We do nothing of the sort. We wait for the sea levels to rise and we build dams and walls. And we reinforce our buildings against natural disasters. And slowly the public demands changes on greenhouse gas emissions, recycling, etc, and it slowly will slow down the worsening effects.
That's the most likely scenario, nothing will change because the HackerNews netizens change cloud providers and start recycling more.
Collapse comes that way. Its not about beach houses. Its about food chain collapse, refugee storms that overwhelm public infrastructure, the 'ring of fire' of expanding collapse that can (and has) destroyed civilization before
Current copyright laws, of course. Or else no one would write a book, sell software, make movies, write music.
No sharing wouldn't be possible, unless in a very controlled environment like watching a movie in the cinema or using software that only connects to a 3rd party service, that does all the computing.
And the next time there is a large scale conflict, some neighbour country may feel tempted to use that opportunity to send a single division to your country and absorb it.
Then you can say how wonderful it is to save a fraction of a percentage point of your GDP on defence and how it worked so well until the day it was needed.
That argument could be made about pretty much any small country using a superpower as the "neighbor". Take for example Russia annexing Crimea.
At the end of the day, it isn't the presence of a military that makes the difference, but the strength and spread of the country's treaties with other nations.
But at the end of the day, somebody still needs to spend money on a military. Being put under the umbrella of the US/Russia/China/etc just alters where it is based out of, and makes you vulnerable to the demands of those that provide it.
I think platforms like Facebook depend on being "cool" over some demographic. Then other demographics adopt it, time passes, other demographics grow tired of the same old Facebook look their parents also used, and Facebook starts to die. We've seen this as well with other social networks like hi5, myspace, that once dominated entire continents as the preferred social website. Of course they are smart and competent people so they will try to prevent it, and it seems to have lasted longer and left a bigger mark already, but still; I'm sure a lot of people around the world already share the sentiment of "not doing anything on FB", and just keeping it open for messenger chat.
It is an anti-network effect. The early adaptors are cool, the late adaptors are not. In Facebook's case, the early adaptors are now old people posting photos of their children. The users aged to irrelevance.
There definitely was a big difference between MySpace and the other social networks. Facebook ran well and worked. People forget the total shit show MySpace was in the middle of 2008. The site ran terribly, was getting hammered by spammers, and they starting covering it in banner ads. We didn't see a repeat of those problems with Instagram or Snapchat.
There is a coolness factor. It isn't as defined as fashion, or the latest hot nightclub, but it is there. That alone won't be enough to make the "next" Facebook, but I think it is the foot that gets stuck in the door.
Facebook might be able to acquire the next challenger in the US, but they will definitely fail to get it by EU regulators.
They're both network effects. The difference is that the relative value per node, to other nodes has changed. Disaster hits when the high-value nodes leave.
Networks are driven by positive feedback both going up and down. This sounds good, but isn't: the system and balance points are inherently unstable. Nothing succeeds like success, or fails like failure.
This is why acquisitions such as IG and WhatsApp are crucial. If they purchase the next cool thing, they never really go out of fashion.
FB has gone from throwing sheep at your friends to this. I don't think they are stopping anytime soon
> This is why acquisitions such as IG and WhatsApp are crucial. If they purchase the next cool thing, they never really go out of fashion. FB has gone from throwing sheep at your friends to this. I don't think they are stopping anytime soon
But it does mean that an even somewhat diligent antitrust enforcement could strangle them to death. They shouldn't be allowed to acquire their future competitors. If the US won't stop them, maybe European regulators can?
I see what you mean, but I'm under the impression that Facebook is not "your father's social network" in that it's not even comparable to what MySpace was, neither in numbers nor in qualities.
What I mean is that we are comparing two different beasts, so I'm not sure "it happened to MySpace" is a good telltale sign of what will eventually happen to Facebook.
Not to mention the growing number of people who only use a mobile phone as their gateway to internet services (along with all of the personal info to be gleaned from them) and who spend the vast majority of their time on the web using Facebook.
I've seen this a lot more in countries where internet access wasn't too common until the past 5-10 years and people didn't start out with a less centralized web before apps and closed networks gained popularity.
My partner isn't from the US originally and when I mention how obnoxious it is that Facebook is like the new AOL and I thought we were past this, she reminds me that it's all anyone back home uses for anything and they didn't have internet access back then.
To her and her friends/family back home, the internet basically is Facebook (and occasionally being forced to open their browser app to search for something if they don't just ask around on Facebook). A handful of other apps and defaults define the internet for them and anything else just sounds like too much hassle.
This is interesting as an investigative work, but what of it?
