Slashdot Mirror

right here...

Mark Zuckerberg is THE biggest threat to the internet that the world has ever seen.

Mark Zuckerberg is a threat to everything the internet was. He's a threat to openness, freedom, end user control, and privacy.

He's a threat to our societies outside the internet, too. His power grab is making ripples in a much bigger pond.

Some people even think he is a threat to the very idea of independent thought.

"Amazon did nothing but lose money for the first ten years of its existence" .....what's your point? That they should do so forever? That it's okay to continue losing money because you've lost money in the past? You need to understand how Amazon works and how it's different from most companies before you keep squawking. The most important quote from that article:

"Here is how Amazon actually works: As long as the company can grow its revenues, it can spend any profit it makes on new lines of business that throw off more revenues. Those revenues may also be profitable, and those profits can in turn be immediately spent again on more growth. By eschewing profits, the company can also offer the lowest prices possible (which is why consumers are so loyal to it). Some parts of the company are profitable and fuel growth in others."

Oh yeah, and uh, Amazon has turned a profit several times despite your claims to the contrary.

"There is nothing about having a physical store presence that forces companies to run in the black when they can run in the red to increase their marketshare." sure there is! It's a physical store selling overpriced "premium" food! Whole Foods will never clean out its competitors by waging a price war. Luxury goods are the first thing to go in a budget when someone's times get a little tough. The only way they could wage a price war in local markets is to become a normal grocery store which will not go over so well with their target customer base.

For someone who keeps squawking about "you could learn this in fifth grade economics class, dumbass" you sure do need to learn a lot of things from fifth grade economics class.

Amazon has been profitable for 11 straight quarters"

What is stupid is trying to paint Amazon as "extorting" or "blackmailing" anyone.

Why is that stupid? When it came to taking bids/incentives offers from various cities, it seem clear it was more of a con than a contest, where "The Bezos’s also own three homes, and the average distance from those three homes to a headquarters is 6.4 miles.". Guess which cities were chosen.

Now that there's threats about backing out on the incentives, suddenly Amazon is going to change its mind where it's going to put its new headquarters? If they go through with it, it seems likely they're doing it out of spite and not of any clear decision making process. At that point, it seems clear whether you want to call it blackmail or not, they're further trying to manipulate NYC into giving them those incentives. If you want to argue it doesn't rise all the way to the level of blackmail because it's not illegal, I'd agree. It does come across as a fraud and a con in any case.

Last year they were projecting no profits for 2018, and purchase offers were in the realm of valuation of this IPO - so I'd conclude their profitability status has not changed - stagnant valuation.

Well, here. There are plenty more from plenty of various sources. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/2...
https://www.recode.net/2019/1/...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/busine...
https://www.newsweek.com/amazo...
https://www.kare11.com/article...
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/16/...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.businessinsider.co...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a...

> But some guy on INFOWARS is selling snake oil! Certainly the founders of our
> nation, in establishing it's ideals, could never have thought this day would come!

Not to mention that Buzzfeed is pushing a line of kitchenware at Walmart, I kid you not https://www.recode.net/2018/3/...

I thank Ajit Pai for making Internet speeds 40% faster in the past year.

But thanks for the nonstop FUD, Beau. Whose payroll are you on again? Slashdot is owned by BizX which is a front for a bigger operation run by the Arabs. Would you care to explain your agenda?

What's the downside of no Net Neutrality? Was the Internet a wasteland prior to 2015? Is the fact that Internet speeds are up 40% over the last year a bad thing? What did the brief, regulation-by-executive-directive Net Neutrality time bring?

That was the reason Pai pushed to rescind the regulation in the first place - the FCC should NOT have the authority to unilaterally make a regulation about such things, like they did back under the Obama Administration. But given that Internet speeds are 40% faster after the repeal of Net Neutrality, perhaps we need to rethink the reasoning in the first place.

And Internet speeds are 40% faster. The horror, the horror!

