save_ferris

The problem is that many wouldn't believe it if they were told (i.e. "this is what big tech wants me to think"). This is essentially what happened when Facebook and Twitter informed users that had interacted with suspected propagandized content.

Particularly after this current purge, social media companies have lost most of their authoritative credibility. Combined with a political culture that embraces wild conspiracy theories, you'd just be adding fuel to the fire.

But how much of social media is real?

One of the biggest problems with social media is the fact that social media companies are financially incentivized to keep the public at large from knowing. Twitter has long refused to answer exactly how many of its users are bots as a percentage of its user base, Facebook did the absolute bare minimum in cooperating with Senate Intelligence in 2017 relating to Russian propaganda, etc.

Kara Swisher said it best in an interview with Preet Bharara around the time of the Russian propaganda scandal: "The Russians didn't hack into Facebook and manipulate its servers. They were users of Facebook, they were users of Twitter. They used these platforms exactly the way they were designed to be used."

The vast majority of tech workers that receive equity stakes in pre-IPO/acquisition companies don't ever see any financial windfall from their stakes. These guys will be just fine.

This is so true, and it doesn't get discussed enough. Folks like Medhi Hassan and Jonathan Swan are a completely different kind of journalist than most of the folks that occupy the airwaves, and it's really frustrating to watch the news when you know people like that are setting a much higher bar than everyone else.

Doesn't the popularity of his content suggest that Americans are very interested in higher level discourse, but have long been denied it?

This is probably true to degree, although Rogan specifically is a pretty polarizing example due to his proclivity for hosting guests that aren't always welcome elsewhere. It's hard to say how much of his popularity is due to his interview style versus his politics. I also expect that the demographic breakdown of podcast listeners aren't reflective of the country as a whole, it probably skews a bit younger.

Long-form interviews with political leaders aren't a new genre, I suspect they just don't get as much attention as the more soundbite-y forms of news, but I could be wrong.

Nonprofit news organizations are a thing and I've been incredibly positive about their future (full disclosure: I used to work for a nonprofit publication).

The nonprofit model encourages much more direct community engagement through conferences, festivals, and long-form interviews with local, state and national leaders.

A major hurdle that nonprofit and higher-quality news outlets face is that the major media players have dopamine-driven news down to a science, and it's a lot easier to consume a small and practically meaningless soundbyte than it is to sit and listen to a politician have a challenging discussion with an interviewer for an hour. The attention span of the average American isn't equipped for higher-level discourse as it's not nearly as exciting and rage-inducing as watching CNN/FOX/ABC/??? network.

Not at all! Nothing to apologize for, I remember when that whole situation blew up very well. And I completely agree with you.

Yeah, I meant to add the caveat that it was one of the most publicly notable government energy investments for the simple fact that it ended up in scandal, since many aren't even aware that the government invests in companies like this. I wasn't trying to criticize the initiative.

Solyndra had such a chilling effect that the DOE stopped taking those risks.

It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.

Solar didn't magically just appear on the market at a lower price point than carbon-based resources though, it had to go through several iterations which required significant investment capital. This is usually where government agencies like DOE leverage their capital investment programs because private business aren't interested in paying for the R&D to solve those kinds of big problems without a guaranteed success.

Solar is only becoming cheaper today because of the research and capital that was put into developing the technology, not because it's inherently cleaner than coal. To your point, based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option. And if the government is motivated to migrate businesses off of dirty energy resources, it also has a motivation to help develop alternatives that the market will accept.

Solyndra[0] was one example of a company that received government support to develop solar technology and became notorious for defrauding the government in the process.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

Freedom of speech as laid out in the 1st amendment protects individuals from being arrested or censored by the government for speech. It does not protect individuals who violate the TOS of a private company, nor does it provide blanket protection in all cases of speech. Inciting violence and making false statements of fact are not protected forms of speech under US law[0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

It's really interesting to see other folks' digital minimalism setups.

It’s all well and good removing all social apps from your phone, but if the strong desire is still there to check these types of services, you will find a way to do it.

You can mitigate a lot of your urges to check social on your phone by using a service like Freedom[0], which is what I use. It allows me to set web and app blocklists and schedule them as needed. Usually, the urges go away after a couple of weeks. Ultimately, the goal of digital minimalism is to change your behavior in regards to your device usage, not change your device to appease your urges.

The two biggest changes that helped me dramatically reduce phone usage was to A) go full grayscale on my phone and B) to add the screen time widget to my home screen. Grayscale instantly makes the phone less visually appealing, which helps to put it down faster and to reach for it less. The screen time widget on my home screen allows me to instantly see how much time I've been on my phone, which I then use to decide if I really need to do what I unlocked the phone for.

