> Educate me please with a comparison of what China has done to be "some of the most imperialist policies"?
Tibet occupation. Taiwan encirclement and ongoing military exercises. Strong-arming African and Asian countries that made the mistake of signing up for belt & road. Tianenmen Square. Illegal Foreign Police Stations. Uyghurs/Xinjiang genocide and concentration camps. Repeated invasion and occupation of Indian territory in North East and North West. The Great Firewall of China - occupation and suppression of its own populations. Ongoing Han settlement of Tibet, Xinjiang and other ethnic regions. Violent destruction of Hong Kong democracy (that was condition of handover). Spratly Islands occupation. Attacks on Filipino shipping and coast guard. Ongoing attacks on Japan's Senkaku Islands.
> Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall’s 1947 book Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command stated that only about 10-15% of men would actually take the opportunity to fire directly at exposed enemies. The rest would typically fire in the air to merely scare off the men on the opposing force.
Having been identified back then, this issue has been systematically stamped out in modern militaries through training methods. Cue high levels of PTSD in modern frontline troops after they absorb what they actually did.
AFAIK the rounds shot to kills ratio is still north of ten thousand in most modern conflicts.
I’ve heard anecdotally that drone operators in Ukraine have a ratio of about ten drones per kill and rack up multiple kills per day every day. Supposedly the pilots “burn out” due to the psychological impacts.
Yea and it also does not help that the people they are killing are just random people that where picked up, thrown in a van, and driven to the front-line to be meat shields.
> If the military is using it in some mission critical way, they can't be fighting the model to get something done. No such limitations would ever be acceptable.
You'd be surprised at what is considered acceptable. For example, being unable to repair your own equipment in battle is considered acceptable by decision-makers who accepted the restrictions.
Overall, this seems like it might be a campaign contribution issue. The DoD/DoW is happy to accept supplier contracts that prevent them from repairing their own equipment during battle (ref. military testimony favoring right-to-repair laws [1] ), so corporate matters like this shouldn't really be coming to a head publicly.
Google is a company well down the path of enshittification, they even got rid of their motto "Don't be evil".
As a consumer, you're better served by using services from companies earlier in that lifecycle, where value accrues to you, and that's not Google, and likely not many other big providers.
When those newer companies turn, you switch. Do not allow yourself to get locked into an ecosystem. It's hard work, but it will pay dividends in the long run.
Terms of Service that span multiple pages of legalese and require an attorney to parse, for something that is either 'free' or a few $ per month, and can result in loss of service across multiple product lines, AND has binding lopsided arbitration requirements, is not only draconian, it is unconscionable.
Look at how messed up this is: Google Attorneys, paid hundreds of $/hour, spending hours and hours putting together these "Terms of Service" on one side; and a simple consumer on the other side, making a few $ per hour, not trained in legalese, expected to make a decision on a service that is supposed to cost a few $ a month, and if you make an honest mistake, can cause you a lot of trouble in your life.
I'm beginning to think that the law needs to be that if there are such egregious terms of service, then the company needs to pay for the consumer's attorney at litigation, no matter the cause of litigation, and no matter the outcome.
I don't have a formal contract with my electricity and water provider; why should there be a dozen pages or longer contract for an email/ISP/Phone provider? Email, Internet, Phones are essential services. Insurance might fall into the same bucket in civilized nations.
> Terms of Service that span multiple pages of legalese and require an attorney to parse, for something that is either 'free' or a few $ per month, and can result in loss of service across multiple product lines, AND has binding lopsided arbitration requirements, is not only draconian, it is unconscionable.
In the general case, I broadly agree, but in this specific case:
1. This wasn't a term buried 2/3rds in a 200 page document. It was a term that was so upfront and clear that everyone knew you weren't supposed to do it.
2. Even for the people who claim they didn't know, when doing the auth, the message specifically asks the user to authorise the antigravity application, not the OpenClaw application.
The argument that users did not know they were violating ToS, in this specific case, is pure BS.
Oh, do you mean the terms in Section 6 of the Additional Terms of Service, in which Section 2, four paragraphs before Section 6, exhorts one to read "... carefully, starting with the Universal Terms ...", which is 23 pages long when printed?
'the plans for the destruction of your house were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'
>> 2. Even for the people who claim they didn't know, when doing the auth, the message specifically asks the user to authorise the antigravity application, not the OpenClaw application.
> Oh, do you mean the terms in Section 6 of the Additional Terms of Service, in which Section 2, four paragraphs before Section 6, exhorts one to read "... carefully, starting with the Universal Terms ...", which is 23 pages long when printed?
It was literally a single sentence on the permissions screen that google pops up.
As it turns out, IMHO, the debate in this thread is about 1 year behind the reality [1]. Personally, I was about a week behind in my reading of the landscape, so didn't realize this is all asked and answered [1].
A number of points that various folks have made in the posts in this thread - free vs paid capabilities, model choices etc. are addressed much more eloquently and coherently in this blog post by Matt Shumer [1]. Discussed here on HN at [2] but like me, many others must have missed it.
The founders of modern nation-states made huge advancements with written constitutions and uniformity of laws, but in the convenience of the rule of law it is often missed that the rule of law is not necessarily the prevalence of justice.
The question a people must ask themselves: we are a nation of laws, but are we a nation of justice?
The parent comment is not presenting a false dichotomy but is making precisely the point that it is how you apply the laws that matter; that just having laws is not enough.
Tibet occupation. Taiwan encirclement and ongoing military exercises. Strong-arming African and Asian countries that made the mistake of signing up for belt & road. Tianenmen Square. Illegal Foreign Police Stations. Uyghurs/Xinjiang genocide and concentration camps. Repeated invasion and occupation of Indian territory in North East and North West. The Great Firewall of China - occupation and suppression of its own populations. Ongoing Han settlement of Tibet, Xinjiang and other ethnic regions. Violent destruction of Hong Kong democracy (that was condition of handover). Spratly Islands occupation. Attacks on Filipino shipping and coast guard. Ongoing attacks on Japan's Senkaku Islands.
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