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Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#211

Post by wallace_f »

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #194
wallace_f wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. They're just not on the robber barron level of the commercial banks, which steal truly unholy amounts of money from American citizens. Reasonable people have put the cost of the financial crisis at 6-30 trillion, or more (6 being the lower bound of the Fed's very own estimate). The higher figure is $93,000/per citizen, and it very will could be more than that.(1) That is only the start of the story. Ever won…

There are tons of nutballs who are convinced the fed is behind every bad thing. Where's the evidence that they are bad? I believe they are like wall street, insulated from normal life via controlling the money supply, and their goals might not help most people, just 'keep the economy going and growing' helps wallstreet more than main street. If they were truly bad, I'd hear about it from respectable liberal and conse…

Remember when Obama was one of the few "respectable" reps to vote against the Iraq War?

Maybe that is not the best criteria, but anyways a lot of respectable figures have spoken out against the Fed, from Nobel Prize winner Friedman, to Aaron Swarz, to Sanders, JFK, Ron Paul, Grieder, etc.

Let me ask you something. So we know the financial crisis cost between 6-30 trillion, or more, so up to $100,00+ per every citizen in the US. The Fed's balance sheet ballooned to over 4 trillion.

So when the Fed turns on its printing press and buys assets, where do you think that Store of Value they are exchanging comes from? Do you think Bernenke and Yellen have pixie dust that magically assembles into productive goods or services? No, the value comes from hard working Americans who actually create value. If no one produced anything of value and exchanged dollars for it, the currency would no longer fulfil the technical requirement that money be, in part, a Store of Value.

So since we dont believe Fed Chairman have magical powers, this value the Fed is capturing must come from somewhere. And it comes from devaluing our currency. They're very simply dilluting (stealing) value from everyone who has dollars.

It is very literally the greatest heist in the history of the world, and it is right there, out in the open. Just like tragedies in history were tolerated by people of their time to the bemusement of us today, so have we tolerated this for some unholy reason.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#212

Post by mythrwy »

bogomipz wrote: post #206
mythrwy wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You don't seem to understand how the news media actually works. The New York Times is paid for by advertisements and subscriptions.... Doesn't take money from special interest.." No I understand very well. Perhaps it is you who have not been paying attention. https://medium.com/@Cernovich/pesos-for-play-how-a-mexican-r... I don't disagree with much of the rest of your post. The same protections that apply to newspap…

>"No I understand very well. Perhaps it is you who have not been paying attention." It doesn't sound like you understand what you are talking about at all honestly. Carlos Slim is just an investor who bought publicly traded stock class A NYT Stock. The New York Times has a dual sock structure and class A has no voting right. Carlos Slim also doesn't have a seat on the board of directors either. Your assertion the NYT…

"It doesn't sound like you understand what you are talking about at all honestly."

And to me it sounds like you just want to argue while deliberately (or otherwise) missing the substance of the point. May I suggest while doing so that you drop the rudeness? It does you no favors and appears to be somewhat of a pattern. If you can't discuss without calling others stupid maybe you shouldn't be discussing until you are in the right frame of mind.

I'm well aware Carlos Slim is an investor. Thank you for the history lesson, you are very good at looking things up. This in no way negates my original point which you either are ignoring or fail to grasp. In which case I apologize for my failure of communication.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#213

Post by wallace_f »

flour_power wrote: post #200
wallace_f wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. They're just not on the robber barron level of the commercial banks, which steal truly unholy amounts of money from American citizens. Reasonable people have put the cost of the financial crisis at 6-30 trillion, or more (6 being the lower bound of the Fed's very own estimate). The higher figure is $93,000/per citizen, and it very will could be more than that.(1) That is only the start of the story. Ever won…

> Thanks to High Priest of the Harvard-Wall Street Order, Gregory Mankiw, the Fed even has an influential academic paper that craftily provides a logical dogma to minimize theft through seignorage, and how muxh the public really is being taken for. source?

THE OPTIMAL COLLECTION OF SEIGNIORAGE ... - Harvard University, Mankiw and Miron, 1987

There are pdfs available online

This paper is just epic bullshit that defends the Fed's existence.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#214

Post by dredmorbius »

PhisherPrice wrote: post #30

The only purpose of a public company is to maximize profits for the shareholders. That means they don't care about your best interests at all.

False.

That's a myth promulgated by Milton Friedman. Jack Welch of GE now calls it the stupidest idea ever. See also Lynn Stout:

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#215

Post by dredmorbius »

vog wrote: post #209
KirinDave wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Because that is a necessary condition (although not sufficient)." I think it's at best a loose correlation. And as an example: the CFPB doesn't offer pay-to-play but does a good job of its work.

