They're desperate. The whole organization is dying.
939 karma · joined November 12, 2021
Arguably Google can't either but at least they provide the engineering talent, if not the ethical leadership. Mozilla just offers spam.
At this point it'd be better for the web if we standardized on Blink and moved on, cleaning up some of the invasive tracking in Chrome but leaving the renderer intact. Gecko and Safari/Webkit are just holding back the web.
Firefox provides nothing but a bunch of incompatibilities these days and some warm fuzzies that honestly haven't been deserved for years and years. Modern Firefox is slow, bloated spamware.
Google is a mixed bag; they used to be a force for real good on the internet, now they're mostly mediocre with a side of evil, riding on their past benevolence. I use their tools here and there, even if I think the internet is overdue for some serious de-googlization.
Facebook is just plain evil. I don't use their stuff in my personal life, but many businesses demand that you set up Facebook ads/analytics for them. I use fake accounts for those.
Amazon is pretty evil too, maybe AWS somewhat less so. I avoid them whenever possible (freelancing, etc., where I get to choose the stack) but oftentimes AWS is baked in to existing stacks and the companies are not interested in switching to anything else.
It doesn't require massive cultural differences, necessarily, but just a degree of moral compromise that most adults have to make in order to survive. Capitalism doesn't easily make for benevolent corporations and moral purity in tech is impossible when like 90% of it is owned by a dozen huge companies.
Google Analytics or its competitors take a few minutes to set up. Recreating that whole stack to feature parity would take forever.
#2 - custom GA events implemented via Google Tag Manager triggers. only takes a few hours to learn.
#3 - once you identify a few particular funnels you want to dive deep into, just skip GA altogether and use an all-purpose recording tool like Hotjar that'll let you automatically record entire user journeys starting or ending at some page. go through those with your UX team/person and look for potentially confusing interactions. takes like 5 min to set up, several days to collect data, and then a good UX person to interpret likely pain points that your users are running into. it's really hard to do a good funnel analysis in Google Analytics. Hotjar, or to some degree Facebook Insights, make that analysis a lot easier because they're GUI-driven and monitor the DOM visually, not code-and-config based like GA
One quick follow-up for #1, I wonder if a political boundaries layer would be helpful? Like districts for state/federal House, or local government divisions. When I lived in Chicago, being able to filter by ward would've been great. It's only gonna get more confusing as gerrymandering increases :)
Best of luck with the project, and thanks again for taking this on!
You can only afford so many Tiananmens before you crush the national morale, and with it, your autocratic pyramid scheme. China doesn't want to become North Korea.
Cloudflare, who almost single-handedly pushes the CDN industry ahead. So much respect for what they do and how they explain it in easy to understand terms.
IntelliJ family of IDEs and their extensive release notes and forum discussions; it can be a bit overwhelming and disorganized at times though
My personal favorite headless CMS: DatoCMS, small company but highly involved devs and iterating very quickly
Google USED to be really good at this long ago, but since Alphabet, they've become less and less transparent and more and more evil
Airtable, for bridging that gap between Excel and a proper database, with a heavy focus on UX and great release notes
There is a reason Comcast is everywhere and Google Fiber is nowhere...
1) The map takes up a lot of screen space but that's arguably not what is most important in this context. If you live in NYC, I would expect that getting around isn't going to be the make-or-break factor of whether you're going to an event. Meetup doesn't even have a map, and Yelp has a small overview map; both let the actual listings take up most of the space, because that's what people are looking for (interesting events, not primarily the closest one by 0.5 miles)
2) Allow people to browse not just events but also groups (associated nonprofits), along with a brief description for each and a "learn more" link. Maybe even some brief metadata (# of members, # of events hosted in the last 3 months, maybe even user reviews...)
3) You talked about the onboarding process in the works. Meetup is pretty good at that, allowing you to select multiple interests (tags) and showing you only the relevant stuff.
