I would hazard a guess that AI technology is already close to break even from an economic perspective, nearly everyone I know (especially those not in tech) uses it on a daily basis to assist with their work, especially coming in the form of dealing with pointless bureaucracy, writing emails and ideation.
From a cashflow perspective however it is no where near close to capturing its economic benefit, and to be fair to the bubble supporters I agree that I can't see how it can capture this in the short term. In the long term its pretty clear that there will be some major winners here who will reap big rewards.
"New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced a bipartisan, 30-state settlement with the owner of Cameo, Baron App Inc., for failing to ensure consumers knew that videos promoting products were paid endorsements...
In 2020, Cameo... launched a service called Business Cameo that allows companies to pay celebrities to record videos endorsing their products. The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that Cameo failed to implement measures to ensure those videos were properly disclosed as paid endorsements, which violated endorsement rules issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and New York’s consumer protection laws."
In an ideal world we would get to do a reverse investigation to understand which government officials were complicit in his very obviously politically motivated detention, action would be taken upon those individuals to ensure accountability, and the system itself would be updated so powerful interests can't abuse the law like this. How far are we from this world?
> A city slicker shoots a duck out in the country. As he's retrieving it, a farmer walks up and stops him, claiming that since the duck is on his farm, it technically belongs to him. After minutes of arguing, the farmer proposes they settle the matter "country style."
> "What's country style?" asks the city boy.
> "Out here in the country," the farmer says: "when two fellers have a dispute, one feller kicks the other one in the balls as hard as he can. Then that feller, why, he kicks the first one as hard as he can. And so forth. Last man standin' wins the dispute."
> Warily the city boy agrees and prepares himself. The farmer hauls off and kicks him in the groin with all his might. The city boy falls to the ground in the most intense pain he's ever felt, crying like a baby and rolling around on the ground. Finally he staggers to his feet and says: "All right, n-now it's–it's m-my turn."
> The farmer grins: "Forget it, you win. Keep the duck."
The real life version is a company sues you for a stupid reason and after spending a couple hundred thousand dollars on your defense the company loses and says "our bad lol", and then the matter is settled.
Or, in this case, after prosecutors hold someone in prison for a decade or two they offer a plea deal.
That's not what's happened here. His time in UK prison counts towards his US charges and is the reason he's not doing time in US prison.
It's more like if "settling things country style" involved giving each other ducks, and after round one the farmer received a duck then said "forget it keep your duck".
There has been reporting on this. Apparently there was one zealous person in DOJ pushing the Assange case and everybody else thinks it's too weak to be worth it.
It's interesting, if you believe that one person can take down the system - as a whistleblower must - well surely, one person can buck the system's instincts and try to take down you.
This doesn’t make sense because the Assange case has been a diplomatic issue between the US and Australia ever since Albanese came to power.
Ultimately the responsibility falls to the President since the DOJ isn’t responsible for international relations. Biden must have thought the case was important otherwise there’s no reason to harm relations with an ally over something like that.
Don’t forget Hillary was fixated on Assange for a long time, and was even quoted with “Can’t we just drone the guy?”.
The direct spat lead to Assange helping Trump and the Russians publish Hillary’s email server spool.
I don’t like that Assange ended up helping Trump and Russia, but you can’t blame him for helping the one person who can kick the person out of office who wants to Tomahawk you
1. Clinton neither admitted nor denied it. She only said she "didn't recall" making that statement.
2. In any case, Clinton has been very openly critical of Assange, saying the charges were not punishing journalism and that "he has to answer for what he's done." [1]
Ad hominem is a fallacy if you are arguing hypotheticals and philosophy in a Greek salon.
In understanding how the world around us works, credibility matters quite a bit, and "I'm not interested in pretending True Pundit says true things" is a pretty reasonable shortcut.
Rather than just thought-terminate with "logical fallacy," the burden is now on the one bringing the evidence to bring it via a channel other than True Pundit.
Clinton has had a knack for knowing the real truth of a situation and either not wanting to share that with the public, or doing it in a haughty way where she's simply not believed. Knowing what I know about her in that way, such a quote is worrying.
It implies that she's being characteristically tonedeaf and screwing up the communication of some pretty serious concerns about Assange, but I think that's no mystery by now. You can always get Clinton to make it all about her and spin it in a way that can let you get away with damn near anything, but that's just exploiting personal failings on her part, where if you dig into what she knows it's unsettling how sharp she is.