0: https://freedom.to/

Speech in the US has always had limits, the idea that America has pushed for completely unlimited free speech is not true, and incitement and false statements of fact are some of the cornerstone cases in which speech loses its protection under the 1st Amendment[0].

Speech has never been, and will never be, completely protected without exceptions in the US.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

He entered into a contract with Twitter, broke it, and Twitter ended things on their side.

I agree, and I'm not saying that Twitter acted in the wrong here. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where Dorsey threatens a president to say or not say something under penalty of deplatforming. That's a pretty significant lever to have over POTUS. That's the point I'm trying to make here.

Most of the discussion seems to be centered around freedom of speech and enabling dissenting voices, no matter how violent, but I think we're missing the bigger picture here.

This represents a vast check on presidential power that exists purely in the hands of these incredibly wealthy and powerful social media executives. I don't necessarily disagree with Twitter's decision given the events of the last few days, but this undeniably strips Trump of a major source of power for him, and that merits a discussion of the role that private social media companies play in our discourse and presidential function as well.

edit: imagine trying to run for re-election without a social media presence. It's hard to imagine that anyone could mount a serious campaign without it, let alone win.

Culturally, we aren't taught to think critically enough about how businesses operate. In an environment that espouses entrepreneurship to the max, we don't spend enough time talking about if companies lie to us or not, how do they plan to monetize, etc.

There's just no way that Facebook wasn't planning to monetize this platform when they wrote this article. Frankly, situations like this should be treated like deceptive advertising practices.

Just like in the political arena, there are very few consequences to just flat out lie to people, and that's unacceptable.

I know I want to spend as little time as possible thinking about sales and marketing, and just focus on improving my product and making my customers happy.

That's fine and understandable, but you also have to weigh the risks of delegating those responsibilities to external parties that don't necessarily care about your success because they have thousands if not millions of customers. Not to mention the restaurants that don't want any part of the delivery platforms altogether because they don't like what they're seeing.

In an opt-out model, the restaurant has to take time to deal with (and possibly remove themselves) from a platform that didn't ask for their business, potentially dealing with upset customers along the way. Wasn't the whole point of this idea to reduce time and energy spent on these kinds of activities to focus on the food and the community? If you had no idea that you were on one of these platforms and an angry customer reaches out to you, how does that benefit the restaurant?

It's really strange to see a collectivist for-the-greater-good argument being applied in a business sense here because it's based on two incorrect underlying assumptions: that every business owner wants the same thing (automated marketing and logistics services handled by one provider), and that platforms will always act in the best interests of their users. As a hypothetical business owner, shouldn't I have the right to prevent delivery platforms from using my restaurant without my permission? Say I get a bad experience with a delivery platform once, and I remove myself. Now I have a keep a lookout for any other platform that wants to use my name, all because those platforms made the argument that they know what's best for the restaurants and then didn't measure up. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

But on the flip side, I've observed a lot of restaurant owners not having the time, energy, or know-how to set up even basic online things that could really boost their business.

Isn't part of being a successful business knowing where to put your energy as a business owner? You're saying that restaurants don't necessarily have the ability to make the best decisions for their business, therefore they should be able to opt-out and not opt-in. The flip side of this argument is that these apps can cause undeserved damage to a restaurant's reputation. How do you know what's best for restaurants?

You're arguing that the onus should be on the restaurant to opt out whenever a delivery platform causes problems, but the onus should be on the delivery platforms to create a product that restaurants, not just consumers, want to use.

This is a major flaw in how many bitcoiners imagine post-apocalyptic scenarios. They assume that when the USD and society collapses they'll be able to do and buy anything because bitcoin survived hyperinflation. It might resist inflation, but it'll be futile if the populace turns against them, or bitcoin.

This is a pretty good point. Many assume that the collapse of the USD will neatly transition us to BTC without any real evidence. Not to mention all of the alleged BTC price manipulation that ran up the price last time.

The more I think about it, the harder it is to envision the public accepting a new currency that doesn’t even have paper. In such a scenario, a BTC crash would probably be the end of it.

The frustrating thing about this is that they’re not necessarily off the mark in terms of the existence of political corruption. When you look at how lobbying works in the US, it’s pretty much legalized corruption.

They have a tendency to focus on the interpersonal relationships involved in these kinds of organizations because those are a lot easier to understand and criticize than the actual underlying behavior of the organizations they work for.

