Well kudos to you for misconstruing what I_ate_god said, then. He merely said that cultural differences are not genetic - with, yes, the implication that aptitude for engineering is a cultural difference. Sure, he didn't prove that - just suggested that it could well be the cause. but then you suggested that the Y chromosome could be the cause - again with no proof other than 'a chromosome has lots of genes on it'.
Men and women differ by an entire chromosome. That's more than differentiates many species from each other.
Well, that's pretty dumb. You make a scientific-sounding statement that may or may not have anything to do with genetic bases for engineering aptitude and provide absolutely no evidence that it does. Not unlike the 'scientific' argument that 'eyes are really complex, so they couldn't possibly have arisen through evolution'. That kind of stuff works when you're feeding it as propaganda to an audience looking to support their non-scientific assumptions, but that's about it.
You got it. Facebook could easily eliminate one of the worst sources of fake news - and one of the things that makes FB a miserable experience. 'Articles' with headlines like "you've got to hear what so-and-so said", and then link you to a 'news' site with 1 paragraph of useless stuff - or a screenshot of a twitter post, followed by a littany of the worst ads for fake cures, etc. I suppose FB makes a lot of money off of that crap, but they should at least label it as advertising and not treat it as if it's news. But better yet, get rid of it altogether. Hey, even Google is providing ways to get rid of the most annoying advertising...
People need to put the fear of God into Facebook and stop using it for a while in protest.
Yep. Microsoft hasn't changed - what's changed is who their enemy is. It used to be that the 'enemy' was anybody who produced desktop software or operating systems. Linux certainly made the cut - but so, also, did Netscape, Novell and anyone who could derail their plan of Microsoft software in every device supported by unavoidable fees baked in - plus hefty fees to corporate customers.
Then, along came Google and proved there were other business models that could produce huge amounts of income. Not only did Microsoft want to get in on that income stream, they also wanted to deny it to any competitor that had the potential of eroding their core business. And Google went on to oblige by taking over the web browser market and the mobile phone markets. Google docs even showed that it was possible to do what MSOffice does - for free. Yes, Docs isn't a one-for-one competitor, but as a proof of concept, it scared the shit out of MS. Likewise ChromeOS.
And in the meantime, along came the rest of the web to demonstrate that the entire desktop software paradigm was out the window - except for some specific use cases that we can ignore for the purposes of this argument. And the new paradigm was based on Linux servers. Somewhere along the line they finally gave up on Windows Phone - which was probably their last connection to their old business model of selling software. Sure, they're still raking it in on patent extortion, but that can't last forever...
So now they're trying to adapt - and doing a pretty decent job of it. They've still got enough corporations hooked on MSOffice and/or some 3rd party Windows-only app to carry them forward for a while, but their enemy today is Amazon. And Amazon is Linux - so if they want to lure AWS customers to Azure, they need to support Linux well. Still, not the best of motives from our point of view - so all things being equal'ish, I'd still prefer to avoid them whenever possible.
Well, mission accomplished. We're all arguing about whether $150K is rich or middle class - and not talking about the fact that the pain stops at $300K - which, coincidentally, is probably where the most egregious tax inequities start. It's pretty hard to make >$300K a year without a lot of that being in the form of tax-preferred passive income like dividends and capital gains. There are more Americans than you'd think in this income bracket, and a truly disproportion of total US income is attributable to that group.
So Trump has us middle-to-upper-middle classers arguing about whether or not we're really rich, and the truly rich are getting to keep all the bounty. Kind of a clever trick for a moron like Trump. But then again, the summary starts with "If Trump sticks to what he has said", and Trump has never stuck to anything he's said, so why are we even discussing this. We were supposed to have "a great and beautiful healthcare system with lower cost and far better coverage" by now. "And it'll be really easy, believe me"...
Okay, so assuming you're correct and current Libre versions still take 3 seconds to paste (in your use case) and 10 seconds to open the book you're writing. Well, then Libre may not be for you. Or... rather than spend a hundred bucks or so for MSOffice, you could plow that into a higher spec'd machine that runs Libre okay for you. Presumably you have some desire to run it - or you wouldn't be commenting here. Or you have some desire to use Linux, but the lack of MSOffice is holding you back - in which case, I'd suggest using WINE with whatever version of MSOffice runs well under it and meets your requirements (which apparently don't include the latest whiz-bang features, so you're in luck).
But for many of us an open source fully functional office suite is an important thing to support. Presumably color schemes and the like are handled by different developers than the core functionality that we all agree is more important - so both can proceed together. From my perspective, native ports to iOS and Android are more important than either at this point.
He may have been trying to overstate his contribution, but he did take the lead (i.e. initiative) in getting the government to turn the military-developed network over to the private sector to become what we now know of as the Internet. So, maybe he was overselling his contribution - or maybe those who heard his statement as 'I created the Internet' didn't know enough about the Internet to understand what his contribution was...
But then again, any politician that doesn't know to steer clear of Maureen Dowd with quotes that can be turned on them to make them seem like a know-it-all prig probably shouldn't be a politician. Gore seems to have finally figured that out...
Yep. The DNC likes wonks. The public hates them - if only because they're smarter than them, and think letting you know that will earn your respect. Bill Clinton was the last one who was able to pretend to be a regular guy. Republicans keep electing real regular guys - i.e. dumb fucks with no ideals (or scruples) whatsoever.
And don't go telling me that 'crooked Hillary' has no ideals. Her scruples may be lacking, but she does stand for something - and yes, a lot of that something is good stuff.
Except that Democrats in Congress keep trying to pass campaign finance reforms - all opposed by the Republicans. And the Supreme Court's 5 Republican appointees thought it was fine to declare that "Money is Speech" is a more important principle than "One Person, One Vote" and utterly ignoring that money, can also be bribery. Overturning that boneheaded decision was prominent in the Democratic platform - a point Bernie Sanders, if not all of his supporters - and many Trump supporters as well - understood.
And that guy, whatshisname?, Al Gore... He got net neutrality (and the Internet, which he helped make public - and never said he 'invented', folks). But yes, he's a bit of a stick in the mud politically, so we got W instead.
Not to mention that the nature of these anti-consumer practices (absent any laws to change it) would be mostly invisible to the consumer. If your ISP is selling information about you that they gathered in the course of your everyday web activity (even in your broswer's 'private browsing' mode) - how would you know?
And for those worried about government 'interference', wouldn't having your entire web browsing history one subpoena away be a bigger threat than the government telling ISP's they can't block access to Netflix or some future competitor. At least with a regulated internet someone has the ability to tell them they can't store your info at all - though, I suppose, if you're paranoid enough to assume they want to be able to subpoena it...? But, at least, if the government has the power to regulate such things, and we theoretically have the power to vote them out if they don't demand our privacy be protected, there's some hope.
This isn't even a Windows 10 thing, since it happens on Windows 7 too. But the latest versions of Office/Outlook/Skype insist on doing stuff like animated 'smooth scrolling' and the like. First of all, I find that mildly annoying on a non-touch interface (might make sense on a touchscreen, where the scrolling is meant to match your finger gesture). But the really bad thing is that if you're on a Remote Desktop session, this animation gets sent over the internet causing full-screen repaints, and everything is unusably slow. Now this stuff can probably all be disabled (I don't actually have the latest stuff on my work desktop - I'm just reporting the complaints of co-workers that do). But seriously, RDP is supposed to 'degrade' features that don't work well in that mode. Certainly my fonts get degraded under RDP, so I assume that's the idea...
I didn't say rich. I was talking about the Two Americas meme - and making the bottom line value judgement that once your basic needs (and future security) are taken care of, the rest of it is a form of excess. Not that that's bad - just that it's not 'necessary'. Feel free, if you must, to include those lattes in your bag of basic necessities. It doesn't change the basic formulation. I'm in no way talking about a subsistence lifestyle.
One of the two Americas (in my opinion) includes the rich and the upper middle class. And, if we had decent national health insurance so that the potential for medical Armageddon didn't hang over our heads, might well include the rest of the middle class...
Today's crypto-conservatism has no actual ideas, other than tax cuts.
If only. Today's crypto-conservatism has plenty of ideas. But they're all about how to sell tax cuts as something they're not. How to flatter people that they don't need to think too deeply about issues, that simplistic answers are fine - and then convince them of the specific simplistic answer that government is always the problem. How to get the government to pay for things they want (and want to sell) while depleting it of resources to regulate the way businesses operate and treat their customers.
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are such outliers that they don't belong in this discussion at all. And the point of the two Americas meme is that in one of them, you don't get the most basic needs met, and in the other you do. Anything beyond that is fluff. In the case of Buffet and Gates, some very high-priced fluff. But non-essential fluff nonetheless.
Buffet and Gates seem to realize this - having pledged to give most of it away. It's those deluded folks that 'aspire' to be Buffet and Gates that don't get the point. You get to try to live a decent life, accomplish something, and then you die. And if you have any sense, you hope your kids will do the same - instead of inheriting a vast fortune and having no idea how to live.
Jesus, folks. $250K might not be 'rich' in the billionaire sense, but it's comfortable enough that in the scope of things anything above that is basically a pissing contest. To impose a 2.5 percent tax on the amount above (not on the first $250K) is a mosquito bite that those folks will barely feel. On the other hand, if it reduces the need to impose a higher sales tax, millions will feel relief every day. There's a reason for progressive taxation. You may not like it in principle - and you may not like what the money gets spent on. But don't kid yourself that a small tax on high income earners is the problem.
Exon is funding plenty of climate science - and actually doing what you assume the government must be doing - simply because you don't like the results. Anyway, any legit climate scientist who thinks global warming is a government-funded hoax can easily find lucrative work for Exon and/or Koch Industries - or one of the Koch-funded 'think tanks'. So, no. Climate scientists are not finding 'phony' man-made warming for profit.
Did you read the article. it's not about the newspapers asking the Government to try to shore them up. It's about asking the government not to treat their own efforts to adapt to online news aggregation as illegal collusion under anti-trust law.
They've accepted that people aren't buying newspapers any more - that's not the issue. They know that people are still consuming news, and they're actively moving their businesses online to where the people are. But various aspects of how Google and Facebook present 'news' are making it hard to distinguish between real and fake news. Yes, they need Google and Facebook to link to their articles. But they'd like to figure out how to keep those articles from being lost in a soup of real and fake news. It's a real problem - that everyone would like solved. They just don't want well-meaning anti-trust law -
intended to stop Standard Oil from colluding with its competitors to fix prices - to keep them from working together to solve the problem.
Except, as far as news gathering goes, Google and Facebook's business model seems to be to use the content generated by these dinosaurs to keep people from venturing out of their (G's and F's) revenue-generating ecosystems. Yes, when you actually open an article from within Google or Facebook, you open the newspaper's site - and the paper gets to sell ads based on that. But the back button takes you back to Google or Facebook.
It's not only about profit. It's about the revenue stream required to support serious journalism. News aggregators tend to give more or less equal weight to real journalism, tabloid stuff, and in some cases, out-and-out fake news/propaganda sites. I'm sure Google and Facebook would like to fix that, too.
In any case, the 'antitrust' rule these news organizations want to bypass is the one that prevents them banding together to take on Google and Facebook. But maybe the news organizations, Google and Facebook could all get together - in a way that's not anti-competitive - and produce voluntary standards to improve the quality of online journalism. Like, say, Google and Facebook agreeing not to link to sites that have a half paragraph of 'news' followed by a stream of links to bogus lifestyle 'articles' that are merely sites that hype phony cancer cures and boner pills...
Taxis in big cities are regulated to limit traffic on crowded streets. Uber gets around that - and also competes unfairly with medallion taxis that have higher overhead due to complying with those regulations. Now maybe the regulations need to be changed to reflect what technology has made possible. But I think it'd be fine to limit Uber to rides that originate or end outside of the center of a big city - forcing them to provide a new and valuable service instead of just lowballing the existing ones and jamming up the streets.
Well, it's not 'all of the Google services'. My ZTE Axon 7 came with a bunch of proprietary ZTE apps - including a calendar (which I assume is one of the Google services) and an SMS app. The ZTE stuff couldn't be uninstalled or even disabled until the latest update after users complained really loudly.
My worry is that once OEM's start being able to bundle their own services into their phones, they'll start trying to grab bits of Google's search or ad revenue - bundling in their own inferior versions that can't be disabled. That'd truly suck. Yeah, I suppose it'd be nice to get AOSP with the Play store - and everything else optional. It'd also be nice to require that phones be unlockable so that the whole OS can be replaced and/or upgraded without input from the OEM. Now that would be a definite benefit to the users. But be wary of simply allowing OEM's to shoehorn in their own, crappy bloatware to replace Google's and not letting you use anything else. OEM support for their devices is lousy enough - and Android is fragmented enough - as it is...