From what is known, it really is due to Fortnite. See e.g. https://www.recode.net/2018/6/...

PS
https://www.charlotteobserver....
"Amazon.com this month narrowed down 238 applicants for its second headquarters to 20 cities, but experts say it got something even from the losing bidders: A rich trove of information that can benefit the company for years to come."
"To dozens of cities across the United States, Amazonâ(TM)s widely publicized search for a âoesecond headquartersâ looked like thousands of new jobs, up for grabs. To Pivot co-host Scott Galloway, it now looks like a âoeruse.â

https://www.recode.net/2018/11...
"I lease office space all the time for my businesses and I always tell my real estate agent, âWe can lease any office in the world as long as I can walk there from where I live,â(TM)â Galloway said on the latest episode. âoeAmazon is now talking about having three headquarters, Seattle, Crystal City and Long Island City. The Bezosâ(TM)s also own three homes, and the average distance from those three homes to a headquarters is 6.4 miles."

It is a ruse, amazon was always going to end up in Washington DC. https://www.recode.net/2018/9/...

That's kind of the idea of Mixed Reality.

https://www.recode.net/2015/7/...

At-will workers can be fired for any reason, with negotiated contracts employers often need JUST CAUSE. Then there is a DUE PROCESS hearing. There is also a GRIEVANCE process, and LEGAL REPRESENTATION. Typically, union members also get LIABILITY INSURANCE with their dues. HEALTH INSURANCE is often negotiated by union representatives.

It is illegal in most U.S. States for dues to be used for political purposes. However, union members can donate separately. Just pricing out liability insurance through State Farm was significantly more expensive than the cost of my yearly dues. Hell, I wrote the check today without hesitation because the benefits of membership make the decision a no-brainer.

How do I know all of these things? Because I have been the president of my local union. I live in a RTW Freedom to Freeload State. I may be forced to represent a non-member because they are covered by the contract. My total compensation for being president was $0, and it is somebody else's turn to take the thankless job.

Clearly everyone in this thread has been living in their own echo chambers for some time. None of you mentioned anything related to the functions of a union. When workers die on the job and nobody notices for 8 hours, it is time to consider unionizing.

Yes they will, and they do it now. They're called algorithms.

No, they don't. They're called immense staffs of human reviewers. If you're lucky, an algorithm automatically flags a subset of material without so many false positive that you overwhelm your Phillipino workforce.

Thing is I'm reading the transcript of the actual interview and it seems like the summary is misrepresenting him a bit. For example:

I guess, if people wanna say, âoeYou know, we oughta just have the government start dictating...â By the way, one of the most stunning aspects of the last couple of days is to see conservative politicians, people like Kevin McCarthy and Ted Cruz, they are essentially saying that the government should run private companies, the government should dictate to private companies what theyâ(TM)re doing. Iâ(TM)m sure itâ(TM)s very popular with their base, but doesnâ(TM)t happen to be the right thing.

So apparently he doesn't want the government to be too heavy handed here.

You know how Backpage was essentially busted? They were busted under existing Section 230 law. The reason we had problems is because law enforcement didnâ(TM)t move aggressively enough and quickly enough. And after a while everybody said, âoeOh, we canâ(TM)t do anything about it, letâ(TM)s go pass this really flawed law, SESTA and FOSTA,â

His goal is to avoid over-reaching legislation like SESTA and FOSTA by having more reasonable rules.

In fact if you grep for the "lay out what the consequences" quote you can see that he wants to avoid trying to define morality or "common decency" and instead lay out what sanctions the social media companies are allowed to use (I guess he means bans, demoting in search results etc.) at their own discretion.

The summary is confusing because it makes it look like he is trying to define "common decency", when in fact he is just giving his personal opinion and using it as an example of how he would create the rules on his own imaginary social network.

Average download speed in the US is 75.94Mbps as of the latter half of last year. The Verizon service has a theoretical limit north of 3Gbps.

