Why do you ask? Do you assume those fired NSF workers want to go work in China now? Or that China manages its domestic variant of the NSF better and accepts people critical of the CCP ideology?
Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage. The dismantling of everything to maximize executive power in order to maximize grift and corruption will have effects for decades.
This is the American version of the cultural revolution. We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.
> Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage.
Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.
(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)
I would tend to assume that the people overseeing the NSF are accomplished scientists. China has been more than happy to recruit those for at least the past couple decades. That said, I doubt this move negatively impacts their careers so I don't expect this alone would motivate any of them to leave the country. Other things might though.
> Or that China manages its domestic variant of the NSF better
Prior to Trump probably yes. Post Trump almost certainly.
> and accepts people critical of the CCP ideology?
Obviously not. But why are you assuming that those removed from their posts were vocal critics of the CCP?
Yeah that is concerning. Glad the US doesn't have any sort of credit scoring system that might make it hard to get out of poverty. That would be really scary. Imagine if you had to pass a credit check to get an apartment!
Sorry for the "actually", but Hentai didn't exist yet as a genre. It was "shunga", that is, erotic "ukiyo-e", a popular style at that time.
Popular shunga works by Hokusai are "Two lovers" or the wrongly translated "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" (the original Japanese title is "female diver and octopus")
Excuse me but can you read? Where did you see me bringing up anything critical of morality in my statement about the author's work? Go play reddit moderator somewhere else please.
>What does your "for your information" bring to the table, other than sidetracking the discussion?
Adding extra curiosity context, that other readers might not be aware of, is not "sidetracking the discussion", but simply contributing to the conversation while respecting the HN rules of "be curious".
Now tell me what does your unwarranted criticism and personal insults bring to this discussion other than being an obnoxious PITA and breaking HN rules?
Did your parents teach you, that you can criticize someone without insults?
>What are we supposed to do with it?
Same thing you do with any other curiosity info you read on HN.
>Think about it like this: Would you manage a fortune in crypto on Windows? I wouldn't
Most banks on the planet manage trillions on Windows, so I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by dying on this hill. Just because you wouldn't do something doesn't make you knowledgeable or right about that.
>MS employees have access to a lot of your work/data/fingerprints.
I wonder how all those companies, banks and governments manage to keep MS workers out of their work data.
Any MS workers here that can answer what are you guys doing with all that customer data you look at all day instead of coding?
I doubt workers stealing data (which is more frequent than you might think) will just openly post about it...
Do you really believe it's normal that banks are on Windows? Do you want governments, military and such to be on Windows, really? It's not a popularity contest, we know that most corpos do terrible choice about IT stuff (at least back then and now they are doomed).
It breach basic every security principles, we should be relying on cryptography and not human trust? Would you let your ISP inject a CA in your OS and just rely on the trust of their employees to not look at your traffic? you're building your security model on the assumption that a private corporation's employees won't abuse access they structurally have, you rely on faith which imo is plain wrong. But even, the privacy factor has not been addressed, you are alright with MS correlating your entire life, many wouldn't accept that.
>>I doubt workers stealing data (which is more frequent than you might think) will just openly post about it.
Can you explain what mechanism is there for Microsoft workers to steal data off my Windows PC that doesn't upload anything to OneDrive? Like I'm genuienly curious - how do they do it?
It depends what you consider data, to me for example, all the devices I use in my home, who comes in my home and such are considered private (as it should, but we might disagree on this), but realize that the moment someone steps-in your home, then the typical correlation of SSIDs, BT devices (to simplify it) is sent as telemtry to MS servers (this is official, I'm not just speculating).
And about pure "data" as in filenames file content and such, then obviously typical Windows Defender, Smartscreen and such that would send file hashes, sometimes content, filenames, mod time and such, making Microsoft directly aware of your filesystem content.
>I doubt workers stealing data (which is more frequent than you might think)
Can you post a source for this? I'm sure every newspaper on the planet would love to publish headlines reading "MS workers are stealing your data", but that would require some actual proof, not made up FUD.
>Do you really believe it's normal that banks are on Windows?
