We're at the point in the cycle where if someone offers you decent money you take it.
It might run on for a while longer but you don't want to be that guy who had a £100m net worth in 1999 but failed to monetise any of it and ended up with nothing
That "antichrist" lecture was an attempt at a reverse Streisand effect - there was a meme that Thiel was the antichrist, but now if you google "peter thiel antichrist" all you're going to see is that lecture.
Pretty clever but to be clear he is an incredibly dodgy human being
Yeah that's what I thought as well. Because even if he hates Greta Thunberg, there are much more extreme people in all the direction. So saying something so absurd seems bizarre. And for sure if anyone is to be tagged Antichrist, it would be war machine profiteer for most people.
Tbh it's kind of a genius move when countless comments like GP tags the antichrist as just slightly malicious or weird comment by him.
The first video says that Thiel is answering the question "What do you make of people celebrating Luigi?" and his response was "There may be things wrong with our healthcare system, but you have to have an argument and find a way to convince people" and that shooting random CEOs "isn't going to work".
Somehow I'm supposed to be led to believe this makes Thiel come across as stupid. My only guess as to how is because the OP must think that shooting CEOs in the street is an obvious rational good and that opposing such is idiocy, or reactionary fascism (in leftist usage, a synonym for idiocy), or so on.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, which is not allowed here regardless of what you're battling for or against.
the submission track of the account, to see you are being untruthful.
The same way you are untruthful, about not disclosing to the community the silently throttling back many of many accounts, not allowing them to post or even reply to comments in a middle of what you decided is acceptable discourse. All the while, at the same time you have here:
Accounts associated with VCs, that do 10 to 20 submissions a day.
You also have been allowing accounts that systematically down vote tech related posts or comments, who are not sympathetic to the current administration. Is that also engaging in political discourse?
And worst you are untruthful, to the community, in not disclosing the main page is manually curated. You actually move posts post with 400 comments within minutes to the 20th or 40th page, if they are somewhat uncomfortable. While pushing to the main page every single submission from OpenAI or Anthropic even if they have 2-3 comments.
Compared to a few years ago, you let the HN main page, transform itself into 90% submissions on Agentic AI. It might serve the 600 billion critical investment of your pay masters, but transformed something where a few years ago, you had posts from Philosophy, Physics, Math, Literature, etc... to nothing more than a marketing poster to the AI VC bros.
Understand that the vast majority outside Silicon Valley, does NOT care about AI, GenAI , AI code generators. They are Hackers...not VCs
No one told me to ban your account, I have no interest in and do not track your views on Peter Thiel, and karma is not a factor.
We've asked you repeatedly to stop breaking the site guidelines and explained to you more than once that using the site primarily for political or ideological battle is against the rules. You've continued to post lots of flamewar comments and even many of the non-political ones have been snarky or aggressive. That's a lot of poison added to the ecosystem. What made you think that was ok? We told you repeatedly that it wasn't:
When I saw you getting aggressive with that other user yesterday, for me it was the final straw and I banned your account. (The other user also, of course, but whether your account was breaking the rules has nothing to do with what someone else was doing.)
You've listed a lot of grievances here, which I suppose is natural at such a moment, but I don't know if it makes sense to go through them in detail. I do want to point out that this bit is wrong: "you are untruthful, to the community, in not disclosing the main page is manually curated": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I/we have nothing against you personally, and if you genuinely want to use HN as intended, we can unban your account. The main thing we'd need to do that is some reason to believe that you've had a change of heart about how to contribute to HN and will follow the rules in the future.
Only a mental five year old would regularly consume tiktoks and YouTube shorts like those above. I'm sorry your brain is fried hard enough that you can only glean political substance from soyboys making short-form clip content.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, which is not allowed here regardless of what you're battling for or against.
People can be profoundly stupid in areas like basic/fundamental morality, while also being in the top 0.001% in areas like manipulating media and making money.
Examples: Every billionaire. Every single one - except Chuck Feeney who proved the rule.
It's not very smart to fail morally and spiritually, over and over, without ever looking into why or trying to correct the issues.
It does take intelligence of a particular kind to examine yourself and what makes you happy, fulfilled. And it takes a certain kind of stupidity to become greedy for more and more and more, neverending.
I don't believe that intelligence is a single axis. You can even have different levels of intelligence on different days for the exact same topic; even on the same day from one hour to the next.
Some people might be great at set theory but terrible at calculus; some people might be great with their hands at sewing but clumsy with glasswork. People are weird and complex.
