[The White House app] ships with 3 embedded trackers including Huawei Mobile Services Core (yes, the Chinese company the US government sanctioned, shipping tracking infrastructure inside the sitting president's official app)
The executive branch has decided this company is so dangerous I can’t buy a monitor made by them - but it’s embedding its SDK in its official app?!
I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there - it was just added by whatever contractor built the app, but that’s arguably even worse.
And I have absolutely no doubt that if it was discovered in a political opponent’s app, and the administration wanted to harm them, there would be no compunction about using that fact against them.
> I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there
Assuming incompetence gives the administration a cover to get away with anything. I'm not quite sure they're as stupid as they all act. Someone is surely using the facade of incompetence to rot things from the inside out.
> We had the first 4+ years to learn that "malice or incompetence" is not the right question. There's been more than enough pathological input to show it becomes a denial-of-service attack on observers.
> The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.
One might also view it as a kind politically-flavored nerd-sniping. [0] Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
The current administration has created a narrative that everything they do is good, while anything their opponents do is bad. Facts or meaning do not matter any more. I honestly don't understand how the USA has become this. This won't end well.
It started with Richard Nixon and his cynical manoevering.
It was reinforced with Ronald Reagan. Remember how he spun the Iranian revolution and the bad economy on his opposition? Remember how he rode the Moral Majority wave?
It was taken up a notch by G. W. Bush and his band of trigger-happy self-serving country club elitists.
No one in between those points tried to roll back the progress. They're just as guilty. It's been a monotonic increasing function towards the current apex (nadir?).
Yeah the democrats are at fault here too. Clinton had eight years to rollback any damage from Nixon and Reagan. Obama had eight years to rollback any damage from them + Bush. Biden had four years to rollback any damage from them + Trump.
One could argue that the courts or congress/senate may not have been favorable during their time, but that wasn't true during the entire combined 20 years they had.
(siddnote - I think "nadir" was the answer to a crossword clue I was stumped on. I'd never heard it before that. And I thought I'd never hear it again. Interesting coincidence!)
I think Trump being elected is a result of anti-thought, feudalism-seeking part of society coming to power, not a cause. Enough people were fed up with thinking elites stealing from them, so they elected thought-averse elites to steal from them because they naively thought that the stealing is because of intelligence.
What? Trump is just a symptom. The US didn't suddenly become what it is now because of a vote. Like it or not (and I certainly don't), the people voted for this, twice. Whether they voted for it because they actually wanted it vs they voted for it because politicians convinced them they wanted it, it is what we wanted.
Sure, absolutely. But again, the people voted for fascism. At his pre-election rallies he'd say shit like "I'm gonna be a dictator for a day!" and get cheers.
An America that didn't like fascism would have never even let this man win the primary.
I think it's like that old saying about bankruptcy - it happens very slowly, then all at once
The rise of right-wing propaganda mass media has been simmering brains for 3 decades in a populist, grievance and resentment stew and positioned things perfectly for right-wing propaganda to explode in the internet age - once social media came around, it was a renaissance for the paranoid-style radical right-wing demagogues, and they exploded in numbers and reach. In turn, that tilled the soil for a Trump figure to come along to disrupt things.
Trump basically took all the recurring themes of grievance from right-wing media to the extreme to turbo-charge the anxiety and fear of the right, including most things that were generally considered wrong for politicians to say/do.
It's almost hard to remember the before-times, but Trump was the first modern presidential ticket that outright attacks the media (calling them the enemy of the people, fake news, etc) to de-legitimize them - it used to be a point of pride in this country that politicians didn't do stuff like this, because it's a feature of authoritarian regimes, not democracies. Right-wing audiences were very used to hearing that sort of thing though, because it was a common feature of the right-wing propaganda media they had been boiling in for years.
When I was in high school (or maybe even junior high), I remember learning the bill of rights and the freedom of speech and press and assembly. Our curricula and case studies always focused on freedom of speech because I guess it was absurd to think that the govt would ever attack the press. That was a thing "other" countries did.
I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too, even if it is stupid speech. But attacking the press is insane.
No I mean the actual stupid shit he says, not the stupid policies he enacts. Like randomly getting up during a cabinet meeting to admire a ballroom that doesn't exist yet. That's stupid but harmless.
I would argue that standing to look at a pile of rubble, where there are disputes paying the contractors hired to work on the project, no approval or consultation with either the public or public infrastructure preservation agencies was performed is not harmless.
Or someone who is in charge of a very powerful economy and military who cannot control the comments that they utter, or have the ability to stay focused during a cabinet meeting, but wander off to admire the "emperors new clothes" is also not harmless.
It would be one thing if he was just some random elderly person suffering from dementia, rambling on - yeah, that's generally harmless. But this? This is not harmless.
The apps have nothing to do with the current administration. All these permissions were already in place before the current administration. It’s easy to verify this by looking at previous versions of the apps. HN has created a narrative that everything the current administration does is bad.
Ah.. I'm glad it's just a narrative then, and that there are in fact just as many good things to report and that America is not rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.
When a coworker leaves the company and I inherit their work, I am given a little bit of time to acclimate and understand the projects they were working on.
If it turns out a secret was exposed in production, or we're exposing PII in logs, or storing CCs or passwords in plain text, there's a certain time frame in which the blame shifts from my coworker for introducing it, to me for not catching it.
So where was that outrage before the current administration? The comments in this submission mostly blame the administration. I verified older versions of the apps and found that the wide permissions were there prior to Trump, and now suddenly it’s "hey, but he did not fix it!" This is hilarious, don't you think?
> I verified older versions of the apps and found that the wide permissions were there prior to Trump
This pretty much insinuates Biden (and Trump v1, and Obama, and Bush) didn't fix it.
And the commenter aren't wrong when they blame the administration. They wouldn't be wrong to blame previous administrations either. But the previous administrations aren't in power right now.
> And the commenter aren't wrong when they blame the administration. They wouldn't be wrong to blame previous administrations either. But the previous administrations aren't in power right now
They are wrong. The current administration did not make a call to widen the permissions or make it intentionally overly broad.
> This pretty much insinuates Biden (and Trump v1, and Obama, and Bush) didn't fix it.
Why do you believe the president is responsible? Could be just a lazy contractor.
> The current administration did not make a call to widen the permissions or make it intentionally overly broad.
Maybe not. But are they not responsible for an app that literally markets itself as the official federal govt app? If Meta sold FB to me am I not responsible for the algorithms that I now own, that perpetuates misinformation?
> Why do you believe the president is responsible? Could be just a lazy contractor.
Obviously the president is not deploying code. But doesn't mean the president gets a free pass. If I did shitty work for my employer and deployed a rootkit to production, I get fired but my employer is still responsible. If they want to be absolved of responsibility, they can always unpublish it while they get stuff fixed and acknowledge the issue.
As an European, the political situation in US has never seemed reasonable to me, and been on a mostly downhill slope for a long time. It has certainly gotten way way worse with the current administration though.
As I've said, facts or meaning no longer matter. There are numerous cases where Trump blamed Democrats for something he did during his first term or took credit for something positive that the Biden administration did. HN does not create a narrative, people are free to post their opinions here.
That’s true - this was the reason for the original action in 2019 - but is not the whole story. The current rationale depends mostly on national security concerns: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47012
…but it also doesn’t really matter here. Either they were sanctioned for a good reason and the Executive Branch is doing business with them anyway, or they were sanctioned for a bad reason and I’m not allowed to do business with them even though the Executive Branch does.
>This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number.
when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point.
(the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")
I remember when I was young seeing videos of North Korea, of audiences always giving rapt standing ovations and many people fake fainting, and I always thought "How dumb and stupid does everyone have to be to carry on this absurd, ridiculous charade."
It is still bad news. The last sentence refers to things working out for everyone except the reader:
"Sources went on to report that, due a minor oversight that also occurred as you slumbered, your student loans must still be repaid in full and are now subject to a highly predatory ballooning interest rate."
What they think they see is actually a short snapshot of North Korean life with a red circle, a red arrow and a red caption text that says "North Korean propaganda here!!! -->", carefully drawn by their local propaganda.
Sanity check: I present you a country X, whose language you don't speak, and whose news you don't read day to day. I show you their politician saying something. Can you tell if that was propaganda? Substitute X from "North Korea" to a country you know nothing about and see how the answer changes.
People don't believe native speakers of their own language when they're told things that conflict with their political world view. Why would they trust someone who says "that's not an accurate translation" if that collides with their political opinions?
For any outsider telling me about North Korea, including South Koreans, I can't tell if I've been pranked with e.g. the South Korean version of The Onion, let alone something milder like I'm being told about this by someone who takes their version Breitbart more seriously than their version of The Wall Street Journal.
The version I know is a little different: A Russian visits America and meets an American at a bar and they get talking about life in Russia. "How is the propaganda?" says the American. "It's everywhere, but it's easy to ignore it" says the Russian. "Yours is much better." "But we don't have propaganda here" says the American. "Exactly" says the Russian.
idk how a person can be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag every morning and not think that's some North Korean style shit.
When I was in kindergarten, I refused to do the pledge one day. My teacher was livid. "Are you American or not?"
Being 5, I didn't know the difference between ethnicity and nationality (I'm Asian but I was born here and didn't know any life outside of America). So I was afraid that my teacher would not let me be American anymore if I didn't say the pledge. So I said it and never refused to say it in school again.
It wasn't til I was well into my adulthood that I realize how absurd that situation sounds.
So you were actually pledging under duress. Contracts and statements made under duress are usually treated as null and void, so you have that going for you.
Have you considered, however, how that event shaped your developing and impressionable subconscious and possibly influenced your future behavior as an adult?
It's not something I fully understood as a child. I didn't even fully grasp the concept of "nationality" so when she asked if I was American I just said yes because I didn't know what it meant. I just understood that not saluting meant teacher mad, just like not cleaning up my toys in the classroom meant teacher mad.
I mean if you agree with it, it’s not propaganda. There are lots of kinds of propaganda you probably agree with like “70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck” and stuff like that. It’s just that the stuff you don’t like is propaganda.
Sure, and this 70% of Americans bullshit is propaganda by that measure. It is frequently trotted out on HN and is met with enthusiastic belief despite being total ass pull. There are US Senators pushing this propaganda and people enthusiastically agreeing.
Uh, what? People don't "agree" with stats. They either believe it at face value, or they fact check the stats and find, oh, this is actually true but the study was limited, or they find that it is indeed just bullshit. No agreement necessary.
Politicians taking advantage of the fact that their constituents will not fact check them is propaganda 101.
My comment has nothing to do with the actual statistic of living paycheck-to-paycheck. OP could have used a completely different (made up or not) statistic. Of course the statistic will change when you change the definition.
Well, the annual death rate is roughly 1 in every 100 and paychecks are every 2 weeks, the death rate every 2 weeks is 4 bps. So 99.96% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
But otherwise I think Matt Darling has a piece on Slow Boring that should help inform you as to the state of the US.
The phrase "live paycheck to paycheck" means "To spend all that one earns without saving anything", not the literal interpretation of "failing to die between paychecks" that you seem to be using here.
(IIRC, 60-70% is based on surveys, that percentage of people feel they're living like that, but actual stats are much lower, like 25% or so, but it's important to make sure the same thing is being discussed when having conversations like this).
In a marvelous twist of irony, the commenter unwittingly and perfectly exemplified how easily it is to get people talking as if they were good little disciples of Goebbels. But don't worry: he's here to make us all woke, or red pilled or whatever specific propaganda term the party has commanded during this election cycle
a. LendingClub: "According to a Reality Check: Paycheck to Paycheck survey conducted by LendingClub and PYMNTS, 60% of employed U.S. adults, including more than four in 10 high-income earners, are living one paycheck to the next with little to no financial cushion.": https://www.lendingclub.com/resource-center/personal-finance...
f. All those are neutral. If you want, I could also find slight D-leaning: CNBC / SurveyMonkey: "more than half of Americans (61%) consider themselves to be “living paycheck to paycheck,” up from 58% in March of this year": https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/07/majority-of-americans-feelin...
g. As previously mentioned, 60-70 is a vibes check, asking people how they feel. Those same vibes checks from R-leaning sources do much the same, they just don't report it with the same phrasing. Which is fine so long as everyone's on the same page about what words mean, but even with the stricter phrasing that R reporters prefer for "paycheck to paycheck", it's not even close to the same meaning you were using which comes across as being needlessly literal-minded for the sake of rhetoric rather than situational awareness.
Mark Carney's famous speech at Davos was a breath of fresh air compared with anything ever spewed by the deranged current president of the USA. I am so glad I live in the best country in the world with him as prime minister and that we have no propaganda here in Canada. We will do so much better when we enter trade agreement negotiations with that degenerate loser south of the border in the next few months. That guy can't even ties his own shoes because of his cankles, but Mark Carney can tie not only his own shoes but he always wears sensible socks too.
You may have missed propaganda because you missed the propaganda.
Because some nations are leader-oriented and some nations are system-oriented. Ask any European if they support the state system in their country. Or ask any muslim if their branch of Islam is the best.
Almost all countries in the world will have heavy handed propaganda that their way of organizing things are the best and most fair that could ever exist.
I'm outside both and I'm not seeing a lot of difference. Main one is that one is threatening everyone with nukes, and the other one isn't making any threats I can understand because they're in Korean.
It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.
The drive to achieve that level of success often comes from weaponized poor self esteem.
Well adjusted individuals just chill out after a few million and work on whatever is fun/important for them.
Only rarely does this also happen to be something that can take you from 10M to 1B. (and if it can it would take a lot of work you can't be bothered to do unless it's some core value like helping the poor beat malaria)
Trump saying recently that he hates hanging around successful people and prefers losers because he doesn't want to listen to other people's stories really speaks to the poor self esteem angle
“I always like to hang around with losers, actually, because it makes me feel better.”
“I hate guys that are very, very successful, and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people who like to listen to my success,” he added.
