IT departments are often (not always) unfortunately full of intellectually weak people who have based their entire careers around knowing their way around Windows and not much else.
Unfortunately it is taboo to acknowledge that people, and especially groups of people have varying degrees of intelligence. Just watch this comment being downvoted into oblivion, for instance.
"VP AR/VR at Facebook. VP of Ads before that. Co-Invented News Feed, Messenger, Groups, and more."
(Those are UI features/sub-products. Not inventions. The fact that you adapted/copied something that has been built thousands of times before in other contexts, like "Groups", to fit the Facebook context does not make it an invention. It may be talented product/UX thinking, but invention?)
Never met the guy, but I I've seen videos of him presenting over the years.
> I think gutting the value of a forum so that people can remove all their content at will on a whim can readily go bad places.
Thankfully, there's a really easy solution that HN today will not consider/is not taking seriously enough: Just change the goddamn displayed username for each comment to "<deleted>" or whatever.
1) this kind of (seemingly; it's all a black box in reality though) naval-gazing-based decision making is exactly why the GDPR makes sense. We can't run our lives on the whims of a few random people.
2) Does YCombinator tell us all of this stuff when we sign up to HN? No. We have to find it out by ourselves. When we e-mail them to ask them to delete our contributions, since there's no delete button, they just say "sorry, we can't do that".
I posted that (I'm vgf). My account was rate-limited and the post was very clearly artificially pushed to the second page, then the third. Just minutes before that it had started to climb up the front page relatively quickly.
My bullshit-guess is that out of those 32.5 percent units, EU/EES was responsible for about 31 units or so, and the rest 1.5 was from the middle east and africa. (Reasoning: the ME certainly has money, but no population to speak of. Africa has lots of people but besides relatively tiny South Africa very little revenue for Google.)
That's one part of the negotiation puzzle. EU would want it's citizens to retain access to their google-hosted emails.
Legally speaking, I'm sure there's plenty of ways the EU can force Google to do things it currently does not want to do.
I'd say the EU has lots of negotional angles currently to win things from Google. That is kind of what you get when you have more or less universal legislation power over 40% or so of the world's purchasing power (please correct me, I just bullshitted that guess). And that, alas, was also a large part of why the EU was born. So now we'll will reap the benefits.
If I could say anything to our EU negotiators in this case, it would be: stay brave.
Note 2: This kind of comment from a moderator feels a bit out of place, given this. At least without a disclaimer explaining the relationship between the topic and the moderator's employer.
Unfortunately it is taboo to acknowledge that people, and especially groups of people have varying degrees of intelligence. Just watch this comment being downvoted into oblivion, for instance.