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2 hours ago by amrrs

Indian Government recently made Twitter do similar things. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/26/twitter-under-...

Do you know what's worst? A guy was booked yesterday for Tweeting he needed oxygen cylinders which according to a state government is spreading fake news. https://thewire.in/government/amethi-up-police-arfa-khanum-s...

While COVID hasn't been kind to the people of India, The current regime's attempts to curb democracy is quite disturbing.

16 minutes ago by naruvimama

Wasn't that because it was part of a political campaign and foreign actors to spread panic and create chaos.

It is like toilet paper but for oxygen cylinders.

23 minutes ago by baybal2

Do you guys still need oxygen there? How is the situation there really?

I see oxygen production being such a basic industrial process, that I never could've imagined even a most poorly industrialised country having troubles producing it.

Anyways, if anyone really need a really emergency only O2 source:

1. Get a 200A-300A DC welding machine, most importantly with as much safety features as possible.

2. Reasonably fine stainless steel mesh, use most pure stainless you can find. Carbon felt if possible. Roll up in tubes. Weld/braze thick copper conductors the top, make sure they can handle the current without melting things. Make sure to cover exposed copper with something less electrically conductive, in worst case, smoking hot cooking oil. Make sure it does not get onto stainless.

3. Either a U or H shaped vessel from PP or PVC piping, available at plumbing supplies. Alternative, a plastic bucket, and two drinking water bottles perforated a bit in their lower part. Put electrodes into them.

4. Find something to cap vessels, use original caps from bottles. Make holes in them for conductors. Then find hoses you can get through those caps. Use reasonably thick plastic hose to survive hot O2. A proper oxygen hose would be idea. Drill the caps, get hoses through them, and seal any openings with hot glue, silicone caulk, or, in worst case, chewing gum. If you can't find anything to seal it, use the thickest plastic bag you can find, and tape it.

5. Make some semblance of bubblers. Small plastic beverage bottles work well for this.

6. Fill with drinking water, or settled tap water. Make sure there is no chlorine in it. Make sure that water does not reach copper parts, even if they are well protected.

7. Add a table spoon of lye, or soda to water. Mix.

8. Connect electrodes to welding machine.

9. Test it starting with smallest current.

10. If things work, connect hoses to bubblers. Make sure the hydrogen hose goes outdoor, to a very, very well ventilated place.

11. Make some semblance of a breathing mask for the apparatus. Connect it to oxygen supply through a breathing bag. Make some holes in the breathing bag. Eye the calculation so that incoming oxygen displaces at least 10 times the volume of exhaled CO2.

12. Top off water as the thing works using something to protect yourself from being zapped.

13. Adjust the current, holes in the breathing bag, lye/soda content, and bottle position (if used the bottle version) for optimal output.

With 200A 220V supply, you can make 1-3 kg of oxygen per hour, 4-5 kg in the most ideal scenario.

8 minutes ago by PragmaticPulp

They don't need bulk oxygen generated ad-hoc. They need medical grade oxygen delivered in standard medical equipment that they can use in a controlled manner right away.

Chemistry experiments won't solve this.

17 minutes ago by oasisbob

> I see oxygen production being such a basic industrial process, that I never could've imagined even a most poorly industrialised country having troubles producing it.

This article discusses some of the challenges being faced, sounds like most of them are around distribution. India has a large steel industry which is very capable of generating and condensing oxygen.

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/coronavirus-second-w...

14 minutes ago by baybal2

L02 reserve in any hospital should've been enough for weeks per refill.

And hospital with on-site O2 generation should've never had any issue. Any industrial scale O2 production machinery would've had many times the capacity reserve.

an hour ago by yangikan

I don't know why twitter does this.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/25/business/india-covid19-tw...

One of the tweets removed from view was posted by Moloy Ghatak, a labor minister in the opposition-ruled West Bengal state, where Mr. Modi’s party hopes to make big gains in an ongoing election. Mr. Ghatak accused Mr. Modi of “mismanagement” and held him directly responsible for the deaths. His tweet included images of Mr. Modi and his election rallies beside those of the cremations and compared him to Nero, the Roman emperor, for choosing to hold political gatherings and exporting vaccines during a “health crisis.” Another tweet from Revanth Reddy, a sitting member of the parliament, used a hashtag that blamed Mr. Modi for the “disaster.” “India recording over 2 lakh cases everyday,” it said, using an Indian numbering unit that means 200,000 cases. “Shortage of vaccines, shortage of medicines, increasing number of deaths.

39 minutes ago by MattGaiser

> I don't know why twitter does this.