It doesn't matter what I believe, what matters are the facts and reality on the street which is what I'm arguing. You are free to believe whatever you want, that doesn't make you right.
I'm not dying on a hill. From a security standpoint, every "trust" step is a security assumption that you cannot verify (especially on a Samsung phone), I'm just not willing to bet my threat model on the "goodwill" of a corporation whose business model is built on data aggregation, there is no proofs needed (MS has had a ton of breaches the last decade btw), but you do you.
Let me ask you something and make an hypothetical and you must reply in good faith, this is because we don't agree on fundamental points on security:
If you were a wanted criminal that still needs to work online somehow to make money, would you feel safe using Windows?
I think we can agree that privacy and security are heavily intertwined. If your honest answer is no,then that alone tells you something about the OS trust model. And if your answer is "yes", then i'd genuinely like to hear why, because I can't think of a single compelling reason.
You first have to answer my challenges to your original statements, on how banks can use Windows without losing money to hackers, and how MS employees access your data, as per your claims.
I first want to see sources hat back up your claims. Otherwise how can we know you're arguing in good faith and not stringing us along with more FUD and tinfoil conspiracies.
In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
Look, I hate (Zuckerberg's) social media just as much as the next person and I would be happy if it were nuked from this planet, but firstly, a lot of this sudden age verification shit to "protect the children" is sus AF, leading me to assume their ulterior motives are surveillance and doxxing of anonymous online free speech, and secondly, I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the bottle anymore similar how prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption, it just moved underground.
As long as kids have smartphones, they'll find a way to use social media, or even make their own social media to organize parties, send nudes or flaunt their parents' wealth and bully the poor and ugly kids, the same way how they start drinking beer at 13 even though the legal age for that is 18.
Social media amplifies the worst of human nature, but you won't be able to change human nature. Maybe governments should regulate the amount and type of data collection social media companies can have from their users, instead of regulating their users.
> In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
FWIW, in the UK you can learn to drive a tank one year before you're allowed to learn to drive a car. Not go into combat, that's another year, I just mean the learning to drive part.
Back when I myself was that age, I also got a letter published in a national newspaper pointing out the oddity that I was allowed to have sex two years before being allowed to look at photos of other people doing so. Since then, cheap cameras would also make it pertinent (though it was true even back then), that I could not have taken photos of myself performing acts I was allowed to perform.
What's with this double standards of you're adult enough to drive tanks and die in a war, but not adult enough to watch porn and drink alcohol? Pick a lane government regulators.
Either you're and adult and should be treated as one with full rights and responsibilities, or you're not and then shouldn't be drafted and be allowed to do anything major with your life like drink, gamble, and sign loans that will put you in debt for the next 30 years.
Yeah, I don't get that either. I'd also want a binary "you're an adult" vs "you're a child" then we decide what belongs where, and the age is the same for everything. So once you're X, you get to fuck, drink, drive, die in wars, take loans, use social media, watch porn and whatever else we've added age limits to.
> In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
Well, that's kinda already the norm isn't it? In the US I'm allowed to go risk my life in the military but not allowed to order a beer with my pizza. It already makes no sense.
Just because the U.S.A. does it, it is by no means normal. We here are not used to such contradictory laws that arbitrarily strip us of our rights. This is also why it feels perversely inorganic and unnatural, as does all regulation that is shoved into our faces by U.S. lobbyists.
It makes slightly more sense if you consider that whether or not you're allowed to drink on base is entirely up to the commander (at least last I heard). Also if you consider that the goal is to prevent various social ills thus there's no particular reason to expect perfect consistency.
In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16. In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
> In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
I might be wrong but in the US I think it's generally anything goes on private land. Public roads would be the only relevant thing to consider.
What prevents absurd situations is (IIUC) the combination of child labor laws and the need to keep your insurance policy affordable.
I suppose if a parent turned his toddler loose in an excavator he might get brought up on some sort of child abuse law but honestly I doubt it. Some of the people out in the sticks teach their kindergartners to wield a shotgun and the government seems to leave them alone.
>In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16
Are you sure that's legal? If those kids kill someone with those farm death machines, who goes to jail for it? The kid or the pearant who gave him the equipment? Will your insurance cover this?
