I have a feeling that if Chrome (for instance) went that route it would quickly become Internet Explorer'd. If you recall, IE was the Chrome of its day for a good while until it slowly eroded away all its goodwill.
I have a feeling that if Chrome (for instance) went that route it would quickly become Internet Explorer'd. If you recall, IE was the Chrome of its day for a good while until it slowly eroded away all its goodwill.
Also, the mobile platform might be a good indicator of what ordinary people are willing to put up with. Chrome doesn't support extensions there, so everybody and their uncle is browsing the web with the full ad experience. I've never seen a non-tech savvy person use Firefox, or just anything but chrome (or the system browser), on an Android device, which easily allows to install uBO. Yet on the desktop somehow even those people somehow learned to install uBO or ABP. It appears that "apparently you cannot do this on your phone" is an acceptable answer to most people.
Chromium LoC: 34,900,821 [1]
Linux 2010: about 12 million [2]
It appears that Chromium has more LoC than Linux. (With LoC being a bad measure, Linux being GNU/Linux, blah). Browsing is hard.
[1] via Google since OpenHub appears down [2] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lines_of_Code_Linu...
I agree that mobile is the direction many things are headed, but currently it's very easy to install any number of (sometimes shady) browsers from the Google app store that include ad blocking.
Today Chrome is a fairly good platform, tons of support for all sorts of html extensions, and a very strong commitment to security.
It’s a really nice product, except for the strings attached.
Alphabet should be broken up and Chrome (OS) spun off into its own business; the tracking should be made completely transparent and optional on a subscription base.
For example, I could see a future, say in 10 years, where we have a vastly better way to browse the web and then we will look back on today and think that Chrome(ium) was coasting on its past success and only providing minor new features (while ensuring that ads continue to be as profitable as possible).
There's an alternate timeline where Microsoft leaned on anyone implementing it. We never would have gotten as far as Sun suing Google over the Java API because no one crossed Microsoft.
No AJAX. No web 2.0. No SPAs. It would be a different world.
Is it better this way? I'm not so sure.
The same is true in politics. Those who shout the loudest, win. A big wallet helps too. Ever heard of lobbying?
While I can see some benefits to having a proportional vote that can be allocated to different issues, money isn't such a vote because it isn't equally distributed. Between this and your reply to kaba0, I have a very hard time believing that you are arguing this in good faith.
I never claimed everyone has the same hourly income. Nor should they. Some people work hard (on their career - not necessarily at their current job!), others take it easy. Both are valid options, but there will be consequences for the respective groups (both good and bad).
If you're against inherited wealth, I expect you to leave none to your own children. Respect if you actually go through with this.
> There's no such thing as passive income; there's only delayed income.
Wrong. If you have $500k in assets, that yields an average of $35k/year, market average over interest. You get paid money for already having money. This is not additional work. This is additional money as a result of having money.
> Some people work hard (on their career - not necessarily at their current job!), others take it easy. Both are valid options, but there will be consequences for the respective groups (both good and bad).
The difficulty of work is absolutely unrelated to the amount paid. Many low wage jobs, such as customer service, landscaping, or meat packing are absolutely ruinous on one's physical and mental health. They are high effort, and low pay. Other jobs are low effort and high income.
Edit: For comparison, Jeff Bezos is 57 years old, and has $192.5 billion. If he were working 24/7 throughout his entire life, that comes out to $107/second. That is 53,140 times the minimum wage. There is no humanly possible amount of effort that is 50 thousand times harder than a minimum wage job.
> If you're against inherited wealth, I expect you to leave none to your own children.
Complete non sequitur. Inherited wealth is an example of how money, time, and effort are absolutely uncorrelated.
Following up on that non sequitur, though, there must be limitations to inherited wealth such that society doesn't separate into a landed gentry. You are also ignoring the middle ground between being against a generational aristocracy and forbidding inherited wealth altogether, such as an estate tax. Even if somebody is morally against inherited wealth, it is not inconsistent to still give wealth to their children, such that they can use it to lobby against inherited wealth. It's the same reason why I donate money to groups pushing for economic and tax reform, rather than deliberately paying more than the current tax rate. I still spend what I consider to be my fair share supporting society that way, and it goes toward making sure that others do as well.
