grobbles

It's years old, but I listened to the advice of-

https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2013/08/07/ten-reasons-you...

-and in re-analysis it all holds completely true. Nginx gives my deploy flexibility, at essentially negligible cost. And no Go development should include a bunch of boilerplate code to do banal stuff like serving static content.

Marginal? Holy shit, how isn't this completely transparent and dead, like my post will be?

Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe.

Just as a point of reference, Samsung's smartphone profits are greater than Walmart's profits. It's greater than the overwhelming bulk of world corporations.

But this is also true for playing the stock market.

Indeed, the stock market and fantasy sites are extremely similar, with the same fundamental issue -- a small number of people with a technical and information advantage are essentially skimming the table clean of the entry fees of a lot of people picking randomly or emotionally.

One unique aspect of the United States is that it's a huge country, where more than half of the land is livable/arable[1]. When an area isn't working, the economic forces that would revive it out of raw necessity just don't have the force that they do in many other countries, so areas can just hollow out as people move to other cities, to the endless suburbs, and so on. These pictures are primarily just abandoned areas, which in a country of some 5 million square kilometers of arable land just isn't that odd.

[1] I'm from Canada and we often like to talk about how big this country is, but in reality most of us live huddled on the US border, and where 45%+ of the US is arable, just 7% of Canada is.

Not at all. The previous government was against binding agreements that did not bind China or India or other developing nations (for reasons that we've seen as China has exploded into the most significant polluter), and which actually might have been negative to the actual cause. Kyoto, for instance, would have been devastating to the environment, however much it might have been illusory of progress.

So right now you see a lot of Canadians who villainized the previous government celebrating what sounds like it is effectively nothing. The new Canadian government sent 388 delegates to Paris, the vast bulk having nothing to do with negotiations and just enjoying the photo ops and a vacation junket, which was more than the United States, more than the UK, more than Australia. Indeed, it was more than all of those countries combined.

I don't mean to politicize this, but there is a detached "words versus action" argument that appears when Canada comes up and it is deeply disconcerting.

I believe their argument is "if you ignore the sources of revenue, it runs at a loss", for what that's worth (which is little).

The search engine runs ads, and is enormously profitable.

Gamification is a demand dropped on users, seemingly forcing self-promotion and social reciprocity in an endless circle.

And for what? In the end there is absolutely no gain, but many like and favorite and heart primarily to ensure that people like and favorite and heart whatever they do. We follow to be followed. We comment to be noticed.

Because the metrics are front and center. I stopped using Flickr when I couldn't post a simple picture for any random passerby or my own storage without having the embarrassment of a low view count sitting highlighted on the page, the site imploring me to evangelize for me.

If you build a site and try to leverage users by forced social metrics to encourage them to become ambassadors and self promoters...well I'd like to pretend it will hurt you, but sadly it won't.