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In my experience, the issue is that performing at the next level is not a guarantee for promotion. So when you do work at the next level, they can just say “it’s not sustained enough” or whatever reason and then you’re stuck — can’t really produce less so you end up looking for a way out because all that work was kind of for nothing.

I look for opportunities outside my job requirements to learn and grow but it gets really tiring and exhausting when you’re not rewarded for it. Basically there is a lot of upside for the employer but for the employee it’s a bit of a crapshoot


> If my property is nationalized in another country by force, I am fully in favor of my country swinging its dick around to get it back.

In this case your property is actually not your property though. Assuming property == oil, then it belongs in Venezuela - you seized control of it but it’s not really yours.


> Dense cities will never have cheaper housing.

Yeah there’s a correlation but I doubt it’s causation. There are underlying aspects like zoning (and other regulations as mentioned in article) that can make an impact on housing prices. Other reasons are because employment and career prospects are higher so that attracts more people, which creates more demand.


> Yeah there’s a correlation but I doubt it’s causation.

There is. Density-misery death spiral.

You can usually check for correlation vs. causation by looking for counterexamples. Do you know a city that increased density and that resulted in cheaper housing?

I don't. And I checked the stats for all of the US, Western Europe, and Japan.

So far, it looks like the only way to decrease the cost is to reduce the city population.


> the only thing that matters is that TikTok is an open door to unduly influence public opinion in America. The immense scale of data collection, from personal information to location tracking data, is also a clear concern.

I understand where you’re coming from - “they ban us so we’ll ban you” is a valid sentiment. But this grandstanding is like slapping a bandaid on a leaky tub and calling it “Job done”. I’m almost being transported to the 1940s with this McCarthy-lite take.

Everything that TikTok is doing is being done by Meta, Snap, Instagram, etc. If it’s not done through TikTok it’ll be done somewhere else. But sure, instead of passing real privacy laws let’s just also be authoritarian - I’m sure that’ll solve the problem.


> Everything that TikTok is doing is being done by Meta, Snap, Instagram, etc. If it’s not done through TikTok it’ll be done somewhere else.

Meta, Snap, Instagram (i.e. Meta), are US-based media companies and subject to US regulation and jurisprudence.

TikTok operates under the jurisdiction of authoritarian adversary. This undue foreign influence is the sticking point, not merely the massive media sway.


> Meta, Snap, Instagram (i.e. Meta), are US-based media companies and subject to US regulation and jurisprudence

Increasingly, this is an argument for the EU banning them. Especially Twitter.


TikTok operates in the US, so they are operating under US jurisdiction and subject to the same regulations as US companies.

The main difference is political pressure, not legal. US companies will bend the knee to Trump, Chinese companies will do so to Xi. Both of these leaders are authoritarian, but Trump's government is also fascist. However Xi's government is more experienced and successful.

I don't know which is worse, honestly. I mean, at this exact second, China is obviously a more authoritarian state, but the US is riding a bullet train into fascism. So who knows what things will look like in a few years?


Everything that is being done on TikTok is not being done on the other socials. Some of the actions are more or less the same. The difference is in consequences.

Yes, they are all manipulating feeds. Yes, they are are using psychological sabotage and attention hacks to steal as much attention as they possibly can from every pair of eyeballs they encounter.

If Meta, Youtube, Snap, et al do something that is illegal, or violates social norms, or commits any of a thousand different offenses, legal or cultural or otherwise, they can be held to account. They have. Facebook and Instagram and Youtube and all US platforms have been sued, settle out of court, have been subpoenaed and forced to account for themselves in front of congress, etc.

China can use TikTok for many purposes, whether it's purely disruptive, or in pursuit of nation-state agendas, or any sort of nefarious deliberate action they might take. You can hold Zuck accountable. You cannot, with China, and because all Chinese companies are under state control, they are by definition not operating in good faith. They do not follow trade agreements, norms, or deal in good faith. They will steal IP, ignore sanctions, and do whatever benefits them most regardless of any agreements to the contrary, and will actively seek to undermine opposition to their greatest advantage. And they're more or less immune to accountability for anything they do outside of China, except and unless they make the state look bad, or costs them money or reputation in the market.

