I would provide you an answer in public, but the authoritarian censor goons are out in full force today. But I'm guessing information is being withheld from you for your own protection, of course. Right? Don't want to harm your mind with wrong-think, do we now.
That brings up another interesting topic though, the psychological tendency for people to defer to authoritarians, a kind of legitimacy or validity from authority (almost as if they were named for it), which leads people to make the mistake to assume that, for example, "if this user was censored (if you ever even find out about it since most of the time you aren't even allowed to know the censorship is happening at all) then those in control must have just cause as implied by the authority they have". It's quite a concerning negative feedback loop.
Cultural homogeneity and qualities of values. People will not like hearing it until the day that someone could say "I told you so" once it is way too late, but here it is.
You will be able to trace the decline in Germany in particular as a kind of longitudinal study of what has long and thoroughly been established by science as the inherent conflict that comes from "diversity". You will be able to clearly track as the German culture and characteristics that made it "better than the rest of developed nations" decline as it is polluted with values and people that aren't just individually of objectively less advantageous quality, but the pollution aspect itself compounds those effects.
Essentially all research into the matter clearly shows that increased "diversity", combination of components of various incompatible and contradictory characteristics, means a fracturing and decline of social cohesion and focused interests in terms of human relations. It will be no exception with Germany, just the same way that you can trace how Poland and other eastern European countries that have not committed to cultural self-genocide and ethnic self-harm will not develop all the very problems that are already emerging and will only increase. This is not even a matter of just a European thing, it's a universal reality of human nature, when you combine substances, especially certain ones that trigger certain reactions, you will get those very predictable reactions; regardless of whether it's "diversification" of different people anywhere on the whole planet, just like if I force you to take in and support the livelihood of a drug addict, you will have some violent reaction to that. It's not really rocket science, yet for some reason the idiom, can't see the forest for all the trees, aptly and thoroughly applies.
Just like oil and water in and of themselves have certain desirable characteristics and are useful in and of themselves for different purposes, when you combine them you don't just pollute the water with oil and therefore make it useless, most, if not all people totally miss that in such a case you have thereby also polluted the oil with water and have made both substances unusable for their respective purposes. Additionally, the pollution aspect as also thereby accrued massive costs ... through a simple act of foolishness ... of separating and making the substances again valuable and of desirable and advantageous quality again that can be used for any number of relevant applications.
Funny enough, it only exists in places that are led by Democrats and liberals or are affected by Democrat and Liberal policies. But please prove me wrong. I just need one indisputable example and I will eat crow regardless of whether one exception doesn't make the rule.
The most bizarre aspect of it is that the very same people that lament that fact, are also the ones who support all its causes and throw the most violent tantrums to scuttle improving the situation. We have tried it their way for decade after decade after decade, and the astronomical cost has only led to barely measurable improvements at wild cost/benefit ratios, while being unsustainable on their own essentially everywhere those measures are not artificially scaffolded and have heavy layers of spin and blatant propaganda lies applied to it.
Maybe the worst part of it is that those very people don't even understand that they are doing any of that because they have been manipulated and lied to about both the causes and solutions as they have ever increasingly been drawn into a cult in which up is down, left is right, and only the con job leaders benefit from it. When you have fixed, preconceived notions about outcomes, don't be surprised that you cannot achieve them with the existing variables. You end up having to bend and manipulate and rig and patch things ever increasingly and more bizarrely in order to maintain the desired end state or outcome that the system becomes ever more unstable and fragile. See the mid aughts housing fraud, aka, housing bubble for reference. The conclusion was that house prices can only go up, so everything was subsequently rigged through self-perpetuating incentives to support that fixed assumed outcome. Precisely what keeps us repeatedly doing the things that have no effect on the desired outcome. But at least it supports a huge non-profit industry complex that perpetuates itself under the guise of "helping" .... itself to your money.
It's quite frustrating that in spite of the truth and solution being right before our eyes, because truth and reality is too inconvenient and difficult and uncomfortable because it does not fit with preconceived conclusions and assumptions, we simply want to ignore reality and substituted our own. And so goes the perpetual poverty "problem" that we are seeking "solutions" for. Organizations can't even move away from Microsoft products simply because they get money from the Gates foundation ... and we want to solve poverty? It's a bad joke.
As someone has said, our "help" and development money is taking money from poor American children, in order to give it to rich Africans ... who then scurry it away into offshore bank accounts.
It's almost even more sickening that our "media" and "news" are totally and utterly compromised. The corruption or even impropriety is really the secondary story when the whole structure and process for holding them accountable is corrupt and rotten and just plain blind with incompetence, ineptitude and stifling bias.
And it's also been not only debunked. It seems like just more intentional disinformation by the handlers of the naive gullible liberal class of self-destructive self-loathing types falling for ideological subversive tactics in the asymmetric war that has been waged against the USA, Europe, and the western civilized world for decades and generations now.
Sorry, but "single payer systems" "cost so much less" because they externalize and obscure and obfuscate the costs in many different ways and the whole accounting of the system is totally inaccurate. You are also trying to compare an American system agains single payer systems that are made up of generally healthy people.
There is simply no easy way to determine how the single payer systems would deal with things like the huge black obesity rates and accompanying diabetes and dialysis and associated complications. And that doesn't even address the fact that, of course single payer systems "cost so much less" when the government sets the qualifications for care AND the government further obscures the true cost by heavily subsidizing it with tax money that is involuntarily taken from lip service citizens.
I find it rather baffling that ostensibly intelligent people simply cannot seem to wrap their minds around the fact that the true costs of single payer systems are not at all easily detectable. And that doesn't even go into the far greater issue of the authoritarian nature of single payer systems where you are forced to not only pay for something, but you don't even have control over it.
Your dystopian conclusion reminds me of the exposure of the NSA's facial recognition harvesting program in coordination with corporate partners like McDonalds. Ever drive through a McDonalds drive through and see that in your face camera? Say hello to the NSA.
So much rationalization and excuse making. Surprise, people don't like being forced on some institution's schedule, forced to ride with strangers without any kind of standards or code of conduct or even just personal safety measures, and they don't like paying essentially just as much as driving a car and they don't like it taking twice as long to get from point A to point B by going through points D, E, and T.
It's really not rocket science, yet the cult of public transportation that holds on to parameters and variables that made sense in the late 19th and early 20th century simply cannot seem to internalize new information.
Whenever this issue comes up I feel like I'm in that scene in Idiocracy where the presidential cabinet's response is a circular logic of "plants crave Brawndo, because Brawndo has electrolytes, what plants crave" (or something to that effect).
Surprise, people, sane people don't want things that are worse that an alternative that is better in many different ways.
It's rather funny how the very types that are going on about corporations and fascism and colonialism and exploitation, etc. today, are also the ones generally supportive of the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Google and their tech-tyranny and tech-colonialism.
It's no different than the original elite's colonization and exploitation through extraction of natural resources in the past, and the neo-colonial exploitation by the elite through human-resource extraction of immigration today. It's now the new tech-colonization of societies and the harvesting and extraction of information-resources. And it is making the very few ever richer, faster.
Quite ironic that comments are being shadow banned, i.e., censored considering this site. Sure, you're smugly satisfied with yourself that you've blocked that meddling opposing view point, but you have no idea in your abuse of power that you are just causing more problems. You're no better than nazis or any other dictatorship, precisely why it is immensely dangerous to give anyone the power to censor "fake news"
This effort is immensely scary to me as an objective observer. There is an inherent bias in the self-righteous "majority" that blinds it to its own flaws, fallacies, and "fake news". It's akin to asking corporations or dictators to regulate themselves. There is a precedent and model on how to provide a structure to combat "fake news" and it's called the American Constitution with it's various means for separating and balancing powers in addition to the breakdown into three branched of government. What is overlooked is that the very nature that we have two distinct parties is a core function of this leveling and balance and regulation of powers.
The effort to combat "fake news", the solution looks ever more like thought police and authoritarian propaganda machine than it looks, let alone would even be able to provide some sort of accurate and precise filter of "fake news".
What a lot of ... basically everyone on the left ... doesn't realize is that CNN was precisely set up after Carter's thumping, with specific and deliberate effort to manipulate people's minds and perceptions for political purposes, i.e., propaganda. Now, will it be accepted that given its history and its rather regular intentional manipulative and false news reporting that CNN will be labeled "fake news"? There is no chance in hell that would happen even if they came out and said "we are fake news". Just let that sink in; this is not a scientific or principled endeavor, it is purely a political one to weed out "fake news" the left disagrees with, while promoting "legitimate news" the left agrees with.
It goes to the very core and purpose of the freedom of speech in the USA, for which many foreign and ever increasingly even American people don't have a deep enough appreciation for. The vulnerabilities one party of people cunningly and in a self-satisfactory manner so slyly put in place so that they can misuse it one day, may very well fall into the "wrong" hands the next. It is precisely what happened with the oh so righteous Weimar Republic and it's emergency measures that were meant to be used for "good". Well, the National Socialists used it for "good" too, just not the "good" their ideologically opposite expected it to be used for.
"...how this will be gamed". Maybe just spin off little small business divisions that happen to be in the very same office they were in before?
It should have been made an across the board, minimum $150k adjusted for inflation and a default requirement of $200k.
I realize the following is not going to be popular here , but people don't take into account how much these programs and illegal immigration are destroying the fabric of America because it allows politicians and corporations to ignore our problems in education and the economy. With every foreign H1B worker you are depriving a child that could and should have been educated to have filled that position. But instead, politicians and corporations ignored the issue and left poor kids to fester amid Democrat and big business policies (including Google and Microsoft) of welfare and immigration that undermines their community's growth and development. They have been trapped in a welfare bubble by Democrats and establishment GOP by selling them and America out to foreigners.
I know that's not what foreign YC readers want to hear, but these H1B visas and illegal immigration, and even excessive legal immigration are wreaking havoc in our society. We will never sole the education problem and never progress if we keep living on credit by importing other people to make it look like we are still successful. The detritus is starting to pile up no matter how much you slap new paint on it.
I don't understand why they wouldn't enter those markets. Is there really some insurmountable hurdle to extending this mobile and internet based service? It makes no sense to me?
Sure it would not be as quick because there would not be as many drivers, but there's no harm in just offering it for facilitation of ride sharing, is there? It is maybe that they just don't see the value of fighting small localities and their taxi mafias? Can someone shed some light on what might be hampering that.
I don't know about others. But for me it's a kind of lack of organization combined with poor technical implementation of UX. As I do things, whether they are reading, researching, task completion, etc. tabs start accumulating and the lack of any kind of management functionality in Chrome makes it rather difficult to clear out the dormant tabs without manually going through every single one.
Firefox tried using ... I forget what they called it and renamed it to ... some kind of grouping of tabs. But I think there would be an opportunity for some smart grouping by, e.g., time, i.e., tabs opened within certain periods of time are somehow visually grouped, or type, i.e., using some google foo to classify the URL to differentiate between things like food, news, dev/coding, scientific related tabs.
I'm just saying, it is annoying and boring as hell looking at dozens of tabs that are all gray because they are so contracted. There needs to be a better UI solution.
What is also discounted now even, when we are supposed to be smart and all learned, is that religion not only has played a fundamental role in why we, the west and roughly central-European based cultures are where they are that cannot or is foolish to discount. There is a particular reason why other non-central European cultures have brought us basically every single human achievement and every single good and positive thing around you that separates you from a brutish and savage life, which other societies simply have not been capable of developing on their own. Not recognizing that only leaves as single alternative view point that it is somehow inherent to genetics and "race" which is a far more dark perspective than acknowledging the role of society and culture and, yes, religion and the particular values it bears in the advancement of society.
When, e.g., your value system is founded on the notion that you reincarnate and have many/infinite attempts at doing good and that "good" is of a certain characteristic, then your life and choices and values and priorities are driven by that frame of mind and world view. If you are driven by the murderous and pedophilic values of islam that demands total domination through lying and killing and the murder of anyone that does not submit to islam then your values are going to form your perspective on the world that is a kind of parasitic and rapacious.
I find it rather odd that the tech industry of all sectors and disciplines would not seem to understand that the parameters and the system define and confine the behavior and outputs. You can put the most pure and perfect data into a shitty system that is broken in so many different ways and it won't output or produce anything of value or might even produce things that are dangerous.
We really are underestimating the value or not only risk and failure by dismissing it altogether and assuming and taking things for granted, but we are dismissing the humanistic and spiritualistic aspect that has played a role in human development and advancement for eons and is probably the core driver of what separated humans from animals in so many different ways.
Considering how Facebook grew on the back of several fraudulent scheme to inflate their numbers in many different ways at different stages, I can't think of a worse entity to spawn a presidential candidate … maybe Plantir but they are already heavily involved in the game without the public knowing it, let alone what and how.
That brings up another interesting topic though, the psychological tendency for people to defer to authoritarians, a kind of legitimacy or validity from authority (almost as if they were named for it), which leads people to make the mistake to assume that, for example, "if this user was censored (if you ever even find out about it since most of the time you aren't even allowed to know the censorship is happening at all) then those in control must have just cause as implied by the authority they have". It's quite a concerning negative feedback loop.