The terrible thing that happened was Larry Page and Sergei Brin made enough money that they don’t need to care what you think anymore.

It’s only a matter of time before the US government breaks up Google. Even Larry Page knows it, which is why he set up Alphabet. But that won’t be enough to keep Google intact. It can’t be enough. Because if the US government doesn’t dismember Google, at the rate things are going, the US public will dismember Larry Page.

Nothing of value will be lost either way.

That's actually true. I can think of some Google services (books, groups, which I already mentioned), but again, Google is letting these things stagnate anyway, and hasn't updated them in years. And maybe it's time for another company / organization / agency to step in and take its place, because the landscape for entities that "organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" is in fact looking rather stagnant itself in its entirety.

And now we have companies like Slack that are trying to replace IRC, although I'm not really sure why anybody would want that. I'm sure there's a need there, but whenever I use it, it just feels so yucky.

Repeat after me folks:

Google. Is. Not. A. Natural. Monopoly.

Natural monopolies happen when either marginal costs are strictly decreasing or marginal value is strictly increasing. In other words, the service becomes cheaper to provide when more people use it, or it becomes better when more people use it. Facebook is a natural monopoly due to the network effect, but there is nothing about search that makes it work better when more people use the same engine.

Google is a monopoly partly because they get sweetheart deals on almost everything - land, taxes, power, bandwidth. They get early exclusive access to Intel CPUs. Their recruiters get exceptional access to undergraduates. But Google is also a monopoly because they want to be one. They pay Mozilla and Apple billions of dollars a year to promote the Google search engine above all others. They dump their mobile OS to promote Google services, which are in turn all tied together.

This stuff is all the real reason you can’t compete with Google. Not because it’s hard to build a search engine, but because Google gets too many small benefits, and gets away with too many crimes, for another company to ever catch up. And if they thought you even could, they’d just steal your idea and laugh off your lawyer.

(Unrelated to Jon`C's last post.) I still pine for the day when the pen is mightier than the popularity contest.

If you ever find yourself marveling at how quickly Amazon rose to dominate the retail world, just remember this fact.

For the first decade they didn’t collect ****ing sales tax.

I am aware of Jeff Bezos' pathological obsession with avoiding taxes. He's felt this way for a very long time, it seems.

The only reason Jeff Bezos is rich is because of a criminal act. If the laws were enforced correctly, he should have lost the proceeds of his crime. But the laws aren’t being enforced, and Jeff Bezos was able to use the money he defrauded from local and state governments to finance a massive expansion of his business.

Same stuffs going on with hotel regulations, cab regulations,... ****ing food and drug regulations. Selective enforcement of antitrust and income tax laws sailed decades ago, but now it’s a free for all, as long as you’re rich and popular enough.

I was gonna make a joke about how I’m surprised nobody has a billion dollar startup selling heroin, but then I realized that they pharmaceutical companies are literally pushing recreational opiates already.

What a mess.

Laws are for the lesser developed, morally incapable creatures of the sewer echelon of society.

Unethical practices drive profits in most large businesses. Wal-Mart's illegal anti-union activities, banks dumping toxic assets onto municipalities among many other things, AirBnB and Uber evading safety regs, everything you've mentioned about tech. I have a hard time finding exceptions, really.

It's almost as if there are appropriate scales for human systems. Dunno what they are but they're smaller than all that.

Speaking of inappropriate scales for human systems, have we talked about the fact that congress veto-proof passed new sanctions against Russia last summer and Trump just... isn't enforcing them? Or the fact that congressional Republicans are trying to turn the investigation into Trump's ties to Russian organized crime (government) into a Democratic witch hunt?

I mean, I didn't see anything. So ^ that.

Nothing dictator-like about that.

Hitler was also a chronic tax evader who refused to pay even after he was elected in 1933.

Okay, now that's just asking for Godwin's law.

Did you also hear that Dick Cheney feasts on the brains of his vanquished enemies?



As no one has ever accepted a second invitation to Davvol's table, the evincar often dines alone.

Yep. Hitler just... didn't pay his taxes. After he consolidated his power, he had himself declared tax-exempt.

Definitely doesn't remind me of anyone.

