Facebook had the same kind of noble mission Google once had. Google's mission was to make information universally accessible. Facebook's was to connect people.
There are lots of reasons FB beat MySpace. MySpace was really a different product. It was focused on your homepage, really. Facebook was one of the first to introduce an algorithmic feed. I would also disagree that people were "tricked" into using their real names. This greatly helped with discoverability and it's actually what most people want.
As for Facebook scraping third-party sites... citation needed. I mean this was great for Facebook's advertising business but it's really no different to the DoubleClick (and ultimately Google) pixel, which is to say it's a high-level profile of pages you visit (that have the pixel).
As for the games, Facebook didn't kill those. Mobile did. And I'm sorry, but nothing will make me feel sorry for Mark Pincus and Zynga [1].
It is insufficient to make a prediction like 50-50 in a US election unless you also can explain turnout. Anyone can throw out numbers like "51-49" or "55-45" but how did you get to those numbers? How are different demographics voting? How is there turnout changing? I've seen people laud their own accuracy in 2020 while being off by about 30 million in predicted turnout.
The way different demographics vote in US elections doesn't change much from election to election. What does change is turnout and turnout is a function of many things: enthusiasm for the candidate, voter suppression, ease of access to voting and so on.
2020 was unprecedented because of the pandemic. We greatly expanded early voting and mail-in ballots, which greatly increased participation.
A perfect example of this is Arizona. In 2020, Native Americans were crucial to flipping the state to Biden. Arizona state lawmakers responded to this by essentially punishing them and making it way more difficult to vote. Voter ID requirements, birth certificates and even having a physical address are all impediments to people who were born on and/or reside on reservations. There were fewer voting places and voting options. A rural voting place might randomly close early too after being an hours long drive.
Some looked at this and said Native Americans in Arizona swung hard to Trump. No, they were simply largely prevented from voting such that the only Native Americans who could reliably vote were more affluent and thus more likely to be Trump voters.
My point is: what polling model captured this prior to the 2024 election? I guarantee you it's none.
What really happened in 2024 was:
1. Biden voters swung to the couch in the millions;
2. Trump basically didn't lose white women, despite the abortion issue; and
3. Trump activated a previously low-propensity voter demographic: angry, young, terminally online white males, basically the Andrew Tate and 4chan crowd.
Any model has a difficulty with low-propensity demographics. Did any model capture this? I think it only started to become apparent with early voting exit polls.
I don't think the 2024 polls were particularly accurate. I do think they threw their hands up and simply converged to 50-50. Small differences in turnout predictions for different demographics can massively impact the result.
Here's an example of how broken the discourse is over immigration and how the media has grossly failed with their responsibility in reporting something remotely factual.
The majority of undocumented migrants aren't border crosses. They're visa overstayers [1].
And of course the "migrant crime" hysteria is completely made up. Despite there being at least 10 million undocumented migrants, the number of murders commited by both documented and undocumented migrants in 2024 was 29 [2]. Not 29,000. TWENTY NINE. That's a per-capita crime rate significantly lower than the American population.
[2] Is an incorrect interpretation. There is no nationwide data on murders by illegal immigrants, only some states like Texas collect this. CPB does not deport many murderers because they are serving prison sentences in the US. In 2022 there were 67 Texas murders by illegal immigrants, more than the supposed CPB FY22 number just in one state.
The per capita trend is still directionally the same as your claim in Texas.
The problem with illegal immigrant murders is there is a legal and proportional way to prevent all of them - don't let them in the first place. This isn't so easy for other murderers.
This should be your daily reminder that every famine is political, meaning it is the result of one group of people willing to starve another group of people. In this case, the British starved the Irish.
This whole thing was exacerbated by relatively few landholders and a system of rent-seeking landlords that only worked when there was a good potato crop so when that failed, the English remained fed, the land tenants could no longer produce enough to eat and the Irish starved.
The world now produces an excess of food yet millions die of famine every year. We are quite deliberately letting people starve while food rots.