But what's clear is when people don't even try to be good people. And that requires a particularly dense form of stupidity.
Umm, I am not sure. If you can type on HN you are probably much richer than most in 3rd world countries and you for sure can give majority of your wealth to them. Almost everyone of any richness thinks they are not rich enough although almost everyone in tech probably is.
The crazy thing is this is with Americans being generally extremely puritanical when it comes to alcohol and tobacco by European standards.
What on earth are they doing over there that's so crazily unhealthy you can have no fun and still only live as long as a beer swilling chain smoking European working class person?
You're European? You guys shipped over all your individualist (aka antisocial) people to the US. They have no idea how to work together to build a society, can't trust each other, so all they do is hustle and pray that having money will insulate them from each other. Doesn't work.
SF and NYC are the surprising ones there, because the rest are low tax (0-25% income tax, give or take).
Goes to show it is possible to tax people quite a lot and still be an attractive place to live, but you do need to bring something special (which in 2026 means "be the centre of the world for either tech or finance").
If you're good at that stuff but still very much second tier (London), the tax rate seems to matter a lot
I think Singapore's immigration policy is still interesting and relevant to western countries, but it's true it's also kind of similar to the UAE.
Essentially it's (relatively) easy to get work visas for areas where there's a genuine shortage but difficult to get permanent residency and almost impossible to get citizenship.
That's still a very different policy to what most western countries have right now.
The UAE has the most extreme version of this so the milder Singaporean version is less interesting as an example.
It’s not really a secret that Singapore uses ethnicity based quotas when granting PR and citizenship to maintain their demographic composition.
Or be like Malaysia. They don't even bother to keep it a secret to maintain Malay governing power and unfair advantage.
Cheaper gas only for Muslim citizens, not Chinese/Indian citizens. A company must hire Malay Muslim no matter what. Plenty of other rules that favor an ethnicity.
I saw a post once from a white guy with a wife and two kids (I think also white) who was confused why he was having so much trouble getting Singaporean PR despite contributing so much to the economy.
Like bro... you are the wrong race, it's that simple, shouldn't be too hard to understand.
I'm not making a moral judgement on whether that's correct or not but it's just how it works
A filipino friend of mine moved to Australia after being denied PR in SG, mainly due his race.
As a white person, I’d probably never get PR too but I think it’s good that they maintain the current percentages, otherwise the country would turn unrecognizable like Germany or France.
This. My mental image of Singapore was always boring guys in suits working for soulless banks. At least Wall Street bankers go wild on drugs and know how to party. Singapore bankers are men who, when feeling adventurous, have a sip of wine here and there and women who push dogs in strollers.
Having been to Singapore many times, I've realized my mental image was pretty accurate. There's no real art scene and even mentioning anything that slightly goes against the grain of Singapore's tight, tidy, and strict regimens doesn't just not appeal to the people, it'll actively infuriate them. A hint of rebellious nature defines cool. Singapore doesn't have a single drop of that within its entire national borders.
It's like North Korea with money and good PR. At least a lot of North Koreans sneak in a little rebellion when they know nobody is watching, even if it's minor stuff like watching illegal foreign TV shows. Singapore is the type of place where your neighbors would report you if such a thing became illegal, instead of saying "Hey bro, let me borrow those DVDs after you're done." It's a great place to make money. Then once you have it, leave to live a little.
The country is so against cool it even has a designated free speech corner that doesn't allow free speech and had its usage hours limited from 7 AM to 7 PM and limits speech to 4 languages only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner,_Singapore
Close to a true perspective, especially if you came as one of those suits. There is soul in singapore, it's just actively co-opted by the govment or actively suppressed. You have to actually live here to see it and have friends who are not expats or mainland chinese (which is hard I think for most foreigners who come), it definitely isn't the same as the soul that you see in america or europe, I guess. The work life (a bit more chill than Japan or Korea but still harsh like the asian norm) doesn't help.
In Russia I noticed that it took barely 10 minutes with stranger before getting into a discussion of philosophy, literature, meaning of life, etc. (or how their soul ached for something)
I never saw this Singaporean soul even in deepest darkest ang mo kio.
It was low key creepy how shallow the locals were. They'd chat about gaming, shopping, grinding and food, food, food but very rarely anything deeper. even after knowing them for years.
I went to some "artistic immersive theater" there one time (there was an event like this maybe once a year?) and even there the first third was a girl monologuing about her love of kpop.
Most countries fit in the middle of these two somewhere but these two countries really stood out to me in their extremes.
