Meta was scraping sites for years while fighting the practice
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Even when these "tech" companies settle to escape admitting to any wrongdoing and creating detrimental precedent, litigation can still be an effective way to reveal what nefarious practices are going on behind the scenes at these "tech" companies. Here, we learn that Facebook was paying scraping-for-hire providers for years while publicly condemning the practice of scraping.
If we knew the identities of the e-commerce sites being scraped perhaps the e-commerce companies could sue Facebook. Assuming Facebook would ignore a cease-and-desist letter.
Maybe they aren't looking to maximize the same things you are? You know, a different perspectives?
It is the same kind of "truth" as "Might Makes Right" and "He who has the gold makes the rules". While these phrases accurately describe the matter in some situations, they do not create a society that is sustainable, desirable, or any value of ethical (even for the abuser/autocrat, who must always watch their back).
So, yes, to the extent that it is an open admission of being an abusive exploiter of the system and people, it is not hypocritical.
But if that same person makes any statement or pretense that they are an ethical or good person, it is hypocritical in the extreme.
It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical.
Pretending that it is doesn't help us with evolving it towards some noble goals. To evolve the system you need to understand it.
For example you can't progress society untill you understand that the one we got after thousands of years of societal evolution is the one entirely based on the concept of monopoly for violence. Some people feel very offended about this. I have exactly zero hopes for their revolutionary attempts at transformation working out.
Spot on!
However it is not all black & white, but a gradient of high trust to almost zero trust. For example, the US is definitely degrading in the last decade, but is still nowhere near the levels of endemic and systematic paranoia of Russia or North Korea.
It all comes down to this: if you want to live a self-determined life in a society with a self-determined government, you must personally and as a nation be better armed, prepared, and allied than the abusers and autocrats who want to steal from you and rule you. Giving the equivalent of nukes to the abusers/autocrats is not a smart move.
The difficulty is knowing which checks are necessary and which are "big government". Which is why we vote.
Being anti big government is not the same thing as being anti all government. Characterising it that way is either lazy or ignorant, take your pick.
But just as the winners write the history books, the richest libertarians like Thiel and Koch seem able to define what the ideology looks like in the popular imagination, because they can afford to shape the debate via think tanks, media ownership, campus outreach, lobbying, etc.
It’s interesting to observe the number of people who will post about capitalism and competition and not consider the fact that for any rational actor, competition is existentially horrible and should be avoided by all means necessary. Perfect competition exists purely as a mathematical model and not as an actually observed outcome of a “natural” system for a reason.
In your simplified economic world, I'm not convinced that profits would be pushed below the cost of capital.
>Economic profit does not occur in perfect competition in long run equilibrium; if it did, there would be an incentive for new firms to enter the industry, aided by a lack of barriers to entry until there was no longer any economic profit.[0]
Your issue isn’t with me, it’s with what’s taught in every economics department in every country around the world.
(I also never said “profits would be pushed below the cost of capital”, my comment does not imply that at all. See: “nominal profits aren’t zero”)
"The collection of data from websites can serve legitimate integrity and commercial purposes, if done lawfully and in accordance with those websites’ terms"
I wonder if you could train scrapers with AI with a reasonable level of success.
My scraper is targeted at smaller crawls, so your feedback might be totally irrelevant to me... but I always want to keep an ear out.
For reference I am primarily a Golang programmer so I find weakly typed tools frustrating.
What does that mean exactly? Were they scraping, say, Dell.com, in order to get the latest prices on Alienware laptops? Or were their bots spamming Middle-Class Joe's Bootstrapped e-Commerce site and putting him out of business?
They said I can download as much as I want, but I’ll have to do it manually or pay extra for their API.
Luckily for them, the sites from which they source their data didn’t enforce such a rule, I suppose.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/technology/linkedin-is-ac...
https://readwrite.com/2011/07/11/linkedin-admits-to-data-scr...
How the wheel turns! They are captive to their own success. Time to move over and make space for someone who will innovate, Google can't find the way out of its local maximum, not even with all the employees and AIs put together.
They collect data and reshape it and resell it
It's good for society but this activity should be fully legal for ALL
Exactly the same as ThePirateBay, conceptually
I think that may be too reductive of a worldview.
Search? Ads. Good search? Attention.
Ads are served by a Browser. Let's throw a few bucks at a Good open source browser (chromium) for good will and then make it our own. And then use it to serve ads.
Gmail? Free service and we just happen to get to build word clouds out of every bit of text that goes your way so we can tell what you're interested in to sell ads.
Android? Ads delivered right to your face, some of which you pay for, some of which pay us for you. And more word cloud text and data scraping. And we have your face and fingerprint. (But that's not bad, Apple is doing it too!)
It's quite efficient just like the funneling gnashing maw of any predator. But Google does not make anything, they only throw out lures to draw in more attention so they can make more ad revenue.
What about integrity in socialism, communism, fascism, confusianism, feodalism and all the others?
In other words drop the silly "in capitalism", it is as vapid as the old-style "in Soviet Russia" reversals.
So as much as I hate corporate bullshit, their power grab, lobbying politicians etc., I would still prefer to live in a "capitalist" rather than a "communist" country.