4) Being able to subscribe to tags and/or groups would be awesome. Most users probably would only care about a few groups, not all the events happening around them
5) Your filters are a bit confusing. What is the difference between Government, Voting, Campaigns, and Demonstrations...? Maybe more useful categories would be things like "Public Meeting", "Protest", "Community Gardens", "Arts & Crafts", "Food Kitchens", etc... like the specific activities people can engage in, as opposed to making people try to guess whether an event is more "Campaigns" or "Voting". I think breaking down "politics" into specific subcategories is something that people in the field (on the hill/work for a politician) might do, but to the general public, being able to (for example) separate thanksgiving help at the soup kitchen vs chalking for a politician is probably more useful.
6) For the search bar, also allow broader searches ("protests") and suggest them in the placeholder and autocomplete. Searching by exact event name is useless because there's no way people would know what nonprofits call their events.
7) Have some measure of popularity or importance, whether it's a heatmap or a count of attendees/group size, etc. I think the biggest job (and the hardest thing to do) for events sites is dealing with the signal to noise ratio, and presenting the most interesting events -- whether by algorithm or human moderation -- as opposed to a long list of tiny events with like 3-4 people attending that most people won't be interested in. The default view of a new user shouldn't be, "here's 200 things happening in your town, good luck choosing one" but rather something like "here are 3 top picks for today, and 2 more later this week... plus browse by category or popularity"
Some other minor stuff: Your images are loading with the wrong aspect ratios. They are being forcibly resized to squares in your popups... it's a small thing but has a big visual impact. Your Share button is way more prominent than your View More. Your addresses aren't clickable.
Overall though, really glad to see this sort of thing springing up. Thanks for building it, and hope it takes off!
Edit: basically what michaelscott said already
I agree that China is more oppressive towards its own citizenry. America's evil is often directed externally; there is a reason much of the Muslim world calls us the Great Satan.
In attempting to describe China, I am not defending it, but pointing out their different goals. They don't strive for personal freedom, but harmony and societal stability -- at an extreme cost to those who do not fit in. Individual liberty is not a strong concern in their culture, and from birth children are often taught to not stick out from the crowd too much. The raised nail gets the hammer.
Is that a bad thing? Yes, I think so, to the extent that they do it. But freedom isn't an absolute good either. Too little, and you get a coercive autocracy where citizens have no autonomy. Too much, and you get balkanization that turns into its own kind of social discord, whether it's an extreme political divide in a democracy, great wealth and power divides, ethnic conflicts, a civil war, or warlordism like Somalia/Iraq/etc. At a societal scale, too little freedom almost always means extreme suffering, but the inverse isn't always true: maximum freedom does not mean maximum happiness.
On a political compass, freedom and authoritarianism may be two sides of an axis, but they are not the only matters of concern. The level of personal freedom in a society directly influences any other axis you may choose to plot: happiness, wealth, equality, sustainability, stability, etc.
In any given society there are always people who seek power over others. The rule of law, be it the Magna Carta or a Constitution, is intended to temper the power of traditional royalty or modern autocracies, to varying degrees of success. I'd argue the most essential function of a democracy is to ensure no one person/group gets too powerful, that checks and balances aren't a side effect of a good democracy but a defining characteristic. That requires a check upon the freedoms of the powerful in order to protect those with less power from exploitation... that's been a truism carried from antiquity through the industrial era and onto the present day. Otherwise you get Hitler, Putin, Trump... all monsters created by democracies in decline, all strong-men who rose to power selling the idea of power for an in-group by exploiting some out-group.
In the modern West, I think the idea of "freedom" is often discussed as both "freedom to" (own guns, have an abortion, start a business, vote, marry who you choose, worship as you please, pay the wages you want, choose the suppliers you want) and "freedom from" (extreme poverty, labor exploitation, slavery, monopolies, a military draft, religious control, vote suppression, WASP male dominance, autocracy). With our freedoms, we've developed a roughly 50/50 split on any major political topic, and as a result our government has been quagmired for decades, our citizens hate each other, and the only things most Americans can agree on is that the government is broken and the country is going to shit. Our enemies savvily exploit these divisions to further divide and conquer us.
China after Mao simply tackled those kinds of controversies by decree, shut everyone up, and focused on transforming their infrastructure and economy with an emphasis on harmony over liberty. In the process they rose from a impoverished, war-torn peasant economy to the world's next superpower. Some of their citizens find this an acceptable tradeoff, especially considering they never really had a history of democracy. Going from divine emperors to nationalist-capitalist autocracy (under the guise of agrarian communism, but who are we kidding) drastically improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people, more than the entire population of the USA. There are more middle-class Chinese than there are Americans (of any class). That is no small undertaking, even if outsiders like us don't agree with their methods.
