Despegar

It's been that way for the past 40 years or so, but I think that's starting to change.

>Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible

That's exactly what they're doing.

Why haven't you gone public yet? Airbnb raising money from private equity who undoubtedly wants to loan-to-own them should have discredited the idea that staying private longer is better than being a public company.

That was also the period when NAND/DRAM prices were up. They've lowered the price after their costs have come down.

Households wouldn't feel like they have to save so much if they felt their economic situation wasn't so precarious. If their incomes were growing faster and they had more safety nets they'd be consuming more.

Household savings would be lower if governments take on more debt, but they insist on running surpluses. Germany in particular has kept wages for workers depressed as part of their "economic model". Germany should be cutting taxes for workers significantly and investing in infrastructure, defense, and social programs.

In fact a lot of the rich EU members should be doing that, but they all have a misguided notion of "fiscal prudence". As if the government's budget is the same as a household's budget.

That's why Bernie needs to be elected so he can bring the neoliberal age to an end. Your career might be over by the time you're 45, but at least you'll have Medicare.

Of all the Big Tech antitrust scrutiny, this one seems like the most straightforward case.

This extremely poor misunderstanding of macroeconomics is likely to lead to the outcome you're supposedly trying to avoid.

And I really hate the moralizing as if the national economy needs to be run like a household budget.

>The German Saver knows better than most that inflation destroys savings.

Yeah this is not the outcome Germany or the EU needs to worry about. It's experiencing Japanese deflation for 20 years.

>This is a looming political issue that's only just beginning.

Yes there's been plenty of hard money cranks that have said this for 10 years since the Great Financial Crisis in the US. Zero Hedge, gold bugs, hedge fund managers, etc have all been sounding the alarm about "money printing" and the deficit. There's no inflation in sight.

This is absurd in the context of Germany. They have a fetish with "fiscal responsibility". It'd be the natural inclination of every politician to cut back on deficits (and I imagine within a few years there'd be pressure to).

Germany is a country with a broken military and infrastructure. They should spend money on that. They should cut taxes for workers. There's plenty of shit for Germany to spend money on, and it would cause yields to finally rise.

The ECB has no choice because rich countries refuse to spend money.

The crazy thing is that Germany is killing their own banks. They refuse to run fiscal deficits while at the same time they criticize the ECB for lowering rates and hurting the German Saver, when the German Saver is who would benefit if they decided tomorrow to run deficits for the next 10 years.

Huh? A few years ago Obama/Biden were considering what to do about the "entitlement crisis". The famed Simpson-Bowles commission (unsurprisingly they suggested cuts to Medicare and Social Security) [1]. Only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (who waffled on M4A, and subsequently faded in the polls) are trying to expand the social safety net. Meanwhile the DNC is trying to do whatever it can to protect their class interests [2][3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Commission_on_Fiscal_...

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-superdelegates-...

[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-shifts-debate-r...

>We took away your unions and safety net, but by golly, we'll protect your "dignity."

Organized labor may not have been targeted explicitly like by Republicans, but Democrats haven't really been a friend to them either [1]. Both parties have been on board with the neoliberal agenda for 40 years.

[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/democrats-paid-a-huge...

That really just says it all doesn't it? It's basically an admission that the use of cross-platform frameworks is worse for customers/users, but they're going to ignore that to optimize for their own software engineering org.

Apple really needs to start using the stick more with respect to the inferior-to-native cross-platform frameworks. I hope that's the strategy after SwiftUI matures.

>Imagine if someone comes along and takes away Google's search business? At this point, their results are such a trash fire it can't be that hard.

This is not going to happen unless antitrust regulators deal with what reinforces Google's search market share: the distribution they buy with TAC (e.g Safari and Firefox) and what they get for free (Chrome) and close to free (Android).

The antitrust remedy should be to separate Chrome and Android from Google and place a ban for some amount of time where they can't buy being the default.

Tech people might have switched to Google because it was legitimately better than the competition, but you're still living in 2000 if you think that's how Google got big. There's a reason why the CEO of Google is someone who was responsible for building the moat around Search (Google Toolbar and Chrome).

I think Pichai is Google's Ballmer, but I don't think that applies to Apple at all. The better comparison for Cook is Bob Iger.

I think the continued underestimation of Apple since Tim Cook became CEO really just comes down to this: people desperately want a Great Man to worship. Tim Cook isn't revered in that way like Steve Jobs was.

>The solution should be to education society, not lock down information flow to protect society.

An extremely 90s tech utopian world view that time has proven to be misguided. And if you're not adjusting your thinking after the multi decade experiment where we tried it this way, then it's just an ideology and you're not really the educated and rational ubermensch you believe to be.

What is there to iterate? Just go back in Google's history and use the design from 2007.

Some things happening to Muslims in the world today (in addition to India) off the top of my head:

-Genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar

-Ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs in China

Then there's just garden variety xenophobic polices like travel bans from predominately Muslim countries in the US to the electoral gains of various far right parties in Europe because of the refugee crisis.

Pretty wide spread there, but clearly fascism is on the rise.

Excellent New Yorker piece about this (I submitted it to HN when it came out but it didn't get any traction):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil...

Fascism is gaining in many parts of the world today. But the 'other' this time aren't Jews, they're Muslims.

>If Apple wants a reputation for privacy and respecting its customers, then it has to put them first.

"or used as an excuse for new legislation against encryption."

By not making iCloud backups end-to-end encrypted, they likely did exactly that.

Although I'd find it funny if by doing so they caused a backlash from governments with new laws that ruined encryption for everybody. It'd be dystopian but also funny.

Apple can't comply with a law enforcement request to get into your iPhone. They can comply with anything in your iCloud Backup except for the things under End-to-end encrypted data on this page [1]. Backups are encrypted "in transit" and "at rest", but Apple retains a key. That's how they can comply with legal requests and how you can restore your data if you forget your password.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

>Most people, including technically knowledgable users here on HN, were unaware iCloud backups have always been unencrypted.

iCloud backups are definitely encrypted. They just aren't end-to-end encrypted.

That should have been plainly obvious to any technically knowledgeable user because you don't lose your data forever when you forget your Apple ID password. Or the fact that you can see your photos through a web browser on icloud.com

You're absolutely right. They could have definitely misled anyone that didn't read the entire support article, including the first paragraph under Data Security:

>iCloud secures your information by encrypting it when it's in transit, storing it in iCloud in an encrypted format, and using secure tokens for authentication. For certain sensitive information, Apple uses end-to-end encryption. This means that only you can access your information, and only on devices where you’re signed into iCloud. No one else, not even Apple, can access end-to-end encrypted information.

If you scroll down another line you'll see another section titled: End-to-end encrypted data

The question and his answer were both completely clear. And most importantly, it's perfectly consistent with what Apple has said multiple times. You can believe they lied to a federal court and Congress if you want, but I certainly don't.