Being critical about billionares is empirically supported. Trump wouldnt exist if not supported by other psychopaths and now he selects even more unethical bootlickers for offices and rewards equally deranged amigos.
Jazz9k just drank too much coolaid from billionare owned and election meddling twitter, i guess.
Well now he'll be remembered for associating with pedophiles, infidelity, and walking back things he allegedly stood for, like climate change, as soon as they become inconvenient or he stops caring or whatever.
It comes down to two things. One is the well documented issue of how, when you are that rich, you are treated differently, and how that will ultimately modify your behavior. The other is the prerequisites to get to the job. Chances are you aren't fully self-made, receiving no investment. From convincing investors, to having immense faith in a project that cannot be obviously good, as otherwise you'd be building what already exists, to the personality to handle the road upward.
This second effect happens in all kinds of places where you have to jumps througha lot of hoops to just get to get there. Every hoop discards candidates, and promotes different things. Sometimes in ways that make sure that nobody capable of attaining the job is fit to actually do it well. You can see the issue all over the place, once you track people's careers. Sometimes things that should be disqualifying for a role are actually requirements in practice.
There's an old SF short where one of the people who won't gets forced to. Battery of psychological tests followed by "you're one of the rulers now, and you're going to hate every minute of it, but we enslave you so the rest of us have a peaceful, prosperous planet."
- Own a monopoly
- Inherit your fortune
- Run a criminal enterprise
Using just these three filters alone, you encompass more than 99% of all billionaires in existence.
The amount of billionaires who do not fit into these categories can barely occupy a family sized vehicle.
The criteria here suggesting that there is a specific sociopathic personality requirement to being a billionaire as each category can be argued as harmful to societies.
And mathematically, only businesses at the top of the graph are capable of generating a billion dollars. Hence, if you are looking to be a billionaire, the path lies either through a Ponzi scheme or through a monopoly. Both of them, in their most pure form, are illegal, and the challenge in the business model is to execute on them while staying just barely on the right side of the law.
I do not think it is the money that made them terrible. I know all sorts of terrible people that would do the exact same things. The only difference really is they do not have the money to execute on those ideas.
Money does not make you a good or bad person. It just makes you more of who you are already.
I specifically did not say money makes them mentally ill, but rather the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness.
> the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness
Do we have any actual evidence of this? I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, they just didn’t sell their piece of the closely-held business they started, and they spend their time skiing, reading, travelling and taking care of their friends and family.
> they would suggest that the thing those exorbitantly wealthy people are hoarding is money
And I’d say they’re literally wrong. They may be hoarding capital. And yes, some wealthy people do hoard money per se. But outside the Epstein class there are lots of people we just don’t hear about because they aren’t on social media talking about how rich they are. Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
while this distinction may be important to you, i dont think it really changes anything about malfists question/point.
>Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
and cigarettes cause cancer. not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad (smoking, too).
(please note: i am not arguing for or against what you or malfist have said, just thought there was a little something lost in translation re: you asking for evidence after a conversation that started with "makes you wonder")
> i dont think it really changes anything about what malfist question/point
Of course it does. Turning capital into spendable or transferable wealth takes work. Plenty of rich people are just enjoying their lives in the same way retirees do.
> not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad
I’m saying the folks we tend to get upset about being rich at are also the rich who are prominently on social media. The problem isn’t that they’re rich. It’s that they’re on social media so much. I think there is a genuine argument to be made that even Elon Musk would have been a better-liked person, maybe even a better person, if he never got on Twitter.
> thought there was a little something lost in translation re: "makes you wonder"
Perhaps. And appreciate your clarifying for them. In 2026 I’m just sceptical of the “just asking questions” bit, particularly when it comes to cultural tropes. (And for what it’s worth, my query for a source was genuine. I’m always down to change my mind on a loosely-held belief.)
> a hell of a difference between a multimillionare who has a successful business and a billionare
Yeah, I'm saying the ones worth hundreds of millions to low billions who aren't on social media are, in my personal experience, often fine people. The ones I don't like are the ones on social media, but that's also true of the folks worth a few thousand dollars.
Plenty of billionaires are assholes. The world's GDP is over $100 trillion. That's going to produce diversity among the rich.
And who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?
What does "hoard wealth" mean to you? A vault full of gold that they swim in?
Jeff Bezos's net worth is mostly in the form of server racks and amazon inventory.
Elon's net worth is mostly in the form of share certificates that are marked to market and contingent on delusional investors swallowing Elons own promises.
This is the peg that society is constantly snagging on. The billionaire class doesn't actually have much "hoarded" wealth. If we want to go after wealth that more classically fits the idea of "hoarded", i.e. cash and cash equivalents, then the middle/upper middle class is the golden goose (most people are surprised to learn they have almost twice the wealth billionaires have too, not a very clickable headline though...)
The idea that everyone gets a suburban house and premium healthcare if we can only pass legislation that taxes billionaires, is a delusion on par with Jesus coming down to battle the transsexuals.
The actual strain in the economy is between the upper middle class and the lower class. The senior developers and the shipping room clerks.
> who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt
I'm not absolving anyone. I'm saying I know good people who are also billiionaires who most people have never heard of. The billionaires I've heard of I tend to dislike. But I think the correlate is the fame, not the wealth.
> guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?
This is where the hoarding metaphor breaks down. If you build a company, is it hoarding to not sell your stake off to a private equity firm?
Because practically speaking, those are their choices. Hold it, manage it and live off the income. (They all donate most of their incomes, but that's neither here nor there. You can be a good person even if not philanthropic.) Or sell it to a private equity firm and then have a pot of money to stare at.
Of course the money doesn't make them terrible. Being terrible makes them money. Lots of money. There aren't really other ways of obtaining so much money, which is why if you see someone that has that amount, they should be viewed with suspicion.
Right? If I had enough money that I could make a serious dent in local or even global poverty without noticing the change in my lifestyle, and I just... chose not to, I have no idea how I could sleep at night.
Huge numbers (billions) of people have enough money to make massive changes to the lives of those less fortunate than them, but don't, and prefer instead to make incremental upgrades to their own lives. New rugs, more savings, first-class airline tickets, eating out a few more times a month, etc.
This is just human nature.
People who are at wealth level x tend to say, "I can't believe that people at wealth level x+1 aren't more generous!" all the while ignoring their own lack of desire to give generously to people at wealth levels x-1 and below.
I remember wrestling with this in my therapist's office when Aaron died. I had known him tangentially - we hung out in the same IRC channels, and had several mutual friends in the Cambridge/Somerville techie crowd that he would hang out in person with.
As a college student and young adult I had always envied his fame, his intelligence, his money (post-Reddit acquisition), and the strength of his convictions. And yet, in that moment in early 2013, he was dead, and I was working a good job at Google (and this was 2013 Google, when it was still a nice place to work doing things that I could generally approve of). And he'd died doing the stuff that I wanted to do but had been too chickenshit to actually carry out.
I think that this illustrates why the world is the way it is. All the true altruists are dead, killed for their altruism. It is adaptive, in a survival sense, to think of yourself and your own survival and not worry too much about other people. Ironically, this is what my therapist was trying to get me to realize.
But I think this also goes back to the GP's point. When people at wealth level x give to people at level x-1, it doesn't raise the people at x-1 up to x. It brings the person at x down to x-1. There are more people at x-1 than x, after all; you could give everything you had away and mathematically, it would lower your net worth significantly more than it would raise theirs. And of course, it doesn't do a damn thing about the people at x+1. Why can't they donate instead, where their wealth would do an order of magnitude more good?
There actually do exist people who are like that: they would rather spread their wealth around the people at wealth level x-1, joining them at that level, than raise themselves up to x+1. I've met some; most poor people are far more generous than rich people are. That is why they are poor. But then, it doesn't solve the problem of inequality, they just disappear into the masses of people at level x-1.
I'm not talking about people with x+1, where X is a standard US middle-class amount of money. In that case, $20k or $100k or some amount that would make a tiny difference in the world is a huge amount of money to a middle-class family.
No, I'm talking about wealth level X*100. For them, the difference between $100M and $1B is basically no difference in the quality of life to that family. They'd have 1 fewer megayachts. They could give away $900M, and eliminate hunger forever in a large city or a small state. $100B is 100x that again, they could give away $99.9B, still have $100M, and solve poverty in most _countries_.
Or, if they don't want to, we institute a 90% wealth tax on everything over $10M, and solve it ourselves.
What you forget is, none of the x+100 people you are talking about would have ever become a x+100 person if they thought like you suggest they should. In german, we have a proverb: "Von den Reichen lernt man das sparen." (The rich teach you how to save money) And giving away huge sums without personal gain, is the contrary of saving.
We can also tell because anyone who can take the time to use a computer with internet to write a comment in well-formed English is already comparatively wealthy or connected enough to provide food and housing for dozens of people.
I also think this could be a symptom of an economically unequal society (which creates a higher range of x), and is a big reason why it's important to fix it, on top of the extra money to the state.
So thats essentially communism right? Is human nature incompatible with communism or is capitalism incompatible with human nature?
Communism doesn't eliminate power relationships, it just papers them over with politics and bureaucracy instead of having them legible with prices and wages.
In the American golden age of capitalism from ~1950-1970, the top marginal tax rate was 90%, and so you didn't have CEOs get paid more than about 3x the median worker, because the government would get it all. Instead, they got perks. Private jets. Positions at the company for their kids. Debaucherous holiday parties. Casual sexual harassment of secretaries.
In Soviet communism, all production was centrally planned by government bureau run by party members. It was not uncommon for these bureaus to make mistakes, leading to severe shortages for the population. Nevertheless, these shortages never seemed to really hit the party members responsible for making the plans. Power has its perks.
And that's also why reforms attempting to reduce economic inequality need to focus on power rather than money. There have been a number of policies that do meaningfully raise standards of living for the poor: they're things like the 13th amendment to the (US) Constitution, the 1st amendment, the jury trial system, free markets, anti-monopoly statutes, bans on non-competes, etc. What they all have in common is that they preserve economic freedom and the power to make your own living against people who would seek to restrict that freedom and otherwise keep you in bondage.
On the other hand, it would have alleviated famine in 43 countries for one year and if your response to that is "but that's not ending world hunger and I will not do it", you really need a long hard look at yourself.
But then again, Musk is going to turn out to be one of the great mass killers of world history with his destruction of USAID. Why would he spoil that by helping some folks?
Also famines are political problems to start with. We have more then enough food. Getting it to people reliably is the issue - i.e. there's usually a plethora of other issues like an active war.
It also isn't an economically isolated enterprise: Ukrainian grain shipments traversing into Europe via Polish roads and not heading to Africa via their ports caused a bunch of price crashes which became political flashpoints.
Not all areas are equally good at growing food. That can be because of climate, soil quality, war or simply population density requiring housing and industry.
Maybe it's too malthusian of a view but I think a big issue to contend with is that some people should not be as populated as they are and there's no push against it from either government or the dominant economic systems.
And yes that includes the controversial poor population hotspots of africa that have grown super rapidly beyond multiples of what the land can provide
But also just the same places like arizona with comparatively rich folk growing the urban desert sprawl
Is shipping food there the correct solution? For war, an ostensibly temporary condition, by all means ship the population food. But if an area is already overcrowded beyond what the land can sustain (due to climate, soil quality, or population density) then is it productive to further bolster the population? Seems a human catastrophe in the making, supporting population growth in an area where the land can not supply enough food.
The issue is that simply saying you're going to deliver food aid is elliding pretty much the entire problem. You cannot simply deliver food aid, because to do so you might have to fight and win an entire war against one or several insurgent groups or governments.
You could turn up reliably and distribute quite a lot of food, and yet at the end of the day find there's still a famine.
Right, which is why I never said I was going to simply deliver food aid like it just required trucks and gas. It's why UN World Food Program, an organization with actual experience, designed a plan to deliver and distribute food. Please explain why they are wrong.
They're not but it also won't end world hunger. Because world hunger is not being caused by accidental deficits in food availability: it's caused by serious local security threats and in many cases deliberate political action.
Trump has largely not had that kind of money. He’s had a _lot_ of money, many many times more than most, but by all accounts except his own, those numbers are much lower than he likes to brag about. Well, they were - there’s been a troubling amount of money going out of the federal government that isn’t well-accounted for under his reign.
He had the kind of money that can hire expensive projects on trust that payment in full will be rendered, but only kept his money by often not paying out.
As with all things Trump, even up to the new ballroom not having a front door despite the massive staircase, his wealth is more in appearance, and less in actual assets…or was. Of course, someday maybe we will know the true extent or shortfall of his bank accounts
I don’t get puzzled that the criminal doesn’t use his ill-gotten gains for pro-social causes. Why would a person ever use anti-social means to acquire funds for pro-social goods?[1]
This is not too disimilar from the case of the billionaire.
[1] Excepting some Galaxy Brain philosophies like Effective Altruism
If you had that amount of money you would also be a sociopath. It's a precondition.
Good news is that you would sleep fine at night. No matter how destructive your existence was, and how much of a net negative you were to the world, you would still think very highly of yourself.
Trump specifically seems to hew awfully close to the symptoms of a long-term cocaine user. The hard drift into self-congratulatory vanity parallels that of Charlie Sheen during a certain infamous interview, for example, and at least two people (Howard Dean and Carrie Fisher) identified him as having compulsive sniffing reminiscent of a cocaine habit during debates prior to his first election.
Remember that Trump is not a first-generation member of the upper class; as a nepo baby, he was born out of touch and has spent his whole life falling deeper into bizarre social bubbles and media silos that were tailored by his ancestors and peers to reassure them that they're doing the right thing. In theory plutarchs should be receiving world-class education from private tutors, but being arch-Conservatives by definition, these teachers are invariably out of date on mental health, and would be forbidden from teaching it even if they had modern material.
Because of this isolation the ultra-wealthy often have certain very uneducated traits around self-esteem—which can paradoxically seem like the result of poverty. They do not have access to DARE or Sesame Street to give them the confidence not to take drugs when pressured, they've never seen Mister Rogers, their biological parents were always off running a business empire, and they have no surrogate figures because their nannies probably get fired at the drop of a hat, even for defending the child's interests.
