sacks2k

We never had free speech online. Only the illusion of it.

I've noticed, especially recently, that most websites that allow commenting will shadow ban comments they disagree with, even if it's not trolling or abusive.

The scary part is that most people don't even see this and just assume that all of the comments they see are the only ones on the site. This can create the false sense that a larger number of people have a particular viewpoint.

This sort of censorship and controlling behavior absolutely effects the outcome of our elections and is much worse than anything Russia can even dream of.

The Chinese government knows this well and in addition to online troll campaigns, they fund our media companies directly and will pull funding if these companies don't toe the line.

With Covid ripping through the profits of many of these media companies, now is the time they will buy them up in mass.

We all should be prepared for an online future of CCP controlled media and influence.

"https://www.vox.com/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-down-...

If a 550 million dollar acquisition is my fate after trying to compete with Amazon, I would look forward to it.

"AirBnB"

You can make good money renting out your place and listing it on Airbnb. Don't like it? You can always use Craigslist or advertise yourself. It's not like airBnb provides nothing. They provide a built-in stream of potential customers, which could take a lot more money and time to obtain on your own.

"Google (play store)" "Apple (App Store)"

People are only willing to pay a few dollars at most for an app, unless it's very specialized. I have always seen apps as a feature/benefit to a main business, which Google and Apple can't control.

"Amazon (the web marketplace, not AWS)"

Most businesses on Amazon have a storefront/website and use Amazon to get more business. Amazon may control the marketplace, but they don't have to control your business. This is a choice with many alternatives.

"and Uber"

Again, this is a choice. Uber was never meant to provide a full-time income for anyone. It's meant as a way to make some extra money on the side.

When we have many choices and alternatives, the argument that these companies are the 'new lords' becomes very weak.

"owners into billionaires on the basis of the cheap labor of their workers, the free labor of their users, and the tax breaks bestowed on them by cities desperate to attract jobs. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (the parent company name for Google) together are worth more than most every country in the world (except the United States, China, Germany, and Japan). The economic scale and impact of these tech super giants, or, overlords, is greater than that of most so-called sovereign states. Evgeny Morozov describes their dominance as a “hyper-modern form of feudalism.”"

How are any of these companies making money on the 'cheap' labor of their workers? Amazon pays all warehouse employees a minimum of $15/hour. This is well above the minimum wage in most areas of the US and outside the US, is a very good wage for doing repetitive tasks that don't even require a high school education.

This article doesn't even touch on the censorship aspects of companies like Google and Facebook becoming more and more a reality every day. They both regularly censor opposing view points and are definitely influencing our elections.

"Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants"

Not quite. Anyone can still start a website and sell a product without a digital overlord. In fact, there are less barriers to entry than there were a decade ago. Most people choose to give control to companies like Amazon because it's easier and more convenient.

"84,000 Americans have died of COVID-19"

This article acts as if only the US has death due to Covid. Nearly the entire world is affected by this virus and the US actually has a pretty low death rate compared to the rest of the world.

Without mentioning per-capita statistics, any article mentioning only the total death rate is intentionally being disingenuous.

Johns Hopkins has some good stats:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

"In the early days of their fight against COVID-19, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland tested their populations at nearly 40 times the U.S. rate, per capita, and now have one-fifth the death rate"

All of the countries listed are the size of a US state. It's very easy to test an entire country when it's this small. When you scale anything up, you will have to deal with a different set of issues.

I'm also curious how they actually tested beyond a simple spot check of symptoms. Most tests were not even close to being accurate until recently and we didn't even know that much about the virus early on.

"included a revised forecast for the virus’s toll, estimating some 3,000 Americans could be dying per day by June 1—a 9/11 every day"

Every prediction so far by experts has been an order of magnitude off about deaths or completely wrong. Why is this new one going to be more accurate?

"South Korea built an innovative digital infrastructure to identify and track every new coronavirus case within its borders"

South Korea also removes the infected from their families, including children, by force. The government is also violating citizens' privacy with this tracking. I seriously doubt anyone in the US would see this as an acceptable solution.

" U.S. is now conducting some 390,000 tests a day—a major jump after a sluggish start."

