Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

If Rice ran for president, I wouldn't vote for her. But I don't think supporting dropbox is helping or hurting the bad things she MAY have contributed to. They make a good product, and i'll continue using it.

I think the proper way to deal with the things she is accused of having done is via court. If it is believed she committed war crimes, then accuse her of it.

"I don't want spend time setting up my own servers, I don't want to use beta software, I don't want buggy 3rd party software, I don't want to compile stuff from sources."

May we invite you, provided you just need cloud storage and not happy-clicky-gui-sharing, to try rsync.net[1] ?

Just works on any unix, including mac, with nothing to install. HN discount, as always.[2]

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [2] https://www.rsync.net/signup/signup_offer.html?code=710b50

I didn't drop it completely -- I have colleagues who use it so I still have it installed. But I won't be giving them any money, and I don't recommend it to new users. Instead if anyone ever asks I steer them toward other solutions like Google Docs, Box, Expandrive, etc.

So basically Dropbox lost me as a loyal or committed user.

The Dropbox thing really peeved me because I really liked that company. I liked what they did. I studied it. It was a great example of solving an old problem in a new way and unlocking a "sleeper market," something lots of MBA types don't get and dismiss from possibility. When someone you look up to appoints someone like Rice to their board, it's really kind of painful.

--

So why do I dislike Rice so much?

To me the Bush administration is in a category by itself -- a category that transcends any ordinary political loyalty or bias. I'm not a fan of Reagan's ideology or Bush Sr., but neither of them or their presidencies comes close. I'm not a fan of Clinton either, but again nothing he did comes close. There is no other presidential administration since maybe Nixon or Johnson that compares in terms of criminality or contempt for American democracy. There's also no administration in recent memory that has done more harm to America's standing in the world (or its economy).

What did they do? In short: they took shameless advantage of 9/11 to sell a whole host of other expensive, destructive, and deceptive policies, chief among these being the invasion of Iraq. They exploited an attack against America that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people to sell things that could not have been sold on their own merits because they were not in the best interests of the American people.

I consider that criminal, and treasonous. At least some subset of the Bush administration belongs in jail, including George Bush himself. To the extent that Rice was involved and put her professional imprimatur behind these things, she deserve at least some of the blame. Whether she belongs in prison or not, she at the very least should pay a professional penalty for willfully assisting in officially sanctioned con artistry against the American people.

The most insulting thing about Iraq is that I still don't understand why we did it. Apparently not only did they abuse 9/11 as a front to sell it, but they don't consider the American people -- who paid for Iraq and who pay their salaries -- worthy of knowing why it was done in the first place.

The only explanation we received was clear and transparent nonsense about Iraq being related to 9/11 (it wasn't) and Iraq having WMDs (they had little if anything and nothing operational). They were effectively contained, and events since then such as the rise if ISIS have shown that removing Saddam did nothing to improve the political reality of the region. In short everything the anti-Iraq war skeptics said about the Iraq war has been true, and everything the Bush administration claimed has been shown to be false.

We -- meaning the technology industry -- can do better than this. We do not need to kowtow or pay homage to scumbags from the worst presidential administration of the past 35 years. If Dropbox wanted someone to add super-high-level social proof and political connections to their board, they could have chosen among a wide array of accomplished executives and former political operatives who do not have blood and treason all over their hands.

Because so many apps assume Dropbox, I still have it. Though I moved all private docs into SpiderOak.