Everything was already built in 2005. It turned out that the more things are already built, the more things people build, and that requires building even more things on top of it...
1,625 karma · joined August 10, 2020
When you give people the power to do anything and dozens, or even hundreds of millions of people start doing anything and everything they can think of, many will create major messes. That happens with anything that becomes extremely widely used.
> or those multimillion dollar companies don't actually need that much functionality on their sites.
The WP world is so big that it has its own specializations and their subspecializations. You cant imagine what kind of complexity is involved in such systems and the variety of the problems that are being solved.
What WP does is to solve the problem of launching, running and maintaining A LOT of things right out of the bat, allowing you to build even more complex things. There are widely used plugins for many things ranging from using replicated databases to launching full fledged software/app store websites. The enterprise WP world builds on it instead of rejecting what others already built and are maintaining.
WP runs 50% of all the websites at the moment. 30% of all ecommerce websites. And 'website' means anything ranging from the sites of CNN, Reuters to the $5 florist shop site a flower shop owner in Oregon just launched without knowing anything about programming...
It works. That's whats important.
They dont since Russian and Chinese SWIFT alternatives were launched.
They don't. And that counts as pretty well off today.
> I challenge anybody who downvoted this post to provide any other explanation for their decision.
Let me provide one:
A lot of Americans dont think that anyone could do a concerted, systematic sociopathy like the one I told in my post. Simply because they themselves wouldnt do such a thing, they think that those with whom they identify also wouldnt do that. Anything bad that happened to others or anything bad that is done by their establishment must be some 'coincidence' or a mistake.
This mentality is strengthened by two things: The Just World Theory and lingering Christian behavior patterns that still dominate the American public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
The just world theory is utilized by people who need to escape reality to avoid cognitive dissonance. Because not doing so and acknowledging the evil and the evildoers in their own society would make living in that society very demoralizing and kill hopes for the future. So, any bad deed must have an explanation, any victim must have 'deserved' it, and everything must be alright with the world.
And lingering religious behavior patterns, because in Christianity, the Christian god and the faithful can do no wrong. They are the good ones. Whereas all evil is done by the unbelievers, heretics and other gods. This belief is translated to modern culture as 'being on the good side' whereas anyone else that is not 'with them' are evil. And so, Americans can do no evil whereas any evil can only be done by others. The manifestations of this can be seen in how every incident like the 2003 Iraq war is interpreted as 'a mistake', or 'an ill advised war', and in things like every US enemy being Hitler.
And these behavior patterns poison the minds of the well-intentioned Americans. Additionally a lot of Americans just flat-out keep the late 19th century manifest destiny white supremacist belief patterns - like how 'brown people' etc not being 'that important' and any bad thing happening in such countries being something unimportant even if it is done by their own establishment, hence it can be ignored.
But mainly, the obsession with being 'on the good side' and projecting every evil and ill to outside to escape cognitive dissonance totally poison the American mind and cause them to ignore even the biggest evils that are being committed in their own society - like how their country kills its own people if they cant pay for healthcare and so on....
In my country, immediately after the last US backed coup, the new 'democratic' government literally ditched French and German for foreign language education from all education institutions and pushed English in every level of education. As a result, I, like millions of youth in my generation, had to learn English as a foreign language. At this point it must be noted that a decent amount of the coup leaders were military men who received additional training in the US, 'School of Americas' style.
In addition to that, the US-backed government first jailed or banned all the artists who used to create content in national, traditional formats, and instead promoted literally American music - one reason for this was the majority of those artists were left-wing, pro-people artists who opposed US corporate interests so they were detrimental to the 'new order'. Those who were not banned refused to appear in state-run channels in protest. Naturally private channels also excluded them because they were seen as 'hostile' to privatization and other US-backed policies. What was left of the creative space was wiped out by private TV and radio channels who were founded by US-friendly capital or direct US-connected investments, run by those who were educated in Angloamerican institutions, pushing either directly American artists or their imitators. It was a literal takeover of an entire country's culture.
Result? Literally a decade of uncontested American movies, series, songs in tv and radio and recorded medium, culturally imperializing around two generations and slapping a weird layer of 'American' on top of their actual cultural identity. These generations still did not recover from this cultural rape, and they are unable to fit in in their own society, leave aside anywhere abroad.
This is what happened in every other US-backed regime. Even in Europe, US-backed parties and capital literally Americanized their societies methodically by either through the local friendly capital or literally US-linked interests buying out local channels. Even in the country that I now live in, the biggest media group is still owned by a corporation that is owned by an American-German dual citizen. Leaving aside it pushes entirely American content with a few national ones sprinkled in, the news that it shoves into its programming is literally US corporate news, pushing literally the policies of the US itself.
You would think that this would be something related to the US foreign policy, mostly affecting people abroad. It was not. It was a concerted, persistent policy that targeted Americans at home as well as it targeted foreigners.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me...
