genericid

Of course, all politicians are the same. Of course, taxes go directly to them so they have a motive to increase tax revenues more than would be otherwise sensible.

Let's go further: If no one has done it, it must be impossible.

> That's a theoretical problem.

Currently.

> You wouldn't be able to realistically intimidate 10,000 people and watch each one drop their ballot into a box.

Your fanatical followers and/or henchman can do that. You can also use photos/videos to watch "your" voters more scalably. Another option is to pay them rather than intimidating.

How about 99.99%? The Soviet Union managed that in 1984. If your elections aren't secret, you may as well not bother. And it's impossible to have secret electronic elections.

> The counterpoint of decentralization - there is a single point where final counts happen.

What voting system are you talking about?

Third option: You deploy TLS 1.3, the middleboxes break, but that's neither your fault nor your problem. Hopfully they're makers or users will learn from this and not make respectively buy broken garbage. All major browser vendors appear to be involved with TLS 1.3.

> Edit: It's potentially productive if they open source some of their new stuff? I'm guessing the whole point is that the firm is developing its competitive edge.

In a way, it's even productive if the workers at Jane Street just get to do something they enjoy. But it's odd to judge a company by its by-products.

Egoism and intelligence are not the same.

> It should be a formal logical fallacy to critique the economic activity of other people just because they're choosing not to engage in whatever your favorite flavor of saving the world entails.

It should be a formal logical fallacy to pretend there is no difference between "not saving the world in someone's favorite flavor" and "doing something useless".

> It always follows a simple formula: woe to the world that all these {brilliant scientists, talented engineers} decide to work in {high frequency trading, advertising, data mining} when they could be working on {curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}.

In order to be intellectually honest, you should replace the strawman "{curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}" by "anything useful".

> If you're not well enough acquainted with economic theory to appreciate why financial markets are at least somewhat useful then that's your problem, not anyone else's. Don't try to insinuate that society has lost something because some very capable people have decided to engage in work you won't even take the time to understand.

There's no effort expended nor insight contributed here either. You not just refused to make an argument, you baselessly claimed that OP considers the work of Jane Street useless because they are stupid and not for reasons you don't even take the time to understand. That is simply disrespectful.

Also, the statements "developing software to gather more money from the financial markets is useless" and "financial markets are useless" are not equivalent. No one claimed the latter.

> It's simply disrespectful.

There is no reason to respect useless work.

> You also have no idea what kind of charitable work they like to do in their free time or what kind if philanthropy their salaries allow them to contribute to the world.

They didn't say anything about what the workers at Jane Street do with their free time.

> And this is all beside the fact that there are many secondary effects of company flush with money releasing excellent open source software and stewarding programming language development.

That is merely a by-product. Also, it may very well be compensated by the fact that if Jane Street didn't have that money, someone else would.

Chapter VII of the Audiovidual Media Services Directive [2010/13/EU] sets rules on "television advertising and teleshopping". Maybe member states can set stricter limits.

[2010/13/EU] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...

Do you think that was product placement?

It is, however, way more manipulative. Disruptive advertising at least makes it obvious that it is advertising.

> trade [...] for a free service

You cannot do that not because of the EU but because of basic logic.

Facebook has a monopoly on social networks used to communicate with people you know IRL.

So their content is available in those places.

The problem is that Apple and Google are not trying to give people the ability to download the software they want without catching malware, but to make a profit. If Google were trying to provide that service they would not ban ad blockers from their store. They would not charge arbitary 30%, but whatever operating a software repository actually costs.

The problem here is not a lack of competition. Ultimately, there needs to be one default software repository that people can trust -- you can't have a free-for-all here for the same reason you can't have a free-for-all for software in general. The profit motive is the problem.

I hope this crowd knows their Joseph Goebbels.

"When our enemies say: But we used to grant you freedom of opinion -- yes, you granted it to us, that is no proof that we should do the same for you! That you gave us that just proves how stupid you are!"

(source: https://de.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels and https://www.sr-mediathek.de/index.php?seite=7&id=37143 ; translation by me)

> My real pain point with Signal is that there is no real desktop application for it

Signal is open source, you can write your own -- just kidding. Moxie Marlinspike wants to lock you into his client as Facebook, Google and their ilk lock you into theirs.[1]

[1]https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

Of course. It's called the Great Despicable Prohibition of Rendering for a reason. It also applies to absolutely everyone, especially local Baltimore newspapers. The EU cares about local newspapers of foreign cities. It hates them.

If you don't obey, the penalties start at 20 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 €, 400% of your income and your firstborn. They will be evil, disproportionate and diabolical. The supervisory authority will not take into account silly things like "the nature, gravity and duration of the infringement" or "the intentional or negligent character of the infringement". That wouldn't be fun. In particular, there is no chance that you will be issued a reprimand instead of a fine. The authority would do that if its mission were to protect citizens' privacy instead of destroying your business and helping big friendly companies like Facebook and Google, which the EU is well-known to love.

Do not leave your house before you have read every single EU law. If you don't the EU will find a reason to destroy your life. Especially if you live in a weak and unimportant country that is easy to bully around like the United States of America.

> I switched from Facebook to [...] Insta.

Well done! That will show them.

So if Google started to say that Google is primarily an interface to Google products, their anti-competetive behaviour would suddenly be okay?

"Natural monopoly" does not mean that.

Yes, politics are necessary.

So, external factors.

What does one's character depend on in your opinion?

Good idea. As a starting point, let's define "HTML Lite" as "HTML without Javascript".

Then "HTML Fat" and "HTML Light" could even be served as one document. If you execute the Javascript, you get the fat version. Else, you get the light version.

If you use Javascript not just to improve the behaviour but also to display content at all, you can provide fallback content that is only displayed in light mode. The fallback content is marked by a special tag. Let's call it `noscript`.

My point is: Making it easier to serve sane and lightweight HTML will not help fix the problem. Publishers don't want to do that, they like all that crap. If we want them to make sane web pages, we must force them.

Do you also never question other individuals because they have their reasons?

But how will you find a good enough doctor to begin with?

More pessimistically, it could make you disagree posts because they're made by someone you disagree with.

It is pretty easy to verify that a plane or an elevator behaves correctly. Did it transport its passengers to their destination? Pass. Did everyone die? Fail. (This is obviously simplified).

You cannot do that with voting software. To verify the result of a software-based election, you would have to compare the vote counts the software reports with the actual vote counts. But if you knew the vote counts, you wouldn't need the software anymore.

There a proposals to get around this issue by storing each voter's decision so they can verify that their vote was counted properly. That would abolish the secret ballot, making it a horrible idea.

Even if there were a software-based voting system that could be verified by experts, it would almost certainly be too complicated to be verified by the general public.

Proper link: https://xkcd.com/2030/