All of this assumes that you never intended to make money from your product from either direct sales or licensing. That model for Open Source projects has been shown to be a non-starter. You open source if you have an adjacent product to sell - either one that makes your OS product more valuable, or a support service that makes companies feel safe using your stuff.
But if they switch to someone else's product, you won't even get the bug fixes.
And, you might have trouble recruiting programmers to work on your product - since these days, nobody makes a career out of a job. And the less 'standard' your platform is, the less mobile you are as a developer. Working on a widely-used Open Source project is a great calling card for a developer, and while you might think that would make them more likely to leave, it's just as likely that the opposite is true. If your devs think they're working in a backwater that will stagnate their careers, they're more likely to jump ship than if they're happily and securely working on a project that keeps them saleable...
Doesn't Google's voice-typing essentially do this? It makes a quick guess at what you're saying and then refines it based on a more powerful cloud based scan - that's still trained using samples of your voice. It sure seems that way, since you get an immediate result on the screen that changes seconds later to a more accurate result. So all they're doing is using the local guess directly when the network is not available. Patentable? Really?
Its often not the police collecting the data, the police are often merely subscribers to the commercial private databases. These database are filled by other private sources, bail bondsmen, reposessors, etc. These private entities will literally cruise up and down the isles of parking lots at various public venues -- malls, stadiums, walmart, etc -- scanning/recording plates and waiting for statistics to find them a car/person of interest. As a bonus they also sell all their collected data to the commercial private databases.
Why are databases of licence plates - and the links to their owners - publicly available? Sure there are some public records - like real estate transactions. But cars? I suppose it's not intrinsically horrible to be able to look up the owner of a car - except that when the cost of the lookup is zero, you get perverse consequences, like commercial companies tracking and selling your location. It's kind of like spam and robocalling. Once the price of sending junk mail went to zero, there was no disincentive to counteract the nuisance value of the mailings. Same for robocalls. And now, apparently, same for the location of your vehicle. All of these things need to be regulated - and perhaps the easiest way would be to make the underlying technology no longer free. Anyone making more than a few phone calls a day could be charged a nominal fee for the calls. Likewise for sending out large numbers of emails. And license plate lookups could carry a cost every time - there's no routine need to use that tech.
Because you're likely to use other Google applications (mail? search?) that monetize your data regardless of what OS you run them on. Same goes for any of the other apps you use.
So, until you convince the world to go with some other business model than 'free, but we get to make money by serving you ads', your choice of OS is going to do very little to 'protect' you. You're better off spending your energy learning exactly how the various services you use monetize your data. Not every ad-supported service gives your data (and that of all your 'friends') away to a sleazy 'analytics' company owned by a sleazy right-wing billionaire that sold it to the Trump campaign...
Twitter and Facebook could go a long way toward minimizing the problem by limiting how many posts you can make on a thread - certainly on a thread that's not 'following' you. Or at very least, make you solve a captcha every 3 or 4 posts on such threads.
And there's another obvious point. If Linux were not free, it would not exist - let alone have any value. IBM has its own, perfectly good, proprietary unix platform. But they want to sell Linux - because people want to use Linux. And people want to use Linux because its free, which made other people want to use it. If the open source contributors to Linux had intended to eventually be compensated for their code, Linux would not exist. So you can't come along once Red Hat has become a viable business and say "I wrote some of the software - where's my payout?".
Red Hat's payout is for having become one of the main go-to companies for Linux support - and consistency as a platform over time. And now that many Linux users are migrating to Amazon's cloud, Red Hat's business is likely to shrink. But IBM's cloud business has nowhere to go but up - unless it fails. But it's a $36 billion bet they feel they have to make.
If Google has a 'no sex between employees' or 'no sex between direct reports' policy, then the dismissal was perfectly justifiable. What I have a problem with was calling the BJ 'coerced'. At some point, when you're having a sexual affair with someone, and you meet them in a hotel room, if you blow them without being physically forced to, the reasons for that specific BJ fall into a gray area - where coercion may or may not have something to do with it.
