Well I guess the gun laws in the U.S have more loopholes in them than I thought (thou I suspect states like California have plugged this) because in most of the world critical components like bolts and bolt carriers do require you to go trough a similar amount of checks and paperwork as buying a whole working weapon and people hence just don't bother frankensteining their weapons. Putting on some finishing touches or even just manufacturing critical components from scratch yourself doesn't give you a pass from the law requiring you to register your firearms in most of the world. Where I come from you need to actually have a license to just work on guns (i.e you have to have a pretty clean criminal record) for a living even if you're not manufacturing any new parts.
The thing about the stuff sold by companies like 80percentarms is that the "remaining 20%" parts they don't sell are the heavily regulated critical and hard-to-manufacture and parts like the bolt and bolt carrier. We're talking about businesses that are only legal because they just don't sell the parts necessary to make an actually working firearm as multiple critical components are simply missing in their catalog. Only way to make a working firearm from their parts is by cannibalizing a working firearm of a suitable type.
3D printed guns on the other hand don't require any cannibalization of working firearms and are thus a different kettle of fish.
The problem with your argument relating to improvised firearms is that while they've been around for ages, they haven't been getting that much better. What 3D printing offers right now may be roughly equal in quality, but 10 years down the line, maybe less, you're going to be able to produce some much more dangerous weapons that can actually withstand being fired repeatedly. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if 10 years down the line we've got fully 3D printed AR-15s and AKs (which famously only have a single genuinely hard-to-manufacture part).
Even the "but people can already manufacture multi-firing weapons already using metal working tools"-argument falls flat on it's face when you remember that that requires not only someone with the will to do so, but also for said person to be a skilled machinist. With this, all that's required is someone to have access to a suitable 3D printer, maybe after hours or during weekends at a business with a legitimate use for said printer.
The way to fight 3D-printed guns is probably just to restrict and monitor the sale of printers and filament for/capable of making critical components similarly to how the chemicals and tools necessary for making hard drugs are controlled. That and having the printers add naked-eye invisible fingerprints to printed items similarly to how (paper) printers do.
What you're talking about is just slightly more extensive employee perks than what we're used to today. You can still find company-paid employee lodging particularly in very seasonal work, but typically it's smaller things like cafeterias, daycare and gyms.
Sure, to an outsider it does look unfair, but in reality the employees who have access to employee perks like that are still paying for all of it, just not up-front.
Not sure what kind of market manipulation you're thinking about, but what I'm talking about is the technically legal kind where you rag on a company with things like setting trading recommendations to "sell" when they should at the very least be "hold" and trying to tell as many people as possible that the company is doomed and they should sell their shares before they become worthless.
It's essentially the same game played during the dot.com era except the other way around. Back then you had financial institutions try to push stocks of worthless companies by massively over-hyping them and their stock with cheerleader "analysts" singing their praises and trading recommendations to "buy" on companies with next to no actual revenue and no path to profitability (not even a completely unrealistic one).
How would "bears" drive the stock price down, especially if no one is selling?
If a company is on the stock market there's always going to be at least some selling and buying of their stock, which combined with a small number of people doing this makes the stock price manipulation relatively easy for big players. A stock short is an investment where you essentially borrow someone else's stock, sell it on the stock market and then bet that by the time you need to return those borrowed stocks the stock will be cheaper than you sold that (someone else's) stock and can buy the same number of shares with money to spare.
We've seen time and time again that the people who say Tesla is doomed and that you should sell your stock as fast as possible tend to be people with shorts on Tesla stock and thus an interest to keep the Tesla stock price low enough that the money they got from selling the borrowed stock will be enough to buy the replacement stock.
If there were 13.000 unsold Teslas lying around there would have to be a lot big enough of them to be noticed. However considering they've been getting Model 3 production into very high gear only at the absolute end of the quarter my feeling is that those cars were produced in the last 2-2.5 weeks of the quarter, they have after all been able to get 7000 Model 3s made in a single week, that haven't yet reached their owners.
