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How are the regime able to do this? Do a majority if Iranians support them? Too afraid? The only job is the government job? Why choose to partake in the massacre even if you are on Team Ayatollah? Do those guards not consider the people the kill as Iranians?

They have a large, very capillary police-like force that answers to the national government, trained to have no problem with killing people.

The Iranians have been protesting that force in one way or another for more than a decade.


Why is it a top request from India? What does the Indian government get out of letting their kids overpay for education abroad?

1. ~4% of their GDP is from remittances, compared to <1% a few decades ago[0]

2. India has a massive male surplus[1] and they actively look to send them abroad to prevent domestic unrest

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?lo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India


> look to send them abroad to prevent domestic unrest

Great, now other countries can import and share that domestic social unrest from the oversupply of frustrated reproductive age celibate males, all in the name of making GDP number go up. Lovely.

Surely using hindsight of documented history and well researched human behavior science, we can't already predict this will lead to a rise in political far right extremism, and everyone will be shocked as if it will suddenly come out of nowhere, and then the local males will exclusively be to blame for it, leading to further frustration, radicalisation and disenfranchisement. Surely this is not EXACTLY what's gonna happen.


India gets a metric fuckload of money back in remittances every year. Debatable if that's actually worth the brain drain, but then there's also the angle of having your young people learn from the rest of the world and return with new skills. I lean more towards the remittances though.

Governments don’t want smart people. They want dumb people because they are easier to control.

This explains why governments never subsidize universities

Most do enough to keep their people from revolting.

Are dumb people, in fact, easier to control?

I have seen a lot of smart people in thrall of ideologies that could be used to manipulate them left and right at will. Meanwhile, true morons tend to be unpredictably chaotic.


Yea. Dumb people are lower class and uneducated. Give them a few bonuses and they’ll happily shut up.

They can then reserve even more seats in education for the "oppressed."

Americans can’t afford to strike like that.

No one (at a national scale) can afford to strike like that, except people who have an understanding of why they even more can't afford not to strike like that.

You're most likely correct; I originally started writing this comment to refute your statement, but found that my assumptions appear to be wrong.

Americans have the nearly the highest nominal and PPP income of OECD countries as of 2024, only behind Luxembourg, Iceland, and Switzerland [1].

India experiences substantially higher shelter and food insecurity and poverty rates than the United States.

However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors, at around ₹2M (₹20 lakh) [2]. Median annual rents for 2BHK (2 bedroom) apartments appear to be around 1/10th of that figure at ₹3 lahk in desirable neighborhoods [3].

It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike. I have never personally traveled to Bangalore, though I have lived in places where cost of living is under a tenth of median American income.

I invite correction by people with first hand knowledge about cost of living in Bangalore.

1. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/average-annual-wages...

2. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/median-te...

3. https://www.birlaevara.org.in/best-areas-in-bangalore-for-re...


> It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike.

I don't think the strikes are done by tech people at all. Just normal workers.


Then indeed these striking workers are doing so bravely, especially in comparison to the wealth of American workers.

and it was an absolutely made up number. The real numbers would be so low it was insignificant. That number was only reported in global outlets, and that strike had zero practical impact in India. It was so uneventful, almost all of India except select pockets that has communist party influence didn't even know about the whole thing - let alone felt the impact of the strike.

> However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors

250 million people striking in India isn't mainly “tech workers in Bangalore”, or mainly tech and other elite workers at all. It’s about 40% of Indian workers, and most articles I've seen about it centered on widespread participation of workers in coal, construction, and agricultural sectors.


Thank you for the correction. Indeed these workers' livelihoods are more perilous than their American contemporaries.

And Indians can?

When India "shut down" for Covid, day labourers suddenly had no income, and no government support - they had to walk all the way to their home province (can't remember if the trains were even running).

But oh well, Uberizing employment means the run-of-the-mill American worker can also live like that in the future... progress!


Americans have chosen to learn exactly how good they have had it. You get to watch!

Can't afford not to.

Worst and most aggressive pat down I have ever experienced was in Toronto for no reason that I can think of, so I have learned to be stoic about all interactions with gate keepers, regardless of country. You never know when someone had a bad cup of tea just before the met you.

New York is the worst security I've ever come through for just being needlessly horrible. Like screaming at people because they didn't literally put their feet on the "footprints" on the floor.

Toronto was fine. Just a slightly incredulous conversation about how we could take 3 weeks off to travel Canada.


Only time I have ever been shouted at by personnel in an airport was at JFK.

That's just a New Yorker's way of saying "I love you and want you to get home safely".

Especially if you've been in New York for a few days, being yelled at shouldn't be taken so personally. Especially when you consider how many people badly need instructions yelled at them because they're so very confused, I can see why they do it!