There was a 'sluggish' start because none of the tests were accurate and the US government would rather have accurate tests than a 60-70% test failure rate. Many politicians in other countries pushed out these inaccurate tests because they didn't want to lose support by looking like they didn't do enough during a crises.

" in May that the U.S. should be conducting 40 million to 50 million tests every month to provide basic surveillance on the spread of the disease in this country"

There really is no point in this much testing. Since there is no vaccine, and the fact that it spreads so quickly, you would need to test everyone every day. This just isn't a good use of our resources or practical.

Until a vaccine is invented, we need to slowly open up and require social distancing while protecting the vulnerable (people older than 60, have health issues, etc).

There is a lack of male teachers and vets. I'm not sure why this matters.

"You seem to be pulling this out of your ar*e, since it is inconsistent with all U.S. reporting"

China had no new Coronavirus cases for an entire month and even before this, it was very few. With its population density, number of people, and how fast the virus spreads, this is scientifically impossible.

Either nobody is being tested during this time, the tests aren't accurate, or the numbers are a complete lie. All are just as bad and don't prove that China has anything 'tamed'.

The article you linked to was from yesterday. They have only just started announcing new testing again because of the bad global press and now the numbers are increasing again.

I would also look at your sources. Many US news sites have large funding from the Chinese government. Hell, the WHO won't allow Taiwan at the assembly and actively ignored them when they were contacted about the virus in December...which would have saved many lives and prevented the potential global disaster we now have today.

"A company laying people off is not confirmation that the things you don't like about them are hurting their business"

As already mentioned, they were going out of business long before the pandemic. The Pandemic is just an excuse for their failures.

There are so many news sites dedicated to progressive content that Vice turned into. They lost their edge, competitive advantage, and I would imagine, most of their viewer base. This is why they failed.

"projects involving psychedelics and cutting edge mental health treatment among a few, are not nearly as prevalent now. Further many of the arguably top journalists to join in Vice’s history have gone (many, but not all)"

These projects are why I started reading/watching Vice in the first place.

I think the pandemic is going to be used by companies like Vice as an excuse for a failing business model.

They mention nursing homes in this article. If this is the case, they should be adding these deaths to the numbers.

In New York City, for instance, people in nursing homes were forced to go back to the nursing home instead of to a hospital if found to have covid-19. This contributed to the spread early on and a high infection rate (and death rate) in nursing homes. We shouldn't allow a complete failure like this to happen in another s tate.

Companies like Google spend all their money on tech and try to automate customer service away.

The automated software running customer service somehow sees your account as in violation of one of their rules, and you get banned. In the mean time, your business is losing money and there is nobody that will answer your calls or emails.

The only way to get your account back is to start a social media campaign and it's reinstated because Google doesn't want the bad press.

Big tech has been getting away with this for too long.

It's not 'tamed'.

China stopped testing ages ago and has censored anyone questioning the current government's narrative (and has arrested doctors, medical professionals, and random people on WeChat).

This is one of the problems with comparing Covid statistics between countries. The US, for instance, counts a death as 'Covid' if they died of some other cause, but had Covid symptoms. In other countries, these aren't counted. it's not just Covid stats where this is a problem. Crime stats are calculated in completely different ways in different countries and used as ammo in political discussions.

The US has been continuing to test, so our numbers are going to go up as more cases are detected. Countries like Iran, China, Vietnam, and Mexico aren't really doing any sort of testing besides spot checking.

These numbers are being used to politically crucify the current administration, when it's a completely disingenuous comparison.

On top of all of this, the Covid death rate per-capita of the US is one of the lowest in the world. Too many people don't understand why you can't directly compare a country like South Korea (population: 50 million) and the US (population 350 million).

Here is a good link from Johns Hopkins: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

The US is at the low end of Covid death rates. I don't trust Iran on this chart, because it's already pretty well known they have been lying about their numbers.

I'm not surprised.

Vice media used to be about cutting-edge reporting and has devolved to fluff pieces centered around a progressive agenda.

"The Way In Which A Company Downsizes Its Staff Says A Lot About The Organization"

It tells me that they are following the stay-at-home orders and not putting their staff in danger due to Covid-19.