While I don't disagree on people not wanting to pay for their OS as a service, I really doubt it's going to be ReactOS that they'll try to switch to. More likely than not it's going to be Linux with wine and/or an older version of Windows in a VM for legacy windows applications.
Nokia bought Televa, founded at the end of WW, major innovator in the area of telephone systems and the originator of their network business, in 1981 and only started selling mobile phones, trough a company called Mobira they had founded together with Salora, in 1985. In other words Nokia had been making networks for years before they sold their first cellphone.
I get where you're coming from, networks are kind of business-to-business products consumers never really come into contact with, but networks have been a big part of their business for longer than their mobile phones.
It was probably to be expected seeing how all of Otto's tech was built on stuff the founder had pilfered from Google's self-driving car project after leaving it and when Google found out (IIRC trough a shared supplier accidentally cc:ing them some of their own documents) they got the courts to put a stop to using any of it.
If your "bans lead to popularity" line of reasoning was correct child pornography would probably be on the level of cat videos a few years ago in terms of popularity.
The thing about effective multi-shot designs (i.e not stuff like the steering lock shotgun) is that they typically require a skilled craftsman to machine the necessary components out of metal thus significantly reducing the pool of people who can cause a problem. These things, which will obviously evolve over time to include more complex and harder-to-manufacture parts like the bolt, are on the other hand available to any idiot with access to a suitable 3D printer.
Sure, you can't stop the distribution of these designs completely, but you can at least restrict them like the instructions for the processes used to make hard drugs and chemical weapons something something you can find in your average library.
The fact that you can't completely prevent something doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. You can't prevent the sale and circulation of child porn either, but that's no reason to go "Ah, fuck it..." and give up on trying to do anything about it.
When you consider this your alarmist slippery slope fallacy becomes completely silly and downright nonsensical...
Sure, you can't stop it, but the fact that you can't completely stop something doesn't mean you should stop trying to enforce the law on something. You can't for example stop all car thefts, but that really doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to make it as hard as possible.
But I definitely do get where you're coming from, you can't completely stop people from breaking any law. However we are talking about people using a new tool that requires very little skill to actually use for making things that are very tightly regulated in most of the world for good reason. People could scratch-build their own weapons before using traditional metalworking tools, but that required a skilled craftsman and thus significantly reduced pool of people this was an issue with as a person didn't just need the will to make weapons for criminals and terrorists, they also needed to be skilled machinists.
The worst you could come up with was some people preventing them from hosting a big public event over traffic concerns? Considering the infrastructure, or rather lack thereof, on tribal land that I've seen that doesn't even sound particularly unreasonable as I imagine infrastructure outside of tribal land is probably a lot better.
I'm also kind of unconvinced of your blanket statements about the police in general being racist against all of them. Having seen what a really bad, and incidentally predominately black, neighborhood in america looks like and how people say the police focusing their resources on the places with the most crime being racist because the places with the most crime tending not to be predominately white suburban neighborhoods I'm also unconvinced of your statements about the police in general being racist against black people. Despite popular sentiment, media reports really are nothing even approaching the whole truth when the media is only interested in anything when things go horribly wrong.
When I first heard of racial profiling it sounded absolutely horrid and then a few years later I spoke to a former Chicago policeman who explained what's actually behind it. He explained that if he pulled over a car full of black men, with nothing untoward about them and clearly going to or coming from work, he's pretty much guaranteed to find at least one of the following things: The driver driving without or with a suspended license, one of the occupants having an outstanding arrest warrant, an unlicensed firearm or a non-insignificant quantity of drugs. When the effectiveness of police is measured by the amount of crime they prosecute, the current state of things and just basic game theory dictates that racial profiling will be the inevitable end result even when there is no racial motive whatsoever.
I've heard people claim they're being screwed by the government, but I honestly have't ever seen much evidence of this. The closest I've seen to them actually being screwed over is local municipalities not going out of their way in building out water mains and roads on reservations, which is kind of explained by said reservations mostly being low population density areas (i.e big per-resident costs) and legal issues relating land use and ownership. A municipality is obviously going to have all kinds of legal issues building on sovereign soil that obviously doesn't belong to them and isn't subject to things like eminent domain laws.
