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You don't matter, consumers matter.

> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem.

And you didn't have distribution either.

> But it wasn't always this way!

Indeed, there wasn't even distribution. Do you actually remember what was shipping mobile software back in 2005?

> I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.

Again, you as an engineer don't matter, only as a consumer. And consumers have never had so many options and at such low prices.

I don't even know how to reply to that. Not only you're completely wrong, but you're a nationalist who would sink your country for "national pride".

Kinda like North Korea.

Sure you might prefer, but your personal preference doesn't change the fact that protectionism is bad in the long term, and illegal in the EU.

Also the king of cherry-picking parts of studies that agree with his view and ignoring everything else, no matter how prevalent.

It isn't even wrong.

The problem isn't in the content hosting industry, it isn't even on the content producing industry. It is on the policy & legal side.

A lot of their positions (taxation, free education, government spending in infrastructure, universal healthcare, etc.) would be classified as left-leaning or left.

Additionally, I've seen that leftist news sources aren't by any means behind rightist ones in terms of fake news. They just focus on different sets of fake news.

Maybe the fact that you find rightist news more biased is just a result of your own bias. You overlook the bias in the publications that are aligned with your beliefs.

Yeah, people should stop idealizing and worshiping companies. Apple is only pursuing "privacy" because it tried and failed miserably at user monetization, but it won't think twice about handing over all your data to the government (like they did in China) if that's the best business options.

They're all companies, they're here to make a profit.

That's one reason why I find it easier to trust companies than to trust governments. I know exactly what companies want, so I can predict how they'll act.

Companies are that "friend" who will always get money from your wallet, whenever they have a chance. Governments are those friends who swear they are on your side and want to help and protect you, but will sneak their fingers into your wallet whenever you're not looking.

I once had a strategy professor define the Google business model somewhat like that, where "Google tries to make every other business around it free or irrelevant". It results in a few different effects:

- By reducing the cost of other links of the value chain, there is more money available to spend on the links you actually generate revenue on. This shifts profits along the value chain to that link. One example is dramatically reducing the cost of phones and internet access, thus allowing customers to spend more time and money online, which generates revenue and profits for Google

- By making the other links free or irrelevant, you reduce the odds that a competitor in those links will strengthen their position and will extract more profits from the rest of the value chain. One example is using Android to prevent a monopoly on the smartphone side. If Apple had a monopoly or near monopoly, it would be able to extract larger economic profits from the other links on the value chain, including Google

A desert of profitability shifts consumers to you, and keeps competitors away.

Oh, easy. Even if owning a gun were actually a "human right", it wouldn't mean that everyone must be forced to allow you to speak your mind about this.

The 2nd amendment isn't "right to bear arms and post videos on YT about it", and "talking about weapons" isn't a protected class.

xkcd "showing the door" strip applies:

https://xkcd.com/1357/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-google-news-effect-spain-r...

Everyone loses. And smaller, local, independent companies lose more.

Because compression reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted, reducing network and battery usage, especially if the radio channel is congested.

Instead of filling the stream and having a constant stream size, you could just code the drone do add random bursts of data, making any prediction from the observer useless.

No sacrificing video quality or freshness required.

Very little of the current infrastructure was built with public funds Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure around the world come from companies, some government owned, some private.

> The registrars were then privatized

Actually, they weren't. They never existed in a public fashion. You're mixing up registry and registrar.

Today, it isn't a monopoly, so anyone can create their own registrar if they want. So if they don't find a registrar wanting to do business with them, they can spend a few thousand $ and create their own.

On the "government-run neutral registrar", I'm not sure if that's a good solution. I've rarely ever seen a government keep something neutral...

Google or GoDaddy aren't running the DNS system, or even street signs.

They are running a phone book service, which is also run by many other companies, each under their own ToS. They can reject service to anyone (well, except protected classes).

I didn't really get your point, too many books in it. Care to rephrase it, please?

With no requirements that they should not refuse service to anyone.

> Also, no one is saying "force."

Then what are you saying? Should Google be "xxxxx" to accept Stormwhatever? What is "xxxxx"? Honest question, what are you proposing?

> Again, using power given to them by the US government.

And doing so per the conditions specified by the US government.