Ironically, American republicanism makes this worse; in a planned aristocracy, parents internalize the belief that their children deserve "the best" because they are meant to be "the best", but without that noble lie, there is no pressure to create a positive environment for the next generation of tyrant. To make matters worse, these families never start off with healthy values to begin with—which produces a founder effect of regressive masculinity that magnifies everything else I've just mentioned.
This excellent list, I expand with my Daddy Issues Billionaire Archetype, which we see in basically all "ultra successful" people. (I haven't found any counter-examples yet, but I'm eagerly awaiting the first! It would be extremely valuable information.)
But crucially, in the face of Unrelenting Standards, what's the difference between total collapse and astronomical success? The belief that you can do it.[0] It's not just "you need to be better than you are." It's "and I know you can."
[0] Incidentally, I posted on this exact subject this morning!
To get moderately rich doesn't require a special personality type, but obscene wealth requires breaking laws and asking forgiveness later (throwing lawyers at the problem). Not caring who you hurt while reaching for a goal is a trait of sociopathy.
Aren’t sociopaths strongly overrepresented among the powerful?
(Assuming that) It’s a bit astonishing that we discuss things like that, go huh, and then go about our day. Effectively acquiescing to rule-by-personality disordered.
They are perfectly aware of their own optics and do it because you can't escape it. See Elon with his cringeworthy Twitter takeover that still hasn't collapsed, Larry Ellison buying up the media or Tim Cook gifting the gold trophy to Trump.
Nobody has the guts to boycott them anymore. Billionaires know that you depend on them for news, social media and smartphones too.
Well... it worked. The shareholders were made whole, Elon got his vanity project, and the only people who got the short end of the stick were the loss-leader Twitter addicts. From a game-theory perspective that's a pretty impressive political polemic to achieve with purely private capital.
When the dust settles the only person to blame is Jack Dorsey, who spent his halcyon years on Twitter pumping Bitcoin and looking even more coked-out than Elon. If people can't move on to better platforms then yes, they are doomed to eternal monetization by warring moron techbro tribes.
I think that's what bothers me the most about the last couple years. These ultra rich people are just brazenly being scumbags and there is nothing anybody can really do about it. I imagine this is what people felt like in the middle ages when their King was going senile.
Both are true. Some things can be done and are simple/healthy, like escaping social media. Others are fundamentally much harder and not worth the risk/trouble/time.
> Some things can be done and are simple/healthy, like escaping social media. Others are fundamentally much harder and not worth the risk/trouble/time.
I think the calculation is very easy, actually. Risk vs Reward. You could even use polymarket to crowdsource funds for the activity!
The Onion is actually making great money on its print edition. Having a real newspaper is a novelty these days, almost like it's part of the joke, and you should subscribe.
The closing point is the one that should get more attention — every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page. And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts: you want access to APIs
the browser won't give you. Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available through a browser, and that's by, unfortunately, design.
> And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app
I have worked on several applications where the product managers wanted to make our web app something that could be installed through the app store, because that's how users expect to get apps.
I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever shows up in a search result.
I've tried pushing back against the native app argument and won once because customers actually reported liking that we had a website instead of an app, and other times because deploying an app through the stores was more work than anyone had time to take on. Otherwise, we would've been deploying through app stores for sure.
Marketing gets plenty of data from google analytics or whatever platform they're using anyway, so neither they nor product managers actually care about the data from native APIs.
> I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever shows up in a search result.
I don't know exactly what you are talking about here, but if I wanted to find a restaurant that is local I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser and then it searches google for 'Miguels' automatically and it know's my location so the first result is going to be their website and phone number and I can load the website for the menu or just call if I know what my family wants.
However even then, I'd rather have an app for them where I can enter in the items I want to order. I've noticed apps tend to be more responsive. Maybe it's just the coding paradigm that the applications tend to load all of the content already and the actions I take in the app are just changing what is displayed, but on a website they make every 'action' trigger an API call that requires a response before it moves on to the next page? This makes a big difference when my connection isn't great.
I also find it easier to swap between active apps instead of between tabs of a browser. If I want to check on the status of the order or whatnot, it's easier to swap to the app and have that refresh then it is to click the 'tab' button of the browser and find the correct tab the order was placed in.
This is pretty much what I meant. Even if the browser is what comes up, the fact is the user isn't interacting with the browser as a browser. They're interacting with their phone through an app (voice => search). They don't understand website URLs, or what search engines are doing. That makes it harder for them to return (engagement metrics!) than tapping the icon on their phone that opens up directly to the app.
It's also why so many websites try to offer push notifications or, back when it seemed like Apple wouldn't cripple it, the "add to home screen" or whatever CTA was that would set the website as an icon. Anything that gives the user a fast path back to engaging without having to deal with interacting with the browser itself is what PMs and marketing want.
I recently took a trip to Hawaii, particularly Maui. I've never been before, but I hit the weather lottery and got to experience the Kona low system that raked the island with copious rain. Anyway... What I found, in the areas that we were staying, was that there were a lot of food trucks that looked to have great coffee, poke, food in general. But with the weather it was unclear if the food truck was 1) accessible 2) open due to other weather issues.
What I found was that none of these food trucks (and even some relatively nice restaurants) had operational web pages. One had a domain but, for some apparent reason, they posted the menu to <some-random-name>.azurewebsites.net. And that page just... Didn't work. The rest got even worse. Most had listings on Google Maps, but the hours and availability did not reflect reality. We went to a coffee food truck that wasn't there, even though the day before they had commented on a review. Then we had others that had a link to an Instagram page of which some claimed to house their "current" hours and location, yet we tried going to two of them and both weren't open.
It's 2026. If you have your business on Google Maps you should be able to update hours and availability quickly. But beyond that it costs almost nothing to host a simple availability page on a representative domain. And even if you don't want to deal with the responsibility of a domain, there are multitudes of other options. Now, I'm guessing that this isn't the norm for most of these vendors, at least I hope. But we weren't there during the worst of the rain, we hit the second low that went through in our timing. So while it was a significant amount of rain and some of the more treacherous switchback roads were closed - I'm talking about food trucks that were off of very accessible main roads & highways. My SO reached out via IG to about a half dozen vendors and only one responded 2 days later.
Clearly tech and simple services like availability and location that is easy to update is not accessible (or known) for these types of businesses. But it definitely does not require an app (nor should it). Having these simple "status" sites would have made the friction the weather caused significantly less than what we experienced. I don't want an app when I'm trying to find out if a restaurant is open. I, personally, don't find apps any more responsive. In many cases a lot of web sites are littered with far too many components that are not required. I've been doing a lot with Datastar and FastAPI recently and some of the tools I've thrown together (that handle hundreds of MB of data in-browser) load instantly and are blazing fast. So much so that I've been asked how I "did that". It's amazing how fast a web app can be when it's not pulling data from 27 different sources and loading who knows what for JS.
Exactly what big businesses do, and governments think what businesses do is good practice. Fore everyone to use an app.
The UK's Companies House (required for anyone who is a director or has a shareholding of more than 15% etc.) requires a Onegov ID now. They offer a web version with a scan of a photo ID (passport or driving license). I tried it. I thought one of those would work. Apparently the web version needs to ask security questions (reasonable, as the app used NFC to read your passport) but despite the vast amount of information the government has on me (to issue those IDs, to collect taxes, etc) it cannot do that, so i had to either use the app or go in person to a post office in a different town.
Similarly I got an email from Occado saying that if I used the app I could change orders without checking out again. If I do it on the website i have to checkout again. Why?
> there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts
The flip side is there are (presumably) real people downloading these apps. Maybe it’s a kid interested in a career in the FBI, or the family of someone who works there. Idk. (I thought it would contain a secure tip line or something, but the app seems to be a social-media front end first.)
I am willing to entertain that there is a legitimate reason for an app to exist without conceding that it should be a pile of trash.
I've been thinking about this for a bit and there are a variety of reasons why it can be appealing for PMs to push for apps over webpages:
- No search competition, when you search on duckduckgo or google for the page a competitor can bid to show up, won't happen with an app.
- Notifications, this is a big one. We live in the attention economy and apps are more likely to slide into push notifications - with ads - than webpages.
- Some users have a mental model that more easily maps to "this app is my go to for this task" and struggle with webpages. That's a psychological and incentive issue. Apple support PWAs but just barely and don't like them because they don't partake in the 100 billion dollar revenue 30% payment processing extortion.
- More intrusive access and "better" targeted advertisement.
- Once an icon is on the home screen somewhere, chances are some users are going to use it because they notice the icon and would not have done so if it were just a tab inside the browser. The attention economy strikes again.
- Companies _love_ to build a relationship with customers. It's usually a very one sided and jealous relationship where getting the user to install an app is perceived as a step in that direction.
- Users are more willing to create accounts for apps than webpages (citation needed, this is just a gut feeling)
- On mainstream iOS and Android it's much harder to block ads in apps than it is in the browser.
I'm sure there are other reasons, but those alone explain why we see them so often.
Not sure if this is still a thing, but some apps used to embed libraries very much tracking everything you do on the phone, including your live location and that was then sold to third parties.
The APIs in question are client-side iOS and Android APIs. Most of these apps are just WebViews wrapped in spyware, which is the point. It doesn't matter that most of the content is static or already uses browser-native APIs for functionality like forms, gating access to this information behind a surveilance device is the point.
You will of course need a couple additional threat intel feeds because what is provided via the browser itself isn't enough, but third party data vendors along with threat intel vendors are fairly cost effective.
I've seen a couple actual live demos of deanonymization a couple years ago - it's a capability that has existed in the Offensive Security space for a couple years now. And the company I'm alluding to is already live in Japan and Israel.
Relatedly, I just registered for PACER to download court documents. It's pretty shocking that to get public legal documents the US Federal Court system requires full name, birthdate, address, phone, email, credit card info... and I THINK (it's past the initial registration page so can't confirm 100%) also mother's maiden name and 2 common security questions. Just a treasure-trove of PII if it ever falls into the wrong hands. (What's esp frustrating is even after going through this, I had to call a number and wait on hold for 1 hour to activate the account.)
It requires SSN or EIN -- almost all situations where you pay the government or they pay you require that as part of a law about enforcing federal debt collection.
Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations? I find this site incredibly difficult to read with things re-playing as you scroll up and down and the articles I've read from here are often light on details. The graphics seem very AI-generated (overlapping text and other little issues) which makes me think the whole thing is from an LLM.
While this post does have some interesting information, I have to wade through distracting animations that seem "off" which makes me questions all of it.
> Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations?
I don't think so. It's more likely that they're upvoted as a signal-boost; convene here to talk about bad government tech.
Some submissions are less about the subject matter than they are about providing a space to talk about only the subject in general. I've found this to be the case when the content is AI-generated.
That may be true in some cases, but I disagree about that in this case. TFA links to numerous sources for it's data (e.g. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/723186/ for the White House app, and AFAICT exodus privacy is a legit service), and discussions around government applications that are loaded with surveillance tech (and in many cases it seems like the apps' primary, and sometimes only, purpose is data harvesting) seem very on-topic for HN.
Also, FWIW, while I found the layout of the top section of the article to be weird, the actual text body and linked sources were easy to read for me.
I was referring to the graphics/animations that the GP comment mentioned. I was more confident that those were AI-generated than the actual text. Upon further scrutiny I'm having second thoughts.
There are multiple cases of inconsistencies between certain claims and the sources that they linked to:
> The acting IRS Commissioner, Melanie Krause, resigned in protest.
> DHS's own internal documents admit Mobile Fortify can be used to amass biographical information of "individuals regardless of citizenship or immigration status", and CBP confirmed it will "retain all photographs" including those of U.S. citizens, for 15 years.
> ICE Homeland Security Investigations signed a $9.2 million contract with Clearview AI in September 2025, giving agents access to over 50 billion facial images scraped from the internet.
If I really wanted to force the claim that the body text is AI-generated (or assisted) then I'd guess that the LLM (likely Claude) counted the "dangerous" icon from its appearance in "The icon [Red exclamation mark] indicates a 'Dangerous' or 'Special' level according to Google's protection levels."
> And the whole CBP ecosystem, from CBP One to CBP Home to Mobile Passport Control, feeds data into a network that retains your faceprints for up to 75 years and shares it across DHS, ICE, and the FBI.
This makes it appear that there are separate apps running concurrently, namely CBP One and CBP Home. They aren't. From the linked source, "CBP One is no longer available". It was replaced with CBP Home. The source does not mention Mobile Passport Control.: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/cbp-on...
> ...discussions around government applications that are loaded with surveillance tech (and in many cases it seems like the apps' primary, and sometimes only, purpose is data harvesting) seem very on-topic for HN.
Which is exactly why I said: "Some submissions are less about the subject matter than they are about providing a space to talk about only the subject in general."
The article in its entirety reads more like a desperate attempt at spinning the recent release of the "White House app" into a story about state surveillance. The problem is that it doesn't have a cogent conclusion or point to make except for a "Surveillance Data Pipeline" graphic that depicts ICE as the central destination for all of this data and the following:
> The federal government publishes content available through standard web protocols and RSS feeds, then wraps that content in applications that demand access to your location, biometrics, storage, contacts, and device identity. They embed advertising trackers in FBI apps. They sell the line that you need their app to receive their propaganda while the app quietly collects data that flows into the same surveillance pipeline feeding ICE raids and warrantless location tracking. Every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page, and they know that. The app exists because a web page can't read your fingerprint, track your GPS in the background, or inventory the other accounts on your device.
>
> You don't need their app. You don't need their permission to access public information. You already have a browser, an RSS reader, and the ability to decide for yourself what runs on your own hardware. Use them.
What is the link between the two? Who is the "You" being addressed here? We have apps that are apparently used only by ICE, apps meant for foreign travelers into the US, apps only someone's conservative/veteran grandfather would be caught using—these are disparate demographics to me.
If my initial impression to all of this information was "So what?" how would this article convince me that it's actually meaningful? Submissions like this aren't about discussing anything novel or critical about the subject matter (with the exception of the Huawei thing which is a missed opportunity from an editorial point of view). They are signal boosts to talk about bad government and technology in general.
I've spent enough of my morning trying to make actual sense of this story, that's not to say that it's not informative (albeit unsurprising), but the quality of the writing irrespective of whether its "readable" makes me question if the submission was popular because of its substance or because it's supposed to be a proxy for r/politics.
These posts get upvoted because the content itself is big news (government apps having insane amounts of spyware is, imo, something worth discussing.) I think if the frontend was just plain HTML/CSS, it would still get a comparable number of upvotes.
You could not pay me to use any of these apps. All of my own devices run some form of Linux (Debian for servers, Arch for desktop/laptop, GrapheneOS on phone). I generally refuse to use non-free software, the main exception being Steam on a dedicated gaming rig.
I really don't understand why everything has to be an "app." My phone only has a handful of apps, including two web browsers, through which other things are accessed. No app gets access to location, sensors, the camera, or the microphone.
Apps obviously gather data. In fact, on common phone operating systems, they tend to have access to an insane amount of information, including what other apps are used, hardware identifiers, information related to Google/Apple accounts and more.
As for things "requiring" apps, I am happy to do without those. If I cannot access something through a website on a device under my control, I will not use it. No convenience is worth more than my freedom and privacy.
The inconvenience is considerable. In the last few days I had the choice of use the app or drive 20 mins each way plus park, walk and possibly queue. Required (UK) government ID verification. The issued my new passport without that!
It is often more costly to not use an app, not just inconvenient. My daughter had to use the bus company app to get (much cheaper) monthly ticker to get to school.
I use few apps, keep location turned off, do not use wallet, etc. but there is going to be more and more pressure to use apps.
> In the last few days I had the choice of use the app or drive 20 mins each way plus park, walk and possibly queue.
It's rather shocking that this government service, whatever it may be, isn't accessible through a normal browser. Still, I would rather spend an hour driving somewhere than run spyware on my phone, at least if this is a one-time event. If I somehow faced an insurmountable inconvenience however, I would probably cave in and purchase a cheap Android phone only for these tasks.
Most of this is bad, but I think it's reasonable for the FEMA app, whose purpose is to help you get to the nearest shelters, to have access to your location.
The best solution is to have a text box that asks for a ZIP code, and every important site has one. It covers all the above cases but also includes the ability to help others in a disaster zone.
Several years ago a hurricane passed through my elderly parent's hometown. There wasn't enough available cell availability to get internet access, but they could make SMS text messages. I was their lifeline getting them info on where the power outages were, which gas stations had gas, when restaurants and grocery stores reopened. If all that information was location-locked to where I was (thousands of miles away), it would have useless.
Complaining about Smartlink is a bit hypocritical as it's the smartphone equivalent of an ankle tracker. The opportunity cost for the user is incarceration.
I put most of my apps into freezer (Realme phone) so they run only in foreground. Apparently my mobile operator uses their app to prevent sharing my mobile into a Wifi hotspot, my food delivery app pretended to be Amazon having an issue with a package etc.
Sheesh... I should not have downloaded the White House app yesterday just to see how ludicrous it was. I just deleted it, though I'm sure a lot of my data has already been exfiltrated. Doesn't excessive tracking like this violate the App Store + Google Play's ToS?
Ahhhh the USA, we can do anything, but others cannot!
The duality of the Statunitians politician.
Folks kept saying Apple protect your data and what not, now folks have their entire phone scanned by Apple unless they prove they are adults by sending personal documents which are being breached left and right.
> regardless of election outcome, the next government is highly unlikely to roll this back
Well yes, it’s not a high priority. I’m not going to bring it up with my electeds. Are you? If everyone who thinks this is a huge deal is too lazy and nihilistic to do anything about it, it won’t be prioritized.
As long as it isn't mandatory like the Russian Max app, I wouldn't worry. The only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent).
> only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent)
There are plenty of reasons to dislike it. The money spent to develp it. The attention spent to maintain it. The abuse of users' goodwill. Dilution of the FBI's brand with a circa 2008. None of these are good. None of them are, frankly, issues I'm going to personally engage on.
they hire one day shell companies that give them a huge chunk of the money back illegally, then turn around and hire a cheap ad agency specialized in churning hotsites and conference apps.
it's literary the same playbook of any developing country when some obviously corrupt group is elected promising to cut government spending
So no, thank you USA. I'm not going to visit you. I have all I need in this our European "socialism" as many Americans like to call it. I'm not assumed to be a criminal, and governments aren't building databases of all my steps and activities, and I have a great healthcare.
There is currently an attempt going on by several governments to crack down harder against the people. While before it was "only", say, California and their age-sniffing laws infiltrating and tainting Linux - thus declaring war against the people, as revealed by Meta acting as primary lobbyist here - today I read that now that age-sniffing was also approved in some european countries (in one EU country the parents are required to install a sniffing app and thus verify the age of the kids; I think it was in Greece. I'd never help any government act as fascist sniffing proxy trying to control and monitor by kids, that is an act of betrayal of such a government), their next line of attack is against VPN. Suddenly the picture shifts, because if VPNs are targeted, how does finding an excuse such as "but but but think about the kids", make any sense? That is very clearly governments becoming increasingly fascist. Add a few lobbyists here and there who benefit financially from this and now we suddenly understand how democracies are undermined. See also:
The recent spate of state-level age verification laws, while stupid, are primarily designed to insulate Facebook from lawsuits and not actually crack down on people. You can comply with them by just having a date field and an API to get bucketed age ranges out of them. The reason why they seem like a concerted crackdown is that Facebook can pay people to go to literally every legislature and bug them up and down[0] until they pass a law to make OS vendors provide age buckets.
The real shit is happening parallel to the actual legislation. Companies that need to comply with, say, the extremely onerous UK Online Services Act, are forcing everyone to use data-heavy verification paths like facial recognition age estimation or ID scanning. Newgrounds just used your account age or a credit card.
A core property of fascism is that, unlike other forms of tyranny, it is specifically a public-private joint venture. The government uses corporations to bypass its own constitutional restrictions, and those corporations then agree to follow rules that don't actually exist, specifically so that those corporations can shut down all their competition and form para-governments that supercede the democratically responsive bits. This has actually been going on for a while, but it's only now that the people are actually noticing it.
[0] Inspired by Louis Rossmann's efforts to get R2R bills passed, I've started doing amateur lobbying for the Rio Grande Plan. It's surprisingly easy, but you will almost certainly have to take off from work or sacrifice many a lunch hour to be able to actually get to talk to people.
Poe's Law is in effect when the thread is a hair away from getting political. I thought it was obvious that the commenter is joking based on the oblivious tone, and because this is HN.
I’m surprised to see no comments on this yet:
[The White House app] ships with 3 embedded trackers including Huawei Mobile Services Core (yes, the Chinese company the US government sanctioned, shipping tracking infrastructure inside the sitting president's official app)
The executive branch has decided this company is so dangerous I can’t buy a monitor made by them - but it’s embedding its SDK in its official app?!
I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there - it was just added by whatever contractor built the app, but that’s arguably even worse.
And I have absolutely no doubt that if it was discovered in a political opponent’s app, and the administration wanted to harm them, there would be no compunction about using that fact against them.
> I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there
Assuming incompetence gives the administration a cover to get away with anything. I'm not quite sure they're as stupid as they all act. Someone is surely using the facade of incompetence to rot things from the inside out.
I read a comment on Reddit that changed my perspective on 90% of recent political commentary:
“Y'all are mad about the dog whistle but you forgot about the dog”
Dogs bite so I'll assume most people want to forget.
The term for this is weaponised incompetence.
Incompetence is the forte of this administration.
Followed closely by malice
Recycling an old post:
> We had the first 4+ years to learn that "malice or incompetence" is not the right question. There's been more than enough pathological input to show it becomes a denial-of-service attack on observers.
> The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.
One might also view it as a kind politically-flavored nerd-sniping. [0] Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
[0] https://xkcd.com/356/
Malicious incompetence. The inbred kissing cousin of malicious compliance.
IMHO incompetent malice is as much likely.
The current administration has created a narrative that everything they do is good, while anything their opponents do is bad. Facts or meaning do not matter any more. I honestly don't understand how the USA has become this. This won't end well.
Tbf living throughout the past 20 years never have I ever get this feeling that the US is gonna "end well"
It'll end well, just not for the working class, if such a thing still exists at that time
The USA became this through Trump being elected.
It started with Richard Nixon and his cynical manoevering.
It was reinforced with Ronald Reagan. Remember how he spun the Iranian revolution and the bad economy on his opposition? Remember how he rode the Moral Majority wave?
It was taken up a notch by G. W. Bush and his band of trigger-happy self-serving country club elitists.
No one in between those points tried to roll back the progress. They're just as guilty. It's been a monotonic increasing function towards the current apex (nadir?).
Fear what comes next. If there is a next.
Yeah the democrats are at fault here too. Clinton had eight years to rollback any damage from Nixon and Reagan. Obama had eight years to rollback any damage from them + Bush. Biden had four years to rollback any damage from them + Trump.
One could argue that the courts or congress/senate may not have been favorable during their time, but that wasn't true during the entire combined 20 years they had.
(siddnote - I think "nadir" was the answer to a crossword clue I was stumped on. I'd never heard it before that. And I thought I'd never hear it again. Interesting coincidence!)
I think Trump being elected is a result of anti-thought, feudalism-seeking part of society coming to power, not a cause. Enough people were fed up with thinking elites stealing from them, so they elected thought-averse elites to steal from them because they naively thought that the stealing is because of intelligence.
What? Trump is just a symptom. The US didn't suddenly become what it is now because of a vote. Like it or not (and I certainly don't), the people voted for this, twice. Whether they voted for it because they actually wanted it vs they voted for it because politicians convinced them they wanted it, it is what we wanted.
I don't deny that Republicans existed before Trump, but Trump being elected certainly fast-tracked this skyrocketing fascist disaster.
Sure, absolutely. But again, the people voted for fascism. At his pre-election rallies he'd say shit like "I'm gonna be a dictator for a day!" and get cheers.
An America that didn't like fascism would have never even let this man win the primary.
I think it's like that old saying about bankruptcy - it happens very slowly, then all at once
The rise of right-wing propaganda mass media has been simmering brains for 3 decades in a populist, grievance and resentment stew and positioned things perfectly for right-wing propaganda to explode in the internet age - once social media came around, it was a renaissance for the paranoid-style radical right-wing demagogues, and they exploded in numbers and reach. In turn, that tilled the soil for a Trump figure to come along to disrupt things.
Trump basically took all the recurring themes of grievance from right-wing media to the extreme to turbo-charge the anxiety and fear of the right, including most things that were generally considered wrong for politicians to say/do.
It's almost hard to remember the before-times, but Trump was the first modern presidential ticket that outright attacks the media (calling them the enemy of the people, fake news, etc) to de-legitimize them - it used to be a point of pride in this country that politicians didn't do stuff like this, because it's a feature of authoritarian regimes, not democracies. Right-wing audiences were very used to hearing that sort of thing though, because it was a common feature of the right-wing propaganda media they had been boiling in for years.
When I was in high school (or maybe even junior high), I remember learning the bill of rights and the freedom of speech and press and assembly. Our curricula and case studies always focused on freedom of speech because I guess it was absurd to think that the govt would ever attack the press. That was a thing "other" countries did.
I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too, even if it is stupid speech. But attacking the press is insane.
>I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too
That just means it’s legally permissible, not reasonable, respectable, or conscionable. Do not look past the things he says.
No I mean the actual stupid shit he says, not the stupid policies he enacts. Like randomly getting up during a cabinet meeting to admire a ballroom that doesn't exist yet. That's stupid but harmless.
I would argue that standing to look at a pile of rubble, where there are disputes paying the contractors hired to work on the project, no approval or consultation with either the public or public infrastructure preservation agencies was performed is not harmless.
Or someone who is in charge of a very powerful economy and military who cannot control the comments that they utter, or have the ability to stay focused during a cabinet meeting, but wander off to admire the "emperors new clothes" is also not harmless.
It would be one thing if he was just some random elderly person suffering from dementia, rambling on - yeah, that's generally harmless. But this? This is not harmless.
The apps have nothing to do with the current administration. All these permissions were already in place before the current administration. It’s easy to verify this by looking at previous versions of the apps. HN has created a narrative that everything the current administration does is bad.
> HN has created a narrative that everything the current administration does is bad.
In all fairness, that narrative has been helped quite a bit by the current administration!
No. That narrative is driven by mass media, which shapes the perception of opinions posted on HN.
Ah.. I'm glad it's just a narrative then, and that there are in fact just as many good things to report and that America is not rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.
Fox news, the biggest mass media in US by far, doesn't seem to drive this narrative
Fox News is not popular on HN.
When a coworker leaves the company and I inherit their work, I am given a little bit of time to acclimate and understand the projects they were working on.
If it turns out a secret was exposed in production, or we're exposing PII in logs, or storing CCs or passwords in plain text, there's a certain time frame in which the blame shifts from my coworker for introducing it, to me for not catching it.
That time frame is a lot less than one year.
So where was that outrage before the current administration? The comments in this submission mostly blame the administration. I verified older versions of the apps and found that the wide permissions were there prior to Trump, and now suddenly it’s "hey, but he did not fix it!" This is hilarious, don't you think?
"but Biden didn't fix it" isn't the defense you think it is.
Is there a double standard? Yes. This administration earned it through their, willful or not, incompetence and malice.
Where in my comments did I say “but Biden didn't fix it”? What I say is the majority of commenters are wrong blaming the administration.
> I verified older versions of the apps and found that the wide permissions were there prior to Trump
This pretty much insinuates Biden (and Trump v1, and Obama, and Bush) didn't fix it.