Ultimately, politics is all about who you know, and it’s not that far fetched at all to see Amazon hiring someone with close ties to the Biden Administration. That’s how this stuff has always worked.

Attitudes like this contributed to the last crash. I sincerely hope that this is a joke, because it’s an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Not OP, but I have a Hey account and I really enjoy it. The screener feature is worth the price alone IMO. The biggest challenge for me was having to re-conceptualize email after switching over since Hey doesn't use traditional email terminology (i.e. "paper trail" vs "archive").

The amount of inbound email I get has dropped immensely due to the screener and my inbox ("imbox") is so much easier to manage with Hey, IMO.

I got into the Hey beta, wound up purchasing it and I haven't had any performance issues to speak of. I'm curious to know what their setup is.

Same, I tried it and was disappointed in the results. Nobody is better-positioned to wirelessly integrate the iPhone camera and a Mac better than Apple is, and it would encourage folks to stay in the Apple ecosystem.

Tangent: I really wish that Apple would make it easier to use the iPhone camera as a webcam when using a Mac. It would be a killer feature since so many people are in the ecosystem and iPhone cameras completely outperform webcams these days. I tired EpocCam but I wasn't completely satisfied with it. This seems like a missed opportunity for Apple, given their seamless integration experience mantra.

The problem is that even if a company illegally triggers a clawback, it's a civil matter and requires the employee to pony up for legal action against the company. That might be worth it if you're already certain that your equity has significant value, but most people aren't going to litigate for relatively small amounts of stock in small startups with uncertain futures.

One of the biggest gripes I have with the current state of equity for employees is that it's treated like compensation while not being legally protected like compensation.

A concrete example. I was courted by a company a couple of years ago to join their engineering team and I was pretty set on joining the company until I spoke with a former employee who told me that this company had reneged on giving him the option to purchase his ISOs because they didn't like that he was leaving after two years.

That's completely unacceptable behavior for a company, and it completely changed the way I look at equity. A company can't come at for my already-cashed paychecks, but they can absolutely prevent me from purchasing my options for pretty much any reason.

There are cars in the 1-2k range that work perfectly fine and will reliably work with minimal maintenance

At the low end cars really don't deprecate much

I tried the whole Tropical MBA buy-an-old-car thing. Went with a 10-year-old Camry that KBB'd around $5k, had it inspected before I purchased it, and everything seemed fine. 6 months in, I ran into an issue that required the entire electrical system to be replaced which pretty much totaled the car. I wound up getting about 15% of what I paid for the car back out of it after 6 months of ownership.

Bottom line is that the old car napkin math works as long as the vehicle doesn't run into serious issues, because the moment it does, it really doesn't make much sense unless you're willing and able to do serious work on your own car.

Having said that there might be some marginal benefit for FDA to have some data for which the FDA should incentivize users by asking them to give consent, offer discounts and promise anonymisation.

If the executive branch (which the FDA falls under) is so far beyond reigning in that we have to resort to disabling an important functionality of government instead of improving the check on power (which is where I believe the focus should be), then why would you assume that they're being honest when they promise you that they're anonymizing your data? You're arguing that the executive branch is out of control but you're willing to trust them if they promise to anonymize the data they collect? That makes no sense to me.

If you're going to use the "rogue administration" argument, then how exactly does FDA, which falls under the executive branch, not fall into the same rogue behavior category?

I want to know, not because I want the world to know.

I understand this attitude, but just to be clear, the FDA != "the world". Their job is to protect the health of the pubic and work to mitigate the spread of a highly-contagious virus that will likely hit 2M global deaths in fairly short order. It's your choice not to take the test, but the reality is that if you've received medical care in the last 10 years, several parties probably already have access to that data. If your medical provider's EMR system uses cloud servers, then at least one of the big firms has access to it. And that's not even considering the possibility that your (anonymized) medical records haven't been sold to third parties for research purposes. Last year, outlets reported that Ascension Health, one of the largest healthcare providers in the US, was sharing medical data on millions of Americans with Google[0] without disclosure.

At least in this case, you're being informed before agreeing to service how your data is going to be used. We're largely losing that right in this world.

0: https://www.engadget.com/2019-11-11-google-ascension-patient...

The fear of "looking poor" is so real in the US, which makes it harder to see who's struggling. It also creates this cognitive dissonance I've noticed here on HN where an article gets posted with pictures of the extended lines at food banks and people point out that most people seem to be driving relatively new cars, therefore why are they in line at a food bank?

I think a lot of people don't understand how poverty really looks because we're socially motivated to project wealth and status wherever we can.