It will probably improve our lives in many ways, make them worse in many others. Complicate some things and simplify others.
In other words like every other technology.
Also like every other technology that has come out way in the past, there will be doomsayers who are wrong and there will be Utopians who are also wrong.
Every generation goes through the "kids these days" phase, everything new isn't as good as it was "back in my day." Add to this, as the author points out, a neo-ludism around the technology being used and the affect is magnified.
Overall, communication technology has made us more connected not less. What throws people is that those connections are no longer geographically bound. So that person you see staring at their phone isn't disconnected to those locally, they are very well connected to an international community.
Of course, one quibble. The author states:
"Maybe your friend has taken his smartphone out of his pocket because he has gotten a message that he needs to reply now. Or maybe it’s just that he feels a bit uncomfortable and is using his phone to try and avoid the awkwardness of the moment because he has social anxiety and you should respect that."
But I don't think it's neo-ludism to think it's rude to treat conversations you are in fact having locally as less valuable simply because they are local. Of course there are emergencies but when someone is constantly checking to see if there is a better interaction to be had, I'd still call it rude.
That aside, and I should point out the author concedes that there are rude people and situations involving technology, the points raised by the author are well stated and all to frequently missed.
I'm sure those wise people you mentioned would also be wise enough to see through a false choice like that.
Good thing for us all that it isn't an either/or.
Fortunately some people can work on the good and needed. And some people can work on the hard, maybe even the too hard to see at first that it's even possible.
"In the short term the market is a popularity contest; in the long term it is a weighing machine."
So to answer the question posed, if you are trying to make money off guesses about who wins the popularity contest - that's gambling. If you are trying to asses which company to be a part owner of, to meet your own particular financial goals (income, growth, etc) - that's investing.
I think the author of this article kind of missed the points being made by Hoffman. For instance, he asks:
"But how did the icon come to look like a snake in the first place?"
Sort of presupposes that it does look like a "real" snake. The icon doesn't necessarily have to look like anything ... we just have to evolve in a way that gets us to jump out of the way. It's the jumping out of the way that is adaptive, not the similarity to anything outside the system trying to survive.
To use Hoffman's analogy, it's like asking why do files on a desktop look like the files in the computer. They don't, they are useful interfaces however.
This same case involved, in addition to Wikimedia, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, PEN American Center (a writers group), Global Fund for Women, The Nation Magazine, The Rutherford Institute, and the Washington Office on Latin America (a social justice group).
With all those groups, with all that's at stake, the decision essentially reads that no matter how much traffic they can't use statistical likelihood to overcome the bar to standing created by Clapper v. Amnesty.
In the end, this means the NSA will never have to face overview as long as they don't tell anyone what they are doing. If we can't in court say they are definitely capturing someones traffic, they can't even use the courts to conduct discovery on what is happening.
The article details the gymnastics required, required only of gay couples, to approximate those rights.
And after all the gymnastics, they and only they had to endure, they ended up with approximation of what heterosexuals were able to accomplish with a conversation at a Justice of the Peace.
The article details the patchwork quilt of rights, the limits, the variation among States, that resulted from this sort of "solution."
It only seems successful to those who didn't need to do it.
Not that long ago people tried to argue that marriage equality wasn't needed to protect basic rights of individuals involved. They just needed to use contracts/adoption/etc.
This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was.
I can only be a sample size of one, but I've lived in countries where tipping is the norm and in countries where it's non-existent.
My own experience is that service is more average when tipping isn't an issue. That is it's always OK, or even good, but very rarely excellent or horrible.
Where tipping is the norm, there is more variability. In both directions - sometimes excellent but sometimes horrible. Ok and Good are still the more common, but there are more experiences in those extremes.
I'm not sure why this is.
I couldn't tell from this article if the studies discussed caught that (or could refute it). That is, they all talked about average tips and service, did they measure volatility.
I may have misread. But what I took from it was the assertion that because of how hyperlinks work, the act of following them to sites we have no relationship creates the needs for ads.
I took that as a moral case, but you are right, he never states the word morality.
This sort of thing has to be remembered next time you hear that prosecutors need broadly worded statutes to have the tools to go after the bad guys.
When people bring up criticisms of laws as over-broad, I often hear that prosecutorial discretion will keep such abuses from happening. People who suggest that the law as written will result in such injustice are often ridiculed for imagining that any prosecutor would act that way, or any Judge allow it.
Turns out, anyone suggesting that even the most absurd interpretations are not possible are the ones who should be ridiculed.
Remember this the next time someone proposes a law, no matter how well intentioned, and even if it happens to advance a cause you care about. The abuses will happen, and how will you feel about that cost if you are the subject of those abuses.
I'm not sure how that relates to the point being made.
The insecurity comes from someone already having physical control of your machine, and if you had alowed saving of your master password (which Lastpass and anyone sane encourages against).
It will probably improve our lives in many ways, make them worse in many others. Complicate some things and simplify others.
In other words like every other technology.
Also like every other technology that has come out way in the past, there will be doomsayers who are wrong and there will be Utopians who are also wrong.