And the commenter aren't wrong when they blame the administration. They wouldn't be wrong to blame previous administrations either. But the previous administrations aren't in power right now.
> And the commenter aren't wrong when they blame the administration. They wouldn't be wrong to blame previous administrations either. But the previous administrations aren't in power right now
They are wrong. The current administration did not make a call to widen the permissions or make it intentionally overly broad.
> This pretty much insinuates Biden (and Trump v1, and Obama, and Bush) didn't fix it.
Why do you believe the president is responsible? Could be just a lazy contractor.
> The current administration did not make a call to widen the permissions or make it intentionally overly broad.
Maybe not. But are they not responsible for an app that literally markets itself as the official federal govt app? If Meta sold FB to me am I not responsible for the algorithms that I now own, that perpetuates misinformation?
> Why do you believe the president is responsible? Could be just a lazy contractor.
Obviously the president is not deploying code. But doesn't mean the president gets a free pass. If I did shitty work for my employer and deployed a rootkit to production, I get fired but my employer is still responsible. If they want to be absolved of responsibility, they can always unpublish it while they get stuff fixed and acknowledge the issue.
“The White House” app seems to be new, first published three days ago.
It’s easy to verify this by looking at the App Store listing for the app. And reading news coverage.
Given that all other apps follow the same pattern, I insist that it has nothing to do with any sitting administration.
To be fair that's the exact narrative European media seems to draw. Not sure how you could see anything else in this shitshow
As an European, the political situation in US has never seemed reasonable to me, and been on a mostly downhill slope for a long time. It has certainly gotten way way worse with the current administration though.
My relatives in Malaysia say it went from a slight downhill slope to a cliff and now we're in free fall.
The bottom has to be somewhere...
As I've said, facts or meaning no longer matter. There are numerous cases where Trump blamed Democrats for something he did during his first term or took credit for something positive that the Biden administration did. HN does not create a narrative, people are free to post their opinions here.
> The executive branch has decided this company is so dangerous I can’t buy a monitor made by them
Huawei was sanctioned because they did business with a sanctioned country
That’s true - this was the reason for the original action in 2019 - but is not the whole story. The current rationale depends mostly on national security concerns: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47012
…but it also doesn’t really matter here. Either they were sanctioned for a good reason and the Executive Branch is doing business with them anyway, or they were sanctioned for a bad reason and I’m not allowed to do business with them even though the Executive Branch does.
It’s the hypocrisy I’m pointing out.
>This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number.
when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point.
(the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")
I remember when I was young seeing videos of North Korea, of audiences always giving rapt standing ovations and many people fake fainting, and I always thought "How dumb and stupid does everyone have to be to carry on this absurd, ridiculous charade."
I don't wonder anymore.
At least there you might be asked to stand in front of a canon if you don’t kiss ass hard enough.
Imagine telling those North Koreans that there are millions of people in the US that do it all for free.
Hell, some will even pay extra for access to the highest levels of ass kissing.
I remember the top tech bros sitting at white house dinner for some serious asskissing, followed by paying zillions for the new golden extension.
Wow such integrity, much win.
I have no doubt in my mind that, more than once, Kim Jong Un has found himself watching TV going "come on, this guy is fucking ridiculous"
They probably play StarCraft together and shit talk each other the whole time.
"lol, I no longer the craziest leader in the world"
trump saw the meme "north korea is best korea" and said Hold my strawberry mcMilkshake!
Not that dumb and stupid. You don't want to be the guy NOT frantically scribbling the Dear Leader's every word into your notebook.
The fake fainting might be an easy get out of having to cheer and bounce for ages.
They've pivoted to good news. It's more absurd.
https://theonion.com/breaking-all-of-world-s-problems-solved...
It is still bad news. The last sentence refers to things working out for everyone except the reader:
"Sources went on to report that, due a minor oversight that also occurred as you slumbered, your student loans must still be repaid in full and are now subject to a highly predatory ballooning interest rate."
Oh, when I read it it says things are going great for everyone but you.
How can people see the propaganda that happens in, say, North Korea, but fail to see what is happening in their own country?
It boggles. It truly does.
A simple answer is that they see neither.
What they think they see is actually a short snapshot of North Korean life with a red circle, a red arrow and a red caption text that says "North Korean propaganda here!!! -->", carefully drawn by their local propaganda.
Sanity check: I present you a country X, whose language you don't speak, and whose news you don't read day to day. I show you their politician saying something. Can you tell if that was propaganda? Substitute X from "North Korea" to a country you know nothing about and see how the answer changes.
Seems reasonable but it's not as if no one speaks Korean outside North Korea to verify what's being said.
People don't believe native speakers of their own language when they're told things that conflict with their political world view. Why would they trust someone who says "that's not an accurate translation" if that collides with their political opinions?
For any outsider telling me about North Korea, including South Koreans, I can't tell if I've been pranked with e.g. the South Korean version of The Onion, let alone something milder like I'm being told about this by someone who takes their version Breitbart more seriously than their version of The Wall Street Journal.
A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking.
The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
"What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.
"Exactly," the Russian replies.
This is the best joke I've heard in a long time
The version I know is a little different: A Russian visits America and meets an American at a bar and they get talking about life in Russia. "How is the propaganda?" says the American. "It's everywhere, but it's easy to ignore it" says the Russian. "Yours is much better." "But we don't have propaganda here" says the American. "Exactly" says the Russian.
idk how a person can be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag every morning and not think that's some North Korean style shit.
When I was in kindergarten, I refused to do the pledge one day. My teacher was livid. "Are you American or not?"
Being 5, I didn't know the difference between ethnicity and nationality (I'm Asian but I was born here and didn't know any life outside of America). So I was afraid that my teacher would not let me be American anymore if I didn't say the pledge. So I said it and never refused to say it in school again.
It wasn't til I was well into my adulthood that I realize how absurd that situation sounds.
So you were actually pledging under duress. Contracts and statements made under duress are usually treated as null and void, so you have that going for you.
Still highly unethical of that teacher
I mean I don't think anything we do or say as a 5 year old is considered binding, otherwise I'm on the hook for a lot of nonsense :)
Have you considered, however, how that event shaped your developing and impressionable subconscious and possibly influenced your future behavior as an adult?
It's not something I fully understood as a child. I didn't even fully grasp the concept of "nationality" so when she asked if I was American I just said yes because I didn't know what it meant. I just understood that not saluting meant teacher mad, just like not cleaning up my toys in the classroom meant teacher mad.
... or realize that they are not morally superior to china as long as they don't abolish the death penalty.
I mean if you agree with it, it’s not propaganda. There are lots of kinds of propaganda you probably agree with like “70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck” and stuff like that. It’s just that the stuff you don’t like is propaganda.
> I mean if you agree with it, it’s not propaganda
A very workable definition of "propaganda" might be "an idea crafted specifically so that you will think it was your idea in the first place"
That's why "agreeing" with propaganda is not the correct verb.
You either believe propaganda or you don't. This has nothing to do with reason or logic.
Sure, and this 70% of Americans bullshit is propaganda by that measure. It is frequently trotted out on HN and is met with enthusiastic belief despite being total ass pull. There are US Senators pushing this propaganda and people enthusiastically agreeing.
Uh, what? People don't "agree" with stats. They either believe it at face value, or they fact check the stats and find, oh, this is actually true but the study was limited, or they find that it is indeed just bullshit. No agreement necessary.
Politicians taking advantage of the fact that their constituents will not fact check them is propaganda 101.
Anybody can live paycheck to paycheck if they want to - no matter how much you earn you can spend it all.
So the "statistic" or the saying has no relevance for anything.
My comment has nothing to do with the actual statistic of living paycheck-to-paycheck. OP could have used a completely different (made up or not) statistic. Of course the statistic will change when you change the definition.
What percentage of Americans do you think live paycheck to paycheck?
Well, the annual death rate is roughly 1 in every 100 and paychecks are every 2 weeks, the death rate every 2 weeks is 4 bps. So 99.96% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
But otherwise I think Matt Darling has a piece on Slow Boring that should help inform you as to the state of the US.
The phrase "live paycheck to paycheck" means "To spend all that one earns without saving anything", not the literal interpretation of "failing to die between paychecks" that you seem to be using here.
(IIRC, 60-70% is based on surveys, that percentage of people feel they're living like that, but actual stats are much lower, like 25% or so, but it's important to make sure the same thing is being discussed when having conversations like this).
No, that 70% is from SaaS content marketing lol. Go read the Slow Boring. It’s written by Democratic Party partisans so you know you’ll believe it.
> It’s written by Democratic Party partisans
In a marvelous twist of irony, the commenter unwittingly and perfectly exemplified how easily it is to get people talking as if they were good little disciples of Goebbels. But don't worry: he's here to make us all woke, or red pilled or whatever specific propaganda term the party has commanded during this election cycle
1. a. Why do you think I'd believe something written by Democratic Party partisans?
b. Partisans? https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/slow-boring-bias-and-credibil...
2.
a. LendingClub: "According to a Reality Check: Paycheck to Paycheck survey conducted by LendingClub and PYMNTS, 60% of employed U.S. adults, including more than four in 10 high-income earners, are living one paycheck to the next with little to no financial cushion.": https://www.lendingclub.com/resource-center/personal-finance...
b. LendingTree: ""Americans Rely on Credit Cards to Make Ends Meet As 64% Admit to Living Paycheck to Paycheck": https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/paycheck-to-p...
c. PYMNTS: "61%: Share of the U.S. population living paycheck to paycheck as of December 2021 // 54%: Portion of baby boomers and seniors who live paycheck to paycheck": https://www.pymnts.com/study/reality-check-paycheck-to-paych...
d. PNC Bank/The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.: "67% of U.S. workers surveyed say they are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s up from 63% last year." page 6: https://www.pnc.com/content/dam/pnc-com/pdf/corporateandinst...
e. ADP Research: "Nearly two out of three workers say they’re living paycheck to paycheck.": https://www.adpresearch.com/repetitive-task-workers-financia...
f. All those are neutral. If you want, I could also find slight D-leaning: CNBC / SurveyMonkey: "more than half of Americans (61%) consider themselves to be “living paycheck to paycheck,” up from 58% in March of this year": https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/07/majority-of-americans-feelin...
g. As previously mentioned, 60-70 is a vibes check, asking people how they feel. Those same vibes checks from R-leaning sources do much the same, they just don't report it with the same phrasing. Which is fine so long as everyone's on the same page about what words mean, but even with the stricter phrasing that R reporters prefer for "paycheck to paycheck", it's not even close to the same meaning you were using which comes across as being needlessly literal-minded for the sake of rhetoric rather than situational awareness.
It looks very different from the outside than it does from the inside. We are all subject to this.
Does it though? I don't see Canadian or Swiss or Slovak propaganda regularly reminding us that their country's leader is the "greatest ever."
Mark Carney's famous speech at Davos was a breath of fresh air compared with anything ever spewed by the deranged current president of the USA. I am so glad I live in the best country in the world with him as prime minister and that we have no propaganda here in Canada. We will do so much better when we enter trade agreement negotiations with that degenerate loser south of the border in the next few months. That guy can't even ties his own shoes because of his cankles, but Mark Carney can tie not only his own shoes but he always wears sensible socks too.
You may have missed propaganda because you missed the propaganda.
I think you will enjoy this: https://youtube.com/shorts/k3nwW40sYkI
Because some nations are leader-oriented and some nations are system-oriented. Ask any European if they support the state system in their country. Or ask any muslim if their branch of Islam is the best.
Almost all countries in the world will have heavy handed propaganda that their way of organizing things are the best and most fair that could ever exist.
If you think NK an US look the same from the outside check your body temp. Source: am outside both.
I'm outside both and I'm not seeing a lot of difference. Main one is that one is threatening everyone with nukes, and the other one isn't making any threats I can understand because they're in Korean.
No. We aren’t all subject to this. MAGA isn’t even logically consistent. You don’t even need fact checking to spot the bullshit.
And miss me with the inevitable both sides response.
Weren't they all anti war a few months ago and anti pedo before that?
Not sure what you're talking about. We were always at war with Iran.
I'm pretty sure if you text anyone, they get your number (and name, via a reverse lookup.)
It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.
I think they are, and strongly.
The drive to achieve that level of success often comes from weaponized poor self esteem.
Well adjusted individuals just chill out after a few million and work on whatever is fun/important for them.
Only rarely does this also happen to be something that can take you from 10M to 1B. (and if it can it would take a lot of work you can't be bothered to do unless it's some core value like helping the poor beat malaria)
Trump saying recently that he hates hanging around successful people and prefers losers because he doesn't want to listen to other people's stories really speaks to the poor self esteem angle
“I always like to hang around with losers, actually, because it makes me feel better.”
“I hate guys that are very, very successful, and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people who like to listen to my success,” he added.
Whew. If ever the phrase "small dick energy" was appropriate...
(I have nothing useful to add, I'm just boggling).
"The drive to achieve that level of success often comes from weaponized poor self esteem."
This sounds like all of the cope I continue to hear about successful people. Very successful people MUST have something wrong with them...
You don't think someone who makes 10 million and then chills out to work on passion projects is very successful?
It's OK to be critical of billionaires.
Being critical about billionares is empirically supported. Trump wouldnt exist if not supported by other psychopaths and now he selects even more unethical bootlickers for offices and rewards equally deranged amigos.
Jazz9k just drank too much coolaid from billionare owned and election meddling twitter, i guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401368611_Psychopat...
https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-642-28036-8_128
> core value like helping the poor beat malaria)
Gates just doesn't want to be remembered for Windows. Much like Nobel didn't want to be remembered only for dynamite.
Well now he'll be remembered for associating with pedophiles, infidelity, and walking back things he allegedly stood for, like climate change, as soon as they become inconvenient or he stops caring or whatever.
It comes down to two things. One is the well documented issue of how, when you are that rich, you are treated differently, and how that will ultimately modify your behavior. The other is the prerequisites to get to the job. Chances are you aren't fully self-made, receiving no investment. From convincing investors, to having immense faith in a project that cannot be obviously good, as otherwise you'd be building what already exists, to the personality to handle the road upward.
