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>Not the most polite way to discuss a genocide, or at the very least an absolutely dire situation.

It's as polite way as using the word genocide to describe the experience of white people in South Africa today merits.

I can only reiterate the parent's recommendation to you.


Here's Genocide Watch's take: https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages

Stages currently active in SA: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6. Some people claim that the high murder rate among white SA'ns means they're also in stage 8/9, but actually the murder rate among black SA'ns is even higher.

There's no genocide, but there's a whole lot of red flags and generally terrible things. Just because Trump believes something does not make it wrong.

From elsewhere on that site: "Dr. Gregory Stanton, Founding President of Genocide Watch, warned that early warnings of genocide are still deep in South African society, though genocide has not begun."

There are countless examples of early warnings. Here are a couple:

- Former president of SA sings "bring my machine gun" song at ruling party conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFIobjP3xAI

- Same guy singing "kill the Boer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JNc7SLUE1g

Many similar statements have been made by other politicians, among them Julius Malema, who collectively represent a large part of SA's population, over the course of many years.

Don't respond to something like this with a flippant statement about clutching your pearls.


>Stages currently active in SA: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6.

Actually, genocide watch says only stage 6 is present in SA. https://www.genocidewatch.com/country-pages/south-africa

For comparison they list 3 different signs for an active genocide against black americans.


You need to make your way through 1-5 to get to 6, but I specifically excluded 5 (organization of militias).

There are rumours of this but if it's true, these militias must be very secret indeed.

One problem is that violent criminals run rampant and the state seemingly has little desire to stop them, and zero capacity to do so. Meanwhile prominent politicians sing songs whose lyrics include machine gun sounds and calls for the murder of whites.

Parallel to this, there are job restrictions limiting the maximum number of whites companies may employ or promote. Franchises limit the number of white owners. White business owners are strong-armed through law and government contracts to give up some of their equity. There's regular talk about seizing white-owned property.

Whatever label you want to put on all that, I think the it's fucked up.

The worst part is, the average poor black South African is innocent in all this and now has to live in a place with a spiraling economy, power & water outages, even worse crime than the whites have to face, terrible standards of education, and much more.


>You need to make your way through 1-5 to get to 6

This isn't true. As the genocide watch page says "The process is not linear."

White South Africans are less likely to be victims of crime, make more money, live longer, and are over-represented among corporate and political leadership. Taking steps to undo the damage done by apartheid isn't fucked up, it's necessary as evidenced by the aforementioned inequalities.


And I'm telling you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are the ones that are active right now.

> "Taking steps to undo the damage ... it's necessary"

What a bullshit argument.

How does any of that help "undo" the damage done by apartheid? The government of SA prizes ideology over outcome. The ideology is to attack Western things, even if the outcome is that black South Africans are now very much worse off than they would've been if SA was thriving.

And to cite this as a defence for the abuses and outrages that has literally landed white SA'ns - despite their relative wealth - on a genocide watch.


>And I'm telling you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are the ones that are active right now.

I trust genocide watch more than you to determine which of the genocide watch stages of genocide are underway,

>How does any of that help "undo" the damage done by apartheid?

White South Africans make up 8% of the population but own 72% of farmland. This is a direct result of apartheid and colonial racism more broadly. Expropriating some of this land and returning it to black South Africans is directly undoing this damage.


>There's no genocide

Thank you. This is all that needs to be said on this subject.

The word genocide does not mean "a lot of red flags and generally terrible things", nor was it made to describe that.

>Don't respond to something like this with a flippant statement about clutching your pearls.

Don't clutch pearls then.

As long as you keep abusing the word "genocide" to apply it to the plight of white people in South Africa, you'll get the response you think is flippant, and I consider to be insufficiently stern given the harm and disrespect of such usage.

Saying this as a Jew whose family members were killed by the Nazis during WW2, by the way.

They were KIA as soldiers, so I'm hesitant to label them as victims of genocide, even though they were certainly the target of it — out of respect both to them, and those who didn't get a chance to die fighting.

You don't get to call a demand for respect flippant.


> Thank you. This is all that needs to be said on this subject.

No? There are tons of completely insane things happening in SA, and much that needs to be said and done. If you're saying the minimum threshold for caring about what happens in other countries is actual genocide, then I disagree with you.

People have been incorrectly calling this a genocide for a long time, which is why the PDF from Genocide Watch dates back to 2015.

On the right you have people trying to make this even worse than it is, and on the left you have people trying to ignore it, or minimize it.


>There are tons of completely insane things happening in SA, and much that needs to be said and done. If you're saying the minimum threshold for caring about what happens in other countries is actual genocide, then I disagree with you.

I'm not saying that.

The subject at hand is whether there's a "white genocide" taking place, and that subject is summed up in a single word: no.

>People have been incorrectly calling this a genocide for a long time

Which is why it's important to not perputate this harmful falsehood any further.

>on the left you have people trying to ignore it, or minimize it.

By using the term genocide where it's not applicable, you're actively minimizing the actual genocides that have taken place (or are taking place) — and by extension, you're complicit in minimizing the very issue you're discussing.

See, we both agree that whatever is taking place in South Africa is not as bad as an actual genocide.

But by using the word "genocide" in conjunction with it, you're diluting the meaning of the word reserved for the absolute extreme — you're helping spread the notion that genocide doesn't have to be that bad; that "red flags and terrible things" fits under the something sort of kind of like genocide label.

What we have in the end is the parable of the boy who cried genocide [1].

The point of the parable isn't that there's no threat of a wolf attack, nor that is shouldn't be seriously considered.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf


They can demand all they want, but they can't guarantee any way of getting the ticket to the person that send a payment... which makes it a bit of a tall demand.

