Before the Internet this was not the case. In Marsh v. Alabama, it was ruled (in line with all previous precedent) that privately owned roadways and sidewalks had to allow religious pamphleters, even though it is private property. The court asserted that anywhere that is the forum for public discussion is de facto allowed for political and religious speech regardless of property rights. In the very early days of the Internet things changed, when people tried to assert First Amendment claims on Compuserve chats. Compuserve claimed they weren't the public square, that they were a private service. I think they were correct, in that Compuserve was a very marginal private space and couldn't possibly have been "the public square". But precedent over this tiny service were eventually laundered into much larger and more critical bits of social infrastructure.

In contrast to Compuserve, Twitter and Facebook are definitely the public square. You cannot petition for a redress of grievances or lobby for policy changes without using them. And the political left delights in suppressing their opponents on them but files lawsuits claiming their rights are infringed when they aren't given access to every inch -- such as when they sued Trump for blocking them on his Twitter account:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-dismisses-trump-t...

When Democrats were barred from interacting even with a very small part of a platform, it is a critical First Amendment violation. When conservatives, racists, sexists, or whatever term you want to use are barred, well, it's a private company bigot.

This hypocrisy must quickly end, or we as a country will end up in a violent conflict. There must be open, public debate on every major platform, and Americans must be entitled to express their opinions because the only other alternative is violence.

Extreme eyeroll on this post. Twitter's shareholders voted overwhelmingly to sell to Musk. 98.6% of them voted an affirmative yes, in which Dorsey was a very small minority. Dorsey could have voted no at ten times his stake in the company and still it would have been sold to Musk. Everyone was in agreement Musk was overpaying to an extreme degree.

> and its 11 million tons of annual CO2 emissions

Nobody is more in opposition to the current energy regime than Bitcoin miners. They are consistent lobbyists for deregulating private nuclear power, so that they can cleanly power their operations.

This reads like a petulant Communist's criticism of Dorsey. Much like many other of the author's diatribes.

However, something should definitely be done about funny money printers. There are plenty of mechanisms in history shown to be successful dealing with them, such as going to where they live and taking care of them in the dead of night. I agree that massive inflation is a serious problem, but the solution is not to say "let's get rid of the utility of money!" -- it is to punish the people subverting market utility for their own gain.

Trying to change reality because a small group of bad actors is absurd. Just get rid of the bad actors.

https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2022/0415/Demand-for-o...

You are essentially saying that the roughnecks that work the rig for $30-40 an hour should be owning it. They don't have the capital to own it and pay for the oil rights to use it, or the risk tolerance that it will sit idle and still have to be maintained, stored in a rented warehouse, and guarded when regulation does not allow them to be used. Nor is there any evidence they would be able to successfully run an oil company even if they were given it for free -- compliance issues surrounding commodities deals typically require a different skillset than the guy working the rig.

The vast majority of businesses are not software. Virtually all industry has capital outlay requirements and capital risks equal to or greater to this.

Here's Linus's commentary on that:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1099

> I think that if some Rust allocation can cause a panic, this is simply _fundamentally_ not acceptable.

> Allocation failures in a driver or non-core code - and that is by definition all of any new Rust code - can never EVER validly cause panics.

Panics are not acceptable in countless contexts. Plenty of things need to be written to keep working through entire categories of errors. The casual attitude of Rust developers towards error handling is one of the many reasons people have trouble taking it seriously. Reliability and robustness is generally more important than language memory safety for almost all contexts.

I didn't introduce the 10M figure, I linked an example article where it was used (the Ynetnews one) -- it is a common number I have seen of those who died in Soviet prisons. Maybe not specifically those who were captured by the NKVD -- but I think a lot of people were dropping dead who were also not political prisoners.

> 10M in this category -- the number who perished "Yagoda's torture chambers" throughout the USSR before the start of the war; and "about half" being in Ukraine;

No -- I said about half of these excess deaths were in Ukraine, most of that half being made up of the 5 million people killed in the Holodomor.

