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> and in America, the odds of bystanders coming to your rescue are... Not zero, but not great

Yes, because there's been a recent push to more heavily punish good Samaritans than perpetrators. When good men get metaphorically crucified for helping, they stop helping.

If that seems like a common sense outcome of such policies, you're right. But as we've seen time and again, common sense is not a flower that grows in everyone's garden.


> Just fox news screams about the "true unemployment" U6 number when Democratics are in charge and then go back to reporting on U3 when a Republican is in office.

To be fair, CNN and MSNBC do the same in reverse.


CNN and MSNBC are not propaganda networks in the way that Fox is.

Only if the local government is still intact, which in this scenario is unlikely. At the very least they could bribe their way in.

What time frame are you considering? You seriously think the world will cease to have functioning governments in the next thirty years?

Not even that. I doubt there are many governments that would not find ways to naturalize a billionaire, if they are willing to invest.

The smart play is goats (for meat and milk), ammo, and maybe some silver if you want some ready "cash". You can barter the meat/milk, and even the ammo (but it has other uses).

I would bury a bunch of gold coins and act like it's my last one from the family heirlooms anytime I spent one. Shaving off chunks of a gold bar makes it pretty obvious there's more at the source. But yeah, ammo will be the new currency.

Definitely, "usable thing" such as ammo will be the currency.

After all, if it is societal collapse, that means no society, hence no bartering for shiny bits of metal. Why would anyone care about gold, or silver? There's no merchants. No social cohesion. What will you do with the gold? Look at it? Hope someone will trade stored food for it?

Why would anyone?

The unfortunate part is that it is far harder to move or carry or hide your wealth. It's quite tangible. Where do you store a million rounds of ammo, or maybe water filters, or even MREs or canned food? It all takes space, and in the end?

No person will horde such wealth if anyone knows they have it. It will be taken.

That's why prepping really only makes sense for temporary disasters in your region.


Not specific to this article, but I generally like to find third party sources to confirm or deny the "bipartisan" and "nonprofit" parts of their about page. I've seen too many where that turned out to be false.

Just today I tried an experiment asking the YouTube Ai question bot "where on the political compass are the opinions expressed in this video?"

The chatbot couldn't get past the fact that the video said it was non-partisan and if they said it it must be true.


I'd say buy a poster instead, but it just now occurs to me that they're likely not displaying them full-time, and the LP has the advantages of being a uniform size and made of stiff cardboard for easy storage and retrieval.

So I guess it actually makes sense.


Many have a small box on the cord with those controls, and you could argue that's handier since it's closer to where your hands naturally are at any given moment.

It's not really "much of the left" that is against it, just the loudest voices. Pew research says [1 sorry for the ugly URL]

Support for photo ID requirements also remains widespread in both parties. More than nine-in-ten Republicans (95%) and about seven-in-ten Democrats (71%) favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/22/majority-of-...


I am p sure a lot of those that aren't for it aren't for it because of access to said ID is gated behind money (or unreasonably out of the way), which would need to be fixed first.

Without an ID, there's far more than just voting that they're not able to take advantage of. Yet I never hear of anyone having trouble living in this modern world that requires an ID for just about everything.

So all you need to do is know somebody's name for that voting station. And since we're not checking IDs, when the "right" person shows up, how do we know they're the right person?

I have to show ID to get into my local zoo, but not to vote someone onto the board in charge of the zoo. That doesn't make sense.


> when the "right" person shows up, how do we know they're the right person?

That prompts an investigation. The “right” person casts an affidavit ballot and the police and courts investigate. If the count is close, the loser usually sure to recount and verify, and any of these incidents then become political kindling. It doesn’t happen because it isn’t worth it individually and difficult to coördinate en masse.


As someone who has lived outside of United States, I find it incredibly baffling, alongside the lack of national ID. Lack of such simple verification makes the potential investigations much more harder than they have to be.

It's a trade-off that many USA states make willingly. Citizens have the right to vote, period^. It's not a "right to vote but only if you have an ID." Requiring an ID to vote, to me, is as ridiculous as requiring an ID to speak or practice a religion.

[^] except for the case of felony disenfranchisement laws, which I personally believe are a travesty


And this was hard won. US history is riddled with examples where the bureaucracy of voting was explicitly used to disenfranchise rightful voters by governmental officials that wanted to keep their power over the marginalized. The skepticism is earned.

> Lack of such simple verification makes the potential investigations much more harder than they have to be

This can be argued for any hindrance to bureaucracy. On the balance you get a much more robust system, with fewer centralized fail-safes.


This reminded me that they made a point-and-click game of Rama. I remember enjoying it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_(video_game)


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