charmides

Thank you for the insight.

I guess that selling user data and advertisements is worth more per user than I realized.

Email is a highly competitive market with a low barrier to entry and thousands of companies offering similar services. It is nothing like hardware, so your comparison is bizarre.

By the way, I was asking for the point of view of an expert. If you are not an expert on email services, then I have no interest in hearing you speak condescendingly to me.

I need to respectfully disagree with you here. In a free market, pricing does have something to do with the cost of providing a service because companies that overcharge would quickly lose market share to competitors, especially in a wildly competitive space like email.

Also, ten bucks a year has nothing to do with how much I'd personally be willing to pay for email. It is just my estimation of the amount you could charge people while still keeping healthy profit margins in this industry, however I don't have much domain knowledge regarding email and that figure could be very wrong. I'd love to hear from an expert.

I think paid email services are a great idea, but $50 a year and 2 GB of storage for Fastmail seems expensive to me. Why not something closer to five or ten bucks a year? Can someone explain to me why this type of pricing makes sense?

>"Platform bias" isn't an antitrust concern, and, in fact, the President has no authority to "de-bias" private companies.

This is a very common refrain and I would agree completely with this if we didn't live in a society where Facebook, Twitter and YouTube dominated the our communication channels. I wish that we had a neutral way (like email) to reach a large audience and that it wasn't owned by three or four private companies.

The Trump administration's critical stance on the tech giants is one of the very few things coming from them that I support, even though their actions here appears to be rooted in self-interest and self-preservation only (just like everything else they're doing).

I hope that this probe will lead to some antitrust action that will be continued by the next administration.

Disturbing that it does not kill its prey first.

Seems like my sleeping patterns are a lot different than those of most other people.

Also, I felt depressed to see that people spend most of their lives sleeping and working or in some transition thereof.

Regarding Point 4: One recurring point in a lot those post-mortem articles is how hard it is to sell software, but how (relatively) easy it is to sell service (incl. consulting). Why is that?

I have not found much opportunity on PredictIt to exploit that sort of thing. Seems like most people there attempt to make rational investments.

The difference in life expectancy between men and women appears to be significant across every human culture. The effect appears to be biological and not cultural.

If you tell me why you would like to learn Java, then I could help you find the appropriate resources.

Are you a native speaker of English?

I believe the highest quality aggregator is the one published by 538:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/...

and I think the most meaningful metric is the "net approval", i.e. the difference between the approval and disapproval rating. You will see that at this time in the Obama presidency, Obama had a net approval of -2.6 while Trump has a a net approval of -13.6 at this time of writing.

Maybe the difference is less than what some people think, but there is still quite a difference.

Why did you have to start from scratch at 35?

I found the article to be mostly self-aggrandizing. With full respect for you, I think it is naive to believe that the author wrote this out of altruism.

I felt similarly about it. The piece lacked cohesion, but the author still made some good points and I think it's fine that they have been discussed frequently before.

Regarding start-ups, I think Wendy is a little bit too willing to make generalizations based on her own experience. There are some exciting high-tech start-ups out there in other spaces than advertising (Perfect Day comes to mind, which is working on synthetic milk). There are definitely opportunities out there for doing rewarding work.

Besides that, I agreed with Wendy's dismal assessment of the tech giants. I find it sad that some talented engineers choose to devote their careers working for companies like Facebook.

I think your hypothesis in the third paragraph is a little off. To take an example, many (if not most) Westerners are strongly against the farming of cats and dogs for meat, which is commonplace in some Asian countries. Those farmers are not breaking any promises of taking care of their animals, so this Western opposition must be coming from the fact that we think that cats and dogs have an intrinsically higher value than the animals we eat here.

To respond to some of your other points:

* I am against the torture and killing of animals for food when other nutritious and more environmentally-friendly food is abundant. This does not imply that animals and humans have the same moral value. I have yet to meet a person who claims this, so this always seems like a straw-man argument to me.

* On the same note, I have no problems with people keeping pets as long as they take good care of them.

* Minimizing suffering does not mean that you would prefer the body not to induce fever to fight disease, because that would lead to more suffering in the future.

* We should both be maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering as far it is possible.

* Also, why involve religion here? I am sorry but I fail to see your point in the fourth paragraph.

That's a strawman argument. Pigs and cattle having the same rights as people is not why it is unethical to torture and eat them. Instead, it is because their behavior and nervous systems strongly suggest that they experience pain in the way that we understand it. Claiming that their non-humanness makes their suffering irrelevant, like some people do, is narrow-minded.

Politics are involved whether you like it or not. The idea of open-source software is a deeply political one.

Doesn't mean we can't do our best to minimize suffering.

That's just an appeal to tradition, which was a popular argument back in the day to support slavery.

All of us are deeply involved in politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. - Nashville, 1975

The summaries of the case studies in Section 2 was disturbing, to say the least. I sometimes think about the NIPS consistency experiment from a few years ago, which I think also speaks very negatively of the current state of academic ML research. I agreed with all of the authors' suggestions to solve this mess and I think many of them need to be implemented urgently.

Wouldn't you need to know the false negative rate too?

You would think that non-profits could be more competitive than corporations. Imagine a non-profit Facebook clone that shared its advertising profits with the users. How could Facebook compete with that?

Seems like "billion-vehicle-miles traveled" is not a good metric; people travel faster in aircraft and in cars than they do on bicycles and on foot. Time spent travelling should be a better metric.

You talk about those things you listed as an irrevocable part of maturity, but back in the day, wealthy people did not have to do them. They had servants who cooked for them, did their laundry, cleaned their homes, bought their groceries, etc. And that's still true today, and even more so in certain places.

And frankly, if you have a high enough salary to pay someone else to take of the mundane parts of your life, I don't see why you shouldn't.

Without giving away more details than you feel comfortable with, could you share more about what the developer was fired for and how it made that executive safe face?