waterphone
waterphone on Hacker News
Because Facebook is a horrible company and an increasing amount of information about just how bad they really are is coming to light lately.
The article explains why.
Facebook is a genuinely evil company with genuinely evil people doing genuinely evil things to manipulate the world in negative ways, and I want nothing to do with them. They've been immoral/unethical from the start.
They manipulate their users, cause genuine harm to people, the world, and democracy, and should not be rewarded with continued use of their services.
Edit: Because people have been downvoting/flagging my comments, I'm no longer allowed to reply to people and continue the discussion.
I'm not going to tell anyone else what they should do, but I am unwilling to use or associate with any of their services or properties.
Am I the only irritated by these inevitable questions from people with no sense of literary craft any time an article from the New Yorker is posted on HN?
Considering that it's run by FEMA, and they are mandated by law to only use it in national emergencies, and multiple FEMA officials have to sign off on any message sent out, political misuse of it is fairly unlikely.
There are a few possible scenarios where a national alert makes sense: ICBM launches that they either can't yet predict the target of or on a scale that is targeting across the country, massive cyberattacks targeting national infrastructure, supervolcano eruption, foreign invasion, etc.
The idea is that it would only be used in the most extreme of scenarios that affect the country as a whole.
Upvoting is not an expression of support for the content, it's a "I think this article should be seen by more people" signal.
The First Amendment doesn't obligate private companies to do business with people or other businesses they don't want to be involved with.
If the U.S. government were ordering his accounts closed, you might have an argument.
I was referring to the failure of whatever mechanism would be used to cancel an alert that appears post-fall.
It does this by default without a subscription service in the event of a detected fall if you do not respond to an alert within a certain amount of time.
Hope nobody falls on their watch and are uninjured but break the touch sensor, preventing them from being able to cancel the 911 call…
Yes, it's an imperfect predictor of the future. No one else does a very good job predicting economic futures either, however.
Investing in total market index funds is literally investing in the economy as a whole. (Or as much of a whole as the index represents.) So while yes, they will crash with future market crashes, of which there will be many in each of our lifetimes, historically in the U.S. so far the market has always recovered.
One of those is based in fact and reality, the other is not. The reason you're having a hard time finding "neutral" news is because reality is not inherently neutral.
Oh, I understood what you meant, I was just providing an additional data point for this particular conversation in response to what you were saying re: search queries vs. results.
Number of search results:
AFAIK: 8,600,000
AFAICT: 346,000
AFAIUI: 14,600
Getting freelance web development work. Maybe the markets are just changing, but in the past couple years my opportunities for new clients and projects have dropped off significantly and it's become very hard to sustain myself anymore.
All the more reason to constantly tell people the right thing to do and why and strategies to avoid letting fear and other emotions get the better of them in those situations. We can all be susceptible to such things, but with a little education and discipline can avoid making terrible mistakes like that.
And those people are the reason everyone else says not to do that, not to time the market, and to invest for the long term. If you stick to an established plan, adjust your allocation according to that plan, and don't panic sell, historically you will have always come out ahead.
http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-...
The assets in your 401k (if invested in the market, especially if invested in broad market index funds to be highly diversified) actually have value beyond simply being a speculative asset. They're shares in businesses with a lot of motivations to make a profit, and they're going to continue doing their best to do so, and you benefit from that as a shareholder.
Cryptocurrency is largely a bubble of speculation and get-rich-quick hype with not much actual utility for most people beyond a lot of claims that don't ever really pan out.
Russian interference and manipulation went far beyond that. They've been buying election machine companies, sending spies to funnel money and influence to U.S. politicians, hacking and offering stolen information on opponents (which they've done for decades, but this is the first known time someone accepted rather than reporting it to the FBI immediately, and in fact ignored the FBI's warnings that it might happen), not to mention the years of deliberate manipulation and radicalization of people online through advertising and sockpuppet accounts.
No one should browse the web without an ad/script blocker enabled all the time at this point. Exposing your computer to the web without one is like unprotected sex given how malicious advertising has become between tracking behavior data and hosting actual malware.
I live 30 miles from the Mexico border along multiple heavily used smuggling routes. I hike and backpack frequently in mountains used by those smugglers and have encountered groups of smugglers many times over the last 7+ years. I have never seen them armed, nor have I ever felt threatened by them. In almost every encounter, they get off the trail and move away before we get close, or if they get startled and there's no time to really do that, they just sort of keep their heads down and pass quickly. Everyone I know who hikes in the region, including a former Border Patrol agent who worked this area for 6+ years (and never saw an armed smuggler), has had a similar experience.
Edit: There are some areas along the border where smugglers are reported to be armed more frequently, but this is almost exclusively in areas where two cartels compete for smuggling routes and their weapons are carried to defend against the other cartels, not to use against civilians or law enforcement. They don't want to get caught with weapons in the U.S., as that significantly increases their legal exposure vs. just bales of marijuana.
What I support has nothing to do with it, they can do what they want. I already don't use Twitter, I don't care one way or another.
Companies have no obligation to allow hate speech and incitements to violence on their platform. And because of how media bubbles work, it's very easy for people to get in a part of the internet where all they see is Alex Jones-type content, and constant exposure to that can change a person without them realizing it. I've seen it happen with people I know, who started out fairly reasonable and have since descended into raving lunacy over the course of several years.
We expect corporations to help fix this problem because they're in part the cause of it by creating systems which recommend content people want to see and in the process trap those people in a bubble of content that reinforces those positions.
Fire suppression is a major problem, for sure. But it wasn't all natural in the past, either. Humans have been managing forests through the use of fire for a very long time, setting fires to thin out the understory and make areas more appealing to wildlife they could then hunt, etc., which would in turn make the forest healthier and less prone to megafires.