Sure, that Verizon speed is bursty (and congestion constrained) and heavily dependent on conditions and distance. The problem isn't that speed will exceed wired. The problem is that it will end last-mile fiber deployment for the foreseeable future because it's cheaper for Verizon.

Silly me and my antiquated notion of profit!

Yes, you don't go straight from "I have an idea for a business" to "profit". There's the part called "investment" that happens in there, and it takes a LOT of money to create a new car company.

Tesla's goal is to switch the world to sustainable energy. They're doing that buy becoming an automobile manufacturer. This is an old, well-established market where it's more likely that an existing company dies than for a startup to succeed. Now, you could plan on being a "boutique" manufacturer, like Lamborghini. Make a few, very-expensive cars, sell them to rich people, have a profit, and call it a day. But selling $200k roadsters isn't going to switch the whole world to sustainable energy. For that, you need to sell less expensive cars, and you need to make a lot of them.

The short-term goal is to gain a ton of market share. All revenue is shoveled back into additional development of even more vehicles. If you're trying to grab a big piece of the market, you better borrow as much money as you can so that you can develop additional vehicles more quickly.

This isn't the "local pizza shop" business model you learned in Econ 101. This is the Amazon model. Grab the entire market, damn the costs.
Some references:
Amazon Never Makes Money But No One Cares
Amazon’s epic 20-year run as a public company, explained in five charts

If this EU law passed you think you're safe in the US? The same actors will push for similar laws in other countries and cite the EU law as basis.

While I generally thing you are right about that, it's at least worth noting that in the US this has already been tried, and it backfired spectacularly.

Publishers threatened Facebook with lawsuits for not paying publishers for the first sentence being used to link to the actual publisher article.
Facebook turned around and started removing their news feeds completely and said the publishers will now need to pay them to be included.
Publishers then bitch and moan that their internet visitors dwindled to a tiny fraction they had before.

https://www.recode.net/2017/10/23/16525192/facebook-explore-feed-news-media-audience-reach-traffic-test

Google had the same thing, at least in the US by Rupert Murdock, but also in a number of other countries. Google told them to pound legal sand and get a court order.

In the case of Rupert, he got chewed out by stake holders and quietly dropped the idea.
In other cases however the publishers did exactly this, and Google complied with the court and delisted those sites.
Not weeks later those same publishers tried to sue Google yet again, this time for not linking to them, exactly what they sued and won to get, and the judge apparently wouldn't reverse the previous order.

That made the publishers sell access to their news for free so Google could legally repost the title of their news articles and keep those publishers from going out of business.

In both cases, neither company got in any legal troubles in the US for what they were doing or did after. The EU law as written wouldn't be so lenient.

As for wikipedia, they should just pull up shop and leave those countries.
Google/Facebook are only there to make money, and will continue to stay there in compliance of the law to keep making money.
Wikipedia however is always going on about their principals of freedom like this, so if that's actually true, there is no reason to stay in the EU, and after would have no reason to follow their laws.

So the US isn't "safe" as an absolute, it's at least somewhat safer in comparison.

Interesting company she keeps.. It's not just the Clintons, but also other Washington power brokers, Republicans and Democrats alike. These politicians publicly denounce crony capitalism and nepotism, and privately are huge beneficiaries and promoters of it. And you can bet that every single one of her board members and political cronies made off like a bandit in her fraud. When these politicians tell you that the system is rigged, they are speaking the truth; what they don't tell you is that the very people who claim they want to fix it are the ones who are rigging it in the first place.

And pollsters wonder why voters reject both the Democratic and the Republican establishment.

Why do employers discriminate based upon age? Study after study has shown that older workers perform just as well as younger workers for most tasks. Ageism bias is ignorant.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda...
https://www.techrepublic.com/a...
https://www.recode.net/2016/10...

