Joke's on you Immanuel Kant, we have a real philosopher in here!
569 karma · joined November 5, 2019
Another way to say this is: "learn".
The real solution is to find a business model, or a way to organize society, that does not depend on us building nonsensical prisons or restrictions for each other. It's almost as if surveillance capitalism is not the final answer...
The same with standards, and you are misunderstanding on purpose.
If Google chooses to not support simple HTML, then they are choosing to not support countless accessibility tools, and they know it. Some blind people will have a more miserable life because Google attained a de facto monopoly, but does not recognize some of the moral obligations that people like me feel should come with such a position. "With great power comes great responsibility", or maybe not.
They don't do it because they are more preoccupied with extracting data about their users than they are about accessibility, and yes, this includes blind people. There is not way around it.
It is perfectly legal to be selfish, but let's not bullshit ourselves about what is really going on...
It is the medium that makes the ads possible, and it is payed by you and me.
> We're talking about content, and ads are the subsidy that lets billions consume for free.
And I have been telling you every step of the way that there was good content before the ads arrived.
> That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true,
That is hardly surprising. There was no moment in the history of the web when the total amount of content available was not increasing. This was already the case before the ads.
Did it grown more than it would have without ads? Maybe. Is it better? I don't think so.
> and advertising pays for much of it.
And yet here you are, consuming content that someone created for free (me) in a platform without ads (Hacker News). So it doesn't pay for all of it, and even you, at least sometimes, seem to prefer the non-ad-funded corner.
> You seem to be conflating ad UX with economics.
Sorry, I have no idea what you mean by this.
Yes there was. Go to archive.org and check for yourself.
> The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads.
Bigger doesn't mean better. The web is now flooded with malicious and manipulative content. The ads pay for that content, while taxpayers and consumers pay for the infrastructure that actually makes the Internet possible. Ads pay to keep the web centralized, they don't pay for what makes the web possible.
> This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
There is indeed, but notice that I did not say that "everything was somehow better in the good old days". I made a very specific comment about a very specific topic. My comment: there was plenty of quality content on the web before ads arrived. Ads made the web worse. Argue against this if you like, but not about things I did not claim.
There was plenty of free content online before ads, in fact I claim that the web was better before ads arrived, and it is getting worse by the day. Marketeers ruined it.
It happens over and over. YouTube had plenty of great content for free before monetization. Now it is becoming worse by the day, because everything is ad-related. "Influencers", etc.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.
Easy access to information is a consequence of the Internet and then the Web, both technologies having been developed by government-funded programs, respectively in the US and in the EU.
Ads brought us re-centraliztion, targeting and erosion of democracy through extreme polarization and fake news.
I know this is hard to believe for a lot of people here, but human beings are motivated by many things other than monetary profit.
Wait, aren't you the person who just wrote "think different"? I'm confused.
> Most of our beautiful classical art was advertisements for the Church
Sure, and Jesus was a Marxist, or something... If you try to force XXI century concepts into XIV century realities you can arrive at silly over-simplified conclusions such as the one above.
> most graffiti is uglier than ads
This is your opinion. Graffitis are not trying to manipulate me.
From the point of view of the victims, it as intrusion on their thoughts of attention, and almost always an attempt to implant a desire into their mind.
Ads are art to the same degree that cannibalism is gastronomy.
Maybe what we call "impulsivity" is just an healthy reaction against absurd constraints and monotony? We forget very easily that we are animals, and the way we have been living for the last few centuries is radically different from the way we were evolved to live.
Perhaps factory-like schooling is inherently painful, and what we call "adulthood" is just learned helplessness...
Every single second that you are working, you know that your employer might be looking over your shoulder. It's like living under a microscope. For me, this is an indignity. Having to work in such circumstances would probably drive me to deep depression.
> Do people in EU countries expect to use any other of their employer’s equipment for personal reasons?
Within reason, sure. I would say that the main value that underlies all EU countries (not that we realize it perfectly, or even get close to it, of course!) is that human beings are the most important thing.
I find mainstream American values increasingly inhumane.
Excellent. Now you only have to remove the expectation of privacy in any situation from the social norms, and another big problem will be solved. You will be able to live under total surveillance without anyone feeling that their privacy is being violated, because there was no expectation of privacy to begin with.
An alternative hypothesis (crazy, I know...), is that the power imbalance in favor of the rich went very far in the US, which means that the poor have no safety net or ability to organize, so they are completely at the mercy of the whims of corporations for survival. And so, they will accept many indignities without bating an eye.
I see a lot of this here on HN, and I think it is a common vice among people with strong knowledge in the hard sciences but with a rather narrow scope of interests outside of it.
I believe that the point was that sovereignty over how one spends one's time is more important than material possessions, beyond what is strictly necessary. Surgeons can save a lot of money and retire early, probably are less restricted by managers than the typical wage slave, have a very meaningful job (something quite rare these days), etc.
Most people's lives today are not like this. They are stuck in a hamster wheel that they cannot jump out of without becoming homeless.
This is absolutely safe. If you brain is healthy, it will produce the dopamine it needs either you want it or not. Abstaining from Facebook, or even abstaining from all activity and spending the day staring at a wall will not change that.
If the answer is no, this should give you pause. A thought experiment. Consider the alternatives:
(a) that we finally removed all irrationality from our understanding of reality, and you happen to be living in this golden age, while the centuries and millennia extending before you were dominated by irrationality;
(b) that it is very hard to spot irrational beliefs when you are immersed in the culture that produces them.
Which one do you figure is more probable?
Not so if you value freedom of human beings above all else, and even less so if you would wish to maximize human freedom across the population.
Unregulated capitalism maximizes the potential for freedom, if you win a lottery ticket, at the expense of diminishing freedom for all the losers. Libertarians tend to either already be rich or believe they have a significant shot at winning the lottery ticket.
A practical example: lack of worker rights in the US corresponds to more freedom in the abstract, but in practice creates a society where the average worker is much less free than, say, the average European worker. For example, workers in more regulated labor markets enjoy many more days of vacation on average, leading to literally more freedom to explore the world and pursue personal interests.
That is just name calling, and doesn't really improve the quality of the discussion.
> Inasmuch as the intent of war is effecting political change (as Clausewitz put it, "the continuation of politics by other means"), your argument applies just as well. By your logic, antiwar activists would be nothing more than status quo fans who want to be comfortable. This would obviously be ludicrous: it's possible to object to the means of war without comment on whether its claimed aims are worthwhile.
Antiwar activists are, by definition, actively participating in politics. The same is true of people who promote war. So, no. Nothing that you write holds "by my logic". If you are "sick of politics", then you are in favor of maintaining the status quo, whatever it is. There is really no way around it.
> Being "sick of politics" in this case easily describes many people I know, people who have been far more serious about the issues you raise for far longer than most of the loudest advocates today are.
How do you know any of that? Sorry, but I won't just take your word for it. And, in any case, it is besides the point. I was not even arguing in favor of the activists, I was instead claiming that wanting people to stop doing politics is politics.
> The aversion isn't to change per se, but to methods that have become fashionable that are seen as both counterproductive to their aims and detrimental to civic society.
Again, how do you know that? Are you a mind reader?