This is also why criticism of Meta tends to get a much worse vote ratio in comments on HN than for the other companies I named, lots of people here with direct personal connections to them due to scale.

Meta just added another chapter to their endless list, election interference in Brazil to help Bolsonaro. Just like X.

Look, in 2026, US big tech companies - and _especially_ frontier LLM companies, which are the topic here - clearly do not have agency to refuse government overreach. The US regime broke their contract with Anthropic, in turn Anthropic rightly raised this as an issue, what happened next? They were threatened to be killed as a company if they didn't play ball.

Let alone the dozens of millions every corp is donating to the dear leader's golden ballroom, giving golden statues, making movies about his wife and so forth. North Korea has nothing on the US any more.

Also google "Qwest NSA refusal". Around the same time as the Google subpoena you brought up. Grat example of just how much agency US companies have to refuse overreach.

We're on HN, not The Onion's comment section. People will take this seriously rather than sarcasm.

It was sarcasm, right?

Now do iOS.

> In light of that final insult and all the above and more details I have forgotten or omit, it may seem strange to say that overall, I am okay with the process.

> I don’t think citizenship is a light thing. It is not rational to make it friction-free or fast. I was not ready to naturalize in 2012. The system is arcane and arbitrary, and also worked correctly to weed me out of the process.

If you were born in Nigeria, it would've been literally impossible to procure all those family documents. Or even if you were born almost everywhere to a single mom/deadbeat dad, or just one such sibling it'd be impossible to get a birth certificate. Or if you grew up in poverty and moved around a lot. Attended school in war-torn countries, and so forth. From the article this doesn't sound like the government would bend the rules for such cases. If they truly do then it sounds like they don't really check in which case the whole process is just fake it until you make it.

That's not a process that's okay. It's one that excludes people purely on the basis of not having been born in a happy, American, nuclear family.

I hate culture war but if there was ever a time where "privilege" is apt, it's here. Could do with some more self-awareness.

A good number of European countries have only half the poverty rates - the dirt floors and carts you're talking about - of the US yet barely use credit cards.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Of course that's the same everywhere else, including the US, meaning it's not worth pointing out.