Nope, Communism is more than just an economic system. It is an ideology which strives to create a "better man" who can create a "better society" where human "vices" like greed and avarice no longer play a role. In this it closely resembles religious orders which strive to create the same through other means.
Capitalism is 'just an economic system' which can be implemented in many ways ranging from laissez-faire libertarian-style capitalism to state capitalism as practised in China. It does not come with the large ideological baggage Communism carries since it doesn't need to - leave people to their own devices and they'll end up doing something resembling a form of capitalism at a large scale while practising something resembling communism at a small - family and neighbourhood - scale. This model works fine since there is no ideological drive to force out the small-scale 'communism' in families and neighbourhoods whereas a communist society needs to do away with the large-scale capitalism. Communism and authoritarianism are indelibly linked.
WTF? Communism is an economic model, not a leadership selection model. Communism is diametrically opposed to capitalism, not to democracy.
(It always baffles me when a communist authoritarian dictatorship enriches wealthy plutocrats while the workers starve, it's always the communism part that gets blamed, never the authoritarian dictatorship. But when a capitalist authoritarian dictatorship enriches wealthy plutocrats while the workers starve, it's never the capitalism that gets blamed. No, then it's the authoritarian dictatorship that's the problem. How about, just maybe, it's dictators and wealthy plutocrats that are the biggest problem for the working class?)
You don't really get the same level of authoritarian in the so called capitalism or "modern democracy" because in order for this model to thrive, you need to have sound relations with other democratic/"capitalistic" countries and they won't trade with you if you don't obey certain standards.
A good example is what is happening in Hungary and Poland now: after the right took over they decided to make a more or less gradual switch to an authoritarian regime, taking over the courts, media etc. But their EU partners said, if you follow this road, you will not get money form the EU anymore. So apart the war in Ukraine, this is the biggest discussion in the EU now.
Cambodia springs to mind. Pretty sure I could find a few countries in Africa that fit the bill too.
[1] https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/cambodia-under-pol-pot/
Both of those countries have stayed in a state of imminent world war (and later nuclear war) since their founding until today. Ronald Reagan even triggered Ww3 a few times while trying to push the USSR back into a corner.
During that time, the dissidents in the US were persecuted harder than any dissidents in the Eastern Bloc - McCarthy commissions would practically end your life by accusing you of being a communist and the society would do the rest by casting you out, jobless to fend for yourself in the wild. Whereas in the USSR, as a dissident to the system, you could have been exiled to a central Asian city in the middle of nowhere, but would still have a job, a house and your children would go to school.
The funniest thing is that people have no idea that the very same laws to effect such persecution exists in every. single. 'democratic' country. They are called 'emergency laws' and they are triggered in the case of existential economic or actual war, major catastrophe, social collapse, alien invasion etc. These laws allow many things ranging from the state or even the local authority that represents the state shoving you into prison for no reason to an officer with a pistol executing you on the spot for treason or trying to avoid fighting for your country.
Just a year ago a New York court suspended habeas corpus, the fundamental right that ALL the rights in the common law system is founded upon. At that moment, all freedoms have ended in NY and the police was able to do whatever they wanted with anyone, until a higher court suspended the decision because the justification for the habeas corpus suspension was not strong enough. Which means that if there was a sufficiently acceptable reason at that moment, habeas corpus could have been kept suspended and any repression way beyond what you could have in Eastern Bloc could have been possible because habeas corpus basically is the lynchpin of every single right in the Angloamerican common law system. The Eastern Bloc countries you keep lambasting were founded on civil law, and in civil law everything has a standard - including what kind of emergency measure allows what kind of drastic action. Nobody can do 'whatever' with anyone outside what the law clearly and indisputably dictates - much unlike common law, which relies on 'interpretations' and 'precedents'.
> You don't really get the same level of authoritarian in the so called capitalism or "modern democracy" because in order for this model to thrive, you need to have sound relations with other democratic/"capitalistic" countries and they won't trade with you if you don't obey certain standards.
Thats only in the romantic theoretical picture. Otherwise you do business with Saudi Arabia, any fascist dictator (much better for labor costs) and no satellite of yours can refuse to trade with you because you (the US in this case) are the master. A master who can easily put up trade barriers through tariffs and quotas to its 'free trade' allies but expect those allies to pull down all barriers. Few people know that the US does that.
> A good example is what is happening in Hungary and Poland now: after the right took over they decided to make a more or less gradual switch to an authoritarian regime
They are authoritarian and those other countries arent authoritarian only because you are shown what happens in any country by the media selectively and you happen to be in the privileged ~10% demographic that doesnt have many problems and is part of the system unlike the poor at the bottom. Otherwise the US has repressed the Occupy protesters by hooking them up with tens of thousands of dollars of fines for 'trespassing' on !public! property back in 2011, effectively bankrupting most of those people and ending their livelihoods for good. Meanwhile Germany is currently busy with jailing people who object to the Ukraine war as of this very moment.