You can't go by whether Clinton's screwed up the optics.
No one reported you claimed those things and particularly not in an official meeting where there should have been minutes and would have been witnesses which could have boosted a lack of recollection to certainty.
Your examples also fail to continue with "but if I did it was a joke" -- a remark itself almost as damning as the act. We're not talking about mere defamation in the case of Assange: talking about the secretary of state-- who unambiguously has the power to murder foreign persons with a suggestion-- suggesting that she's would joke about murdering people. Not a great look.
So, no, your remarks are unambiguously not denials, but no denial was required in your case.
I don't think the issue is whether Clinton made this comment or not. The legend simply points out what every one is thinking. That this threw the election for her, and that is likely her entire perspective on this. The Trump admin was likely motivated to prosecute, so as to appear they were not in collusion with the release of the emails, and the current administration directly backed HC. People like Kromberg do not come out of a vacuum.
As far as I know there is zero evidence that wikileaks did not publish everything newsworthy that they were given regardless of who it helped or hindered.
Anyone have anything credible showing they suppressed anything ever?
I thought it was the warrant canary of their email provider (Riseup) that died in 2016. Did Wikileaks ever even have a canary?
Riseup currently has a canary[1], they state that it would not trigger for "gag orders, FISA court orders, National Security Letters" which seems like it makes it pretty useless.
This says nothing about it being a canary. All canaries are stated as such.
Instead, all I see is some debate about PGP.
I can believe that only one submission ever used it. PGP is not friendly to people who barely undersrand how computers work (99.999% of the population), and some panicking whistleblower isn't interested in taking a layman's course in crypto to send some docs.
So why would wikileaks renew their useless(from their perspective) PGP key?
I would have to dig up a decade old computer or scour the web for years. THis is nonsense. It's 100% true that Wikileaks has a cryptographic canary that expired sometime after Julian Assange was incarcerated.
Forgive me, I've never heard of a "cryptographic canary." Google tuned up nothing for me about what it is or how it relates to wikileaks. It gave me the strong impression of being nonsense. Perhaps I'm wrong about that.
Have you got a link for what it is?
My prior is that any evidence of substance that contributed to a belief in wikileaks being untrustworthy would be /very/ easy to find in many locations. Maybe it's not but I can't think why. Perhaps you know?
A canary goes something like "This website has not received or acted on any government orders to disclose or modify or remove material." When they ever do, then they remove that notice. The government enforcement usually includes a gag order prohibiting the target from saying that they're under orders, so the intent is that you can infer government gag pressure by the canary having been removed. Wikileaks used to have such a notice and no longer does, so we assume government enforcement is why.
I'm not sure what the cryptographic part has to do with anything. I'd guess it was signed in a way that you can verify the government itself didn't tamper with the notice.
Wikileaks information was trustworthy and accurate. It may still be that the information prior to their canary expiring is okay, but anything released after can't be trusted.
I'd assume that once the canary died whichever actors compromised them scrubbed it.
It's been over a decade now, but I do have a machine somewhere with evidence.
Some nerd bigger than me here certainly has evidence available in a dropbox or somewhere accessible. I don't.
I thought there was some story about Wikileaks receiving a bunch of stuff regarding Russian gov't officials and there was internal debate in the org and it ended up not being published. Was that just a made up story?
It isn't made up. It was during one of the email leaks when the org was stretched to it's limits. Suddenly they get these documents that they don't have time to fully parse and don't look very interesting anyway. Immediately there are dozens of articles put out simultaneously about how Wikileaks refused to publish Russian documents. I guess they learned about the documents being passed to Wikileaks in the first place, wonder who let them know?
The documents were later published elsewhere and nobody cared because they were uninteresting.
I mean all of their leaks are politically motivated, they are axiomatically a cutout. acting scandalized that someone tried to leak stuff is weird. I get the overworked argument in theory, but odd they didn’t publish it at all in the end.
As I mentioned they were in the middle of one of the biggest releases in their history, the submitted documents didn't look interesting and indeed when they were published nobody cared. Do you know what they were? Publishers won't just publish any old trash you send them.
There is no claim here of documents or a story being suppressed by wikileaks. The documents and one side of the conversation were provided to ForeignPolicy.com. The anti-wikileaks angle immediately fizzes in the opening paragraphs.
WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.
The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks’s side of the conversation.
“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.
“WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.