The only logical reason to discriminate against older workers is because health insurance costs in the US are far higher for older people.

Is age discrimination less of a problem in countries that have single payer heath care?

No no, I believe that the multi-billion dollar advertising campaigns from the Democrats was able to be defeated by tweets like these

https://www.recode.net/2017/10...

seen once or twice by a few people. This can totally affect the opinion of millions of people bombarded all day by ads on CNN.

Hey, remember when you asked me to let you know when there are a few tens of thousands of miles of self-driving? Well, we've finally hit that. So, just sharing the news.

In all seriousness though, I don't think there's any way to know these numbers, but I bet the 5 million Waymo miles alone (I misstated 4 million above) contain at least tens of thousands of miles with no intervention. But, unless you're looking at sources that I'm not, I don't think it's possible to say exactly how many. The sources range from this, which looks like marketing, to this, which is over a year old.

Scroll down past the two images and take a look at the fourth video:

Driving in SF (4 of 4): Cyclists are everywhere
https://www.recode.net/2017/10...
Cyclist cutting off a car at night. The driver took over, but post-analysis shows our vehicle was already braking and would have stopped in time to avoid a collision.

Granted, this is not the video of the woman in Arizona who got killed. No one got hurt in this one. But this just goes to show you that some collisions can be super difficult to avoid.

That doesn't make us "monsters". That makes us pragmatic human beings, that need to travel at above 5 miles an hour (despite all the pedestrians, skateboarders, and bicyclists who are so used to getting the right of way, they'll gamble with their lives over this expectation).

On a side-note, if you have a skateboarder in your family, go out with them to make sure they get the right size, and buy them a helmet. I know it's not cool to wear helmets if you're a skateboarder. But I was giving a ride to someone recently and their friend had just died from head trauma while skateboarding. The skateboarder was 21 years old, he was going to a local University. Everyone liked him by all accounts. But he struck a car and suffered injuries that he would have easily survived, had he been wearing a helmet.

Also, if you see someone wearing headphones while they're riding their electric skateboard going up to 35 miles per hour right in the middle of traffic (this is especially a problem in San Francisco, hopefully, it hasn't reached your city yet). But please yell at them and tell them that they're being idiots. No one should be riding with headphones on. I'd rather those guys wear a boombox that's blasting music to everyone, instead of just wearing headphones. At least with the latter, people might hear them coming. But right now, these guys are super stealthy, they don't make any noise, they go very quickly, and top of that, if they're listening to music on their headphone, that means they're much less aware of their surroundings.

This is the best argument for why we need Content Neutrality rules and campaign finance laws:
https://www.recode.net/2018/1/5/16854324/silicon-valley-trump-netflix-free-internet-association-fcc-net-neutrality-lawsuit

The leading lobbying group for Amazon, Facebook, Google and other tech giants is joining the legal battle to restore net neutrality. The companies will intervene in a coming lawsuit through their trade group, the Internet Association.

...

As an intervener, though, the Internet Association still will play a crucial role, filing legal arguments in the coming case. And in formally participating, tech giants will have the right to appeal a judge’s decision later if Silicon Valley comes out on the losing end.

https://internetassociation.org/our-members
Some members:

Amazon
Ebay
Expedia
Facebook
  Google
Groupon
Intuit
Linkedin
Microsoft
Netflix
Paypal
Reddit
Salesforce
Snap, Inc.
Spotify
TripAdvisor
Twitter
Uber
Yelp
  Zwillow

That doesn't appear to be the case. 11 quarters of profit in a row.

https://www.recode.net/2018/2/...

"While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, " But not their great grand-children.

Exactly.

Pray tell, what to do about the impending impending human/computer convergence - The Singularity, when you don't die, you're still around and you kinda ARE your own great grandchild?

Plant your brain in a new body? Clone yourself with DNA? How old fashioned, move on up to The Cloud and use CloneZilla, snapshots, or just start yourself up (!!) another Docker Personality Instance. Gives a who new meaning to schizophrenia or to Dissociative identity disorder.

