Google Analytics has >80% market share. Most of the websites you visit are helping them build a profile of everything you do on the internet with the goal of selling targeted advertisement. That is their business, it's what pays for everything else they do. I think that is what is meant by surveillance capitalism.
Every iPhone that people buy gives direct money to Apple, centralizing their power. This means, they get to dictate what apps can / cannot run on the device.
So what? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy iPhones. Similarly, nobody is forcing anyone to install Google Analytics, or go to that website.
Nobody is forcing people to do Heroin or Cocaine. We should start giving it for free to people in the street. Everyone can then decide if they want to take it or not. Oh yes and once you are hooked we should definitely never keep the dealer accountable. It's the users who always decides to use it! They are the ones to blame, never the giga corporation making money on your back!
That surely would work very very well in society. Literally the same thing is happening with Google, Facebook, TikTok etc.
You probably work for bigtech and your salary depends on people losing their braincells so I don't expect you to suddenly get some ethics and understand all of this.
Why is it important that Google (or any of these large companies) only hire Americans for their jobs in the first place? They are global companies now, they make money from everywhere. Why is the insular "Americans only" idea worthy of consideration at all?
The law forces American corporations to hire Americans, various work visas are exceptions from the law given under certain conditions. It appears the companies are abusing these exceptions and violate these conditions. There is no such thing as a "global company" in the law, with the exception of foreign consulates all the entities that hire people in the US are American corporations.
They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq.
Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11.
A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to fess up to wanting anything to do with that mess.
Public wants aren't discovered in some interference-free democratic vacuum. The people who own the press put a millstone on their side of the scales.
> Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11
There was desire for vengeance on 12 September. Reporting and politicians channeled it. That’s very different from driving consensus against something people would otherwise support.
You're proving my point. The thumb was put on the scale, he public was bombarded 24/7 with self-serving false dichotomies and viola, you've just manufactured mass public support for insane bullshit.
It works the same way in other countries too. Look at any country that you believe to believe in insane shit - most of those beliefs aren't organic.
Neither are the insane things you believe in. It's just that you can't even see that they aren't the product of your own reasoning. Fish don't have a word for water.
> You're proving my point. The thumb was put on the scale, he public was bombarded 24/7 with self-serving false dichotomies and viola, you've just manufactured mass public support for insane bullshit.
See also Covid-19. Same shit only waaaaaaay more batshit insane and waaaaaaaay more crazy 24-7 fear mongering.
Not being as happy and being unhappy are not the same.
Regardless, you should read Robert Putnam's essay, E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century (2007). He makes it clear that social trust goes down because of it.
Because the culture that's moving in is intolerant of my way of life and wants to piecemeal eradicate it by using the government to incrementally make every bit of the way I live harder, more expensive or subject to capricious enforcement if not outright illegal.
I thought I would be able to get in a good 20-40yr settling down where I did and would only be complaining about this stuff when I was old. It's been about 10 and it's all going to shit.
And yes, I am intentionally not being specific and leaving room for assumption.
> And yes, I am intentionally not being specific and leaving room for assumption.
One thing I've consistently noticed about these kinds of conversations is that people want to be allowed to share racist opinions without suffering the social consequences of sharing racist opinions, but in order to do so they have to hide their true values by masking their language and not actually say anything that has any meaning.
I have nothing in my value system I'm ashamed of, I'll say any aspect of it in any company at all. Is it hard not having a value system like that?
Lol, and that's exactly why I worded it the way I did.
As far are I'm concerned the "wrong kind of people" are the ones with no real problems and a propensity to make ones by gettin involved in other people's business. The fact that those people are mostly white is just random luck of how history turned out.
They show up, they get to screeching in the town hall meetings and before you know it the flock cameras go up, code enforcement is prowling around with a drone, Starbucks replaces the Popeyes, half the businesses you patronize sell out to developers of bougie stuff you don't want, everything costs more, etc, etc.
I'm sure the city wins on paper, it's replacing it's existing people with richer ones. And I'm sure the people who sell stuff to these richer people win, but everyone who was here first loses. We just wanted to pay low rents, drink beer on our front porches and let our kids ride dirtbikes in the street and generally live our lives.
I chose this city specifically because the kind of people I didn't want anything to do with said it sucked so much "my dad dealt crack in the 90s and that's where he'd meet his supplier" and all that, and it was so far away from where they usually like to settle. But with what happened to land values, rents, etc. after 2020 pushed a lot of them out here.
This is so bizarre, your initial comment comes off like the typical "crime is because diversity" people, but it sounds like you have some kind of class conscious issue with affordability?
Articles about two countries cannot be more true than the lived experience of actual residents of Africa. I am Kenyan as well, that article describes something very specific to individual communities in some countries in West Africa, it is foreign to me. The largest expense of funerals that I've experienced in my life is usually paying the medical expenses of the deceased (if the person had been ill for a long time) and feeding the funeral attendees (we do usually get a huge crowd and they generally get lunch).
Another data point: maybe 35-40% of people in Africa identify as Muslim. They usually bury people the same day they die or at worst the next day, and there is no elaborate coffin, usually just a cloth sheet.
Is that because of some heritable presence/lack of intelligence or because scientists feed their children well early in life, have books in the home, and take the time to follow up on their children's education?
Isn't it all relative? Cooling actually isn't a problem at all with solar. I can run my AC full blast during the summer and still get the batteries fully charged before evening.
reply