> Why was this article hidden from the front page? A similar satellite journalism article from the BBC about a killing in west Africa was allowed on the front page a few weeks ago.
Because it's about China, and information about Chinese human rights abuses is apparently considered "nationalistic flamebait."
HN moderation has nothing to do with what YC is doing in China, as anyone can see by looking back through the many years' worth of comments I've posted. The macro political climate has changed; HN moderation hasn't. The standards are a flatline, to the point of janitorial tedium.
We've had extortion and murder as well, your argument doesn't really help.
Modern nation states can 100% regulate themselves on the use of irregular forces - there are situations for them, and many not.
They could be doing some enhanced security, some types of armed guards ... but not anything tactical, certainly not anything mission oriented or directed kinds of violence.
Mercenaries may always exist, but American ones don't have to. Participation in them should be made illegal, and all these private military companies should forbidden to operate until they find another line of business or liquidate themselves. If some former soldier or former general wants to become a mercenary, let him renounce his citizenship and go find a new home.
The only military forces in the US should be explicit parts of official US military.
Given that the US is not, in fact, at war with Yemen, it doesn't seem to be legal outside the US for US citizens or people within US jurisdiction when doing any planning, etc., related to it; see, U.S. Code tit. 18, ch. 45, particularly §§ 956, 958, and 960.
What's the difference between a private military company and a really heavily armed private security company?
If we can't clearly articulate this, we can't really ban these companies.
When guards have to accompany a VIP into an unstable environment they frequently employee armored vehicles, armed helicopters and specialists like designated marksmen.
> and a really heavily armed private security company
Most Western countries prohibit that form of organisation, too. Close protection is provided by State bodies ( the police and Royal Marines in the UK, for example ).
So the question arises, why does the USA permit armed private companies at all?
I don't agree with that. Didn't these mercenary companies start out as just "enhanced security guards?" It seems like once you allow them to operate in any capacity, the rot spreads until you have assassination operations like the one in the article.
The only military career path for Americans should be within the ranks of the US military.
Post-war Iraq is not the same as a war zone, so protection of the civil service, bureaucrats, diplomatic corps, etc. I think can be done by some kind of other trained force.
In fact, it might be better in some ways - soldiers are trained to have a very aggressive posture, a very 'lean in' kind of assertion. The 'killer instinct'. And it involves a lot of training in heavy weapons, assaults, recons, urban warfare etc. etc.. We don't need that for these missions. Because in any serious engagement they should be calling in the actual Army.
> Post-war Iraq is not the same as a war zone, so protection of the civil service, bureaucrats, diplomatic corps, etc. I think can be done by some kind of other trained force.
I said conflict zone not war zone, which I meant to encompass lower-intensity dangerous areas. But in any case, aren't American embassies traditionally defended by US Marines? I see no reason to change that.
> In fact, it might be better in some ways - soldiers are trained to have a very aggressive posture, a very 'lean in' kind of assertion. The 'killer instinct'. And it involves a lot of training in heavy weapons, assaults, recons, urban warfare etc. etc.. We don't need that for these missions. Because in any serious engagement they should be calling in the actual Army.
These "contractors" are former soldiers with exactly that same "aggressive...killer instinct" training, so you're not avoiding it by hiring mercenaries for guard duty.
You can set your line wherever you deem best; the slipperyness of any slope is just how much effort you need to put into stopping the line from being moved by others.
> not a libertarian, but what do the alleged actions of of a theocratic monarchy have to do with the potential excesses of free market capitalism?
Probably because there's profit to be had in making deals with that theocratic monarchy. It's the same thing with China. If you're optimizing for market success as you are in free market capitalism, you're incentivized to overlook things that stand in the way of that success, like the immorality of making deals with foreign authoritarians.
Samsung may decide to use different apps not Google ones, they may decide to use a Chromium fork with Bing as search engine so your data will not go do Google, maybe Mozilla will manage to do a deal with a big manufacturer and put Firefox as default and nobody will have to pay.
