US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343
US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391
A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477854
[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)
>the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
Yes, billionaires are shovelling money at the midterms. Yes, Trump is likely holding rather a lot of AI stocks. This is what happens when you allow money into politics and politicians into money.
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Now a good preface to add true or not to avoid being targeted.
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-who-worked-a...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-28/fbi-raid...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-and-two-us-c...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-...
Etc
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...
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We live in interesting times, truly.
> In June, the Justice Department intervened in an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over dozens of gas turbines the company was running without air permits to power a data center it maintained in Tennessee. The department asked a federal judge to throw the case out, arguing that the NAACP “threatens American national, economic, and energy security.”
> To make the point, the government filed a sworn declaration from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Stanley swore to the court that Grok was “a matter of paramount national security.”
Seriously, wow. Time to clean up our act.
It will be bad for our economy, but local LLM's are way better for the future.
We happen to be on the wrong side of things for the future I would rather have.
(I'm American BTW)
LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3
While there may be real foreign influence to delay our AI infrastructure, I would not believe anything this administration says.
Ken Klippenstein is not a journalist and has no accountability.
I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.
As long as the site remains ecologically "healthy," I suspect it would be beneficial to learn how to leverage otherwise vacant land.
IMO, the "AI" part of this story is just a distraction.
The real story is going after people for protesting and voicing their opinion. A clear move towards authoritarianism and potentially fascism. Seems like it touches 4 of "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" : https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
(1,2,7,12 and maybe 10?)
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It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.
Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.
I’m past assuming these lot have the US’s long term interests at heart
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
It gets flagged here instantly so your duty to read this.
Try searching "tech fascism" or "nerd reich" and almost every topic is flagged.
Nerd Reich describes the Y Combinator connection nicely.
How do you know?
NPR did an episode of Planet Money on paid protests that are indeed funded by Chinese and Russian governments. So have many other news organizations.
For the past 25 years, ever-increasing numbers of Russian civil society have been labeled foreign agents. They are then ostracized and harassed by officials.
One prominent example is Memorial, a human rights organization founded at the end of the Soviet Union, which received the Nobel Peace Prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)
“After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice. The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St. Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.”
Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
This seems right out of the Red Scare, when normal everyday american socialists were treated as agents of the USSR.
The term "witch hunt" was used then, because just like the historical witch hunts - an accusation alone was enough to find you guilty
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What has one to do with the other? Why would a believe "widely held" have any bearing on it being manufactured in China or not? This is a non sequitur.
Setting aside the politics, trump, ai-doom/boom, I just think this claim is fascinating. Can somebody steel man this? What’s the best evidence for this?
Coincidentally we have seen the CCP talking point applied to AI critics here in the last week, so it was in the briefing of the influencers.
The oligarchs employ a standard red scare tactic like it's 1950.
Everyone else is a "terrorist".
Ever since the charge was used against pipeline protesters, I've been saying that the working definition of "terrorism" in the US, is "anyone that impedes the profit of large corporations"...
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I am confident this has absolutely nothing to do with the Super Intelligence private financial interests.
The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
I wonder if we can infer any chronological forecast from relative USA::РФ time frames?
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This is directly, line for line, copied from Putin's playbook. In Russia, if you do anything the government doesn't like, you can either declare yourself a "foreign agent" and live with the massive restrictions that imposes, or get designated as one anyway with flimsy or non-existent evidence, and then face those same restrictions plus criminal prosecution for non-compliance.
Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.
> “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood,” Trump also posted, “are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.”
Pot calling the kettle black, as always.
This is unsupported by the reported Trump statements.
Declare everyone who opposes you to be "Foreign agents".
In Putin's case it worked; he managed to drive pretty much all independent journalists out of Russia.
This isn't necessarily some weird corrupt conspiracy.
Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments.
> the administration declared war on protestors and opponents of AI, threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
This is literally the go-to playbook of Russia and China for silencing critics. Label every critic a foreign agent and use state violence to silence them.
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/01/russia-new-restrictions-...
- https://apnews.com/article/china-hong-kong-national-security...
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Worse, without sharing the data with feds!
The stated reason for the "terrorist" title was not them being not-rich. It was facilitating a platform which hosted organizations which behave on the extreme end - because it's privacy centered and those elements obviously want that.
If would be a valid discussion point wherever that justifies setting the whole platform on fire, but the way you're making the point ultimately sabotages your message.
The first and most evident is that the reason is false. That hosting provider makes it clear in its ToS that extremist groups aren't allowed, and when one is detected they actively ban those accounts. They've show documental proof of both.
The second is that it violates the first amendment of the US's own constitution, which uses universal language, not discriminating between citizens and non-citizens, nor between inside and outside US territories, nor between nationals and foreigners. So any federal US action trying to prevent people anywhere from saying anything they want between themselves, and with people in the US, is, in principle at least, out of bounds.
>We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Although more generally I do believe even without the preamble it would still be implied that the US government does not have jurisdiction over the entire planet. We would never be able to invade a foreign country if their government was entitled to third-amendment and fourth-amendment rights.
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Anyone can be a terrorist if “different opinion than the President of the United States” is all it takes to be labeled a “terrorist.” The label has lost all meaning.