China chose to deliberately manipulate and abuse their platform by using it to cause all sorts of users to flood their representatives with calls - that one move, by itself, the choice of a paltform to deliberately intervene at scale and advocate for political action, should be sufficient to have seized the platform outright, and then tell China to go pound sand. Imagine how they'd respond to us broadcasting American Freedom TV across their whole country from Starlink satellites, with free satellite 5G compatible with their carriers, bypassing all their great firewall and censorship? As much as I loathe the authoritarianism, we ostensibly have to respect state sovereignty - China deliberately and specifically violated US sovereignty by manipulating a bunch of useful idiots to their own purposes, flexing on the US, threatening them with manipulating the electorate unless they played ball on TikTok control.

We should just seize it and tell them to pound sand, then auction the assets. You can't trust the code, so sell off the name, domain, the network to other platforms if they want to rebuild it, then scour the content and software and hardware, burn it, and salt the earth over it.


> China can use TikTok for many purposes, whether it's purely disruptive, or in pursuit of nation-state agendas, or any sort of nefarious deliberate action they might take. You can hold Zuck accountable.

Yeah they can in theory but so can Facebook. Remember Cambridge Analytica? They held Zuck accountable in the sense that there was a slap on the wrist and he went on his merry way. You can similarly hold the ByteDance US CEO accountable and they operate as a US business.

It’s all political theatrics and has nothing do with keeping our personal data safe or protect the American people. These companies might run in the US but corporations are beholden to no nation.


True downloads don’t equal usage but there’s a correlation. I also doubt deployment equals usage - I can deploy to some env and not make any requests.

Additionally, how you can get data on how many deployments without telemetry? The only telemetry that I’m interested in is for my uses, and don’t really care about sending data on deployment count to a third party. So the download count becomes a “good enough” metric.


That’s such a cool Lego diorama. Beautifully done!



> I'm not particularly concerned about unfair gains made possible by insider knowledge.

I am. I work at a company that trades publicly. My wife works at a firm. I can’t do anything with my stocks outside of three weeks a quarter. I can never buy options. My wife has to clear her positions with whatever department. If I have these obstacles, congress should absolutely have them — maybe more. Ideally they can trade index funds and that’s about it.


> If I have these obstacles, congress should absolutely have them

This jealousy is a minor issue, though. There's no reason for you to believe Congresspeople should have exactly the same limitations and opportunities that you have. This is in fact a discussion that involves limiting them from doing things that you would retain the right to do.

The problem is how they govern.


It’s not jealousy, it’s equality. If insider trading is illegal, then it should be illegal for everyone and Congress should be no exception. They have even more opportunities and insider knowledge, about many more companies than I do. It absolutely affects how they govern, they tend to be more corrupt because they don’t have to abide by the same regulations that a civilian does.


Yeah, your equality really is just jealousy. It's your feeling that the situation is unfair. But there's no principle of nature that says that things must be fair.

For me, if I can improve the lot of everyone by at least X%, but doing so means that some few people will actually get a benefit of 2X%, that's a darn good deal. Withholding the potential X% from those poor people just because it's not fair seems rather cruel. We may have the luxury of wanting things to be fair, but there are some people for whom those X% will make all the difference.


> Yeah, your equality really is just jealousy. It's your feeling that the situation is unfair. But there's no principle of nature that says that things must be fair.

By that logic why have equality for anything? Why even have civil rights if you can just be like “that’s just the way it is, why should you be able to vote? I’ll vote for the best of all our interests”. It doesn’t work that way.

> For me, if I can improve the lot of everyone by at least X%, but doing so means that some few people will actually get a benefit of 2X%, that's a darn good deal.

In an altruistic society, maybe. But economic theory is based on the idea that everyone will try to do what’s best for them and not for the masses. Congress sets the laws - so they are more interested in benefiting themselves than anyone else. Therefore we need a forcing function, and one way would be to clamp down on insider trading.


https://sancharsaathi.gov.in

- Report fraud/scam calls and SMS directly from your phone.

- Block or track lost/stolen phones by disabling their IMEI so they can’t be misused.

- View all mobile numbers registered under your ID and report any unauthorized SIM cards.

- Verify if a phone is genuine with an IMEI/device authenticity check.

- Report telecom misuse, such as spoofed calls or suspicious international numbers.

