Windows 2000 was a bug riddled, poorly architected punching bag for malware.
Things definitely went up-hill AFTER Windows 2000.
What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release? It wasn't even a good release when it came out, and it definitely didn't stand the test of time.
Why do we need public funds to build a private authority that pays people absurd amounts of money who don't actually do anything instead of just you know.... building the road like we always have. For the public.
If we're going to spend the money anyways why do we need private profits?
Furthermore, just tax the vehicles that are actually doing damage to the roads. i.e., trucks.
A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.
Not literally exponentially, but the damage is proportional to the FOURTH power of the axle load. Imagine how expensive shipping would've become overnight if all these trucks had to pay their fair share and passed the costs to their customers.
Honda Civic weighs 0.7t per axle, or 0.24tttt of wear.
F-150 weighs 0.9t per axle, or 0.65tttt of wear.
A school bus weighs 7.5t per axle, or 3164tttt of wear. That's more than thirteen thousand Honda Civics' worth of road damage. Imagine the driver of the Honda had to pay 1c per mile. The school bus would have to pay $130 per mile. Yes, it's carrying 78 passengers, so the cost would be $1.67 per mile per student, but I think most people would just drive their kids to school.
>Imagine how expensive shipping would've become overnight if all these trucks had to pay their fair share and passed the costs to their customers.
The roads are already being paid for and maintained at their current state. All you'd be doing is making goods slightly more expensive and other taxes slightly less. About 1-4% of your total tax burden goes to the roads. That's a small enough total number to be easily buried among your annual spend on goods.
Like if roads were these huge financial burdens that didn't amortize away to practically nothing.
The civic barely does anything to a road, except require its existence and maintenance, and it turns out that roads are expensive to build and maintain (even if only damaged by weather).
The means of collection and treatment of it as something other than tax revenue are problematic for sure. Those should be solvable problems, though.
Your point about semi-truck damage vs lighter vehicles is exactly why I think moving in that direction is so useful. The most fair taxation would accurately take both that aspect and actual miles driven into account.
Except the impact of even gas prices going up has added to costs in basically anything delivered by truck. Every tax you put on that just eventually ends up in consumer hands.
The US interstates move military equipment across the country without needing to deal with railroad bottlenecks. It is a public good. Just like GPS, it has ancillary civic functions but it still serves its original purpose.
I mean, that's the de jure purpose, but that's really a nonsensical point to make here. We're not talking about one controlled access route with two lanes in both directions to move tanks around.
We're talking about 10 lane monstrosities, with 8 or more flyovers, standing 20 stories high in places like in Houston and Dallas.
> you can definitely use school facilities after hours
Aside from a few things like some playgrounds shared with public parks next door this has often been pretty untrue. I've definitely had police escort me off school basketball courts when school isn't in session, the natatoriums haven't had much public access, it's not like the school libraries are open after hours, etc.
I'm sure some places are more open and some are less open, I wouldn't say you can "definitely" use them.
I'm not aware of any public schools in my area that would allow me to, e.g., use the basketball court or soccer field after school hours or on the weekends.
Have you tried? I've certainly been able to. And I'm definitely not alone in having used those facilities. I've used them personally and for ad-hoc sport events (lacrosse isn't exactly popular in the area I'm in right now).
Not recently, though I have observed locked doors and gates that make it pretty difficult to use. If your caveat is you need to call ahead to organize an event that's a pretty different use-case from what I'd like to do, which is to use them very casually and occasionally.
I've never called ahead or anything like that. There are a fair amount of people using them on the weekends, as far as I've seen.
There is one school that definitely is gated off, but that's because it's near a major point of interest and I can only assume they're worried about non-community members damaging the property.
I'd argue there should be some access to school facilities by the public if you want to call them "public". Otherwise it's about as public as the police department.
I don't understand, there are plenty of other things the public pays for that you can't use for other, unintended purposes. You can't fly your hobby drone out of a public airport just because you want.
Necessary public infrastructure that is paid for with tax dollars is not a public good?
And just in case this fact is being lost / forgotten: Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars but are disingenuously structured in a way these bozos can go "see, it's not actually tax dollars" (it is). The same exact dollars that should be used to build fully public, free roads are instead used to privatize public infrastructure.
There has never been a time where a toll raid has failed and the losses were treated as private. The bonds magically get repaid (to the right people, of course).
It's all tax dollars in the end, one way or another.
"Public good" is a term of art in economics which means a good is both non-excludable (it is impractical to control who benefits from it) and non-rivalrous (one person benefiting does not prevent others from also benefiting).
Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.
You’re both right. Roads can be an impure public good.
At low traffic loading, they are not rivalrous and can be modelled as a public good. At high traffic loading they become rivalrous and thus closer to a common-pool resource.
If roads are made excludable, they resemble a club or even private group.
> Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars
This is untrue of all the toll roads I've regularly driven in multiple cities in the US. Their construction was funded through bonds which are paid back from the toll revenues.
why did you ignore my other statements that expressly address this "viewpoint."
The bonds are issued either by the authority itself or some other agency expressly delegated to issue those bonds.