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It can also level the playing field.
Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips, and a personal assistant to help them navigate through it.
- LLMs give users more knowledge (debatable due to hallucinations and selection bias)
- having more data/knowledge means more power and therefore less authority / power imbalance (that was an argument for the Internet and social media, but it turned out exactly the other way around)
Both of these arguments is dubious, but somewhat reasonable, but requiring both to be true to achieve any form of net positive is a hard sell. That, plus as Al Khatib argues, AI is about taking away autonomy from the people. Beyond the cognitive studies about LLM impacts on our brains, having someone/thing else decide for you is decidedly incompatible with anti-authoritarian politics (autonomy vs heteronomy).
do you agree or disagree with the following:
- Knowledge should not be gatekept.
- At this point in our civilization, a single human cannot learn all of accumulated human knowledge, let alone remember it and master it.
- It's increasingly difficult to make progress in frontier fields without mastering a lot of other fields first ("shoulders of giants") or to even navigate through all the laws and social institutions governing daily life.
- Groups who employ many people to pool their knowledge have an exceedingly broad advantage over a single person.
I agree.
I absolutely think that is not what all this compute power is for.
I do believe that all this statistical inference and generation, alongside the massive data collection apparatus we have built, is designed explicitly to completely lock down the possible actions for any person targeted by the folks who own these systems, and these systems aren't owned by "every human".
Quite the contrary- historically the folks who own those systems are pretty, uh, specific about what they man by "human". Those folks are so capricious about that concept of human they can't believe brown folks are human while their kids suspect the computers might be human.
Oh, and they are using consumers prompts to gather even more data. LLMs are creating even greater asymmetric information situations than we had before.
Also, the common person has no say in how these systems are developed, the big actors do, and these systems are already used to automate decisions. That's a totalitarian potential, not just authoritarian.
So, your banking passwords?
>I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through.
I mean it is a technology. Politicians may go on about it but didn't create it.
I think AI falls into the second category. Even the most optimistic interpretations of AI, such as in Asimov, are very totalitarian. They're only positive because AI is automating away human work to create more resource/financial equality between people. In our real world though, AI is just as totalitarian, but there's not a single glimmer of hope that it will be used to better share resources. That sounds more political than technical.
somebody gotta build all those datacenters ... (a kind of reference to the gulag tremendously growing simultaneously with and being the major source of labor, and practically free at that, for the very fast and massive USSR Industrialization in 193x)
And with opposition to the datacenters in developed areas, and all the need for water and energy, the datacenters (and all that massive infrastructure like power lines, power plants, etc.) would probably be built in less hospitable areas, like China does in Inner Mongolia [1], and it would be very hard to make people to move there at their own free will. DHS is already building out their own large gulag, and i think it is only a matter of time with this administration when they decide to use the forced labor USSR style.
This is an incentive to build. Not to manage downside risk.
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The USA's economy is now so precarious when the AI DC music stops it's about to all just go poof. That has to happen after the election, not before. Between other countries being forced to sell their US bonds (i.e. dedollarize) to afford oil, a 100% tax on all imports, reciprocal trade bans like fresh water from Canada, truckers running out of diesel and having to cancel food deliveries, and non-oil-based energy sources being illegal, the USA is cooked.
GDP is a particularly poor proxy to measure all of this. AI/Datacenters can increase the GDP while the costs (energy,infra, labor,disruption,capital concentration) are distributed elsewhere
It reminds me of the old joke where two economies each eat a dead rat for 10k$ and conclude they just added 20k$ to the GDP/Economy.
I wish to ask if its that AI is increasing our actual economic output but also who really captures the gains and who bears the costs if the boom eventually reverses.
Energy lockdowns have always been part of US culture, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#USA
It's un-American to invest in infrastructure and build a better power network. Both parties agree on this.
(/s)
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
energy lockdowns
Another item from the soylent green checklist.
Three claims of propagandists with agendas.
While I do think AI will be disruptive like other tech advances, I think the manner and extent to which it could cause trouble is rarely discussed in a way that will be looked back on as resembling what actually ends up happening.
Datacenter build outs: use turbines for direct noise and air pollution... or use grid electricity and increase prices for everyone nearby.
Every modern phone, laptop, computer in the world: more expensive thanks to datacenter buildout.
Web experience: slop blogs, slop videos, slop "searches" - would you like more slop with that?
Corporate strategy: lets try to monopolize LLM use!
.. ..
Public Elected Official: Not liking these outcomes makes you a traitor.
Creating these vague justifications for insane power abuse has become the norm.
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
The article:
> Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The DoJ:
>“If a person acts as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power, he or she must register with or notify the appropriate federal authorities”
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The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
>it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
You think people oppose data centers in their towns to protect their React jobs?
With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.
1. We've seen AI being crafty and cheating
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
Another twist is getting rid of any remaining truth in the already post-truth world.
For example, the head of the totally corrupt Centerizberkom in Russia, the organization behind all those rigged "elections" of the past 20 years, showed an AI video depicting a casually looking man mass-dropping ballot papers into a box, followed by several outright fantasy AI characters doing the same.