That sounds like a good idea. Of course, Apple is mostly trying to dodge U.S. taxes by gaming it so their profits appear to be made in Ireland. And if the EU were able to shut down that game, Apple would still save money - but maybe not enough to make it worth while.
Yes, global competition means that a high U.S. corporate tax rate can't hold up. And something will need to be done about that - including hiking other personal taxes to compensate for lowering the corporate rate to be more competitive globally. But then again, foreign corporations have other advantages too - like not having to buy health insurance for their employees. Where's the uproar over that?
That's what Yelp is trying to do - define Google search as a 'platform' that is capable of excluding competitors - never mind that you can easily type yelp.com into the location bar of any browser. Yes, Google search has a big market share - apparently more in the EU than in the US. But does that make it a 'platform'? And if so, did it get there illegally? Is Facebook a 'platform' - does it need to steer its users to their friends' Google Plus postings so that G+ has a viable business?
Microsoft Windows definitely is - and is largely marketed as - a platform for running 3rd party software. So is iOS, I suppose, but their market share isn't high enough to get them in trouble.
By the way, when I type 'comparison shopping services' into Google, it comes up with articles comparing comparison shopping sites - rather than the sites themselves. That's a little odd... Most of the actual comparison sites listed are ads.
I guess. But your 'fishing wiki' example is pretty far from this. Comparison shopping is a form of search. It makes sense for Google to be providing that kind of service. A fishing wiki is it's own primary source of information. Google includes Wikipedia results - normally at or close to the top, based on popularity - because it benefits both parties for that to happen.
If comparison shopping sites are good enough, people will hear about them and go to them directly. Maybe that's why Trivago advertises so heavily. Or maybe they're concerned that Google could get into the travel comparison business too. Would that be illegal - who knows? But maybe Yelp should advertise their service instead of expecting Google to steer its users their way.
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Well kudos to you for misconstruing what I_ate_god said, then. He merely said that cultural differences are not genetic - with, yes, the implication that aptitude for engineering is a cultural difference. Sure, he didn't prove that - just suggested that it could well be the cause. but then you suggested that the Y chromosome could be the cause - again with no proof other than 'a chromosome has lots of genes on it'.
Men and women differ by an entire chromosome. That's more than differentiates many species from each other.
Well, that's pretty dumb. You make a scientific-sounding statement that may or may not have anything to do with genetic bases for engineering aptitude and provide absolutely no evidence that it does. Not unlike the 'scientific' argument that 'eyes are really complex, so they couldn't possibly have arisen through evolution'. That kind of stuff works when you're feeding it as propaganda to an audience looking to support their non-scientific assumptions, but that's about it.
You got it. Facebook could easily eliminate one of the worst sources of fake news - and one of the things that makes FB a miserable experience. 'Articles' with headlines like "you've got to hear what so-and-so said", and then link you to a 'news' site with 1 paragraph of useless stuff - or a screenshot of a twitter post, followed by a littany of the worst ads for fake cures, etc. I suppose FB makes a lot of money off of that crap, but they should at least label it as advertising and not treat it as if it's news. But better yet, get rid of it altogether. Hey, even Google is providing ways to get rid of the most annoying advertising...
People need to put the fear of God into Facebook and stop using it for a while in protest.
Yep. Microsoft hasn't changed - what's changed is who their enemy is. It used to be that the 'enemy' was anybody who produced desktop software or operating systems. Linux certainly made the cut - but so, also, did Netscape, Novell and anyone who could derail their plan of Microsoft software in every device supported by unavoidable fees baked in - plus hefty fees to corporate customers.
Then, along came Google and proved there were other business models that could produce huge amounts of income. Not only did Microsoft want to get in on that income stream, they also wanted to deny it to any competitor that had the potential of eroding their core business. And Google went on to oblige by taking over the web browser market and the mobile phone markets. Google docs even showed that it was possible to do what MSOffice does - for free. Yes, Docs isn't a one-for-one competitor, but as a proof of concept, it scared the shit out of MS. Likewise ChromeOS.