Was it US customs or the Canadian TSA equivalent?

US customs were less friendly in my limited experience.


While there's U.S. Customs agents in Pearson, the entirety of security is done by CATSA. I cannot imagine U.S. Customs doing any sort of pat down. I'm not sure they'd even be allowed to do anything like that in Toronto. I think they're pretty much only allowed to screen and admit or reject.

People keep trying to push for this. It won't happen. Masses will go vegan before they eat maggots if we run out of meat.


I wouldn’t be so sure about what will happen or not in general, and in that case it’s certainly an option as

   - people already do eat maggot without noticing (and pretty sure some *do* notice)
   - if you don’t know about cheese you wouldn’t believe I’m eating fat’s mold. 
   - our siblings ape, pigs and other animals eat them too, it’s a good nutrient source
   - someone from the past wouldn’t believe modern humans eat stuff made from petroleum, animals from gigafactories
   - being *not-vegan* is like a religion for some and I’m wondering if they would think about cannibalism before realizing they get plenty of nutrients from the plants already on the menu.


I'd like to add to this, only because it is an early stage item but maybe a little unrelated:

If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a habit of talking about "competitors", run like hell.


+1. and if they say things like "we're going to disrupt the industry," again, run.

There were many things I did not like about working for Jeff Bezos, but one I did like is he kept repeating this.


> If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a habit of talking about "competitors", run like hell.

Why? Comparing what the competitors are doing can be a great way to come up with new ideas


because comparing yourself to your competitors will get you a faster horse buggy, not an automobile. if you're in a startup, you should be risking making automobiles. if you want to make faster horse buggies, go work for AT&T.


Good ideas need the right timing to line up. AT&T can afford to keep a research project around until the timing is right where a startup needs to find market fit immediately.


i'm not sure that is true about AT&T. you may be thinking about Bell Labs, which effectively destroyed it's culture in the 90s or early 2000s.

but i take your point to mean there are large companies that have budget to maintain projects that do not have an immediate need to be profitable. and agree that for startups, it's a great idea if you're building things for which a market is emerging. everyone talks about how Steve Jobs is a miracle worker. not to diminish his accomplishments, but he was also very lucky. he wanted to sell apple 2's into a market that was just starting to want to buy apple 2's. i'll give him the iPhone, however. i think he was smart enough to understand the forces were aligning to make a product that your average user would like.

but apple didn't spend 30 years making the iPhone. they had to wait 'til the market was there and manufacturing costs were low enough and bandwidth was available. i'm mostly agreeing w/ you, but i think ideas can weave in and out of companies and organizations. CALO jumped from DARPA to SRI to Apple to Quato and motivated several more startups.


Before the 1990s, Bell Labs was the research arm of the world's largest and richest telecommunications monopoly. That explains the difference between old and new Bell Labs.

Wiki says:

    > With the breakup of the Bell System, Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984, which resulted in a drastic decline in its funding.


Ah, the mythical secret weakness of all startups: another startup doing the same thing.


of course. how else would they get funded?


Your competitors are not necessarily targeting the same users, and their internal strengths and weaknesses are different from yours. All comparisons to competitors are superficial and distract you from building what your users want and improving upon your internal strengths and weaknesses.


Why


Scarcity mindset.


Saying competition is integrating with whatever or has a feature for bla seems like a good thing

Maybe not for everyone, but it will never be the year of the Windows Desktop for everyone either.


Everyone is a basically impossible metric, so this is a fairly pointless statement.


It was, some 25+ years ago.


No it wasn't. Only in your head


Over 90% of desktops had Windows back then. So yea, that's everybody. Unless you're being pedantic because one guy was using IRIX on an SGI workstation, or the odd Mac.


10% of everyone is still a whole lot of people. Even 1% of everyone is a lot of people.


Of course "everyone" isn't meant literally in a context like this.

No one said “everyone” until you did, and now you’re using it to be pedantic… bad faith tactic that.


Don’t be a troll.


Arch is the reason I didn't choose Gentoo for my latest build. It's convenient and "good enough" for all my use-cases. Gentoo gives you the feeling of being fully connected to the computer like no other OS - the kind that leaves you nostalgic - but it also requires a time commitment.


My friends stop communicating when they visit their home in Iran. They did this even when their data and water were flowing.

I'll take the current state of HN over every other forum on the internet.


I know, right!? Wait! You don't?


I guess what you really want inside bodies that are contrary to your interests is not your official representatives, but moles pretending to be representatives of other states. (But not nobody at all.)


Aren't all official reps moles? That's what a diplomat does - represent your best interests with a big smile talking to their guy or gal that also has a big smile. We're all friends here... until we're not.


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