At that point money will stop being the in-game comparison metric, it'll change to how big you are. (In bytes.) Hell, corporations will end up being People while People won't be.

I think you might want to re-evaluate that first statement. It's like all of them. It's not if, but when:
Brick Layers:
https://www.marketwatch.com/st...
Bridge Building:
https://www.engineering.com/Ed...
Concrete homes:
https://qz.com/924909/apis-cor...
Flat Concrete: Look for the automated one
https://www.forconstructionpro...

Shoes:
https://www.recode.net/2016/9/...
Clothing:
http://www.deviceplus.com/conn...

Electricians and plumbers might fair better for a while as well as seamstress's, but it's coming. Car repair might take a little while also, but look at where automotive building has gone in the last 100 years.

And how long before this one can pick up it's own tire?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Times are changing. The only safe jobs are with the Amish.

promotes such a toxic workplace...

I would hasten to add that toxic workplace is as most subjective as can be, and that this is *your* opinion. There are a lot of external references to Uber's toxic workplace. Try google searching Uber+toxic+workplace. A few hits I could dismiss as "a few haters", but I get 443 thousand hits.

Here are some of the top few. It looks pretty toxic to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... https://www.recode.net/2017/6/... https://thinkprogress.org/trav... https://www.recode.net/2017/6/... http://www.businessinsider.com... http://theconversation.com/fix... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... https://www.theguardian.com/te... https://qz.com/1010986/a-timel...

Maybe Alphabet doesn't believe that Google's results are accurate. ;-)

Strangely, I just ran the same search in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Google: 157,000 hits

Bing: 3,690,000 hits

Yahoo: 21,000,000 hits

promotes such a toxic workplace...

I would hasten to add that toxic workplace is as most subjective as can be, and that this is *your* opinion. There are a lot of external references to Uber's toxic workplace. Try google searching Uber+toxic+workplace. A few hits I could dismiss as "a few haters", but I get 443 thousand hits.

Here are some of the top few. It looks pretty toxic to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... https://www.recode.net/2017/6/... https://thinkprogress.org/trav... https://www.recode.net/2017/6/... http://www.businessinsider.com... http://theconversation.com/fix... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... https://www.theguardian.com/te... https://qz.com/1010986/a-timel...

Maybe Alphabet doesn't believe that Google's results are accurate. ;-)

Strangely, I just ran the same search in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Google: 157,000 hits

Bing: 3,690,000 hits

Yahoo: 21,000,000 hits

Google made the same mistake with the Pixel. From where I sit, indistinguishable from Apple envy. Note the guy on the stage dressed head to toe in Steve Jobs black.

On the other hand, it's either intellectual lazy or indicative of topical ignorance to yell "SAUCE OR FAKE!" in response to references to mainstream news closely related to the topic at hand. But here you go:

Original poster of video Trump retweeted was banned:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...

Trump has engaged in harassing behavior that others have been banned for:

https://www.vox.com/culture/20...

Twitter's newsworthiness defense, pretty much reiterated in TFA:

https://www.recode.net/2017/9/...

TFW your first guess gets confirmed a few days later: "Ajit Pai canceled his scheduled appearance at a major upcoming tech industry trade show after receiving death threats, two agency sources told Recode on Thursday." After a Bernie supporter tried to kill a bunch of Republican politicians and staffers at baseball practice, it should not surprise anyone that people take death threats seriously.

Oh my slashdot where hast thou gone?
November 22, 2017
https://www.recode.net/2017/11...

FWIW, Maybe people forgot this, but M$FT made a big investment in FACE about a decade ago...

https://www.recode.net/2017/10...

Is the CEO of Yahoo or the CEO of Mozilla trolling Slashdot?