There are many possible explanations for why the woman in question didn't just say no and "it's over, Andy". One of which would involve potential harm to her career - which, face it, may come in the form of loss of any advantage her career gained by fucking the boss. None of this says that Rubin isn't a schmuck - and in violation of company policy. It does not, however, automatically make him a rapist. Maybe 'coercion' is not being used in this case to imply any kind of forced sex, but it sure sounds like it's meant that way.
The latest shake-up in personal computing has been the Chromebook. Not perfect for everyone - but perfect for the use case where it's perfect;-)
Seriously, though. The concepts behind the Chromebook that make it great are ease of management. Always up-to-date software. And, while not the cheapest, perhaps the best bang for the buck hardware-wise. Microsoft is attempting to compete with that by, duh, shoehorning a version of Windows into a similar device category. That seems destined to fail - and unless the hardware can be repurposed to run Linux or Android, I sure hope it does... I wonder if Apple could come up with something truly creative in that device space. Cheap, high volume isn't Apple's forte, but reinvention is.
The main problem with Chromebooks is Google's use of them to suck up all your data. Maybe Apple's hardware-based business model could reinvent the category without having to rely on spying. I wonder if the creativity to come up with something truly new still exists at Apple, though...
...or does everyone hate the new Google News app as much as I do.
I used to use the 'News and Weather' app that came with the phone until recently, when that app went blank except for a notice that it was being replaced by Google News. So I switched. The two apps are pretty much the same thing, but there's something overly busy and overcrowded about Google News.
The old app just gave you lists of stories in various categories, and that was it. A little scrolling, and you had a sense of what was there, and what of that was new. The new one gives you groups of stories within the lists - which are also much longer, including lots of stuff I've already seen. Plus my 'favorite' categories are not on the main screen with everything else. The whole thing makes for a clumsier experience, curated I assume, but hell if I know by what criteria.. Guessing it's some 'chosen just for you by our fabulous AI bots'. Well, no thanks.
Sorry man. When it comes to the Supreme Court, the biggest dose of propaganda you're gonna get is the whole 'originialism' philosophy. That's nothing more than a well-crafted fig leaf for a philosophy that more or less is happy with the power structure as it is, and so finds a juditial philosophy of resistance to change convenient. Except, of course, when it conflicts with a change they want to make - in which case some other lie will be crafted to justify a decision at odds with that 'deeply held' judicial philosophy.
Ginsberg hit the nail right on the head with that quote - and your calling her a Communist (deep thinker, you) does nothing to refute the obviousness of her point - and the obviousness of Roberts' twisted logic.
Or the voting rights act. John Roberts apparently thinks that, because Barack Obama got elected twice, there's no racial discrimination in voting any more - or none requiring Federal oversight. And then the next day, North Carolina enacted a voting law that was 'surgically targeted' to suppress the black vote. And this year, well the ostrich court thinks phony 'voter fraud' fears are a perfectly good reason to throw eligible voters off the rolls, etc, etc, etc...
Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in a catchy turn of phrase, likened Roberts' stand to "throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm, because you're not getting wet". But unfortunately, such logic does little to trump the naked political concerns of the SCOTUS majority that thinks, all things being equal, that "money == speech" is a more important value than "one person, one vote".
Unless I'm misreading the summary, the statistics here are kind of dodgy too. It seems like they're saying that the percentage reduction of CO2 won't be so impressive if the car is manufactured using dirty energy. That's not to say that an electric car won't produce way less CO2 in operation than a diesel one - only that operation is only part of the CO2 footprint of a car. So what? Sure, we need to clean up our power generation grids too. But that's no reason not to be reducing the actual CO2 emissions of the car itself.
And, at the risk of sounding like I'm mixing my liberal rationales, dirty power generation doesn't render us 'powerless' to criticize Saudi Crown Princes who assassinate and dismember their critics willy-nilly. There are other reasons than carbon reduction to wean transportation off of oil...