Bullshit. As bad as McCarthyism was, nothing in the US could compare to the Great Purge [0], or Culture Revolution [1], or Cambodia Genocide [2]. Millions of people died. Families separated. People were forced to choose ideology over family ties. Religion persecuted.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide
Did you live under the communists? I did. My family suffered. For 30 years. Don't even dismiss events that you had no experience first hand.
Tell that to those whose lives were destroyed by McCarthyism - and this is without touching the subject of extrajudicial FBI actions. Leaving aside operation gladio, cointelpro and all that - a democratic storefront is easy if you just extrajudicially blow up any regime opponent with a car bomb in the morning when they turn on their car key. All across Europe in between 10,000 to 50,000 is estimated to have been murdered that way, or just taken out and 'disappeared'. In South America, its far worse - extrajudicial killings were in the open there.
What you call "Great Purge" was a filtering of the anti-system personas in the Soviet Union, which is something that the US already have done way before with the laws that were made in ~1917 to persecute the anti-war opposition. Andin the great purge, most of those were reinstated to their former positions in a few years anyway. Cultural Revolution was directed against the anti-system elite in China as well, and just like the Great Purge, a lot of those were reinstated - the current president of China had his family 'purged' during the cultural revolution. Cambodian Genocide is a genocide as much as Vietnam War, 2003 Iraq war, all the CIA-organized paramilitary murders that killed an uncountable amount of people in South America are. And even in that, it was something that happened over existing racial hatreds, not anything related to the system.
Funnily how whatever happens in non-imperialist countries are 'genocides' and 'purges' whereas nothing that happens in a US backed country etc is. Like how Indonesia killed 300,000 left wingers, communists, or the first US backed dictator of South Korea killed 3 million people. Indonesian government just recently recognized those murders and apologized for it, but they still pushed out a law to !surprise! persecute communists and communism. Or pick any US-backed coup. In my country, the US-backed coup that brought 'democracy' immediately hanged 10,000+ people from the opposition and jailed 30,000 for 2 decades afterwards. So save that 'freedom and democracy' tirade. That only exists if you arent in the targeted anti-system opposition demographic.
> Did you live under the communists? I did. My family suffered. For 30 years.
You do look like to have suffered so much with your family and very probably you getting a top tier education to the point of being able to speak fluent English and be on this site where white-collar tech professionals frequent. So that horrible repressive communist country provided your parents and very probably you with all the financial resources and also the higher education that catapulted your family to this position. Which is something you would never get if you were born into a disadvantaged minority in the US during the cold war. And which is something difficult even for those from the 'right background' today thanks to education costs for college pushing upwards of $100,000.
...
One thing that people like you who lived in such Eastern Bloc or communist countries make is to think that you would have been able to have housing, education and all that if you lived in a 'democratic' (read: capitalist) country. This is because your segment was those who were able to receive such perks and benefits at the right time before they were abolished by the free market and who were able to get into the top 10% segment of the society. Those who werent able to do that think totally different now, as they have to work as underpaid labor in other European countries.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-...
I belong to a segment like you - whose family was lifted thanks to socialized education and amenities that a country that imitated the Eastern Bloc provided. But unlike many of those from my socioeconomic white collar segment who think that they would have 'just' happened to be in the same educated white collar jobs with 'the free market', I know what was lost after the transition to a randian economy.
However, beyond that - really, just try declaring yourself to be an opponent of the system and see what happens in your 'democratic' country. You are 'free' only because you are a collaborator of the system with only minor criticisms and you dont constitute any threat whatsoever.
It is not only shameful to see how communists can strut their stuff where they would have been shunned had they been neo-nazis, it is dangerous as well. It can lead to more countries falling to starry-eyed revolutionaries leading to more suffering, deprivation and death. Yet even more, as if those which fell in the past were not proof enough of the failings of this ideology.
And yet the standards of living post revolution and post war increased quite dramatically in the soviet union.
In capitalism, the repression is outsourced to 'the market'. Try openly declaring that you are a Marxist-Leninist and find out how fast you will lose your livelihood, including those jobs that you thought to have existed 'out there'.
All is ok as long as you dont threaten the system. If all that you have is mild objections to this specific politician or that specific policy, you wont have any problems. That is the same with every other system. The moment you become a threat to the system by speaking up against 'the wrong thing', then you'll see how efficient the repression is.
The genre never made any sense, but the original joke was quite good.
In Soviet Russia, television watch you!
You joke, but some smart TVs with cameras and microphone do indeed that if they have certain malware. This applies even more widely for baby monitors and some other "smart tech for home". What was once a wet dream of Soviet leaders is a reality in our capitalist world, just wait untill it will be mandated by the government that you can't cover the camera with tape and rip out the mic. "You will own nothing and will be happy".
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-stop-smart-tvs-from-snoo...
This fatalism is exactly the problem. You see poor behavior, slap the label "business" on it, and all of a sudden it is expected, accepted and even defended.
… probably not in the most powerful x percent.
A company with integrity has an amazing marketing department.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
So, should we believe what you just told us about yourself?
Putting it to spotlight is an effort to make sure they can't get away with it. Even in a scenario where you say "of course they do it", jumping to the conclusion of "we should not report on it" is ridiculous.