samlevine

There are a number of ways of paying for a social network. Among them:

- Ads

- Subscriptions

- Loss leader for another product

- Microtransactions

Facebook does ads.

Subscriptions hurt network effects.

Google+ ran into a brick wall of network effects.

Nobody uses Flattr, and it's hard to imagine people paying a buck for video filters or other premium features.

It'd be great to solve the problem without building another Facebook, but my best guess is that if Facebook goes down someone else builds another system basically identical to Facebook and we all have this conversation again 10 years in the future.

The same way the Germans do, they save money.

Rising housing prices have played out the same across the Anglophone world. It's not sustainable as a means to get the lower classes into the middle class, because the higher prices rise the more debt they need to take on to join the game.

Housing is something people consume. It's durable, but so are cars and imagining them as being a gateway investment to the middle class because they will cost more in the future should be just as silly as for housing.

> I also expected, as a result, a correction in the price of housing to actually realistic levels.

Housing prices were realistic. We know this because most of the Anglophone world has had similar experiences with housing prices without the "bubble" bursting, and because prices have gone back to where we started back before everything blew up.

There were bad loans, and financial products that were fraudulently repackaging them. Regulators were asleep at the wheel. And the government has played a huge part in getting housing prices to high levels. But the value of the homes themselves was and is clearly real because people remain willing to pay for them.

The US is pretty darn good at manufacturing and has gotten stronger with global competition. Even if US geopolitical dominance fades, it's hard to see this changing this century.

Hopefully not what was done to open up imperial China to the opium trade.

A war with China over Taiwan, for example, wouldn't be a total war (at first, god willing). But it would be one that would have the US pitted against a foe with better technology than we've ever faced, even if they can't easily project much non-nuclear force into our territory.

People in the 20th century didn't think WWI would happen, because it would be incredibly stupid to blow up yourself and your trading partners. We did it anyway, and underestimating our capacity for self-destruction invites it.

Because Amazon could build their own city if they had to. The US has a lot of land, power and freeways leading to international airports.

> I'm not sure I'm following your points. You're moving back and forth between enormous historical and current problems and sweeping the platitudinal meat under the rug.

The problems America faces are largely controlled by democratic systems.

Google, Facebook, et al are neither the cause nor the solution to the problems described by the author of the post.

If we decide to turn ad networks into surveillance systems used to commit crimes against humanity it will be because our democratically elected representatives were told to do something by voters and they did so.

The author correctly points out that the Bay Area's problems are political in origin, and that tech companies and technologists in general have been reticent to get dirty with politics.

However, their solution, putting tech companies under more democratic control, does not solve the problems specified.

Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's work is under democratic control. As are the zoning policies which keep out poor and middle class citizens from the few parts of the country which have benefited from our economic growth. The companies that charge our local state and federal governments 10x what Europeans to build roads, bridges, mass transit and build other projects are very tightly controlled by our democratic systems.

Facebook and Google are not preventing people from building housing. They are not building tools for the government to round up "undesirables", nor are they building drones that blow up civilians. They are building technology that allows advertisers to more accurately sell people stuff.

It should be obvious to anyone at this point that this could be used for nefarious purposes. But so can any number of other technologies developed over the past two centuries. The 20th century was a testament to how much murder humans can commit when given the opportunity, and we did not need machine learning to make it happen.

> Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard because they involve politics. But they should involve politics.

... SNIP ...

> In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise democratic control over that software.

Tighter control over targeted advertising by Facebook won't suddenly help with crappy zoning or infrastructure projects designed to maximize the extraction of wealth from taxpayers while minimizing the results.

> LIES. ALL LIES.

It's difficult to do marketing for things that aren't yet in productized form without them being aspirational to some extent or another.

Case in point, the public unveilings for the Kinect and original Mac were combinations of stuff that worked at the time of the demo and stuff they hoped to finish by the time they sold. The former didn't deliver, the latter did.

It's clearly bad to overhype a product, but you have to try and reach for what you think you can do even if you're not done yet. And for new product categories you're even more dependent on marketing than for established ones.

The parent comment suggests becoming a billionaire through a short. The people who bet long are likely leveraged to some extent, and if they have enough of a BTC portfolio to allow a short against them to make you a billionaire it's not unlikely that they just won't have the money to cover the bet.

We saw this prior to the Great Recession, and in the 1929 crash too. I'm ignoring the potential for a bank run to complicate matters, just sticking with counterparty risk which is easy to model.

