Earlier quoted context omitted.
laws are for the poor
Laws are for the poorly connected. But you'll get more internet virtue points phrasing it your way.
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Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
411–420 of 428 posts
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Vote with your wallet" might as well be "stop thinking about it", especially when it comes to a niche site like Hacker News.
"Vote with your wallet" is crony capitalist-speak for don't complain to the government to protect your consumer rights and / or create a fair market for small businesses too.
don't vote in the politicians that have been enabling this for the last 20 years
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Laws are for the poorly connected. But you'll get more internet virtue points phrasing it your way.
"Yeah, one of those days, I was smoking a joint after leaving my shift as a janitor in a hospital and the police took me. If I hadn't called my friends Buffet and Elison to help me, probably I would be still stuck in jail." - Nobody, ever. Being poor and poorly connected, in the real world, are basically the same thing.
Yes, but poorly connected is a superset of being poor.
One could not be poor but still be poorly connected
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#414What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do? Individually we can use browsers like firefox or brave and probably donate time or money to them, but I think it's not enough. I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses, but probably the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market. Is this possible? Has a…
Vote for better politicians that are not bought and paid for. Donate to them too. Also, don’t work for them.
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google doesn't sell scooters and food delivery -- other companies do, and advertise about that via Google. Google's ads service is something those companies (the advertisers) want. And at the same time, Google has been acting unethically.
Not sure what you are trying to tell me.
We agree that much of what Google does is bad, but your solution both doesn't seem like it gets to the core of the issue, and moreover I can't actually think of a company that meets your threshold - it would be stupid for a company to produce a product that nobody wants.
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Laws are for the poorly connected. But you'll get more internet virtue points phrasing it your way.
"Yeah, one of those days, I was smoking a joint after leaving my shift as a janitor in a hospital and the police took me. If I hadn't called my friends Buffet and Elison to help me, probably I would be still stuck in jail." - Nobody, ever. Being poor and poorly connected, in the real world, are basically the same thing.
How about this one.
>"Yeah, one of those days, I was smoking a joint after leaving my shift as a janitor in a hospital and the police took me. If I hadn't called my cousin Billy in the police department and had him vouch for my good character I would be out bail money and a fat fine" - tons of people with LEO connections
The fact that this wasn't obvious says a lot about HN's interactions with government.
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Vote with your wallet" is crony capitalist-speak for don't complain to the government to protect your consumer rights and / or create a fair market for small businesses too.
don't vote in the politicians that have been enabling this for the last 20 years
the number of software engineers is far below any meaningful voting number.
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what you are trying to tell me.
We agree that much of what Google does is bad, but your solution both doesn't seem like it gets to the core of the issue, and moreover I can't actually think of a company that meets your threshold - it would be stupid for a company to produce a product that nobody wants.
I disagree. Production is cheap, more so for digital services, you can very well make shit nobody wants and then use advertising and marketing to produce demand.
And of course ‘wanting’ is ambiguous. There is a difference between impulsive desire and a cold-headed need. Heroin users also “want” the drug; gambling addicts “want” the gems in the f2p game’s store; people “want” the fantasy of beauty and success on social media, or fast-fashion’s first impression. People “want” sugar, love, attention, pleasure and safety/security in a way that’s disconnected to their modern actual needs. We are wired a certain way, adapted to natural scarcity and threat, and marketing and sales know this.
The abstraction of rational actors and beneficial, self-regulatory markets are evidently wrong for the most part, as we do know today. Everyone who says otherwise is driven by dogma and ideology, not scientific insights and recognition of our past’s experiments. Advertisement itself should make people question their ideas about the economy.
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of rhetoric is problematically naive. Advertising effectiveness is often vague, but it also works well in many circumstances. It takes a certain kind of hubris to suggest that all these companies spending $500B on advertising have no idea what they are doing, and that if only they listened to HN/Reddit they could save so much money and make the world a better place. The issue here is to what extent G has ma…
In every discussion about advertising you typically get a comment similar near the top that tells us that advertising never actually works. For a lot of us working in a related field, we know it to be false, there’s plenty of online business that rely on online ads and are profitable. Yes they are invasive to your privacy. Yes some of them fake their effectiveness. Yes to all of that. But saying that advertising onli…
But saying that advertising online doesn’t work at all ...
Ok, so I guess it's a good thing that no one actually said that.
Re: Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course this exists, it is called socialism. But our society is so deep into consumerist propaganda that it has lost the ways to evaluate anything that doesn't presume capitalism.
I suspect that worshiping "The Rule of Law" as an unadulterated good is responsible for a lot of the corporate overreach we observe in the past few decades. When we construct a social fiction that state is just one among many actors, and must be bound by rigid rules and justify its actions, that Bermuda is basically an equal partner to the US, it just naturally leads other entities to malignant behavior Of course the…
While I appreciate the point you're making, and don't completely disagree, I think you make a faulty assumption about our collective ability to find a suitable sovereign and that person's ability to resist the very same forces that lead to the inevitablity of corporate overreach. Having a single person with that much power was the core reason historic Americans revolted from the crown, and I don't think they were wrong
Again, I appreciate your statement of the problem. But I'm scared of your hypothetical solution.