There's an extremely interesting datum that most are not familiar with. In total in the transatlantic slave trade, about 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of these, 10.7 million survived the voyage. And of those, about 388,000 thousand went to North America. [1] Up to 60-70k more would make their way North America eventually for a total of up to ~450k - about 4% of the slaves that made their way to the New World.
North America's use of slavery was relatively low compared to many other places in the world. Even within the United States itself it's interesting to compare the states where slaves disproportionately ended up to those where they did not. And the Confederate/Union states works as a pretty solid proxy there.
- Confederate: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas
- Union: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and many others.
Suffice to say, slavery does not seem have had a lasting positive effect for the states that most actively utilized it. Ultimately I think the reason slavery is more of a focus for the United States than other countries is not because of any unusual usage of slavery, but because of an extremely unusual outcome.
For instance Brazil alone ended up taking on about 5 million slaves yet, like much of the south, has little to show for it. The point of this is not to say 'what about other countries' but to emphasize that the relative impact of slavery in the US was smaller than in many other places, yet we achieved vastly more than those places. So to attribute the exceptionalism of the United States to slavery, in any meaningful way, seems driven more by bias than logic.
Doesn't it strike you as odd to suggest that society was built for "white" males when such classification, as a meaningful indicator, didn't even exist until extremely recently? Irish, German, Italian, and many more are all groups today you'd just often just refer to as "white males." In times past? People who were very much second class citizens. And it went well beyond just national origin. Protestant vs Catholic was a huge deal and this also persisted until extremely recently. For instance something lost to history is how monumental JFK's election was because of the fact that he was a Catholic - the Obama of his time. Incidentally the first and last Catholic elected, even though more than 20% of America is Catholic.
Even when you get into things like slavery, Africans were not enslaved because they were black. Slavery was global and of course always began as in group - whites enslaving whites, browns enslaving browns, blacks enslaving blacks, etc. The big reason that "white" on "white" slavery ended was because of a shared religion and Christian church declaring it illegal for any Christian to enslave another Christian (in times before the schisms, such as 'Christian' was reasonably encompassing). The "problem" this posed for those seeking slaves is that tremendous empires were starting to form around the world.
For instance in the ~18th century you're looking at the Qing dynasty in China, the Mughal Empire in South Asia, the Ottoman empire in the Mideast, etc.. The world was rapidly unifying under incredibly powerful empires who were more than capable of protecting their borders and people. But Africa was a major exception. It not only lacked both meaningful unification and technology, but also had a thriving domestic slave trade. This made them a prime target. It had nothing to do with the color of their skin. Had Africans happened to have had a bit less melanin, but the situation remained otherwise identical, it's extremely improbable that things would have changed in any way whatsoever.
I'm sure you probably know why Coca-Cola is called Coca-Cola. If you don't - cocaine. It was one of the key ingredients in coke's initial product. A less well known example is Vin Mariani. A French wine that was made with a mixture of 6 milligrams of cocaine per ounce of wine endorsed by numerous historical figures including Thomas Edison and Ulysses S. Grant. Edison claimed it helped him stay awake. Oh indeed Mr. Edison.
The reason this is relevant is because the dates for these things start in the mid 1800s. Vin Mariani was made in the 1860s, Coca-Cola was inspired by Vin Mariani and came a decade or two later. Suffice to say the coke craze spread pretty quickly. And it's not like this was coke-lite or anything like that. It was genuine cocaine, same as we have today. And you had similar mental and physical consequences atop raging addiction.
It wouldn't be banned until 1914 and even that was due more to racism than concern for its effects. The New York Times ran a story in 1914 decrying "negro cocaine fiends" [1] which is what finally started the push to it getting banned. The only reason it took so long is because people were addicted and tried to ignore or set aside the negative consequences of it all, or even deny they existed. And that was pretty easy to do - Edison and Grant don't exactly rank near the top of your list of famous druggies. Nonetheless, the consequences were real and widespread.
