It is a bit sad to see the smartest engineers in the world all working towards implementing and maintaining the largest spying apparatus in history.
We should be focusing on learning from and highlighting people who are working to make the world a better place - and not focusing on employees from these companies. Any online news aggregator could institute a policy to not promote products or services of these companies. Unfortunately, many startups are operating with the hope that these companies acquire them, and so they're all to happy to continue extending this spying apparatus even further into other domains.
> It is a bit sad to see the smartest engineers in the world all working towards implementing and maintaining the largest spying apparatus in history.
It is inevitable when society promotes "fiduciary duty" and "I got mine" as apex values for corporates and individuals, respectively. Unfettered selfishness cannot get to a globally optimal solution, despite what any free market zealots may tell you.
The collective good is out of fashion - it has been for a long time, TBH, but now it is unapologetically so.
I have turned off I think hundreds of ad targeting switches in Facebook, Google, Windows, and LinkedIn, and despite the incessant passive-aggressive warnings about how ads will be "less relevant", I don't find them to be worse.
I hope you're not one of the weirdos who likes to contradict people and say we are all fooling ourselves and the algorithm knows all.
Lobbying itself doesn't involve an exchange of money (its illegal to directly compensate a politician in exchange for services). If you write a letter to a politician its lobbying. Donations, many of which are legitimate, are regulated in many ways (e.g. https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate... ) The author is disingenuous by implying that all donations are bribes towards a single issue. If the goal is to fight the corruption, its best to be honest.
You're 100% correct. Its mostly about finding a system that works for you. As a format fat person I have internalized the fact that my body's hunger signal is broken and that 'eat when you are hungry' leads to weight gain for me. Focusing on the CO part of CICO, especially non exercise expenditure of energy has helped me keep my weight in check.
A lot of human progress in core sciences and engineering is on the backs of people toiling the midnight hours on sheer passion for little monetary reward. We owe a great debt of gratitude towards them.
In any commercial organization, there are tremendous pressures in high-investment, super high-risk projects and anyone can trivially find things that are wrong with the current system. The much more difficult challenge is showing an alternate path that is superior - based on the results it achieves. The times when you see the ugly behavior of people are times of desperation. Online commenters expend a lot of effort point out how to improve things by "proving" it by linking to random studies - but the more persuasive argument is by implementing those changes in the real world. "Talk is cheap, show me the code." ;)
Sure thing! I've got your alternate path that is superior right here: see, first I give the semiconductor industry a big fat middle finger, and then I go work for somebody who fucking pays me.
There were a lot many years from the time of Amazon's inception till they became a monopoly. It seems like your "what could be" experiment has already been done. There was plenty of opportunity, but nobody managed to build a better competitor to them.
It is a separate argument, but 'more competition' isn't a magical fix to everything. This sort of gating mechanism relies on the end user/consumer having good knowledge, sound judgement, etc. Also what is best for the consumer isn't best for the society. A wild example - For me, as the consumer I'm happy to get an iPhone for $200, but that might mean that Apple pays their employees below US minimum wage.
For me, I am convinced that they create jobs, spend money in the economy, help provide valuable goods and services to society, etc. Amazon is famous for not hoarding money but re-investing their profits. Most 401ks invest in index funds that are buoyed by the tech stocks. I don't have ready citations but I believe these to be relatively uncontroversial statements. This whole talk about "net positive" and what is "net" is a pointless discussion that is going nowhere. There is no way to prove anything unless we have an alternative universe without Amazon to study.
States provide the infrastructure and educate the workforce which enables the job creations. Jobs would be created without the rich. See responses sibling post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31743755) about the issue with 401(k) (or pension funds in non-USA countries).
This is indeed a very controversial statement because the rich are living a lifestyle which is at best unsustainable for the planet. They emit more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere for their own lavish lifestyles. They exploit poor labor conditions and lobby against every minor improvement. They don’t contribute to our shared funds like regular people, decreasing the state’s funds for more infrastructure which would have created more jobs. And they cause stress with their increased wealth disparity. Many research has shown perceived inequality is a significant stress producer. We may very well be bettor off without them.
>States provide the infrastructure and educate the workforce which enables the job creations.
