I think this is a good thing but I'm curious why the same reasoning isn't used towards preventing ads and trackers. They're both unwanted unless the user expresses an interest and as a bonus they also degrade performance or consume power and data on mobile devices.
I want something like uBlock running in Chrome on Android. I can do it in CopperheadOS or with Firefox, but it blows my mind that Google recognizes these types of issues but won't deal with perhaps the most egregious one.
Given Equifax is locking access to whether you're a victim behind an agreement that forfeits civil rights to act on that information, this looks like a textbook unconscionable contract.
You find out whether you're affected before you enroll. YOu enter your info, get a result that says "no/maybe/you should enroll right away" and then it shows the button to actually enroll in their service. Until you actually enroll you haven't agreed to the arbitration clause.
Somebody should open a second lawsuit about this. A hack is one thing, but a deliberately evil reaction to it should spell the end of the line for the company.
That seems like a tad bit of an overreaction on Salesforce's part. The only mismatch here was the expectation set around the availability of the tool's source? So yeah, it was clear the tool is owned by Salesforce and ultimately something like that is decided by the company, but saying you're going to "fight to have it open sourced" and advocating to have tooling you build be shared outside of your company doesn't seem like a fireable offense to me. Look at what it's done for companies like Facebook and Google.
What the hell, Salesforce? This looks bad. There's either more to the story or this is just extreme knee jerk.
The title seems a little clickbaity. It seems all that's being said is the FCC is recommending a reasonable minimum, not a maximum. I don't think it makes sense to run gig fiber connections to rural homes unless someone is footing the bill, but they definitely should have some internet capability, and 10/1 mobile and 25/3 direct seems at least minimally viable.
This title makes it sound like the FCC is advocating that speeds above those are unnecessary for anyone, as if they're coming for your network speed. I don't get the sensationalism here, this hardly even seems newsworthy.
While not exactly rural, I certainly enjoy having rock-solid gigabit fiber here in Rome, Georgia (via AT&T Fiber). And while mobile networks are improving, I can't envision mobile as an adequate replacement to dedicated fiber, at least currently. Especially given the variability in signal strength and speed. Not to mention data caps and throttling are also pre
And just because a cell provider purports to offer LTE within a geographic area, that doesn't translate to LTE being available and reliable within and throughout your residence. In the past, I frequently experienced downgrades to 3G and Edge, with only intermittent LTE availability.
I don't think we're in disagreement; I just wanted to share my perspective.
Precisely. They're just saying that the current situation doesn't warrant regulatory intervention. In most metro areas, 100Mbps is pretty readily available due to market forces rather than regulation and competition among fiber providers is pushing speeds into the 1Gbps range in many areas.
That comes across as unfair by definition, but practically there are no such ways to do what you've claimed.
It's unfair in the sense that this progressive or far left ideal is allowed to be pushed onto entire organizations and by the media as de facto "right" or "correct", which is inherently a political position and would likely offend anyone who disagrees with it. If these processes and programs should be publicly enacted on people who disagree with them, it's unfair then to disallow any discussion about them under an implicit threat of termination. Google just confirmed that threat is very real. I know many conservatives here (a classical liberal / libertarian mostly myself, which is far too "right leaning" for this area) who are actually scared of any political discussion due to this exact threat, even though those with the "correct" opinions can openly discuss them without any fear of repercussions. I don't think they should because inherently politics brings out discussion and debate, often vigorous forms of it, and that's not generally the best thing for the office, but because that discussion/debate is effectively banned here, it's completely fine to express leftist and socialist ideals publicly, even if in extremely poor taste.
Secondly, if you were to decide to bring up issues with these programs with a person responsible (for instance in Google's case, this VP of diversity) you'd get a predictable dismissal, or they'd silently drop whatever issue you raise, which means you have no actual means with which to present these viewpoints. She publicly dismissed the entire thing without actually refuting any argument that was made, with language that effectively sounded something like "this is wrong think, and Google doesn't agree with this wrong think." You could do it outside of work, but you lose the context and the specifics of the program, and more importantly the impact any such discussion could have on your immediate environment.
These discussions do need to be had, and where they're being had, the majority of even liberal minded people tend to agree with the author of this piece, but it's hard to know if that's a consensus (even at 500,000+ views for instance on each video on YouTube) or if it's just an echo chamber because even demanding rigor and evidence of the ideas behind diversity is taboo in far too many places. For instance tptacek can be found in these very comments essentially arguing that this topic of discussion isn't open because it's been decided. By whom? How can any discussion of highly debatable topics like this be had if people like him and Google are just going to say "it's not up for debate because I'm right" in order to shut down any discussion before it can even begin, hilariously in this case by likening this to discussing child labor or marital rape? It's nice to see logical fallacies are alive and very well with people who otherwise seem fairly intelligent.
> As Damore reminded us, most of the people who agree with him only dare to agree privately.
> What do they answer when their opinions are measured through a poll run on Google-plus – which the SJW officials in charge could still hypothetically access? Some other Google employees gave us the following pie chart:
> 14% strongly agree, 22% almost agree with Damore's letter. That's some 36% if you combine it – over 20,000 employees of Google. If you add the 13% of neutral folks, you will get almost 49%, a slightly greater percentage than 48.5% of those who almost disagree or strongly disagree. Clearly, even if the participants of the poll face some risks that their vote could be used against them, the supporters of Damore's view are at least comparable in size to the opponents.
> If you add the 13% of neutral folks, you will get almost 49%, a slightly greater percentage than 48.5% of those who almost disagree or strongly disagree.