With this many people being let go, it would take too long to call each person individually without the press/others knowing.

No matter what you do as a company, people are going to get angry when they lose their job.

They are vicious. In the Summer, I get at least one or two praying mantises in my garden and I regularly see them eating bees and other bugs while they are still alive and trying to escape.

How easy it to transfer it out? What about the renewal rate? I'm leery about signing up for a 'free domain' and then base a business on it with this much uncertainty.

It wouldn't be that hard to find.

"firing the leaker is going to rile them up more."

It seems our society has devolved into satisfying the mob rather than doing the right thing these days.

I've seen some of the comments from internal Google groups that were since leaked after this incident. Some of the most horrible thoughts and opinions were posted, with actual real names, but nobody got punished or fired. Why? Because they were progressive/hard-left thoughts and opinions.

This is all about politics and has nothing to do with right or wrong.

It's just more proof that these large tech companies are becoming the equivalent of fascist governments that police our thoughts and opinions....and punish us for wrongthink.

He never released anything to the public. Someone who didn't like his political views leaked it to Twitter and the press.

If I were him, I would have personally sued the person that leaked the content and continued the fight until they had no money left. They really need to be taught a lesson that it's not okay to do something like this with the intention of destroying a person's life.

It's pretty well known that if you go on Fox news, the other news organizations like CNN, MSNBC, etc will ban you from their station. Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew have talked about this on their podcast and so have many other people interviewed by Fox news.

This creates the false impression of "Fox News darlings" and ends up furthering the "us vs them" narrative.

"According to Twitter, they have instead found that numerous accounts belong to government entities, nongovernmental organizations, and journalists. The review was ongoing, the company said, noting that it planned to follow up with the GEC on its findings."

How do they know who actually posts to these Twitter accounts? If I was trying to create a disinformation campaign, it wouldn't be difficult to use IP addresses scattered across different countries and IP banks.

The Chinese government has almost unlimited resources. It wouldn't take much to buy IP banks, phones for verification, and pay people to post.

The irony is that the same people that wanted to show us the dangers of monopolies, have no problem with a government with the exact same powers which result in the exact same problems.

Why wasn't this enforced 3+ months ago?

I oversee the hiring of dev shops for a mid-sized company in the US and the rates for e-commerce/web development are all in the $120-$150/hour range.

The funny thing is that some of these companies outsourced to the Ukraine and India and the rates didn't change. I would have thought that we would at least see some of the cost savings.

Both companies that outsourced ended up being complete disasters (we are still cleaning up the technical debt 3+ years later), which happened before I was involved.

Since this is the case, it made no sense to hire any company that didn't hire all developers directly in the US or Canada (which is now a requirement).

I suppose I should thank these companies, because it's the reason I have a job today.

It's not just WeChat.

They own stakes in many american media companies and movie production houses. They use this influence to also change our Media and push pro-Chinese propaganda to the American public.

"fixed by public policy"

Public policy right now is to stay home or die of Covid 19. Many people are scared to even go outside or go to a hospital if they don't have the virus.

Starting to open businesses again and requiring social distancing would definitely help with the fear and more people would actually go to the hospital for non-covid health issues.

People are staying home and dying. This is one of the major trade offs no government official is talking about regarding re-opening the economy.

"This is especially important if you have to edit a file on a remote server"

This may have been true a decade ago, but editors like Visual studio code now have remote editing abilities over SSH.

I regularly have 50+ files open at a time for editing/compiling and I've never found editors like VI very helpful.

If I need to make a quick edit to a config file, it does the job.

Side projects. You can try any new modern framework you want with a side project.

Also, read the code of good projects on Github.

This is great.

What many people don't realize is that without a vaccine, the plan has always been to slowly re-open and socially distance. This was the plan all along after flattening the curve, which was already accomplished.

"This is the opposite of what is true. When you have no rights and no constitution, the people who have control will use that control to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else."

This was my point. The only reason the USSR is better 'prepared' for anything is because they can make choices that countries like the US can't, at the expense of human lives.

"People use the USSR in WW2 as an example of where central planning led to success"

This is a good example of success in a country that doesn't care about human life.

USSR total deaths in WW2: 24 million United States: 418,000

I think we agree.