This second effect happens in all kinds of places where you have to jumps througha lot of hoops to just get to get there. Every hoop discards candidates, and promotes different things. Sometimes in ways that make sure that nobody capable of attaining the job is fit to actually do it well. You can see the issue all over the place, once you track people's careers. Sometimes things that should be disqualifying for a role are actually requirements in practice.
> To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
> - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The people who would, shouldn't. The people who should, won't.
There's an old SF short where one of the people who won't gets forced to. Battery of psychological tests followed by "you're one of the rulers now, and you're going to hate every minute of it, but we enslave you so the rest of us have a peaceful, prosperous planet."
Wish I could remember the name/author.
Isaac Asimov had a story where one voter was selected by Multivac to pick the leader of the world.
Thanks. Franchise. Not that one...
- Own a monopoly - Inherit your fortune - Run a criminal enterprise
Using just these three filters alone, you encompass more than 99% of all billionaires in existence. The amount of billionaires who do not fit into these categories can barely occupy a family sized vehicle.
The criteria here suggesting that there is a specific sociopathic personality requirement to being a billionaire as each category can be argued as harmful to societies.
I've been thinking that you can divide businesses on two axes,
And mathematically, only businesses at the top of the graph are capable of generating a billion dollars. Hence, if you are looking to be a billionaire, the path lies either through a Ponzi scheme or through a monopoly. Both of them, in their most pure form, are illegal, and the challenge in the business model is to execute on them while staying just barely on the right side of the law.Which one is Minecraft?
I do not think it is the money that made them terrible. I know all sorts of terrible people that would do the exact same things. The only difference really is they do not have the money to execute on those ideas.
Money does not make you a good or bad person. It just makes you more of who you are already.
I specifically did not say money makes them mentally ill, but rather the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness.
> the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness
Do we have any actual evidence of this? I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, they just didn’t sell their piece of the closely-held business they started, and they spend their time skiing, reading, travelling and taking care of their friends and family.
>Do we have any actual evidence of this?
to be fair, the original comment by malfist started with "makes you wonder", so i dont think they are asserting this as fact.
>I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything,
some people would see this sentence as contradictory, and they would suggest that the thing those exorbitantly wealthy people are hoarding is money.
> they would suggest that the thing those exorbitantly wealthy people are hoarding is money
And I’d say they’re literally wrong. They may be hoarding capital. And yes, some wealthy people do hoard money per se. But outside the Epstein class there are lots of people we just don’t hear about because they aren’t on social media talking about how rich they are. Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
>They may be hoarding capital.
while this distinction may be important to you, i dont think it really changes anything about malfists question/point.
>Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
and cigarettes cause cancer. not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad (smoking, too).
(please note: i am not arguing for or against what you or malfist have said, just thought there was a little something lost in translation re: you asking for evidence after a conversation that started with "makes you wonder")
> i dont think it really changes anything about what malfist question/point
Of course it does. Turning capital into spendable or transferable wealth takes work. Plenty of rich people are just enjoying their lives in the same way retirees do.
> not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad
I’m saying the folks we tend to get upset about being rich at are also the rich who are prominently on social media. The problem isn’t that they’re rich. It’s that they’re on social media so much. I think there is a genuine argument to be made that even Elon Musk would have been a better-liked person, maybe even a better person, if he never got on Twitter.
> thought there was a little something lost in translation re: "makes you wonder"
Perhaps. And appreciate your clarifying for them. In 2026 I’m just sceptical of the “just asking questions” bit, particularly when it comes to cultural tropes. (And for what it’s worth, my query for a source was genuine. I’m always down to change my mind on a loosely-held belief.)
There's a hell of a difference between a multimillionare who has a successful business and a billionare.
The difference between a person who has a million dollars and a person who has a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.
> a hell of a difference between a multimillionare who has a successful business and a billionare
Yeah, I'm saying the ones worth hundreds of millions to low billions who aren't on social media are, in my personal experience, often fine people. The ones I don't like are the ones on social media, but that's also true of the folks worth a few thousand dollars.
Plenty of billionaires are assholes. The world's GDP is over $100 trillion. That's going to produce diversity among the rich.
And who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?
What does "hoard wealth" mean to you? A vault full of gold that they swim in?
Jeff Bezos's net worth is mostly in the form of server racks and amazon inventory.
Elon's net worth is mostly in the form of share certificates that are marked to market and contingent on delusional investors swallowing Elons own promises.
This is the peg that society is constantly snagging on. The billionaire class doesn't actually have much "hoarded" wealth. If we want to go after wealth that more classically fits the idea of "hoarded", i.e. cash and cash equivalents, then the middle/upper middle class is the golden goose (most people are surprised to learn they have almost twice the wealth billionaires have too, not a very clickable headline though...)
The idea that everyone gets a suburban house and premium healthcare if we can only pass legislation that taxes billionaires, is a delusion on par with Jesus coming down to battle the transsexuals.
The actual strain in the economy is between the upper middle class and the lower class. The senior developers and the shipping room clerks.
> who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt
I'm not absolving anyone. I'm saying I know good people who are also billiionaires who most people have never heard of. The billionaires I've heard of I tend to dislike. But I think the correlate is the fame, not the wealth.
> guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?
This is where the hoarding metaphor breaks down. If you build a company, is it hoarding to not sell your stake off to a private equity firm?
Because practically speaking, those are their choices. Hold it, manage it and live off the income. (They all donate most of their incomes, but that's neither here nor there. You can be a good person even if not philanthropic.) Or sell it to a private equity firm and then have a pot of money to stare at.
Of course the money doesn't make them terrible. Being terrible makes them money. Lots of money. There aren't really other ways of obtaining so much money, which is why if you see someone that has that amount, they should be viewed with suspicion.
Right? If I had enough money that I could make a serious dent in local or even global poverty without noticing the change in my lifestyle, and I just... chose not to, I have no idea how I could sleep at night.
Huge numbers (billions) of people have enough money to make massive changes to the lives of those less fortunate than them, but don't, and prefer instead to make incremental upgrades to their own lives. New rugs, more savings, first-class airline tickets, eating out a few more times a month, etc.
This is just human nature.
People who are at wealth level x tend to say, "I can't believe that people at wealth level x+1 aren't more generous!" all the while ignoring their own lack of desire to give generously to people at wealth levels x-1 and below.
Aaron Swartz had a good take on this - http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall
I remember wrestling with this in my therapist's office when Aaron died. I had known him tangentially - we hung out in the same IRC channels, and had several mutual friends in the Cambridge/Somerville techie crowd that he would hang out in person with.
As a college student and young adult I had always envied his fame, his intelligence, his money (post-Reddit acquisition), and the strength of his convictions. And yet, in that moment in early 2013, he was dead, and I was working a good job at Google (and this was 2013 Google, when it was still a nice place to work doing things that I could generally approve of). And he'd died doing the stuff that I wanted to do but had been too chickenshit to actually carry out.
I think that this illustrates why the world is the way it is. All the true altruists are dead, killed for their altruism. It is adaptive, in a survival sense, to think of yourself and your own survival and not worry too much about other people. Ironically, this is what my therapist was trying to get me to realize.
But I think this also goes back to the GP's point. When people at wealth level x give to people at level x-1, it doesn't raise the people at x-1 up to x. It brings the person at x down to x-1. There are more people at x-1 than x, after all; you could give everything you had away and mathematically, it would lower your net worth significantly more than it would raise theirs. And of course, it doesn't do a damn thing about the people at x+1. Why can't they donate instead, where their wealth would do an order of magnitude more good?
There actually do exist people who are like that: they would rather spread their wealth around the people at wealth level x-1, joining them at that level, than raise themselves up to x+1. I've met some; most poor people are far more generous than rich people are. That is why they are poor. But then, it doesn't solve the problem of inequality, they just disappear into the masses of people at level x-1.
There's also twitch viewers who love to give all their money to people at wealth level x + 10-100
Game theory is the most dangerous force in the universe.
RIP
I'm not talking about people with x+1, where X is a standard US middle-class amount of money. In that case, $20k or $100k or some amount that would make a tiny difference in the world is a huge amount of money to a middle-class family.
No, I'm talking about wealth level X*100. For them, the difference between $100M and $1B is basically no difference in the quality of life to that family. They'd have 1 fewer megayachts. They could give away $900M, and eliminate hunger forever in a large city or a small state. $100B is 100x that again, they could give away $99.9B, still have $100M, and solve poverty in most _countries_.
Or, if they don't want to, we institute a 90% wealth tax on everything over $10M, and solve it ourselves.
What you forget is, none of the x+100 people you are talking about would have ever become a x+100 person if they thought like you suggest they should. In german, we have a proverb: "Von den Reichen lernt man das sparen." (The rich teach you how to save money) And giving away huge sums without personal gain, is the contrary of saving.
We can also tell because anyone who can take the time to use a computer with internet to write a comment in well-formed English is already comparatively wealthy or connected enough to provide food and housing for dozens of people.
Dirt poor people in 3rd world countries have smartphones and internet access and write comments in well-formed English.
Safe to assume those downvoting you will not be donating their MacBooks and refrigerators.
I also think this could be a symptom of an economically unequal society (which creates a higher range of x), and is a big reason why it's important to fix it, on top of the extra money to the state.
So thats essentially communism right? Is human nature incompatible with communism or is capitalism incompatible with human nature?
Communism doesn't eliminate power relationships, it just papers them over with politics and bureaucracy instead of having them legible with prices and wages.
In the American golden age of capitalism from ~1950-1970, the top marginal tax rate was 90%, and so you didn't have CEOs get paid more than about 3x the median worker, because the government would get it all. Instead, they got perks. Private jets. Positions at the company for their kids. Debaucherous holiday parties. Casual sexual harassment of secretaries.
In Soviet communism, all production was centrally planned by government bureau run by party members. It was not uncommon for these bureaus to make mistakes, leading to severe shortages for the population. Nevertheless, these shortages never seemed to really hit the party members responsible for making the plans. Power has its perks.
And that's also why reforms attempting to reduce economic inequality need to focus on power rather than money. There have been a number of policies that do meaningfully raise standards of living for the poor: they're things like the 13th amendment to the (US) Constitution, the 1st amendment, the jury trial system, free markets, anti-monopoly statutes, bans on non-competes, etc. What they all have in common is that they preserve economic freedom and the power to make your own living against people who would seek to restrict that freedom and otherwise keep you in bondage.
Elon tweeted that he'd fund ending world hunger if someone presented him with an actual plan to do that. UNESCO did. Elon did not act.
can you verify that the UNESCO plan would have ended world hunger?
It was a 6.6 billion dollar plan to alleviate famine in 43 countries for one year, so, no.
On the other hand, it would have alleviated famine in 43 countries for one year and if your response to that is "but that's not ending world hunger and I will not do it", you really need a long hard look at yourself.
But then again, Musk is going to turn out to be one of the great mass killers of world history with his destruction of USAID. Why would he spoil that by helping some folks?
Also famines are political problems to start with. We have more then enough food. Getting it to people reliably is the issue - i.e. there's usually a plethora of other issues like an active war.
It also isn't an economically isolated enterprise: Ukrainian grain shipments traversing into Europe via Polish roads and not heading to Africa via their ports caused a bunch of price crashes which became political flashpoints.
Which is why UNESCO's plan focused on delivering the food, not buying it.
Why not grow it, where the hungry people are?
> Why not grow it, where the hungry people are?
I bet no-one has ever thought of that before. You should present that idea at the UN.
It was a serious question.
Not all areas are equally good at growing food. That can be because of climate, soil quality, war or simply population density requiring housing and industry.
Maybe it's too malthusian of a view but I think a big issue to contend with is that some people should not be as populated as they are and there's no push against it from either government or the dominant economic systems.
And yes that includes the controversial poor population hotspots of africa that have grown super rapidly beyond multiples of what the land can provide
But also just the same places like arizona with comparatively rich folk growing the urban desert sprawl
Is shipping food there the correct solution? For war, an ostensibly temporary condition, by all means ship the population food. But if an area is already overcrowded beyond what the land can sustain (due to climate, soil quality, or population density) then is it productive to further bolster the population? Seems a human catastrophe in the making, supporting population growth in an area where the land can not supply enough food.
The issue is that simply saying you're going to deliver food aid is elliding pretty much the entire problem. You cannot simply deliver food aid, because to do so you might have to fight and win an entire war against one or several insurgent groups or governments.
You could turn up reliably and distribute quite a lot of food, and yet at the end of the day find there's still a famine.
Right, which is why I never said I was going to simply deliver food aid like it just required trucks and gas. It's why UN World Food Program, an organization with actual experience, designed a plan to deliver and distribute food. Please explain why they are wrong.
They're not but it also won't end world hunger. Because world hunger is not being caused by accidental deficits in food availability: it's caused by serious local security threats and in many cases deliberate political action.
Trump has largely not had that kind of money. He’s had a _lot_ of money, many many times more than most, but by all accounts except his own, those numbers are much lower than he likes to brag about. Well, they were - there’s been a troubling amount of money going out of the federal government that isn’t well-accounted for under his reign.
He had the kind of money that can hire expensive projects on trust that payment in full will be rendered, but only kept his money by often not paying out.
As with all things Trump, even up to the new ballroom not having a front door despite the massive staircase, his wealth is more in appearance, and less in actual assets…or was. Of course, someday maybe we will know the true extent or shortfall of his bank accounts
Don’t forget the fairly naked corruption around his crypto coins too…
He may not have been that successful as a businessman, but his whole clan are monetising the Whitehouse.
I don’t get puzzled that the criminal doesn’t use his ill-gotten gains for pro-social causes. Why would a person ever use anti-social means to acquire funds for pro-social goods?[1]
This is not too disimilar from the case of the billionaire.
[1] Excepting some Galaxy Brain philosophies like Effective Altruism
If you had that amount of money you would also be a sociopath. It's a precondition.
