Apologies for that intro, I had planned to delete it but I'll leave it so your comment makes sense. I was planning to expand a thought about how it's always the rich who casually conclude that lower taxes and less welfare will help the economy.
"Can people who are part of the lower earning rung of society give a unbiased opinion of the system?"
In a democracy, yes, they do. Someone who is lower down on the earning rung of society (say earning the median US income), has a far more accurate view of the "average" society than someone who is at the very top, merely because they represent an average citizen.
"Yes the evidence does speak for itself. Capitalism worked out pretty great for much of Western Civilization. Everywhere where more socialist approaches were tried it failed. Just ask all soviet countries', Japan, East Germany, China etc. citizens if they are happy."
East Germany no longer exists and Russia is essentially a dictatorship with a very powerful upper class of plutocrats, not unlike the US. The happiest countries in the world are Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Canada according to the World Happiness index. Do you notice a trend among those countries?
"America is not for nothing the land of opportunity, and it is not for nothing that emigrants are flocking to the USA, Europe and Australia."
Denmark has twice the social mobility of "the land of opportunity" as defined by the probability of someone born in the poorest 25% of society making his/her way up to the richest 25% of society within their lifetime. I don't think America is the land of opportunity, unless you count the children of the rich who were shuttled into Ivy Leagues as those with opportunity.
"Unfortunately the soviets discovered you cannot have a classless society. It is that drive to elevate yourself to a higher class that makes us want to achieve more than the absolute minimum required effort."
I do not disagree, it is impossible to have a completely classless society. But that does not mean that the lowest class cannot have a decent quality of life and financial security. I think it begins with education. After all, only 5.7% of the US population has an education above high-school level. (obviously skewed by <18s, but still a shocking number)
A large number (majority?) of people who are proponents for american-style capitalism, advocating for less government intervention, are from big universities around the U.S, and will often earn a relatively high wage. Although it's very hard to quantify, I feel as though these people are very disassociated from the everyday life the claim to be studying. If you live near Harvard earning ~300k a year, how easy is it to imagine (pretend?) that everything is fine and that the skewed income distribution is actually a positive thing. Boiled down - can people who are part of such a skewed system really produce unbiased studies and theories about the system?
They back up their claims with various arguments as to the nature of the average consumer and echoes and remnants of trickle-down economics theories.
Why don't people instead look at the actual world for more accurate evidence? The U.S. is a pioneer of creating highly divided cultures, with the top 1% earning ridiculous amounts of money and living in relative luxury, while having a very large population of people struggling to make ends meet, or even get healthcare due to the associated costs.
At the same time, countries exercising a highly socialistic economic policy (welfare countries), such as the Nordics and Germany to some extent have a far higher "average" quality of life, as well as (arguably) a happier population. Being a taxi driver in Norway or Denmark doesn't mean you live in near-poverty and have to work 80 hours a week to make ends meet.
While I'll try to not get into details of economic theory, and so forth, one question that has always irked me is the following:
Does the evidence not speak for itself? In what country has pure capitalism (or at least as close as we can get), actually worked to produce a happy and harmonious society?
In no other developed country (in the sense of a competitive GDP, somewhat large and somewhat well educated population) have I seen the same disdain and mistrust for government. Why is it amoral for a government to take taxes if you are - born in a hospital funded by taxes, given vaccines and medication partly funded by taxes, drive to/from home on roads built by taxes, so on and so forth. The people who thing it's unfair they have to pay taxes - what would you prefer? Living in an "AT&T country" where every single service is "privately" owned and you'd be charged fees for it? Sounds like a dream.
Comparatively, in countries such as Sweden and Norway, everyone pays taxes (much moreso than in the good old US of A), and yet the tax agency is rated the most trusted government entity in the government. Strangely enough, this "amorality" also leads to some of the best standards of living and social mobility in the world?
Interestingly enough almost all of them hold these beliefs in areas they themselves have no expertise in (of course, there are one or two exceptions).
I think it's dangerous when laymen who admire these individuals for their excellent work in their respective fields also assume their beliefs in other fields and areas are equally credible. The same examples suggested here can occur in much more subtle ways - for instance - Elon Musk and his views on A.I. have been made famous, even though he has absolutely no formal background in A.I.