VERY different markets. Bing's search technology is getting expanded on and used within Office/Azure tenancies. I think MS announced something about this at Ignite last month. I see Bing as more of a tech experiment than an actual Google rival. Maybe MS captures a share of the search engine market, but I think their real aim was to learn how to build a better search engine, one that they could use elsewhere.
Perhaps, but that's a recent (at least since Bing failed in its initial obvious attempt to compete with Google) development. But hey, you could say the same thing about Google Plus. Yes, it's a very different market, but Google kept it around... why? Because it was a testbed for other social-ish things Google wanted to try? Because it was already written and cheap enough to keep alive? Because it had some users that liked it better than Facebook? Because it worked better for some things than Facebook?
But I guess what you're saying is Microsoft did eventually come up with a viable Plan B for Bing - and Google never did (or tried to) for Google Plus...
I don't know what Plex is, but I have a general question. Would anybody want an open source project to be distributed as a snap? I installed Skype on my kubuntu 18.04 system, and it insisted on it. But Skype isn't open source, so okay - it's easier for them to package it once and have it work everywhere. But in the meantime, I see that the snap has set up a loopback filesystem. In fact that conflicted with an encrypted filesystem I used to map using/dev/loop0, until I changed that. But do I really want extra filesystems showing up in the 'df' command just because I've installed a bunch of apps that come as Snaps.
Okay. Plex seems to be a server app, so maybe. But Skype - easy for them, pain in the ass for me.
I recently went to install the Atom text editor to give it a whirl. That also wanted to install as a snap. Luckily there was a regular deb available and I installed that instead. But seriously - any open source project ought to be included in the distro's repository and kept up to date there. I guess snaps could be handy for things you can't afford to keep up to date - to prevent breakage. But there are ways to prevent taking repo updates for individual apps. I guess snaps can protect you from library updates breaking things too, but seriously - open source desktop apps ought to be either less mission critical or more backward-compatible than the kinds of things that snaps are useful for. Wishful thinking?
People who want their Alexa's deciding for them when they're feeling ill. Nobody - I hope.
The screen on your phone is for more than typing commands and emails. Somebody might want the AI capabilities he's working on, but that doesn't mean they want a new kind of device without a screen...
Having Windows 10 spy on you is part of their re-focused cloud business model. They still own the Windows platform, and in order to keep it 'cheap' enough to continue to compete with ChromeOS, MacOS and yes, Linux - while still monetizing it, they're gonna spy on you and hope that enough users keep Bing as the default search engine for them to make money selling ads there. Of course, some people won't stand for that - but those people have already found a way off of Windows.
But PC business software is dead - as far as Microsoft is concerned. They know enough companies are still stuck on 3rd party Windows apps to keep the monopoly going more or less indefinitely, but they're cash cow Office apps are now essentially web apps. I use Outlook to access my work email when I work from home - on Linux...
Speaking of Bing... now that Google's shutting down Google Plus rather than endure bad press for a product that will never compete with FaceBook, I wonder if Microsoft will similarly accept that Bing will never compete seriously with Google. Different markets, I know. Bing vs Google doesn't have to deal with the network effects of 'everybody's already on Facebook'.
What's "free market" about providing a platform that allows for 3rd party apps - except browsers and certain other apps that Apple doesn't want you to provide - apparently because they can use their iOS browser monopoly to extort billions from Google? I believe the default search engine and browser on Windows are still Bing and IE (or Edge). But at least they allow you to install Chrome there - which, for the typical user, is probably easier than figuring out how to change the default search engine.
I get that targeted ads are more valuable. But in order to sell targeted ads, you need to have the targets. So, just saying, if a Facebook or WhatsApp competitor decided to go into the business of running a similar site that's ad-funded, but does not use user data to target ads, and if (big if?) enough people switched to that competitor to avoid being spied on, then advertisers would have to advertise there too. And maybe the ads there would be cheaper, and the owners of the site would be less fabulously rich, but in the end everyone would be happier.
