It just so happens that humans inhabit the outside world too? And that the outside is shared by everybody?
131 karma · joined May 9, 2019
I on the other hand, Maximus Virtus, am a net gain to humanity when I hack into tech products for visualizing my home’s data.
Now you just have a no-show at the gate (P>50% ? something they’re surely used to handle efficiently) giving them some slack to fly their overbook flight without having to bump anyone. Truly a win-win
#2. You can pay? Also is the argument somehow that the free thing isn’t free because the ad in it makes the UX worse?
Also curious to know how many ads exactly do you get while using google workspace? drive? android? maps?
Finally: You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.
Which is a bad thing and should stop. Right now!
Ps: it’s also not like you’re paying so little that you could say you’re getting it for…… free
Excellent criticism too that the evil monopolist that devilishly gives away extremely useful and value-add products and services in order to expand its evil monopoly is also famously criticized by the victims of those free data-mining products for sometimes discontinuing them without giving them proper notice! Surely Google can’t just stop mistreating them without adequate prior notice!
“But my data” Have your ever sold your data? Would the value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever equate to the value you get from the free services?
Likely No and No.
Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are free
Someone creating something appealing and giving it away for free in order to make up for it through ads in front of eyeballs does not in any way mean that the free thing isn’t free
Is it the free maps? free mobile OS? free email? free cloud storage? free video service? free office suite? free desktop OS? free AI chat?
- Providing a free alternative to Microsoft’s monopolized office suite and desktop OS
- Provide a free alternative to Apple’s mobile OS, spurring a revolution in access to the internet for the world’s poor
- Provide free global maps with streetview sights
- Provide a free to access video platform with invaluable educational resources that allows millions of creators to make a living and that likely wouldn’t exist save for Google’s monumental investments and ability to sustain years of losses
- Research given away for free that ignited the current AI revolution
- Research given away for free that is revolutionizing medicine and drug development
In sum, truly a horrible thing they’ve done
- An office software suite
- Global maps and GPS, City Guides
- Video entertainment
- Mobile and Desktop OS
- Web Browsers
Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion global corporations
In my case I both set a daily time limit and block certain apps to only certain hours of the day
To be clear I’m working from two assumptions: 1) I have no issue with people being completely dependent on government support. 2) I have no issue nor do I partake in our glorification of work for work’s sake.
Having said that, the most important economic aberration UBI would do away with is the need for government and most public policy in general being run as de-facto job programs for the otherwise unemployable. If UBI were a reality there would be no rationale for bloated agencies, over-staffed infrastructure projects, tax schemes for factories, you name it. In that world, we could potentially turbocharge governance, as well as governmental and policy efficiency and efficacy.
A secondary, yet also important benefit of UBI is that it would unleash a ton of capable people who are otherwise bound to jobs or arrangements far below their capacity, for the simple fact that the fear of starvation or homelessness is too great. Think of all the human potential we could release if capable people felt safe enough to get an education or start a business.
Ultimately a bunch of people would just rely on UBI from birth to death. I don’t think that is a bad outcome. We live in a society advanced enough to be horrified by just letting people die/starve. However we struggle with the idea of some people just doing nothing when in fact the best possible outcome is for them to do just that. Some people are just not capable enough to do stuff at the level required in an advanced society, and saddling some institutions with employing them for charity does more harm than good.
It critiques working conditions without providing any context as to how these jobs compare to other low pay -or more likely even average pay- jobs in those countries.
Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady employment outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come by in many -if not most- countries of the world, never mind Africa alone.
Although most of these claims seem to be “obvious” and logically sound, there are I think a number of caveats to consider:
1. While overall population is shrinking, by and large china is replacing a huge population of low-skill farm and industrial laborers with medium to high-skilled educated workers who are likely to out-earn them by large margins.
2. If anything the problem for the Chinese economy for the past 20 years hasn’t been under-investment but Over-Investment. What that means is that all those ghost cities, empty roads and suboptimally run factories leave a lot of slack in the system for growth to continue at lower investment rates.
3. It may actually benefit China, as it shifts from an export driven to a consumption driven economy to have a large population of idle old people spending money on the economy, it means that the government can grow the economy by directing more funds to people rather than to hard assets whose ROI becomes increasingly dubious.
4. China is investing heavily in AI, automation and creating other types of competitive advantages in order to supersede their historical dependence on raw numbers of cheap labor. Although the judge still is out, I think this article is premised on backward looking assumptions (You need lots of workers to have a growing economy!) rather than forward looking... (what type of society may technology enable us to build?). Furthermore it misses out on how all the investments China has made in the near past will be leveraged in the future. I’d argue that what a small population can do with good infrastructure, education, etc. is orders of magnitude higher than what a huge population can do with poor infra/edu. By any measure even in a hundred years China will still have a working population roughly equal to the west/NATO as a whole... they will also have thousands of miles of bullet trains, subways, roads, waterways and if things go to plan an unrivaled manufacturing capacity and a digital infrastructure (in terms not only of internet connections, but also an ecosystem of big and small companies, VCs, etc) that although powerful in the US is almost nonexistent in europe.
5. China is building a domestic financial infrastructure that is likely to rival that of the west (already how many IPOs were there in Germany, or all of europe ex-UK last year vs NY or HK+Shanghai+Shenzhen?) which will enable it to create a self sustaining domestic ecosystem for allocating capital more effectively.
All this goes to say that -and I’m no China shill- that I find the whole article rests on some sort of western progressive complacency that diminishes the scale of geopolitical rivalry that China presents and thinks that we can overlook our problems because in due time the public will come around to some easy, invariably obvious, solution. For instance, if you think that national power derives from sheer numbers of people the logical conclusion is that all the west’s problems will be solved once massive numbers of immigrants -mostly uneducated- are let in. Nevertheless although there is undoubtedly a role that immigration can play in growth (just look at the number of companies started by first or second generation immigrants) I think this obfuscates the real factors that enable economic growth and which often times are opposed by the type of facile progressive arguments that often underlie pieces like this and are also often against business and growth friendly policies. In particular I don’t think that immigrants themselves are that important if you think of them without also considering the enabling factors, such that it wasn’t Elon Musk alone that made paypal/tesla/spacex, but Elon Musk + America. Why I say this is that I believe China is heavily investing to make this type of thing a reality there and so I think any analysis of the country that looks at it through “anyplace-glasses” errs, because in fact we should look at China through “exceptional-place-glasses” and more importantly, we should think more about what the consequences may be for the future of all of us outside China of an exceptional place fully becoming its own but with an almost all-powerful 21st century tech enabled authoritarian regime.
Similarly if you don’t like the terms of the App Store you could have the option to purchase an open iOS v.1X and install whichever store you please. The only difference would be that you would need to pay again for subsequent versions of the OS, just like ppl would pay to update windows from XP to Vista to 7, etc.