A DNC insider that set up a very large trail indicating external phishing?
Edit: at the time I think this was considered to be a pretty comprehensive description of what happened. Not sure if new information has come to light since then.
Responsibility has to be pretty defuse, right? You can at least begin with all the presidents in office since he was prosecuted, until N-1 since presumably the Nth just released him.
Diffusion of responsibility is definitely a defense in these cases, but the system should recognize this shortcoming and assign accountability (at least in an ideal world).
Although I'm willing to bet that the true actors here weren't necessarily presidents (even though they would ultimately be accountable like you say). Would be interesting to see who demanded what and when.
It's not to lionize Assange, but these are almost crimes against humanity, they stole peoples tax dollars and then built a surveillance state used against the citizens. When that was revealed they then used the same tools to destroy a single human being for the purposes of creating a decade long chilling effect for anyone who might consider doing the same.
There shouldn't be any diffuse responsibility for participating in this farce at any level. When the information was released the public never clamored for it to be investigated and for people to be hunted down and jailed for releasing it. It was entirely a captured administrative state claiming for itself rights it demonstrably never had, such as claiming a foreign national committed treason, or that he could be viewed as an "enemy combatant."
To have gone along with this willingly deserves the same scrutiny we gave German officers at the end of WWII.
> There shouldn't be any diffuse responsibility for participating in this farce at any level.
I would argue there should, no exception. Not even WWII. While keeping in mind that the responsibility was so gigantic to begin with, that even diffusing it might end up putting most participants in jail, some of them for a long time.
A lot of Assange supporters are going to feel weird about giving Biden credit for his release, especially since Biden was part of the administration that initially decided to pursue Assange.
Also because he was forced into pleading guilty for doing journalism. A great crime has been committed against Assange and I understand why he would do this. I would never ask him to spend another day in a small Ecuadorian embassy room with no living facilities or in a medieval torture cell in England... He has suffered more for the free people of the world than we have a right to ask for but this is not a just outcome.
He wasn't "doing journalism". WikiLeaks just posted a completely unevaluated firehose of data fed to it by whomever, which is why they were such an easy asset for Russian intelligence.
I agree they have no idea about journalism. I remember they had put a big pile of emails sent to some government agency in Turkey. It was all some people complaining about daily things, reporting issues in their cities etc (emails were not anonymized of course), They just dumped them and claimed they were exposing the corrupt government.
I'm not exactly disagreeing because it is a factual view. But there are some knotty issues that go a lot deeper.
1) The US was doing a lot of things wrong. Going off the 2011 cables [0] they were spying on various people they weren't meant to be, there were one or two things that look war crimes to me but who knows technically and a few gems like "Der Spiegel reported that one of the cables showed that the US had placed pressure on Germany not to pursue the 13 suspected CIA agents involved in the 2003 abduction of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen".
2) It wasn't obvious in that leak that the US was doing anything counter the interests of the US. But Assange isn't a US citizen and wasn't in the US at the time, so that isn't a reasonable standard to hold him to.
3) Even internally to the US though there is a reasonable argument that he was helpful. If US citizens don't have easy access to this sort of information, how are they supposed to effectively exercise democratic control on the government? People are going out and doing terrible things in their name which, arguably, are counterproductive and they would probably not want done. Accountability requires sunlight and they can't debate whether there is enough sunlight without people like Assange.
4) It turns out that the US does have a huge probably-illegal certainly-ill-advised spying program that was being sniffed out by leakers. The response to Assange seems likely to be part of a campaign to keep material information on such topics like that out of the public sphere.
I could somewhat follow you until (3). Throwing the confidants and allies under the bus for idle public curiosity is absolutely not an acceptable trade-off.
If I dig in to the Saudi Arabia section of wikipedia I get to "Diplomats claim that Saudi Arabian donors are the main funders of non-governmental armed groups like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)". That is a quintessential staunch US ally. It probably is acceptable to throw them under a bus, metaphorically speaking and it is more useful than mere idle curiosity be useful to have that sort of information in the public discourse. The spending and liberty-backsliding done in the name of terrorism has been material to date.
It might help you to follow the perspective if you consider it is plausible that the US's current diplomatic strategy is ineffective and needs pressure to reform. Especially after discounting the heft of their domestic economy. From what I've seen of the game theory, generally speaking best policy is to be scrupulously open and honest with very short bursts of sudden backstabbing when it makes overwhelming sense. The is, happily, a strategy that is highly compatible with radically transparent democracy.