Including the VC's that funded it - since it would be a new form of social media site that they could fund. As it stands, there's no place in the social media space for VC money to go - Facebook doesn't need it, and they have enough of a monopoly to prevent a direct competitor from succeeding. But with a new business model that could appeal to customers turned off by surveillance, there could be an opening. An app like WhatsApp wouldn't be that hard to clone - and the barrier to entry isn't so high either - just ask for access to user's contact list, et voila.
In theory, taxi owner/drivers are small business people. That may not take any special skills, but what special skills does it take to own any small business? And in theory, traffic optimization and the price of a medallion would balance each other out. Yes, unrestricted Uber traffic upsets that equation - but isn't that the point. Uber should face restrictions to avoid clogging the streets. As it stands, the only market force constraining them is competition for riders pushing drivers to restrict their hours - with the streets still jammed with vehicles.
The real solution, congestion pricing - with the revenue geared toward funding mass transit, has been staring us in the face for decades. But it's a hard sell, with big moneyed interests aligned against it.
But that was true of Amazon for years - maybe decades. Who says investors won't put more cash in. Especially if they've already pulled out their initial cash investments by selling their inflated shares.
Besides, didn't Facebook make a pledge to keep the Whatsapp data separate? He might have known that was an iffy promise from the start, but this broken promise is not on him, it's on FB. And it's something the EU have given them shit for.
Right. And why the hell can't Facebook sell non-targeted ads on WhatsApp? If the users are there, advertisers will follow. They may not be able to charge quite as much, but they can still charge for anonymous eyeballs. Or they could make a deal with their users along the lines of "you agree to tell me some basic statistics (gender, age, location) and let me use that to target ads, and I promise I will not user (or even store) your data". There's a business model in there that, while not as lucrative as "develop a monopoly and then abuse your users' privacy to extract every penny possible", it might be lucrative enough. And if it's popular enough to pull lsots of those users from the incumbent monopoly, well... it becomes the best available business model.
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All of this assumes that you never intended to make money from your product from either direct sales or licensing. That model for Open Source projects has been shown to be a non-starter. You open source if you have an adjacent product to sell - either one that makes your OS product more valuable, or a support service that makes companies feel safe using your stuff.
But if they switch to someone else's product, you won't even get the bug fixes.
And, you might have trouble recruiting programmers to work on your product - since these days, nobody makes a career out of a job. And the less 'standard' your platform is, the less mobile you are as a developer. Working on a widely-used Open Source project is a great calling card for a developer, and while you might think that would make them more likely to leave, it's just as likely that the opposite is true. If your devs think they're working in a backwater that will stagnate their careers, they're more likely to jump ship than if they're happily and securely working on a project that keeps them saleable...
Doesn't Google's voice-typing essentially do this? It makes a quick guess at what you're saying and then refines it based on a more powerful cloud based scan - that's still trained using samples of your voice. It sure seems that way, since you get an immediate result on the screen that changes seconds later to a more accurate result. So all they're doing is using the local guess directly when the network is not available. Patentable? Really?
Its often not the police collecting the data, the police are often merely subscribers to the commercial private databases. These database are filled by other private sources, bail bondsmen, reposessors, etc. These private entities will literally cruise up and down the isles of parking lots at various public venues -- malls, stadiums, walmart, etc -- scanning/recording plates and waiting for statistics to find them a car/person of interest. As a bonus they also sell all their collected data to the commercial private databases.
Why are databases of licence plates - and the links to their owners - publicly available? Sure there are some public records - like real estate transactions. But cars? I suppose it's not intrinsically horrible to be able to look up the owner of a car - except that when the cost of the lookup is zero, you get perverse consequences, like commercial companies tracking and selling your location. It's kind of like spam and robocalling. Once the price of sending junk mail went to zero, there was no disincentive to counteract the nuisance value of the mailings. Same for robocalls. And now, apparently, same for the location of your vehicle. All of these things need to be regulated - and perhaps the easiest way would be to make the underlying technology no longer free. Anyone making more than a few phone calls a day could be charged a nominal fee for the calls. Likewise for sending out large numbers of emails. And license plate lookups could carry a cost every time - there's no routine need to use that tech.