Assuming someone shorts BTC and it crashes, how are they going to collect when the other parties are likely heavily invested in BTC to begin with?

If someone else is running code you can't read on your device where you don't have root, it is someone else's device.

Failing this, we rely on the hope that companies can make more money off protecting our privacy than they can from exploiting our data. It remains to be seen which will win in the marketplace.

Seattle's modest light rail system is going to end up costing $50 billion. Ultimately Americans are just really bad at infrastructure and if you're not willing to spend 10x what other developed countries are you're not getting it.

San Francisco's population density: 18,573/sq mi

Manhattan's: 71,998.9/sq mi

It's difficult to look at this without thinking that the initial problem to be solved is density in the urban core.

Eventually, yes, you need much better transit to outlying areas. This will take decades even with iron clad political will, which isn't happening short of a takeover by house of Bourbon.

We can apply Kant's categorical imperative to lots of stuff. Some people don't want to have children. If everyone chose to not have children the human race would face extinction.

This does not imply that we must (or more importantly, can from a moral perspective) force people who do not want children to have them anymore that it implies that forcing people who do not want flu shots is the right thing to do.

Singapore or Zurich are about as close as you're going to get, depending on what you fancy in a country.

China is doing a pretty good job of building giant cities without much local consultation.

People fight wars where millions die and billions of dollars are spent so that they aren't told what to do by another group of people.

Colonizing Mars is, by comparison, vastly cheaper in blood. Just not in treasure.

> It makes sense, as a country you wouldn’t want US companies taking over your social media.

Not having to build your own Facebook (and WhatsApp, etc.) means that you can build something else that can (eventually) compete internationally.

China isn't being irrational here, but there is a tradeoff between growth and security.

> will we reach a point where cameras are digital paintbrushes that construct a human-pleasing image out of hints from the real world, rather than tools that capture the real world?

We're all stuck in Plato's cave. Aperture is just one thing you can use to change how a photo looks, and this has always been under the control of photographers:

https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e17ac8adb8b21eaa43d409...

It's the best way to raise socially and economically successful children in the modern era.

It has a good side effect of giving otherwise ineligible bachelors the ability to form families and thus do something other than die in wars and commit crime, but I don't think this drives individuals to marriage.

Journalists aren't even SMEs in most cases.

If they're good, they get enough depth to explain what SMEs are talking about and to understand the difference between a huckster and an expert. And, amazingly enough, the SMEs themselves will disagree on fine points and big issues.

There is too much specialized information and knowledge for social media companies to be reliable arbiters of truth for any controversial topic.

It's hard to bootstrap some models without a lot of money. Even with money, it's not obvious there is a market until people prove it via piracy.

For example, Crunchyroll is the least terrible anime streaming site and they got started by stealing anime that was "stolen" by folks that wanted to put decent subtitles on shows from Japan.

They eventually hired some of the folks they were stealing subtitles from, and got licensing deals from the content owners once they had revenue. But they never would have been able to negotiate a deal if they'd have asked for permission instead of forgiveness.

It's entirely possible to imagine that another streaming company (Netflix, Hulu) would have looked at all of the great quality subtitles being produced by non-content owners and figured out that there was revenue to be had. But I fail to see how they would have seen the demand if people hadn't been stealing and making good subtitles to begin with, and producing huge numbers of stolen downloads/streams.

> The view from the pinnacle, people counting the dividends on the checks that they inherited is that they're the job creators, and everyone else is dispensable. This company just found out that is not the case.

The solution to this, should it become a regular occurrence, is to make the folks with the keys to the kingdom replaceable.

It's doable, companies just don't do it because most people don't want to destroy their high paying and relatively comfortable careers committing felonies and getting sent to prison because they had to spend a few weeks or months looking for a new job.

Facebook is worse than Fascism and Communism? Seriously?

> The Kobe Bryant workout routine features a hefty mix of track work, basketball skills and weightlifting. His off-season workout has been called the 666 program because he spends 2 hours running, 2 hours on basketball, and 2 hours weightlifting (for a total of 6 hours a day, six times a week, for six months).

This seems disingenuous, given that Kobe does a lot more than just work out.

> Housing, ... supply limited

The US is incredibly sparsely populated, there would be billions of residents if we were as dense as Western Europe.

We do have limited supply of housing in artificially low dense cities that have good jobs, but that's politics and not economics.

Simple, robots with guns to prevent the humans from guns from takings your stuff.