There isn't a way to run this sort of institution without transparency. The incentives don't tend to work out.
Lets pick on the one I think is easy here - a Taliban source. The US spent 20 years in Afghanistan, wasted trillions, murdered almost a million. Opportunity costs even bigger than the needless waste of course.
How much is that Taliban source worth vs. greater transparency that could have ended the war earlier? The biggest problem was publicising which interest groups in the US government were responsible for prolonging the inevitable. Just keeping all meeting minutes on a website unredacted would have been a lot more valuable than having a source.
The tricky one is the Saudis. How much is a Saudi source worth vs. full transparency of voters into the US-Saudi relationship? The issue here is ... we can't debate that, the necessary knowledge is secret. But since large organisations are generally dysfunctional, and there is no reason to believe that the Saudi source is more valuable than more transparency into what is actually going on in the Middle East.
The issue to me is that secrecy makes democratic institutions ungovernable - they can't be assessed without full information and therefore voters can't even attempt to make rational decisions. Full transparency is probably more valuable than the net influence of secret sources [0]. The value of long-term secret sources is highly questionable. If there is a source or confidant in some foreign organisation you want to protect, give them a passport and set them up in Texas. Problem solved.
I'm struggling to figure out how wikileaks works as a russian intelligence asset in a way that somehow doesn't apply more aptly and openly to western media as a whole. Hell our entire elections are built around directly and indirectly paying media to run content ("ads").
There is no genuine concern here over some deep vulnerability our society has to russians or anyone because of wikileaks. Assange (nor snowden) caused any material harm remotely proportional to the blowback they've received since. This is about punishment for circumventing state-level controls and embarrassing the state. To think that Trump would somehow be more lenient on either is unthinkable—he's part of the same class of people that Clinton is that is most sensitive to the health of systems Assange threatens.
Oh, but it does, and that's also a problem. Key Western media, for instance the NYT, are seriously compromised due to being poster children for what's called 'MICE' (Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego): if the NYT, like all newspapers, is going broke in the age of the Internet, it's got all of that as vulnerabilities, especially Ego as it sees itself as the bulwark of truth, yet it can't pay its bills.
Enter Russian oligarchs, just like they bought up London, and then control the oligarchs by force when you can't simply direct them by shared ideology, and you've got pretty much the most powerful propaganda outlet you could possibly have, until you exploit it so heavily that you burn its former reputation to the ground. Which you do, because you yourself care nothing for its well-being: it's a tool for your political aims in fighting NATO and furthering your empire.
Sure, it applies to western media as a whole, from the bottom to the top.
If WWIII had stayed entirely in the infosphere, and Russia had not invaded Ukraine and tried to make good on their preparations, nobody would ever have known WWIII had been waged in the infosphere. That's how well it had been going. It ran aground when physical countries had to be annexed.
This is misinformation. Their policy was never to publish anything they could not verify, and the "asset for Russian intelligence" was only ever a DNC and US intelligence smear to discredit Wikileaks.
It's not just "DNC and US intelligence." Wikileaks tried to influence the 2017 election in France among other examples. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacronLeaks. This partially backfired when the dump of e-mails they published was found to contain russian-language messages.
That Wikileaks systematically favors the russian government, and never does anything contrary to the interests of the russian government, strongly suggests they are an asset of russia.
Tell me and be honest: is that link to a politically-motivated, unproven allegation that will be believable only to those who want to believe, because the "evidence" will be a rabbit warren of innuendo, emotionalism, question begging, circular citations, and talking head pundits assuring us all that they have seen the evidence and "it's extremely credible"? Because that's all the anti-Assange people have so far.
Exposing corruption mainly in the anglosphere is not some systematic error if that is what you do best and where most of tge organisation live and know people.
You could claim Wikileaks is a Thai or South African asset too on those preconditions.
To quote the article: "“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice and there was no White House involvement in the plea deal decision,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement Monday evening."
My recollection is that the Obama administration was split on this, with DoJ officials enthusiastic but Obama purportedly being concerned about the political implications for journalism. The charges were only filed in 2018/2019 under the Trump administration, which presumably did not have major concerns about journalism. Am I wrong in this?
The DOJ and the Obama administration were in agreement that you would have had to prosecute the papers and journalists who had previously run stories on the Bush era leaks revealed through Wikikeaks as well.
