ordinary it warrants being paraded as a puff piece in a newspaper.

The "diktat" is the thing you just voted on which says "we will not negotiate". There is always room for negotiation until you vote for a law that says "no negotiations, we are now legally mandated to do X".

> 2 years provides time for another referendum.

Voting for a no-negotiations amendment to your constitution as a negotiation tactic with the idea that you will later pass another constitutional amendment in a small window of time to revoke it is some kind of 4D checkers strategising that I suppose I am not enlightened enough to grasp.

The vote did commit you to amending your federal constitution with a population cap, period.

> If the 10-million threshold is exceeded, Switzerland would have to terminate these agreements, including the one with the EU on the free movement of persons after two years. This would also render the other agreements under Bilateral Agreements I null and void. Switzerland’s participation in the EU’s Schengen and Dublin agreements would also be called into question, thereby jeopardising close cooperation in the areas of security and asylum.

There is no room for negotiation in it. The government page itself spells out the hardline consequences.

But I suppose that's how these votes have to be marketed, isn't it? The Brits were under the delusion that they'd get to have their cake and eat it too, that they could keep any benefits of being in the EU even as they exited it. I wonder how many Swiss were aware they were voting to end their own freedom of movement, that blocking EU immigration would mean they would no longer be able to move elsewhere in the EU themselves. Which, again, is valid if that's the intention, but I suspect a lot of voters like yourself rather believed they were only voting to end freedom of movement for brown foreigners, or voting to negotiate special privileges, when in actuality it was literally a vote to exit treaties.

In what way? It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations. Unilaterally breaching your obligations is not a grounds for discussion or compromise, it is simply an exit from them, benefits included.

Suppose you're not getting on with your roommate. You could talk to them and try to resolve the problems, or you could default on your lease and receive an eviction notice from the landlord. You are opting for the latter. That is not "confronting" anything, it is a done deal. It is a choice you are allowed to make, to be clear, just as the Brits did, but let's not pretend it's something it isn't.

Microsoft is not as bad as Google and Apple, yet, but they absolutely have the power to be as bad and are flirting with how to accomplish greater and greater control of their platform without triggering too much backlash.

Delivery is actually more resource-efficient if the store isn't within walking distance of its customers. If instead of making 10 people get in their car and make a round trip to the store/warehouse, you put 10 packages in one vehicle and deliver to everyone in the same neighborhood with one trip, you're looking at an order of 90% less wasted emissions.

"Incompetence" of this degree is malice. It is actively malicious to create a system that automatically locks people out of their accounts with absolutely no possibility for human review or recourse short of getting traction in the media. "No sir, I didn't grind those orphans up. It was this orphan grinding machine I made that did it, teehee!"

This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds like it's just a business plan that you don't like very much.

Off the top of my head, I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence. Or more recently there was uv, that write-it-in-Rust Python package manager that had no avenue for monetization but received millions in investment funding a team working on it full-time until successfully getting bought out by OpenAI.

There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:

> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.

I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).

I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.