The world produces excess of food but the distribution costs are very high for example. Would you go into debt sending food to another country or are you relying on the government to bear the burden of that through taxes? There’s a secondary factor which is that we’ve learned through efforts in the 80s that charity breeds dependence and the food aid drives often had a paradoxical effect of preventing those countries from building up their own local farm base which is more harmful long term for everyone involved. I don’t think it’s quite clear and dry as you paint it and that every famine is the result of one group intentionally trying to starve another.
Well, that's the thing, right? If we were thinking about humanity as a global populace, the second (bear the burden of that through taxes) would be the obvious answer, for precisely the same reason Americans in Florida pay taxes into a FEMA system to address wildfires in California, even if they never visit California. Besides ideological reasons, there's also the practical that that same FEMA is going to help Florida the next time it's hurricane season.
The concern about suppressing local agriculture is relevant (although I do wonder if one can make the same argument regarding FEMA and "suppressing local blue-tarp manufacturing"). But if food rots while people starve, the taxes probably aren't high enough. We've recognized (in the US, at least) the role of government in distribution and management of distribution policy since at least the Great Depression.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
While the Ireland famine was a political act, the main driver of most other famines in modern times tends to be economical rather than political which is the rebuttal I’m making to the claim that ever famine is political.
For the couple of remaining places with hunger, the causes are political as you say. But the rest of the world is in most cases not "letting it" happen. We're sending food and aid, sometimes at risk to the aid workers delivering the food.
You can make the case for that, but a disorderly transition to that kind of system will ensure that some people starve to death before the new system is in place.
I don't have any of the purported 'savings' in my pocket right now and I don't suppose I'll see them any time soon, so I don't have any extra money. Quite the contrary, what with the stock market tanking.
well, that didn't work (waiting for audits and transparency) for 20+ years, so we're doing it this way now. Donate to causes you believe in, don't rely on the government to do good. do it yourself.
Depends who "we" are in this context of course, but there's a middle eastern country whom the USA shower with military aid, that is committing a genocide and using starvation as a weapon, and the US is absolutely letting, even encouraging that to happen.
Which is why most non-failed countries try to self-sustain a large amount of their food requirements and agriculture is subsidized and protected. But it also means food export isn't a big business.
Let's talk about the way in which the West uses the IMF and World Bank to create economic crises and famine. Specifically, let's talk about Somalia. The playbook is basically this:
1. A country borrows money for some project. There's often corruption involved here (as the leaders siphon off work to make themselves rich);
2. The IMF imposes conditions on those loans. These includes financializing the food supply. Typically, what might've been a self-sufficient agricultural sector tends to get banned from producing food for themselves. Instead they have to produce export crops and buy food from, surprise surprise, Western nations. This tends to lead to a drop in food prices that means farmers can no longer support themselves. They then often become destitute and move to cities to find work;
3. If the loan is for an infrastructure project, it's usually Western companies doing it so the US is funding the IMF to give money to Western companies, basically;
4. As inevitably happens, the currency ends up tanking. The foreign food that decimated local production is now much more expensive in local terms. The government's ability to service the debt also gets savaged;
5. The IMF steps in with "structural programs" (including those like the financialization of agriculture) to take money out of the government to service IMF debt, which has similar devastating effects "austerity" measures do in Western countries;
6. The country is now trapped in debt, so much so that some call this "debt colonialism".
This has happened to Haiti and other countries.
The point is that Western interference most often comes with destroying agricultural self-sufficiency, creating famine.
They all subside agriculture and do seek ability to produce necessary food. That does not excludes trade or import - you can live without bananas and oranges if you can't produce them. You needs to produce calories in some form.
I've always seen it as a logistical problem. With the Irish famine the British had a sophisticated world spanning logistical system that deliberately de-prioritized the Irish, even during an active famine that was a consequence of their own design. It's hard not to point fingers here when the culprit is obvious.
With modern famines it becomes more nuanced though imo. The logistical systems are not already in place like with Ireland, they are often built and sustained reactively, like a bridge during a storm. Some never "turn off" properly and undercut local farmers creating a stronger potential for future famines in the region. The solution isn't just allowing everyone to starve of course, but doing a better job at the follow-up work.