Because you're likely to use other Google applications (mail? search?) that monetize your data regardless of what OS you run them on. Same goes for any of the other apps you use.
So, until you convince the world to go with some other business model than 'free, but we get to make money by serving you ads', your choice of OS is going to do very little to 'protect' you. You're better off spending your energy learning exactly how the various services you use monetize your data. Not every ad-supported service gives your data (and that of all your 'friends') away to a sleazy 'analytics' company owned by a sleazy right-wing billionaire that sold it to the Trump campaign...
If it goes further, and enough people don't like it, they fork Firefox. That's what the open source part is for...
Twitter and Facebook could go a long way toward minimizing the problem by limiting how many posts you can make on a thread - certainly on a thread that's not 'following' you. Or at very least, make you solve a captcha every 3 or 4 posts on such threads.
And there's another obvious point. If Linux were not free, it would not exist - let alone have any value. IBM has its own, perfectly good, proprietary unix platform. But they want to sell Linux - because people want to use Linux. And people want to use Linux because its free, which made other people want to use it. If the open source contributors to Linux had intended to eventually be compensated for their code, Linux would not exist. So you can't come along once Red Hat has become a viable business and say "I wrote some of the software - where's my payout?".
Red Hat's payout is for having become one of the main go-to companies for Linux support - and consistency as a platform over time. And now that many Linux users are migrating to Amazon's cloud, Red Hat's business is likely to shrink. But IBM's cloud business has nowhere to go but up - unless it fails. But it's a $36 billion bet they feel they have to make.
If Google has a 'no sex between employees' or 'no sex between direct reports' policy, then the dismissal was perfectly justifiable. What I have a problem with was calling the BJ 'coerced'. At some point, when you're having a sexual affair with someone, and you meet them in a hotel room, if you blow them without being physically forced to, the reasons for that specific BJ fall into a gray area - where coercion may or may not have something to do with it.
There are many possible explanations for why the woman in question didn't just say no and "it's over, Andy". One of which would involve potential harm to her career - which, face it, may come in the form of loss of any advantage her career gained by fucking the boss. None of this says that Rubin isn't a schmuck - and in violation of company policy. It does not, however, automatically make him a rapist. Maybe 'coercion' is not being used in this case to imply any kind of forced sex, but it sure sounds like it's meant that way.
The latest shake-up in personal computing has been the Chromebook. Not perfect for everyone - but perfect for the use case where it's perfect ;-)
Seriously, though. The concepts behind the Chromebook that make it great are ease of management. Always up-to-date software. And, while not the cheapest, perhaps the best bang for the buck hardware-wise. Microsoft is attempting to compete with that by, duh, shoehorning a version of Windows into a similar device category. That seems destined to fail - and unless the hardware can be repurposed to run Linux or Android, I sure hope it does... I wonder if Apple could come up with something truly creative in that device space. Cheap, high volume isn't Apple's forte, but reinvention is.
The main problem with Chromebooks is Google's use of them to suck up all your data. Maybe Apple's hardware-based business model could reinvent the category without having to rely on spying. I wonder if the creativity to come up with something truly new still exists at Apple, though...
...or does everyone hate the new Google News app as much as I do.
I used to use the 'News and Weather' app that came with the phone until recently, when that app went blank except for a notice that it was being replaced by Google News. So I switched. The two apps are pretty much the same thing, but there's something overly busy and overcrowded about Google News.
The old app just gave you lists of stories in various categories, and that was it. A little scrolling, and you had a sense of what was there, and what of that was new. The new one gives you groups of stories within the lists - which are also much longer, including lots of stuff I've already seen. Plus my 'favorite' categories are not on the main screen with everything else. The whole thing makes for a clumsier experience, curated I assume, but hell if I know by what criteria.. Guessing it's some 'chosen just for you by our fabulous AI bots'. Well, no thanks.
