I believe the "runners high" to be a placebo thing for the same reason, I've never felt a "rush" or "buzz" after exercise. Then again perhaps they are only felt by people who've never had an actual buzz.
It's not a buzz or a rush; for me it works in a few different ways:
1) A small amount of euphoria about 20-25 minutes into a run; this primarily manifests itself as an increased pain threshold, meaning that if I had some minor nagging injury (say muscle aches) I can tune the pain out for the duration of the workout and a non-zero amount of time afterwards.
2) A vastly improved mood after the exercise is complete. I'm usually smiling for no obvious reason after a run, no matter how bad my mood was prior to the run; this doesn't sound like a lot but my personality is such that I rarely smile or experience 'happiness' as others define it.
3) Related to #2, a sense of accomplishment; Yes, I'm tired, but it's a good tired.
#3 is the only one of the above that I can get from strength training, the rest require a relatively intense cardio workout to achieve, which for me usually means >20 minutes of running. I have experienced them after cardio workouts at the gym but not to the same degree or in as short of a time.
There are other effects that I could point to too: sounder sleep and higher sex drive being the two that first come to mind.
If you want to build a next generation last mile network you've got to provide enough incentive for someone to invest the billions of dollars it's going to cost. Short of the Government building the network and leasing it out (an idea that has merit, but it's a political non-starter in the United States, for better or worse) that money is going to have to come from private parties who will want to know they're going to get a return on their investment. If the Government is going to step in and tell them how they can run the resulting business where's the incentive to put up those billions of dollars?
I suppose you could get a group of investors together to try and build the network for resellers from the beginning, rather than trying to both own and operate the network. This has been done on a small scale with co-ops and the like; I'm not certain it would scale nationwide but it's an interesting premise to serve areas the big boys are neglecting.
NetFlix has offered many times to provide fee CDN service to the ISP.
Free to NetFlix, not free for the ISP. They tried to offer this "deal" to a local ISP and weren't even willing to pay the usual co-location fees to offset the ISPs security/energy/space/bandwidth costs. Is there anybody not named Hastings that's arrogant enough to think he should get free co-location services?
It will discourage them from continuing to expand it; what's the point of spending billions of dollars to lay a next generation network if the Government is going to compel you to share it with people who didn't have to invest nearly that much money?
Thank you for giving us the Netflix perspective. Counter arguments:
1) Residential broadband networks were never engineered as video delivery systems. The advent of mainstream streaming video completely changed the engineering calculus for last mile networks. Over subscription ratios need to change to accommodate the higher peak hour bitrates; this takes time and costs money. Where should this money come from? Why should I pay the same for my connection as the household that's running three or four simultaneous HD streams during peak hours? My 95th percentile is less than 0.5mbit/s, yet I pay the same as my neighbor who regularly runs three HD streams at the same time. Hardly seems fair, does it?
2) Related to the last point above, moving bits doesn't directly cost the ISP money but sustained higher bitrates do require a larger CapEx investment. Caps are a blunt force instrument that should be done away with in favor of demand or 95th percentile billing, IMHO.
3) IPTV is inherently inefficient vis-a-vis point-to-multipoint delivery systems (i.e., cable, OTA, satellite)
4) Settlement free peering (which is essentially what Netflix is demanding) has historically only been offered in instances where the traffic to be exchanged is roughly equal. If you're relying on me to deliver your traffic for you then you pay me. It has been this way since the beginning of the commercial internet. This ecosystem literally built the internet as we know it. If you want to blow it up the onus is on you to explain why your system is better.
5) Netflix has a history of trying to offload their costs onto third parties, be they ISPs, Tier 1 networks, CDNs, etc.
6) Netflix isn't exactly the white knight that everyone thinks they are. They're a for profit company; one that I stopped doing business with after they decided to double my price with little prior warning. They've cut deals that are detrimental to their customers (i.e., withholding new releases); any other company that behaved in such a fashion would be roundly hated around these parts.
