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Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

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Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#791

Post by anigbrowl »

akira2501 wrote: post #770
anigbrowl wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but in that case people shouldn't be allowed to put up securities they own as collateral for loans ( a popular kind of financial engineering among very wealthy people).

> shouldn't be allowed to put up securities they own as collateral for loan Is that because the people making the loan aren't sophisticated enough to price those securities correctly in this context and so are being taken advantage of? > a popular kind of financial engineering among very wealthy people To use assets without a single universal price as collateral? I think everyone does this.

No. Say you just made $1 billion in capital gains but you don't want to turn it into cash and pay taxes. So what you do is take out a loan of say $100 million against some of your securities, which gives you plenty of cash to play with. In fact you can keep doing this, just raising another loan to pay off the first one, and so on, until you die - at which point your estate can pay off the outstanding loan, and your legacy is exempt from capital gains taxes. It's called 'buy, borrow, die'.

Obviously I am over-simplifying a little, but this is a real thing. Here's a more comprehensive explanation: https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich...

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#792

Post by dredmorbius »

philipkglass wrote: post #327
feoren wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Dead] means they've been downvoted to oblivion. Moderators had nothing to do with it -- those were other users on HN. I always browse with "showdead" on and the vast majority of [Dead] posts are awful. They don't need to violate HN Guidelines, they were killed by the community. [Flagged] means it was killed by a moderator. Those are more rare. I don't agree with everything that is flagged but I think HN has a great…

Comments cannot be hidden by downvoting. Comments are marked [flagged] [dead] only after other users have clicked on the timestamp and selected "flag." I think that these things get conflated because comments that tend to attract heavy downvotes also attract flagging. The [flagged] [dead] comments are mostly (entirely?) killed by the actions of ordinary users, not moderators. Comments that are marked [dead] without t…

It's usually possible to find the banning event using the "replies" HN endpoint:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375637>

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#793

Post by refurb »

Malidir wrote: post #250
bko wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying Zuck is lying about being asked by the White House to censor content or regretting it?

Neither, he is getting onto the bandwagon that he (and his well paid pr team) know is populist. He is a billionaire who is hated, and now has changed his image entirely. Following in Elon's path. People tend not to change their colours at a later age, and he is a cutthroat business guy. Lots of ongoing commentary over the years that he really wants to be President. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/will-mark-zu…

But what he said is true? The Whitehouse pressured Facebook to remove or reduce visibility of politically inconvenient facts?

That seems like the issue here, but nobody seems to care.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#794

Post by rixed »

ianhawes wrote: post #744
jazzyjackson wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instagram is {in}famous for its bikini babes, a not insignificant fraction of which advertise their "availability" in various cities. How this has never come up in the various congressional hearings about protecting children mystifies me, reddit, twitter and instagram all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work.

What exactly is there to protect children against? Instagram forbids nudity and regularly cracks down on it by banning accounts. I don't recall seeing any advertisements for prostitution on Instagram either. And of course, young women have been recruited into sex work long before social media or the internet.

We must not have used the same Instagram. Every time i post a picture it is "liked" by several robots trying to sell sex under fake accounts which name would look suspicious to a 3 lines long perl script. I used to report and block them, now i just have all notifications permanently off.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#795

Post by gwbas1c »

seydor wrote: post #490
gwbas1c wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first amendment specifically uses the word "congress," and the President is not congress. > Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amen…

but if the president had the power to censor, that power should come from a law that the congress made. it wouldnt make sense otherwise

Basically, aides call up media outlets and aggressively nag.

The media then gets favors if they comply. There's no law against a politician playing favorites in the media.

The media can also choose to ignore. It's not in the White House's interest to make enemies in the media.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#796

Post by Dalewyn »

code_duck wrote: post #557
silverquiet wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who…

Same here. There was nothing I could do to get my feed to not be full of provocatively insulting and irritating political posts. I’d unfollow, unfriend, block, say “show me less of this” and so on. But when I’d unfriend some person, very next thing on my feed would be political content I didn’t like from some totally random person on my friend list who I’d never interacted with. Meanwhile I’d notice that people I act…

>some totally random person on my friend list who I’d never interacted with.

While the Algorithm(tm) is complete garbage, you could also probably add less Totally Random Persons(tm) to your "friends" list.

If Totally Random Persons(tm) are getting added automagically, we have bigger problems.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#797

Post by Nursie »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #788
silverquiet wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who…

You're probably using it wrong. I never see the stuff people complain about. When one of my half-dozen Facebook friends posts something, Facebook emails me and I click the link for that specific post and don't see any other crap. I also occasionally participate in some local-only groups which don't have political ragebait or soft porn, just local people posting silly things they saw in the street or local marketplace…

> I don't even know how to find this feed people keep talking about.

You go to https://www.facebook.com

That's literally it. If you don't have a suite of adblockers and extensions like FB Purity installed, you'll probably see a ton of crap. If you don't see a ton of crap, I would love to know what sort of wizard spell you have cast to ward it off.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#798

Post by exoverito »

alxmng wrote: post #637
this_user wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody with assets over 100m has a "pile of gold", as you put it. Those assets are always productively invested in some form or another. But you would prefer that those investments be pulled, because the government are clearly much better at employing those assets productively?

What's productive? Measured in purely financial terms selling cigarettes, junk food, and fentanyl is productive. Figuring out how to get teenagers to scroll TikTok all day is productive. ... What people are suggesting is to take money from some productive enterprises and put it towards other productive enterprises such as education, medicine, public infrastructure, etc. Enterprises which have more benefits beyond sim…

Increased spending is the simplistic solution. Government spending as percentage of GDP is 35%, compared to about 25% in the 50s/60s. Since then inflation-adjusted spending per student has increased by roughly 3X with no measurable increase in test scores. Baltimore spends 21k/yr per student, with abysmal results. College tuition prices have increased far more than inflation, in large part due to federal student loans. The USA spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than any other country, with insane markups on routine procedures. The California High Speed Rail project has taken 15 years to do environmental reviews and lay a few miles of track in the middle of nowhere, all while costs have grown to more than 128B from its initial estimates of 10B.

Giving money to ineffective organizations is throwing good money after bad. I'd love to see competent government that can effectively use funds, but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for it these days. There needs to be deep reform and anti-corruption efforts. Good luck doing that without the status quo powers pulling out all their dirty tricks.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#799

Post by mullingitover »

throw10920 wrote: post #781
mullingitover wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is an extremely disingenuous and intellectually dishonest strawman of the views that people of the political party that you're attacking actually hold. This shouldn't be on HN: > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#800

Post by dangus »

chrisco255 wrote: post #240
andy_ppp wrote: post #109

I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of d…

Unrealized gains taxes is an extractive and totalitarian tax. Someone is always risking 100% loss until they realize those gains. It's an affront to entrepreneurial risk-taking and it's capricious. It would be just as ridiculous to allow someone to write-off unrealized losses.

You think Mark Cuban is risking being homeless or something? How insulting to equate the risk of people who already have over 100 million dollars to the risk of hourly wage employees who live paycheck to paycheck.

When you are wildly wealthy you are not risking anything, risk is merely an input to the math equation that only goes one direction. Up.

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