The ghost of Marissa Mayer strikes again. When Mozilla signed their contract with Yahoo, she put in a clause that gives Mozilla the right to walk away from the deal at any time if they don't like whoever aquires Yahoo -- AND -- Yahoo would still have to pay Mozilla $375 Million a year till 2019.

I'm guessing that Yahoo's new corporate overlords at Verizon aren't happy about this.

I heard ZERO indictments of him about his political leanings

https://qz.com/1055466/the-alt... basically calls him a liar when he denies being 'alt right'.

Then there are the suspicious string of articles all basically going, "Damore is an alt-right [hero|martyr]":
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
https://www.vox.com/culture/20...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.newsweek.com/who-ja...
http://nymag.com/selectall/201...

Maybe that was just because there was too much material to get to boring stuff like that in his 15 minutes of fame.

No, it's because his political leanings are by all accounts very much aligned to the people trying to demonise him, hence the multitude of articles trying to position him with the people they don't like.

I hesitate to say 'conspiracy' but it sure as fuck doesn't look like independent and honest reporting to me.

If they had users' best interest in mind they wouldn't have made something like 90% of all the UI and feature-related changes they've made over the last decade...

If you're not familiar with the specifics Yahoo contract*, it includes clauses for situations like the sale to Verizon where they get to keep all the payments without having to do anything for that money if they decide they don't like Yahoo's new owners for some reason. More probably than not they just decided use this part of the contract to get double income, Mayer deal money from Verizon and search money from Google.

* https://www.recode.net/2016/7/...

WTF? Amazon has had 10 quarters and counting of net profit. AC is an idiot. Tesla will never make a profit, probably will close in 3 years as capital dries up...

and 50 thousand dollars just wow.

Number of active Twitter accounts 328 million
https://www.statista.com/st...

Number of tweets per day 500 million. 7700 per second so far today.
http://www.internetlivestat......

1 billion in digital political advertising in 2016
https://www.forbes.com/site...

Twitter was deliberately not carrying advertising supporting Trump
https://www.recode.net/2016...

I recall other incidents but ehh

Your understanding of Amazon is poor. https://www.recode.net/2017/4/...

I understand that Amazon hasn't been profitable for a while. Why would a company with such an ugly statistic slash prices this much? I do not get it!

Given how utterly fucked up your entire premise is, I bet there are a LOT of things you "do not get", mostly related to reality.

government has via franchise laws

Not since the federal government outlawed exclusive franchises in 1992.

Now the government prevents competition by not allowing companies to steal fiber and enslave labor and tresspass on peoples's property. If you try and do it legitimately, well, Just laying fiber in Kansas City cost Google over $1 Billion to reach 80% of the city, not counting the final connections to the houses.

Not even Google has that much money lying around in their couch, which is why they've stopped rolling out fiber (the court cases haven't made it any cheaper though).

Actually, the studies were done and the results are it is not accepted social science. In fact, the actual science points in the other direction.

In fact, one of the studies the Google manifesto relies on could not be replicated by the person who originally did it. Kinda a poster child for not a valid experiment, no?

https://www.recode.net/2017/8/...

Does he really have no clue about? I bet he has more clue than you

That's an ad-hominem (and not just the butthurt accusation of ad-hominem where someone is just angry they were insulted). 11000's expertise is not relevant to the question of whether Damore has any expertise. What matters is that actual experts on the topic disagree with him. Like this woman who teaches statistics at Harvard and actual neuroscientists.

Oh, you mean the ones that are actually bullshit?
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/...

The West Coast is certainly the worst, especially any company that's big enough to get into the public eye. If your company has hired a VP of Diversity, you know your company is in trouble.

Breitbart has some interviews with ex-Googlers up.

But we've seen these kinds of stories at a regular pace for several years now. Donglegate. GitHub's meritocracy clusterfuck. Intel's $300 million "diversity" push. Code of Conduct identity-politics pushing. The "progressive" agenda pushing coming out of and being forced on social media companies. Etc.