It's not like you can actually get away with paying people living in California the same wages you can pay in rust belt states and the south... In those places you don't even need to have pay raises keep pace with inflation.
Many states in the U.S have allowed the natives to skirt around various laws for god knows how many years as sort of repayment for what their ancestors did to them. To a foreigner like myself it seems to be pretty absurd, but to some people the idea of having the natives subject to the same laws as everyone else is somehow repressive.
Most of what they use their sovereign status for is skirting around gambling laws, but you do from time to time hear about suspect alliances like this where tribes help people get around various laws. Last example I heard of was one payday loan company, who operated in a different state, who used the claim of being associated with a tribe to skirt around loads of financial regulations. Thankfully the authorities saw right trough it and just dismantled the whole company. Even went as far as putting their executives in jail, thou one avoided jail by committing suicide, and having them forfeit most of their property.
The most shocking thing about that case was how dismissive the members of the tribe were to the distress of the people screwed over by the company, how they didn't see anything wrong with what the company did and how after the company's justified demise they were in the process of building up a similar enterprise themselves.
Considering there's loads of left wingers who use the same kind of inflammatory language and pretty much exactly the exact same playbook that got Milo Yiannpolis (spelling?) banned and very rarely see any kinds of consequences for it I'm going to call bullshit on your assertion. They don't even have a problem with far-left publications and groups like It's Going Down despite promoting things like arson, violence during protests and trying to cause train derailments by sabotaging the rails.
Don't get me wrong, being a privately owned platform they've got every right to exclude whoever they want to, but at least they should be honest about who they're trying exclude and whose voice they're trying to tone down. I still wouldn't use the platform regardless if they were open about their biases and/or stopped being partisan, but that's just more reasons not to use a platform that has pretty much engineered any intellectual and/or in-depth conversations out of itself.
Seriously thou, we know that they promoted Trump, but we know they also promoted Bernie Sanders and loads of other divisive far right and far left politics outside of the political mainstream. The goal was not to get Trump elected, the purpose was to sow chaos and division which going on about how Trump should be impeached because of this doesn't exactly help with. Had Bernie gotten the democratic nomination and won the election, which isn't that unlikely seeing how Hillary was literally the worst candidate to put up against Trump in an anti-establishment themed election like 2016, we'd be talking about the exact same thing with him.
Outside of the anti-establishment vs embodiment-of-the-established candidate in an anti-establishment themed election if you actually look at how Hillary and Trump ran their campaigns you can clearly see that they both ran very different campaigns and that just in itself provides a good explanation as to how an un-electable candidate like Trump could win the election. Trump ran, or rather had his campaign run, in a way that was very cognizant of how the election system in the U.S works, polling data on what states can actually swing either way and used this to not only inform his policy promises, it most importantly informed where he would hold his campaign rallies. Hillary on the other hand not only completely failed to understand the prevailing anti-establishment winds, she also focused on touring places where she overwhelming support, which is what you're not supposed to do, and as a result ignored multiple swing states that ended up swinging the other way.
The best demonstration of how incompetently Hillary's campaign was run is how she succeeded in loosing both Pennsylvania and Michigan, neither of which has voted republican since Reagan along with Wisconsin, whose blue streak goes even further.
As much as I hate having to defend Trump & Co, it's not like Obama & Co all that much better when they were in power. Despite many promises under Obama's watch the rich still payed way less than what they should, the oil industry were not only allowed to continue to expand their "fracking" operations with little regard to the environment, but also continue having an exception to environmental protection laws like the Clean Water Act (which absolutely baffles me personally), the war on drugs and terror only escalated, old import tariffs like the 25% "chicken tax" on light trucks, cemented in place by Lyndon B Johnson to win over special interests, were left completely untouched, allowed the SEC to be staffed by the sector it's supposed to be a watchdog and regulator of along with mass dragnet spying and general privacy violations reaching an absolute staggering all time high as shown by the Snowden leaks. Hell, even Obama's much praised net neutrality rules required mass outrage to get put in place.
