beecat

Correction: Title should read "Why It's Hard for Startups to Excise Wealth From Europe."

Cigarettes are technology. They are referred to as "nicotine delivery devices" in the tobacco industry. Magazines are technology. Billboards are technology.

If google is part of the "technology industry" then you could say there is no real delineation between the two industries. It seems like we're either making technology for advertisements or we're using technology to advertise.

The lawsuit said GitHub had an obligation under California law and industry standards to keep off or remove the Social Security numbers and personal information from its site. The plaintiffs believe that because Social Security numbers had a fixed format, GitHub should have been able to identify and remove this data

I can't wait until I get to debug our first build that won't run because we uploaded some data, however broadly that ends up being defined, with 9 digits in a row...

... And why exactly should we return to that? How is that progress?

Peak Medium.

Yeah no contract, but if you don't formally cancel your month-to-month service they will send you to collections for the next months bill.

If I think about it, I feel pretty dehumanized myself each time I click through a clumsy AWS GUI for a set of shoddy services that my company pays 60k a month for the privilege of running our operations and storing our business intelligence on the computers of the one entity that has not only the financial muscle but also the lack of moral scrupples to use that intelligence to enter our market and outcompete us.

Jussayin'

Solution: Publish your infosec tutorials as fetish videos on pornhub.

I bet they have a better monetization model for creators anyways.

Good, and good enough, are two totally different things.

I didn't see this before I posted my reply. I'm so glad I'm not the only one who is seeing this. I would go so far as instead of saying:

It was fine.

To say that "it was better", because there was more competition.

That's a keen insight, that it might be a "generational thing". I remember things, in general, working better before the Shermann Antitrust Act stopped applying to technology companies.

I don't understand comments like this. I see this sentiment adopted, and echoed by so many really smart people who should know better. They talk about FAANG like they're essential services, like the food supply, or water. Almost as if it's not a real option for ANY business to fail or be overtaken by a competitor. Regardless of their current size and scope, if they all disappeared over the course of a month, do you honestly think nothing would rise up to take their places almost immediately? I mean, I would definitely move a product or two to market and attempt fill some of the demand left in their wake. Wouldn't you?

Section 4-B says it's acceptable to use a customer's personal data:

"To advertise or market the provider's communications-related services to the customer;"

With ISPs that own networks, e.g. Comcast -> NBC, would a service like NBC Sports be considered a communication-related service of Comcast's? If yes, then could they feed that customer data into NBC's advertising infrastructure? If so, could NBC then sell that data?

Do Maine judges tend to honor the spirit or the letter of the law more often?

Okay, for the sake of semantic digression, let's call it 'fraud' then. It's tantamount to fraud...

... Which is tantamount to theft.

Comparing 'Apples' that are killing us to 'Oranges' that will kill us.

I can't second this strongly enough. Why are we utilizing such vast amounts of our limited resources to persuade people to make certain decisions? In my humble opinion it's usually because the decisions the people who employ advertising tactics want the people they are advertising to, to make, are suboptimal, if not downright bad, and people wouldn't make those decisions, but as a by-product of having been advertised to.

Quite frankly, advertising is psychic violence, and you can't escape it. Exploiting people's psychology to consolidate their resources for yourself is tantamount to theft. When men do it to women to push them to sell sex, we call it "pimping", and judge it as a completely reprehensible, unredeemable act. Of course your general well-being is diminished by a barrage of messaging encouraging you in every conceivable way, that the only road to satiety is to act against your own self-interest. How could that not totally fuck with you?

Spending your time coming up with more devious mechanisms, and ways to decrease the escapablity of said mechanisms is a fucking unseemly way to behave, as an individual. As a species, it's absolutely tragic that all those brilliant people doing it, can't break from the comfort of those fat paychecks and find something better to do with their time on Earth... Myself included.

Yeah! That's a really good idea! Why not set an upper limit? Why not set it at say... 5 million dollars? Once you have 5 million in total assets, that's it. You can't keep any income beyond that point. Your income in excess of that is subject to redistribution to the poorest people. Would there even be a tangible decrease in lifestyle for the wealthiest folks?

Yep, it turned out for me the slow transition was best. Over the course of a year anytime I register anything new, I just didn't use my gmail, and would just check both. Eventually I just wasn't checking gmail.

Google -> DuckDuckGo

Gmail -> Protonmail

Chrome -> Firefox

Google Maps -> Paper Maps

The hardest part I could see, would be for someone younger who didn't use search engines before they parsed plain phrases getting used to thinking in terms of keyword blocks, or learning to orient themselves in place by reading a map.

That said, it's fully possible. I found it to actually be more of a process of changing behavior, like say, quitting smoking, than simply substituting services.