And in the meantime, along came the rest of the web to demonstrate that the entire desktop software paradigm was out the window - except for some specific use cases that we can ignore for the purposes of this argument. And the new paradigm was based on Linux servers. Somewhere along the line they finally gave up on Windows Phone - which was probably their last connection to their old business model of selling software. Sure, they're still raking it in on patent extortion, but that can't last forever...
So now they're trying to adapt - and doing a pretty decent job of it. They've still got enough corporations hooked on MSOffice and/or some 3rd party Windows-only app to carry them forward for a while, but their enemy today is Amazon. And Amazon is Linux - so if they want to lure AWS customers to Azure, they need to support Linux well. Still, not the best of motives from our point of view - so all things being equal'ish, I'd still prefer to avoid them whenever possible.
Well, mission accomplished. We're all arguing about whether $150K is rich or middle class - and not talking about the fact that the pain stops at $300K - which, coincidentally, is probably where the most egregious tax inequities start. It's pretty hard to make >$300K a year without a lot of that being in the form of tax-preferred passive income like dividends and capital gains. There are more Americans than you'd think in this income bracket, and a truly disproportion of total US income is attributable to that group.
So Trump has us middle-to-upper-middle classers arguing about whether or not we're really rich, and the truly rich are getting to keep all the bounty. Kind of a clever trick for a moron like Trump. But then again, the summary starts with "If Trump sticks to what he has said", and Trump has never stuck to anything he's said, so why are we even discussing this. We were supposed to have "a great and beautiful healthcare system with lower cost and far better coverage" by now. "And it'll be really easy, believe me"...
Okay, so assuming you're correct and current Libre versions still take 3 seconds to paste (in your use case) and 10 seconds to open the book you're writing. Well, then Libre may not be for you. Or... rather than spend a hundred bucks or so for MSOffice, you could plow that into a higher spec'd machine that runs Libre okay for you. Presumably you have some desire to run it - or you wouldn't be commenting here. Or you have some desire to use Linux, but the lack of MSOffice is holding you back - in which case, I'd suggest using WINE with whatever version of MSOffice runs well under it and meets your requirements (which apparently don't include the latest whiz-bang features, so you're in luck).
But for many of us an open source fully functional office suite is an important thing to support. Presumably color schemes and the like are handled by different developers than the core functionality that we all agree is more important - so both can proceed together. From my perspective, native ports to iOS and Android are more important than either at this point.
He may have been trying to overstate his contribution, but he did take the lead (i.e. initiative) in getting the government to turn the military-developed network over to the private sector to become what we now know of as the Internet. So, maybe he was overselling his contribution - or maybe those who heard his statement as 'I created the Internet' didn't know enough about the Internet to understand what his contribution was...
But then again, any politician that doesn't know to steer clear of Maureen Dowd with quotes that can be turned on them to make them seem like a know-it-all prig probably shouldn't be a politician. Gore seems to have finally figured that out...
Yep. The DNC likes wonks. The public hates them - if only because they're smarter than them, and think letting you know that will earn your respect. Bill Clinton was the last one who was able to pretend to be a regular guy. Republicans keep electing real regular guys - i.e. dumb fucks with no ideals (or scruples) whatsoever.
And don't go telling me that 'crooked Hillary' has no ideals. Her scruples may be lacking, but she does stand for something - and yes, a lot of that something is good stuff.
Except that Democrats in Congress keep trying to pass campaign finance reforms - all opposed by the Republicans. And the Supreme Court's 5 Republican appointees thought it was fine to declare that "Money is Speech" is a more important principle than "One Person, One Vote" and utterly ignoring that money, can also be bribery. Overturning that boneheaded decision was prominent in the Democratic platform - a point Bernie Sanders, if not all of his supporters - and many Trump supporters as well - understood.
And that guy, whatshisname?, Al Gore... He got net neutrality (and the Internet, which he helped make public - and never said he 'invented', folks). But yes, he's a bit of a stick in the mud politically, so we got W instead.
Not to mention that the nature of these anti-consumer practices (absent any laws to change it) would be mostly invisible to the consumer. If your ISP is selling information about you that they gathered in the course of your everyday web activity (even in your broswer's 'private browsing' mode) - how would you know?