The accounting is done EXPRESSLY with the knowledge of the states general fund, even though there's a "wink wink" don't use the tax dollars to """directly""" pay for these bonds.
Don't believe me? Look at the financial reports yourself.
There is zero point in the fuzzy accounting other than to make something that simply should be public, private, and allow grifters to make a buck or two off it.
In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.
If you have the money, investing in a toll road is the easiest way to make lots of money with 0 risk.
But you can only do that if the entity issues those bonds "knows" and "selects" you. :)
I have for the toll roads I drive on. It shows the debt payments being paid by the toll revenues, not other state taxes.
> In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.
Sure, the toll agencies are ultimately a creature of the state but it's incorrect (a lie?) to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars, at least for the toll roads I drive on. What's the rate of these failures? What's the actual percentage of these bonds being paid by toll revenues versus failing and the states being on the hook? Once again you said it's primarily and originally. Being paid because the bond failed to be paid back by toll revenues isn't the original payment plan, and unless it's happening most of the time it's not the primary way of those bonds being paid.
> make something that simply should be public, private
> to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars
Do you know how bonds work? It's an isomorphic operation. A state entity is issuing bonds out to creditors. A lot of those major creditors will also be secured creditors.
It's the same thing, just covered under a sleight of hand trick.
So the state borrows money from a select few major creditors but it's "wink wink" not against the full faith and credit of the state, then regulates a consumption tax on the road, and the investors and authority get a slice of the pie.
For what purpose?
And when the toll roads fail either the creditors are paid out either through the state out right buying the road or allowing the debt to be a tax write off over X amount of time.
>This "viewpoint" is otherwise known as "reality".
This American brainworm is exhausting, ngl. Buddy you're getting bamboozled by a few vocab words and a 3 step accounting trick, please don't presume to talk to anyone about reality.
Yeah, the toll. One assumes you're not talking about the toll but other tax revenues when you're complaining about tax payers paying for the road. Obviously the tolls go to pay for the toll road, so what's the point otherwise about talking about the taxpayers paying for it?
Buddy it's really exhausting ngl having people always assume every toll organization is a private enterprise. It's not just a 3 step accounting trick, please don't presume you know how every toll arrangement is made.
And if your point is the idea of government bonds going to private investors, well, how do you think the freeways are financed? How does it make a difference then if it's a freeway or a toll road or a library or a playground? It's all financed in largely the same way. Government bonds issues to selected investors.
You didn't link me to the thing that we are discussing. You linked me to a current financial report, that of course just lists the tolls.
Do you understand how bonds are issued?
But, since you're seemingly in Texas and are completely unaware of a vibrant example of the type of outcomes I'm discussing, here's one right in your home state from 2017.
>According to the terms that emerged from bankruptcy court, all of the private entity’s $1.4 billion debt was wiped away, leaving federal taxpayers left holding the bag for the $430 million federally-backed Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loan given to the private entities.
>Some are asking why the state of Texas didn’t step in and insist the public interest was protected and defended in bankruptcy court. Taxpayers have a right to know why they didn’t get the road back, why their $430 million federal TIFIA loan was wiped out, and why they have to continue paying tolls for another 45 years to use a road that’s lost $1.2 billion of its $1.4 billion original value. The state also had a revenue sharing agreement with the previous owners, Cintra-Zachry. Will the state ever see any of that promised toll revenue?
Would you care to explain that in the course of this discussion, why that very recent and very vibrant example of the exact thing being discussed did not resonant with you?
I mean you clearly implied that you've read these financial reports before, so it raises lots of questions about your motivations and I dare say, honesty.
I don't know what atdrummond's political views were, and after your comment, I still don't know.
The label "literal Nazi" has become not particularly useful recently.
At best, it seems to be used to mean that the person in question agrees with one or more of:
"I think Hitler was awesome"
"We need to stop letting poor people into our country"
"Gee London was a lot better when it was whiter"
"I think we should forcibly sterilize everybody with an IQ under 85"
"I keep a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion under my bed"
"I will always use he/him when referring to trans women"
--
At worst the label is applied for much more prosaic reasons.
One can be racist, or a Eugenicist, or a white supremacist, or an anti-Semite, or transphobic without being a Nazi, and those terms are all far more descriptive than "Nazi," so are more informative.
>I don't know what atdrummond's political views were, and after your comment, I still don't know.
You literally don't understand what the term Nazi implies or what Nazi's stood for? And you could not _literally_ take less time than it took to write this comment to research what he was apart of?
I guess you refuse to.
Because you're purposefully trying to muddy the waters :).
>One can be racist, or a Eugenicist, or a white supremacist, or an anti-Semite, or transphobic without being a Nazi,
He's all of the above. Literally, by his own words. Thanks for spelling it out!
> You literally don't understand what the term Nazi implies or what Nazi's stood for?
I'm not sure how you could read my comment and come away with that impression. I gave a partial list of the sorts of things Nazi's stood for.
> And you could not _literally_ take less time than it took to write this comment to research what he was apart of?
Honestly, I did not search for it before I wrote the comment. After you posted this, I used a few search engines to search up both "Alex Thomas Drummond" and "atdrummond."