Germany is not the United States. Everyone pointing at Europe seems to miss one large difference: there's a whole hell of a lot more room between people and places they need to go in most the United States than in Europe. If you live in Massachusetts, half an hour is a "long drive," but if you live in North Carolina it can easily be how far away Charlotte or Raleigh or Greensboro is.
I agree with all of your points but you're overgeneralizing a bit. Finland has a population density lower than the United States. In Western Massachusetts a half hour drive (or more) to the grocery store would be considered normal. The whole of the EU isn't Germany, nor is the whole of Massachusetts Boston.:)
but collectively it massively increases healthcare, cleaning and military costs.
The United States sources the lion's share of her crude oil from western hemisphere sources. Most of these have friendly relations (Canada, Mexico) with the United States, are domestic (off shore) resources, or come from countries (Venezuela) that talk a big game about how horrible the Yankees are but continue to do business with them.
China, Japan, and the EU are the major economies that are dependent on Middle Eastern oil, which begs the question of why they aren't the ones spending their blood and treasure to try and stabilize the region. In the case of the EU and Japan it's an unwillingness on the part of their populations to engage in such adventures, combined with the fact that they have no need, since the United States is willing to do it for them. In the case of China it's a lack of power projection ability combined with the trepidation the West and Japan would feel if China started intervening in the region. Personally I think we should let them have a go at it; it would give the radicalized elements in the Middle East someone new to hate, at least for a little while.
BS. I live in Finland. Some of my co-workers cycle to work every day around the year. -30C, a goddamn snowstorm, +30 C, Thunderstorm.
Yeah, well, the rest of us don't have that much sisu.:)
Point 2 is valid. Although I'd believe there are showers available pretty much anywhere.
Umm, why would you believe that? I've been to Finland; there aren't showers "available pretty much anywhere" in Finland, much less in the United States. My employer doesn't provide showers for the benefit of employees who choose to cycle to work in +30 C temperatures. It would be nice if they did but they don't, so that's that. The only American employers I can think of that provide showers are those with on-site fitness centers, which isn't exactly unheard of, but it's definitely the exception and not the rule.
Even then the advice was simple -- "don't tell a lot of people your going away, and when you will be back". Advice that holds true today. Advice that you must willfully ignore in order to bring about anecdotes like yours.
If you're worried about your close friends robbing your house I would submit that you have bigger problems than Facebook. Conversely, if you're posting it publicly, I would submit that you've failed the common sense test previously mentioned.
Common sense would have you look at the growing body of studies that show that facebook on average makes people less happy. And then draw the obvious conclusion.
Common sense would have you walk away from this bloody conversation, because we're obviously not going to see eye to eye. I'll draw my own conclusions about what makes me happy or sad, thank you very much.
Do you have a real argument FOR using facebook?
I've given you multiple arguments from my personal experiences. You've chosen to dismiss them. *shrug*
Because comparing being on facebook to having a checking account and voting is pretty weaksauce.
I'm not the one who went on a tin-foil hat rant about "big data" (wtf is it with Americans and the word "big"? As if putting the word "big" in front of something we don't like makes it scarier...) while rambling some nonsense about DNA collection or whatever the hell it was. You've already lost to "big data", whether you avoid social networking or embrace it. I've chosen a middle course of action that allows me to get some value out social networking without surrendering every detail of my life to "big data" or annoying my friends with "I'm at the grocery store!" posts. Real life is shades of gray, not black and white.
And what if you get back from Helsinki and find your place has been robbed because you posted you were going away on facebook.
How old are you? I'm old enough to remember when poorly chosen answering machine messages got houses robbed. This isn't a new concern. Common sense goes a long way.
In fact, "common sense" is enough to shoot down most all of your arguments, which border on tin-foil hat drivel from my perspective. Congratulations, you're sticking it to the man by staying out of social networking. I hope you're likewise refusing to maintain a checking account, don't have any credit cards, don't own any property, aren't registered to vote, and are posting on/. via a tor proxy or some other such method to preserve the privacy that you profess to value so much.