First Amendment lawyer Ken White describes the Daily Stormer as a "sewer of humanity." In a statement to Ars, he argued that the article about Heyer "is repulsive, and arguably advocates for killing people in general, but it's not actionable incitement under the law. GoDaddy, of course, can kick Nazis off its platform as it likes, though."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/godaddy-blacklis...

Are you implying that every online community and service should be forced to accept absolute freedom of speech?

Porn is speech, should YT and Fb be forced to host porn?

Actually, you can deny anyone except protected categories.

> Can a doctor deny to treat them if they end up in his office for serious injuries?

Yes, the doctor chooses not to treat patients with the illness or injury you suffer from.

> What if all registrars deny them, is it morally right to effectively erase them from the internet for simply expressing their thoughts?

Nobody is being erased from the internet. Also, they can open their own registrar system.

So no, there's no obligation for Google, or any other registrar, to host their information.

Please notice that the quote is not "I disapprove of what you say, but I'll offer you my house for you to say it".

Supporting someone's right to free speech doesn't mean enabling them to.

I support the right of the Nazis to voice their (IMHO completely absurd) speech, but if I had a business, I'd have guidelines against that type of speech in my business. In the same way, I wouldn't welcome one into my house. None of those measures infringes on their freedom of speech.

Nobody is doing that.

Nobody is mandated to give you a medium for your speech. Go on the corner and scream all you want.

Do the students in those community colleges share that as well?

I see far more diversity in tastes and interests in most other majors and careers, while in CS/SWE, X seems to hold a monopoly.

CS/SWE goes far beyond a career, usually becoming close to a religion or way of life. I rarely see doctors, lawyers, or most professions engaging in their practice outside work as a hobby, but in CS/SWE, you're evaluated by your hobbie-contributions on GitHub, your postings to HackerNews, etc.

There's not a lot of room for people to be in CS/SWE and not take part in all this non-work community.

And that brings us to X, a set of interests and values that permeate CS/SWE workers, and frequently makes those interested in CS/SWE feel unwelcome if they don't take part in X.

It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman (or any of the other identities/genders/etc.), if you don't like X (which might include sci-fi, fantasy, video-games, board games, certain types of discussions, and a lot more), there's a good chance that you might not feel like you belong in CS/SWE (this isn't universal, and I've seen many teams that embrace cultural diversity pretty well).

Sadly, for whatever reasons (I have my own hypothesis that the rise of male-dominated gaming culture in the 80's and its further attachment to CS studies due to the overlap between coding and gaming is the cause) X is male-dominated. So even if men who don't take part in X feel unwelcome, the impact is bigger on women, as they have a much lower representation in X.

One of the key pieces of information that led me to think like this, was this: http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachel...

I don't claim any authority on this, or even that this is correct. These are just my own (low-n) observations, and I'm pretty sure a good part (if not all) of it probably doesn't stand up to reality.

So I'm probably all wrong here, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

My gut feeling is that I shouldn't post this, as the previous discussions here about this issue are borderline flamewars, from both sides, but I still have hope that some good discussions are possible here.

It reminds me of the often-cited Stanford Prison Experiment. The lack of any rigor during the experiment is usually ignored when the findings are discussed.

The "experiment" had no control group, or even a separation between the observers and the ones involved in the experiment (Zimbardo was both the prison chief and the lead researcher). From an experimental setup point of view, it was just an amateurish mess.

For example, one popular way to hack your HSA is not requesting any reimbursements when the expenses happen, letting your cash grow tax-free for decades and then request reimbursements from the old receipts. Today this requires detailed record-keeping by the customer, it would be great if that was a feature:

- Request reimbursement

- Set timing (now or save for future)

- Add receipts/etc.

- Reimbursement is approved by HSA

- "Saved reimbursements" are stored/tracked for future use

- When it's time to withdraw, user selects amount ("I need $10k") and HSA creates a portfolio for withdrawal ("You'll get reimbursed for claims 23, 46 and 73 adding to $11,456")

Do you have anything beyond "I'm making $3.5k using methods I won't disclose on an initial investment that I won't disclose"? What's your return on your investment? Sharpe Ratio? If you apply your investment criteria in historical data, do you beat the market?

How different is it from the guy who invested his tuition money on Tesla?

You can read a hundred books about coding, but until you actually try, you don't really know anything.

So a technical background with an MBA can be a killer combination. You know how things work across the company, and that gives you a huge edge over everyone else.