Cool. You wrote an opinion that perfectly matched the opinion of a particular demographic that’s common on the site, and are now very offended that no one knew you were someone less common.
Which also entirely draws the conversation away from you saying it’s good that the government pulled funding from an organization that’s doing something good because government messes everything up.

They’re already a non-profit. Why are you upset that they got money from the government? Wouldn’t the ideal to you be an NGO that got money without being under government control, and was therefore free from business influence as well?

Linux is a great example. It’s backed by a non-profit foundation, under the direction of mostly corporate advocates. That’s what people talk about when they talk about a non-profit being beholden to corporate money.
The shape of Linux has steadily been pushed towards being more and more focused on server and data center operations, since that’s what the people in charge of funding allocation care about, and that’s what they’ll direct their parent organizations to contribute developers to working on.

Your government sucks. I get that. It doesn’t mean I don’t expect more from mine, and it doesn’t mean that I reject the notion that I should have say in the management of the things around me.
The NGO that you envision will do a better job managing the drainage where I live doesn’t answer to me, and I have no recourse if they mess up and flood my house.

I’d like something like the NGO you envision, but with public accountability. This is often called a “government”.

Yeah, the lobbying question is a complicated one.

In an ideal world it would be much closer to how the standards committees work. The issue isn’t people sharing their opinions and desires for how the system should work, it’s when they use inequitable means to bias the decision. My industry, security, has lobbied for official guidelines on security requirements for different situations. Makes it easier to tell hospitals they can’t have nurses sharing login credentials: government says that’s bad, and now your insurance says it’s a liability.

The problem is that lobbying too often comes with stuff like a “we’re always hiring like minded people at our lobbying firm, if you happen to find yourself in the position to do so, give us a call.”.
It’s too easy for people with a lot of money to make their voices more heard.

It’s not that the wealthy and business interests should be barred from sharing opinions with legislators, it’s that “volume” shouldn’t be proportional to money. My voice as a person who lives near a river should be comparable to that of the guy who owns the car wash upstream when it comes to questions of how much we care about runoff going into the river.

So you want it to be run like it is today, but with less money? Do you think they’re going to spread whatever incompetence you see them having via funding?

Usually when people celebrate the removal of government from a public service it’s because they think it should be arranged to turn a profit.

You didn’t list your stance on every issue in your comment so I can only assume that you have the rest of the beliefs that I’ve always seen go with that opinion.

people will always mess stuff up. Government is just the group of people you have a say in.

When the public good gets messed up, I’d rather it be by the people I can vote out than by the people who only answer to shareholders.

I just don’t understand the persistent belief that a profit motive will magically make something more aligned with the public good.

I think you might be overestimating how complex the system is. This isn’t collaborative, and it’s barely even dynamic. It’s essentially bookkeeping around a list of numbers and a zip file of text documents.

https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

The reporting of the issues is already done by other people, they just rely on a central group to keep the numbers from colliding.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-3576

Not a whole lot there.

Significantly more worrying is the nvd.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-31161

There’s additional data attached relating to not just the vulnerability, but exploitation and the system configuration that’s known to be exploitable.

Up until now it was benign, as well as entirely unavoidable, for so much of the infrastructure of the Internet to be closely tied to the US government.

Even corporations understand the value of having a seat at the table. A significant reason for corporate sponsorship of standards groups and such is so that if it comes up, they have a person there who can argue for their interests.
Not even in an interesting or corrupt way.
“Our engineers think it would be better to do it this way, any objections?” And then everyone talks about it.

Leaving means you only get to use what others put together. If your needs don’t fit you just have to cope.

Corporations love getting stuff for free, but if all it takes to solve a technical problem is cash, that’s great too. Cash is a better way to solve a technical problem than time and engineers.

The things that are cheaper to make in the US were already made in the US.
Because of the high cost of labor here, we tend to specialize in things where the unit cost is so high that the labor cost doesn’t matter as much and spending extra for educated and skilled workers becomes a cheaper upgrade. Things like jet engine parts, engines, and machine tools.
Also things where you make a lot of them in an automated fashion, like precision screws and nuts or refined petroleum products. We’re probably not making the plastic bags or chairs, but we would be making the giant tub of plastic beads used for the injection moulding, which is then shipped to Malaysia to be moulded, and then back to the US to be a deck chair.

The set of industries that are close enough to the line to make sense to move to the US and can be moved quickly enough for it to matter is vanishingly small.
It’s why most of our exports have been intangible for so long.

I believe it’s paid as part of clearing customs. Since everything is in some capacity inspected (even if that just means checking the weight, container seals, and serial numbers in the freight container), that means there’s some record of what’s coming in and from where. At that point the importer pays customs the various fees and taxes before customs let’s them take the goods out of the port of entry.

The importer would mark it down as part of the taxes that they paid on their purchase, but it would largely only matter so that they can appropriately indicate what portion of the purchase price was taxes that have already been paid so they don’t double pay later.

If not having it doesn’t lose you anything can I have yours?

You’re focusing on loss of money while ignoring loss of value. It doesn’t have to be currency to have value, and the value of something falling has an impact on your expectation of realizing that value later.

Your position works better with people treating the expectation of profit as value, and decrying unmet profit goals as a loss.

I lack your confidence in the racism of the US military. I think it just changes what terms they use to dehuminize anyone they shoot.
It’s not like the US has never invaded anyplace with white people.

I have zero belief that any units will ignore or slow walk any orders. There’s just no history of that happening in recent US military existence to expect it to happen now. Vietnam saw a handful of cases where people likely killed their commanders, but it very plainly didn’t impact the course of the war.

The UN will never determine that the US is engaged in an illegal war. The security council needs to vote on that, and the US gets to veto. The ICC doesn’t apply to the US because we never ratified the agreement. It’s just someone elses laws.

Direct action against the military is more likely to have an effect, but linking arms is not going to be effective. Impeding military production is just going to get you beaten and arrested, at best.
Specifically interfering with military operations is particularly illegal and carries penalties way worse than the usual you get for messing with other businesses.
If you’re going that far, at least do something effective rather than slowing down a truck for a few hours.
Look to the WW1 protests, and what was effective there and what happened.

But that also assumes the US military is unified to follow orders into an illegal war, and that may not be the case.

Curious about why it would be an illegal war. Unjust, immoral, unprovoked, and unnecessary are not actually what makes a war illegal.

The invasion of Iraq was entirely based on false pretenses and the military was perfectly unified. Compared to that, an open war of conquest is pretty reasonable.

No, the supreme Court ruled that the individual who is the president has immunity for actions taken in a presidential capacity. Absolute immunity for exercising presidential powers, and and presumptive for actions taken as the president, pending the prosecutions ability to argue that holding the individual personally liable couldn’t possibly infringe of their exercise of constitutional powers, and they have to make that case without referring to intent.

The specific case was about when trump, as president, contacted Governors and law enforcement to try to convince them to overturn the election for him. Under their ruling, since he was acting as the president, they decided you can’t consider his intent. So the prosecution would need to argue that there’s no possible infringement on constitutional power if the president can be prosecuted for discussing an election, election security, and election interference with Governors and law enforcement.

On what? It’s all crazy. “We’re going to invade Gaza” is just as insane as “we’re going to put 18 year olds in charge of the Treasury”, “eliminate the department of education” or “win the war on diversity”.