2,063 karma · joined June 28, 2016
The culpability for the many civilian deaths in this war, of course, lies with the aggressor. Short of concluding that morality compels us all to simply capitulate to any illegal aggression--a patently absurd argument--it seems we have to be willing to accept the consequences of resistance, right?
But, look at that: the federal government already provides the homeless with cell phones. Yet instead of arguing that the government should also provide free email—which of course costs far less than cell service—the poster argues that existing commercial services should better serve the homeless.
Which, of course, would be nice! But my point was that this kind of argument seems to reflect a mistaken perception of free online services as some sort of social service, with commensurate obligations.
Can governments (not necessarily the federal government) run a public service internet system? Sure, and probably more easily than we can, as another poster suggested, regulate tech companies into providing the right tradeoffs for housed and unhoused users.
While public spending as a % of GDP has indeed increased, that's primarily driven by two things: increased defence (and related) spending, and increased spending on health costs.
In the US, the growth in social assistance spending over the last 3 decades is driven almost entirely by the latter: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-expenditure-as-per....
At the same time, we continue to believe in privatizing basic government services: outsourcing social assistance to charities (including religious charities), outsourcing military and intelligence functions to mercenaries, or, on point for this thread, outsourcing ID verification to VC-funded private startups.
If email is a societal requirement--and maybe it is, or should be--public utilities should provide it.
It's easy to build an email provider. Why shouldn't your state or local government provide one?
Which leads me back to the point made elsewhere in this thread: we have too high an expectation for what private companies can or should do, because they have taken the place in our minds if government.
And our expectations for what government can or should do are too limited, because we've convinced ourselves government is ineffective and unaccountable.
Initiatives at for profit corporations will always exist within some business constraints, shareholder obligations, and so forth.
It would be very reasonable for governments to provide tax-supported digital services. I could easily imagine that spending a few dollars per year to provide the homeless with basic digital services would pay off simply in easing administrative overhead.
But we don't do it, because, in America, our sense of what government can or should provide is atrophied, and we, mistakenly, look to private actors to provide basic public services.
Google seems to support all of those?
Google+ isn't the only competitor to fail to unseat Facebook. I think that says far more about Facebook than it does about Google+.
I'd love an explanation of what technical delivery failures--not the right functionality, or delivered too late--the author thinks led to G+ not beating Facebook.
Pinging (https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/getting-speed-high-...) would be an example such strategy.
Again, not an expert.
Could I have made more money at Jane St? No idea. Probably? But money isn't exactly holding me back right now.
Would I have felt like I was working on interesting problems? For me, personally, I don't think so. I don't find abstract problems as interesting as I do practical ones, and, practically, working at Jane St is working to make a few rich guys incrementally richer. Not really a problem I'm interested in, I guess.
(As an aside, it seems to me retention is much higher in tech than it is on Wall St. The rosy view of this seems to be that Wall St pays so well that everyone retires early, but then again, there's a reason they call it "compensation.")
You have to make your own choices. Jane St has a gleaming reputation--and maybe, for you, it would have been a perfect match!--but not getting hired there seems to me to be a strange thing to consider a "greatest regret."
When I was younger, I held a lot of anger at Bush, Cheney, and other ideologues whose belief in the righteousness of their cause allowed them to ignore the evidence (no WMDs, no terrorist links), logic (the strategic costs of invasion), or ethics (torture, civilian deaths).
Now, though, I find myself a little bit more sympathetic to them: in recent years, American politics have been warped by non-believers—non-believers in democracy, in law, in any cause other than their own power and enrichment. Bush, Cheney, even Rumsfeld, seem to me to be smugly mistaken believers in the justness of their cause, but that’s still a cause other than their own personal power.
Erik Prince, in my view—discounting the lurid (but potentially true!) allegations that he believed he was fighting a Christian crusade against non-believers—is a foreshadowing of the Trump era, a privileged and wealthy man wrapping himself in the flag to hide his cynical interest in nothing more than making even more money, in absolutely any way possible.
Hard to say what’s worse, of course, but there’s certainly variety.
It does not describe the actions of someone who started a private mercenary company in order to make money. Which is a generous interpretation, since Prince has also been accused of holding a religious belief in killing Muslims.
Whatever you say about Bush and Cheney’s motives—and there’s much to say—they are not Prince’s motives. His motives, and responsibility, are his own.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotation...
Now selling a low-end "secure" smartphone?
Weird change of business, right?
I was just reading “Fistful of Shells”, which is written by a reasonably serious historian. He repeats this claim, but sources it to this somewhat silly Time Magazine article: https://money.com/the-10-richest-people-of-all-time-2/. That article in turn puts forth a surprisingly thoughtful methodology: https://money.com/richest-people-of-all-time-methodology/.
Obviously these comparisons are of limited value, as the methodology link above bothers to point out, but I don’t think it’s crazy—insofar as even stating “wealthiest person of all time” is meaningful, Mansa Musa looks to be a credible candidate.
Judges aim for consensus, and juries are intended to debate/discuss until they can reach it. So the complaint about "well, prosecutors can just keep trying" rings a little more hollow in that case.
(Again, there are a ton of other reasonable complaints--bullshit forensic "science", the fact that expert witnesses cost money that defendants don't have, mandatory minimum sentences, federal prosecutors' aversion to risking losses at trial, the awful penal system, etc. But this is a weird one to be hung up on, I think.)
What right of his do you think was violated?
Race is, of course, relevant, since case outcomes dramatically differ by race.
1. That outcomes should be binary, i.e. "guilty" or "innocent" with no mistrials. 2. That outcomes should be decided by unanimous, supermajority, majority, or some other arrangements.
I don't think either of those arguments are especially fundamental. My point was only that it's a bit hyperbolic to view the whole hung jury rule as some sort of Bill of Rights violation.
Nobody here looks good, of course. But even top flight tech companies have this sort of time-wasting, so it's not exactly a surprise you'd find it at a TLA as well.
Whether that's a fair description here, I can't say--but the New Yorker story is certainly internally consistent (and, it must be said, doesn't exactly make the CIA look good, either).
I read https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-ca... and, well, this guy's not exactly a poster child for "the system is out to get you."
I think the "our system is rigged" argument is a bit more compelling when looking at, say, the mandatory minimum sentences for crack possession.