PricelessValue

If you aren't paying for it, then you are the product.

Even still, apple is still collecting data on you. If their business ever suffers, they can still sell your data. Apple still owns your data even if they aren't currently selling it.

What if they were israelis? China, russia, britain and israel run the largest espionage rings in the US. If the FBI called out israel, I bet the media would call it racist.

Of course we do and of course they do. What's interesting is why the sudden "expose" and the media blitz. It's like how we knew the russians and everyone has been taking steroids for decades, but all of a sudden there was a media blitz against russia.

Is it just the elites trying to put pressure on china or are we at the beginning stages of a fundamental shift in our relations with china?

Have the elites decided on a more antagonistic position against china?

Isn't this well known fact? It isn't a secret that the chinese, along with the israelis, russians, british, french, japanese, koreans, canadians and even the saudis have operatives in academia, government, business, etc.

And of course we have operatives in all those countries as well.

> Big cars and trucks sell immensely well in the US because of the effective subsidization of fuel, as well as anti-competitive behaviour in the light truck sector.

No. Big cars and trucks sell well because we like big cars and trucks. SUVs, Range Rovers, Trucks, even humvees are what americans generally want. Or gas guzzling sports cars. Cars are part of american culture.

> Virtually throughout the entire world, governments put taxes on fuel to address negative externalities caused by fuel consumption.

No. Oil poor countries and regions put taxes on gas/cars in order to push the market towards smaller and more efficient cars that use less gas. We are oil rich and therefore really don't require such interventions.

> As a result, most countries have much higher gas prices than the US, where in some places, is below $2/gallon.

I know. I'm american. I know gas is cheap. But even when gas was expensive ( $4+ ), the top selling vehicles were trucks, SUVs, etc. It's not politically feasible in the US to push people to smaller cars. People will simply vote for politicians who promise lower gas and bigger cars. It's why even elon musk wants tesla to get into SUVs and trucks.

People think that the government supports big vehicles and cheap oil and that's why americans buy big cars and use lot of oil. You have it backwards. We like big cars and cheap oil and that's why the government supports big cars and cheap oil.

Are they going to drop shakespeare or his works next because of the racist antisemitic language in his works?

When does it end? There are offensive language in almost every work of literature? Of Mice and Men? Scarlett Letter? Catcher in the Rye? Do we shelve them all?

I hope bittorrent doesn't decline too much. A lot of open source software offloads their downloads to torrents to save space/bandwidth/etc and lower costs.

Because empire is what the british or europeans do. We were born out of freeing ourselves from an evil empire. So since birth, empire had negative connotations. To say we are an empire means we are just as evil as the british empire or the french empire or the spanish empire. But we are the beacon of freedom, liberty and democracy. So we can't be an empire...

Every nation lies to itself.

Why is empire in quotes? We are most definitely an empire - the largest that'll ever exist on earth. We are the only global superpower.

> Seems to me that American cars are not competitive (outside of America)

American cars are very competitive in china. They aren't competitive in europe and japan because of laws protecting their own car industries, smaller roads and expensive gas.

> It's because they are large, fuel inefficient monsters.

Which is what american people want. The top 3 selling vehicles in the US are all large trucks for a reason.

> But times have changed.

It hasn't. The top 3 selling vehicles in the US are trucks - Ford F-Series, Chevrolet Silverado, Ram P/U.

You might not like it but you can't blame american car manufacturers for wanting to build cars that americans like.

There is a reason why small european car companies aren't doing well in the US. The markets are different.

That's why it is sql "lite". It's great for certain things because it's generally lightweight and manageable.

But you wouldn't want a single file format on enterprise level systems where enterprise level performance and stability is required. At the very least, you'd want your data and transaction log files to be different files on different disks. Especially when IO throughput is important.

Also, since DBs tend to have important data on them, being able to copy a file (db) and move it anywhere you want isn't much of a selling point on serious systems.

Having said that, sqlite is great for application/client side storage.

So essentially string interning for Ruby?

> So what is the HN audience to Facebook? Our we taste makers? A demographic ahead of the product curve, predictive of Facebook's imminent decline?

We certainly aren't taste makers. HN is so small that it is irrelevant.

> Are we the people going to the art house movie theaters while the masses flood into multiplexes for the latest Marvel sensory overload spectacle?

We are just victims of the ongoing media campaign against facebook and social media. Once facebook gives in, the media will shift their hate to something else. Every time I come on HN, it's the same old facebook story. So just do what I do and click "hide" whenever you see an article about facebook on HN.

I wish HN would offer us the ability to filter our stories. I don't have facebook. Never used it ( I'm a unicorn ). I don't want to read headlines about it every day on HN.

Reminds me of coinbase using mongodb with silent fail and no ACID transactions a few years back. And of course the mtgox fiasco. The amount of amateurishness in the cryptocurrency ecosystem is disappointing.

Why do we need academics to tell us? Go ask wall street. Go work on wall street. It's not a secret. There is a reason why the most valuable commodity on wall street is information.

We know insider trading happens. Just like we know price collusion ( libor rates or lysine price fixing ) happens.

If banks are colluding on something as fundamentally important as libor rates, then everything and anything is happening.

> In hindsight the last 30 years have been great for tech so maybe I just got lucky on my industry selection.

A lot of tech companies went bankrupt. So you got "lucky" selecting the right tech companies and buying and selling them at the right time.

If you bought YHOO or Petsdotcom or any of AOL during the dot com boom and held on, then you would have lost a lot of money. For every AMZN there are dozens of tech companies that went under.

Also, the last 30 years have seen an absurd stock market boom. Take a look at the chart to see what the last 30 years have been like. The S&P has been on a tear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500_Index#/media/File:S_...

To the moon baby!