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This is the dumbest idea and it screams that the House just wants to appease their constituents. You can't break up tech companies; we've been through this before with Microsoft.

What happens is, congress breaks up a big tech company then the people who started said big tech company invest large sums of money into the next generation of tech companies and effectively control them. The next set of boy geniuses get to be the face of these new companies for recreating ideas that the big monopolists weren't allowed to finish because they were broken up.

See Microsoft and Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg is the "boy genius" who recreated an idea that wasn't allowed to be completed by Microsoft.

See Bill Gates starting Microsoft recreating a bunch of ideas that weren't allowed to be completed by Xerox.

In some places it is an organized effort of a small number of people. It's literally small groups of people independently doing this all over the country.

It's because Human Resources, public relations, advertising and marketing are the very departments that are taken over by people with an agenda.

I have no idea why people are so naive, there are literally people in government who are trying to slow and impede the progress of technology because they want to retain the right to manipulate the public via centralized advertising, marketing and mass media.

Nearly every single technology company in the United States that has a large enough user base is partially taken over by people with an agenda to slow down the pace of technology. There are severely mentally ill people who literally believe they are in a war against technology devouring people's jobs. Most corporations aren't telling people this because it is embarrassing. There is a growing e-commerce company in NY that was partially taken over and the employees they hired believed that you had to be enslaved (yes, enslaved I'm not kidding) to people who do no believe in technology in order to participate in technology. This is a real thing but not a single company is going to admit this is happening because they want everyone to believe they are perfect.

The way this works is that they use these departments to control the people in these companies and slow down innovation by creating unusual amounts of frustration and screwing with the advertising and public relations of companies to give technology and people in technology a bad image.

The Russian government compromised Microsoft in early 2000 and the source code for windows 2K XP and 2003 were all leaked on usenet over a decade ago. Why is this news?

I dismissed the article because I refuse to click on link-bait titles just to generate ad impressions.

There are all sorts of problems with technology but technology "sucking" isn't one of those problems:

The problem is people:

1.) Don't remember far back enough to when everything was literally more difficult to do. They don't actually understand how much easier their lives have become due to technology. If you grew up before cellphones became ubiquitous you would understand how much of people's lives were devoted to traveling long distances and haggling with people just to get small things done.

2.) They are young enough that they expect everything to happen instantaneously because they grew up post ubiquitous cell phone. They won't ever be able to understand how easy technology has made our lives because they haven't experienced anything else.

Every time someone writes articles like this they should be forced to live without any technology for a year. It's not perfect but its made life measurably easier for every single person in most countries.

With that said there is a legitimate problem with technology:

People don't know how to use it responsibly, many of them are addicted to their laptops, tvs and cellphones in ways that are frightening.

Conspiracy theories are a way for people to create rationale when they experience cognitive dissonance.

Almost all conspiracy theories can be disproved if you consider if they are:

1.) Reasonable given the circumstances. (i.e. is there a simpler way to achieve the same ends) 2.) Is the conspiracy theory possible when adjusted for behavioral biology, neuroscience, physics and mathematics. 3.) Is it possible that sufficiently advanced technology is involved but has not been made public. There are many conspiracy theories that can be simply explained by technology that is possible but has not been made public. For instance you can make people paranoid by repeatedly having people walk by them talking about what is going on in their home. The problem is the technology to view and listen into people's homes has been available since the 1970s and is available now for less than $5000. You can modify millimeter wave technology for this purpose today.

If the above two conditions hold true, you need to seriously consider the idea that some of the things that sound like conspiracy theory might be factual.

You can't label everything a conspiracy theory, some of it is just crazy people who need a reason for things they don't want to take the time out to find a rational explanation for.

What makes you believe this is a consolidation of power? Some of these companies may not be able to survive a long term recession.

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred million dollars before they finally realized it wasn't generalizable. They had to scrap the entire project.

It isnt possible to measure employee productivity because its impossible to properly quantify the relative importance of a task. Properly scoping problems is a massive task and finally its impossible to adjust for employees gaming the system, collusion or simply malicious behavior.

Employees always figure out how to abuse productivity metrics.

I'd love to but I've signed NDAs for the companies I've worked for.

If you like advertising that will put on the right path.

This happens repeatedly and isn't anything new. This happens because there are a bunch of mentally ill people running tech companies that want jobs to be about "belief".

They don't want older people in tech because they want to empire build with the latest and greatest insecure technology.

They want to create frustration engines with poor engineering practices they older tech workers won't put up with it. The goal is to make technology more difficult so they can slowly re-train you to go to other people and hate all technology. This is a real thing and has burned out so many software engineers you'd be shocked at how many of them don't know their manager was the person who purposely made their job difficult to burn out another software engineer.

They want strange conspiracies about what the software actually does that older workers don't need to put up with (because some of it is illegal). If you're good at reading source code and figure out what they are actually doing in the source code, in some cases companies blatantly selling software that doesn't do anything they are selling their customers on. In some cases people inject code into a repository when no one is looking, so they can run side businesses using the company infrastructure. There are a ton of older tech workers who read every line of the source code and when they start asking too many questions people freak out and fire them to maintain a conspiracy.

This happens for all sorts of reasons.

You're looking for Germany and Suse Linux.

The US govt can't protect the chip manufacturers from malicious actors. It takes an obscene number of people with the right culture and expertise to have a company that can secure its chip platforms. Even then, the chips and associated software has to be sold to specific trusted customers.

Facebook isn't returning to its roots. This is just another re-branded social media site meant to capture the attention of another generation of college students for advertising purposes.