Good news is that you would sleep fine at night. No matter how destructive your existence was, and how much of a net negative you were to the world, you would still think very highly of yourself.
Most don’t seem to think about morals or quality at all: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/introspection-andr...
Trump specifically seems to hew awfully close to the symptoms of a long-term cocaine user. The hard drift into self-congratulatory vanity parallels that of Charlie Sheen during a certain infamous interview, for example, and at least two people (Howard Dean and Carrie Fisher) identified him as having compulsive sniffing reminiscent of a cocaine habit during debates prior to his first election.
Remember that Trump is not a first-generation member of the upper class; as a nepo baby, he was born out of touch and has spent his whole life falling deeper into bizarre social bubbles and media silos that were tailored by his ancestors and peers to reassure them that they're doing the right thing. In theory plutarchs should be receiving world-class education from private tutors, but being arch-Conservatives by definition, these teachers are invariably out of date on mental health, and would be forbidden from teaching it even if they had modern material.
Because of this isolation the ultra-wealthy often have certain very uneducated traits around self-esteem—which can paradoxically seem like the result of poverty. They do not have access to DARE or Sesame Street to give them the confidence not to take drugs when pressured, they've never seen Mister Rogers, their biological parents were always off running a business empire, and they have no surrogate figures because their nannies probably get fired at the drop of a hat, even for defending the child's interests.
Ironically, American republicanism makes this worse; in a planned aristocracy, parents internalize the belief that their children deserve "the best" because they are meant to be "the best", but without that noble lie, there is no pressure to create a positive environment for the next generation of tyrant. To make matters worse, these families never start off with healthy values to begin with—which produces a founder effect of regressive masculinity that magnifies everything else I've just mentioned.
So, Hormozi boils it down to:
> The wealthiest people in the world have:
- A very big goal
- Insecurity: Massive fear of never being enough
- Impulse control to stay on goal
This excellent list, I expand with my Daddy Issues Billionaire Archetype, which we see in basically all "ultra successful" people. (I haven't found any counter-examples yet, but I'm eagerly awaiting the first! It would be extremely valuable information.)
But crucially, in the face of Unrelenting Standards, what's the difference between total collapse and astronomical success? The belief that you can do it.[0] It's not just "you need to be better than you are." It's "and I know you can."
[0] Incidentally, I posted on this exact subject this morning!
https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/you-can-do-anything-if-yo...
To get moderately rich doesn't require a special personality type, but obscene wealth requires breaking laws and asking forgiveness later (throwing lawyers at the problem). Not caring who you hurt while reaching for a goal is a trait of sociopathy.
You aren't the first one to notice the correlation. It is a heavily studied subject.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wealth+and+sociopathy
Imagine having $999 million and deciding it’s not enough. There’s no way a mentally healthy person could reach that conclusion.
To be fair, if I had $999 million, it'd be bugging me all the time until I got to $1B.
> To be fair, if I had $999 million, it'd be bugging me all the time until I got to $1B.
Conversely, it'd be bugging me until I got to $50M because even in my wildest fantasies, I'd find it hard to spend even $50M in the years I have left.
(Obvs. the calculus would be different for someone in their 20s / with kids.)
Yeah, but you have to be really careful or you’ll pull the handle just a bit too much and hit $1,000,000,000.01.
Aren’t sociopaths strongly overrepresented among the powerful?
(Assuming that) It’s a bit astonishing that we discuss things like that, go huh, and then go about our day. Effectively acquiescing to rule-by-personality disordered.
They are perfectly aware of their own optics and do it because you can't escape it. See Elon with his cringeworthy Twitter takeover that still hasn't collapsed, Larry Ellison buying up the media or Tim Cook gifting the gold trophy to Trump.
Nobody has the guts to boycott them anymore. Billionaires know that you depend on them for news, social media and smartphones too.
> still hasn't collapsed
Which is why he's playing a shell game with xAI "buying" twitter and then SpaceX "buying" xAI
Well... it worked. The shareholders were made whole, Elon got his vanity project, and the only people who got the short end of the stick were the loss-leader Twitter addicts. From a game-theory perspective that's a pretty impressive political polemic to achieve with purely private capital.
When the dust settles the only person to blame is Jack Dorsey, who spent his halcyon years on Twitter pumping Bitcoin and looking even more coked-out than Elon. If people can't move on to better platforms then yes, they are doomed to eternal monetization by warring moron techbro tribes.
I think that's what bothers me the most about the last couple years. These ultra rich people are just brazenly being scumbags and there is nothing anybody can really do about it. I imagine this is what people felt like in the middle ages when their King was going senile.
I think you're wrong and it's worse- there are a lot of things that many people can do about it, it's just that they choose not to.
Both are true. Some things can be done and are simple/healthy, like escaping social media. Others are fundamentally much harder and not worth the risk/trouble/time.
> Some things can be done and are simple/healthy, like escaping social media. Others are fundamentally much harder and not worth the risk/trouble/time.
I think the calculation is very easy, actually. Risk vs Reward. You could even use polymarket to crowdsource funds for the activity!
The Onion is actually making great money on its print edition. Having a real newspaper is a novelty these days, almost like it's part of the joke, and you should subscribe.
The closing point is the one that should get more attention — every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page. And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts: you want access to APIs the browser won't give you. Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available through a browser, and that's by, unfortunately, design.
> And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app
I have worked on several applications where the product managers wanted to make our web app something that could be installed through the app store, because that's how users expect to get apps.
I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever shows up in a search result.
I've tried pushing back against the native app argument and won once because customers actually reported liking that we had a website instead of an app, and other times because deploying an app through the stores was more work than anyone had time to take on. Otherwise, we would've been deploying through app stores for sure.
Marketing gets plenty of data from google analytics or whatever platform they're using anyway, so neither they nor product managers actually care about the data from native APIs.
> I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever shows up in a search result.
I don't know exactly what you are talking about here, but if I wanted to find a restaurant that is local I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser and then it searches google for 'Miguels' automatically and it know's my location so the first result is going to be their website and phone number and I can load the website for the menu or just call if I know what my family wants.
However even then, I'd rather have an app for them where I can enter in the items I want to order. I've noticed apps tend to be more responsive. Maybe it's just the coding paradigm that the applications tend to load all of the content already and the actions I take in the app are just changing what is displayed, but on a website they make every 'action' trigger an API call that requires a response before it moves on to the next page? This makes a big difference when my connection isn't great.
I also find it easier to swap between active apps instead of between tabs of a browser. If I want to check on the status of the order or whatnot, it's easier to swap to the app and have that refresh then it is to click the 'tab' button of the browser and find the correct tab the order was placed in.
>I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser
So you open safari first. I think that’s a step further than what’s being described.
Many people it’s just “hey siri, book a table at Miguel’s.” And then click whatever app, web result, or native OS feature pops up.
It’s a chaotic crapshoot that I have never been able to stomach personally. For others, that’s just called using their phone.
This is pretty much what I meant. Even if the browser is what comes up, the fact is the user isn't interacting with the browser as a browser. They're interacting with their phone through an app (voice => search). They don't understand website URLs, or what search engines are doing. That makes it harder for them to return (engagement metrics!) than tapping the icon on their phone that opens up directly to the app.
It's also why so many websites try to offer push notifications or, back when it seemed like Apple wouldn't cripple it, the "add to home screen" or whatever CTA was that would set the website as an icon. Anything that gives the user a fast path back to engaging without having to deal with interacting with the browser itself is what PMs and marketing want.
I recently took a trip to Hawaii, particularly Maui. I've never been before, but I hit the weather lottery and got to experience the Kona low system that raked the island with copious rain. Anyway... What I found, in the areas that we were staying, was that there were a lot of food trucks that looked to have great coffee, poke, food in general. But with the weather it was unclear if the food truck was 1) accessible 2) open due to other weather issues.
What I found was that none of these food trucks (and even some relatively nice restaurants) had operational web pages. One had a domain but, for some apparent reason, they posted the menu to <some-random-name>.azurewebsites.net. And that page just... Didn't work. The rest got even worse. Most had listings on Google Maps, but the hours and availability did not reflect reality. We went to a coffee food truck that wasn't there, even though the day before they had commented on a review. Then we had others that had a link to an Instagram page of which some claimed to house their "current" hours and location, yet we tried going to two of them and both weren't open.
It's 2026. If you have your business on Google Maps you should be able to update hours and availability quickly. But beyond that it costs almost nothing to host a simple availability page on a representative domain. And even if you don't want to deal with the responsibility of a domain, there are multitudes of other options. Now, I'm guessing that this isn't the norm for most of these vendors, at least I hope. But we weren't there during the worst of the rain, we hit the second low that went through in our timing. So while it was a significant amount of rain and some of the more treacherous switchback roads were closed - I'm talking about food trucks that were off of very accessible main roads & highways. My SO reached out via IG to about a half dozen vendors and only one responded 2 days later.
Clearly tech and simple services like availability and location that is easy to update is not accessible (or known) for these types of businesses. But it definitely does not require an app (nor should it). Having these simple "status" sites would have made the friction the weather caused significantly less than what we experienced. I don't want an app when I'm trying to find out if a restaurant is open. I, personally, don't find apps any more responsive. In many cases a lot of web sites are littered with far too many components that are not required. I've been doing a lot with Datastar and FastAPI recently and some of the tools I've thrown together (that handle hundreds of MB of data in-browser) load instantly and are blazing fast. So much so that I've been asked how I "did that". It's amazing how fast a web app can be when it's not pulling data from 27 different sources and loading who knows what for JS.
I want to be really clear that I'm not trying to argue with your experience, just to understand it... but:
> However even then, I'd rather have an app for them where I can enter in the items I want to order.
Really? You want to download a different app for every restaurant you order from?
Exactly what big businesses do, and governments think what businesses do is good practice. Fore everyone to use an app.
The UK's Companies House (required for anyone who is a director or has a shareholding of more than 15% etc.) requires a Onegov ID now. They offer a web version with a scan of a photo ID (passport or driving license). I tried it. I thought one of those would work. Apparently the web version needs to ask security questions (reasonable, as the app used NFC to read your passport) but despite the vast amount of information the government has on me (to issue those IDs, to collect taxes, etc) it cannot do that, so i had to either use the app or go in person to a post office in a different town.
Similarly I got an email from Occado saying that if I used the app I could change orders without checking out again. If I do it on the website i have to checkout again. Why?
Today morning, I was checking TSA wait times. Guess what, they want you to install their app to get the wait time. [1]
[1](https://www.dhs.gov/check-wait-times)
In their defence, there is a fairly nice website too, not sure why it needs to have its own logo though
https://bwt.cbp.gov/
That's border wait times, not what the OP was looking for.
TSA used to have an API [0]. But, of course while the deprecation page still lives on the service does not.
Edit: Also looks like TSAWaitTimes.com [1] is an option, I'm sure their API works. o_O
[0] https://www.dhs.gov/archive/mytsa-api-documentation [1] https://www.tsawaittimes.com/
> there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts
The flip side is there are (presumably) real people downloading these apps. Maybe it’s a kid interested in a career in the FBI, or the family of someone who works there. Idk. (I thought it would contain a secure tip line or something, but the app seems to be a social-media front end first.)
I am willing to entertain that there is a legitimate reason for an app to exist without conceding that it should be a pile of trash.
I've been thinking about this for a bit and there are a variety of reasons why it can be appealing for PMs to push for apps over webpages:
- No search competition, when you search on duckduckgo or google for the page a competitor can bid to show up, won't happen with an app.
- Notifications, this is a big one. We live in the attention economy and apps are more likely to slide into push notifications - with ads - than webpages.
- Some users have a mental model that more easily maps to "this app is my go to for this task" and struggle with webpages. That's a psychological and incentive issue. Apple support PWAs but just barely and don't like them because they don't partake in the 100 billion dollar revenue 30% payment processing extortion.
- More intrusive access and "better" targeted advertisement.
- Once an icon is on the home screen somewhere, chances are some users are going to use it because they notice the icon and would not have done so if it were just a tab inside the browser. The attention economy strikes again.
- Companies _love_ to build a relationship with customers. It's usually a very one sided and jealous relationship where getting the user to install an app is perceived as a step in that direction.
- Users are more willing to create accounts for apps than webpages (citation needed, this is just a gut feeling)
- On mainstream iOS and Android it's much harder to block ads in apps than it is in the browser.
I'm sure there are other reasons, but those alone explain why we see them so often.
Quoth the Doctorow: "An app is just a website wrapped up in enough IP to make it a felony to modify it."
Can't trust the government to make a usable webpage [0].
[0] https://realfood.gov/
Not sure if this is still a thing, but some apps used to embed libraries very much tracking everything you do on the phone, including your live location and that was then sold to third parties.
> access to APIs
It's mostly static data. Just publish it under a URL that won't change. Then we could actually cache and archive it.
The APIs in question are client-side iOS and Android APIs. Most of these apps are just WebViews wrapped in spyware, which is the point. It doesn't matter that most of the content is static or already uses browser-native APIs for functionality like forms, gating access to this information behind a surveilance device is the point.
Very well said.
> Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available through a browser
Most browsers do in fact offer that level of granularity, especially for PWA usecases [0].
And from an indicators perspective, having certain capabilities turned off can make it easier to identify and de-anonymize individuals.
[0] - https://pwascore.com/
Fingerprint? Yeah. Deanonymize? No.
There's a considerable difference. And doing whatever one can to mitigate the former shouldn't be discouraged by falsely equivocating the latter.
Nope. Actual deanonymization.
You will of course need a couple additional threat intel feeds because what is provided via the browser itself isn't enough, but third party data vendors along with threat intel vendors are fairly cost effective.
I've seen a couple actual live demos of deanonymization a couple years ago - it's a capability that has existed in the Offensive Security space for a couple years now. And the company I'm alluding to is already live in Japan and Israel.
