It's more complex than free vs. non-free, but it's solvable and will be solved.
118 karma · joined January 24, 2013
I collect down-votes, so help a brother out!
http://nwzpaper.com/journalistProfileStream?userId=4
The world quickly devolves when the ROC on this benchmark goes flat and the social world heads for chaos when it goes negative.
"Why not use your knowledge of the future to play the stock markets? We could make trillions." "Why make a trillion when we could make... billions?"
PS - Well said.
Edit - No one cares until they're hit where it hurts.
I'm just happy I knew what the Internet was like before mosaic and the www emerged. It seems so quaint now.
Edit - How long until people ditch their Black Amex cards and go back to cash for some privacy restored? A short decade ago it wasn't so uncommon to carry a few bucks. How many people really want banks and the government knowing all of their consumption habits in addition to the timing of their consumption?
All in the name of fraud prevention! Just carry a few bucks and no worries again!
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/W022RC1A027NBEA?... http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDP
Fact 2: State and municipal governments have subsidized borrowing costs via the federal tax exemption. I don't know where you live, but are your state and local governments borrowers? What about the road money from the Federal Government?
Fact 3: Private savings come from public deficits
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mzu
What if, what if, what if...
Well, you will discover in due time what all of this nets out to and no one will enjoy it. The forces of deflation are far mightier than the forces of inflation for inflation requires persistent and exponentially increasing consumption, fueled by net-borrowing of the combined public and private worlds.
As it turns out, the zombie apocalypse isn't triggered by an infectious disease or rapidly mutating virus. Instead, it's capital destruction via chaining debt defaults.
A perfect example is the South African who would be a one and done without our Rich Uncle Sam borrowing to invest and subsidize his markets.
It seems all of the technology companies are givin their best effort to invading privacy and undermining trust on a societal level. There will be lasting consequences for these behaviors.
When everyone got computers that were faster than calculators, hedge funds and bank trading desks bought mainframes and colocated them next to or with the exchanges' servers and all of the trading volume moved to high-frequency trading-friendly dark pools and the exchanges...
In the context of political influence, what does everyone think all of the campaign money goes toward these days? A lot of angry people start revolutions and there is nothing technology can do to placate someone(s)who is being abused for any reason and certainly not at scale!
All of these marketing firms are chasing the mass market consumers/voters that have had diminishing spending power for over a decade now. Here's a tip: build something really expensive and desirable for someone really rich because they have lots of spending power and few things to do with the money.
It is true, however, that there would be no market for anything such as Wikileaks if there was no opaqueness in the public sector.
"Send us an anonymous package with information through post and we will vet it and publish it, if it's juicy" is nothing new under the sun though.
Contemporary society is a mess because we institutionalized the legitimacy of a voice in the form of for-profit journalists. Has anyone considered how long the journalist career has existed in its recent history form?
Before Guttenberg did we have for-profit journalists? I will indulge semantics here, but I suspect no one will argue that organized society existed for a long time before we delegitimized the primary sources of information--the person a journalist investigates--to legitimize professional secondary and tertiary sources of information(aka journalists).
In other words, complaining about the evolution of public information dissemination is utterly fruitless as it isn't actionable. I've made the bet that most career journalists are already marginalized and that the common person is and will continue to marginalize the career journalist and the institutions that legitimize them.
Primary sources disseminating public information if the future.
You are the journalist now!
It's the JDs and MBAs, IMO.
What's wrong with hackernews today are a bunch of musq-worshipping, "smartphone" toting, self-righteous dolts opining on subjects they have zero depth on.
Let me guess, you are boss with a joystick on your Apple Thunderbolt display and MSFT Simulator-X.
Do you understand what drives the cost of a physical good? Do you understand why the US government has structured the defense contractors into a prime-sub hierarchy? Do you understand why the US government has cost-plus contracts?
What do you know that I can't read on Wikipedia?
Why don't you Google the Forbes list and tell us about all of the billionaires the government is minting in the defense contracting industry?
You know where the money is going? Look at raw materials.
Why do we have prime contractors? So they aren't "too big to fail."
Why do we have cost-plus contracts? Because no one can hedge raw material and labor costs for projects that are 10-30+ year contracts. You see, the US government issues its own currency and as we have seen the Federal Reserve do since 2008, it can spend and self-finance(quantitative easing) as long as the political will exists to spend. The government has no budget constraint other than the arbitrary ones we periodically invent for it.
Canada's military budget is a fart in the wind and the only reason we are SHARING any piece of the development with anyone is diplomacy.
Tell us all something substantive and save the impassioned platitudes.
The biggest criminal enterprise is "outside money" vs. "inside money" and the scale is orders of magnitude larger than the folks peddling narcotics or paying for hookers.
The Internet is a social tool and is used to engage remote information, not local. I want to protect privacy as much as the next person, but I have a reasonable understanding of the context of privacy.
There's simply no way to legislate (socially guarantee) privacy for individuals on the largest piece of social infrastructure ever built.
The end.
The terrorology field has blossomed post-2001 and there are more definitions, but everything still files nicely: state/non-state and religious, political, cultural. If you ask me, they're all the same.
Regardless of what the lawyers--politicians--add to the body of definitions, definitions of terrorism are very gray unlike conventional war.
Low-intensity conflict is how wars are waged today and the definitions aren't as black and white as conventional war.
8/8/2013 AMZN: $295.74 @ $135.12 billion market cap MSFT: $32.89 @ $273.97 billion market cap
WaPo, for the brand, assets and people.