The US government protects Facebook, and is what enabled them to become they company they are today. There are plenty of examples of their loyalty to the US government. They make back doors available and allow the US government to moderate content. Seems like they are very aligned!
It is mind blowing to me that this fact is not widely understood. A mountain was made out of a molehill. $4B was spent in 2016. $12B in 2024. Yet $100,000 somehow is believed to have made any difference whatsoever. Literally 0.0025% of the total in 2016.
The fact that reports on "misinformation" don't look at the denominator when considering the volume of impressions is a great example of selectively reporting statistics to support a preconceived notion.
There is no correlation in practice between these benefits and greater birth rates. Countries with some of the most friendly policies to parenting have the lowest birth rates. In the past, people with much more difficult lives had many more children. This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't hold up in the real world.
They’re missing the whole point of free speech. The purpose of it is to protect the type of speech people despise and don’t want to hear. This is important because the most evil form of censorship comes from examples like those quoted in the article above. The “limit reach” people effectively are explicitly targeting the very types of ideas that free speech was designed to protect. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. This is basic free speech 101 that is, or at least used to be, taught in high school.
And for kids to not see each others faces, honestly even adults, has implications for communication and empathy you have for others. You are “anonymous” in your mask. For kids it really impacts development for them not to see each other.
There were a lot of people working very hard in the 50s and 60s, not having luxurious lifestyles. My grandparents had 6 kids on a farm because they all had to work to make ends meet, and lived in a modest farm house. They grew their own food, and didn't have what some would describe as 'luxury'. My other grandparents had a 1000 square foot home with 5 boys in it. Both parents worked and a vacation consisted of driving 4 hours to a nearby big city once a year, not going to Machu Picchu or the Amalfi Coast.
Ask someone from an urban area any basic question about a rural area, and they will be clueless about some simple things. I once had a friend who grew up in Chicago ask me if a cow was a Buffalo because it was brown and he thought cows were into black and white. That’s a silly example but it applies even more so to more meaningful policy decisions that happen is rural areas.
"I think that's also not sustainable to just expect that rich people who don't need to care for their bread in the morning can just come and work for us." - Nataliia Tymkiv
Call me crazy, but $623,286 USD will buy a LOT of bread.
"Putting food on the table for your family" phrases start to become almost comical when they're made by people earning good portions of a million per year.
This is why making the government more effective or powerful has major unintended consequences. Checks and balances, fundamental rights, separation of powers are all beautiful things that are under-appreciated today
A large portion of the market for anonymous phones are for illegal purposes. For any company doing this at scale, they are inevitably confronted with this fact and can get in a lot of trouble if they are proven to be knowingly supporting crime groups/individuals.
By the way, at some companies where you are sponsored to go there is a 90%+ acceptance rate of people into business school. It is effectively a 'backdoor' into MBA programs. They like them because the same companies come on campus to recruit and hire people back into their company. It's a nice circle to be inside, but locks others out.
[Impact per unit of spying] X [number of spies caught] - [impact per unit of innocent person being impacted] X [number of innocent people falsely accused] = net impact to society
Typically, the first part of the equation is wildly overestimated because by stopping spies in 1 area, they just find another way to do what they want to do and the impact happens anyways. Or the threat evolves over time but the policies do not resulting in negative side-effects and very little benefit anymore (e.g. the TSA)
Why is it so acceptable for packages to be stolen? Imagine in the old days you went to a mall, bought something, and on the walk to the car someone ran by and grabbed your shopping bag and ran. This happens 100x more often today and there are seemingly zero consequences for it.
The point of Moneyball is that the market did not correct for it for so long, it takes a catalyst and might happen significantly later than when the first people recognize the issue.
How will you know if the total amount of ransom payments goes down? How will you know how much is under the table vs over the table? This argument seems to be "the over the table stuff goes down therefore the total goes down" which is faulty logic.
Yes they resell the gift cards. If I quote the article: "... these accounts can all be cleaned out and deposited onto a gift card number that can be resold quickly online for 80 percent of its value"
Additionally, a quick google search for "sell gift cards online" reveals many sites that offer the ability to sell your gift cards. One example: https://www.cardcash.com/sell-gift-cards/