Hegar

The only way this gig is ethically justifiable is if the support act is a guillotine.

That headline really is a thing of beauty. It’s like finding out that your trash is piling up because the city retasked all the sanitation workers to lie in fields of filth and create a heavenly host of garbage angels.

I can’t not read that in a garbled south african accent.

Uber is a bad faith actor, their business model is entirely monopoly-seeking. If they’re trying to expand into bus routes, the goal will be to reduce the choices available to just Uber.

It’s very naive to think that a weapons dealer who also kills it’s commercial airline passengers for profit isn’t also killing whistleblowers.

Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics

According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ’s attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law.

It’s perfectly reasonable to see this practice of avoiding the creation of evidence of their wrongdoing as evidence of wrongdoing, which is 100% what it is.

It’s not the same as a person using TOR, it’s a company hiding evidence.

Yes, getting sued for stepping on a mine like rounded corners is so good for inventiveness.

It’s so strange to me that people buy this BS line about IP laws having anything to do with why we get cool new things.

Either competition fosters innovation and therefore IP laws stifle it, or protecting monopolies fosters innovation and our IP laws make sense.

There has been a centralized bureaucratic autocracy in china since the legalist reforms of qin, a couple thousand years ago. Yes, the empire once united must divide but even during the long disunity before the sui and tang, there were multiple centralized autocratic states. Unity across all of the territory called modern china is not necessary to have a centralized state, and you’ll notice I never once used the word united.

forcibly “united” by external forces, such as the Western powers in the 19th century, dividing up and ruthlessly controlling economic spheres of influence

Wait were western powers dividing or uniting china? You’re claiming both in the same sentence. But that’s kind of immaterial to my point that the centralized autocratic state has existed in china for a couple thousand years and that many important new technologies came out of the cultures governed in that way.

I wouldn’t be looking for ‘game changers’ - that’s a marketing phrase with no firm meaning and very low applicability to reality. All invention is just iterating on existing ideas.

We didn’t see much cutting-edge tech coming out of China while they were recovering from the collapse of the imperial system and the colonial period, but now that they have more resources to throw at new tech, we’ll see new tech.

China has been a centralized autocratic state for a couple thousands years and has invented almost everything in that time.

More seriously though, it’s just not true to suggest that collectivist societies or autocratic states can’t invent new things. The briefest glance at history shows it’s just not true.

New things come from people having the time and resources to sit around and think about how to improve on the things we have. IP, social mobility and individualism just don’t really come into it.

Plenty of idiots using a cruise control system and trusting their lives to beta software.

Using it exactly as it was marketed doesn’t make you an idiot.

Why?

Who buys a new peripherals? You can get 100% functional peripherals for a couple of bucks from any thrift store.

No, it’s not likely at all unless we get into an open conflict. Then cyber warfare will be just one arena of conflict. But I think most estimates are that that would be disastrous for us, china and the world so it’s unlikely for now.

It’s way more likely that the fbi want more money or are repeating some talking point to push an agenda or as a political favor.

You’re always subsidizing a company by shopping there though right?

I usually find that the self checkout line moves faster, but choosing a line had always been a guessing game.

Still, 60% of consumers said they prefer self-checkout as of 2021

Ah yes, the ‘Nightmare’ that a clear majority of people prefer.

This is yet more ‘wahhhh shoplifting’ bullshit from companies whose interests are directly opposed to the interests of their customers.

People want self checkout to be less shit, which it easily could be. In Australia I didn’t even have to put things in the bagging area, just scan them. It made the whole process so much smoother.

I’m honestly asking what the impact to the users is from this breach.

The stolen info was used to databases of people with jewish ancestry that were sold on the dark web. I think there was a list of similar DB of people with chinese ancestry. 23andme’s poor security practices have directly helped violent white supremecists find targets.

If you’re so incompetent that you can’t stop white supremecists from getting identifiable information about people from minorities, there is a compelling public interest for your company to be shut down.

The easiest way to tell that something’s not really innovative is if the person describing it uses the word innovative.

We can’t do business with genocidal dictatorships and expect to walk away unscathed.

Yeah, we learned not to do business with genocidal dictatorships after ww2… Except all those dictatorships that we funded to kill leftists.

But then we learned not to do business with genocidal dictatorships after the cold war… Except all those dictatorships that we funded to buy oil.

But this time I’m sure we definitely learned not to do business with genocidal dictatorships even when they align with our policy goals.