The 1971 US Chamber of Commerce Lewis-Powell memo said that the then-existing popular movements like the antiwar movement etc were pushing Americans away from the 'American way of life'. And the rich who own the media and education corporations should use their corporations to condition the people back into 'the American way'. The result is the concentrated, lying corporate propaganda machine that not only pushed wars like 2003 Iraq War, but also destroyed all the humane behaviors and traditions in the US to maximize corporate profit.
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Then there is this thing about the monetization of entire world's resources that was started by Nixon, forcing everyone to trade in dollars and providing unending capital that was created from zero-interest money inflating everything in the US economy, leading to the corporate takeover of everything abroad by US interests as well as creating phenonenon like Silicon Valley and allowing business-model-free companies that ran on endless investor cash cornering all angles of the Internet and killing off their competition including the domestic independent players, forcing everything to revolve around Silicon Valley.
Which is precisely why many non-Americans here not only speak English aside from the above cultural imperialism reasons, but also post in this forum.
But no worries - as the zero-interest economy goes away, things will change.
Enough for the companies and interests who sponsored this 'initiative' to catch up to the market leaders, probably...
The problem with Twitter was that it had no legitimate monetization for the app itself. It was a zero-interest, investor/vc money fueled growth machine. And even for that purpose, it used that api to great extent to bring a lot of users into the platform and integrate a vast swath of internet to Twitter - from Twitter logins to automatic embeds to entire 3rd party applications that served different subsets of users.
But now that the investors who dumped cash on something that does not have a level of monetization and revenue compared to its over-inflated valuation want something for their money, suddenly growth is not that important anymore and problems ensue.
Even in this particular situation, its a dumb idea to restrict or close down an api. If you do that, another service that doesnt do it will get an ecosystem built around it and it will eventually eat your lunch. A fixed set of people working on a singular app in a company can never produce as much features as an entire ecosystem with its large community can produce through an api. The Open Source movement and its successes follow the same pattern: Centralized, large corporations cannot compete with the development speed and breadth of communities of millions of people, even if those corporations employ tens of thousands of engineers.
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The ability in some Angloamerican and 'Western' segments to publicly talk with this kind of double standard is amazing. You have billonaires. They have corrupt oligarchs. All is well in the world and all that...
Your government was the one kidnapping its own citizens through 'rendition flights' totally outside the legal apparatus and holding and torturing them whenever it wanted. It still does that.
Your government has power over you. Not China. If you would be concerned about 'opinion manipulation', there is still the open issue of the Iraqi WMDs lie and the entire false reality created by that very government of yours and its private sector extensions. If you are not worried about that, you would have no grounds to be worried about 'hostile' governments.
And what does 'hostile' even mean? You think that China or any other country cares about what you do as a singular American? And their hostility is toward you, the random American in god knows where in the US and not instead towards your government that is openly, explicitly, directly saying that it is targeting China in total violation of the international laws? Are you aware that any such threat or open admission of intent of economic or actual warfare from a country that can follow up those threats gives a legitimate casus belli against the targeted country and triggers the Article 51 of the UN convention?
Its amazing how the Americans think that they have anything in common with their government and establishment and they literally claim shared interest...
> whataboutism
There is nothing wrong about 'whataboutism'. Those who make moral, legal, ethical accusations have to provide an objective framework for their accustion. You cant just smear others while your own side does even worse things than what you accuse others of. Without an objective framework, any kind of moral accusation becomes a mere smear.
Chinese government does not have the power to abduct you without telling anyone, hold you in an undisclosed location for however long it wants without telling anyone. The US president does. No other president and government in the world has that kind of openly legislated power. Not even any secret service anywhere has been given that power. And yet you worry about 'other governments'.
This behavior pattern seems more like projecting the troubles at home to abroad to avoid cognitive dissonance than any actual concern...
Working, functional partnership do not dissolve easily. The Eu, despite all its problems is a good example. Even the US-controlled system was one - it had a lot of disadvantages, but it worked to some degree, and it kept going on.
BRICS and the analogues that are converging with it are multilateral, egalitarian partnerships that worked well for all their participants, totally independent of the US. Some favored US allies kept increasing their BRICS participation even while they got a lot of benefits from the US. So its unlikely that they would just leave.
To simplify, BRICS and its analogues seem to be what the WTO would be without the 'special rules based order' that the US was subjecting everyone to, and the blackmailing influence of the Anglosaxon dominated financial system. (as can be seen from what happened recently with 'sanctions' and the resulting confiscations of money).
That was the last straw actually, all the countries that are rushing to BRICS as of this moment, started those initiatives immediately after 'asset seizures', or, rather, theft, that was effected on their enemies by the US, the UK and the supposedly neutral Switzerland. The 'neutrality' was discovered to be a farce and the 'rules based order' discovered to be able to change its rules whenever, however it suit its rule-makers.
The result is everyone applying to BRICS membership or observer status...
Huh? Its an actual organization with actual rules and actual institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS
Brazil's ex president Rousseff has been elected the president of the bank of that non-existing organization.
https://brazilian.report/liveblog/2023/03/24/dilma-rousseff-...
How does one get elected to be the president of the bank of something that is 'not real'...