Since we're on the topic of monopolies in tech, I'll pass along this article which hit Hacker News today. I only skimmed the article, but my conclusion is that the FTC is basically derelict. It would be interesting to trace the gradual erosion of its enforcement duties.

Who else has got popcorn ready for the official death of net neutrality? I can't wait to see how long it takes my ISP to limit my access to real websites and promote advertising platforms instead. And now that the W3C no longer has any pretense that it cares about users, I can't wait to see how long it takes the web to become unusable without content decryption module DRM. It took javascript what -- ? 10 years to make the web unusable without javascript enabled? I give it five years, tops, this time around.

It was a good run, dudes. I'm glad to have been around for the glory days of the web, but it makes me sad there are so few people who care about what it has become. It seems like 99% of people can't even see the issue. So what's it going to be? IPFS to the rescue? Should we go back to using FTP for everything? I don't know, but I really hope the ****ing-over-of-technology-for-the-benefit-of-giant-corporations stops accelerating so damn quickly at some point. It's practically unbearable already.

Apparently Google (funny seeing them again in this thread) is pushing a very aggressive DRM API, which basically only works by giving Google full control over your device, or else you get shut out of using things like Netflix.



https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15547397

It really looks like it's time to break these guys up. With a trajectory like this, it only seems like a matter of time.

Only when we stop the larger taking-over-of-all-aspects-of-our-lives-for-the-benefit-of-giant-corporations issue.

On the other hand, a dystopian geohell in which the United States is a technocracy run by a clown fascist president and giant megacorporations is pretty cyberpunk and that's cool.

In other news, a study was done which confirms stuff everybody already knew.

Those questions are for the most part highly disagreeable things to consent to (in my own opinion), but it still feels just a bit slippery, since it seems too much to ask of most people to think about these questions with any amount of sophistication. Of course the gut reaction is what's important, and those distributions certainly are telling. No surprise who "won" this poll.

Everyone except the center-left leftist bashers who think that it's the "Socialist Left" who has the real problem with misogyny. (FOR EXAMPLE: https://twitter.com/zackbeauchamp/status/922832221114953728)

Why am I not surprised that the numbers would indicate that that the "Bernie Bros" are actually more progressive on woman's issues, despite the center-left screeching about "facts" incessantly?

What the heck do Rubio supporters have against people they see as gaining special favors (compared to their answer to the first question)? Is this a spillover opinion from something racial? After all, Florida....

And Cruz is almost tied with Trump as being the most evil.

That's true. Lately there has been a bunch of focus on sexism in the left-wing circles I read online, it's really entered the limelight. It's a serious topic that needs to be addressed. I also feel it's a tool that can be used by centrists to distract the left, though. Since, from what I can tell, the left takes sexism far more seriously than other political leanings, and will engage in some fairly thoughtful self-criticism. But overall I think sexism, esp casual sexism is a worse problem on all other parts of the political spectrum. But call a Trump supporter sexist and see if that sticks.

Overall though, the complaint of centrists that the left is somehow "more" sexist is fairytale delusion.

I mean, just think about Ted Cruz, and think about the types of people who would support that man, and I think the image rendered will leave little doubts as to what's happened there.

Definitely. It's a smear tactic.

I've never met anyone who believed that anyway. I'm sure it says more about Clinton apologists than it says about anything else

Also, can anyone else commiserate with me about how thoroughly annoying Zack Beauchamp is as a media personality? The dude is profoundly obnoxious.

A recent poll suggested that, even among Hillary voters, Bernie wins out in popularity. (As well, a different poll suggested Bernie supporters were more progressive on race issues than Hillary supporters). Most Americans support and like single payer. And most people in any form on the left have pretty similar progressive views.

The writing is on the wall. The type of policies and positions that Occupy people, Sanders support are very popular. People really really dislike moneyed interest in Washington. And that is probably where the biggest contradiction was in Hillary's platform. When she went around saying that campaign finance laws were broken, because moneyed interest has undue influence on politicians and elections, yet also claimed to not be influenced by that same financing. It was internally contradictory. But people see someone like Sanders, with all of his faults, and at least see something different, some hope and promise. Again I really don't want to glorify him personally too much, because really he's just a man and is flawed. But I also feel there's some real hope in the political movement that surrounded him. I don't really care to see him run in 2020 but I hope that same sort of movement will happen again. However:

So, you say, you don't meet people who believe that way. That's fine, I don't come across them often myself. The problem is, the people who do believe that are the people who are most influential in the Democratic party: the same people who buy "Hillary beat sexism" children's books are the same people voting in the primary, the same people who accuse Sanders of costing Hillary the election are the people preparing the party for 2020. These Clinton apologists aren't your everyday people, they're often privileged, bubbled white people with a outsized influence in politics. And they will very likely be the primary voice of any leftward movement in the coming years, where the stakes are much higher than they have been previously (and I don't mean that hyperbolically, I believe the United States is at a tipping point in terms of global power and economics). But the leftward shift in people's sensibilities will march over Clintonites and leave them in the dust if they don't fight, they're entrenched in privilege and power and don't want to surrender it for anything.

I don't really know him, can you share some of his takes? It seems he has written for Vox, which teeters between tolerable and intolerable for me.

Here's one that's obnoxious! https://mobile.twitter.com/zackbeauchamp/status/922942105986764801

I just threw up in my mouth!

I like some Vox reporters. Quite a few of them, actually. But Beauchamp consistently irritates me by bringing up totally irrelevant internet-identity-left mumbojumbo into discussions that don't call for it at all. On Vox's foreign policy podcast, somebody once stated their opinion that Macron is a handsome man, and Beauchamp responded by saying sarcastically, "Vox's Wordly podcast: the podcast where we objectify men". Another time, someone merely acknowledged the fact that Kim Jung Un was large, and he said, without sarcasm, "don't fat-shame Kim Jung Un"! It's PC censorship at its most smug and unproductive.

Add on top of that that every time he goes on TV he wears tasteless maroon suspenders despite being barely out of his 20s, and that he actively advocates a global world government in a way that's intended to be defiant, that he slavishly follows Democratic orthodoxies on foreign policy, and... well, he deeply annoys me.

As they say, /end rant

So, I just wanted to mention Eversor, realistically I think you're right that violence on the left is nonproductive. I just feel that, our political system is so efficient at alienating everbody from anything that matters, that there's not many places for that anger to go.

That would mean that violence is effectively acting out -- nothing more than a kind of catharsis. I don't see what's good or desirable about that, especially if, as you admit, it's counter-productive.

It's not "desirable", nobody prefers there to be violence, but most of the criticisms of it are shallow and ignore the systemic issues causing it. The basic fact is most Americans are totally politically alienated and, without addressing that core issue, criticizing the violence amounts to dismissing the issues.

I agree that the violence can be traced back to causes, and that addressing those causes is what's really important. 100% agree with that.

But I disagree that dismissing the violence amounts to dismissing the "core issue", as you put it. People make the choice to commit acts of violence; it's not something that they are compelled or coerced into doing, no matter what the pressures they live with. There's no sensible, necessary connection between, on the one hand, a person being desperate because they don't have health insurance and they're suffering from crushing debt due to expenses associated with a congenital condition, and, on the other, throwing a brick through the window of a Foot Locker. The desperation didn't compel the act of violence; the person chose to do it, even if they allege they did it as reaction to their deplorable circumstances. The people who commit acts of violence are breaking the law, they're criminals, and they're doing something wrong. They're accountable for their choice, not the people whose exploitative policies were a remote cause, at best.

And, furthermore, there's no necessary connection between the suffering of the perpetrator of the violence and the victim of the violence. What's the connection between the owner of the Foot Locker franchise having to pay for a new window and another person not having health insurance? The lack of dissonance between those two things is a reason why the violence is especially egregious. (And, obviously, one can imagine violence that is much, much worse, and involves people dying.)

I expect that, ultimately, the flare up of right-wing violence has to do with poor prospects for upward social mobility amongst a certain class of white Americans who believed at one point that they would become wealthier than they are now, and that the racist, anti-immigrant and anti-semitic dimensions of their ideology are really just various ways that uneducated, deranged people explain to themselves the fact that their expectations don't match their actual economic circumstances. Or, in other words, it has to do with desperation related to the fact that the economy isn't working for them as well as they'd like. I think if you're going to say that "criticizing the violence amounts to dismissing the issues" on left-wing violence, you'd have to do the same vis-a-vis right-wing violence.

And I don't expect you want to do that.