Can you guess what the bottom line of that demonstration was?
Exactly - no video is a proof of anything anymore, and if some vigilant citizens try to film egregious violations of the "democratic elections" and share that, then it must be fake, because it's trivial to create any video these days with AI.
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
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That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
This bleak future is all the more believable when tech companies are laying people of, en masse, citing AI as the reason. Meta's current "We're betting on people" ads appears conceived to combat this, yet at the same time Zuckerberg has been trying to lay off as many people as he can to be replaced with AI.
The disruption of society is not some Chinese created idea - it's also coming direct from the US AI companies, with Anthropic and OpenAI apparently in competition to see who can claim/admit credit for the most out of control AI hacking into external systems, and non-stop stories of employees of these same US AI companies apparently living in fear of it, and believing it could make us extinct(!). With that sort of vibe coming from US AI leadership and rank-and-file, it's hard to imagine how any foreign country could top it!
As far as datacenter locations goes, I was interested to read the other day about DeepSeek planning for a new 160,000 GPU cluster in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which sounds a bit of an obscure location until you realize that apparently there is a whole mass of existing data centers in that same city/region, chosen for it's remote location as well as easy access to power. I don't know what anti-datacenter messaging Trump imagines is coming from China, but maybe what he should be doing is being like China in this regard and planning where to put them.
Notwithstanding all his anti-China-ism, and regarding US locked in some life or death battle with China over AI, what's the betting that his current pop-wow with visiting Xi will result in some "deal" being announced where Trump softens his AI sanctions on China? He's brought Jensen Huang with him, Musk too, and apparently is looking for China not to block US sale of NVIDIA H200's he is offering, maybe increase NVIDIA sales.
There's an 11 gigawatt cluster going in near Pantex. If they use evaporative cooling, they could use hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day... sucking it from an aquifer that gets replenished at the rate of millimeters per year, and was already being massively depleted. Without that aquifer's water, this region is dead.
They claim they won't use evaporative cooling, but... they'd save a lot of money if they did... until the water ran out.
Texan Republican statesmen are fighting it. Oil money, farm/ranch money, etc., are all fighting it. People who have historically been ride-or-die for Trump. These are the people he's threatening to treat as traitors.
I'm as pro-AI as a person can be... you can read my comments here. But, this build-out is wildly irresponsible - incredibly poor civic engineering.
A lot of which is fake "grassroots" movements by... foreign actors. This isn't new:
- 2021: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro...
- 2022: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
Today's America has no FDR to save runaway capitalism from itself.
It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.
This must be satire. Most of congress seems to have no issue undermining and self-dealing.
linking .net as a source for a claim a network is making lol
Now label me as an adversarial agent to the great nation or given my ethnicity the "terrorist" label will be more befiting.
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They even have agents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei posting at a furious rate about how AI is going to decimate the American workforce to undermine Americans' support for AI!
Should the Civil Rights movement have been proscribed on the basis of Nazis and Soviets making propaganda about the treatment of black people in the US of A?
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Co-founder Jodie Evans is married to Neville Roy Singham who lives in China, has extensive links to the CCP and is currently Code Pink's major funder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
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But there aren’t. At least not in any of the anti datacenter discussions. There are just vague fears of using up the river water and spewing chemicals back in. Then the majority of actual issues people come up with aren’t even data center specific, they are just construction mishaps.
https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine...
The reason they need to be written like that, it because honest takes have a pretty hard time making data centers look close to being as bad as everyday things like golf courses, average car emissions, AC's set at 70, eating meat, normal industrial power demand, or the overnight shipping economy.
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
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You say this like it is some sort of exception to the rule. Glancing at history, usually when societies with trains come up against competitors using horses it turns out that the train people are literally power hungry dictators who do kill off the entire opposition. The reason most countries tend towards capitalist economies is what happens to your society if the capitalists are all on the other side when battle lines are drawn up.
Sucks to be poor and tech-illiterate. The advice is don't set society up that way on purpose.
I'm not sure what side are you talking about here.
What's wrong with AI? The people yearn for the spreadsheets?
If you want to deal with income inequality achieving UBI is a separate issue. It is perfectly coherent for someone to support AI buildout and UBI. Let everyone get a piece. But trying to "go back to the land" because "killer robots" is economic suicide. It's like the American electorate can't stop committing self-owns.
Let's go from a decade+ of Trump to more cuts of Bernie Sanders debating Claude. How about instead of a moratorium on AI we get a moratorium on the same cast of old geezers?
It's really hard to be optimistic about America sometimes... redistributing wealth is really not that hard of a concept. Before Reagan this country understood that everyone should be able to do well and everyone should have a stake in America and that the capital class needed to pay it back. Now people are lobbying against the only chance their kids will have to not work like rats. Who wants their kids sitting in an office all day? Take away the inflated paycheck and most "knowledge work" straight up sucks.
If they were true patriots they would respect the restrictions of the congressional FLOUR Act 2028 and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.
So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?
Bro, Jeanine Pirro filed to dismiss this (ridiculous) case against Hearn in July. It's over; they are not still trying to prosecute him.