Are we to believe only Russia conducts extra-judicial assassinations of people of interest? And do we expect the governments responsible to come out and admit it?
To me this circus around this particular assassination just appears to stem from having to justify sanctions against Russia by the UK. But then again, I don't expect a country to come out and admit that they'll sanction a country just to weaken it's economy and provoke social instability until they get a more favorable government.
To me this circus around this particular assassination just appears to stem from having to justify sanctions against Russia by the UK.
I’m not going to touch the majority of the bait you’re laying out and instead merely note that the “circus” was probably more a result of the extensive and expensive decontamination required over a large area. Oh yes, and the civilian who died and her partner who was affected. That kind of thing tends to make people pretty upset, no need for sprawling conspiracies of the state required. Personally it didn’t seem like much of a circus unless... did you see the decontamination tents and get a little confused?
Are you upset about the droning of civilians with very little oversight? Are you upset about the kidnapping of civilians into cargo ships to act as prisons without jurisdiction?
This attack killed four people, let's say there have been 20 times as many, so 80 deaths overall. do you believe the CIA, Mossad, Iran secret services, China secret services, didn't kill more?
You seem very dedicated to making this a case of “everyone is bad, so no one is bad.” I’ll repeat that old saw, two wrongs don’t make a right. The injustices and acts of violence committed by America against others don’t justify, excuse, or mitigate similar acts by Russia.
Now, can we get back to the topic at hand without these diversions? You were claiming that the “circus” of the UK being outraged by the use of a chemical weapon to attempt to murder two people on their soil, and the incidental killing of a third and injury of a fourth (both civilians) was a “circus” I think. I’m still interested to your non-diversionary response to my take on why that would legitimately anger not just the government of the UK, but anger and terrify its people.
My point is not that everyone is bad. My point is that this is par for the course. We don't live in a world of law. We live in a world of civilian law separated and insulated mostly in countries, and over that, anything goes. We are not at war because our wars are financial now but it is very normal for the kidnapping and murder of people that a security threat to a country.
My point was that, if you switched and the murdered was a nuclear scientist and the assassins were Mossad agents (like it happened at least once), no one was surprised or made sanctions because of it.
You are committing a category error right there. There is a difference between "is" (as is "we don't live…") and "ought" ("I find it morally repulsive and it's wrong"), you can't argue one with another. Though it's a very popular rhetoric device to cover morally dubious deeds
That's not the point at all, because you don't know how significant was the result when changing the question, because this article conveniently doesn't mention it's sources and if you search a bit you find the probable source article is not online (to the best of my knowledge).
So this article seems to be just about spreading division among racial lines.
Google Scholar search for "Frank L. Samson" - the cited researcher - finds as the #1 hit "Multiple Group Threat And Malleable White Attitudes Towards Academic Merit", Du Bois Review, 10:1 (2013) 233–260.
> The current study presents three main results. First, how Whites adjust the importance that a criterion of academic merit should have depends upon which ethnoracial outgroups Whites are considering. This finding weakens the argument that White commitment to meritocracy is purely based on principle, since the importance given to particular meritocratic criteria, here grade point average, varies depending upon the outgroups under consideration and the extent of the group threat they pose to Whites.
This appears to be aligned with gant's statement, though couched in the academic phrasing "This finding weakens the argument" rather than "full of shit." The title is more direct, with "Malleable White Attitudes Towards Academic Merit".
Since gant's comment is in rough agreement with both the Inside Higher Ed piece and the original paper, I do not agree with your assessment that "that's not the point at all."
I disagree. I think that companies have such a vast and strong grasp on public discourse, opinion, and even whole countries, that it will only get worse and worse. I'm sure some companies will sell "privacy" at a premium for the few that can afford it, but I don't see any future where there will be actual riots in the streets for privacy.
Yeah I have to agree here. I don't see this getting any better. Look at how many people are willing to give up their entire lives worth of privacy to FB just so they can chat to friends, which they could do on any number of IMs and other services.
People just don't care.
It's a very very tiny minority who actually do, and the big companies and Governments are quite happy to ignore that problem until it goes away, as the vast majority pf people are steam-rolling any chance of privacy mattering in the future by accepting all this.
But it won't, there's too much money involved to demonize China. And there are many other such examples of mass surveillance from the five eyes, CCTVs in major cities, less and less "freedom" in the web. Just this week in my country (western European) the whole database of everyone that enters and leaves the country was moved from the police to the secret services, to avoid any kind of scrutiny.
That's the most likely scenario, nothing will change because the HackerNews netizens change cloud providers and start recycling more.