A reality of scaring social media companies with regulatory threats.

People call for regulation and unsurprisingly their priority becomes keeping those who might regulate them happy with them.

2 hours ago by rodgerd

COVID is a catastrophe in India because the government's core is religious extremism and other forms of bigotry, and those have driven its response, including cabinet members promoting folk remedies above vaccines and encouraging large religious gatherings (including an upcoming one).

2 hours ago by encryptluks2

I guess in America there is a lot of the same with some groups of people believing they can pray the virus away or that it simply doesn't exist and is part of some satanic cults agenda.

2 hours ago by bobthechef

Seems like a very caricaturish characterization of what people actually believe. That sort of broad contempt and unwillingness to understand the range of perspectives on the issues besides the "official" (read: oligarchic) narrative is unfortunate.

2 hours ago by lindy2021

Or those that won't trust the science and insist on masks and distancing even after vaccination.

2 hours ago by undefined

[deleted]

2 hours ago by bobthechef

What is "religious extremism"? That term always struck me as odd. Either the truth claims of a religion are true, somewhat true, or false.

If they're true (read: have sufficiently good reasons to believe them), then it's not extreme to live in accordance with them. In fact, it is arguably insane not to live in accordance with them. Imagine if someone said "Oh, I believe things fall to the ground when dropped, but I'm not an extremist about it". What does that mean?? That you only sort of believe that they fall to the ground? That you only sometimes avoid jumping off of bridges?

If they're somewhat true, then they need refinement and correction because they contain error.

If they're false, then it would be an error to follow them in any way.

So really, if what's being done is evil or wrong, it should maybe be called religious error, or just error.

an hour ago by InitialLastName

I would expect that most of the window of peoples' perspectives in most religions fall in the "mostly true, but we don't know which bits, so we'll be tolerant of people who disagree about which bits". Extremists are the people who say "Absolutely true, thus anyone who disagrees on any of it is a *"

As an example, I believe that things usually fall to the ground when dropped, but I've seen a number of counter-examples, and I'm aware of some disagreement at the margins over exactly how quickly those things fall. An extremist would say "Anyone who disagrees that things fall with an acceleration of 9.8m/s^2 is a transgressor".

edit: format

22 minutes ago by tobr

I don’t think extremism is about whether the claim is true or not. It’s about what the claim is. If you’re a gravity extremist, it would suggest that your views on gravity are very different from what’s considered mainstream.

an hour ago by SirYandi

I think it has something to do with one's tolerance of other people's version of truth.

an hour ago by eloff

Most people say they believe some of the ideas in their religion, but often act like they don't.

Extremists believe many of the ideas of their religion with certainty, and act in accordance which can lead to behaviour that is illogical from an outside perspective or ethically unhinged. Extremists are the ones who take their religion too seriously.

You can be an extremist about other ideas too. Like a raw vegan. Arguably regular vegans too - there's no health reason to be 100% vegan vs 95% - probably the contrary.

2 hours ago by asenna

The media control and censorship here in India is definitely getting our of hand!

Setting aside the absolute criminal mismanagement and planning of the Covid situation in the past few months, the fact that the people in power are still applying their brains and might into figuring out how to manipulate the narrative and how to squash dissent in this moment when the country is going through an unimaginable disaster.

Just today, a guy was slapped with some serious charges (which could lead to Jail time) because he tweeted that he needed Oxygen for his Grandfather. [1][2]

I know this is sounding alarmist but I've seen the change in the past 8 years and the country is heading in the direction of China at breakneck speed right now (not in the good way).

[1] https://thewire.in/government/amethi-up-police-arfa-khanum-s...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/mzx3zb/youth_sought_...

an hour ago by elliekelly

I don’t understand what Modi is doing. It seems like many huge companies based in the west will be looking to leave China as much as possible in the next 5(ish) years and India is a democracy perfectly situated to grab all of that economic productivity. They have the education, the infrastructure, and the population. All they have to do is be a bit less dictator-y than China and a bit more respectful of human rights.

That should be a pretty low bar. But for some reason when Modi should be positioning India as “we’re not like China” he instead seems intent on repeatedly pointing out the similarities on a national stage. It just seems really short-sighted to me.

32 minutes ago by akiselev

Many Indian politicians learned the exact opposite lesson from the 90s to 2000s when China's economy far outgrew India's despite the supposed geographical, labor, and education similarities between the two (i.e. see the debate from a western perspective in [1][2][3]).

The idea that democracy and free markets help with economic growth simply didn't pan out for India w.r.t. its neighbor and biggest rival. As far as Modi is concerned, why keep trying something that doesn't work? Especially when the alternative is self serving.

