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The number of men in the US aged 18-30 reporting no sex in the previous year has almost tripled since 2010 [1]. It seems there are economic or cultural factors at play besides not well-crafting their messages or showering enough.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...

Forget the media, ask the former Federal Reserve president who literally wrote that "if the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-27/the-fe...

The 1860s when the Irish in NYC refused to fight for their new country, killing over 100 people and ethnically cleansing most of Manhattan? Or a few years later when two different subgroups of Irish killed another 100 of each other in the same city? These questions re-litigating history are immaterial to the fact that there is always some point at which putting groups next to each other will cause conflict, modulated by things like population density, culture, religion, tribalism vs. individualism, prosperity, etc.

Reduce wealth inequality through industrial and fiscal policy, don't stuff cities full of millions of culturally distant immigrants (distant from both each other and the existing population), encourage integration and patriotism instead of ethnic sectarianism via education and cultural pressure.

The car thing is another big one. Almost every car, truck, or SUV made in the past few years has a cellular connection, either for tracking purposes or infotainment. A determined attacker could probably just shut down 10-20% of cars in the country, a number which is increasing every year.

If your cities immediately turn into "tribal warzones" when they lose utilities, you've definitely made some governance failures well before the cyberattack.

It can also be illegal when VCs do it: "Pricing below your own costs is...a violation of the law [if] it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses." [1]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

I would love to know the organizers' opinion on whether these various uses of AWS "accelerate oil and gas extraction," i.e. whether they would be allowed on AWS:

-The engineering of drill bits or other equipment that could be used for oil wells, but also for water or geothermal wells

-A business consulting firm running payroll, marketing, or accounting for an oil company

-Personal internet services for offshore oil workers

-Telemetry for drilling or pipeline monitoring equipment

-Geology research by a university that is likely to be used by oil companies

"There's no cloud: it's just someone else's computer (and it's run by people who hate your guts)"

Google Search has gotten worse in the past few years in my opinion. It seems biased towards newly published content and content from the top 100 sites or so. Before it felt like you were grepping the internet, but now it feels like you're at an airport newsstand. It will frequently re-write your queries for you if you are searching for uncommon things, and putting it in quotes doesn't always fix it.

6. Pretty much everything about AMP: forcing sites to conform to a standard they created in order to show up in search, a standard that doesn't let sites control their UX or interactivity (then, just showing Google hosted caches by default instead of being a search engine.)

7. Overzealous GMail spam filters making it hard for anyone new to run email services

8. Google Groups: buying the biggest Usenet archive, breaking features, and embrace-extend-extinguishing it with groups that are on the same interface but don't syndicate to Usenet

9. Buying Meebo to shut it down, buying Softcard to shut it down.

10. Breaking reCAPTCHA for Firefox users, then maybe fixing it a year or two later after causing untold numbers of people to switch to Chrome (possible duplicate of degrading services)

11. Running YouTube at a massive loss for a decade to prevent anyone else from competing in online video

12. Not letting YouTube be run on Amazon devices

13. Bundling / requiring / defaulting Google services on Android phones, the world's dominant phone platform

14. Slowly allowing more ads in search (which has 90+% market share) and reducing their visibility so that people have to pay to have their own website show up when they are searched for

All this being said, my gut is that something with their opaque ad markets is what's really going to stand out in the investigation.

NYT and other legacy newspapers depend on traffic from Facebook and Google to continue existing and are threatened by things like AMP and new media in general. If newspapers demonstrate that they can change public opinion about the tech companies, they have more bargaining power against them.

Perhaps, the NRA has been already declared a domestic terrorist organization by San Francisco. I think everyone wants to avoid TSA agents questioning passengers when the last time they had sexual intercourse was and pulling out a taser and handcuffs if it's too long.

This is a little comforting, but I doubt the secret rulebook is going to cover everyone's concerns.

We need to start thinking ahead about who is going to run the federal agencies and "tobacco truth" type organizations funded by the billions of damages from the inevitable settlements, to avoid regulatory capture.

To avoid this: Firefox with uBlock Origin and resist fingerprinting setting on. Use private mode whenever you don't need logins. Bonus: Use a $3/mo VPN to dodge your ISP's tracking (xandr.com and weep) or just use Tor Browser for browsing, it's pretty fast these days.

How are precise reading logs of websites that help people learn about and treat mental health conditions not "mental-health information"?

"Subject A traveled from a house (maybe not his house, you see, it's de-identified!) went to the library, selected a book on depression and another on cognitive behavorial therapy, read two chapters in the book on depression, made notes about 4 chapters from the CBT book, went back and re-read one chapter from the first book. Subject took quiz from first book which indicated a severity of 22 on the PHQ-9 depression score (it's not PHI because maybe he made up all the answers!) Subject appeared to move slowly with a sad affect through the library and while reading. Subject appeared to be interested in the 2nd chapter of the first book. Subject's other interests include 2000s romantic comedies and RPG video games. Subject's income is approximately 60k/yr and lives in a household with size 1."

Yes, every mouse movement, unsubmitted form input, scroll, highlight, and so on. This stuff can also be used to fingerprint you. LiveSession, Inspectlet, UXCam are competitors. uBlock Origin on Firefox can be configured to block these.

It's amusing that now the (to me, fairly natural) "strangely gratifying...withholding of details and delaying of pleasure" is portrayed as "[casting] off the imaginative constraints of mass culture", when the general story has been that treating sex like shaking hands or sharing a cigarette is itself the breaking of old-fashioned constraints. The circle of life, I suppose.