Sorry man. When it comes to the Supreme Court, the biggest dose of propaganda you're gonna get is the whole 'originialism' philosophy. That's nothing more than a well-crafted fig leaf for a philosophy that more or less is happy with the power structure as it is, and so finds a juditial philosophy of resistance to change convenient. Except, of course, when it conflicts with a change they want to make - in which case some other lie will be crafted to justify a decision at odds with that 'deeply held' judicial philosophy.
Ginsberg hit the nail right on the head with that quote - and your calling her a Communist (deep thinker, you) does nothing to refute the obviousness of her point - and the obviousness of Roberts' twisted logic.
It's possible for both things to be true - if the dirtiest manufacturing jobs all got exported and replaced with cleaner ones.
Or the voting rights act. John Roberts apparently thinks that, because Barack Obama got elected twice, there's no racial discrimination in voting any more - or none requiring Federal oversight. And then the next day, North Carolina enacted a voting law that was 'surgically targeted' to suppress the black vote. And this year, well the ostrich court thinks phony 'voter fraud' fears are a perfectly good reason to throw eligible voters off the rolls, etc, etc, etc...
Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in a catchy turn of phrase, likened Roberts' stand to "throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm, because you're not getting wet". But unfortunately, such logic does little to trump the naked political concerns of the SCOTUS majority that thinks, all things being equal, that "money == speech" is a more important value than "one person, one vote".
Unless I'm misreading the summary, the statistics here are kind of dodgy too. It seems like they're saying that the percentage reduction of CO2 won't be so impressive if the car is manufactured using dirty energy. That's not to say that an electric car won't produce way less CO2 in operation than a diesel one - only that operation is only part of the CO2 footprint of a car. So what? Sure, we need to clean up our power generation grids too. But that's no reason not to be reducing the actual CO2 emissions of the car itself.
And, at the risk of sounding like I'm mixing my liberal rationales, dirty power generation doesn't render us 'powerless' to criticize Saudi Crown Princes who assassinate and dismember their critics willy-nilly. There are other reasons than carbon reduction to wean transportation off of oil...
VERY different markets. Bing's search technology is getting expanded on and used within Office/Azure tenancies. I think MS announced something about this at Ignite last month. I see Bing as more of a tech experiment than an actual Google rival. Maybe MS captures a share of the search engine market, but I think their real aim was to learn how to build a better search engine, one that they could use elsewhere.
Perhaps, but that's a recent (at least since Bing failed in its initial obvious attempt to compete with Google) development. But hey, you could say the same thing about Google Plus. Yes, it's a very different market, but Google kept it around... why? Because it was a testbed for other social-ish things Google wanted to try? Because it was already written and cheap enough to keep alive? Because it had some users that liked it better than Facebook? Because it worked better for some things than Facebook?
But I guess what you're saying is Microsoft did eventually come up with a viable Plan B for Bing - and Google never did (or tried to) for Google Plus...
I don't know what Plex is, but I have a general question. Would anybody want an open source project to be distributed as a snap? I installed Skype on my kubuntu 18.04 system, and it insisted on it. But Skype isn't open source, so okay - it's easier for them to package it once and have it work everywhere. But in the meantime, I see that the snap has set up a loopback filesystem. In fact that conflicted with an encrypted filesystem I used to map using /dev/loop0, until I changed that. But do I really want extra filesystems showing up in the 'df' command just because I've installed a bunch of apps that come as Snaps.
Okay. Plex seems to be a server app, so maybe. But Skype - easy for them, pain in the ass for me.
I recently went to install the Atom text editor to give it a whirl. That also wanted to install as a snap. Luckily there was a regular deb available and I installed that instead. But seriously - any open source project ought to be included in the distro's repository and kept up to date there. I guess snaps could be handy for things you can't afford to keep up to date - to prevent breakage. But there are ways to prevent taking repo updates for individual apps. I guess snaps can protect you from library updates breaking things too, but seriously - open source desktop apps ought to be either less mission critical or more backward-compatible than the kinds of things that snaps are useful for. Wishful thinking?
People who want their Alexa's deciding for them when they're feeling ill. Nobody - I hope.