Would we choose to give up the freedoms we have now to become more like China? No. You wouldn't, and I wouldn't. But would our answers be different if we were a peasant in 1980s China, who didn't have much freedom to begin with, and were looking at imminent starvation and death? I don't know. Mao's revolution failed and destroyed the country, yet in its wake somehow their people picked up the pieces and clawed their way back to relevance, and now, strength. It wasn't pretty, and the loss of personal liberty was part of the price they paid. It's easy to judge that value system out of its historical context, from a comfortable seat in the West, but I imagine for their people on the ground back then, it was a very different situation.
Anyhow... back to the topic at large. Freedom is often a loaded word, carrying so much cultural baggage and weaponized politicism that it's difficult to use in everyday discussion anymore. I usually find it less emotionally charged to discuss freedom in adjacent terms: individualism and collectivism.
The USA is strongly individualistic, China strongly collectivist. In between, some of Europe is more individualistic (the UK), while others are more collectivist (Finland). In aggregate the wealthiest, happiest, most developed countries tend to be those that are highly free, but also rather homogenous and collectivist. The United States may be more free than others, but its freedoms typically favor the elites (white gun owners, WASP business owners, people arising from the European tradition of individualism, etc.), and as a result it suffers in other measures of human development (healthcare, education, equality, etc.).
Arguably there is a wrong place to be on the individualist vs collectivist spectrum: on either extreme. But there is not necessarily a "right" place. Much of the West leans individualist, much of the East leans the other way. We see both strong and weak countries in both, and happy and miserable citizens in both. Different societies have different ideals, and different power structures, and from their values arise different laws and propaganda. It's not as simple as saying freer countries are better. There is both a value and a cost to our freedoms.
Only by NOT equating us to China can we tease out potential changes for the future. I'd argue that America would see better societal outcomes by pivoting more towards collectivism, and China would see better societal outcomes by pivoting more towards individualism. In the middle both would have to tease out what sorts of freedoms to protect and which to sacrifice. Personally I'd hope both would ultimately land somewhere near the Scandinavians, but with the way things are going, probably both are headed towards ultra-authoritarianism instead.
Back home, in the US, I don't think our fractured democracy will survive the challenges of the next few decades... we are a country now without vision, unity, or purpose. Once the advertising bubble collapses and China and Russia catch up to our tech and services sectors, then soon after overtake our military, there won't be much left for us. Because we were so blindly chasing personal freedoms we forget anymore what it means to be a country.
I'm guessing it probably varies by species and soil and climate and such. It's not a given that old growth will keep sequestering more than replanted forest. Old growth, according to that followup study, eventually reaches a carbon equilibrium. They don't grow to infinity and keep sucking up carbon. If you take those trees and move them into furniture you've essentially freed up soil and canopy (light) for more wood to grow.
If they just replace the old growth with rangeland or development, then yes, it's much worse.
The US has been doing what its entire existence? Propaganda, camps, both? And so what? Doesn't make it right for either country. The US and China are both evil in their own ways.
Many other countries are multilingual and to some degree multicultural. Few are as homogenous as East Asian countries.
> Wouldn't it be hard to integrate into the business community if you didn't speak the official language of business in a given country?
Uh, so offer free Chinese language schools and economic opportunities. It doesn't require kidnapping them and putting them in concentration camps.
How do you sell violence to the populace? For collectivist countries, it's "they are unlike us, we will show them our ways." For individualist countries, it's "we are unlike them, we will show them our ways." It doesn't really matter what noble buzzword you attach to your violent ideology, in the end you have a hierarchical society predicated upon the exploitation of the less powerful.
In describing what I perceive their objectives to be, it does not in any way mean I condone their actions. Only that I desire to understand a great power that is more than likely going to become a great enemy someday soon, unless we can somehow find common ground with their common people and rebel against the violent, coercive elitism in both cultures.