I think #2 is a bigger concern than #1; at least for those of us who live in areas with real summers. My office is less than two miles away but I find it exceedingly difficult to contemplate walking there during the dog days of summer. It's possible during temperate days, though even at that I feel compelled to make the walk in active wear and change into work clothes upon my arrival. Walking two miles in dress clothes is no fun even when it's cool outside. Doing so when it's >30 degrees C with >80% relative humidity is impossible unless one wishes to torment themselves and their office mates for the next eight hours. At that point it's not even really feasible to change upon arrival, and since I don't have the luxury of working for a Google that provides on-site showers.....
You seem to be trying to take your personal preferences and apply them to myself and the millions of other people who have found social networking to be useful despite the annoyances that come with it. I find it nice to stay abreast of the developments in my friend's lives. It's awesome having a centralized place where I can see such developments, particularly from the friends who are scattered all over the world and whom I might get to see once every five years if we're lucky. Did my local friends benefit from the marathon posts? Not really, most of them were there, and all of them were there at the party held a few days later. My friends in Europe and Asia certainly benefited though; I suppose I could have e-mailed them, but that doesn't scale real well nor does it easily allow the type of group discussion that one can have under a social networking post.
Want another anecdote? I'm going to Helsinki in less than three weeks; I posted this fact for the benefit of my Finnish friends and guess what happened? A long lost friend of mine chimed in, whom I haven't seen in 11 years, who I previously knew to be living in Italy. As it happens, she's going to be in Stockholm while I'm in Helsinki, so she's going to take the ferry over and we're going to link up. That reunion would not have happened without some sort of social networking platform; it's not as though I would have e-mailed everybody I know who lives in Europe on the off chance they're going to be near Helsinki for the two weeks I'm there. The chance to see someone I haven't seen in more than a decade is well worth the aggravation of Facebook.
Not that it's hard to do safely, but we really are talking about small amounts of explosives
Smokeless powder doesn't explode it burns and it's perfectly legal to ship it via common carrier (UPS or Fedex) or even to fly with it in your checked baggage. The real reason Amazon/eBay/et. al won't allow ammunition and firearms sales is twofold:
1) The regulatory burden, both real and perceived.
2) Political correctness.
I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime.
That's a reach; the regulatory apparatus will doubtless place a heavy enough burden on it as to preclude Amazon or really any generalized online retailer from selling it. There's a multitude of legal products that Amazon could sell -- firearms and ammunition are the easiest example -- but do not because of compliance and regulatory burdens.
Then it should have been "the KMS Bismarck" not "the German battleship the Bismarck"; "The American battleship the Missouri" <--- Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
Dr. Ballard: You're probably better known for the discoveries of Titanic and Bismarck, but I've always been more fascinated by your expeditions in the Pacific, specifically Iron Bottom Sound. Would a follow up expedition with more modern technology be a worthwhile endeavor? I would most interested in seeing another exploration of Kirishima, since the circumstances of her battle damage and loss have recently come into dispute.
Anything a friend broadcasts me is rarely worth reading
Don't blame me if your friends have a low signal to noise ratio. In the last six months I've made four posts to Facebook: Two for half-marathons I completed, one for a full marathon, and the last to share the details of my forthcoming trip to Europe with my friends there.
And a broadcast email etc for something like a baby being born etc... is fine.
Which kind of defeats the purpose of a centralized system, one of my qualifiers.
Easy. Those aren't friends.:) Seriously... they WON'T communicate with you except on facebook, so therefore you MUST be on facebook?
They don't know how. *shrug* I think it's pretty stupid too, just as I think the tendency of people these days to dislike phone calls is stupid, but it is what it is.
I've yet to encounter one. Several local businesses have facebook pages instead of websites, but its public and it comes up when i search for them, even though I don't have a facebook account. Of course I can't "follow" them... but that's their loss not mine.