Relatedly, I just registered for PACER to download court documents. It's pretty shocking that to get public legal documents the US Federal Court system requires full name, birthdate, address, phone, email, credit card info... and I THINK (it's past the initial registration page so can't confirm 100%) also mother's maiden name and 2 common security questions. Just a treasure-trove of PII if it ever falls into the wrong hands. (What's esp frustrating is even after going through this, I had to call a number and wait on hold for 1 hour to activate the account.)
It requires SSN or EIN -- almost all situations where you pay the government or they pay you require that as part of a law about enforcing federal debt collection.
Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations? I find this site incredibly difficult to read with things re-playing as you scroll up and down and the articles I've read from here are often light on details. The graphics seem very AI-generated (overlapping text and other little issues) which makes me think the whole thing is from an LLM.
While this post does have some interesting information, I have to wade through distracting animations that seem "off" which makes me questions all of it.
> Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations?
I don't think so. It's more likely that they're upvoted as a signal-boost; convene here to talk about bad government tech.
Some submissions are less about the subject matter than they are about providing a space to talk about only the subject in general. I've found this to be the case when the content is AI-generated.
That may be true in some cases, but I disagree about that in this case. TFA links to numerous sources for it's data (e.g. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/723186/ for the White House app, and AFAICT exodus privacy is a legit service), and discussions around government applications that are loaded with surveillance tech (and in many cases it seems like the apps' primary, and sometimes only, purpose is data harvesting) seem very on-topic for HN.
Also, FWIW, while I found the layout of the top section of the article to be weird, the actual text body and linked sources were easy to read for me.
I was referring to the graphics/animations that the GP comment mentioned. I was more confident that those were AI-generated than the actual text. Upon further scrutiny I'm having second thoughts.
There are multiple cases of inconsistencies between certain claims and the sources that they linked to:
> The acting IRS Commissioner, Melanie Krause, resigned in protest.
No mention of that here: https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/politics/irs-dhs-sign-data-de....
The actual link should be https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/politics/melanie-krause-actin... (which is a "Related Article" in the former link).
> The Defense Department even purchased location data from prayer apps to monitor Muslim communities.
Nope: https://www.eff.org/issues/location-data-brokers
> ICE's contract gives them "unlimited rights to use, dispose of, or disclose" all data collected.
Quote doesn't appear here: https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2022/06/27/meet-smartlin...
> DHS's own internal documents admit Mobile Fortify can be used to amass biographical information of "individuals regardless of citizenship or immigration status", and CBP confirmed it will "retain all photographs" including those of U.S. citizens, for 15 years.
Both hyperlinks lead to the same page, neither quote appears: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202512/ices-use-of-cbp-biome...
> ICE Homeland Security Investigations signed a $9.2 million contract with Clearview AI in September 2025, giving agents access to over 50 billion facial images scraped from the internet.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT THAT!!! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/rights-organizations-d...
> This one requests 14 permissions including 7 classified as "dangerous,"
Only 6 permissions are classified as dangerous: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/gov.dhs.cbp...
If I really wanted to force the claim that the body text is AI-generated (or assisted) then I'd guess that the LLM (likely Claude) counted the "dangerous" icon from its appearance in "The icon [Red exclamation mark] indicates a 'Dangerous' or 'Special' level according to Google's protection levels."
> And the whole CBP ecosystem, from CBP One to CBP Home to Mobile Passport Control, feeds data into a network that retains your faceprints for up to 75 years and shares it across DHS, ICE, and the FBI.
This makes it appear that there are separate apps running concurrently, namely CBP One and CBP Home. They aren't. From the linked source, "CBP One is no longer available". It was replaced with CBP Home. The source does not mention Mobile Passport Control.: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/cbp-on...
> ...discussions around government applications that are loaded with surveillance tech (and in many cases it seems like the apps' primary, and sometimes only, purpose is data harvesting) seem very on-topic for HN.
Which is exactly why I said: "Some submissions are less about the subject matter than they are about providing a space to talk about only the subject in general."
The article in its entirety reads more like a desperate attempt at spinning the recent release of the "White House app" into a story about state surveillance. The problem is that it doesn't have a cogent conclusion or point to make except for a "Surveillance Data Pipeline" graphic that depicts ICE as the central destination for all of this data and the following:
> The federal government publishes content available through standard web protocols and RSS feeds, then wraps that content in applications that demand access to your location, biometrics, storage, contacts, and device identity. They embed advertising trackers in FBI apps. They sell the line that you need their app to receive their propaganda while the app quietly collects data that flows into the same surveillance pipeline feeding ICE raids and warrantless location tracking. Every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page, and they know that. The app exists because a web page can't read your fingerprint, track your GPS in the background, or inventory the other accounts on your device. > > You don't need their app. You don't need their permission to access public information. You already have a browser, an RSS reader, and the ability to decide for yourself what runs on your own hardware. Use them.
What is the link between the two? Who is the "You" being addressed here? We have apps that are apparently used only by ICE, apps meant for foreign travelers into the US, apps only someone's conservative/veteran grandfather would be caught using—these are disparate demographics to me.
If my initial impression to all of this information was "So what?" how would this article convince me that it's actually meaningful? Submissions like this aren't about discussing anything novel or critical about the subject matter (with the exception of the Huawei thing which is a missed opportunity from an editorial point of view). They are signal boosts to talk about bad government and technology in general.
I've spent enough of my morning trying to make actual sense of this story, that's not to say that it's not informative (albeit unsurprising), but the quality of the writing irrespective of whether its "readable" makes me question if the submission was popular because of its substance or because it's supposed to be a proxy for r/politics.
You owe me a coffee.
It's upvoted because the message is "the administration bad." Which, heuristically, is the correct take most of the time.
These posts get upvoted because the content itself is big news (government apps having insane amounts of spyware is, imo, something worth discussing.) I think if the frontend was just plain HTML/CSS, it would still get a comparable number of upvotes.
Yeah, this site has been posted a few times recently, and there is something just very odd about the site design and the writing.
For example, this post seems unhinged at best: https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-ve...
I didn't even realise it was an article. I thought the grid thing at the top was just an index page linking out to other pages.
I can only presume it's designed for people who's attention will not be kept by sparse but fitting graphics and a well written article.
I can't read any of it, but the other comment's descriptions sound like the new mandatory Russian Max app, so it isn't without precedent.
Speaking for myself unless I know the site and like how they do things, my default these days is a reader view.
It helps a lot!
In this case it helped me lose interest in the article within about 20 seconds.
I'm old enough to remember when people actually took the Hatch Act seriously.
You could not pay me to use any of these apps. All of my own devices run some form of Linux (Debian for servers, Arch for desktop/laptop, GrapheneOS on phone). I generally refuse to use non-free software, the main exception being Steam on a dedicated gaming rig.
I really don't understand why everything has to be an "app." My phone only has a handful of apps, including two web browsers, through which other things are accessed. No app gets access to location, sensors, the camera, or the microphone.
Apps can gather data, and there are lots of things that requires apps now.
Edit: I meant apps can gather data.
Apps obviously gather data. In fact, on common phone operating systems, they tend to have access to an insane amount of information, including what other apps are used, hardware identifiers, information related to Google/Apple accounts and more.
As for things "requiring" apps, I am happy to do without those. If I cannot access something through a website on a device under my control, I will not use it. No convenience is worth more than my freedom and privacy.
Oops. I meant apps can gather (more) data.
The inconvenience is considerable. In the last few days I had the choice of use the app or drive 20 mins each way plus park, walk and possibly queue. Required (UK) government ID verification. The issued my new passport without that!
It is often more costly to not use an app, not just inconvenient. My daughter had to use the bus company app to get (much cheaper) monthly ticker to get to school.
I use few apps, keep location turned off, do not use wallet, etc. but there is going to be more and more pressure to use apps.
> In the last few days I had the choice of use the app or drive 20 mins each way plus park, walk and possibly queue.
It's rather shocking that this government service, whatever it may be, isn't accessible through a normal browser. Still, I would rather spend an hour driving somewhere than run spyware on my phone, at least if this is a one-time event. If I somehow faced an insurmountable inconvenience however, I would probably cave in and purchase a cheap Android phone only for these tasks.
Can you offer some examples?
Most of this is bad, but I think it's reasonable for the FEMA app, whose purpose is to help you get to the nearest shelters, to have access to your location.
Browsers can get access to your location too.
The best solution is to have a text box that asks for a ZIP code, and every important site has one. It covers all the above cases but also includes the ability to help others in a disaster zone.
Several years ago a hurricane passed through my elderly parent's hometown. There wasn't enough available cell availability to get internet access, but they could make SMS text messages. I was their lifeline getting them info on where the power outages were, which gas stations had gas, when restaurants and grocery stores reopened. If all that information was location-locked to where I was (thousands of miles away), it would have useless.
Complaining about Smartlink is a bit hypocritical as it's the smartphone equivalent of an ankle tracker. The opportunity cost for the user is incarceration.
The names of the offending apps on the cards need much more emphasis.
Don't install these apps unless you absolutely have to. If you absolutely have to install them, uninstall them as soon as you're done using them.
I put most of my apps into freezer (Realme phone) so they run only in foreground. Apparently my mobile operator uses their app to prevent sharing my mobile into a Wifi hotspot, my food delivery app pretended to be Amazon having an issue with a package etc.
I can usually defend what appears to be federal incompetence with nuance and vice versa but even I can't say anything about this.
Whoever fulfilled this contract gets a stop work order for gross incompetence and the CORs/COs should be terminated immediately
The article mentions “exodus privacy” as a source for android app permissions auditing, etc.
What is the ios equivalent?
Sheesh... I should not have downloaded the White House app yesterday just to see how ludicrous it was. I just deleted it, though I'm sure a lot of my data has already been exfiltrated. Doesn't excessive tracking like this violate the App Store + Google Play's ToS?
Apple and Google’s App Stores? The companies whose CEOs were both standing at attention, present during Trump’s inauguration?
Rules for thee…
Ahhhh the USA, we can do anything, but others cannot!
The duality of the Statunitians politician.
Folks kept saying Apple protect your data and what not, now folks have their entire phone scanned by Apple unless they prove they are adults by sending personal documents which are being breached left and right.
Deserved!!!!
Which government?
Title is missing the number 13, which makes it much harder to parse. Should be "Fedware: 13 Government Apps That Spy Harder Than the Apps They Ban"
FYI, regardless of election outcome, the next government is highly unlikely to roll this back
> regardless of election outcome, the next government is highly unlikely to roll this back
Well yes, it’s not a high priority. I’m not going to bring it up with my electeds. Are you? If everyone who thinks this is a huge deal is too lazy and nihilistic to do anything about it, it won’t be prioritized.
As long as it isn't mandatory like the Russian Max app, I wouldn't worry. The only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(app)
> only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent)
There are plenty of reasons to dislike it. The money spent to develp it. The attention spent to maintain it. The abuse of users' goodwill. Dilution of the FBI's brand with a circa 2008. None of these are good. None of them are, frankly, issues I'm going to personally engage on.
Why is every part of this website animated, and part of the text is backwards? Am I the only one who sees it this way?
I think they are supposed to be like cards that flip over and you see what's on the back.
If the webmaster notices this, the squares aren't great on mobile.
These devices don’t actually give access to biometric fingerprint data do they??
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per...
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per...
Fear-mongering. Not even dangerous permissions. Granted on install
Heh. American funny
they hire one day shell companies that give them a huge chunk of the money back illegally, then turn around and hire a cheap ad agency specialized in churning hotsites and conference apps.
it's literary the same playbook of any developing country when some obviously corrupt group is elected promising to cut government spending
So no, thank you USA. I'm not going to visit you. I have all I need in this our European "socialism" as many Americans like to call it. I'm not assumed to be a criminal, and governments aren't building databases of all my steps and activities, and I have a great healthcare.
There is currently an attempt going on by several governments to crack down harder against the people. While before it was "only", say, California and their age-sniffing laws infiltrating and tainting Linux - thus declaring war against the people, as revealed by Meta acting as primary lobbyist here - today I read that now that age-sniffing was also approved in some european countries (in one EU country the parents are required to install a sniffing app and thus verify the age of the kids; I think it was in Greece. I'd never help any government act as fascist sniffing proxy trying to control and monitor by kids, that is an act of betrayal of such a government), their next line of attack is against VPN. Suddenly the picture shifts, because if VPNs are targeted, how does finding an excuse such as "but but but think about the kids", make any sense? That is very clearly governments becoming increasingly fascist. Add a few lobbyists here and there who benefit financially from this and now we suddenly understand how democracies are undermined. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
Democracy needs to be adjusted - right now private interests can too easily sabotage and undermine it.
The recent spate of state-level age verification laws, while stupid, are primarily designed to insulate Facebook from lawsuits and not actually crack down on people. You can comply with them by just having a date field and an API to get bucketed age ranges out of them. The reason why they seem like a concerted crackdown is that Facebook can pay people to go to literally every legislature and bug them up and down[0] until they pass a law to make OS vendors provide age buckets.
The real shit is happening parallel to the actual legislation. Companies that need to comply with, say, the extremely onerous UK Online Services Act, are forcing everyone to use data-heavy verification paths like facial recognition age estimation or ID scanning. Newgrounds just used your account age or a credit card.
A core property of fascism is that, unlike other forms of tyranny, it is specifically a public-private joint venture. The government uses corporations to bypass its own constitutional restrictions, and those corporations then agree to follow rules that don't actually exist, specifically so that those corporations can shut down all their competition and form para-governments that supercede the democratically responsive bits. This has actually been going on for a while, but it's only now that the people are actually noticing it.
[0] Inspired by Louis Rossmann's efforts to get R2R bills passed, I've started doing amateur lobbying for the Rio Grande Plan. It's surprisingly easy, but you will almost certainly have to take off from work or sacrifice many a lunch hour to be able to actually get to talk to people.
I don't really understand. Do you have anything to hide from you government?
I have a lot to hide from your government if that was the question
You don't have to install my government's software.
It's 2026 & we still have people saying this ..
Poe's Law is in effect when the thread is a hair away from getting political. I thought it was obvious that the commenter is joking based on the oblivious tone, and because this is HN.