I'm not saying this is some impossible problem, just that it's a delicate one despite best intentions. Food grown in abundance in one region of the world might be rotting by the time it arrives where it's needed. While we have systems through the UN and non profits for this I still think we could do a lot better.
They used that logistics system to export most of the food that Ireland produced as they were growing more food than they needed, not even counting potatoes. But the English would pay more, so another great free market experiment.
All famines are caused by natural disasters. What makes them political is that people die when their ability to overcome natural disasters is restricted or removed.
E.g. for the Irish Famine, the natural disaster was the outbreak of the phytophthora infestans disease affecting potato crops - the outbreak spread from North America across Europe, affecting Belgium, Netherlands, France & the UK. The cause of death in Ireland was the English exporting all food produced in Ireland that wasn't potatoes. An interestingly relevant historical record here is the Australian Convict Collection showing the number of Irish convicts sent to Australia & Tasmania for stealing food during the famine years.
So far, if it's lasted long enough to be considered a famine, it's political. Yes, there's temporary and severe interruptions due to natural disasters, but if the political will is there, resources would be able to arrive anywhere in the world in the matter of days.
Modern famines, sure. But I think that's a relatively recent development. It also isn't guaranteed. A sufficiently large volcanic eruption could severely impact agriculture the world over.
I have no idea how a for-profit company can exist that solely produces a browser.
There's only one model that can work long-term here: collective ownership. The closest model is probably the Wikimedia Foundation. Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation are here, obviously, but they've tried to act like a corporation with rising costs and lower earnings going over years. The money Google pays them is basically poison.
Linux has survived and thrived with something analagous to this but it's also dependent to an unsettling degree on one person (Linus Torvalds). I realize his power has decentralized over the years (intentionally, by Linus) but there's still the constnat risk of a schism.
Google and Chrome is just one small part of the problem. Apple's Safari monopoly on iOS is also a problem. Browsers really need to be a common good.
I suspect none of this will happen. Even though these efforts began in the Biden administration, I suspect this will now become a shakedown. This administration will look to Google to fall in line and kiss the ring. That is now the cost of doing business.
The big question is, would it keep that market share without Google. The big selling point of Google Chrome is the seamless integration with all the other Google services.
> The big selling point of Google Chrome is the seamless integration with all the other Google services.
People keep saying this, but everybody I have spoken to dont care about that. They are just used to pressing the coloured circle icon to get on the internet. That muscle memory and brand recognition will be around for many years to come.
That share will plummet to near 0% the moment it is transferred because people will just switch to Chromium.
The only difference between Chrome without Google and Chromium is the name and logo. You lose all integration with Google services like sync, suggestions, etc.
You'd be stuck with only the captives that can't switch because they're using older appliances with Chrome baked in.
People only know the name and logo, they dont care whos behind it.
99% of users just click that little coloured circle to open 'the internet', they know nothing past that. They will continue to download Chrome for many years to come.
The market share will drop, but slowly and over decades. That will give some greedy company plenty of time to milk it for all its worth.
What's frustrating to me is how predictable all this is if you analyze the world with a materialist understanding.
To boil it down, the most dominant philosophy, whether peole know it or not, is idealism. In idealism, people, nations, corporations, etc have some inherent quality beyond their physical make up. It's almost spiritual in that way. Even the concept of a soul is an idealist position. It's largely a circular argument that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
So, the USA on the world stage is the good guy because we are the good guys, regardless of our actions or the consequences thereof. So an awful lot of effort is spent to label certain actors as "good" or "bad" to suit some objective. Superhero movies and a perfect example of idealism and it's no coincidence that they've had a renaissance since 9/11.
Materialism is simply the view that the physical world is all there is. The consequence of this is that we affect the material world and it affects us. There are no inherent qualities like being "good" or "bad". Instead, those are simply labels you apply to the actions of an entity.
My point here is that for years Google pushed this good guy narrative (ie "don't be evil") but any materialist understands that Google is a corporation so ultimately will act like any other corporation.
Google makes money selling ads. Ad blockers affect Google's bottom line. The relentless pursuit of increasing profits means fighting ad blockers was always an inevitability. Nobody should be surprised by that.