And the the DOJ came back wanting to lay additional charges (other than those dropped in July) and Hearn was back in court in August and September arguing that the case should be dropped with prejudice so the original criminal case is permanently ended and to block the Trump administration from filing the same claim again.
The current sitting POTUS is a deeply petty man, pathologically incapable of letting perceived grievances rest.
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Looking at those numbers. Looking at what it does now. And then simply comparing it to anything else and very reasonable some start to question what even is going on...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/...
And while you’re at it? Tell it to Renee Good and Alex Pretti
That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
However, there is a second pillar: the agent has to " engage in political activities, gather information on military capabilities, or create and disseminate information intended for a broad audience." Which is why eg Gazprom is presumably not a foreign agent.
Edit: and by the way, that's a total misrepresentation of what I wrote. AI companies are attempting regulatory capture to protect their business, which should be opposed by all means possible.
What you wrote was: "Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments." which is false on the face of it, anti BDS laws have still not been proven to be constitutional where they have been passed or proposed in a few states, and the wiki entry shows a significant lack of 'name the US Civil or Criminal Code' in any of the references; the only source of "38 states have passed" type wording is an article in an unsourced foreign publication.
So either you are not comprehending the state of anti-BDS legislation, or do comprehend it and are intentionally being misleading. There may be some regulations which prohibit the US gov't from accepting contracts or bids from organizations which are boycotting Israeli business but that is not the same as being 'illegal to boycott' by any stretch of an overactive imagination.
Also, this entire line of conversation has ZERO BEARING on the original topic which is about a particularly egregious misbehavior on the part of the US gov't. which has echoes of 1930's Germany's use of "National Security" to restrict freedom of the press and used that same premise in increments to restrict all manner of personal freedoms to greater and greater extremes without judicial oversight. The application of this approach is broader than the scope of AI conversation as this same approach has been championed by Trump staffer with a history of writing in support of those 1930's actions. This should be concerning to anyone with a mind to prevent repetitions of nefarious and malicious historical pretexts leading to loss of freedom.
There's nothing gained by adding unrelated and incorrect statements to the thread, and my prior comment stands. Posts from a less than 1 week old account with nothing substantive, useful or true in this conversation which is behavior consistent with long-standing troll farm noise here on HN. If you're not a troll account, then stop acting exactly like one. Otherwise, shut up and go away.
we are not Russia nor China thankfully, any litigation at this stage against an AI critic would fall flat.
In the future, maybe? However in the current climate it's just a bunch of empty words like the rest of the admin has been
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr...
The Trump administration IS instructing US Attorneys to go after such things, and juries are in some cases buying it. It's probably better if you aren't protesting a data center in Texas.
do you think this is a useful way to have a discussion?
If you know the government will be interested in documents in your possession in relation to a criminal investigation, it is in fact a crime to destroy or remove them. Regardless of content. As to the sentence term -- this is up to the judge.
And it's all completely unrelated to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which was the topic of this fine article.
How does being critical of AI directly connect to a spurious association with antifa or any connection to a riot or shooting?
These two categories are different. I agree there is overreach in Sanchez's case however i don't know how one can assume the same will happen to some guy saying "AI bad"
If they were rioting; or connected to a rioting group, that might be different.
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> The second is that it violates the first amendment of the US's own constitution, which uses universal language, not discriminating between citizens and non-citizens, nor between inside and outside US territories, nor between nationals and foreigners.
If you take this universalist interpretation, that would mean it's fine for US citizens to truck guns into Canada (which they can't, but they still occasionally do, largely for much more boring reasons than believing there's a constitutional justification) with no restrictions because the implication is that the US constitution supersedes other laws in other countries.
It is, however, against the spirit of the document, and it's arguably an abuse of the existing framework of sanctioning organizations which take part in terrorist efforts. It's another case of the US legal system falling short because of an assumption of good faith by those in power.
This is why, for example, the US gives itself the right to tax people in other countries. If those people happen to be Americans, the US enforces that by threatening them with this or that the moment they step back anywhere the US has enforcement means. This is also why the UK tries to enforce its censorship laws on US companies, why my country tries to enforce our censorship laws on SpaceX, and so on.
Hence, if the US considers itself capable and allowed to enforce this and that law internationally, it follows that the supreme law that governs all those more limited laws also applies internationally unless a specific point in it says otherwise (and several do, so this delimitation is in fact meaningful and coherent).
> Every country believes its laws apply universally
Canada has the Canada Health Act, which describes the specifics of what provinces and territories must provide in terms of public health services, and how, and how those health services are funded, how the money gets disbursed, and how the money gets reimbursed by various parties within the system. It would be absurd to think that the expectation of anyone in the Canadian government is that this should apply worldwide.
The UK has the Highway Code, which describes a number of driving laws, restrictions, conventions, and requirements of drivers, among them, their (at this point rare) left-hand drive rule. Do they expect that to be enforced universally? Do they have some kind of plan to power-project onto the rest of the world with that by having agents of their government travel abroad to, say, France, Mexico, or South Korea, and ticket people for driving on the right?
But that's an entirely different matter to the original claim.