> There's no real art scene and even mentioning anything that slightly goes against the grain of Singapore's tight, tidy, and strict regimens doesn't just not appeal to the people, it'll actively infuriate them.
Somewhere I read that the government once went around arresting theater troupes and the like that were seen as too leftist, but I can't seem to find the specific info. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
You do not seem to like a rules based society. I’d have no problem renouncing my German citizenship and become Singaporean. I just want stability, safety, good food, good bars, excellent transit, low taxes and excellent internet.
Germany has always had a massive and influential art and music scene. It's been the source of fine cinema. It's globally known for raves, dabbling in drugs, and wild fashion. I encounter Germans all around the world hiking up mountains in freezing temperatures while wearing nothing but shorts and sneakers and smiling while doing so. Germans are known for their strict rules when it comes to the day to day, but they very much know how to unwind.
Singapore has none of these. The national pastime is talking about how much money you have and how much you love having money and can't wait to have more money. And the money never goes towards interesting experiences. It's the same as Dubai. Shopping and international chains and thinking that means class. It's boring and makes East Germany seem like a good time.
Singapore is also a very young country though, so it's not fair to compare to Germany. You do have a point though that there is not much out of the box thinking. I found that to be higher in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
There are elections but a combination of gerrymandering and honestly just good governance by the ruling party has kept them in power. People genuinely like the PAP. To the extent people vote for opposition candidates, most people would readily admit they do so only to send a message to the PAP. Most Singaporeans do not sincerely want to be ruled by anyone else yet.
Unionisation in Singapore is very different than the rest of the world. There is one very large union (the National Trades Union Congress, NTUC) but it mostly works with the government and the PAP and has a bit of a revolving door with some PAP MPs serving as leadership in NTUC. Wildcat strikes are illegal, and striking is generally not allowed. I think the last sanctioned strike by NTUC was in the 80s. The union does still generally represent workers in disputes between employers and the government and does other work on behalf of workers (trainings, some welfare, it runs the largest grocery chain that at least theoretically is supposed to be a social enterprise and a cooperative), so most members I think accept the arrangement, for what it's worth.
The ruling party has perfected the art of using legal and social pressures to fracture any competing parties if they get too big.
They have a jealously guarded media monopoly and viciously crack down on opposition bloggers by suing them into bankruptcy using absurdly strict libel laws.
As a last resort they steal any policies which make the opposition popular. This is actually an underrated means by which Singaporeans exert democratic pressure on the government but it makes it pretty demoralizing to be in opposition.
There is a national union but it is controlled by the government. Striking is illegal iirc, but membership will get you discounts on your shopping.
Singaporeans are pretty apolitical on the whole, which is how the PAP seems to like it. Theyre not like Americans - not split into two herds who are trained to hate one another.
Sound like Singapore's system rewards competence + stability, and that makes it hard for opposition to scale, because the incumbents can absorb popular ideas while keeping institutional advantages.
That’s demoralizing if you’re doing party-building. But the flip side is: it means citizens do have leverage, just not always in the form of “replace the government.”
I agree, without even talking about gay rights, I think both the UAE and Qatar have a legal system and an immigration system I wouldn't want to be subjected to.
Generally true for most of the world outside of the West
[1]: I mean, in my book consensual trade between two grown up people is closer to consensual sex between two grown up people than it is to murder. That said, there is still some difference.
There aren't any examples for Dubai (afaik), on record.
In the UAE, 2015 was the last execution for homosexuality.
There was a deportation in 2017 for maybe cross dressing?
Either way, I would consider the UAE an exceptionally unsafe place to visit.
Many traditional cultures don’t really distinguish between homosexuality and pedarasty. That distinction, or at least the cultural recognition of a distinction, is largely a distinctive artifact of the sexual revolution, a western phenomenon.
Right, my point is that if they were men raping four and eight year old boys, they may very well have been convicted of sodomy rather than child rape like they would in some Western countries.
The state law in Washington even had a similar issue. Bestiality was prohibited by the sodomy statute, which the state repealed in its entirety as a gay rights thing. After the Enumclaw incident the legislature scrambled to re-criminalize bestiality.
That's probably partly why things have got increasingly flaky - until they finish there'll be constant background cognitive load and surface area for bugs from the fact everything (especially the data) is half-migrated
You'd think so, and we don't know about today's incident yet, but recent Github incidents have been attributed specifically to Azure, and Azure itself has had a lot of downtime recently that lasts for many hours.
It might run on for a while longer but you don't want to be that guy who had a £100m net worth in 1999 but failed to monetise any of it and ended up with nothing
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