Now some will point to Google's control of Chrome as an antitrust issue and it probably is but that misses the point. A corporation that solely owns Chrome will ultimately act in a user-hostile way too because that's what corporations do.
The only long-term successful model for something like Chrome is to be something like the Wikimedia Foundation. The profit motive will always ultimately destroy it otherwise. If you can even find a business model for a browser, which I have serious doubts about.
A materialist knows all this because of how the workers relate to the means of production. A collective (which Wikimedia Foundation is, basically) is where the workers own the means of production. A corporation introduces capital owners whose interests are in direct opposition to that of the users.
We see this all the time. There is some shock or reduction to supply and the price goes up but it always goes up way more than the supply change would necessarily warrant. Then it takes forever to return to normal (if it ever does).
Interestingly, in the early weeks of the Kamala Harris campaign last year, she actually advocated to fighting or stopping "price gouging", something that was wildly popular: 66% of respondents on a Harris Poll approved [1]. After bringing on her brother-in-law and the former Biden campaign staff however, she never mentioned it again because Wall Street didn't like it.
Now you will find all sorts of articles online from serious outlets about how price gouging won't work and they'll simply put a bullhorn in front of economists who say that but there is precedent, namely when Nixon put in a freeze on prices and wages [2].
Now one can agree or disagree with such a policy, whether it's a long term fix or not and so on but we can still say the following:
1. There is absolutely opportunistic price gouging going on, way more than the avian flu would otherwise warrant. This is true for so many things beyond eggs; and
2. Life is becoming unaffordable, especially with housing and food. Ordinary people feel this. Politicians who address those issues will resonate with voters; and
3. Gutting the executive branch, which is currently going on, will only make this worse as there will be even less enforcement of price-fixing than there currently is.
Yes, and when toilet paper sold out in the pandemic it should have been priced higher. Yeah it sucks to pay more but it also deters hoarding which was a huge contributor to the problem.
And those people who scalped toilet paper and sanitizer....their motivations may be scammy, but they were correcting a market that wasn't correcting itself.
Yeah it would suck for sanitizer to cost 10x as much, but that's the only thing that's going to make people ration it like they should.
Yes, agreed, the agencies were put in place by executive order and they're being gutted. However, that doesn't mean the executive branch is being gutted. Gutted means "to destroy the essential power or effectiveness of". Maybe there's confusion about the word "gutted"?
Indeed the power and effective of agencies is being dramatically reduced. I believe this is the point that was trying to be made.
However, rulings like Trump v. United States vastly expand the power of the executive branch. Even if you're one of those people who believes in Unitary Executive Theory, prior to Trump v. United States, those powers were hypothetical. Hence the need for a ruling. It's to be seen whether a Unitary Executive would be more effective.
Don't work to do what? If you think layoffs are about efficiency or saving the company, at least in tech you couldn't be more wrong. Companies like Meta and Google have done multiple rounds of layoffs despite being insanely profitable and never taking a loss.
The real purpose of layoffs is to get people to do more work for the same or less money (by firing people and distributing their responsibilities to those who remain) and to suppress wages because nobody is asking for raises when they fear for their jobs.
Big Tech is really out of ways to grow their business. The only way they can keep growing profits is by cutting costs and the biggest cost is labor. It's really that simple.
I distinctly remember the lead up to the 2016 election. I remember having one conversation with a friend who is relatively affluent. Not independently wealthy but a top 1% earner. I had been watching Bernie gain steam and I brought this up in the context of how unhappy with the status quo people seemed to be.
This immediately got dismissed. "Everything is fine". It is a mistake to paint all Trump voters as just being proto-fascists (which the majority are). Many ended up there because they desperately wanted change and establishment candidates were just offering more of the same. Hilary absolutely was a "more of the same" candidate. And the entire GOP primary field (21 at one point) were "more of the same". That's why Trump won the primary. That, combined with Hilary's massive negatives and her generally being a terrible candidate, were why Trump won in the first place.