I run road races; many of them only provide useful updates via FB, even when they have your e-mail address. I can boycott these faces or I can subscribe to their Facebook feed. I choose the latter. Facebook has nothing on me that I didn't choose to provide them with; it runs in a separate browser instance, so I'm not tracked that way, and I'm not the type to do check-ins for every mundane detail of my life. I have a love/hate relationship with FB but at the end of the day it's usefulness exceeds its obnoxiousness.
Yeah, that's all well and good, except for the fact that Facebook has reached a critical mass; resistance may not be futile but it's damn hard:
1) I have friends all over the world; literally, on every continent. Is there a better centralized method of communicating with them? Should I send out a broadcast e-mail to all of them every time something noteworthy happens in my life? (Noteworthy actually means noteworthy in my world, I'm not logging check-ins every time I go to the grocery store....)
2) I have friends that only communicate via Facebook. They won't talk on the phone, they don't text, and they rarely check/answer e-mail.
3) Ever tried dating in the modern world without Facebook? It's instantly assumed that you're hiding something, which to be fair is frequently the case for people that refuse to share Facebook with would-be mates.
4) There's an ever growing list of companies and events that decline to maintain a webpage or otherwise keep it updated. If you want to stay abreast of their developments the only way is via FB or Twitter. This ties back into the critical mass comment from earlier.
Facebook is a necessary evil. It would be nice to see G+ displace them, because the G+ interface is light years ahead of FB's crappy software, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards does it?
Slashdot Mirror
The only fat animals are those in human captivity. And they have miserable lives and die early.
Huh? You might want to look up the life expectancy of indoor vs. outdoor cats....
I believe the "runners high" to be a placebo thing for the same reason, I've never felt a "rush" or "buzz" after exercise. Then again perhaps they are only felt by people who've never had an actual buzz.
It's not a buzz or a rush; for me it works in a few different ways:
1) A small amount of euphoria about 20-25 minutes into a run; this primarily manifests itself as an increased pain threshold, meaning that if I had some minor nagging injury (say muscle aches) I can tune the pain out for the duration of the workout and a non-zero amount of time afterwards.
2) A vastly improved mood after the exercise is complete. I'm usually smiling for no obvious reason after a run, no matter how bad my mood was prior to the run; this doesn't sound like a lot but my personality is such that I rarely smile or experience 'happiness' as others define it.
3) Related to #2, a sense of accomplishment; Yes, I'm tired, but it's a good tired.
#3 is the only one of the above that I can get from strength training, the rest require a relatively intense cardio workout to achieve, which for me usually means >20 minutes of running. I have experienced them after cardio workouts at the gym but not to the same degree or in as short of a time.
There are other effects that I could point to too: sounder sleep and higher sex drive being the two that first come to mind.
If you want to build a next generation last mile network you've got to provide enough incentive for someone to invest the billions of dollars it's going to cost. Short of the Government building the network and leasing it out (an idea that has merit, but it's a political non-starter in the United States, for better or worse) that money is going to have to come from private parties who will want to know they're going to get a return on their investment. If the Government is going to step in and tell them how they can run the resulting business where's the incentive to put up those billions of dollars?
I suppose you could get a group of investors together to try and build the network for resellers from the beginning, rather than trying to both own and operate the network. This has been done on a small scale with co-ops and the like; I'm not certain it would scale nationwide but it's an interesting premise to serve areas the big boys are neglecting.
NetFlix has offered many times to provide fee CDN service to the ISP.
Free to NetFlix, not free for the ISP. They tried to offer this "deal" to a local ISP and weren't even willing to pay the usual co-location fees to offset the ISPs security/energy/space/bandwidth costs. Is there anybody not named Hastings that's arrogant enough to think he should get free co-location services?
I wonder how this will affect Google Fiber?
It will discourage them from continuing to expand it; what's the point of spending billions of dollars to lay a next generation network if the Government is going to compel you to share it with people who didn't have to invest nearly that much money?