The stated goal is protect users from digital fraud and safer telecom usage, who knows how good it’ll be. Probably a PITA.


So a pretty transparent way to tie IMEI to someone's identity and track their location under the guise of "finding lost phones" and "checking your phone's authenticity"


IMEI is already tied to your identity. You need ID to buy a phone or a SIM.


I think this is to crack down on sharing a SIM card which is registered to someone else. It ties identity + location + aggregates all SIMs registered to someone with their current location.

Not to mention they can probably payload anything into the app whenever they want.


That's already the case for most places around the world, unfortunately. Though, this does make the link rather obvious, which is a bit more surprising. Normally shady tracking just happens through a combination of data brokers and leaked databases.


I've been using it since it came out. It does its job.

I was getting 5-6 scam calls per day, now down to maybe 1 in a month.

It's just a wrapper around their website (for now).

I think this app is harmless but I don't think it should be forced onto anyone.


> I think this app is harmless..

It may be today. And you have no way to know for sure. But there is also no way to know what the app will do down the road when a politician you do not trust is in control of it.


Agreed. But they already have massive tracking capabilities. I don't they are so stupid that they'd do this in such an obvious way: too much scrutiny.

CDOT's CMS system already exists in the background.


This is great first hand feedback. I like these kinds of HN posts.

How do you think it works? Example: If enough people report, then some police agency investigates? Rinse and repeat enough times and the scam calls/SMS should fall?


It partially automates the process of lodging a complaint against a call, SMS, or WhatsApp communication.

On IOS, you still have to copy/paste the incoming number into a form, provide a screenshot of the message, date/time and it uploads the complaint to their systems.

They inform you that they will not send updates.

What I've observed is a huge drop in scammers, and new scammers get tagged as potential spam by the operator upfront. So they're doing something on the back end.

You can only file a police complaint if you actually suffered monetary loss. I haven't, so I don't know how that works.

The other benefit is that you can keep an eye on id theft used to get connections using your info. This is a huge problem in rural India. Scammers use this to create bank accounts to move money.


Another great post. Thank you. It is great to hear that haven't suffered any monetary loss and you are getting fewer scam calls.

I have a "dumb" follow-up question: (Honestly, I don't understand the pushback here on HN against this app.) Do you feel it is invasive or acts as gov't surveillance on your mobile phone? What you describe sounds pretty good to me.


As of now, it's completely passive. It's just a wrapper around their website with some features which reduce friction.

For example, we have a DND (Do Not Disturb) system which is opt-in. Most people don't know about this. Originally signing up required a new user to send a series of text messages to register (opt-in) and select what kind of ads (spam) they would tolerate. For example you could say block everything except bank offers.

This app walks you through the process.

I keep a close watch on permissions etc which apps ask for. This app doesn't really want access to anything unusual.

This on IOS, I know nothing about Android.


Can you uninstall it? That's the litmus test.


At the moment, yes, as I installed it myself off the App Store.

That's what the ruckus is: the govt wants to push it everywhere mandatorily.

Right now it's harmless: it's just a way to report scammers and lost handsets.

But who knows what they'll shovel into it tomorrow.


> There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)

This is fair. But issues like this will never get my attention in general because I don’t have time to do this exercise - I would much rather have it all spelled out. Even if there are a bunch of related issues they won’t get fixed in a single PR, it likely will be multiple.

I guess my point is that if you really want OSS projects to improve, the issue submitter can’t just ask the maintainer “figure it out”. It totally works this way in the corporate world though (IME).

Edit: I’m sorry to have jumped to conclusions. Leaving my comment up for accountability.


I didn’t ask the maintainer to “figure it out”. I posted a thread in the forum with multiple videos to start a discussion.

People here have stated I should have filed on GitHub, and because I don’t want to link my GitHub to this account I suggested someone else do it.

That was 6 hours ago, and people are still commenting about my lack of a suitable report rather than actually reporting it correctly themselves - as is evident by the lack of a new issue on the github.


I’m sorry for jumping at you like that.


No problem :)


> I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.

I didn’t either! I stared at that gif for a few minutes and I couldn’t tell what the problem is (or what to look for). It wasn’t until you said “changing button width” I knew where to focus my attention.


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