anon1m0us

This is really a red state vs blue state debate, but even on a county by county level, the majority of the counties of California, Oregon and Washington state are red. Those states' votes are determined by a handful of counties around a few urban centers. The rest of the counties' interests are more closely aligned with the red states.

And thus, the electoral college gives those red counties a voice that's ignored in their own states.

Thus, the question is: Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?

If you eliminate the electoral college you give political control of resources to those who have absolutely NO physical control of those resources and yet still suffer the impact of their environmental influence.

What I mean is, people in California, Texas, and New York would push all the bad things to the rural states and take all the good parts, leaving those who live in the rural areas to feel the full brunt of those decisions. Take Louisiana as an example. It's been decimated by everyone who doesn't live there.

Basically, only index items where webpage.indexOf('google') < 0

  No Google Adwords enabled sites
  No Google Analytics enabled sites
  No Google CDN referencing sites
  etc...

Or anyone who has anything to do with them.

Can we take our internet back?

That seems like a way better approach. All content creators on the internet should join the same union -- preferably one that already exists -- rather than recreate a wheel that will water down their message.

Google knows you want to click on that link. If your niche hobby had an ehow article how to do it, that'd be first for me I bet, unfortunately.

All those together are "The new internet" which is really just the new main stream media. We grew up with ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS. Now it's facebook, twitter, and youtube. Those new internet bootstrapped itself off the hopes and dreams of individual content creators and now that they are big enough, they are disregarding the individual and moving back toward the "mass brain" corporations.

20 years ago, the internet was the dream that now individuals could create and have as much visibility as big corporations. It was liberating. It was democratizing!

But the internet has gone the way of the airwaves and sadly, the content has too -- for the most part. Yes, there's still good content out there, but if ABC, CBS, and NBC won't show it to you, you have to work harder as a consumer to find it. Like at the library or from your friends and family, or idk, ddg?

We need a search engine that refuses to index any content with Google Ads on it. Or any ad network on it.

We need to actively disengage from anything associated with Google.

If YT is moving to subscription services, shouldn't the content creators be thinking like that too?

It's also ... unright to be moving toward MSM when they are supposed to be the people's way to share video content.

YT is becoming NBC or HBO, but without all the regulations those MSM distributors have to follow. I want real closed-captions on all my content for example, so I can listen to my own music during the video instead of whatever music the content creator preferred -- like I can with TV.

Of course YT would say, "There's too much content, we can't be expected to CC everything."

I agree with you. This is just a huge side conversation.

Also, there is a TON of great educational content on youtube produced by governments. Google won't show me those videos on web pages at the government website, but they'll show me the youtube video with ads on it.

It actually does in fact take less time to build something to share your own content than it does to create the content itself.

That's why I don't understand why does airbnb take 10% of the transaction? They are just a website. Why does Apple take 30%? They are just a search engine.

And google makes something like $1.2 million per employee. How much of that on average does the google employee get to keep? Is it more or less than content creators?

Google things new, updated content on large sites is more relevant, but it's not. That content is recreated from older content on the web that doesn't have ads on it.

I'm sure it's just that google requires more and more work from webmasters to easily find searchable content, meta tags, modern HTML, etc, but the way new content is being produced now is under the guise of ultimately getting the content reader to buy a product.

The old internet was, "Omg, I can share my knowledge with people." Now it's, "Omg, I can make money with ads."

It's a huge drink the google kool-aid cult.

If you want to be on Google, you need to have adwords bringing people to your site, ads on your content, popups for the ad-targeters, click-bait at the bottom, tons of overlays.

Why is that all there is anymore, I don't get it.

What happened to the good content? Why can't I find it anymore?

It's the same thing with Uber and airbnb, etc. Big corporations are making billions while those doing the real work that is valuable to the consumer are making pennies.

Sharecropping. This is not a new concept. It wasn't ever an equitable model and yet, here we are right back in it.

It feels like a lot of big corporations are taking advantage of a lot of people who hope to change their lives. It's a fraud. It's not ... right.

I want it to be right. It takes hours of filming, lots of equipment, courage, etc.

Each one of the content creators -- those creating original content -- are taking as much risk as the founders of YouTube, even more really in the big scheme of things and yet they and now Google are making billions, while the people they make those billions off of are making pennies.

Why does it work this way? I don't know why it works this way.

I might be having a philosophical break down atm or something, idk, but it feels like there's a huge fraud being perpetrated out there in internet land and I don't like it one bit.

I called the agency, they said, "You should print out the PDF, fill that out and bring it to our office."

Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that.

As an aside, I'm seeing the same pattern at Amazon. People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful. Businesses there are now devolving into repackaging jobs.