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2003/07/01/can-india-overtake-chin...

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/06/india-plays-catch-up/

[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/07/05/think-again-indias-rise...

5 minutes ago by baybal2

One needs to be heavily inebriated to call India a market economy even today, after 3 decades of supposed economic "liberalisation."

I myself is in the process of scouting an opening for a satellite office in India now.

The progress India made towards freer markets since a decade ago is this ->_<- much.

Best to compare it with Bloc of late eighties, early nineties.

an hour ago by asenna

Absolutely agree with this. In fact even if the minimum they do is walk back to how the country was before Modi, that would be a huge step forward. Not talking about politics here but just to a time when comedians and journalists didn't have to fear harassment for doing their jobs.

Also a fun fact - Modi has not done a single open, unscripted press conference in his entire 7 years of being in power! Can you actually believe that. He hasn't taken a single question on camera that was not per-determined. Most likely because of the lesson he learned after the one interview he did with a reputed Journalist a while back before coming to power - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAGAYL8dtic

The effort that he puts into forming his public-image is actually impressive at some level.

an hour ago by Bang2Bay

probably the likes of arfa khanum are not of interest to modi.

33 minutes ago by Bang2Bay

It is better to be a consumer than a west leaning producer. One would never advance when the primary market is outside the country.

32 minutes ago by plinkplonk

>I don’t understand what Modi is doing.

I assure you, neither does he.

Not a particularly intellectual or introspective man. He is a living example of the Peter Principle.

Too bad a billion people have to suffer for his incompetence.

2 hours ago by lindy2021

The entire world is heading in the direction of China at breakneck speed. The capitol of the free world is surrounded by steel mesh fencing with some 2,250 armed National Guard troops on duty.

We can't expect developing countries to uphold democracy as it dies in the west.

2 hours ago by yinyang_in

This I find is true, globalisation is eventually failing as imo it was always about cheap labour never anything elss and nationalism is on rise. Every country protects rights, America being leader of free world have those patriotic acts where they stopped raw material in name of America first(full blown nationalism), that too when leader is from by democrat party(left)

Nationalism is on rise even Germany's chancellor gave some taste of it(on parma industry comment), but still democracy is all good in india as I see, where to do you see democracy falling in india?

P.s. pardon my english, still learning.

an hour ago by bobthechef

> it was always about cheap labour

Oh yes.

Globalism is not a healthy arrangement. It violates the principle of subsidiary. Global oligarchs are freaking out and hence the frantic uptick in fear mongering. They fear their loss of power. Deflection is key. Stirring up manufactured conflicts among the plebes and bogging people down in bad, self-destructive habits (like drugs and porn) and an endless series of diversions is the classic way you stifle uprisings and pacify the populace. Anyone with a basic understanding of history knows this. The surveillance state and rampant censorship are attempts to neutralize threats (the private sector can skirt constitutional obstacles because, hey, it's private, right?). It is troublesome if you can't use knowledge of history to read the signs in our day. It's one of the reasons we learn history: to understand our present conditions and learn from the past.

The merger of state capitalism and state socialism has been under way and crossing a new threshold, now represented by the convenient phrase "the Great Reset".

2 hours ago by ethbr0

I think that says less about democracy and more about the US' former president.

2 hours ago by lindy2021

This is on Biden's watch.

Trump was berated for even contemplating deploying the National Guard as American cities burnt last summer.

2 hours ago by nawgz

Well, it kinda died in developing countries because of the west too. There was a sweet spot in human history where communication was strong enough and technology limited enough where some many groups managed to find themselves on the brink of democracy, and the USA and other powerful bully nations replaced those regimes to keep the exploitative world order.

It's no surprise with a house of cards like that that it all eventually collapsed. Extremely depressing though.

2 hours ago by hkt

The US just had a pretty good election. Democracy is alive and well.

an hour ago by krapp

The US should consider itself lucky that its well armed neo-nazi lunatic fringe and the Orange Man were better at racist shitposting than pulling off a coup d'Ă©tat.

"Pretty good" sounds like a B, but I'd give this last election a C- at best.

12 minutes ago by baybal2

I'm afraid to say, but Modi G's approval ratings are made out of steel.

If they keep above 60% even with current royal mess happening, and don't know what else he can do to loose the election.

2 hours ago by yinyang_in

First the wire is known to be very alt-left but even then the patient didn't had any requirement for oxygen, his grandfather died of heart-attack. Not sure which part of article or twitter thread says a normal guy got screwed up ?