What has stopped them from doing this all this while? A shell company by Samsung renders any deals with Google impotent - a strategy used by many Chinese OEMs who have Google Android for international markets and their own app stores within China.
This is not my opinion. If you go to a VC or even YC with these claims, they will counter with the widely available data pointing towards the high probability of a third ecosystem failing.
> By obligating handset makers to load the free apps along with the Android operating system, regulators said Google had boxed out competitors.
It sounds like a very good thing to me to prevent companies like Google from having such terms, which allow them to use dominance on one area to fuel dominance in many others. Each product should stand on it's own, and the idea that the entire ecosystem is one big product is frankly BS.
> Look at the comments that already exist - is there any way that you can imagine this not turning into a flamefest?
That's an interesting censorship tactic: if you don't like a topic or an idea, start a fight about it, the ruder and unproductive the better. Your disliked topic is thrown out like a baby with the bathwater, an objections to the censorship can be countered with the misdirection that the topic or idea isn't getting suppressed, just "fights."
That's why I think, in the interest of open, good-faith discussion, the flamers themselves need to be moderated, but not the topics that attract them.
You're not wrong, it's an instance of a heckler's veto.
But HN policy is (basically) to allow the veto to work as the lesser of two evils, on the theory that there are lots of other places to discuss this sort of stuff. I think that's a reasonable policy for a tech site.
When people talk about 'the stock market' or 'the stock price' they are using a very coarse abstraction.
In reality for most trade-able instruments there are a variety of exchanges all operating at once. Further in each exchange there isn't a single price. There is a collection of buy and sell orders that combined together form the 'book'. For instance if you had 10 buy orders at $1 and 2000 sell orders at $1.10 what is the 'price' of that thing? The structure of the book and how all the exchanges relate (and Reg NMS in the US equities space) are all the 'market structure'.
In this specific case, it means that retail flow is much less likely to immediately move the market than flow from an informed (knows the market will move soon) or large (will trade so much that it will move the market) player, and is much more valuable to market makers who try to capture the spread on that order (and usually improve it) and hedge/trade out of that risk relatively soon.
> Months ago, senior Facebook executives briefly debated banning all political ads, which produce less than 5 percent of the company’s revenue, sources said. The company rejected that because product managers were loath to leave advertising dollars on the table...
Do you have a problem with political ads on tv? From my perspective we should have campaign finance laws that regulate political ad spending, but there's nothing inherently wrong with showing political ads on tv, facebook, or elsewhere.
> ... there's nothing inherently wrong with showing political ads on tv, facebook, or elsewhere.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Facebook is different than television because ads can be targeted extremely narrowly. This makes them hard to audit and possible to use ads for things like voter suppression of populations that are likely to vote a certain way.
Advocating for/against a specific policy or politician is one things. Attempting to disenfranchise a group of people through misinformation is another.
Agreed, but the idea that any publicly traded company can or will have ethics is an equally absurd idea. I tend to think of companies as Darwinian machines whose evolutionary 'fitness function' is the maximization of profits.
> Nah, this isn't a legal debt that they can forward to a collection agency, as pointed out in the article.
My understanding is that many collection agencies aren't very scrupulous about they debts they try to collect. Many of them are false, already paid, or lacking necessary documentation.
What United is threatening to do is forward a clearly uncollectable debt to a collection agency. This is pretty much fraud at its finest - they know it's not supposed to be collectable. It doesn't matter if the collection agency comes after you - United is on the hook for having forwarded that debt in the first place.
Yes, in an ideal world, collection agencies would properly verify the debts they collect on, but they definitely can't be arsed to do that voluntarily without gov't regulation saying so (and this administration is unlikely to provide said regulation).
This story: 19 points, 46 min ago, 2 comments: rank 35 (2nd page)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18405775: 17 points (less votes), 2 hours ago (older), zero comments: rank 11 (1st page)
It appears this story was suppressed off the front page.