Adam Curtis, a documentary film-maker and journalist, has a brilliant aptitude at analysis in this area. His work in general, at the intersection of reporting and politics, is pretty excellent.
It is some malice, more than you might expect; with with a great dollop of ineptitude, far more than you might expect; that allows this climate of total disorientation to exist.
Take some of his thoughts:
> "Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events.
> "But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.
> "And journalism - that used to tell a grand, unfurling narrative - now also just relays disjointed and often wildly contradictory fragments of information.
> "Events come and go like waves of a fever. We - and the journalists - live in a state of continual delirium, constantly waiting for the next news event to loom out of the fog - and then disappear again, unexplained."
The difference being, surely, that Snapchat has 26million users, not 26million customers.
That said, it may very well be worth $4billion, or north thereof. The article concedes that it's difficult to speculate from the outside (and thus labels it "insane"), but fails to concede the simple point that it may be entirely justified.
Not sure why you're quoting this. I read this when I visited the page... I just find it ridiculous that if I pay the $24.99 to upgrade, I will have put close to $100 into an app that basically stores passwords for me conveniently.
They can do what they want with their pricing, but I agree. I just don't see the value at the current price points, especially the $18 iOS app. I'd be more inclined to upgrade at around $20 and $10. At $18 and $7 I'd already have pulled the trigger.
The top answer to the question is visible without an account, and is interesting enough. The rest of the answers (frustratingly) require a Quora account to view.
I'm a little surprised by the HN crowd's desire to turn this into some kind of Michael Bay movie with diplomatic explosions left, right and centre: the phrase "act of war" is being dropped around as if some kind of violent confrontation would ever actually occur between Ecuador and the United Kingdom based on this. This is simply not the case; at most, it would be loosely unfair of the British government to 'bully' Ecuador into its bidding and they would protest as harshly as they could (not very). This is not a fair system; international relations is a system wherein "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"[1].
The Government here has advised that under through a sound legal process it may revoke the legal status of an instituion within and on its territory. Is this right? Well, it's a little unusual...alternatively, ignoring the interests and desires of Sweden, the European Union and the United States would be still further unwise for the British. Britain has its interests, and it must do what serves them best.
In this case, doing something less than usual is worth it: there's virtually no downside to upsetting a small Latin American country in the process. The British government just won't care. It's not fair, but for better or worse, that's that.
"In this case, doing something less than usual is worth it: there's virtually no downside to upsetting a small Latin American country in the process. "
Let's analyze this a bit further...
Next time a British citizen holes up in the British embassy over some sham charges at the hands of the local police what are the likely aftershocks of Britain bullying Ecuador over Assange.
The pilots, mostly, acted legitatemly based on the flawed and lacking data of which they were presented with.
Initially, the captain's non-fear of the storm was based on incorrect weather data based on a mis-configured radar system. His data seemingly grossly underestimated the severity of the weather: had he had the correct data originally he would almost definitely, like every other pilot in the region, known to avoid the area to which they eventually flew into. As soon as the radar was configured correctly, the pilots banked left to avoid it as best they could. How common a misconfigured radar is and how easily it is done is perhaps the most vital piece of information here. No aircraft should be allowed to fly with such important data being incorrect, ever. This needs to be checked and re-checked far better in future. It is the original link in this fatal chain. It was wrong data, not a wrong human assessment of data, that started off this crash sequence. Given the original radar data, the captain made the right call. And there's nothing obsentibly wrong with him going to take a nap, insofar as that's typical protocol.
Due to flying into the wrong weather-zone, the autopilot turns itself off. And that's that from there. Given that this is such a rare event it's notification is relatively minor within the grand scheme of fear and confusion that one would expect to exist for such an event that so drastically affects flying itself. There exists such a massive difference between autopilot and pilot-driven flying that there needs to be an unignorable physical presentation difference between the two: perhaps gently vibrating the control stick, changing the entire colour of the cabin (to, say, orange) using some LEDs and even changing the posture of a pilot's seat to a more upright position to subtly but distincly make for a different "feel" to computer-led flying. You'd just know based on these indicators alone. Perhaps it'd be harder to mentally block the stall warnings based on the notion that "we can't be stalling, the airliner won't let us" when it feels like you're personally in control of the whole airliner. They didn't just "ignore" the 70+ stall warnings, they completely ignored the very idea that it was possible for them to be stalling at all.
