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I directly addressed the "no true Scotsman" issue, for example.

No, you didn't. You simply asserted that you weren't committing that fallacy.

Similarly, you simply asserted that when evaluating unexpected positive and negative consequences of an action, it is acceptable to dismiss nearly all of the positive ones while including nearly all of the negative ones. This is obvious nonsense, but you couldn't see the problem because you're blinded by your ideology.

And after that you engaged in the always fun sport of moving the goalposts. You switched your argument from 'there are no unintended positive consequences' to a completely unrelated set of complaints about public discourse.

You were intellectually dishonest. If you can't see this, it is only because you do not wish to see it. Your cognitive dissonance will not change reality.

I respond poorly to people accusing me of intellectual dishonesty without demonstrating in what way I'm being dishonest.

Grow up.

It's in no way appropriate. You're purposefully conflating completely different arguments to try to score cheap political points.

And it's almost comic that you're essentially pretending that nobody talked about potential problems and failure modes for various healthcare reforms prior to the passing of Obamacare.

It saddens me that you seem to be an otherwise intelligent person, but you're so blinded by your ideology that you don't realize what intellectually dishonest nonsense you're spewing.

If you're going to stand by your judgment, you should do so on both sides.

Actors within government are generally aware that their actions have some negative consequences. They have a lot of smart people who tell them about problems that can (and will) occur, along with some likelihoods of the magnitude and frequencies of those problems. So under your classification scheme, there really aren't many unintended downsides of governmental action.

You seem to be conflating the public marketing of a policy (it will be sunshine and rainbows) with the internal understanding of a policy (it will solve a few problems, create a few different problems, and hopefully net positive).

Give me a break. I guarantee that when NASA was proposed, nobody had a presentation which showed all the companies that would result, nor all the side effects of the engineering talent that would be accreted in industry and universities, nor all the innovations that would occur not just from items listed in the RFPs but from items inspired by those items and so on.

You're pretending that if something good happens after a government action it was all intentional and thus there were never any unintended positive impacts of anything, ever. Because government is full of far-sighted individuals who totally grokked that ARPAnet would eventually be used for every conceivable form of communication, entertainment, and commerce.

The world is complex. Governmental programs aren't all good or all bad. Reality isn't compatible with your small-minded ideology. Deal with it.

Yes. Any moderately intelligent and informed person could look at a government program and identify both positive and negative impacts.

As an example, the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem started from the confluence of government programs, such as one where private investor dollars were matched by government dollars to create the very first valley VCs. I don't think anybody inside or outside of the government, projected the immensity of the impact of those programs.

Or y'know... about 90% of the stuff that spun out from NASA.

Anyway... I get it: you're a closed-minded ideologue and you weren't REALLY asking a question, you were just being snarky. So I'll stop pretending that I respect you now. And I'll stop pretending that we're having a conversation.

One other thing we can be very sure about this law: there's going to be a bunch of "unintended consequences", and some of them will be good. Some are likely to be very good.

It varies from book to book. Some of them are only 1 or 2 devices. The annoyance is that I inevitably forget which books are device limited and end up unable to open them from work / while traveling / etc.

The point stands that I can't read those books on original Kindles at all. It's not like there's a "let me read the text, and don't show some graphics" option.

I bet all 1st gen Kindles can still buy all books from Amazon.

You lose this bet. There are quite a few Kindle books like this: http://cl.ly/image/2t2m2V3Y0513 that won't play on basic Kindle devices. I discovered this when I tried to read one of my books on my gen 1 Kindle.

There are also some unexpected restrictions on some titles, such as books that are viewable only on 1 or 2 of your devices, which is quite annoying to discover when you're not near one of the previous devices to deactivate it.

I can't comment on the functionality of iBooks on Gen1 iPads because I've never purchased an Apple iBook, but your guesses about Amazon are, sadly, wrong.

This isn't about my preferences. The whole point is that only an arrogant asshole would claim their preferences are the only rational ones.

As another example within GPS, Waze used to give truly horrendous routes, as it would often fail to understand the difference between overpasses and intersections. A bunch of early adopters liked the promise of Waze and helped crowd-source the fixes, so that now Waze is a very good navigator.

By the OP's logic, the early adopters who helped make Waze great were irrational, because it truly was worse for quite a long time.

That said, I get it, you're just here to snark at strangers. After all, if you'd had even a hint of an interest in a real conversation you would've realized I never stated that any set of attributes was better than any other, nor that my interpretation of attribute definitions was the only valid one.