They don't even have to have the same price if the seller just effectively returns the ticket back to the system.

Then it's up for grabs.

There's no guarantee for the buyer that an out-of-band payment will get them the ticket (someone else can get it), and there's nothing that forces them to send an extra payment once they do get the ticket.


>> Aren't JSON parsers technically not following the standard if they don't reliably store a number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float?

>That sentence has four negations and I honestly can't figure out what it means.

This example is halfway as bad as the one Orwell gives in my favorite essay, "Politics the the English Language"¹.

Compare and contrast:

>I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Orwell has much to say about either.

_____

¹https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...


that Orwell quote can be saved a lot by proper punctuation

I am not, indeed, sure*,* whether it is not true to say that the Milton *(*who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley*)* had not become *-* out of an experience *-* ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect*,* which nothing could induce him to tolerate.


Has the proper punctuation allowed you to see that there's an extra negation there that makes the sentence say the exact opposite of what the author intended it to say?

>Wise is a "payment processor" so it isn't regulated to the same standard.

Which standard?

In the US, the standard in question is "money transmitter", regulated on the state level.

In California, both Revolut and Wise are licensed by DFPI: Wise has MTL (Money Transmitter License) in California, Revolut has a broker license:

Revolut: https://dfpi.ca.gov/search-result-detail/?id=304600

Wise: https://dfpi.ca.gov/regulated_entity/wise-us-inc/

FinCen guidance on the distinction between the to two is not the easiest read, but my takeaway is that both of these companies would be registered FinCen too as MSB's (money service but businesses to

https://www.fincen.gov/resources/statutes-regulations/guidan...

And indeed, here's Wise's MSB registration: https://www.revolut.com/en-US/blog/post/changes-for-revolut-...

Revolut doesn't have on the... because they outsource money handling to an actual bank, FDIC insured and all:

https://www.revolut.com/en-US/blog/post/changes-for-revolut-...

So, doesn't appear like Wise is any less regulated.


>Are those fintech companies under any financial regulatory authority?

In the US, they need to be licensed on a state level.

E.g.: they'd need to have an MTL (Money Transmittance License) in California, regulated by DFPI:

https://dfpi.ca.gov/regulated-industries/money-transmitters/

So, yes, they are.


> In the end I made a gif[0] and called them out publicly in the hope that they'd do something about it.

Did they end up doing something about it because of that post?


>It's easier to get justice from a local bank in your country, or to at least talk to a real person face to face than from PayPal Luxemburg or wherever they're located.

Is it, really?

It would not matter to the local court where PayPal's HQ is.

PayPal needs to be licensed in your country to handle money transfers. They can lose the right to operate in your state if they aren't compliant with the laws.

In the US, the licenses are required even on the state level: e.g., here are the requirements for California Money Transmitter License:

https://www.jwsuretybonds.com/states/california/money-transm...

Fraud and theft are one fun way to lose such a license.


I doubt they have a license to operate in all countries where the service is accessible/used. And yes, it is way easier to get justice from a local bank, a letter from a lawyer is usually enough if it ever gets to this point in first place, whereas for PayPal&co good luck with ever getting a response. Filing a lawsuit against a foreign company and getting anything out of it is even more of a gamble.


>I doubt they have a license to operate in all countries where the service is accessible/used.

Really?

I doubt you have tried checking all countries' regulations. Or any, for that matter.

Because there isn't a country where money transfers aren't regulated. Go prove me wrong.

To save you some effort: in the US, you need to have a money transmitter license issued by your state, e.g. in California'

https://dfpi.ca.gov/regulated-industries/money-transmitters/

>Filing a lawsuit against a foreign company and getting anything out of it is even more of a gamble.

Are speaking from experience, or hypothetically?

In any case, filing a lawsuit and raising a complaint with the regulator is an action that can cause the foreign company in question to lose the license to operate in your state.

And unlike your local bank, they don't have direct ties to politicians.


> I doubt you have tried checking all countries' regulations. Or any, for that matter.

I checked it for my country before writing anything. They don't have a license, nor does Revolut for that matter. I'm not pulling this out of my ass, go check it yourself: https://www.bsi.si/sl/nadzor-bancnega-sistema/izdana-dovolje... (Hint: look in the 4th column where the 2nd column says "Dovoljenja za opravljanje storitev bank in hranilnic")

They definitely do business here, just like Revolut, which has the authorization to do banking in the UK, but not here.

> To save you some effort: in the US, you need to have a money transmitter license issued by your state, e.g. in California'

That's the US, not the entire world.

> In any case, filing a lawsuit and raising a complaint with the regulator is an action that can cause the foreign company in question to lose the license to operate in your state.

They _don't_ have it in the first place, there's nothing to lose for them, only for you as their customer. Furthermore, there's no legal entity of theirs in my country which the court could liquidate to pay me back in such a case. Please consider the fact that not every country has the same legal system as the US before you start lecturing me on how the legal system of my own country, which I dare assume you don't live in, works.

> And unlike your local bank, they don't have direct ties to politicians.

But they have ties to international politicians, which is no better.


That sounds like a small claims court case, if not suing PayPal for outright theft.

I'm not a lawyer, but theft under pretenses of "protecting your account" (from being accessed by you, that is) is still theft.


Awesome!

I've rigged my 3D printer to use as a 2D plotter, and had a ton of fun programming it to draw fractals like the Dragon Curve [1].

I also made a tool to do cursive handwriting/calligraphy with it, to make fancy postcards and whatnot [2].

Guess this would fit right on that blog :D

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/BlJ8dgmAaTA/?utm_source=ig_web_c...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V45cj0-GQyQ


Do you have a blog post with more technical details and closeups? It may be good to post here.


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