Thank you for giving us the Netflix perspective. Counter arguments:
1) Residential broadband networks were never engineered as video delivery systems. The advent of mainstream streaming video completely changed the engineering calculus for last mile networks. Over subscription ratios need to change to accommodate the higher peak hour bitrates; this takes time and costs money. Where should this money come from? Why should I pay the same for my connection as the household that's running three or four simultaneous HD streams during peak hours? My 95th percentile is less than 0.5mbit/s, yet I pay the same as my neighbor who regularly runs three HD streams at the same time. Hardly seems fair, does it?
2) Related to the last point above, moving bits doesn't directly cost the ISP money but sustained higher bitrates do require a larger CapEx investment. Caps are a blunt force instrument that should be done away with in favor of demand or 95th percentile billing, IMHO.
3) IPTV is inherently inefficient vis-a-vis point-to-multipoint delivery systems (i.e., cable, OTA, satellite)
4) Settlement free peering (which is essentially what Netflix is demanding) has historically only been offered in instances where the traffic to be exchanged is roughly equal. If you're relying on me to deliver your traffic for you then you pay me. It has been this way since the beginning of the commercial internet. This ecosystem literally built the internet as we know it. If you want to blow it up the onus is on you to explain why your system is better.
5) Netflix has a history of trying to offload their costs onto third parties, be they ISPs, Tier 1 networks, CDNs, etc.
6) Netflix isn't exactly the white knight that everyone thinks they are. They're a for profit company; one that I stopped doing business with after they decided to double my price with little prior warning. They've cut deals that are detrimental to their customers (i.e., withholding new releases); any other company that behaved in such a fashion would be roundly hated around these parts.
Germany is not the United States. Everyone pointing at Europe seems to miss one large difference: there's a whole hell of a lot more room between people and places they need to go in most the United States than in Europe. If you live in Massachusetts, half an hour is a "long drive," but if you live in North Carolina it can easily be how far away Charlotte or Raleigh or Greensboro is.
I agree with all of your points but you're overgeneralizing a bit. Finland has a population density lower than the United States. In Western Massachusetts a half hour drive (or more) to the grocery store would be considered normal. The whole of the EU isn't Germany, nor is the whole of Massachusetts Boston. :)
but collectively it massively increases healthcare, cleaning and military costs.
The United States sources the lion's share of her crude oil from western hemisphere sources. Most of these have friendly relations (Canada, Mexico) with the United States, are domestic (off shore) resources, or come from countries (Venezuela) that talk a big game about how horrible the Yankees are but continue to do business with them.
China, Japan, and the EU are the major economies that are dependent on Middle Eastern oil, which begs the question of why they aren't the ones spending their blood and treasure to try and stabilize the region. In the case of the EU and Japan it's an unwillingness on the part of their populations to engage in such adventures, combined with the fact that they have no need, since the United States is willing to do it for them. In the case of China it's a lack of power projection ability combined with the trepidation the West and Japan would feel if China started intervening in the region. Personally I think we should let them have a go at it; it would give the radicalized elements in the Middle East someone new to hate, at least for a little while.
We should have a tax on fossil fuels which would make green energy cheaper
"I'm gonna raise your taxes." <--- Said no winning American politician ever.
BS. I live in Finland. Some of my co-workers cycle to work every day around the year. -30C, a goddamn snowstorm, +30 C, Thunderstorm.
Yeah, well, the rest of us don't have that much sisu. :)
Point 2 is valid. Although I'd believe there are showers available pretty much anywhere.
Umm, why would you believe that? I've been to Finland; there aren't showers "available pretty much anywhere" in Finland, much less in the United States. My employer doesn't provide showers for the benefit of employees who choose to cycle to work in +30 C temperatures. It would be nice if they did but they don't, so that's that. The only American employers I can think of that provide showers are those with on-site fitness centers, which isn't exactly unheard of, but it's definitely the exception and not the rule.