I guess you could argue AI is more a mathematical discovery than a technology. I mean the recent boom has been driven by the discovery that if you stick the internet into the transformers algorithm you get intelligent sounding results which is true regardless of the hardware involved.
I don't agree with the resource pessimism - I think it'll go more https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/business/a-world-where-al... though I guess time will tell on that one.
Interestingly, this article does not make a single argument why this is technically possible, but does point out that Musk and friends have no plan to make the wealth redistribution happen. The article does not quote a single researcher on extractivism, material sciences, ecology... This is religious dogma at its finest. You may be a believer, but that does not make it plausible.
On the other hand, there is an abundance of data points that ecological collapse is already happening. All scientists agree we are on a non-sustainable path. Many agree that this model's collapse is unavoidable, but the question remains: do you want to plan for a humanist degrowth making quality of life better for everyone and more sustainable? or do you want a Mad Max-like future where people fight for drinkable water?
This is the magic. Historically many Americans voted for Leopards Eating Faces out of either a misplaced belief that their face wouldn't be eaten or a rational but still awful choice that OK, I don't want my face eaten but at least the people I don't like get their faces eaten and that's important to me. Today the idea is you vote for the Leopards Eating Faces and then when your face gets eaten that's explicitly not because of the Leopards Eating Faces. "Facts aren't true" becomes Dogma.
This almost works. Except for the most important thing. Mother Nature. Ma doesn't give a shit that you don't believe her facts are true.
"I could not help myself. It is my nature."
Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.
Neuron activation
A lot of people will only hear half of that sentence. Semantically speaking.
If only investors and buyers weren't so vulnerable to the "might kill you and everyone you ever cared about" ploy
Great grandparent claimed (or at least strongly implied) that the labs have been saying that their creations might end the human race because the labs expect that saying such things will attract investment in the labs or purchases of their creations. I disputed that claim (using sarcasm).
Do you agree with me or disagree with me? (I honestly cannot tell.)
Would you say that the meme you quoted is sarcasm?
Do you believe that the meme you quoted has attracted investors or buyers?
That anyone ever expected that it would?
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
Are we only going to accept arguments based on guessing at motivations or should we perhaps also evaluate the actual material facts?
Reminds me of “this guy Diego…”
Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?
Are you gonna continue to tolerate it? Or are you gonna stop them from playing with grenades in this train car we call earth?
They've played you like a fiddle.
That’s a very engineer type of take.
Both middle management and HR serve roles that are believed to be useful to someone (maybe not you).
Often it is some form of protection by serving as a fall guy or complying with regulations, but it can be other things (e.g., increasing headcount/budget to gain power, etc.).
Yes, many sales people or even whole sales teams are effectively dead weight, but a highly-skilled sales team is a godsend both to the company and the economy.
We should all be wishing for more effective sales teams — the world would be a better place.
Most people have never experienced a good sales team, so I’m guessing this sounds like total fiction.
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This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things the administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously the plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just an authoritarian lever to silence dissenting speech the government does not like.
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
FARA requires coordination with the foreign power. You are perfectly allowed to further its goals unless you have actually coordinated with them.
You have to actually be an agent of the foreign power. You can't be that just because you share their goals.
1. "We mean people who at that time qualify as agents under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, we said "acting as" because it indicates a temporary employment status rather than an innate human characteristic."
2. "We are weasel-wording to target all people with similar acts to how agents would act, but who would not qualify under the law we want you to think we'd be drawing authority from."
According to who?
If that's according to the current us administration, then "qualifies as an agent" means "disagrees with the administration".
If they try charging Joe-Shmoe under FARA, there's still some chance of loss in federal courts.
1. People in general who have opinions that might happen to align with a foreign power's stance.
2. People who are literally "agents" of a foreign power as defined under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 [0], which often involves being directed/hired/paid.
That'd be a significantly different legal standard. (The constitutionality of FARA-type laws being a separate question.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
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Only a truly naïve person would not have seen this next logical step (prosecutory threats) coming when the preceding step received virtually no opposition.
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Right. The DoJ is demanding the former group register as foreign agents, as they are required to under FARA.
That's far too kind a description. Donald Trump is a compromised lunatic who's so untrustworthy that he ought not be allowed to run a carnival game.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
here it is: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-...
> To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification
Wdym? GPT-6-Astra is AGI - Jensen even said so!
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
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No he was not
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
The righteousness of making a fast buck is also burning down the world.
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
Meanwhile, they dont care about acrual harm to real people. They sell to Palantier for christ sake.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
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When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
The establishment and its techbro enablers have messed up so badly that telling the torch people that the pitchfork people want to take their torches isn't working anymore. So now they're moving on to claiming that anyone with a torch or a pitchfork is secretly working for the next kingdom over.
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And anyway, it's not as if the money is freely given. Some of it's expiring equipment, some are loans or exchanges for the promise of resources, etc. Yes, it is a modicum. A few days of bombing Iran has cost us almost half the total amount given to Ukraine, for negative value.
Framing it as trillions and blaming the nation being attacked (all for what, having some nice land with resources?) makes it very hard to take any of your other points seriously.
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I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.