And for those worried about government 'interference', wouldn't having your entire web browsing history one subpoena away be a bigger threat than the government telling ISP's they can't block access to Netflix or some future competitor. At least with a regulated internet someone has the ability to tell them they can't store your info at all - though, I suppose, if you're paranoid enough to assume they want to be able to subpoena it...? But, at least, if the government has the power to regulate such things, and we theoretically have the power to vote them out if they don't demand our privacy be protected, there's some hope.
This isn't even a Windows 10 thing, since it happens on Windows 7 too. But the latest versions of Office/Outlook/Skype insist on doing stuff like animated 'smooth scrolling' and the like. First of all, I find that mildly annoying on a non-touch interface (might make sense on a touchscreen, where the scrolling is meant to match your finger gesture). But the really bad thing is that if you're on a Remote Desktop session, this animation gets sent over the internet causing full-screen repaints, and everything is unusably slow. Now this stuff can probably all be disabled (I don't actually have the latest stuff on my work desktop - I'm just reporting the complaints of co-workers that do). But seriously, RDP is supposed to 'degrade' features that don't work well in that mode. Certainly my fonts get degraded under RDP, so I assume that's the idea...
I didn't say rich. I was talking about the Two Americas meme - and making the bottom line value judgement that once your basic needs (and future security) are taken care of, the rest of it is a form of excess. Not that that's bad - just that it's not 'necessary'. Feel free, if you must, to include those lattes in your bag of basic necessities. It doesn't change the basic formulation. I'm in no way talking about a subsistence lifestyle.
One of the two Americas (in my opinion) includes the rich and the upper middle class. And, if we had decent national health insurance so that the potential for medical Armageddon didn't hang over our heads, might well include the rest of the middle class...
Today's crypto-conservatism has no actual ideas, other than tax cuts.
If only. Today's crypto-conservatism has plenty of ideas. But they're all about how to sell tax cuts as something they're not. How to flatter people that they don't need to think too deeply about issues, that simplistic answers are fine - and then convince them of the specific simplistic answer that government is always the problem. How to get the government to pay for things they want (and want to sell) while depleting it of resources to regulate the way businesses operate and treat their customers.
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are such outliers that they don't belong in this discussion at all. And the point of the two Americas meme is that in one of them, you don't get the most basic needs met, and in the other you do. Anything beyond that is fluff. In the case of Buffet and Gates, some very high-priced fluff. But non-essential fluff nonetheless.
Buffet and Gates seem to realize this - having pledged to give most of it away. It's those deluded folks that 'aspire' to be Buffet and Gates that don't get the point. You get to try to live a decent life, accomplish something, and then you die. And if you have any sense, you hope your kids will do the same - instead of inheriting a vast fortune and having no idea how to live.
Jesus, folks. $250K might not be 'rich' in the billionaire sense, but it's comfortable enough that in the scope of things anything above that is basically a pissing contest. To impose a 2.5 percent tax on the amount above (not on the first $250K) is a mosquito bite that those folks will barely feel. On the other hand, if it reduces the need to impose a higher sales tax, millions will feel relief every day. There's a reason for progressive taxation. You may not like it in principle - and you may not like what the money gets spent on. But don't kid yourself that a small tax on high income earners is the problem.
Exon is funding plenty of climate science - and actually doing what you assume the government must be doing - simply because you don't like the results. Anyway, any legit climate scientist who thinks global warming is a government-funded hoax can easily find lucrative work for Exon and/or Koch Industries - or one of the Koch-funded 'think tanks'. So, no. Climate scientists are not finding 'phony' man-made warming for profit.
Did you read the article. it's not about the newspapers asking the Government to try to shore them up. It's about asking the government not to treat their own efforts to adapt to online news aggregation as illegal collusion under anti-trust law.
They've accepted that people aren't buying newspapers any more - that's not the issue. They know that people are still consuming news, and they're actively moving their businesses online to where the people are. But various aspects of how Google and Facebook present 'news' are making it hard to distinguish between real and fake news. Yes, they need Google and Facebook to link to their articles. But they'd like to figure out how to keep those articles from being lost in a soup of real and fake news. It's a real problem - that everyone would like solved. They just don't want well-meaning anti-trust law -
intended to stop Standard Oil from colluding with its competitors to fix prices - to keep them from working together to solve the problem.
I'd argue that Disqus is at least as bad a substitute for Facebook as the NY Times is for the WaPO.