Pardon my lack of knowledge, but what do you mean by "CFPB"?

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#216

Post by dredmorbius »

dragontamer wrote: post #5
wil421 wrote: post #4

If you aren’t paying for the service then the company is certainly not your friend. Even when you paying I would still be cautious. In the beginning, FB was a great way to connect and the community seemed more friendly and united. Now it’s used as a political divider and a cesspool of mis-information. NextDoor has been a positive experience for me but I can see it going they way of FB. Depends on your neighbors I gue…

> Now it’s used as a political divider and a cesspool of mis-information. As a longtime user of the internet, from the 90s days of Usenet, to Gamefaqs LUEsers, to Something Awful, to Slashdot, to 4chan and to Reddit... public discussion has always been a political divider and a cesspool of misinformation. I'm not old enough to comment about the "early web" or the days before the "Eternal September". But my understand…

The big difference was that the damage was largely limted to those forums. There simply wasn't a critical mass of people worth influencing online, and mass culture lay elsewhere.

The hot jokes of the day turned up amongst Wall Street traders, probably spread by phone. Not Internet forums such as Reddit, 4chan, or Facebook. (You'd find occasional mentions of this in various news stories of the time.)

What's changed now is that the heart of media is online, and there are people who've realised this and are trying very hard to influence it. The period while different factions are sorting out what works, and various gatekeepers, including Google, Factbook, Twitter, and even, yes, our own Hacker News, sort out what their power and responsibility are, is going to be fairly chaotic (and has been). Much as in earlier periods of media transition: printing press, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, radio, cinema, television, talk radio, cable.

Almost every period of new-media introduction has seen tremendous social and political upheaval. Many quite violent.

w W 3 #

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#217

Post by dredmorbius »

losvedir wrote: post #37
baron816 wrote: post #8

I'm no fan of Facebook, but I don't get why they're to blame for Russia's meddling in the election. It's hard to believe that they were aware of what was going on and allowed it to continue because they were making money off of it. The money they were getting was a pittance, all things considered.

Even if they knew, I'm still not totally clear on what's wrong with running those ads. It seems everyone has such a low opinion of everyone else these days. I really wish the outcome of learning that Russians bought ads on facebook was a cultural antibody to not believe ads, not a call to ever more closely regulate what stuff people should see.

It's illegal.

https://www.fec.gov/updates/foreign-nationals/

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#218

Post by dredmorbius »

WalterBright wrote: post #177
aaroninsf wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The generalized case is both obviously the case, and not an examined axiom in contemporary politics: corporations operating without a value function that incorporates the public good and the commons, are not your friend. Well, unless 'you' are one of the very few (statistically speaking) benefiting. It's neither impossible nor unreasonable to constrain organizational behavior to incorporate collective goals. It's jus…

> a value function that incorporates the public good and the commons That would be providing a product that people are freely willing to pay for.

Heroin?

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#219

Post by Scea91 »

rublev wrote: post #168
Hextinium wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op but there are people who I like to communicate with on Facebook and Snapchat and the like who if I got off that platform I would never see again because that is their primary platform for communication. I have tried to lose these applications for a week or month at a time and I do miss out on the latest happenings with them. I have tried to switch them to different services but for one reason or another they d…

I just drop those people. Why should my mental health suffer just to leech off someone? They should be willing to reciprocate. I don't see it as a switching cost. Well I do, but only in the beginning. You switch the thing on and you are exposed to X more people. Then it seems like switching it off you're losing those people, but you're probably just going back to your original state. >Commonly this is the switching c…

You realise that it is symmetric? That it can be said that YOU value the friendship so little that YOU can't be bothered to use an app (facebook)?

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#220

Post by dclowd9901 »

rublev wrote: post #146
dclowd9901 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms. We don't always get to choose our battles, and this is one I won't win. And trying, in earnest, to avoid putting yourself on a stage is a far cry from publishing posts incessantly, looking to be a social media celebrity of some kind.

>This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms. Must maintain? With who? Do you use FB to exclusively chat to your wife and boss or something? Will the stasi knock at your door for not checking in with Lord Zuckerberg every 5 minutes? I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform…

I suppose I can get real with you to make my point. My daughter lives in another state, and her mother's platform of choice is Facebook. I don't get to see her but once every couple weeks, so, if I want to regularly see what my daughter is up to (in a day-to-day sense vs. in a formal sense, like when I Facetime her daily), I _have_ to be on Facebook.

I realize such a situation is an outlier, but you must realize that if you could not conceive of this, there's probably many more situations you could not conceive of. For better or worse, things like Facebook are now a staple in our lives. If it means being able to follow along with my daughter's growing up, I'll subscribe to whatever the hell social network she's on.

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