The point here is that if you go back to the times before 1914, it'd be easy to imagine a future full of an ever larger chunk of the population degenerating under the influence of an ever increasing number of cocaine driven products. And in fact it would have seemed odd to predict anything else. Because when you're predicting the future you never predict 90 degree turns, because they sound absurd. Yet it's paradoxical because one of the few things you can guarantee about the future is that there will be countless more of these 90 degree turns.
The median donation to Wiki is, of course, $0. By giving anything users would be giving infinitely more than the regular user.
It'd be quite interesting to know what your aggregate CPM is. One way you could probably determine brave users is by contrasting raw user agents against your analytics data. The discrepancy there is going to be some mixture of Brave and those running other things that also block analytics like uBlock. But it should at least you give you a very rough ballpark CPM that's probably going to be much more reliable than e.g. a survey.
One other important figure that Brave could probably roughly answer (but also probably won't) would be what percent of Brave users opt in ads.
I think that ship has pretty much sailed, but in either case that has nothing to do with Firefox's decision. If they wanted to use Google, for whatever reason, they could do so while supporting user privacy by piping it through e.g. Startpage.
Sure it's only a few bucks a month but look at that in terms of your user base. What are you going to assume your marketshare of Brave users is? For context consider the marketshare of Firefox is in the single digits. Brave is probably a fraction of that. If we assume Brave's popularity is 10% of that of Firefox, that'd give you an expected userbase of < 1% Brave users.
That'd be $3/month for, at most, 10k users. If your entire userbase was on brave that'd be $300/month for doing literally nothing. It's really quite a nice model.
Actually this also understates the profit per person for another reason. In Brave you have to opt in to the site rewards system. So you're likely not only seeing a fraction of your userbase paying you but a fraction of your Brave users.
The reason I offered Popper's entire quote is because while I do think many people use it as are you suggesting, his quote makes it quite clear that is not what he is suggesting. He is speaking of an intolerant view as one that is intolerant of alternative views. In other words a view that:
- refuses to debate or discuss its merits and values
- refuses to meaningfully consider or discuss alternatives
- responds to discussion with aggression
The book which includes his quote was published in 1945, Popper was of Jewish ancestry, and the book was speaking primarily about avoiding totalitarianism. His philosophy should be taken in that context. People are manipulating his quote to try to justify intolerance of anything except their own world view, but it is this exact sort of totalitarianism he was suggesting that may imperil an open and free society. In particular he also defined an open society as one "in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions" as opposed to a "magical or tribal or collectivist society."
Intolerance trends towards a closed society where you believe what you are supposed to believe, or face the consequences. Tolerance trends towards an open society where individuals may not agree, but are free to express themselves and challenge one another on any view or value.
Issues similar to this have been brought up in the courts many times, and they almost invariably (sexual obscenity is one exception) yield lopsided results in favor of the 'offender.' One random recent case is Elonis vs the United States [1]. Elonis made statements online suggesting a desire to kill his estranged wife, later on kindergarten children, and then after that an FBI agent that had visited him in relation to the threat against children.
He claimed it was art and he was only expressing himself and not attempting to threaten or intimidate the individuals/groups in question, even though he was aware they would likely interpret it as threats. This is really a million times more threatening that some vague expression against an ethnicity. The supreme court ruled 8-1 in his favor. The US Supreme Court is extremely supportive of free speech, including the most detestable.
As an aside the links on the scotusblog are extremely high quality and provide lots of plain language analysis of the technical points. A phenomenal resource for any case or issue you're ever interested in learning about the legal nuances behind. For instance this [2] is their coverage of the 'gay cake' case.
Yes, it is. The nuance he was intentionally illustrating is the basis of our entire law. The one key exception to freedom of speech is speech that will, with high certainty, provoke "imminent lawless action."
And this is something that is interpreted in the most literal and conservative fashion possible. In his former statement he has a specific target, time, and location. It is extremely likely that his behavior will result in imminent unlawful action. By contrast condemning a large group lacks any specificity and is, in and of itself, not likely to suddenly drive any specific unlawful action.