When you consider all of this, Trump & Co really aren't that big of a step backwards. Maybe I'm just a bitter Bernie Sanders supporter, but at least I'm capable of seeing the flaws in Obama's slightly-less-corrupt government.
I've personally got much the same experience when I visit older family members and when I'm house sitting at my parents' and need to pass the time. Thankfully there's at least the local BBC equivalent where the only ads they have are for upcoming programs and they're between programs. It's always kind of funny to look at shows that are supposed to have ad breaks not actually have them, which I guess is part of the reason why they buy in so many shows from the BBC and HBO in particular.
However even streaming services aren't always completely annoyance free. My ISP, which started out as a phone company, has decided to try to break into the TV market with their own streaming service/box and man have they pushed that service trough telemarketing. Over the last couple of years they've called me up well over a dozen times even thou I've told them every time that I don't have a TV so their box would be useless to me. Last time they called me I actually lost my temper and swore at the poor sod they had pushing their crap so he then admitted that they don't have any system to note down things like this and just call you again about services you don't have and they want to push once enough time has expired.
Thankfully there's enough competition in the market that they can't use bundling to force people to pick up their crap service/boxes and not even their main competitor in the area I currently live in, who bought out the local cable TV company, use bundling to push their cable TV packages. Hell, the third biggest ISP in the country also bought out the cable TV company in another city I lived in up until a couple of years ago and haven't used their infrastructure for much beyond regular internet service.
I quite honestly can't say I feel much pity for him... As the saying goes: "You reap what you sow" and it was just a matter of time before he had irked too many people who wouldn't stand for his despicable behavior.
There's expressing your opinions and then there's just plain harassment and much of what he did clearly qualified as the latter. Considering how much of that he's been doing over the years any responsible employer would have also shown him his pink slip.
There's running an assembly line, which Tesla has obviously mastered seeing how they made over 100.000 cars in 2017, and then there's running an assembly line at the speed Elon wants the Model 3 line to run at. To put it into perspective, a stable 5000 cars per week works out at about 260.000 cars a year, i.e about 2.5 times their total 2017 output for a single model even exceeds Porsche's 246.000 total production numbers for 2017.
Also, the "fluffbot" you're obviously referring to was just for one single part, a dampening mat between the battery and the body, that was then discovered to be unnecessary and dropped completely so the human replacements were also useless. Even your comparison to the Model T falls flat on it's face when you consider how much simpler it was, how it took 4 years of Model T production to break the 100.000 cars per year mark and how working conditions at the factory were so terrible (IIRC) about a half of new workers quit in the first few months and the only reason Ford was able to keep attract enough replacement workers was by paying them well above industry average salaries.
The difference between traditional meatspace services like the mail is that they're at least to some extent traceable and will actively co-operate with authorities when their services are used for malicious purposes. What the Indian government isn't asking whatsapp to start being selective about who gets to use their platform, what they're asking for is making communication on the service more traceable so that they can track deadly hoaxes back to their originator and put a stop to those hoaxes by putting said people behind bars.
I'm not saying that the traceability of meatspace services is always perfect, the post office couldn't track down Ted Kaczynski when he was using them to deliver his mail bombs, but at least they took an active part in the taskforce that eventually brought him to justice and were never blamed for facilitating his rampage. I personally haven't heard of a single time a mail service has been blamed for facilitating things like poison or bomb letters and their use goes way back. Even the suffragettes sent letters with ink that corroded the mailboxes or were just plain poisonous and even sent very crude firebombs with white phosphorous (which ignites on contact with air) in easily breakable glass containers.
Either way, the thing about anything that helps trace the origin of something can both be abused and used for very legitimate purposes so if you understand the concept of nuance you're not going to have an extremist "nothing should be traceable" or "everything should be traceable"-outlook on this.