Even then the advice was simple -- "don't tell a lot of people your going away, and when you will be back". Advice that holds true today. Advice that you must willfully ignore in order to bring about anecdotes like yours.
If you're worried about your close friends robbing your house I would submit that you have bigger problems than Facebook. Conversely, if you're posting it publicly, I would submit that you've failed the common sense test previously mentioned.
Common sense would have you look at the growing body of studies that show that facebook on average makes people less happy. And then draw the obvious conclusion.
Common sense would have you walk away from this bloody conversation, because we're obviously not going to see eye to eye. I'll draw my own conclusions about what makes me happy or sad, thank you very much.
Do you have a real argument FOR using facebook?
I've given you multiple arguments from my personal experiences. You've chosen to dismiss them. *shrug*
Because comparing being on facebook to having a checking account and voting is pretty weaksauce.
I'm not the one who went on a tin-foil hat rant about "big data" (wtf is it with Americans and the word "big"? As if putting the word "big" in front of something we don't like makes it scarier...) while rambling some nonsense about DNA collection or whatever the hell it was. You've already lost to "big data", whether you avoid social networking or embrace it. I've chosen a middle course of action that allows me to get some value out social networking without surrendering every detail of my life to "big data" or annoying my friends with "I'm at the grocery store!" posts. Real life is shades of gray, not black and white.
This post would be so much better if you defined where "here" is. :)
And what if you get back from Helsinki and find your place has been robbed because you posted you were going away on facebook.
How old are you? I'm old enough to remember when poorly chosen answering machine messages got houses robbed. This isn't a new concern. Common sense goes a long way.
In fact, "common sense" is enough to shoot down most all of your arguments, which border on tin-foil hat drivel from my perspective. Congratulations, you're sticking it to the man by staying out of social networking. I hope you're likewise refusing to maintain a checking account, don't have any credit cards, don't own any property, aren't registered to vote, and are posting on /. via a tor proxy or some other such method to preserve the privacy that you profess to value so much.
True, but the Google executive has to be content with a Gulfstream; POTUS has Air Force One and commands men with guns....
I think #2 is a bigger concern than #1; at least for those of us who live in areas with real summers. My office is less than two miles away but I find it exceedingly difficult to contemplate walking there during the dog days of summer. It's possible during temperate days, though even at that I feel compelled to make the walk in active wear and change into work clothes upon my arrival. Walking two miles in dress clothes is no fun even when it's cool outside. Doing so when it's >30 degrees C with >80% relative humidity is impossible unless one wishes to torment themselves and their office mates for the next eight hours. At that point it's not even really feasible to change upon arrival, and since I don't have the luxury of working for a Google that provides on-site showers.....
You seem to be trying to take your personal preferences and apply them to myself and the millions of other people who have found social networking to be useful despite the annoyances that come with it. I find it nice to stay abreast of the developments in my friend's lives. It's awesome having a centralized place where I can see such developments, particularly from the friends who are scattered all over the world and whom I might get to see once every five years if we're lucky. Did my local friends benefit from the marathon posts? Not really, most of them were there, and all of them were there at the party held a few days later. My friends in Europe and Asia certainly benefited though; I suppose I could have e-mailed them, but that doesn't scale real well nor does it easily allow the type of group discussion that one can have under a social networking post.
Want another anecdote? I'm going to Helsinki in less than three weeks; I posted this fact for the benefit of my Finnish friends and guess what happened? A long lost friend of mine chimed in, whom I haven't seen in 11 years, who I previously knew to be living in Italy. As it happens, she's going to be in Stockholm while I'm in Helsinki, so she's going to take the ferry over and we're going to link up. That reunion would not have happened without some sort of social networking platform; it's not as though I would have e-mailed everybody I know who lives in Europe on the off chance they're going to be near Helsinki for the two weeks I'm there. The chance to see someone I haven't seen in more than a decade is well worth the aggravation of Facebook.