The fact is that I don't have a stake in analyses about whether the administration is operating in good faith. I'm an opponent of the administration. I'm already sold on that point.
My problem is with the Ken Klippensteins who are engagement farming with posts that misinform people about how the law works.
If you're already winding up with a reply about how the law doesn't matter anymore, ask yourself "why are we talking about this then?" If it doesn't matter, they don't need to announce anything, and their announcement has no content.
As it stands: the announcement really doesn't have any content anyways; they generate this stuff specifically to rile people like you up, and Klippenstein feeds off that energy like a remora.
He is misinformed and intentionally trying to change the subject away from China though, and it worked.
Which was kind of the point in my initial post. If this fresh account is operated in the US by a person receiving funds from a foreign government (i.e. from or on behalf of the CCP) then there is a requirement to register under the 1938 Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). The website for this is at : https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara
It's not illegal for a US resident to recieve funds for lobbying, but it is illegal to do so without compliance with the appropriate regulatory oversight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...
Or just acknowledging that they exist?
They require government contractors to not participate in certain boycotts, which is completely in line with long standing US policy. Doing otherwise would be insane, the government would be funding both it's own stated objectives and the opposite.
When the shoe is on the other foot you support this behavior. I don't see you crying over half the countries in the middle east forcing every company they work with to boycott Israel.
Or is he right that it’s a crime to refuse such payments?
Or is he right to make stuff up about Israel and use it to create a diversion when the topic was something negative about China?
Anti-BDS laws do not make it a crime to refuse payments from the Israeli government to influence Americans.
Why don't you use a non throwaway account and stand by your behavior?
Why is this tolerated on HN??
The same goes, I suppose, for the UK code you refer to. I imagine the British legislators specified clearly what roads are under its control. If not, then yes, that's the expectation, exactly like is happening right now with their censorship laws.
To learn more on this Google for the quite famous phrase "Parliament can criminalize smoking on the streets of Paris”. You're going to either double facepalm, or be horrified, if not both.
I referenced the meme in order to show that yes, the zeitgeist does believe that the investor-class will destroy civilization for short-term profit.
And yes, I believe at least a subset of investors are short-sighted and willing to inflict immense harm for profit, and that claiming the ability to cause incalculable damage is a deliberate attempt to appeal to such people.
I believe the LLM-mania is in no small part driven by an ultimately fraudulent implicit pitch to investors that OpenAI etc will eventually Install Planetary Overlords, and that claiming "we could wipe out the human race" serves as marketing in furtherance of that implication.
My in laws don’t have a microwave because they think it nukes food… one of them mentioned rouge AIs attacking a site called huggingface by name to me… this shit is not organic.
The evidence in front of us (the malicious words of the person in question) strongly favors malice anyways.
Wow, you're really triggered by the idea that people should get a say about what happens in their lives.
You'll note I didn't oppose the datacenters - I offered a solution to getting the datacenters built. If you trade houses with the people who don't want a data center in the neighborhood you're getting the datacenter! It's just that you're so upset about someone else having the ability to affect their own lives that you aren't seeing that you have the same power, and can work towards your own perfect world with power plants and datacenters and sewage treatment plants and subway stops just down the street!
I think the problem with that plan is what I pointed out - you want other people to have all the downsides of those things in their neighborhood while you get the benefit. It's pretty sick to think that them not wanting the downsides is a problem, but you not wanting the downsides also means they have a problem. Fortunately there's a solution! Go form a YIMBY community that allows all the projects that have representatives promising benefits, and prove that the NIMBYs are all wrong. I'm 100% certain it will make you way happier.
> What's your plan to solve income inequality?
Well part of it starts by not giving giant companies with lots of money even more money in the form of tax breaks, extra access to government, and the ability to use eminent domain for their profit. All these thing grow income inequality.
You mean, utilities, run by the public for public benefit instead of private profit?
So you concede you don't care about private value in the face of public benefit?
I don't support that. The administration is the worst advocate for AI because they are so clearly corrupt. If local people pursue their economic self interest at the end of the day that's their right. This whole nimby thing was a diversion from my point about knowledge workers turning on AI. Perhaps I should have just ignored that comment.
If people want to stop a local data center then fine. I think it's bad national politics. But if it's helping these companies make better deals or find better places to go then good. What I object to is the doomerism about it, and the uncritical conflation of self interest with civic virtue or robust public policy.
However these AI ones are being built with all expenses spared. That's why they come with on-site electricity generation that is loud enough to keep the whole town awake at night and pollutes enough to give them all permanent asthma.
I lived by a datacenter in Cali and would happily do it again. It’s about the most benign form of “industrial” activity you could imagine.
I understand you're disappointed that people had the ability to choose things in their lives and didn't choose the thing you wanted. You can still do plenty to get the datacenters right across the street from you - sometimes in this world you have to work for the outcomes you want. IDK if it's fair or not, but it is how it seems to work out.
Those are two I know off the top of my head. There are others.
Why would you lie about something so easily dispoven?
He was wrong about so many things and now refuses to talk. Also got the first pre pardon for crimes undiscovered against him.
At the end of the day a debate is only as good as the interlocutors. I wouldn't advocate spectating two people screaming at each other either.
