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Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

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Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#81

To any "outsider" unfamiliar with Hacker News, it's heavily populated with Google employees, contractors, and developers that build on to Google products and services. Keep that in mind when you read the comments here.

It is unfortunate that so much effort in this thread is being put into suggesting that anyone who disagrees with Assange must be a tool of the government or Google. We must not allow ourselves to fall prey to the military intelligence complex and actually think critically.

But I suppose when you agree with the premise then it's not actually propaganda...

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#82

It is not that I believe that Google and Eric Schmidt along with the government are part of some kind of conspiracy. And I do acknowledge that someone like Assange probably is much more paranoid than he should be. It is simply that we should not voluntarily give so much power to a single company.

It's stupid that you are being down-voted but I agree profusely.

Google might stand for a better way of doing things (from what we had before) but at the end of the day it is a global and impersonal corporation with thousands of employees.

What our governments must due is keep a close eye on them. What we must do is compete with them and do everything in our power to beat them to market or circumvent their walled garden. If they go down in the process then too bad, we will take all their engineers - the real value of Google.

I would expect any startup and government to approach a huge conglomerate like Google, Apple, or Microsoft without fear and with much integrity.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#83
post #81

To any "outsider" unfamiliar with Hacker News, it's heavily populated with Google employees, contractors, and developers that build on to Google products and services. Keep that in mind when you read the comments here.

It is unfortunate that so much effort in this thread is being put into suggesting that anyone who disagrees with Assange must be a tool of the government or Google. We must not allow ourselves to fall prey to the military intelligence complex and actually think critically . But I suppose when you agree with the premise then it's not actually propaganda...

An ad hominem attack voted up to the top is one giveaway that the rebuttals are emotional, rather than counter-arguments supported by facts.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#84
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunate that so much effort in this thread is being put into suggesting that anyone who disagrees with Assange must be a tool of the government or Google. We must not allow ourselves to fall prey to the military intelligence complex and actually think critically . But I suppose when you agree with the premise then it's not actually propaganda...

An ad hominem attack voted up to the top is one giveaway that the rebuttals are emotional, rather than counter-arguments supported by facts.

The suggestion that the thread must be full of Google shills and that critics can be dismissed out of hand as part of the conspiracy is also an emotional argument unsupported by evidence.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#85
Despite all the people that think he sounds like a lunatic, is any of what he is saying a lie? Lots of people who sound like lunatics but aren't telling lies are worth listening to, I think.

So, he's putting a lot of "these guys are all evil" spin on it, but then again, all the connections he is making seem to be true. Whether it means Google is in bed with the US government or not is up to the reader (with nudging from him, of course), but I don't anyone confronted with this many factual connections between a CEO of a mega corporation and government actors could simply write this off as "lunacy".

I think most people in the tech industry (and sadly not many people outside it) have already realized the Google is very very big-brothery.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#86
post #60
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. That's kind of the catch, isn't it? All the government agencies that do their job with efficacy wouldn't be the ones you'd be made aware of. Only when something goes wrong do you become aware that your local water board performs useful work. To the point though, regulation ensures our planes crash at a rate of less than one per 21,000 years of flight time. Food safety regulations have dropped e.coli poisoning by h…

1. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actually used on Wikipedia as an example on the regulatory capture page; saying that "[i]n a June 2010 article on regulatory capture, the FAA was cited as an example of "old-style" regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation but placing key people to head these reg…

Reading through the specifics, you are right, it seems that the FAA is not doing as good a job as it should be, with episodic laxness in safety checks. It's a leap to say that the industry would be safer or otherwise better off without it though.

Claiming that the FDA has caused more deaths than prevented is, I'm afraid, utterly mindboggling. I can't really entertain the notion seriously, and can only think that this is more selection bias. Do share the evidence, though I feel it'd be a difficult thing to quantify concretely.

Ingredients lists is a throwaway example. More difficult elements to police are things like pesticide usage, hormone usage, presence of disease causing bacteria or molds. The reason Mad Cow Disease is no longer relevant is due to quick identification of the problem and suitable regulation to rectify it. 4.4 million cattle were killed to eradicate the disease, which is difficult to imagine happening quite so thoroughly by the individual volition of the farmers involved.

As for boycotts, it comes down to a separation of belief and behavior. Say a company with production in the third world sometimes uses slave labor. I'm confident that the majority of consumers would agree that this is not a morally acceptable thing for the company to be doing. However, this doesn't necessarily translate into changes in purchase decisions, if the consumer even finds out about this fact in the first place. Immoral corporate action is only rarely confronted by boycott, and only rarely does that boycott then work. Personal preferences are beside the point, and it's disingenuous to compare cartoons to human rights abuses.

Codification of standards can and is done without privileging special interests over the commons. In most other Western countries, this is pretty well understood. The political structure in the US (low voter turnouts require excessive campaign funds which require pandering, for one) means that regulatory bodies may be more susceptible to capture than most, but the fault does not lie with the existence of the body in the first place, nor in most places, does it wholly negate what good the regulator does do.

It does look that way, of course. "Fluoridation of Water Saves Another Ten Million Cavities" is unfortunately a headline I've yet to see.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#87
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ad hominem attack voted up to the top is one giveaway that the rebuttals are emotional, rather than counter-arguments supported by facts.

The suggestion that the thread must be full of Google shills and that critics can be dismissed out of hand as part of the conspiracy is also an emotional argument unsupported by evidence.

We can agree this thread is full of shills, just possibly not google shills.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#88

A lot of innuendo and guilt by association, political conspiracy ala Kevin Bacon. I suppose isolation tends to produce conspiracy theories. I'll get down voted for this of course. When Assange is raising concerns about a potential Google monopoly over the whole of the internet, he is of course, raising a legitimate concern. But the attempts by Assange, and people like Yasha Levine, to tie Google into the military ind…

It's not mentioned in the article, but Google acquired Boston Dynamics, a military contractor.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#89
post #87
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The suggestion that the thread must be full of Google shills and that critics can be dismissed out of hand as part of the conspiracy is also an emotional argument unsupported by evidence.

We can agree this thread is full of shills, just possibly not google shills.

How do you tell the difference between a shill and someone who actually holds an opposing point of view?

It might be true, but Hacker News has a diverse userbase and it might as well be false. Using the term seems to me to be just a way to dismiss the credibility of critics - it's a thought terminating cliche.

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