Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos calls Sundar Pichai a liar over China | Hacker News Reader

Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos calls Sundar Pichai a liar over China

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56 pointsmasonic18 comments

Watching these guys argue is like watching mud-covered pigs argue about which one is dirtier.

these guys (stamos and millen) are either being intentionally daft or are embarrassingly naive.

nobody needs a primer to decode pichai’s statement. it’s political positioning.

to think that these guys are shining a light is laughable. stamos is obviously using this to help wash his own hands of his complicity at fb. millen i don’t know.

BTW the real horror here is not that google is lying to the public — that’s expected. It’s that they are lying to their employees. Just awful.

https://outline.com/LgB7Bs

Sensationalist much? And that too coming from a guy who worked for a company who is bending over backwards(Zuck on board for Tsinghua Univ, asking Chinese president to name his baby etc).

If not for China, there's no room for growth in traditional markets anymore. Yeah, there's Africa, South East Asia, but Google and FB already are putting on big efforts there. So whether you like it or not, if you want a billion users right away, you have to make a compromise. Apple did it, why not Google?

So...don't grow? I understand the pressures of Wall Street and being a publicly traded company, but Google (or Alphabet) is in an incredibly unique situation that the founders can do whatever they want and not be ousted by shareholders. I don't know what it's like to be worth tens of billions of dollars, but maybe that should be enough?

I'm more and more becoming convinced that we should just put a hard cap on company size. It's radical, yes, but all attempts to regulate those large corporate behemoths either turn out to be toothless in practice, or so heavy-handed that they cause too much trouble to everybody else.

Just as radical, yes, but likely more effective would be to limit the size of political parties.

A much simpler and more effective method would be to create a minimum of 3 official political parties. That way it would not be entirely us-vs-them and so many other benefits, including a rank voting system which is so much better.

I believe, with no hard evidence, that a 3 party system could solve most of the political problems facing the United States today. Because it would remove the incentives to be impossible to work with (although I feel this applies to one party more than the other, it definitely goes both ways).

If you create an electoral system that has ranked voting and, ideally, party-proportional representation (e.g. straight up party lists, or MMP), then you'll get more political parties pretty much automatically.

As it is, we already have more than 3 parties (not sure what "official" means in this context, since you don't really have to register a party in US for it to meaningfully exist). The problem is Duverger's Law, which confines mainstream politics to the top two, and presents a near-insurmountable barrier for everybody else.

You might find this interesting

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/politics-industry/

What do you mean by this? Limit the number of seats they can get in the legislature? What happens with all the excess votes if they hit the cap?

In US specifically, this would also require recognizing that parties are even a thing. There's nothing in the Constitution that says anything about parties, and federal elections don't elect parties - they elect individual representatives, who happen to be affiliated with some party (sometimes not even in any official way - much like e.g. Bernie Sanders is an independent senator, even though in practice he votes with Democrats most of the time).

From my observation, in order to succeed in SEA and maybe Africa, you need to be predatory, the market has little rule, everyone is jostling to make the most bucks as quick as possible.

And Xi is not a president, don't let their wording finesse fool you, they call the Korean War "Assisting NK against the US", to this day, vast majority of Chinese believe it was the US being the aggressor invading NK.

Kettle - Pot

The pot is still right.

The kettle sat upon the stove absorbing heat in order to control the state of the water contained within. Nearby a pot was perched over a burner, boiling away. The kettle thought to itself, "What a glorious tool am I. That I can heat water with such efficiency. When my contents have been coerced into the desired state, I force the water though my finely crafted spout to release a useful scream. My custom fit handle makes it an ease for my user to pour the liquid into the desired consumption vehicle. My construction is an economy of function--truly beautiful design. My creator must be proud. The ugly, black pot to my left is such a brutish tool in comparison. Boiling water with such a utensil would be utterly daft. I am the path to the future of water enhancing tools!"

After some time had passed, both the kettle and the pot rested above their heating elements, rigid in their stillness--charred, empty. No human had monitored the job these tools were designed to solve. The water was gradually vaporized until none could be found in its native form.

> compared censorship there to the “right to be forgotten” law in the European Union, which can force Google to delete data it holds on people who don’t want the information showing up in search results.

You see? Forcing us (google) to delete data is literally the same as surveillance capitalism that sends dissent to gulags. I literally can’t tell the difference between the two.

You're stretching his claim. He compared censored search to censored search. Nothing about reporting searches to private parties who requested to be forgotten (not happening) or to governments who requested some results be removed (speculated to be what Google would do). His comparison is still wrong for the reasons stated in the article but not as wrong as your comparison.

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