It's just sad that I can't even point to an instructive example here. This is part of my frustration. I don't think I've seen a good contemporary debate in a long time.
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Individualistic: vaccines don't help the young
Communitarian: vaccinating everybody creates herd immunity that protects the community
Individualistic: Masks don't protect the wearer
Communitarian: Masks reduce the virus the wearer breathes out reducing the harm to others
On lab-leak, Rogan pushed it hard based only on circumstantial evidence while Fauci thought natural spillover was more likely but didn't rule out lab leak. I don't think we'll ever know for certain.
You should believe the intelligence agencies.
Despite the fact that they don't approve of our speaking to their people, we do it anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
The U.S. is a democracy. We hold freedom of speech as sacrosanct. We let people make up their own minds as to how to evaluate competing viewpoints. I see no reason why the viewpoints of other countries--even those very different from ours--shouldn't be considered.
I have no problem with labeling speech's origin so that people can take it into account, but that's not the same as censoring it.
Even ‘Citizens United’ is about otherwise eligible citizens being able to organize under an umbrella (and act under that umbrella) - not that the umbrella itself fundamentally has rights independent of the people under it. Though it has resulted in widespread abuse due to the ability to hide who is actually under the umbrella.
Foreign nationals making statements outside the US towards US citizens have historically no protection either - it’s why the NSA and CIA are in theory not chartered for domestic action, but have nearly carte Blanche outside the US. The CIA and US military has rather publicly assassinated folks off US soil for statements and actions that would be protected inside the US.
In fact, prior Supreme Court precedent heavily uses phrases like ‘the constitution is not a death pact’, and ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not protected speech’.
Historically, foreign nationals have even been ejected/deported from the US for what would have been perfectly normal protected speech for US citizens, and it’s very common for visas and other entry documents to be denied based on what would be protected speech for US citizens.
Unregistered foreign agents tend to be locked up, deported, or hung.
Why shouldn't the same principles we apply to our own people apply to foreign people? Isn't freedom of speech a universal principle? If not, what makes outsiders' speech substantively different from ours that we should censor it?
Moreover, people in the U.S. are free to say the exact same things that foreigners might say. Why does it matter that it's coming from outside the country as opposed to inside it?
> Supreme Court precedent heavily uses phrases like ‘the constitution is not a death pact’
1/It was "suicide pact." 2/That was dicta from Justice Jackson in a dissent in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949), not law.
> and ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not protected speech’.
That was from an early free speech case in 1919 (Schenck v. U.S.) when speech restrictions were more broadly upheld--and it was not the question in the case (it was just an example). Freedom of speech has been significantly liberalized since then. Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) overruled Schenck: "[T]he constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
> Unregistered foreign agents tend to be locked up, deported, or hung.
It sounds to me like you're just an unapologetic xenophobe.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.
Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?
All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!
What does "survival as a civilization" mean to you, exactly, and how might speech from other countries threaten this?
Wow, almost as if opposing the genocide of millions and the invasion of Europe by a hostile invading power is good or something. Sounds like you're saying it's bad, though. Weird.
Neither side got their quick victory, but now the war seems to have been effectively decided. It was arguably decided years ago after the major counter-attack yielded nothing but corpses. All that remains now is prolonging the conflict quite pointlessly, with regular efforts to try to escalate it once again that will hopefully go nowhere. Not because I hope one side or the other wins, but because if other countries start actively jumping in then we have WW3, and in a few years every single person alive, which would be substantially less than today, would regret that decision.
Could you link a reliable source that says international law supports forcefully attacking and annexing other countries to take their land which lies within internationally recognized borders?
The current state is that the vast majority of countries have judged that russia should leave, and the continued conflict is their fault (regardless of what a few in the extreme minority may think).
So that can make them informative, but you need to keep in mind what they mean as well. For instance a vote proposed by Russia to form an independent multinational coalition to investigate the Nordstream sabotage was rejected. Why? Because everybody knew Russia obviously didn't sabotage themselves, and so the investigation would be politically inconvenient, and the US won the influence check - so it wasn't passed. But this also points to something more interesting with regards to Ukraine. There are a total of 193 UN member states and early on there were extreme votes demanding Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine and more. These passed with 141 nations voting in favor, so your statement was quite accurate.
But as the war has turned in Russia's favor, with consequent geopolitical implications for the future, the things being voted on are now far less extreme, like a call for a ceasefire, yet even that is only garnering 93 to 107 votes. That's not even a simple majority in some cases. It's mostly coming down to the 'global north' versus the 'global south'. Notably, the global south makes up something like 85% of the world's population as well as the majority of its economy as well now. So your statement is certainly no longer true, and verging on misleading given the population issue.
I only replied that bringing up Israel out of nowhere in reply to a discussion about the US government and China is clearly an attempt to change the subject, and making false claims about Jews, especially when they fit the usual Elders of Zion pattern of "Jews control the world so they have different rules" is antisemetic, which it is.
That doesn’t support any argument against new builds nor does it support the notion that they are inherently noisy.
Also, in reply to your further up NIMBY nonsense suggesting I move.