That's it? Just 3 companies? Out of which one is a state propped defense provider, and the other won from purchasing US tech. IDK how you can see that as a win for the world's richest block.
>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.
Because they have no spine and no leverage/muscle on the international stage to throw their weight around and make sure they get what's best for themselves at the expense of everyone else the same way US, China, etc do.
They play the international nice guy that just ends up being the doormat everyone takes advantage of, being at the mercy of Russian and Azeri gas, at the mercy of US tech, energy and defence, and at the mercy of Chinese manufacturing after dismantling their own manufacturing, at the mercy of Turkey for migration enforcement, etc so they can't do anything radical that upsets their "partners", or that makes their virtue signaling policies look bad, or risk massive repercussions they aren't prepared for, so they just turtle, bury their head in the sand and pretend everything is going fine while falling further into obscurity.
EU flaunts its "moral values" as its strength, but their geopolitical adversaries have no such values and are dominating over them in the process exploiting their morals against them as their weakness. There's nothing virtuous in being/acting weak and letting others dominate you.
European Union construction happened after the second world war in the context of the Marshall Plan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan ) to help rebuild Europe that had been destroyed.
By design European laws are superior to national laws. Leaving the union is also instant bankruptcy because all countries have very high level of debt which are only guaranteed because they are in the union.
European population is getting old and replaced by a migration coming mainly from previous African colonies.
> Leaving the union is also instant bankruptcy because all countries have very high level of debt which are only guaranteed because they are in the union.
That seems to violate basic physics and accounting laws. It isn't possible for everyone to be in debt all at once, because when everything nets out then there isn't anyone to make the loans. Someone has to be producing the goods that get consumed.
That's the magic of interest rates. Countries in the EU, let's say France for example have roughly 115% of GDP of debt. To service the interest of the debt it must finance each year the debt by paying the interests, and borrowing the sum on the market to reimburse the previous debts which are currently reaching their terms. The full owed amount is never paid back, but can be rolled forward indefinitely.
These interests are currently ~2% for France. Which mean the debt is manageable and the interests can be paid with the citizen's tax and the music can continue to play. But once France get out of the UE, interests rates become 5% then the citizens tax are not enough to pay the debt, and nobody wants to lend money to France anymore because even at 5% interests the risk of default becomes too great and they risk not getting the full amount-owed back so nobody lends, and since their is no money in reserve, and they can't borrow it means they default => bankruptcy. France doesn't have its own currency anymore so it cannot print its own money which compounds the problem. National resources get plundered, citizens get poor.
It is a game of musical chair which is highly non-linear.
Uhm, Europe is not the US. We still have a lot of manufacturing. It varies by country - the UK unfortunately had structural problems, finance supremacy and a Thatcher who hated unions so much that she'd rather destroy unionized industries than have unions. Central Europe still does a pretty large amount of manufacturing.
I think the "still" implies that it's at least not increasing and probably slowly decreasing.
And except in some of the largest companies like Siemens (where it doesn't seem to be a big deal anymore neither), the idea that manufacturing (or anything) may be profitable but not profitable enough has not taken hold as much as in the US.
>Production of state of the art semiconductors, yes.
If you fall out of the state of the art then the claim of EU fumbling semiconductors is correct. The richest block in the world should settle for no less than being state of the art. Anything less is fumbling it.
>NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.
The EU semi companies you listed are absent from the state of the art and only make low margin commodity parts that don't have moats. ASML exists but is not enough for claiming EU superiority since the EUV light source is still US IP designed and manufactured. And one top company is too little.
>Worldwide massive success, mostly yes.
Worldwide success is where the big money is, and you need a lot of money for cutting edge research and experimentation to build the future successes. Hence the claim of EU fumbling software is correct.
>Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.
EU mom and pop shops aren't gonna make enough money to be able to afford risky ambitious ventures the likes of FAANGs have. Which is probably why you work for Hashicorp, a large global US company, and not some local EU company.
> Care to explain your accusations. I never attacked you directly, just the points you made.