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Well I guess the gun laws in the U.S have more loopholes in them than I thought (thou I suspect states like California have plugged this) because in most of the world critical components like bolts and bolt carriers do require you to go trough a similar amount of checks and paperwork as buying a whole working weapon and people hence just don't bother frankensteining their weapons. Putting on some finishing touches or even just manufacturing critical components from scratch yourself doesn't give you a pass from the law requiring you to register your firearms in most of the world. Where I come from you need to actually have a license to just work on guns (i.e you have to have a pretty clean criminal record) for a living even if you're not manufacturing any new parts.
The thing about the stuff sold by companies like 80percentarms is that the "remaining 20%" parts they don't sell are the heavily regulated critical and hard-to-manufacture and parts like the bolt and bolt carrier. We're talking about businesses that are only legal because they just don't sell the parts necessary to make an actually working firearm as multiple critical components are simply missing in their catalog. Only way to make a working firearm from their parts is by cannibalizing a working firearm of a suitable type.
3D printed guns on the other hand don't require any cannibalization of working firearms and are thus a different kettle of fish.
The problem with your argument relating to improvised firearms is that while they've been around for ages, they haven't been getting that much better. What 3D printing offers right now may be roughly equal in quality, but 10 years down the line, maybe less, you're going to be able to produce some much more dangerous weapons that can actually withstand being fired repeatedly. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if 10 years down the line we've got fully 3D printed AR-15s and AKs (which famously only have a single genuinely hard-to-manufacture part).
Even the "but people can already manufacture multi-firing weapons already using metal working tools"-argument falls flat on it's face when you remember that that requires not only someone with the will to do so, but also for said person to be a skilled machinist. With this, all that's required is someone to have access to a suitable 3D printer, maybe after hours or during weekends at a business with a legitimate use for said printer.
The way to fight 3D-printed guns is probably just to restrict and monitor the sale of printers and filament for/capable of making critical components similarly to how the chemicals and tools necessary for making hard drugs are controlled. That and having the printers add naked-eye invisible fingerprints to printed items similarly to how (paper) printers do.
What you're talking about is just slightly more extensive employee perks than what we're used to today. You can still find company-paid employee lodging particularly in very seasonal work, but typically it's smaller things like cafeterias, daycare and gyms.
Sure, to an outsider it does look unfair, but in reality the employees who have access to employee perks like that are still paying for all of it, just not up-front.
Not sure what kind of market manipulation you're thinking about, but what I'm talking about is the technically legal kind where you rag on a company with things like setting trading recommendations to "sell" when they should at the very least be "hold" and trying to tell as many people as possible that the company is doomed and they should sell their shares before they become worthless.
It's essentially the same game played during the dot.com era except the other way around. Back then you had financial institutions try to push stocks of worthless companies by massively over-hyping them and their stock with cheerleader "analysts" singing their praises and trading recommendations to "buy" on companies with next to no actual revenue and no path to profitability (not even a completely unrealistic one).
How would "bears" drive the stock price down, especially if no one is selling?
If a company is on the stock market there's always going to be at least some selling and buying of their stock, which combined with a small number of people doing this makes the stock price manipulation relatively easy for big players. A stock short is an investment where you essentially borrow someone else's stock, sell it on the stock market and then bet that by the time you need to return those borrowed stocks the stock will be cheaper than you sold that (someone else's) stock and can buy the same number of shares with money to spare.
We've seen time and time again that the people who say Tesla is doomed and that you should sell your stock as fast as possible tend to be people with shorts on Tesla stock and thus an interest to keep the Tesla stock price low enough that the money they got from selling the borrowed stock will be enough to buy the replacement stock.
If there were 13.000 unsold Teslas lying around there would have to be a lot big enough of them to be noticed. However considering they've been getting Model 3 production into very high gear only at the absolute end of the quarter my feeling is that those cars were produced in the last 2-2.5 weeks of the quarter, they have after all been able to get 7000 Model 3s made in a single week, that haven't yet reached their owners.