I'm sorry I don't have perfectly legible accounting of the millions of people Stalin killed in Ukraine, but with the lower bound being in the millions I don't think saying 7.5 million people killed in Ukraine is unreasonable. The Holodomor killed 5 million and then there's assuredly another 2.5 million made up in further excess deaths there somewhere. I don't know if it is perfectly accurate and I don't care. These were the people who Bandera had a fiduciary duty to protect, as a leader of Ukrainians. I don't support the evil things that happened in Volhyn and Galicia, but those things had a historical context where there was a credible threat of millions more lives of his countrymen on the line. Tough choices had to be made and he made them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...

There were 20 million+ excess deaths, of which 10 million are commonly attributed to Yagoda:

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

Maybe you disagree with these numbers, but they're the ones I know of.

10 million people died in Genrikh Yagoda's torture chambers. Another 5 million starved to death in the holodomor.

Hitler was bad, sure, but only a third as bad as the Bolsheviks. And about half of those 15 million deaths happened in Ukraine, and Bandera's fiduciary duty was to fellow Ukrainians, not to some foreign nation. If you had to pick a side (and Bandera did) it was best to go with Hitler.

Though Bandera did work with the Nazis, he later worked against them. They weren't ideologically into Nazism.

Even Karaite Jews in Ukraine joined SS regiments at some points. They didn't love Hitler, everyone knew Hitler was a stinker. They were just more immediately concerned with the immediate threat of forced starvation or torture in a gulag.

> I generally call this behavior that of a junkie

and most people that voted in favor of prohibition would say that everyone that drinks alcohol must be a public drunkard, I guess. Usage of ether is a tradition on par with drinking in at least one part of the world. It is a little more dangerous, given ether's excessive flammability and low flash point, but inhaling some ether does not make anyone a junkie. America doesn't have a tradition of ether at all, and it is the only country where there are shambling masses of xylazine/fentanyl zombies defecating in the streets. Maybe you could all use a little more traditional ether consumption.

Bandera was fighting against the Nazis by the end of the war. At any given time, he was doing what was prudent for his country and getting resources to fight the Cheka, because the Soviets were disappearing Ukrainians in the middle of the night and sending them to gulags.

Appreciating Ukrainian cultural traditions is not political. "Slava Ukraini" should not be a political or offensive phrase, unless you are a genocidal maniac supporting Putin's mass murder.

> a liberal attitude like yours.

Lemkos then and now generally had a pretty high opinion of Bandera (they were forcibly resettled by the Soviets). Doing ether is not a particular indicator of a liberal attitude -- it is a traditional practice in Lemko society, and it was so during the time Bandera was alive. Ether is fun and enjoyable, and I like it better than alcohol. I don't think it changes your political designation. It is maybe a Calvinist/Puritan attitude to see the consumption of ether or alcohol as associated with political liberalism, are you perchance of American Protestant stock? This attitude is extremely alien to me.

If you're looking for a great NMDA inhalant experience I'd recommend another classic 19th century anesthetic, diethyl ether. It is extremely simple to produce -- heat everclear and sulfuric acid together and distill. Adjust the PH afterwards. Anyone can make diethyl ether. The actual meat of the ether experience is actually on par with Xenon. I'd say the only element that makes it worse is the aftertaste.

It's still a tradition among Lemkos in the Carpathians (Slava Ukraini!) to drink ether. Drinking is a little trickier, as the boiling point of ether is lower than your body temperature. You should chew and swallow some crushed ice beforehand, and also serve a bit in a shotglass with some crushed ice and lemon shaved ice to offset the taste. I've also found pina colada mix to be a great accompaniment. If you're just starting out with ether I recommend just inhaling the vapor.

Regardless, Kapersky has plenty of money. If he doesn't support his nation's mass butchering of its neighbors he could easily buy citizenship in a country like Nevis, which puts it up for sale, denounce Putin, and abandon the Russian state. As it is, he is under the control of the FSB, and every dollar he earns generates demand for the ruble and tax revenue for the Russian state.

Banning foreign agents from a hostile regime in a time of war is not an attack on free speech. Kapersky is free to speak -- and he has, through public statements from his company. He is not free to do business with the Western world while living in a sanctioned country.

The number of times I've seen HN posters rejoice that people are not allowed to even communicate their political ideas because they are x-ist (it's a private company, bigot!) is too many to count. But the minute there's an actual genocidal war being waged by one of the most wicked nations on earth, people are very concerned about the Constitutional right to commercially sell antivirus software from the enemy's borders. Absurd.