The former turned up a single white-pages listing, the latter various people named "Drummond" most notably a basketball player. There is also a twitter/x account which I can't see posts of without an account but has an Estonian flag in his profile, which matches HN comments I later found so is probably him.
So now I'm going through his HN comments one by one, which does in fact take longer than writing the comment I wrote.
I should note that on the first page (which indeed took less time to read than writing my comment), the only thing I saw that gave off any "Nazi vibes" was this sentence, in the context of dealing with homeless addicts:
> The issue is there’s a cohort who thinks that the solutions that enable safe streets require too much sacrifice of one’s individual liberty - even if said individual abuses their freedom to harm themself and others.
But that view is not even definitively a politically right view, I'm probably reading it that way primarily because I'm looking for Nazi evidence.
On page 2 we get this thread[1] which turns into a discussion similar to what my comment was, but specifically defends two people that atdrummond claims to be respectively Jewish and philosemitic and accused of being Nazis.
At this time, I do not know who these writers are, so I have to search them. Assuming Cremieux refers to Jordan Lasker[2], who (after this comment was made) was revealed to have a Reddit pseudonym where he self-identified as a Nazi, but at the time would have been primarily known for his arguments that white people are genetically superior to black people with regards to (at least) intelligence while also rubbing shoulders with avowed eugenicists. I'm not going to spend a lot more time searching him, but I should note that, as a convert to Judaism, I could not find any evidence that he would be defined as Jewish by Nazis, who were primarily concerned with race (as they defined it) rather than religion, which certainly muddies the waters here.
Next up is Hanania[3], someone I also had not heard of before, who was definitely an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist, but claims to have changed; journalists close to him deny this, and quotes on the Wikipedia page seem to support that he is at least still fairly racist. In my (admittedly brief) searching I didn't find strong evidence for him being particularly anti- or philo-semitic, though the Wikipedia article did include a quote by him implying that America would be better run by Jewish people than black people (and maybe also hillbillies; he said "voters in Baltimore or Appalachia"). Presumably he considers at least Ashkenazim to be "sufficiently white" in his racial calculus.
While it seems likely that these two people have not specifically called for the extermination of all ethnic Jews, given that there are far more milquetoast people who have been accused of being Nazis, atdrummond defending these two people specifically makes it seem likely that he has some far-right views, but I still haven't gotten to what those are specifically.
As I was scrolling down, I almost missed this quote[4] in a collapsed reply, but saw his username:
> I am frequently called a Nazi (despite being on, and identifying as left wing, my entire life) on X simply for having the temerity to challenge certain orthodoxies.
X has made it very hard for me to view posts of users, so I don't know what he has said on X, but with what we've seen so far, I suspect he is some form of racist hereditarian. Let's keep going:
Next item[5] is the first overtly racist post from him, so looks like I may be on to something. In the context of discussing how the former confederate states seem to be a different country with different health and educational outcomes from the rest of the US:
> The outcomes are primarily due to race, not the contours of the Confederacy. Nearly all of these “red state demographic maps” are isomorphic to the percentage of African Americans within a given state/county/city.
I was skimming so I may have missed something, but the next racially tinged comment is:
> Look at the rates of homicides by firearm for White Americans and they’re within the same order of magnitude as European nations.
> This is a conversation that is verboten in the US because people assume that it means you believe that crime must be intrinsic to race, even though this statistic is actually fully compatible with the liberal orthodoxy regarding the disparate impact of government policy on American Black people.
With a later reply clarifying that he believes this difference to be not solely due to increased poverty in said demographics.
At this point, it seems clear that he believes that black people are more criminal, and he's being coy about whether he thinks it is racially intrinsic, which is arguably a tacit admission of what he thinks. I'm also done reading through his HN comments.
I strongly suspect there are much spicier comments on Twitter, but of the 3 posts that X let me see, the only relevant one was a reply saying "You don't believe correctly" to a post saying "If you believe (correctly) that immigration is a huge positive for society..."
So it seems clear to me at this point that he likely believes black people are inherently more criminal than white people, and he is opposed to immigration. This is what I could find with several times as much time and effort that went into my first post.
> Because you're purposefully trying to muddy the waters :).
I seriously am not, I didn't know what you meant by "literal Nazi" originally; your reply made it clear that you meant "Racist, Eugenicist, White Supermacist, Anti-Semite Transphobe." Please understand that calling someone a "literal Nazi" on the internet does not reliably communicate that today.
Why does the title not match the article? It's under the character limit.
Original title is: “Super secure” MAGA-themed messaging app leaks everyone’s phone number
I think that's incredibly important context. Instead of conferring with actual experts in the field, the populist, fascist segment of our society just decided to wing it with technology.
They BELIEVED they were more secure, with no evidence to back it up.
Yup, it's almost like they're feelings/emotions over evidence/science. It's not that hard to understand considering how that weird lot consists of all sorts of cranks, pooled by the alt right radicalization pipelines of wellness/conspirituality/flat earth/alt-med/anti-vaccine/UFOs...
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