Now Youtube is doing the same. They used focus on being a search and distribution mechanism. Now they produce content, allow sponsorships, have more ads per minute of viewing then television, ... jobs there are again, repackaging jobs. Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips...

They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff?

Nowhere. There's no other amazon. Ebay? The flea market of the internet? That's where people who wanted to sell to wal-mart go.

The only place for them to go would be to create their own online store, or their own website where people can watch their movies. Then you have to be found through...

... that's right, Google. Nope. That won't work either, because only AdWords sponsored content appears in Google searches anymore. Google wants you adding data snippets to google.com so people won't even visit your website.

The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days.

The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers.

It's just gross. So sad.

Is such an ratio normal?

  function trackClick(){
     //steal users' privacy here
     return true;
  }
  $(document).ready(function(){
    $('a').click = trackClick;
  });

The value of the programmers is equal to all the people their programs replace, but yet, they are paid less than a single one of the individuals they replace.

Our society doesn't properly value programmers. If it did, there wouldn't be an H1-B issue. There are more Americans who want to be doctors than America will legally allow to exist. There's no cap on how many programmers there can be, yet America throws its hands up in the air wondering why.

The answer is obvious: America doesn't value programmers appropriately.

You can't say, "We can't afford to pay what programmers are worth." How about pay sales people less. Why do sales people get 30% commissions? Why do CEO's get millions?

The only real solution to the problem is to properly value the work and pay for it.

This isn't an AI problem. This is an owner vs. employee problem. Advances in technology accrue to the owners at the expense of the employee. This always happens because employees sign over rights to their innovations to the employer in exchange for a short term need for money.

Most people never take the time or spend the money to invest in themselves.

I remember watching a BBC documentary about the history of the American Revolution -- it was very different than what I was taught in the USA.

Read Ishmael as well. Similar take on, according to some, all of history.

Corporations can't go to jail. They only pay fines that are a fraction of their profits from the illegal behavior, which is a mathematical incentive for them to break the law before their competitors.

Even in silicon valley, we laud AirBNB, Uber, Facebook, Google, et al.

Do you want corporations to be better or not care?

Of course the business didn't know all the scenarios at the beginning of the feature development and didn't care because: iterative development means we'll figure it out later.

This creates a confusing code-base with lots of IF statements, copy/pasted code, data modifications from several areas of the system, etc.

You'll fix a problem with data getting into the database incorrectly and realize a couple sprints later, fixing that bug caused other bugs elsewhere.

Automated testing doesn't catch it because automated testing only handled certain scenarios.

It's a mess.

You aren't wrong, either. I found Scrum to be a series of waterfalls that weren't well thought out. "Iterative Design" essentially meant, "We aren't sure what the button should do exactly, but we know we need it there and it kinda has to do this and we'll figure the rest out for the next iteration."

That caused so many problems with tech debt.

Stories began to take longer due to the increasingly large and discombobulated code base, but the expectation was that we continue to deliver the same number of story points each sprint.

Then we got blasted for losing pace. "Why are you under-performing? We are just adding little features. You've already implemented this button on another form before? Why does it take longer the second time? You already know how to do it!"

It became absurd and no one could hear or understand what was happening was easily predictable and in fact -- was predicted by several members of the team many months prior.

When the project management was informed of these predictions now having come true, the development team was accused of intentionally causing the delays.

The project mgmt response was, "Attendance at standups is mandatory."

Regardless, I didn't go to anymore standups and when I got flack for that, I stopped going to the office all together. When I got flack for that, I stopped working all together.

Then I got fired. That solved all my scrum problems.

There's not an onus of proof on someone who says the sky is blue or water is wet. We need a certain foundation of understanding to have productive conversations.

And we all have stuff to do. Suffice it to say, there is plenty of supporting evidence for the claims.

Might IQ be a measure of the aggregate of the benefit of equivalent measures of neurons?

For example, we know that MS patients have autoimmune diseases that attack the myelin sheath on neurons which slows their neuronal processing speed. Perhaps higher IQ people might have more Schwann cells to speed neuronal transmission more than lower IQ people.

Maybe the diameter of neurons or the width of the gap between the synapses. Or the sheer number of neurons and synapses might be different.

IQ could be an indirect measurement through test taking, that approximates a combined measure of all the physical properties of neurons and their arrangements that contribute to higher intelligence.

Perhaps, you know, in the past, it was more difficult for those with lower IQ's to survive. Now people with lower IQ's can survive for longer, which is good for them -- absolutely! -- however, it would reduce average IQ's.

That would also suggest, this isn't something bad for civilization like the article suggests. Perhaps the same number of incredibly intelligent people like the ones you mention are better able now in this modern age to get their solutions to more people to make it easier to live.