> BRICS members don't even vote in each other's favor in the UN. Russia has received zero meaningful assistance from them during the war in Ukraine.
False. And even if true, that wouldnt change the existence of the actual organization, its rules, and the arrangements in between countries.
What happens in the UN is mostly PR. Brazil voted to condemn the war in Ukraine because the left-wing segment that Lula and his crowd belongs to condemns all wars, and yet it voted in favor of the Nord Stream investigation.
> India and China are enemies, they keep having border skirmishes. South Africa is a failed state and it has negligible influence on the world stage. Brazil is one of the reasons why the term "middle-income trap" was devised......It's entirely possible that in the future a real anti-western bloc will emerge. But it isn't BRICS
This feels like a lot of reality-denial. Or copium at best...
Yep. They couldnt put the backdoors through the 'we are fighting pedophilia' excuse. Now they are using Tiktok...
How is that any different from the US itself. People seem to have forgotten the WMD lie...
So calling it 'acting stupid' totally negates the stranglehold that Paypal and Stripe have on a majority of online commerce and payments and totally liberates people from their unregulated tyranny then...
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Things dont change their nature by 'rephrasing them differently'. Unregulated private tyrannies that dominate people's lives are still unregulated private tyrannies.
There is a time and place for each argument and there is a time and place for conceding the argument. This is one of them:
No one can ban anyone from crypto. If your business wallet gets stolen, you suffer some losses, but you can create a new wallet, add it as your payment option in your business or personal account at your site or wherever, and just continue your life.
With these unregulated private tyrannies, you cant.
> planet destroying ponzi.
2010s called. They want their proof of work back. What decade are you living in. Dont keep repeating invalidated arguments. That looks like religious zealotry.
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In any case, Yuan is the new foreign currency. And China has, well, all of it...
The moment Hetzner starts providing managed DBs or managed kubernetes, they will wipe the floor with all the big 3...
Yeah, and that's a Japanese institution not British. Its incorrigible like the BBC...
> Suggesting that the values coming from the UK are fake is an extraordinary claim
Its as extraordinary as other claims like Iraqi WMDs or the GDP numbers generated from 'homeowners creating and using rent services'.
The trust of Brits in their institutions is amazing.
> Groceries were rationed because UK supermarkets refused to buy them at spot-prices
Surely not because of Brexit... It has to be something else.
Even we gloss over it and trust the UK's own numbers, the Eu inflation in February would have been driven by mostly Germany with ~24% inflation compared to the ~10% most of the major countries have.
...
However it still does not make any difference since prices are irrelevant if there simply arent groceries and they are being rationed. That was the point.
So, the corporations were bamboozling entire planet and sucking it dry during the pandemic, but they are not doing it now...
> before the price surges really began
What does even 'really' mean. 36% is not 'really', but some other percentage is? Doesnt make sense.
> Nestle
https://www.mashed.com/1117426/popular-food-companies-that-r...
There are heaps of other companies other than Nestle. One company doesnt make an argument.
> But it’s typical for leftists to cherry-pick their data and only read news sources that confirm their bias
Its not 'leftists' cherry-picking data. Its those who use vague words like 'price increases REALLY starting' - whatever that means - even as the very capitalist publications of the most capitalist corporations on the planet say that food corporations profited off of pandemic and the war.
So its basically the words of CNBC, Oxfam etc versus your 'really' theory.
> I hope you are even more angry with me now. :-p
I didnt notice that you were disingenous debater. I do now. It explains your absurd arguments, and the 'really' theory of price increases. I'll act accordingly and avoid losing time discussing with you.
The economic illiteracy would be not being aware that all those megacorps are posting record profits and trying to gloss it over with made-up theories of your own and accusing an entire continent of people with economic illiteracy in the process:
https://theconversation.com/food-giants-reap-enormous-profit...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-prof...
If their costs were rising more than their revenue, they wouldnt post record profits. They are posting record profits. You are simply wrong. You just !made up! a theory to avoid the actual reality.
Why have you made such a blunt, exaggerated, false statement like 'European economic illiteracy' without doing so much as a google search. Do you know how that made you look...
The difference apparently is in how much the inflation affects different basket items. Like food.
> Deprioritised
Yeah, that means 'unable' when there is a shortage like how there is just now.
> A lot of people take the Daily Mail seriously (including other news outlets too) when they say stuff like we can't get tomatoes
CNBC is not daily mail.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/europe_inflation_rate
> The UK is absolutely capable of tapping EU supply,
I don't understand what are you trying to falsify. CNBC or their news about the UK not being able to import as it used to from the Eu.
"...James Walton, chief economist at the Institute of Grocery Distribution, told CNBC: “The U.K. is highly reliant on imports of fresh produce at all times of year, especially in winter — the EU accounts for much of this import volume. If there are shortfalls in production in the EU, then it would make sense that EU producers would serve their local demand first. This leaves less available for export to the U.K...”"
Having a 'free' trade deal does not mean that you will get priority over the domestic buyer as an outsider.
> I'm eating Spanish cherry tomatoes as I type
Your personal experience does not constitute a statistic.