Anyway, thanks for the snarky bullshit and have a nice day.

You seem to have defined rationality to mean 'a person who cares solely about the present, with no value put on the future'.

Because a person who rationally cares about great map data for their whole lives, and also cares about other things (like liberty) might well prefer the growing pains of being an earlier adopter to the instant convenience of using Google Maps.

I understand that you, like many people, have decided that the attributes you care about are the only ones that are rational to care about. But that is a gross mistake, and that mistake undermines the entire premise of your rant.

Mutual funds are an investment. Hoarding is savings.

One is productive, one isn't. That's the key difference.

The difference is even more glaringly obvious if you think about the difference between equity in a productive company, loans to productive organizations, and simply doing nothing.

Dropbox's website used to say: All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES256) and are inaccessible without your account password.

This was changed to simply say that they are encrypted after this FTC complaint was filed: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/05/dropbo...

Luckily for them (and unluckily for consumers) they got away with that particular lie during the early years where it was most valuable.

There's also a fundamental problem that Arash doesn't understand security. This was clear after the incident where no password was required in order to login.

Arash claimed that this was only a problem if you were one of the unlucky few who was actually hacked. He didn't understand that a risk exposure is also a serious problem, even if you happen to dodge the bullet on that particular incident. In fact, he seemed to get quite angry with paying customers who were upset by it because in his mind you don't have the right to be even slightly bothered by a major screw-up unless you were affected that time.

I understand that at this point Dropbox is huge, so it's full of people like you who don't have anything to do with the customer-hostile bullshit that the founders did... but it's still impossible to trust anything you guys do. After all, when the CTO is untrustworthy, only a very, very naive person would trust the product as a whole.

They're mostly addicts who still have room left on one of their credit cards.

That's a different issue. This one is instances that are launched into an sg that is then left unmodified. If there are a moderate to large number of instances in that sg, intermittent network connectivity problems will ensue.

The issue you mention (where you have to treat sg's as being immutable if you want them to work reliably) is another problem with the sg's.

Two points:

1) Dropbox has many thousands of their own servers, alongside the Amazon. It's not like they're just using raw S3 and nothing else.

2) Dropbox has a history of egregious mistakes which they try to sweep under the rug. Only a very silly person would believe that Arash has suddenly decided to be open and honest with the customers.

Remember, when you talk about Dropbox, you're talking about a company that flat-out lied, claiming that they encrypted your data so they couldn't read it, and didn't stop lying until the FTC got involved.

So yeah... when somebody says Dropbox is better than X, I tend to think that person is deluding themselves.

As a simple example, if you have a moderate number of hosts in a single security group (e.g. 200+ hosts), you can expect to have intermittent communication problems between the nodes. They used to deny this was a problem.

here's a source, since you're attacking and disbelieving everybody who doesn't love AWS: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240203992/N...

The paid support tier is also atrocious and close to useless. AWS routinely denies the existence of major flaws for months or years, until they eventually admit it, often by just documenting it instead of fixing it.

They're horrifically expensive, and low quality.

It's really, really sad that so many startups have been convinced that it's "cheap" when it's almost comically expensive and lousy.

I've run a consultancy. They're not making anywhere near the money you likely imagine. There are several major sets of costs to consider.

One set is costs directly related to employing you. Benefits, employer paid taxes, equipment, insurance, office space, a fraction of your manager, and so on. These alone are hefty.

A second set is buffer to pay you when you aren't being utilized. A well-run consulting company might expect 80% utilization, so 20% of the time you're incurring salary plus all the above costs and they are receiving absolutely nothing for it. A more typical consultancy might have even lower utilization rates.

A third set is the costs of customer acquisition and account development. There are expensive staff who do a lot of expensive things solely to get the contracts signed in the first place. And if a consultancy stops attempting to grow, it's at grave risk that a few existing customers will leave for one reason or another, and they'll be left in a terrible spot.

A fourth is the cost of finding somebody like you in the first place. If I'm hiring a junior employee it might be something like $10k direct, plus the time associated with sourcing, vetting, and interviewing candidates. For a senior employee, it could be a lot more than that.

Put all of these factors together, and the profits simply aren't nearly as hefty as you'd imagine.

I have huge amounts of money stolen from me, and spent irresponsibly and inefficiently.

This is not a help.