I don’t think you understand how people operate. I like my small city and am upset idiots spread fear and harmed its prospects that we will pay for with continued anemic local employment, poorly budgeted infrastructure, etc.
I want to see good things here. I’m not just going to give up on it and go to some city that has its shit together on the business side.
Datacenters have been around for decades and the Dulles Tech Corridor, the ones around Portland, the SIX in Seattle, etc all have shown they can operate just fine.
> I understand you're disappointed that people had the ability to choose things in their lives and didn't choose the thing you wanted
No, I’m disappointed they did it based on ignorance and propaganda. There was no informed decision making going on. This is no different than people who voted against gay marriage because they thought their god would seek retribution through calamities.
This is a good point. Was it a data center across the street from somebody’s house when it was mining Bitcoin? Yes. Will it still be a data center across the street from somebody’s house when it reopens as an ai data center? Also yes
Does my comment re: anti-self defense make sense now? I think you summarized the existing law pretty well - and what it grew out of.
If people feel threatened/are being targeted with a legitimate threat, they’ll react - or die. Regardless of rules or agreements.
That’s happened in the past, and is starting to happen again.
Besides, the Constitution is designed to sustain our nation not just against speech, but even if our most sacred buildings are destroyed and our president is killed. That’s the beauty of it. It’s a clever design by the most brilliant minds of our time. Thus, I’ve never understood some people’s obsession with security. Such people are focused on current office holders and icons they deem important, not the health of the system, and not the ideals and principles enshrined by it. Paranoia and vengeance does not befit us.
Also, it pains me to have to remind self-identified Christians—the ones typically most obsessed with national security—that to “turn the other cheek” is one of the fundamental pillars of the faith, straight out of Jesus’ mouth. (Matthew 5:38–39)
Unregistered foreign agents tend to receive a fine, if they are charged at all. Before the past decade even this was very rare, now maybe there is one per year. The maximum punishment is like 5 years in jail, and no one has ever been hung for this. The directive to conflate these only traces to Pam Bondi.
Most of your post is like this in that you speak authoritatively but fumble premises. For instance you clearly don't understand free speech law. Yelling fire in a crowded theatre IS protected speech. The Schenck case your quote comes from was overturned in Brandenberg 60 years ago and is considered a national judicial embarrassment.
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Very little is more existential to even the idea of a nation than the national identity, the in-group, out-group, etc. and that is what it is used for.
And if you think Hollywood didn’t turn that out in spades, I dare you to watch Top Gun and tell me that movie is about people flying planes, hah.
If so, seems remarkably stupid to allow foreign powers to use proven effective techniques against you unchecked, doesn’t it?
Right up there with being convinced that if someone punches you in the face, you can’t punch them right back - or worse - and/or throw them in jail for it.
That last comment is pretty hilarious in the context of geopolitics. Or criminal law.
The court may make you swear on a Bible, but what would you think about a judge telling an assault victim that they going to not give the assailant a day in jail and they should just turn the other cheek?
That judge isn’t going to be on that bench very long, that’s for sure!
This is something well understood in the Bible too - Romans 13:1-13:7 sums it up pretty well.
What is the practical difference between propaganda from the inside and that from the outside? Internal propaganda is often much more dangerous than external propaganda because it has a patina of legitimacy. President Trump, as you may recall, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential Medal of Freedom for, among other things, legitimizing the racism and sexism and a fairy-tale version of America that eventually set the stage for his election.
I'd contend we should worry a lot less about what others are saying than what we are saying to each other. Yet it still doesn't mean we should censor speech.
> Very little is more existential to even the idea of a nation than the national identity, the in-group, out-group, etc. and that is what it is used for.
Who is the in-group? Who is the out-group? Who shouldn't be in? Are you sure they're not in already? Should a nation evolve or be the same as when they were founded? What evolution is ok? What's not ok?
My experience is that when people don't want to answer them, it's because they either 1/don't actually know the answers, or 2/are afraid of what their honest answers will reveal about them.
Literally everything you seem to be arguing about has already happened, even on the platform you are arguing on, but you seem oblivious to it.
It’s like arguing with a child about tax policy or something while they insist taxes are bad. Sure, but they are clearly not going to be able to do anything about it, and it isn’t even useful for anyone, so why waste the time?
Don’t forget the 5 Cubans thrown in jail under FARÁ, the LA major just indicted under it, or the numerous other successful prosecutions.
I gave a range of common punishments, don’t act like I’m not being entirely accurate here.
Hell, one of the recent prosecutions was a multimillion dollar bribery scandal from foreign nationals with the current admin - that only avoided jail time because of one of the more blatant pardons by the exact same admin.
That some were bad is par for the course. Most weren’t, and haven’t been.
Read it, it’s a short read.
You’re the one making bizarre statements unsupported by any cogent arguments.
Historically, unregistered foreign agents get deported, imprisoned, or executed. Not protected.
There is a long, long history of this. It’s only recently where it was possible to do this with any meaningful effect without physically being present in the US, which is the reason it is a lot harder to prosecute now. But the laws are still on the books, and the Supreme Court has had no issues supporting them in the past.
If you’d like to have a serious intellectual debate, I welcome it.