Management in many companies are just puppets installed for the purpose of keeping a person or group of persons in control. You'd be surprised at how many companies have management that has the decision making capabilities of a toddlers. And when I say toddler, I mean that in a literal sense. You can take an intelligent toddler and have them make day-to-day decisions that would be BETTER than middle-management.

If you resent people who have children at your place of employment you have too much time on your hands.

likely? It's completely filled with bot traffic. At some point someone needs to create verified accounts on LinkedIn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia Speak to a neuroscientist if you don't believe me.

I'm having a difficult time believing that someone picked up coding and is proficient in doing so at 40 years old unless they had prior experience in something that was similar. It takes years to become proficient in coding to the point where you don't utilize massive amounts of executive function (which we have a finite amount of in any given day). In addition the act of reading and writing code does a ton of damage to the Wernicke and Brocas area. Over time it can cause damage to the ventral what pathway to the point of complete speech impediment, memory loss and even Alzheimers.

Always be extremely skeptical of anyone learning to code in their 40s, they can do it for short stretches but it is probably not a good idea to pick up coding for the first time in your 40s since the probability of doing damage to your brain is going to be relatively high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area

There are anxiety-like responses in animals but nothing similar to what we consider anxiety in humans. The key take-away is that most of the anxiety behaviors are found in prey animals. Most predators have a social system that removes members from the genetic pool who get anxiety.

Anxiety is a disorder of the nervous system that is a by-product of civilization. We are one of the only mammals that gets anxiety, if you get anxiety in the wild you won't be alive much longer.

Depression and PTSD are not responses to adversity. If you face adversity and suffer depression or PTSD you were raised psychologically weak in a way that is dangerous to you.

There are people who have survived civil wars, drought and mass starvation all over the world that don't have these problems get out of your bubble.

I'm not in favor of removing qualified immunity because I have former classmates who are police officers and some of them work in places where they are constantly dealing with violent crime and they occasionally have to things that appear criminal but aren't. They have to spend weeks justifying why they made certain decisions and if they have a pattern of behavior they will lose their jobs. If you speak to really good police officers in an environment where they don't have to worry about retaliation they will tell you directly they don't trust most of the police force where they work. Some of them are more afraid of their co-workers than the people they encounter on the street.

There was also a piece of software in the early days of optical mouse sensors that let you use your mouse as a scanner.

The reality is we need fewer, higher paid police with an extremely high barrier to entry. They should be required to go through the kind of training the military goes through for months so you see how they react under pressure. They should have people constantly giving them an opportunity to lie, cheat, steal and abuse their position of power to test if they are corrupt in any way. They should be monitored 24/7 and if they do anything that remotely looks suspicious they should be removed from their position of power. They should be required to go through intense training annually to see if they are still psychologically fit to do the job. Finally they should start as peace officers for several years and be required to communicate with people in difficult situations until it is possible to determine if they can be trusted. Everyone else should be put on peace officer duty with no weapons and no authority to do anything but observe and report information. The police don't need the amount of authority and power they have.

Now you know, life isn't fair. The rules don't apply. No one wants to see a demonstration of his advertising budget.

Read the documentation. It should be clear.

Privacy doesn't exist: see http://dev.ti.com/tirex/explore/node?node=AB64dFbicd2BPc23jv...

The minute there was technology available that allowed people to see and hear through walls privacy died. It now costs less than $5,000 and if you have the right antenna you can see inside of homes from long distance and listen to people's diaphragms which allow you to listen to their inner-thoughts.

The default demo software for that particular device is to allow for listening to heartbeats but with the right modifications listening to the human diaphragm is just a matter of effort. There are people at several universities working on these kinds of imaging projects using mmwave right now even though the technology to do this has been available for over fifty years.

This doesn't seem like a complete story or any kind of rationale for taking down apps, if you have a problem with hate speech you should probably get off the internet.

You're delusional if you think individual people aren't threats to governments of multi-billion dollar corporations.

There are people with information that no one wants leaked because the information is incriminating without proper context or someone may have made a massive mistake and not known what the consequences were at the time. There are people all over the place that have to make decisions where both choices might be illegal.

There are powerful CEOs and politicians who are afraid of being outed for not being what they say they are. Some of them are simply paranoid that they will be outed as incompetent. You'd be shocked at how many CEOs are terrified of people finding out they just got lucky and applied for the right jobs at the right times. They walk around in complete and total fear that someone will find out they don't know a single thing about how their company is run or that they are banging half the people in their company.

There are startups that are essentially cults and the founders use cult tactics in order to keep an entourage of employees who are loyal to the point that they will sacrifice their dignity and personal safety for the company. If you don't believe in the founder and the company they purge you because they are afraid someone is going to figure out their business may border on illegality. These guys do the same thing, their employees run around harassing anyone who doesn't believe in their company and the founder.

This happens all the time.

I hope you're not this naive.

Gang stalking is a real thing, when I was a child people used to call each other up to and gang stalk anyone who had just moved into the neighborhood just for shits and giggles.

It was just a bunch of kids who would call their next door neighbor to let them know someone we didn't know was walking around. The game was to walk outside of your house and just stare at the person as closely as possible as they walked by and then walk back in. Individually its not a big deal but when you walk through a neighborhood and hundreds of people walk out of their home one at a time just to stare at you and they never say a word it makes the person walking around hyper paranoid.

People do this sort of crap all the time for many reasons including extortion, they text message networks of people to follow an individual person around as part of targeted harassment. If the person doesn't pay up in the form of shopping at the right places they just keep following the person around. It's illegal but hard as fuck to prove.