2 hours ago by asenna

Here's the tweet:

https://twitter.com/khanumarfa/status/1386757457393770496?s=...

It's in the article as well. The text message was tweeted out.

I understand the wire can be considered left-leaning but does that automatically make everything they report on as false?

You can ignore their "alt-left" opinion but screenshots of texts and tweets are actual facts that happened.

41 minutes ago by Bang2Bay

the correct tweet is the one where the local elected leader was targeted[1]. the leader made police run around to help the person. cops found foul play.[2] What am I missing?

[1]https://twitter.com/elsamariedsilva/status/13867600304818954... [2] https://twitter.com/amethipolice/status/1386982878328758273?...

an hour ago by iliekcomputers

He has charges against him for trying to find oxygen for his sick grandfather. What part of that does not involve the guy getting screwed?

Also, instead of criticizing the source, criticize the content.

2 hours ago by ceejayoz

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/health-library/diseases-and-con...

> Often a person who is having a heart attack is given oxygen, which also helps heart tissue damage to be less.

COVID isn't the only disease that requires oxygen.

2 hours ago by ben_w

So far as I can see, “alt left” is a recent neologism to denigrate anyone who opposed Trump. What do you mean when you describe them thusly?

2 hours ago by Vadoff

Updated at 1.17am IST, Thursday: Facebook comms Andy Stone said the company has restored the posts and is “looking into what happened.”

2 hours ago by asenna

I've always wanted to ask the HN community about this problem, what exactly can be done from a technology standpoint?

I feel we're already at a point where tools are available to make a censorship resistant social network.

The main challenges would be: - Kickstarting a network is a difficult problem - A way to ensure sane content moderation (child porn / abuse, etc) while still keeping the decision-making decentralized enough - Easy enough for the first time mobile internet users to onboard

Would love to hear your thoughts. In my opinion a blockchain based solution seems appropriate (I know there's a lot blockchain-hate on HN but requesting for constructive comments).

I know something needs to come up soon because the situation on the ground is actually quite bad.

an hour ago by lindy2021

> Kickstarting a network is a difficult problem

Crypto networks can solve this through incentivising early adopters, e.g. https://bitclout.com

> A way to ensure sane content moderation (child porn / abuse, etc) while still keeping the decision-making decentralized enough

Subscribable mute and block lists. This allows each user to tailor moderation to their comfort level.

an hour ago by lovecg

What’s a “censorship resistant social network”? Would Trump be allowed on this platform? Would it be hosted on AWS? One person’s censorship is another person’s moderation.

2 hours ago by lucasmullens

I think Mastodon might be similar to what you're describing?

an hour ago by asenna

Yeah I've heard about it and will be looking into this. But I haven't actually ever seen it in the wild anywhere online which makes me wonder why it hasn't gained traction much.

For a country like India, the solution needs to be dead simple. Exploring a mastadon server a bit, it doesn't feel like it would cut it.

44 minutes ago by undefined

[deleted]

2 hours ago by mancerayder

Shocking. What do the pro censorship people say all the time when defending Facebook or Twitter: speech is free but not free from consequences. I believe that's the line.

2 hours ago by neither_color

I believe they say "as long as we censor just this one particular politician because he's really bad just this one time using a variety of arbitrarily enforced technicalities, it's not censorship and it'll never come back to haunt us."

an hour ago by pionar

I believe you're:

A) using a strawman B) Comparing apples and oranges

When facebook decides on its own to remove posts, I'm ok with that, they're a private company and can do what they want on their platform.

When the government tells FB to remove posts, I'm not mad at FB; they can do what they want on their platform. I'm mad at the government for telling them to do that.

40 minutes ago by mancerayder

The government can suggest it and they can choose to do it. No?

Censorship is censorship. No one cares about narrowly defining Freedom of Speech as conflated with the 1st Amendment except Americans .. and especially Americans who support censorship on giant monopolistic platforms.

41 minutes ago by pyronik19

So when democrats drag zuck in front of congress and ask why he isn't banning more right wingers, no government coercion?

37 minutes ago by mancerayder

No because it's just a friendly suggestion, kind of like the Indian government.

Bottom line: Silicon Valley techies often suffer from a lack of education in civic matters and liberal democratic values in particular. They believe as long as Bad People have their, here's another term they often use, megaphones, taken away, then ethically it's a thumbs up.

The lack of civic education and historical education becomes evident when you ask them, OK, you support censorship and cleansing misinformation: now who decides?

2 hours ago by ceejayoz

> I believe that's the line.