This is just not how you analyze a poll and maintain the impression of honesty. Although I agree with the conclusion that "the supporters of Damore's view are at least comparable in size to the opponents" (based on the 36%/48.5% split), the obvious willingness of the author to exaggerate support for his side is just despicable.
Yes term is mostly used as an insult. But there just isnt any other term that would replace it and include all those counterproductive radical left groups that relay on character assassination when faced with logical points they cant refute.
PC culture? regressive left? feminsts? LGBTQIAPK? lefties?
Definitely, because it is code for signifying a particular worldview which is dismissive of minorities, and as such is a polemic, not a reasoned argument.
Thank you for writing this comment. I'm a conservative/classicial liberal and I also find HN to be rather hostile place. I'll put you on my "liked comments" list.
I agree, but (and call me old fashioned) I don't think these kind of discussions should happen at work and I definitely don't think an employee should be publishing opinionated documents naming the company they work for.
If you read it, it was about his opinions about damage that Ideological Echo Chamber causes to company.
This discussion needs to happen at google. And he made it clear that this arent his opinions but he sourced most of controversial claims in memo.
His paper was completely aligned with section 1.5 of Google's code of conduct that says “Any time you feel our users aren’t being well-served, don’t be bashful - let someone in the company know about it. Continually improving our products and services takes all of us, and we’re proud that Googlers champion our users and take the initiative to step forward when the interests of our users are at stake.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in memo “We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it.”
...and fired him anyways. It seems to me that he will easily win on court saying he was fired for political reasons and accuse them of defamation.
I'm in favor of directly funding creators. I hate everything about ads. That said, I don't see any real value Patreon provides over other payment services, especially given their cost.
I definitely don't want politically driven judgement calls made on my behalf as to whether or not that creator should even be allowed to have my money, when that person hasn't actually done anything illegal. It's my money, and no business has any business telling me who I can and can't give money to, or why, and to step into that position is to trivialize competition. It's a bad move on Patreon's part, and it's completely antithetical to the service they should be providing: making it easier to find content you like by creators you like and then fund it so there's more. They don't do the former, and the latter is more and more only for "Patreon approved" creators. What is it they do that makes them invaluable or irreplaceable, because I'm not seeing it.
I've given thousands through Patreon but I've stopped using it for many reasons. I feel pretty justified in that decision just looking at their behavior, both lately and in the past. They've allowed pages to remain up for people who are provably doing nothing but harassing others (and advertising that behavior as the "activism" their Patreon page is funding), but taken others down just because they run a service which on principle refuses to police discussion but which isn't breaking any law because Patreon dislikes what people on that service say/do. Now they've removed someone because they disagree with something that person has done unrelated to their content creation being funded through Patreon (again, not even illegal behavior), and it looks entirely politically motivated.
I don't support Lauren and never have, but this kind of moral grandstanding and virtue signaling from Patreon just isn't acceptable to me, and definitely not from what is a glorified payment processing web interface. Tim Pool as usual has a fairly solid take on it, and I mostly agree with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_yIp7eQO1c.
If this follows the trend of what happened to YouTube advertising (TV 2.0) in that certain websites will be targeted for demonetization without any transparency or consistency, this will open a giant hole for competitors to eat one of Alphabet's core businesses. Perhaps leveraging this use of control over Chrome to effectively cripple competing ad networks with perfectly reasonable ads on websites that don't want to provide profit to Google will open them to litigation as well.
I think the problem is less that there are companies who want to sell you "faster internet to specific websites" and more that there can't be any companies who want to sell you "fast internet to all websites." And that remains true even with reclassification, and the arguments against that aren't against the freedom to access any content you want on the internet, but rather than it makes that competition even harder and less likely to happen.
I'm just not sure it's fair to say that one side here is for content agnostic networks and the other is against them, but rather two different approaches to solving the problem where just about everyone agrees with content agnostic networks.
> I think the problem is less that there are companies who want to sell you "faster internet to specific websites" and more that there can't be any companies who want to sell you "fast internet to all websites."
I don't follow. You don't feel there are currently any companies that provide fast access to all websites? Perhaps that's true in some parts of the US, but it isn't true worldwide. That suggests there is another way to go about setting up a competitive environment that yields low cost, high speed internet.
> I'm just not sure it's fair to say that one side here is for content agnostic networks and the other is against them, but rather two different approaches to solving the problem where just about everyone agrees with content agnostic networks.
When your ISP middle man charges special access fees for certain data, that isn't content agnostic. It's specifically giving preference to some content over others based on big corporate $$.
Given how common it is for members of Congress to become mega millionaires over a few decades on a job that pays ~$200k/yr, I wouldn't trust them in this capacity.
How many of us would hold steady in our own ethics and morals if someone routinely offered something like a $2,500,000 payday and we had no risk at all of being fired or jailed?
> Given how common it is for members of Congress to become mega millionaires over a few decades on a job that pays ~$200k/yr
Can you provide a source for this? Don't know much about the topic but I've always assumed that, in general, Congressmembers who are wealthy were already wealthy before they were elected to Congress.
From a different article, that study has some odd data points:
> The study found some significant difference based on party membership and seniority, with the Democratic sample beating the market by nearly 9% annually, versus only about 2% annually for the Republican sample.
> And representatives with the least seniority considerably outperformed those with more seniority.
I want something like uBlock running in Chrome on Android. I can do it in CopperheadOS or with Firefox, but it blows my mind that Google recognizes these types of issues but won't deal with perhaps the most egregious one.