Not that it's hard to do safely, but we really are talking about small amounts of explosives
Smokeless powder doesn't explode it burns and it's perfectly legal to ship it via common carrier (UPS or Fedex) or even to fly with it in your checked baggage. The real reason Amazon/eBay/et. al won't allow ammunition and firearms sales is twofold:
1) The regulatory burden, both real and perceived.
2) Political correctness.
With a bit of practice, a 20-30K commute on a bike is really not hard, and you'll save money on gym fees.
Yeah, that's all well and good, except for two factors:
1) Winter.
2) We don't all have the luxury of coming to work smelling like someone who just took a 20-30K bike ride....
I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime.
That's a reach; the regulatory apparatus will doubtless place a heavy enough burden on it as to preclude Amazon or really any generalized online retailer from selling it. There's a multitude of legal products that Amazon could sell -- firearms and ammunition are the easiest example -- but do not because of compliance and regulatory burdens.
Then it should have been "the KMS Bismarck" not "the German battleship the Bismarck"; "The American battleship the Missouri" <--- Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
Dr. Ballard: You're probably better known for the discoveries of Titanic and Bismarck, but I've always been more fascinated by your expeditions in the Pacific, specifically Iron Bottom Sound. Would a follow up expedition with more modern technology be a worthwhile endeavor? I would most interested in seeing another exploration of Kirishima, since the circumstances of her battle damage and loss have recently come into dispute.
He is best known for his discoveries of hydrothermal vents, the Titanic, and the German battleship the Bismarck.
The second "the" is redundant; the name of the ship was simply "Bismarck", not "The Bismarck".
Anything a friend broadcasts me is rarely worth reading
Don't blame me if your friends have a low signal to noise ratio. In the last six months I've made four posts to Facebook: Two for half-marathons I completed, one for a full marathon, and the last to share the details of my forthcoming trip to Europe with my friends there.
And a broadcast email etc for something like a baby being born etc ... is fine.
Which kind of defeats the purpose of a centralized system, one of my qualifiers.
Easy. Those aren't friends. :) Seriously... they WON'T communicate with you except on facebook, so therefore you MUST be on facebook?
They don't know how. *shrug* I think it's pretty stupid too, just as I think the tendency of people these days to dislike phone calls is stupid, but it is what it is.
I've yet to encounter one. Several local businesses have facebook pages instead of websites, but its public and it comes up when i search for them, even though I don't have a facebook account. Of course I can't "follow" them... but that's their loss not mine.
I run road races; many of them only provide useful updates via FB, even when they have your e-mail address. I can boycott these faces or I can subscribe to their Facebook feed. I choose the latter. Facebook has nothing on me that I didn't choose to provide them with; it runs in a separate browser instance, so I'm not tracked that way, and I'm not the type to do check-ins for every mundane detail of my life. I have a love/hate relationship with FB but at the end of the day it's usefulness exceeds its obnoxiousness.
Yeah, that's all well and good, except for the fact that Facebook has reached a critical mass; resistance may not be futile but it's damn hard:
1) I have friends all over the world; literally, on every continent. Is there a better centralized method of communicating with them? Should I send out a broadcast e-mail to all of them every time something noteworthy happens in my life? (Noteworthy actually means noteworthy in my world, I'm not logging check-ins every time I go to the grocery store....)
2) I have friends that only communicate via Facebook. They won't talk on the phone, they don't text, and they rarely check/answer e-mail.
3) Ever tried dating in the modern world without Facebook? It's instantly assumed that you're hiding something, which to be fair is frequently the case for people that refuse to share Facebook with would-be mates.
4) There's an ever growing list of companies and events that decline to maintain a webpage or otherwise keep it updated. If you want to stay abreast of their developments the only way is via FB or Twitter. This ties back into the critical mass comment from earlier.
Facebook is a necessary evil. It would be nice to see G+ displace them, because the G+ interface is light years ahead of FB's crappy software, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards does it?
You'll forgive me if I decline to take political science lessons from someone who doesn't know the difference between "it is" and "its"