Yes, there is a nice division of responsibilities. But ultimately, governments are doing the jobs they get paid for. And they're not only wasteful with our money (spending on wars, defense, etc), ironically (in a sad way) they pay government workers poorly - See teachers' salaries.
>Jobs would be created without the rich.
Jobs were created at all stages in history in all kinds of social and economic conditions. Also, plenty of rich people got rich after starting companies and creating jobs. We're incentivizing people who like money to create jobs, among other things.
Those are not responses to my comment, so specifically what part of my comment was inaccurate? I can correct any misunderstandings, or improve my comment to fix any errors on my part.
By that same logic, why should USA salaries be higher than the rest of the developed world? Will you work less hard if you can only get $70,000 versus $200,000? The CEO is an employee. The owners of the company hire him/her to do a job.
Wind the clock back to a time when you made a decision. Is it possible for you to make a different decision if you had the exact same mood/context/environment/knowledge and all the sub-atomic particles were exactly identical with the same spin, etc? Current dominant philosophical thought points towards a big NO.
Well current scientific thought says yes because measuring the spin in a particle in a superposition is truly non-deterministic from the perspective of observers, but I don't think that's relevant and I'm happy to think about the brain as an entirely or mostly deterministic thing, so I don't think this is too relevant, but we're not in a clockwork universe.
Well, quantum mechanics describes the universe as a wave function which describes a probability distribution. Most physicists who work on quantum mechanics seem to believe that wave function collapse is a truly nondeterministic process; the only real alternative, from what I understand, is hidden variable theories, which we know imply nonlocality thanks to Bell's theorem.
There's the caveat of Everettian quantum mechanics, where the universe is described exclusively through the wave function which evolves completely deterministically. However, this still causes the observer to experience a measurement outcome as truly nondeterministic; there's just one version of the observer for each measurement outcome.
EDIT: Though while this topic is fascinating, I don't think it's extremely relevant to my own thoughts on free will or whatever. I'm perfectly happy to discuss a hypothetical brain which is truly deterministic, and I don't think I would consider a consciousness simulated on a deterministic computer to have any less "free will". The consciousness in the computer would _be_ the circuitry and program. Of course it couldn't make different choices twice given the exact same state and input; it wanted to make the choice it did because of its state and inputs. I don't understand how the choice is any less free just because it's deterministic.
The quantum substrate being non-deterministic doesn't mean that free-will exists/doesn't exist. It has to be shown as such.
What is happening at the quantum level, to the extent that we can understand it, isn't directly translatable into a non-deterministic world at the higher macro level. And so, we do expect and observe a certain level of determinism in our macro scale world. For e.g. A topic relevant to this community - Computing. For the vast vast majority of cases when thousands of people execute the same program on the same or similar hardware at different times in different regions we do expect, and observe the same deterministic result. The outliers to this are primarily due to damage to the processor/equipment, software bugs, or other known factors (including alpha particles/radiation, etc).
Ah, I see what you're saying. I interpreted what you said to mean that current philosophical thinking is that the universe is deterministic, but you're saying that even though the universe is nondeterministic, the processes in the brain are completely deterministic. This feels like a purely empirical question rather than a philosophical one; I don't know whether there are processes in the brain which depend on quantum measurement outcomes. Though I would be kind of surprised if there's nothing at all; something as simple as putting a polarization filter in front of your eyes would make which exact photons are hitting your retina determined by the outcomes of quantum measurements, which seems to mean you'd be introducing truly nondeterministic noise into the system. But I'm also completely open to the idea that in general, quantum measurements don't affect the processing of the brain or sensory inputs in any way which affects decision-making, if that's what empirical investigation of the matter shows. Whether the brain is deterministic or nondeterministic doesn't really have any impact on the way I think about the concept of free will.
I think Everettian interpretations are secretly quite popular among physicists because the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't really get you that far. In Everettian QM, the evolution of the entire system remains deterministic.
We should be focusing on learning from and highlighting people who are working to make the world a better place - and not focusing on employees from these companies. Any online news aggregator could institute a policy to not promote products or services of these companies. Unfortunately, many startups are operating with the hope that these companies acquire them, and so they're all to happy to continue extending this spying apparatus even further into other domains.