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I think your logic is flawed, Facebook is nothing more than a self maintained state surveillance dossier that naive fools have been tricked into participating in. As Zuckerberg famously said early on "I can't believe these idiots are giving me all their information" (paraphrased). No dictator or other authoritarian regime of all of history could have even ever dreamed in their wildest state of imagination that people would willingly participate in such a self-surveillance system. It's really rather bonkers and only a symptom of the human detachment from reality that surrounds them.

What I find more interesting is how form follows function in this numbering system. It is the clay "writing" system of pressing a kind of wedge into the clay in a layered fashion that gave form to the numbering system as a matter of practicality from the medium. The clay dictated how to "write" the numbers, it wasn't simply a matter of a writing system that was simply recorded in the medium of clay. It is precisely why that "writing" system did not survive the transition tho papyrus or parchment. Or, in other words, it was deemed to have advantageous characteristics that were then adapted to through the numbering system.

It's what I don't get about the whole outsourcing, tech sector debate; if bay area tech employees are so expensive, why not hire people that are equally or at least sufficiently as qualified in other parts of the USA, where you could get away with paying them less even though it would provide them with wildly higher quality of life than they would get anywhere in the Bay area from most perspectives. Essentially the question is why the heck outsource to places like India, where people don't speak proper English and the technical skills are lower in many ways, which is only compounded by communication issues, let alone why hire H1B visas from, e.g., India at Silicon Valley rates; when you could have hired net far better Americans in the long run. Western and American society suffers from a shortsightedness that will end up destroying not just the USA, but the advancement of all of the rest of humanity through that kind of mentality. You can only live on the inertia of others for so long before momentum ceases.

I think the unspoken fear is that bringing down Uber means pulling a big card out from the house of cards. The money that has been pumped into Uber simply on hopes and dreams of a utopian vision of autonomous cars all controlled and operated by Uber and the schizophrenic valuations would have to face their day of reckoning if Uber is even just slightly acknowledged as being rotten. The emperor does in fact have the most wonderful clothes on indeed, because we all agree he does.

Interesting and rather specific and niche perspective. Would you agree that the biggest problems in our healthcare system are transparency, i.e., no way of telling how much something is going to cost in spite of all the data existing to provide just that, and the crushing administrative costs of a system that seems to incentivize massive administrative burdens?

It's what makes me wish designers and developers would work with artificial constraints. Sure, it's easy to design and develop without really thinking of bandwidth constraints, but reality is you are and will always be a better developer and designer by setting artificial bandwidth constraints in your mind and choices.

Seeking out or thinking as though you have bandwidth constraints can push you to find better solutions and thereby make your services better. The west and the tech centers in particular is really rather blinded by the glutinous bandwidth that keeps eating up greater and greater amounts of data with only marginal improvements in outcome or user experience.