The average person anywhere isn't really all that different, in my personal experience. But their supposed values, most of which go unexamined their whole lives, are largely shaped by the cultural environment they grew up in. More often than not they just toe the line of whatever hero their parents or friends happened to worship, typically some asshole elite. That's as true in China as it is in the USA. That's not a defense of Chinese oppression, it's a recognition of human folly in the aggregate.
For what it's worth, we incarcerate more people than the Chinese, even though they have 4x the population. For every Xinjiang they have we have a Gitmo, for every Tibet we have Afghanistan and Iraq. There are no innocent superpowers; all are evil and got there by doing great evil in the not-so-distant past.
If you burn it for fuel though, it's back in the atmosphere.
Please note that I am NOT advocating that we log old-growth forests, just that the carbon math isn't simple or, well, clear-cut.
Additionally, much of the modern conservative movement (around the world) is centered around personality worship and anti-democratization of power structures and are trying very hard to move their democracies toward autocracy favoring a cultural or ethnic in-group.
Wikipedia has a much more extensive list, along with various things that contribute to it:
Speaking as an agnostic, outside observer looking in on the various forms of Buddhism:
Buddhism has mutated a lot in its history, and every country it touches has been changed by it and in turn changes it. I don't think any two countries practice the same form of Buddhism. Some sects of it are strongly mystical and others are more rational, and deification is an important part of some practices (and practitioners) and not others. In the US, I've been to supposedly Zen practices that had an emphasis on "acknowledging/honoring" the bodhisattvas prior to meditation; to me, as an agnostic, it felt very similar to worship.
"Buddhism with Chinese characteristics" (to steal a phrase) mixes their particular cultural norms with the Indian version, adds on Confucianism and Taoism to some degree, and then seeks to put it all under CCP control. Much like the Romans absorbed Christianity and added their own flavor, China does the same with its assimilees... again, for cultural and political hegemony. They are trying to weave the young puppet Dalai Lama into their own narrative, slowly and subtly.
You are a Buddhist in the same sense that Protestants and Catholics are both Christian, but that never stopped them from disagreeing :) Weird, the arbitrary lines in the sand we like to draw, no?
Self-sacrifice as an act of martyrdom lets you maintain the moral high ground, continue your role as the victim, and still speak your truth -- however quietly, in the modern attention-deficit, compassion-fatigued era.
Also, keep in mind the power differential between China and Tibet. There is no feasible way for Tibet to even put up a fight, much less win an actual armed conflict. Suicide bombing would just bring even more terrible oppressions upon their people.
The self-immolation isn't an act of grand military strategy. It's a desperate cry for justice in this world or their next, whispered into the wind and carried to an uncaring world. It's the sort of thing that requires a deep commitment to one's values, knowing its ultimate effect and still choosing to go through with it, not because it's strategically useful but only because you are exercising what little agency you have left with the ideals you've carried your whole life.
China very rarely does anything in the name of short-term profit. Their government doesn't work on 4-year competitive cycles like ours does, they plan and orchestrate in decades, and to them it's safer to conquer and assimilate other territories while they are still underdeveloped than when they become too powerful, either economically (like Taiwan) or culturally (like Tibet) or both (like Hong Kong). Having a puppet religious master under their control, along with all of Tibet's future economic output, is reason enough to seize it, even the real gains won't be realized for another few decades. The artificial legitimacy of Chinese-controlled Buddhism would greatly expand their cultural sphere of influence both inside and outside their immediate borders.
I sincerely doubt there will be any meaningful democracies left by 2040 :) People always trend towards strong leaders and authoritarianism in the face of crisis, and there will be oh so many crises...
But in this case there is such a vast power differential between the two (the persecuted and the persecutor). The Chinese kids are literally taunting the victim of a genocide their country is perpetrating. That's not a free speech/hate speech thing, that's just straight up bullying... while that girl's family is still in danger of life and liberty.
"Hahahaha your family is in danger, boooo you suck, hahaha." That is unacceptable in any circumstance, akin to Holocaust denialism in a synagogue, except that in this case the Uyghur holocaust is still ongoing. One side has no power and is at risk of death while the other side is completely protected and just being assholes.
It's not a freedom of expression issue, it's a basic human decency thing. If you don't want to hear it, just leave, don't taunt the people your government is enslaving and murdering.