*EDIT: completely missed that the author used Elon as an example. Nonetheless I stand by my point.
Europeans never paid for speed, that's completely incorrect. There's no tradeoff - mobile phone usage in Europe is simply much, much cheaper because there's not the same quadrupoly that exists in the US (thanks to government intervention and much stricter competitivity laws).
That's an interesting attempt to justify the price, but it completely fails to take into account that simply calculating area is nowhere near accurate for the number of towers - it depends on where people live. Fortunately people live close together, so towers don't need to cover every square inch of the country.
If you look up the number of towers, you'll find that the US has roughly 120,000 mobile base stations, while the UK has 23,000. (Despite the fact that the UK is ~30 time smaller than the US). So your argument does not hold.
On another note, I'll never understand how people think that you get "low to no cost upgrades" of hardware. You don't. You're literally paying _more_ to upgrade your phone/get a new phone in the long run, than just buying one outright.
The reason you can buy an iPhone for 99 USD is because you'll be paying ~27 USD "extra" for the next 2 years, which is exactly the same as if you had just spent 600 outright and saved that amount (or even more, 99% of the time) over the next 2 years. There's no "subsidization" going on, if anything, you're subsidizing the company.
I'm sure Stallman absolutely HATES services such as Spotify. However the as I mentioned in the parent comment, the world is not black and white, and thus viable solutions will always be in a middle-ground.
Nothing he could ever say would bring me from playing music with ridiculous ease in Spotify to downloading "free" ogg files and playing them in GNU Mediagoblin, or something similar.
As a side note: the FSF complains liberally about different "evil" products using javascript on their "giving guide". Stallman himself asks us not to "mistreat" family by giving them non-free gifts. Yet they themselves use javascript for analytics. Proving how ridiculous some of these practices are.
Indeed. If only we had had Stallman right before Pearl Harbor, I'm sure he could have published a manifesto, saving everyone from the obviously impending doom and most importantly maintaining their FREEDOM!
I honestly don't understand why people value Stallman's opinions on these matters so highly. I completely disagree with him on essentially everything he writes about these topics.
Granted, he's an incredible programmer who contributed immensely to the development of our modern operating systems and the tools we use, and people here love to bring that up ("what - you DON'T KNOW WHO STALLMAN IS? SHAME? HOW DARE YOU CRITICISE HIM?")
Does this make his opinion on Facebook or privacy or freedom any more correct or valid? No.
Just like I wouldn't listen to Usain Bolt if he were trying to teach me the biological mechanisms behind doping, I can't see why Stallman's opinion is considered so correct in these matters.
IMO his ramblings about personal liberties and freedom being infringed by everything under the sun from Amazon to Google to Facebook are oversimplified and childish. The world isn't black and white and he obviously fails to understand the entire point behind many of these companies. When Facebook makes you use a real name it's not because theres some "Mr. Evil" at the top level plotting to steal your freedom, it's because it leads to a better working social network.
Just his description of AirBnB is ridiculous: "Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel)."
That's an immensely stupid argument, because any _viable_ company that wants to provide a service that a consumer other than Stallman himself will use will "infringe" on those two idiotic requirements.
I absolutely believe Mike should have paid Patrick.
On the simple premise that since Mike was hosting a bet that he KNEW was impossible (i.e. under no circumstance, ever, would he have to pay the 5000$), then literally the only point of the game is to find any loopholes. Otherwise it's just Mike preying on unsuspecting victims.
If you design an impossible game, the only possible thing for anyone to do is to break it. If you then complain that THAT is cheating, you're a pedantic idiot - one of those annoying kids in middle school who loses a bet and then tries every possible way to weasel himself out.
To add fuel to the fire, his obnoxious replies such as "I tried running the first two files and it didn't work", make my blood boil, as it's a clear attempt to try and belittle the contestant.
TL;DR - the author claims to have hacked their encryption by reading the messages in phone memory.
I don't understand how this is a valid exploit/vulnerability? How would any device, Android or not, render the actual picture of the message on the GPU without having the unencrypted string in memory? It's not possible. If you have local memory/code execution, you will ALWAYS have access to the messages any client application is rendering/using.