While I don't disagree on people not wanting to pay for their OS as a service, I really doubt it's going to be ReactOS that they'll try to switch to. More likely than not it's going to be Linux with wine and/or an older version of Windows in a VM for legacy windows applications.
Nokia bought Televa, founded at the end of WW, major innovator in the area of telephone systems and the originator of their network business, in 1981 and only started selling mobile phones, trough a company called Mobira they had founded together with Salora, in 1985. In other words Nokia had been making networks for years before they sold their first cellphone.
I get where you're coming from, networks are kind of business-to-business products consumers never really come into contact with, but networks have been a big part of their business for longer than their mobile phones.
It was probably to be expected seeing how all of Otto's tech was built on stuff the founder had pilfered from Google's self-driving car project after leaving it and when Google found out (IIRC trough a shared supplier accidentally cc:ing them some of their own documents) they got the courts to put a stop to using any of it.
If your "bans lead to popularity" line of reasoning was correct child pornography would probably be on the level of cat videos a few years ago in terms of popularity.
The thing about effective multi-shot designs (i.e not stuff like the steering lock shotgun) is that they typically require a skilled craftsman to machine the necessary components out of metal thus significantly reducing the pool of people who can cause a problem. These things, which will obviously evolve over time to include more complex and harder-to-manufacture parts like the bolt, are on the other hand available to any idiot with access to a suitable 3D printer.
Sure, you can't stop the distribution of these designs completely, but you can at least restrict them like the instructions for the processes used to make hard drugs and chemical weapons something something you can find in your average library.
The fact that you can't completely prevent something doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. You can't prevent the sale and circulation of child porn either, but that's no reason to go "Ah, fuck it..." and give up on trying to do anything about it.
When you consider this your alarmist slippery slope fallacy becomes completely silly and downright nonsensical...
Sure, you can't stop it, but the fact that you can't completely stop something doesn't mean you should stop trying to enforce the law on something. You can't for example stop all car thefts, but that really doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to make it as hard as possible.
But I definitely do get where you're coming from, you can't completely stop people from breaking any law. However we are talking about people using a new tool that requires very little skill to actually use for making things that are very tightly regulated in most of the world for good reason. People could scratch-build their own weapons before using traditional metalworking tools, but that required a skilled craftsman and thus significantly reduced pool of people this was an issue with as a person didn't just need the will to make weapons for criminals and terrorists, they also needed to be skilled machinists.
The worst you could come up with was some people preventing them from hosting a big public event over traffic concerns? Considering the infrastructure, or rather lack thereof, on tribal land that I've seen that doesn't even sound particularly unreasonable as I imagine infrastructure outside of tribal land is probably a lot better.
I'm also kind of unconvinced of your blanket statements about the police in general being racist against all of them. Having seen what a really bad, and incidentally predominately black, neighborhood in america looks like and how people say the police focusing their resources on the places with the most crime being racist because the places with the most crime tending not to be predominately white suburban neighborhoods I'm also unconvinced of your statements about the police in general being racist against black people. Despite popular sentiment, media reports really are nothing even approaching the whole truth when the media is only interested in anything when things go horribly wrong.
When I first heard of racial profiling it sounded absolutely horrid and then a few years later I spoke to a former Chicago policeman who explained what's actually behind it. He explained that if he pulled over a car full of black men, with nothing untoward about them and clearly going to or coming from work, he's pretty much guaranteed to find at least one of the following things: The driver driving without or with a suspended license, one of the occupants having an outstanding arrest warrant, an unlicensed firearm or a non-insignificant quantity of drugs. When the effectiveness of police is measured by the amount of crime they prosecute, the current state of things and just basic game theory dictates that racial profiling will be the inevitable end result even when there is no racial motive whatsoever.
I've heard people claim they're being screwed by the government, but I honestly have't ever seen much evidence of this. The closest I've seen to them actually being screwed over is local municipalities not going out of their way in building out water mains and roads on reservations, which is kind of explained by said reservations mostly being low population density areas (i.e big per-resident costs) and legal issues relating land use and ownership. A municipality is obviously going to have all kinds of legal issues building on sovereign soil that obviously doesn't belong to them and isn't subject to things like eminent domain laws.
