If you're interested in this type of stuff I strongly recommend "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. He describes the social psychology of mass movements, looking largely at religion and nationalism. He wrote it in 1951, but feels nearly perfectly applicable to today's global nationalistic trends. It's an incredibly compelling read.
As someone who is on a pretty strict news diet, this is exactly the wrong reaction. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to be informed about important thing without visiting any news websites.
* You can have direct email feeds about the things you find important.
* You can use RSS readers curated to your interests.
* You can listen to podcasts.
* You can—gasp!—talk to people around you who are more knowledgeable than you on these areas.
News websites make money of you visiting and staying on their site, so they give you stuff that will get you to come back. Their interests are almost certainly not aligned with yours.
If you define your own priorities, you can define for yourself what it means to pay attention and be informed, and then seek "news" specifically on those topics.
No one implements compliance goals for fun. If they didn't think they were going to have to comply, they wouldn't do it. If they thought the law would be overturned they wouldn't do it. Same if they thought they would successfully fight the law in court, if they thought consumers would revolt, if they thought that they were a Special Squirrel who would get exemption, or whatever.
Does this put them stupidly behind schedule? Yes, and bummer for them, but I highly doubt that a company as politically savvy, legally savvy, and wealthy as Apple would do this "by mistake".
I assume you're asking this in good faith, so I'll answer in good faith.
Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and they vary tremendously. Laws are also changing all the time. There's literally no way to predict what rules will be in place at any given time.
Also, adding code to meet some government regulation takes time and effort that (form the company's perspective) could be better spent building a product and making money. No one would "choose" to implement some random compliance rule unless they're forced to.
Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.
It's kind of fascinating how well Amazon can repeat this. Google has attempted this literally dozens of times with various sub-businesses and failed almost every time. Amazon has a real skill in doing this well that many other large tech companies simply don't have.
<sarcasm> Time to investigate Apple again for monopolistic practices in their ebooks store! </sarcasm>
More seriously, it's somewhat mind-boggling that Amazon is allowed to keep it's "everything store" business, it's logistics business, and it's internet business all under one roof. The P&G discussion here highlights how insane it is that this isn't being investigated and prosecuted.
Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneously hiring new ones. A company this size is also constantly reorganizing, cutting departments and creating new ones. On any given day there may be as many as a hundred employees losing their job and another hundred joining.
To my recollection, since the 2023 layoffs—where >10% of the company was let go and hiring was basically stopped—Google hasn't done anything even remotely similar to this.
That said, a layoff like that can definitely affect company culture for a few years, so yeah, your point is taken there.
Alternative take: The fact that twitter / facebook / whatever allow arbitrary, unverified posting enables large-scale misinformation that led to, among other things, Russia's manipulation the US electorate and ultimate impacting the presidential election.
This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.
This is being downvoted, but is raising a serious point.
- Nearly 90% of Americans eat red meat [1].
- Environmental activity against meat has led a lot of people (26% of Americans) to believe that there is a push to ban red meat. This issue does not poll well [1].
- Despite the above, Americans are eating less red meat than we used to [2].
- The vast majority of people who choose to reduce their meat intake do so for cost or health reasons, not environmental [3].
Putting all that together... studies like this do not help the environmental cause. Sure, they find something that's vaguely interesting, and can possibly be a bullet point on an environmentalist slide. However, a far better research study would be one focusing on human health impacts of red meat, or demonstrating economic benefits to red meat alternatives.
tl;ld - This study is not useful, and is probably damaging to it's own cause.
The purchasing power of $3.05 in 1914 would require $100 in today's time. A bag of "stuff" worth $100 today could have been purchased for $3.05 in 1914.
Technically, it does mean that $3.05 from 1914 is worth $100 today, but that's not a useful way of thinking about this. I.e., if your great-grandfather put $3.05 in an envelope in 1914 and you opened it today, it's still $3.05 worth of money (ignoring wheat pennies being a collectors items and whatnot).
* His points about collaboration are excellent. So many research students think that their brains are their best asset. There are many smart people. There are much fewer smart people who can communicate and collaborate well. Be one of those people.
* His points about papers are completely on spot. There are simply too many papers, and many actually aren't that good. The light bulb moment for me was realizing that this author didn't write this paper to help me solve my problem, they wrote it to describe how they solved their problem. Finding the right way to measure whether "their problem ≅ your problem" is key.
* Do a lot of learning on your own. If you don't you're only hurting yourself.
I'm pretty surprised at the amount of hate here. All the "just build it ourselves!" and "Google wants your data", and almost no top-level comments even discussing the difficulty of dealing with malware and social engineering.
There are at least three moral arguments that can be made:
- Google, as a capitalist company, is ignoring the privacy and FOSS implications, and is guilty of screwing the customer due to greed
- Regular, non-tech folks are constantly being robbed of their privacy, money, and/or identity through malware and social engineering attacks, and Google is guilty of not doing enough to protect them
- Enabling malware delivery and use props up criminals and known bad actors (e.g., north korean), and by not stopping this Google is guilty of supporting these bad actors
I'm not seeing either of those last two points being made strongly. Maybe it's just not the target audience — people here aren't as likely to be scammed, and few of us are regularly thinking about north korea — but I'd expect to see more consideration for the costs of inaction here.
Fully agree, and glad you posted this. Atari has no responsibility to the open source community, and indeed has every reason to push back against this effort. That they're willing to discuss things at all, and that they agree to help support the effort, is frankly astonishing and extremely kind-hearted.
For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited:
I'm struck by the utilitarian mindset of this essay. What Paul so disparagingly refers to as "brand" can also be referred to as "art". People _want_ art, and will indeed pay good money for it. Said differently, people _value_ art enough to differentiate it from "optimal design", and indeed a subset of people will pay top dollar for a suboptimal but artistic design.
It is possible to view the fact that capitalist markets can turn a desire for art, individuality, and "something special" into a business as a bad thing. I'm not entirely convinced that's particularly interesting, though... it seems just a localized restatement of a generic "capitalism is bad" take.
This comment seems to confuse _straightforward_ with _easy_. On the merits, this proposal is well argued and has good points, and his solution—essentially extend the Biden approach with more strict requirements—makes sense.
Everything you mention will also have to happen, which means that doing this will definitely not be _easy_. That said, it is still a very _straightforward_ solution.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer