What a ridiculously elitist comment. So because some of them can't code at a professional level but want to make money with a small online business or startup it means they're just "hustlers" (in a negative sense)? Is there something somehow wrong with wanting to create a product that makes money even if you aren't a professional coder? For many people, being good at coding is secondary to just getting something off the ground, even if it doesn't fit your snotty definition of what's proper. And customers don't really care either way as long as they get perceived value.
The community on the site itself is quite friendly and supportive, hardly just a bunch of cheap hustlers.
First, congratulations! Now, speaking practically, Act as if you just won the lottery, and proceed accordingly. I'm saying this seriously for the sake of the advice offered in this rather remarkably useful post in reddit about managing a lottery windfall in a way that doesn't ruin you or your family life and relationships. Came to mind right away when I saw this thread, and again, the post is really worth reading through (I have no connection at all to the author, just thought it was very, well written): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...
I consider this to be a potentially terrifying idea. Maybe if "status" were rigorously kept to measurements of honesty and reliability that are as objective and unbiased as possible, I could see it working reasonably well but the much more probable reality would be one of crushing conformity to established social trends and a tendency toward ostracizing people who don't follow along with them, even if those trends (by virtue of being trends) aren't at all reasonably objective measurements of good, bad or moral in a person.
That was, to put it mildly, exceptionally generous of your dad and mom. Very few people would go that far in helping a complete stranger. And what happened to the homeless man eventually?
Bringing politics to a discussion thread that's very definitely and correctly about politics? Wow, what a problem. Or is it just that they give a point of view that you don't like.
Jbob I truly, absolutely hope you're right on every level. It would be wonderful and if we can put this sort of monstrous society off for decades before ubiquitous surveillance truly becomes ubiquitous. Or maybe until we find some way of practically/legislatively quashing it, and all the better. What worries though is that it DOESNT have to be perfect like some people here are fearing. It simply has to be good enough so that most people never truly know when its following them rigidly and when not. We can probably safely assume that X percentage of the surveillance operating in a "total" surveillance society isn't working properly or being fucked up through human error but in such a scenario we can never be sure which percentage that is or when such a thing is the case, and that will be enough to dampen a lot of healthy civil disobedience, protest and spontaneous action by people (and im not even talking about actual criminals here).
It's like an ultra-modern version of what the 20th century totalitarian states counted on: The gestapo, KGB or NKVD type police agencies of these countries knew they couldn't watch everyone all the time, and everyone knew they weren't being watched all the time (they also knew that a lot of incompetence and corruption ruined control frequently) but they could never be sure when they were safe or not and that kept a lid on individual freedom quite effectively.
Wow, read the book years ago (books actually, there are four that I remember but the first is by far the best) and you just brought me back to the emotional impact of that particular story. It was powerful. The story of Rachel and her Merlin's sickness also. The story of the priest, the cruciform parasite and the bikura was viciously disturbing on the other hand.
But this is simply wrong, at least partly. Yes, your criticisms of many of these tech founders and youth fetishism in general are right in certain ways but these existing companies help millions of people all the time.
Facebook is used for a lot of vapid social media posing, but it also serves as a platform for millions of social protest and communication movements worldwide. The same for twitter (possibly even more). I've seen both used amazingly well by people at a grassroots level where I live to communicate news that the government and organized crime try to censor in normal media with deadly violence.
Amazon is considered a vast exploiter of cheap labor and a crusher of "mom&pop" businesses, but it also frees millions of people to instantly sell their offerings online, while offering honestly useful savings and product access to millions of others.
And as for Google, besides all the serious and real criticisms of it, there are numerous benefits too, so many of such a scale that we almost seem to take them for granted as part of the daily tech background, until we really pause to consider what that company has done for access to information at zero cost on a global scale.
Tech founders of all kinds and especially the young tech founders of the giants have already helped millions and possibly billions of people all over the world. That they became billionaires and in some cases narcissistic snoops in the process doesn't eliminate what their technologies have done to benefit the world.
My take on legal punishment of banks that commit these sorts of frauds: the only method of punishment that strikes me as likely to actually make them feel the pain of their acts is to also pursue indictment of specific executives that knowingly allowed activity that was very evidently shady to continue. Multimillion and multibillion dollar fines levied against giant corporations are ineffective for the very reasons stated above by others, they're proportionally absurd for these kinds of corporate actors and the costs of these fines are mostly an abstraction (no one bank executive or group of them really feels the drain from their own pocket) that most likely get subtly passed onto customers anyhow.
I would strongly suggest watching the Netflix documentary "Dirty Money" series episode on the HSBC/Mexican cartel fiasco. It goes into many of the details of how it went down and how it was discovered.
Definitely second this, That was one stunningly good documentary series.. Saw it on a lark but ended up with plenty of emotional reactions. The director received criticism from both left and right, virtually all of it undeserved IMHO.
Oh please, piss off. Some of the best commentary I've personally seen about the very real dystopian nightmare slowly being built in China is right here at Hacker News, so if someone wants to take a discussion thread about technology helping tyranny into China territory, i'd call that an excellent fit. If the comments are informative and descriptive of ideas that are relevant to factual events (yes China really is authoritarian and using high technology to become ever more so in many ways) then it's hardly just nationalistic flamewar or insult.