604 karma · joined April 1, 2017
I’m critiquing the shape of the system and the potential for harm. The municipal duties our ancestors fought to have managed through democratic processes we love to pride ourselves on are swiftly being surrendered to private corporations who citizens widely do not trust. And then we wait until the damage is irreversible and pretend we weren’t asking for it.
I warned you.
But what if they could?
The issue here isn’t that Google got the name wrong, but that they actively chose a new one and could change it to the new one because the public depends on a private entity’s map system and that private entity is able to manipulate the representation in their own private interest.
>If< I didn’t like you and I were able to change your name on every non-public record to “Fucking Idiot” (Job applications, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, etc.), maybe you wouldn’t mind that. Or maybe you would mind it and I convinced you to not mind it by explaining how it wouldn’t effect your government records. (I doubt the residents in question mind the name “The East Cut” either, but they already had one and preferred it. In many of these name changes, the effects can mean rapid mass development, raised rents and evictions, etc.) For you, this name change would mean at least a lot of explaining how this obnoxious poster on Hacker News was trying to make some disparate point but it has nothing to do with your qualification for the job, getting your account banned from Social media sites. You could start a new one but you’d lose all your posts and followers. At the end of the day, you should probably have been able to stop me, but you couldn’t.
West Virginia is precisely an example of only the wealthy enjoying nature.
The wealthy retreat to Greenbrier or go skiing at Snowshoe Mountain.
All the while, the working class turn to nature to build squatter camp in the summer to pinch and save for winter shelter since the mines went out of business. In many valleys (not the wealthy ones), nature cannot even provide decent water, the result of contamination from modern top chop mining (by the wealthy). Things have only deteriorated recently, unless you consider not dying young of black lung disease “enjoying nature”.
EDIT: I thought about it some more and realized how big California is. As far as California goes, I think you’re actually right. California is just simply too big. I haven’t worked out an algorithm for it yet. That will require probably a whole city of computer scientists to work that one out.
The “brilliant” descriptor depends how many millions of dollars they make.
If you want to have input in a powerful entity, I really recommend starting a government. If you have an old one layout around, maybe dust if off and use that, but it’ll probably take some work.
I don’t know where you live, but in the US, there’s a bunch of people who are interested in reviving their government entity. They can’t do it alone, though. Here’s the website:
By definition, “companies” are incentivized to prioritize capital pursuit over moral pursuit. It’s actually the most fundamental part of the whole concept.
Many democratic governments in the world, and particularly the most wealthy and powerful ones, are run by people who are (to a large unmeasurable extent) incentivized to do what companies want them to do. This is not a fundamental concept of a democratic government, but as long as the electorate fails to take responsibility for their own government’s behavior, the incentives remain in the company’s favor, which doesn’t make a very good case for democracy.
Democracy is a very slippery concept. America, for example, is well understood to not be a democracy, but it’s people seem to have convinced themselves it is. These kinds of miscalculations are really at the root of “why not”.
For the Americans who want your government to represent you, you’ve got some work to do. Most Americans I know speak of their government as though it were just some poorly run business that somebody else is responsible for. Get your own house in order before you criticize others peoples’.
And the tech committee is wonderful people with some great open stack projects in tow. Now is surely the best time in history to volunteer.
Karl Marx’s contributions to the field of economics are, to put it lightly, vast. Despite the authors’ insistence on it’s incompleteness, Marx and Engel’s 3 volumes constitute a painstakingly detailed and, as evidenced by the lack of serious refutation from the field, accurate analysis of the economic and social systems of their time.
And let’s be honest; the guy knew a thing or two about disruption.
We might also ask “what is ‘their own’?”
If you are proposing that the government is the organization of the elected officials, you’re wrong. A democratic government belongs to the members of the society. Many Americans don’t realize that so I’ll assume you’re one of them.
In reality, most American elected officials don’t make decisions on behalf of their electorate because they get paid more by private companies to specifically not do so, which is clearly the issue at hand.
But furthermore, if you are an American, it is your society who hired this company by proxy, and who is paying for it.
When you give these strange narratives which insult your own government, you are only insulting yourself. You are the people who let this happen.
“Smart, thoughtful” people who are happier in the private sector is exactly who currently runs our governments. So your plan is already in action.
In America you can also freely speak slander on the internet and the victim will have to live with it for life.
The caps in other countries might not implemented in an umbrella dollar amount but as rules like no TV ads, or the dollar amount could only apply to certain items. Often it is a cap on donations which effectively caps spending. At the end of the day, democracies generally must limit campaigning influence because if they don’t, they might end up with skewed democratic process, possibly a reality show star as president.
Maybe ask why America is the only democratic nation with uncapped campaign spending.
The idea that capital == money is merely the guiding basis of capitalism.
Something worth considering in relating this to Marx is that while Karl Marx did not live at a time that would have favored a deep awareness of media, his work is very concerned with culture. His more economic terminology was "human relations" and how capital mediates human relations.
These days, what we call media ("mediation" of human communication) is at the root of our concerns with attention.
Having studied Marx, I assume my eagerness to relate his work to contemporary economics discussions might seem desperate but it seems desperate to me that others try so hard to do otherwise. I hope you'll forgive me.
Marx did live in a more simple time but the wonder of his work is that he identified so much of the forces that guide our society. Even living at a time when attention was at a surplus, his work is robust and thoughtful enough to translate in more modern times.
Most HN readers were indoctrinated to simplisticly demonize Marx despite ignorance of his nuanced academic legacy, and might overlook the glaring similarities here. They should be reminded that Marx laid these foundations ~150 years ago and offers a lifetime of critical research on this very discussion.
And they harvest maximum legal amounts of data in the meantime, so they can execute any future loophole they decide beneficial to profit at that time.
It’s all exploitative authoritarian capitalism.
Usually, when an entity motivated against our best interests is considered “competent”, we calculate that they are more of a threat. This makes fine sense to me. Why would one reason differently about Google? It looks illogical to me.
Google is a company. Google is optimized for profit, not data privacy. Quite the contrary, of course. And that isn’t changing any time soon. Right now, they have a lot of surplus, but that can change, which will effect the nature of their optimization’s. For that reason, we should consider the incentives since they are evidently the core motivation of Google’s behavior.
If I’m not mistaken, you are encouraging others to trust an unrelated entity known to be incentivized against their best interests. Sounds like a tough sell to put it lightly.