The screen on your phone is for more than typing commands and emails. Somebody might want the AI capabilities he's working on, but that doesn't mean they want a new kind of device without a screen...
What's to prevent Samsung, Asus, and the rest of the companies paying MS to use Android from joining the OIN themselves?
Having Windows 10 spy on you is part of their re-focused cloud business model. They still own the Windows platform, and in order to keep it 'cheap' enough to continue to compete with ChromeOS, MacOS and yes, Linux - while still monetizing it, they're gonna spy on you and hope that enough users keep Bing as the default search engine for them to make money selling ads there. Of course, some people won't stand for that - but those people have already found a way off of Windows.
But PC business software is dead - as far as Microsoft is concerned. They know enough companies are still stuck on 3rd party Windows apps to keep the monopoly going more or less indefinitely, but they're cash cow Office apps are now essentially web apps. I use Outlook to access my work email when I work from home - on Linux...
Speaking of Bing... now that Google's shutting down Google Plus rather than endure bad press for a product that will never compete with FaceBook, I wonder if Microsoft will similarly accept that Bing will never compete seriously with Google. Different markets, I know. Bing vs Google doesn't have to deal with the network effects of 'everybody's already on Facebook'.
What's "free market" about providing a platform that allows for 3rd party apps - except browsers and certain other apps that Apple doesn't want you to provide - apparently because they can use their iOS browser monopoly to extort billions from Google? I believe the default search engine and browser on Windows are still Bing and IE (or Edge). But at least they allow you to install Chrome there - which, for the typical user, is probably easier than figuring out how to change the default search engine.
I get that targeted ads are more valuable. But in order to sell targeted ads, you need to have the targets. So, just saying, if a Facebook or WhatsApp competitor decided to go into the business of running a similar site that's ad-funded, but does not use user data to target ads, and if (big if?) enough people switched to that competitor to avoid being spied on, then advertisers would have to advertise there too. And maybe the ads there would be cheaper, and the owners of the site would be less fabulously rich, but in the end everyone would be happier.
Including the VC's that funded it - since it would be a new form of social media site that they could fund. As it stands, there's no place in the social media space for VC money to go - Facebook doesn't need it, and they have enough of a monopoly to prevent a direct competitor from succeeding. But with a new business model that could appeal to customers turned off by surveillance, there could be an opening. An app like WhatsApp wouldn't be that hard to clone - and the barrier to entry isn't so high either - just ask for access to user's contact list, et voila.
In theory, taxi owner/drivers are small business people. That may not take any special skills, but what special skills does it take to own any small business?
And in theory, traffic optimization and the price of a medallion would balance each other out. Yes, unrestricted Uber traffic upsets that equation - but isn't that the point. Uber should face restrictions to avoid clogging the streets. As it stands, the only market force constraining them is competition for riders pushing drivers to restrict their hours - with the streets still jammed with vehicles.
The real solution, congestion pricing - with the revenue geared toward funding mass transit, has been staring us in the face for decades. But it's a hard sell, with big moneyed interests aligned against it.
But that was true of Amazon for years - maybe decades. Who says investors won't put more cash in. Especially if they've already pulled out their initial cash investments by selling their inflated shares.
Besides, didn't Facebook make a pledge to keep the Whatsapp data separate? He might have known that was an iffy promise from the start, but this broken promise is not on him, it's on FB. And it's something the EU have given them shit for.
Right. And why the hell can't Facebook sell non-targeted ads on WhatsApp? If the users are there, advertisers will follow. They may not be able to charge quite as much, but they can still charge for anonymous eyeballs. Or they could make a deal with their users along the lines of "you agree to tell me some basic statistics (gender, age, location) and let me use that to target ads, and I promise I will not user (or even store) your data". There's a business model in there that, while not as lucrative as "develop a monopoly and then abuse your users' privacy to extract every penny possible", it might be lucrative enough. And if it's popular enough to pull lsots of those users from the incumbent monopoly, well... it becomes the best available business model.