I'm trying to work this out myself. Julian's wiki page has
> He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012[10] on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States.[11]
It seems to me like the Trump administration simply mainted the status quo of what came before them. One theory could be the timing of the charges was more aligned with Ecuador changing PM/kicking Assange out of the embassy. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/14/lenin-moreno-julian-assan...
Without starting the whole "is publishing documents received from an enemy of the state seditious," debate, I didn't think there was supposed to be a jail term on taking sides in politics. :-)
The Biden administration doesn't have a terrible track record with a bunch of things (bringing back net neutrality for instance) they just have a really bad marketing department.
I don’t know if Biden had anything to do with this, but he has some good old school democrat instincts. The problem is that he’s surrounded by globalists and progressives who can’t loudly promote the good things he did, like tariffs, getting out of Afghanistan, initially maintaining tight border restrictions, etc.
I mean, even if Biden has something to do with this plea deal, his staffers won’t promote it because they think Assange is a kremlin puppet who conspired to help Trump get elected.
Biden is a potted plant. I saw him at a small campaign event in Iowa five years ago, where all the candidates delivered a speech. He made it through the speech okay (like his SOTU) but they accidentally started playing the transition music early and he completely derailed. He started saying random things like “support the troops.” He was not there anymore in the moment.
Voters backed Biden in the primary because he was a throwback to an earlier version of the party. But the Elizabeth Warren bots ended up running the administration anyway.
Or: nothing really interesting happened here at all, the USAO figured they were 2-3 years out from wrapping up a trial on these charges, that the only toothy charges they had for Assange were conspiracy charges for which Assange's active participation was weak, and so the sentencing guidelines would likely have left him at "time served", which is not a good use of the prosecution's time.
But, I mean, sure, maybe Biden directed DOJ about an open case, and AG Garland just rolled with it, because he sure seems like the type.
I’m just responding to the person giving Biden credit above. I don’t know what happened. But the DOJ is under the executive, so why wouldn’t Biden be able to direct the DOJ about the case? Even if to say “I don’t want my administration prosecuting whistleblowers?”
In the sense that the US letting up on the poor man is a surprise, yes. But without having polled the pro-Assange crowd it doesn't seem like a special surprise that it was Biden. He's been the name on impressive things before, like ending the Afghanistan war (which at the time had been a political humiliation for the US longer than Assange had).
Supporting transparency and good journalism isn't a partisan issue, and there are going to be good people in any administration. Plus Assange wasn't annoying presidents, he was going after people in the deep state.
They're forcing Assange to 'confess' to a crime in the US, where he has never been and which creates enormous problems. It should be remembered how severe what the US was doing at the time. They got some people handed over to them here in Sweden, who they agreed to not torture, and then started already at the airport. They had torture facilities in Poland, where people almost certainly died, etcetera.
What Assange did was legal and what the many activities the US was engaging in to obtain people abroad etc., illegal. He has no duty to the US, because he is not a US citizen or permanent resident.
Consequently even this is not a friendly act from Biden. It ends Assange's imprisonment, but it is a use of threats in order to obtain something from him, namely his 'confession'.
Since your comments have become repeatedly flamebaity and unsubstantive, and now appear to consist mostly of "LMAO", we've banned the account. HN is for something else.
Corrupting legal processes with a combination of weasel talk and bureaucracy is always the first step towards a Navalnyj situation. When that happens to political dissidents how ever bad they are we should all feel great concern.
1. I agree with you.
2. Assange is a Russian asset and the West’s (esp USAs) emphasis on freedom of speech puts us in a very difficult situation with respect to information dissemination.
3. This blind spot is being heavily leveraged to alarming success and Authoritarian regimes are gaining momentum with their goals. Mainly To destabilize democracies and make us all like them. We also want them to fail and be reborn as democracies.
4. I do not know how to navigate this challenge in an ethical/moral way. But i want to make sure we all recognize the biggest genuine threat to our descendants’ freedoms.
No, absolutely not. The West must be held to a higher standard and we have a duty to hold ourselves there, but too many are failing to understand the biggest threat to all the world’s freedom. Hint hint, it is the actual authoritarians.
> action would be taken upon those individuals to ensure accountability
Out of genuine curiosity: what "actions" do you want taken and what accountability are you interested in? I mean, to be blunt: you think this is a crime, right? You want someone charged and prosecuted in a court, with due process, in front of a jury of peers, yada yada.
