Hacker News: bbzealot

New comment by bbzealot in "Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed"

bbzealot — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:15:39 +0000

Account created two weeks ago, posting pretty much only right-wing propaganda comments.

A bit suspicious...

New comment by bbzealot in "Italy's privacy regulator goes after DeepSeek"

bbzealot — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:59:15 +0000

That happened during the Biden administration though, now the situation has changed quite drastically

New comment by bbzealot in "Italy's privacy regulator goes after DeepSeek"

bbzealot — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:21:36 +0000

> The US has and will come to your defense

While threatening tariffs and a hostile takeover of Greenland?

New comment by bbzealot in "Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code"

bbzealot — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 16:09:26 +0000

Why though?

I'm worried these technologies may take my job away and make the balance between capital and labor even more uneven.

Why should I be happy?

New comment by bbzealot in "Google Maps Will Rename Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in US"

bbzealot — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 15:14:57 +0000

Just because the new name may be geographically accurate doesn't mean it was a good idea to change it.

The change was clearly for propaganda reasons, and that is what makes people upset

New comment by bbzealot in "Google Maps Will Rename Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in US"

bbzealot — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 15:12:44 +0000

Worth noting that most of that user's history is right wing propaganda

New comment by bbzealot in "The Origins of Wokeness"

bbzealot — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 19:36:19 +0000

Not if they're from PG apparently

New comment by bbzealot in "Visualizing 13M Bluesky users"

bbzealot — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 07:12:49 +0000

My feed was mostly leftist but since musk took over I started seeing a lot of musk posts and far-right propaganda.

Twitter is far from being a neutral platform.

New comment by bbzealot in "Visualizing 13M Bluesky users"

bbzealot — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 23:15:00 +0000

> Musk was left-leaning not so long ago

So what? He's been clearly far right leaning since before he purchased Twitter.

He's been one of the main supporters of the Trump campaign and he's vocal about his political ideas. Twitter has no credibility as a neutral platform as long as it's run by him

New comment by bbzealot in "Visualizing 13M Bluesky users"

bbzealot — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 18:41:58 +0000

How can a platform owned by a far-right man with a clear political agenda be the place for "political balance"?

It's inevitable that left-leaning people will increasingly leave Twitter, as long as it is run by Musk

New comment by bbzealot in "Covid-19 Intranasal Vaccine"

bbzealot — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 06:41:20 +0000

There were other similar (ie. nasal) vaccine candidates for COVID, like the Cuban MAMBISA [0], though it seems it never got final approval

New comment by bbzealot in "Cursorless is alien magic from the future"

bbzealot — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 08:25:08 +0000

Or just use evil-mode and get the best of both worlds

New comment by bbzealot in "Italy to seize $835M from Airbnb in tax evasion inquiry"

bbzealot — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:40:35 +0000

For sure the situation won't improve under the current government, but there have been improvements in the past.

TBH I just hope that honest taxpayers (which I'm sure are the majority of people, given employees can hardly avoid taxes) will realize that this system is a problem, and start pushing for a more just fiscal system.

New comment by bbzealot in "Italy to seize $835M from Airbnb in tax evasion inquiry"

bbzealot — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:37:12 +0000

Indeed, the Italian state is totally capable of enforcing taxes.

However it lacks the political will to go after (especially some categories of) tax evaders, as they're a big source of votes in particular for rightwing governments like the current one.

New comment by bbzealot in "Italy to seize $835M from Airbnb in tax evasion inquiry"

bbzealot — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:15:01 +0000

How is this relevant to my comment?

As an Italian I agree that taxes are rather high, but enforcing them only on a subset of citizens while happily allowing another subset to easily avoid them is definitely not the solution.

I'd be much happier if the government enforced taxes for everyone, which would then allow it to either improve services or reduce taxes.

New comment by bbzealot in "Italy to seize $835M from Airbnb in tax evasion inquiry"

bbzealot — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 10:51:29 +0000

It's not really an arms race, it's more an inbalance between different categories of citizens.

Employees can hardly avoid taxes (as long as they're regular workers), while autonomous workers ("partita IVA") and small companies/entrepreneurs can easily avoid large amounts of taxes.

The latter are a huge source of votes especially for rightwing parties in Italy, so it's not uncommon for governments to make it easier to avoid taxes for them.

The current rightwing governemnt went as far as calling taxes "state's pizzo" (where "pizzo" is the payment Mafia asks for protection), it raised the limit for usage of cash, and it's discussing measures to forgive debt of tax evaders ("pace fiscale").

So no, it's not an arms race, it's just that it's convenient to let it happen for some political parties.

New comment by bbzealot in "Are We Close to AGI?"

bbzealot — Mon, 08 May 2023 14:23:21 +0000

Unfortunately, in the current economic system having a bullshit job is way better than having no job (unless you're rich of course).

New comment by bbzealot in "Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you"

bbzealot — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 13:20:04 +0000

Yet the fact that shareholders want to get richer doesn’t mean that laying off people when a company is drowning in money is ethically right.

New comment by bbzealot in "Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you"

bbzealot — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 22:19:34 +0000

I’m pretty sure that if you need some stock to grow in order to support your children, then your influence on a public company is virtually irrelevant.

New comment by bbzealot in "The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns"

bbzealot — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 14:09:07 +0000

You’re claiming that a relevant amount of Americans accused Trump of being Xenophobe due to his remarks on TikTok.

Do you have any source to back that claim?