You get paid for already owning money... that you had to earn previously. There are many other examples of something similar. If you do a really good job on a particular month, you might still get the same wage at the end of the month. But you might get a bonus at the end of the year. Or you might be promoted next year when a position becomes available. However, you will not get a bonus and will not get promoted if you quit your job/get fired in the meanwhile. Do you also consider this unfair?
I never talked about the difficulty of doing a particular job, be it meat-packing or customer service; I meant the emotional difficulty of leaving a bad job and the mental difficulty of making the right choices and being excellent in what you do. Working not for others, but for yourself.
If there are indeed 'low-effort, high-income' jobs, why isn't everybody doing them? Why don't you personally those low-income workers that investing in the stock market (to give an example) is 'easy' and 'guaranteed' to yield high returns?
In fact, many manual jobs are already being replaced by robots/AI. Yet people are complaining about losing their jobs. If you took my high-effort, low-income job away, I'd be eternally grateful.
In the case of billionaires, they don't get to spend all their money, so the comparison between them and a minimum-wage earner is not apt. Jeff Bezos is surely holding lots of paper, but until he spends it, it has no value. Do you have proof his spending is out of line? Besides, when you're rich you overpay for everything, which means higher income (with arguably the same amount of effort) for those who provide goods and services to you.
And I've never heard of children using their inherited wealth to... lobby against inherited wealth. If anything, they'd be more in favor of it. But I see the point you're trying to make. You're not part of the 'aristocracy' (whatever you mean by that word), which you means you hold a grudge against them. Little do you know that people poorer than you hold a grudge against you too (you're considered relatively well off) and would use the first opportunity do redistribute your wealth amongst themselves.
While I entertained the idea of arguing with you, there is simply no point and I've come to the conclusion there are better uses for my time.
I'll just burn some points to point out how disagreeable I find your position.
Partly, the interface of Hacker News or any vote-based commenting system makes it hard to track comments overall. I can look up comment trees relative to my own posts, but that doesn't show me that the user "ilovepitchdecks" has been arguing along the same lines with multiple other people in sibling comments. Their viewpoint isn't in any way a community consensus, and is being soundly addressed by the community, but that wasn't readily visible just from one thread.
All in all, a bit of a ramble, but I wanted to say thank you for posting this and that sometimes I need to just downvote and move on.
Who exactly is part of this 'community' you speak of? This site is on the public internet and open for anyone to join. I don't remember being asked to accept some political ideology when registering.
And this is exactly the problem with consensus: There never is one. Just because nobody speaks up, doesn't mean everyone agrees with you. Nor should they. I have been to those kinds of meetings where the majority of people don't voice a dissenting opinion or, in fact, any opinion at all. To interpret silence as agreement is just bad faith.
In fact, your narrow definition of 'community' is elitist and closely mirrors its use in the mainstream press (such as in 'international community', which just means 'the West').
Many of your arguments are insufficiently defined. You make a statement, and then force others to assume what you meant from it in order to have any further conversation. When people do, you instead say that there was a different intended interpretation. For example, in the thread between you and me, the ambiguity of what you meant by time and effort earning money. Or, in your thread with "teddyh", your ambiguity about what you would like done to government.
In other cases, you ask questions that have obvious follow-ups or obvious follow-ups. They don't function as rhetorical questions, because the obvious follow-up works against the point you are making. Instead, they come across with the impression that you are deliberately wasting somebody's time by requiring somebody else to give the bare background information on a topic. For example, when you ask "If there are indeed 'low-effort, high-income' jobs, why isn't everybody doing them?". To me, the obvious follow-up is that there are structural imbalances that allow access to those jobs only to subsets of the population. We can talk about what those structural imbalances are and how they manifest, but needing to first establish that different people have different opportunities available to them is one step removed. That is what makes people feel that you are arguing in bad faith, because it makes the argument be on something that had been taken as given when entering the conversation.
