expathacker

> Why are tech billionaires buying up these companies? Just to push their political agenda? To support their political ambitions? To run for office? They obvious aren't doing it to make money.

So that Trump supporters can speculate on social networks that they're doing it for some nefarious reason and so that Trump-opponents can speculate that they're doing it for the sake of their egos? Maybe they're doing it to troll the ultra-rightwing Breitbart crowd into having a deep-state conspiracy-theory induced stroke?

Clearly it could not be that they understand business and money more than your average commenter on Reddit or Hacker News and see either an intrinsic value in the traditional free press, or have a vision for the long-term financial viability of the business itself? Nah. It must be a conspiracy.

Last year my iPhone 5 died while on a flight, so I stopped in duty free to buy a new one. I was about to pickup an iphone X when I realized that I couldn't stand it up on it's end and take videos, which I do on a daily basis when practicing my instrument. There was an iphone SE 128GB sitting next to the iphone X for less than 1/2 the price ... I expect to use this phone for another 3 years until they've slowed iOS down enough to make it unusable.

Unexpectedly, the killer feature for me ended up being, "Can I record myself drumming without needing some stupid attachment?"

I'm not sure you understood my point. I am actually in agreement with you that we should be looking to the rest of the world for a voting model that works, because I feel that ours is a failure. I am not advocating against voter-id laws in fact, I am quite for them, but I recognize that these laws in the United States are frequently designed as weapons to be used against members of other parties.

My point is that the rest of the world has exactly 1 legislative body governing elections. America has 51 (perhaps more, I'm not sure to which level of influence local governments can influence electoral processes, but they can certainly influence zoning of polling booths. American resistance to a federal identification card is quite unique, and silly.

> Google invented infantilism of their workers. They invented basic colors, office slides, and office ball pits. They make new employees wear propeller hats.

In 1999/2000 I was riding office slides at excite@home[1], and jumping in ball-pits at idealab when Google wasn't at all noteworthy except that their fans were exhausting directly into mine from their adjacent cages at globalcenter.

> They want a naive "ender's game" work force while their business of monitoring the web browsing and location of hundreds of millions of people is actually very serious.

Interesting choice of comparison, as Ender's Game is frequently criticized being an apologia for Hitler[2][3] or a Handmaid's tale for conservatives. Fanboy thugs of Card's "Handmaid's tale for conservatives". and fanboy thugs of Orson Scott Card were encouraged to attack the writers who posed this argument[4]. Card himself is a rather outspoken conservative and homophobe[5], [6] whose work is primarily about encouraging mormon ideals/moral absolutism and has essentially called for an anti-gay genocide[7].

Ender's brother and sister over the world by putting on online personaes, Locke and Demosthenes of both the right and left soas to control popular opinion by owning both sides of the debate. In a way was sort of a guidebook to modern right-wing political strategy. In a subsequent book, Ender moves to a world colonized by Brazilians. Brazil itself was a favorite post-WW2 hiding spot for Nazis.[8]

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Who-killed-Excite-ho... [2] https://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html [3] http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm [4] http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_5_28_22428_7034.html (postscript section) [5] https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/arti... [6] https://www.salon.com/2013/05/07/sci_fi_icon_orson_scott_car... [7] http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2013-05-09-1.html. [8] https://www.history.com/news/how-south-america-became-a-nazi...

Do any of these other countries have the local / state / federal government separation nightmare of the United States, or do they have the same voting standard applied unilaterally for all citizens regardless of location? If not, then they aren't apples to apples comparisons. The American system is 50 different legal bodies, which means 50 governors, 50 senates, N local governments, all doing their best to muck up the system to bend to their own political goals. It's designed to be complicated, which means there can't be an easy answer without re-wiring the entire system.

Then, can you please clarify for me the wording, "well-regulated militia"? Who does the regulation? How do you quantify "well-regulated" versus "poorly-regulated". Do you have to be part of a militia in order to obtain arms? Am I breaking the law by not being part of a militia while owning guns?

At my last full-time job, I helped our infra team staged a revolt and some of us threatened to quit when HR announced they had signed up for Equifax's employee verification service about 2 months after Equifax's most recent breach. I'm happy to say that within 3 days HR had stopped using this service.

Fully agreed. I spent most of my life in San Francisco, and the past 5 years living abroad has been eye-opening. Many people move to SF from the 'burbs / New York / Dallas and think that the answer to the housing problem is Manhattanization. The reason they think this, is that they have never been to a well-designed city like Barcelona. 3-5 story units, at max, cover most of San Francisco. It could be just as lovely as a city with 6-10 story buildings, and without being as ugly or unlivable as New York. We would just have to have sane zoning that didn't hamper new housing with antiquated parking requirements.

SF is home and I love it, but not all of it is as worth protecting as my nimby friends think. The Richmond, the sunset, ingleside, bayview / hunter's point, South SF .. Most of that wastes space, and could easily be rebuilt to be as dense and beautiful as Paris or Barcelona, but it would require courage and a more social government than what we actually have.