Except, as far as news gathering goes, Google and Facebook's business model seems to be to use the content generated by these dinosaurs to keep people from venturing out of their (G's and F's) revenue-generating ecosystems. Yes, when you actually open an article from within Google or Facebook, you open the newspaper's site - and the paper gets to sell ads based on that. But the back button takes you back to Google or Facebook.
It's not only about profit. It's about the revenue stream required to support serious journalism. News aggregators tend to give more or less equal weight to real journalism, tabloid stuff, and in some cases, out-and-out fake news/propaganda sites. I'm sure Google and Facebook would like to fix that, too.
In any case, the 'antitrust' rule these news organizations want to bypass is the one that prevents them banding together to take on Google and Facebook. But maybe the news organizations, Google and Facebook could all get together - in a way that's not anti-competitive - and produce voluntary standards to improve the quality of online journalism. Like, say, Google and Facebook agreeing not to link to sites that have a half paragraph of 'news' followed by a stream of links to bogus lifestyle 'articles' that are merely sites that hype phony cancer cures and boner pills...
That's where Uber makes the most sense.
Taxis in big cities are regulated to limit traffic on crowded streets. Uber gets around that - and also competes unfairly with medallion taxis that have higher overhead due to complying with those regulations. Now maybe the regulations need to be changed to reflect what technology has made possible. But I think it'd be fine to limit Uber to rides that originate or end outside of the center of a big city - forcing them to provide a new and valuable service instead of just lowballing the existing ones and jamming up the streets.
Well, it's not 'all of the Google services'. My ZTE Axon 7 came with a bunch of proprietary ZTE apps - including a calendar (which I assume is one of the Google services) and an SMS app. The ZTE stuff couldn't be uninstalled or even disabled until the latest update after users complained really loudly.
My worry is that once OEM's start being able to bundle their own services into their phones, they'll start trying to grab bits of Google's search or ad revenue - bundling in their own inferior versions that can't be disabled. That'd truly suck. Yeah, I suppose it'd be nice to get AOSP with the Play store - and everything else optional. It'd also be nice to require that phones be unlockable so that the whole OS can be replaced and/or upgraded without input from the OEM. Now that would be a definite benefit to the users. But be wary of simply allowing OEM's to shoehorn in their own, crappy bloatware to replace Google's and not letting you use anything else. OEM support for their devices is lousy enough - and Android is fragmented enough - as it is...
That sounds like a good idea. Of course, Apple is mostly trying to dodge U.S. taxes by gaming it so their profits appear to be made in Ireland. And if the EU were able to shut down that game, Apple would still save money - but maybe not enough to make it worth while.
Yes, global competition means that a high U.S. corporate tax rate can't hold up. And something will need to be done about that - including hiking other personal taxes to compensate for lowering the corporate rate to be more competitive globally. But then again, foreign corporations have other advantages too - like not having to buy health insurance for their employees. Where's the uproar over that?
That's what Yelp is trying to do - define Google search as a 'platform' that is capable of excluding competitors - never mind that you can easily type yelp.com into the location bar of any browser. Yes, Google search has a big market share - apparently more in the EU than in the US. But does that make it a 'platform'? And if so, did it get there illegally? Is Facebook a 'platform' - does it need to steer its users to their friends' Google Plus postings so that G+ has a viable business?
Microsoft Windows definitely is - and is largely marketed as - a platform for running 3rd party software. So is iOS, I suppose, but their market share isn't high enough to get them in trouble.
By the way, when I type 'comparison shopping services' into Google, it comes up with articles comparing comparison shopping sites - rather than the sites themselves. That's a little odd... Most of the actual comparison sites listed are ads.
I guess. But your 'fishing wiki' example is pretty far from this. Comparison shopping is a form of search. It makes sense for Google to be providing that kind of service. A fishing wiki is it's own primary source of information. Google includes Wikipedia results - normally at or close to the top, based on popularity - because it benefits both parties for that to happen.
If comparison shopping sites are good enough, people will hear about them and go to them directly. Maybe that's why Trivago advertises so heavily. Or maybe they're concerned that Google could get into the travel comparison business too. Would that be illegal - who knows? But maybe Yelp should advertise their service instead of expecting Google to steer its users their way.
Those countries also have little niceties like free healthcare, child care - and probably subsidized housing. But who's counting...