Addressing either of these two issues alone could have helped save AF447. Evaluating the other problems presented, like why two pilots can input vastly different instructions through their joysticks with both being in ignorance of one another clearly needs to be addressed (perhaps even a weighted average towards the more experienced pilot's input rather than a straight up average?); why there existed no clear chain-of-command; why the captain didn't get back quickly enough and how to "force" captains to be quicker; the best way to brief exactly what you've been doing more quickly; and perhaps a new technology that's basically "Clippy" for flying, that could say things like "You're in a stall, consider pointing down?"
This was a tragic mistake that ought not to have happen. Based on so much, let's not so easily condemn the pilots actions to stupidity and instead take a moment to consider the sheer horror they suffered after commanding such a massively complex machine in such challenging conditions with so much noise, lights and general "WTF"-ness.
Consider that environment the next time you get frustrated investigating a non-obviousl compile error in your quiet, air-conditioned, well-lit office.
Well, of course, as one would expect the poor to take out hugely unfair debt agreements to load up their small houses in bad neighbourds with all the electronic gear they can muster for as much entertainment as they can barely afford to have.
They do not, unlike the (European and American) middle class take foreign holidays, drive foreign cars, take trips to the movies, go to theme parks, go on school trips, shop at nice places, eat healithly, etc...just because they have a bunch of cheap electronics crap stuffed inside their homes it does not make them rich.
Seriously, what do you think life is like for the European middle class? In rich Europe, it's extremely comfortable.
> They do not, unlike the (European and American) middle class take foreign holidays, drive foreign cars, take trips to the movies, go to theme parks, go on school trips, shop at nice places, eat healithly, etc...just because they have a bunch of cheap electronics crap stuffed inside their homes it does not make them rich.
Actually, they do, apart possibly from take foreign holidays, and even that's a suspect difference. Remember, they that they live in the US, so visiting Texas from CA, which they do, is comparable to visiting Italy from the UK.
While "1 in 6" appeals as a lot, the actual statistic of 15.1% poor people seems significantly less harmful -- as, ipso facto, the vast majortity of all American people (84.9%) are not poor.
Isn't this the way the model essentially works out in our system? There is a small "working class" at the bottom, then a giant bump in the middle for the middle class, and a tiny spot at the top for the 1% of wealthy -- wealthy, not merely rich -- individuals.
I wouldn't simply try to brush off poverty, as surely every effort must be made to ensure social mobility among the classes (both up and down), but in a country as large as America having 45 or so million poor people isn't only to be expected, but actually relatively necessary for our economic model -- which, on the whole, works quite well for most people.
I think the problem recently is that the bump in the middle is getting relatively smaller, as rich people seem to be getting richer while the poor and middle-class get poorer.
Is that true, or just oft-repeated political rhetoric? (Telling the middle class that they're being ripped off is, of course, a time-honoured political ploy.)
I'm sitting in the middle of the income curve right now, and it looks fine around here. In terms of income distribution the main effect of the recession has been to destroy wealth at the top end of the scale, since these are the folks who owned all the assets which are now performing poorly.
It is some malice, more than you might expect; with with a great dollop of ineptitude, far more than you might expect; that allows this climate of total disorientation to exist.
Take some of his thoughts:
> "Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events.
> "But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.
> "And journalism - that used to tell a grand, unfurling narrative - now also just relays disjointed and often wildly contradictory fragments of information.
> "Events come and go like waves of a fever. We - and the journalists - live in a state of continual delirium, constantly waiting for the next news event to loom out of the fog - and then disappear again, unexplained."
The rest of that article is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/ae14be85-3104-...
And the documentary-film that he's referring to in that post, Bitter Lake, is available on iPlayer (for British viewers...or people on a VPN...), here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bi...