It's not like you can actually get away with paying people living in California the same wages you can pay in rust belt states and the south... In those places you don't even need to have pay raises keep pace with inflation.
Many states in the U.S have allowed the natives to skirt around various laws for god knows how many years as sort of repayment for what their ancestors did to them. To a foreigner like myself it seems to be pretty absurd, but to some people the idea of having the natives subject to the same laws as everyone else is somehow repressive.
Most of what they use their sovereign status for is skirting around gambling laws, but you do from time to time hear about suspect alliances like this where tribes help people get around various laws. Last example I heard of was one payday loan company, who operated in a different state, who used the claim of being associated with a tribe to skirt around loads of financial regulations. Thankfully the authorities saw right trough it and just dismantled the whole company. Even went as far as putting their executives in jail, thou one avoided jail by committing suicide, and having them forfeit most of their property.
The most shocking thing about that case was how dismissive the members of the tribe were to the distress of the people screwed over by the company, how they didn't see anything wrong with what the company did and how after the company's justified demise they were in the process of building up a similar enterprise themselves.
Considering there's loads of left wingers who use the same kind of inflammatory language and pretty much exactly the exact same playbook that got Milo Yiannpolis (spelling?) banned and very rarely see any kinds of consequences for it I'm going to call bullshit on your assertion. They don't even have a problem with far-left publications and groups like It's Going Down despite promoting things like arson, violence during protests and trying to cause train derailments by sabotaging the rails.
Don't get me wrong, being a privately owned platform they've got every right to exclude whoever they want to, but at least they should be honest about who they're trying exclude and whose voice they're trying to tone down. I still wouldn't use the platform regardless if they were open about their biases and/or stopped being partisan, but that's just more reasons not to use a platform that has pretty much engineered any intellectual and/or in-depth conversations out of itself.
can manipulate millions of voters
[Citation Needed]
Seriously thou, we know that they promoted Trump, but we know they also promoted Bernie Sanders and loads of other divisive far right and far left politics outside of the political mainstream. The goal was not to get Trump elected, the purpose was to sow chaos and division which going on about how Trump should be impeached because of this doesn't exactly help with. Had Bernie gotten the democratic nomination and won the election, which isn't that unlikely seeing how Hillary was literally the worst candidate to put up against Trump in an anti-establishment themed election like 2016, we'd be talking about the exact same thing with him.
Outside of the anti-establishment vs embodiment-of-the-established candidate in an anti-establishment themed election if you actually look at how Hillary and Trump ran their campaigns you can clearly see that they both ran very different campaigns and that just in itself provides a good explanation as to how an un-electable candidate like Trump could win the election. Trump ran, or rather had his campaign run, in a way that was very cognizant of how the election system in the U.S works, polling data on what states can actually swing either way and used this to not only inform his policy promises, it most importantly informed where he would hold his campaign rallies. Hillary on the other hand not only completely failed to understand the prevailing anti-establishment winds, she also focused on touring places where she overwhelming support, which is what you're not supposed to do, and as a result ignored multiple swing states that ended up swinging the other way.
The best demonstration of how incompetently Hillary's campaign was run is how she succeeded in loosing both Pennsylvania and Michigan, neither of which has voted republican since Reagan along with Wisconsin, whose blue streak goes even further.
As much as I hate having to defend Trump & Co, it's not like Obama & Co all that much better when they were in power. Despite many promises under Obama's watch the rich still payed way less than what they should, the oil industry were not only allowed to continue to expand their "fracking" operations with little regard to the environment, but also continue having an exception to environmental protection laws like the Clean Water Act (which absolutely baffles me personally), the war on drugs and terror only escalated, old import tariffs like the 25% "chicken tax" on light trucks, cemented in place by Lyndon B Johnson to win over special interests, were left completely untouched, allowed the SEC to be staffed by the sector it's supposed to be a watchdog and regulator of along with mass dragnet spying and general privacy violations reaching an absolute staggering all time high as shown by the Snowden leaks. Hell, even Obama's much praised net neutrality rules required mass outrage to get put in place.