2020 was an anomaly in many ways. We had Covid lockdowns and were coming off 4 years of Trump chaos. Because of the lockdown, voting was made substantially easier with early voting and mail-in ballots. The more people vote, the more Democrats win. It's why voter suppression is a key part of the Republican platform (make no mistake, "voter ID" is simply voter suppression). Were it not for the pandemic, I very much suspect Trump would've won re-election. Biden was a terrible candidate and never should've been the nominee. Clyburn basically handed him the nomination (in South Carolina) and Warren stayed in long enough to split Bernie's vote, the second time the DNC had actively sabotaged Bernie's campaign.
Remember in 2020, Bernie had Joe Rogan's endorsement.
The Democrats are really just Republican Lite now. Kamala's immigration plan was Trump's 2020 immigration plan. Kamala abandoned opposition to the death penalty from the party platform and called for the most "lethal" military. She courted never Trumpers like Liz Cheney. Like seriously, who was that for? She refused to separate herself from Biden on any issue despite his historic unpopularity. And of course, she refused to deviate from the deeply unpopular position on Israel-Gaza. In short, she offered the voters absolutely nothing.
In this election, progressive voter initiatives outperformed the Democratic party by a massive margin. For example, minimum wage increases passed in Missouri, a state Trump won by 22. Trump won Florida by 14 yet recreational cannabis and abortion protection got 55-59% of the vote (unfortunately, you need 60% to pass in Florida).
The Democratic Party exists to actively sabotage any progressive momentum. We didn't get a convention primary after Biden withdrew because the DNC was scared a progressive candidate would win. They stuck us with Kamala to avoid that.
My point here is that Trump doesn't have and has never had a majority. He only won each time because there was effectively zero opposition. A chunk of Trump's base are simply people desperate for change. At least Trump lied to them and gave them something to vote for. Democrats wouldn't even lie to them and tell them they were going to fix housing and egg prices and give them healthcare.
This is an excellent summary. The core problem that has led us to this point. I wish there was an easier way to explain the entire context to my European and Non-American friends but I try my best.
I have often felt that the only way to break this cycle is to get more non-voters to join the fray. There are enough people totally checked out but get a bunch of them and you can make up for the centrist dems. Its gotta be a celebrity that has any chance of ramming through the Democratic primary just like Trump did. AOC isn't going to cut it. If we make it to 2028, We need a superstar.
This is the real bisector. If one party gets to use magic and capture the stupid vote, what's the other party supposed to do? Lie more? Lie less? As long as magic appeals to stupid people, we're screwed.
The real underlying problem is the collapse of the consensus of the elites, projected through corporate media. Murdoch saw a financial opportunity to break from this model, and social media companies followed with this as their only business model. Murdoch and Zuckerberg make money spreading magic which appeals to stupid people who vote in deranged morons. There is no effective feedback mechanism because not enough voters have the mental skills to evaluate the consequences of their actions. Or perhaps they just like seeing chaos and destruction. Rinse repeat.
The problem is how AI is and will be used and how unaccountable it is.
An Ai scans job applicants. Is it biased? Is it conforming with legal requirements? A person's bias can be an issue in a lawsuit. AIs are a much more difficult target, at least for now. This is why companies like them.
You know what the impact will be? More scandals like Hertz falsely reporting people to the police for stealing cars [1].
AI will make financial and lending decisions that could easily become redlining 2.0.
Companies are so desperate to eliminate labor. People have rights. They need to be paid. They can strike.
If the AI purveyors fulfil their dream, companies will be automated but nobody will have any money because nobody has any jobs anymore.
There are lots of reasons FB beat MySpace. MySpace was really a different product. It was focused on your homepage, really. Facebook was one of the first to introduce an algorithmic feed. I would also disagree that people were "tricked" into using their real names. This greatly helped with discoverability and it's actually what most people want.
As for Facebook scraping third-party sites... citation needed. I mean this was great for Facebook's advertising business but it's really no different to the DoubleClick (and ultimately Google) pixel, which is to say it's a high-level profile of pages you visit (that have the pixel).
As for the games, Facebook didn't kill those. Mobile did. And I'm sorry, but nothing will make me feel sorry for Mark Pincus and Zynga [1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218774
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