I believe you're misrepresenting the line.

Free speech in the US is about being protected from government-inflicted consequences. I can say "fuck you" all I like, but that's never meant I can say it to my boss and demand a First Amendment right to remain employed.

It's never been an absolute, either. Incitement to riot, fraud, libel, actionable threats; all are speech, but we've long accepted restrictions on it.

29 minutes ago by hajile

When I was younger, the Left was pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship. Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.

It seems that the big factor is power. When you're in power, you use any excuse to silence the people who disagree. When you're not in power, you recognize that free speech is a universal principle.

The majority of the US is anti-abortion. Would you be fine if they cancelled the other side? Huge swaths are anti-gay. Should coming out mean people are free to cancel you? While the number of churchgoers is around half, the number of Christians in the US is well over 75%. Should claiming to be another religion (or no religion) mean that cancellation is in order?

Once everyone agrees that persecution is acceptable, all that's left is arguing about who to persecute.

The government is by the people and for the people. It reflects the values of the people. You claim that free speech is government only, but why does the government create ideas like hate speech then? Why force private people and businesses to desegregate if your inalienable rights only apply to the government? If rights are inherent in humans, but may be stripped at a whim by the majority, either they aren't actually rights or the pro-cancellation majority are actually despots.

The pro-cancellation argument is all sophistry to gain and increase power.

25 minutes ago by dragonwriter

> When I was younger, the Left was pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.

> Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.

I'm not sure when you were talking about; since at least the 1980s the positions have been basically identical—to today, both sides complaining of institutional biases cutting against them (often both accurately, though selectively), both sides claiming support for free speech but disagreeing that what the other side advocated for was genuine freedom. The big change is that the Right recently adopted the phrase “cancel culture” after nearly 4 decades of using “political correctness” in exactly the same arguments.

Sounds more likely that as you’ve gotten older you’ve just gained more sympathy for the right and thus have given more credit to their claims of support for free speech than you used to.

19 minutes ago by mancerayder

>When I was younger, the Left was pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.

>Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.

100 percent. When I was growing up, the Christian Right wanted to pass anti-flag burning amendments, because veterans were offended. Pornography, because children might see it. Bad words. Unpatriotic stuff, defined as socialism or communism, was a few decades before me. Also to protect morality.

Today we ban so-called hate speech and X phobic speech because 'it hurts'. And in the same way, there's a religious zealotry where if you attempt to use reason you'll be psychoanalyzed and motives attributed.

My advice is, don't engage with these people. If someone uses phraseology like words kill, words are violence, silence is violence, there is no such thing as neutrality, megaphone, we need to do better, systemic Xism, and so forth, run, don't walk away. It's a secular religious movement.

My main problem is the secular religious movement of banishing naughty thoughts has taken Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue by storm.

2 hours ago by readflaggedcomm

The First Amendment is about that. The principle is broader. We don't all accept restrictions on it.

2 hours ago by rodgerd

The Indian government's position is perfectly in line with so-called free speech defenders: they are shutting down illegal content, not applying their own judgement.

42 minutes ago by mancerayder

Couldn't Facebook just call it Misinformation? Certainly authoritarian enough for Silicon Valley to rally behind.

2 hours ago by lindy2021

When you can define the laws, any content you dislike becomes "Illegal content".

2 hours ago by 1cvmask

Facebook and other social media platforms (even Google manipulating and sacrificing search integrity to prevent unearthing alleged misinformation much to the detriment of academic research when we need long tail results) are already censorship platforms and have been for a while. They even censor academic conferences on censorship.

Outcomes like these are to be expected when you also commit censorship (including shadow banning, algorithmic downvoting etc.) blatantly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217

https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce...

an hour ago by lovecg

This headline is at best misleading and at worst intentionally dishonest. How I interpreted it when I first saw it: “Facebook is considering hiding these posts” (looking into, as in planning to do something). Censorship, bad, etc. What it actually says (after reading the article and the referenced tweet): “Facebook is investigating why these posts were removed” (looking into, as in investigating an action that happened).

42 minutes ago by pessimizer

The willingness of the big social networks and Google to submit to authoritarian rulers makes it obvious that any difficulties we have in the US with them are a legislative failure, not a Silicon Valley one. They're not evil, or twisted, they're sociopathic; they'll do whatever they're told, but we refuse to decide what to tell them. They'd love to be made into common carriers as long as they could still run ads.

37 minutes ago by varispeed

Their customers are shareholders and consumers are just a product. They'll do whatever it takes to provide value for their customers. It's like turning capitalism on its head and that should be stopped.

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