When you consider all of this, Trump & Co really aren't that big of a step backwards. Maybe I'm just a bitter Bernie Sanders supporter, but at least I'm capable of seeing the flaws in Obama's slightly-less-corrupt government.
I've personally got much the same experience when I visit older family members and when I'm house sitting at my parents' and need to pass the time. Thankfully there's at least the local BBC equivalent where the only ads they have are for upcoming programs and they're between programs. It's always kind of funny to look at shows that are supposed to have ad breaks not actually have them, which I guess is part of the reason why they buy in so many shows from the BBC and HBO in particular.
However even streaming services aren't always completely annoyance free. My ISP, which started out as a phone company, has decided to try to break into the TV market with their own streaming service/box and man have they pushed that service trough telemarketing. Over the last couple of years they've called me up well over a dozen times even thou I've told them every time that I don't have a TV so their box would be useless to me. Last time they called me I actually lost my temper and swore at the poor sod they had pushing their crap so he then admitted that they don't have any system to note down things like this and just call you again about services you don't have and they want to push once enough time has expired.
Thankfully there's enough competition in the market that they can't use bundling to force people to pick up their crap service/boxes and not even their main competitor in the area I currently live in, who bought out the local cable TV company, use bundling to push their cable TV packages. Hell, the third biggest ISP in the country also bought out the cable TV company in another city I lived in up until a couple of years ago and haven't used their infrastructure for much beyond regular internet service.
I quite honestly can't say I feel much pity for him... As the saying goes: "You reap what you sow" and it was just a matter of time before he had irked too many people who wouldn't stand for his despicable behavior.
There's expressing your opinions and then there's just plain harassment and much of what he did clearly qualified as the latter. Considering how much of that he's been doing over the years any responsible employer would have also shown him his pink slip.
There's running an assembly line, which Tesla has obviously mastered seeing how they made over 100.000 cars in 2017, and then there's running an assembly line at the speed Elon wants the Model 3 line to run at. To put it into perspective, a stable 5000 cars per week works out at about 260.000 cars a year, i.e about 2.5 times their total 2017 output for a single model even exceeds Porsche's 246.000 total production numbers for 2017.
Also, the "fluffbot" you're obviously referring to was just for one single part, a dampening mat between the battery and the body, that was then discovered to be unnecessary and dropped completely so the human replacements were also useless. Even your comparison to the Model T falls flat on it's face when you consider how much simpler it was, how it took 4 years of Model T production to break the 100.000 cars per year mark and how working conditions at the factory were so terrible (IIRC) about a half of new workers quit in the first few months and the only reason Ford was able to keep attract enough replacement workers was by paying them well above industry average salaries.
The difference between traditional meatspace services like the mail is that they're at least to some extent traceable and will actively co-operate with authorities when their services are used for malicious purposes. What the Indian government isn't asking whatsapp to start being selective about who gets to use their platform, what they're asking for is making communication on the service more traceable so that they can track deadly hoaxes back to their originator and put a stop to those hoaxes by putting said people behind bars.
I'm not saying that the traceability of meatspace services is always perfect, the post office couldn't track down Ted Kaczynski when he was using them to deliver his mail bombs, but at least they took an active part in the taskforce that eventually brought him to justice and were never blamed for facilitating his rampage. I personally haven't heard of a single time a mail service has been blamed for facilitating things like poison or bomb letters and their use goes way back. Even the suffragettes sent letters with ink that corroded the mailboxes or were just plain poisonous and even sent very crude firebombs with white phosphorous (which ignites on contact with air) in easily breakable glass containers.
Either way, the thing about anything that helps trace the origin of something can both be abused and used for very legitimate purposes so if you understand the concept of nuance you're not going to have an extremist "nothing should be traceable" or "everything should be traceable"-outlook on this.