So... what if your imaginary prosecutor jumps ship to somewhere else where they get arrested and detained, and then refuse to come back to the US to face trial. Are they not then a political prisoner? Why not?
The point being: Assange wasn't thrown in jail without trial, he was thrown in jail because he refused trial. And there's an important difference.
Is there any reason this couldn't be made into a right to prevent the constant legislative onslaught? Is it a lack of organisation/will or is it something intrinsic to the way the system is setup?
The right to privacy is in quite a few constitutions. The reason nobody wants to stomp Chat Control for good is because of how it has been framed: it’s to protect the children. Parents are fiercely protective, and I suspect that for a majority of them, mass surveillance and a police state is not too high a price to pay for the safety of their little ones.
As an engineer you really have a finite amount of good working years, and accepting startup salary vs big tech compensation is a bigger risk than founders are willing to generally admit.
I would be thrilled, if I were board member I would want the organisation to succeed and ChatGPT can't be described as anything other than an unmitigated success. I wouldn't feel the need to make myself the main character of the story and act like my permission was required for innovation. But that's just me.
Almost everyone would prefer not to have repeats of Enron, FTX etc where poor corporate governance and unethical behaviour is tolerated just because the company is making lots of money.
I'm not sure OpenAI compares to Enron or FTX in terms of unethical behaviour or financial fraud. The only similarities might be, funnily enough, disfunctional boards (or in FTX's case, no board).
If OpenAI gets as far with AI as they want to, then it is absolutely imperative that nobody there is accidentally leaning on the scales, let alone actually doing anything (even something minor) with selfish intent.
Even if they're "just another tech firm", that's still enough for them to be another Facebook with the Cambridge Analytica and Rohingya scandals, and many people would like to make sure such things don't repeat.
It is. Like I said above I would be concerned about the continuing success of the organisation according to its operating principles. Destroying the company over childish disputes would not be fulfilling that charter. I'm very glad OpenAI got the competent board they deserved after this event.
I've always thought the purpose of code review was to determine if the implementation was consistent from an architectural perspective, bug finding seems like something that should be caught by unit tests and other tools (unless you happen to catch it by chance).
In Dubai right now, one of the things I really like about this place is the optimism they have for the future. It's exhausting working in tech and being in places that don't believe engineering will usher in a better future (but somehow think legal policy will). I'm visiting the museum of the future tomorrow, can't wait.
Having optimism about the future means it will change for the better. You are referring to the present. Weird how many people find this concept uncomfortable, and perhaps is a good example of my original argument.
There's foolish optimism too. E.g. what is stopping the dubai government from ending laws like death penalty for homosexuals and atheists, or being put on trial for violating ramedan as a nonmuslim? Nothing, except for their cruel leadership who is interested in harming groups they don't agree with in this manner. Why would you expect to change if it hasn't already? What evidence does the leadership need to wake up from their bigotry and hatred? Has logic and empathy ever shifted a bigots opinions before? I think not. You can argue well "the next generation will be better" but at the same time this current generation of leadership is the generation that should have known better, yet here we are.
Every culture at some stage has its dark ages, western countries did exactly the same thing not more than 200 years ago. They changed, all things change. Your argument regarding the high water mark of cultural morality could be used by Europeans about Americans currently (and frequently is). It doesn't make America a bad country in my eyes though, still find it amazing. I'm not going to judge each place by its lowest points but the gradient its on.
Given that I doubt you are following the high water of cultural morality as it shifts around the world, sounds to me like bigotry might be fueling you here.
Nothing stops them but it doesn't happen overnight. These laws have been in place for a long long time. Women weren't allowed to drive in Dubai until 2018 but it changed. Changes will come but not in a blink of an eye
I feel you, however I would say at the very least I find the YC submission process a very useful exercise and encourage all people thinking of doing a startup to complete it, even if you don't submit it. When I submitted to YC and got an interview with them, they were extremely courteous to me, way more so than the VCs and investors I'd dealt with, and while they ultimately didn't accept me they sent me a lot of feedback with how I could improve for next time. That is much appreciated and I won't forget it.
As a counter point it would be nice to see some data around predictors such as degrees, connections etc.
From a cashflow perspective however it is no where near close to capturing its economic benefit, and to be fair to the bubble supporters I agree that I can't see how it can capture this in the short term. In the long term its pretty clear that there will be some major winners here who will reap big rewards.