You twisted "national successess" to "mon and pop shop". It's a typically American argument "unless it's the global behemoth that has a global monopoly in the domain, it's a failure", which is, frankly, absurd. Would you say Venmo is a failure because they're not used outside of the US (because other countries have better banking infrastructure)? Or that GM are a failure because they barely sell outside the US (because their cars are not adapted to other markets)? Or that United Healthcare Group are a failure because they only operate in the US?
Leboncoin are a massive peer to peer marketplace in France and a few neighbouring countries (IIRC Belgium), like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. They do a couple of hundred million in annual revenue. They are, undoutedly, a local success story. Are they a failure because they don't rival Ebay or Facebook Marketplace? No, because that would assume that the goal of each and every business is to become a global behemoth monopoly, which is an impossibility.
Similarly, Doctolib run healthcare appointment and everything related (online appointnments, digital prescriptions, secure storage and sharing of medical data like test results, AI voice note taking assistants for doctos, etc.) in France, and are expanding in a few neighbouring countries. In France they are the standard and pretty much what everyone uses. They are undoubtedly a success.
> It's a typically American argument "unless it's the global behemoth that has a global monopoly in the domain, it's a failure"
1. I'm not American, I'm European. And cool it with this finger pointing around nationality as I never brought it up. We can't have a civil discussion if you resort to identity politics as an argument.
2. I said no such thing. I never called those companies failures. You're the one saying that by twisting my arguments.
And those online marketplaces and doctor apps you mentioned that are "local success stories" don't have invented any core tech that can be exported and monetized globally the same like Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc can. export products abroad, they just used existing FOSS technologies to build some local websites in the EU. Any other country on the planet can build their own versions of those apps, and they have, from India to Argentina. It's nothing special the EU made here. So how you can consider them in the ballpark of the tech companies before is beyond me.
And I didn't say you're American, just that you're using the traditionally American bad faith argument.
> I never called those companies failures
You just called them "mom and pop shops".
> And those online marketplaces and doctor apps you mentioned that are "local success stories" don't have invented any core tech that can be exported and monetized globally
And that's a different argument altogether. Not everything has to be core tech exportable all over, and one can be very successful without doing that.
If you're looking for core tech developed by European countries exported all around the world, enjoy Airbus, Siemens, Infineon, Alstom, Spotify, DeepMind (ok they were acquired by Google), VLC, ASML, SAP and plenty of others.
> Microsoft
> they just used existing FOSS technologies
Can you explain to me the difference between using FOSS and proprietary software to build a product, and what Microsoft are doing?
Pretty easy. Get them to talk about a project they've managed and start poking holes. Who was on the team? How did they organize meetings? What were the bottlenecks? How well did everyone get along? What did they do to help grease the gears? Did they have to change the process? How did they like the software? Which software did they use? Did they have to administer it themselves? How did they deal with management changes / team changes / tons of support requests / issues in production? Where did they draw the line between PM work and engineering work?
People have a very difficult time keeping their story together, especially when they're asked a couple of questions that interview prep didn't cover.
Beyond that though, there's the probation period. If they can't do the job, they're supposed to be let go before they become permanent.
Trouble I see from most interviewers is a tendency of asking questions with a "right" answer. Those tend to be a lot easier to game. They then fallback on sorting applicants by pedigree - the old, "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM" method.
Then, they come back and rant about how PM's are trash, and Agile is trash, etc. etc.
Well, quite frankly, you work in a shitty place then that doesn't know how to competently interview for these positions.
There are real differences in the knowledge and work behavior of great PMs and the bullshitters, and it's usually not that hard to tease out the bullshit in an interview if you know what you're doing.
>Well, quite frankly, you work in a shitty place then that doesn't know how to competently interview for these positions.
I was talking about a country, not a workplace, and franky, so what? I can't change that. What I can do, is tell you how it is, and how the system gets exploited.
If you live in some magic utopia where things are different(the US maybe?), good for you, but this information doesn't change anything for me where I live.
Best I can do is adapt and exploit the system in my favor as well if I can the same the rest do, otherwise I get left behind by the unscrupulous clueless scammers who do.
So it's similar to working for the UN or IAEA where most jobs are fixed term.
reply