Another part is that it is just so damn hard to tell the difference between earnest people and trolls. I know people personally who have your views. Heck, I had pretty close to your views for a while after reading Terry Goodkind's "Faith of the Fallen". But this is also the internet, where I don't know people other than by the few words in an individual comment, or a single comment thread. And depending on how far off somebody's views are from the Overton window of any particular forum, they can easily be the troll positions taken in order to rile up a crowd for their own amusement. Some people become desensitized to these attempts, and then assume that anybody with those views is automatically a troll. (See also, Brandolini's Law.)
I do honestly hope that you are sincere, and that this helps you to better express and examine your views in the future. It's hard to have conversation in a text-only medium, both because it is asynchronous communication, and because it doesn't have the side channel information of tone or facial expressions. Hopefully in the future, we can have more productive conversations and both come away the better for them.
have a good one...
Don't argue with me then - but you should at least explain how anything I've said was in bad faith if you accuse me of that.
Jeff Bezos sure worked like crazy to get Amazon to where it is now, so he has every right to take it easy now that he's 'made it'.
Also, you underestimate the effect of laziness. A company really has to do some atrocious thing to result in people leaving its services. Like, what would make the average person change from Gmail? He/she may not even know that 1) it is part of google which should be avoided now 2) what are alternative email providers 3) the whole change requires quite the technical know how.
It is simply naive to expect that “the market will solve it” to work in the general case. Competition only works when there are strict rules. Otherwise, the strongest/least fair player wins, and that’s why monopolies have to be broken up.
You can't just leave a government the same way you can leave a job (and become unemployed) or a product (become a non-customer); you can only switch to another one. Why don't you try parking a vessel in the international waters and see how long it takes before it's sunk.
You advocated for the government to be broken up like a monopolist would be. I can’t really interpret that any differently.
> I was merely pointing out that there's a double standard.
Yes, it’s a double standard. Now, why do you imply that this is bad? Don’t you have to have special rules for the top level? Like, the root directory is its own parent directory, but nobody complains about “inconsistency” in file systems.
Your comparison is not apt. The root directory is merely a container for its subdirectories. In that way it much more resembles geography (a country being subdivided into regions, for example) than a government.
It's bad, because it's a blind spot. Governments, despite being at the top-level, have consistently grown since their inception. I'd expect the top level to be the leanest, not the fattest.
Decentralization and secessionism are highly unpopular ideas that don't look like they'll ever get mainstream acceptance. If anything, it looks like exactly the opposite trend is taking place (take the EU, for example).
Every day you read about new legislation being proposed and introduced. How often do you read about outdated legislation being abolished? Never. It's like writing an app and constantly adding new features but keeping all the existing ones. We all know how well that works out.
Even though HN shouldn't be about politics, when political rhetoric does get posted here (and it's far more common than one would expect), it's extremely one-sided.
Referees, in comparison to governments, can be fired for doing a poor job.
Yeah and I will simultaneously work for google to not fk up the open web, for facebook to not disrupt democracy, and nestle to not goddamn force breastfeeding mothers on their shitty product.
How do you imagine a world without governments? The first thing they will do is put cocaine in their special food so you get addicted, add cheaper and more unhealthy components, even toxic ones, etc. Companies after a quite small size becomes the stereotypical paper clip AI, but instead of paperclips, it optimizes profit over everything else. A well functioning government with separation of power and without much corruption is good - it protects us from the cancerous outgrowth of companies.
This will never stop, and essentially defines the realm of "politics". Either you and people like-minded that share your views collectivize to protect your preferences from others forcing theirs upon you, or you lose.
This includes monopoly corporations that acquire power to restrict your ability to choose. And just wishing it weren't so, or asking people to stop achieves nothing. People won't, so your only choice is to protect your own turf however you can. "Libertarian" style abstaining from this fight ensures you lose, so is an impotent strategy.