Popper's quote is often quite misconstrued. Here it is, in context:
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
He is specifically framing the issue as one where an ideology goes outside of the realm of debate and on to violence. So for instance an ideology that says 'attack migrants' is obviously something that should be suppressed because these people have skipped the whole debate step and instead appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner. But, by contrast, an ideology that argues for reasons why unchecked migration may be unhealthy for a society and lobbies for according change is something some may consider intolerant, but is quite obviously not what he was referring to. On the other hand, he would certainly have been opposed to Antifa which, though ostensibly fighting against intolerance, have once again appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner and have 0 interest in debate or discussion or their views.
This defense of "free" platforms is reminiscent to feudalism. In feudalism you of course did not pay rent. You simply took care of the land and in exchange your lord would provide you a small share of the produced food, a place to live, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system. All for "free." But of course it wasn't free. The lords were utilizing the labors of the peasant to generate mass surpluses which were in turn used to greatly empower themselves.
In today's times human attention is arguably the most valuable 'commodity' there is. And YouTube is using their peasants to produce it in unprecedented quantities. In exchange they return a small share of the returns produced, a free place to host, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system.
It's of course technically correct that it's free, but the connotation is entirely wrong. Few would idealize for the "free housing" of feudalism, and I think in the future we'll have few that would idealize the "free hosting" of today. In the present? People are simply greatly undervaluing their own worth, much as the peasants did. It took the black death emphasizing their relevance for them to finally understand they were the ones running the show all along.
Everything you're stating is driven by wild assumptions that seem to be based on nothing except for trying to paint a pessimistic picture as possible. Everything would be contingent on a huge variety of variables - the algorithm, the usage, whether we think of a unified crypto or software specific coins, and much more. The idea is not to go for another VC hype bubble aiming for 80 billion percent growth or bust, but simply to create a stable source of revenue that companies can use to sustain themselves without resorting to the increasingly broken 'ecosystem' we have in digital rent seeking/advertising today.
This is really quite a perfect application for cryptoes where everybody could win, but there are a number of not yet solved problems that need to be overcome. One issue with this idea, and as with all good decentralized ideas, is that the person who does ultimately create it would likely receive little reward for it. It's not about making money, but about improving the state of software as a whole. There are only so many Tim Berners-Lees.
One might argue that the current system is making things much more terrible than any alternative. Software as a service makes sense for some things. But for the majority of things its now being used for, its only purpose is rent seeking. Cryptocurrencies offer an interesting balance between rent seeking and consumer friendliness. You use a piece of software, it mines for coins which are transferred to the company. The more you use their product, the more money they get yet from the user perspective it's all free (beyond some initial purchase) and doesn't even get into the nastiness of the ad world.
Only problem there is that as ASICs are developed, general purpose CPU mining rapidly becomes grossly inefficient, so you'd somehow need a decentralized coin optimized for extremely high usage scenarios that was also resistant to ASICs. Not really sure how you'd achieve that latter part without simply constantly changing the algorithm, but it poses a complex challenge of changing the algorithm in a purely decentralized fashion in a way that one can not build adaptive ASICs for. Though I would imagine this is a solvable problem.
This doesn't necessarily mean what you think it would mean. As always the problem with social sciences is that correlation != causation. For instance taller people also have higher IQs. [1] Its for reasons like this that I think we're rather more likely to recreate Frankenstein than Gattaca.
There's been another major shift as well. This [1] graph is critical. There were more self employed workers in the US in 1948 than there are today. The population since then has increased by more than 220%. And the trend increases the further back you go. I mention 1948 only because that's as far back as FRED's data goes! The US used to be a land largely driven by self employment.
We had large numbers of mostly independent economic centers populated with local businesses owned and operated by local individuals. In many ways it's something akin to what you can find in many parts of the developing world today. And it's awesome. But as the economy 'globalized' we've reached a point such that an urban business streetscape in California can very often look effectively identical, in terms of businesses in operation, to one all the way on the other side of the country in New York. You're never going to have anything even vaguely resembling economic equality when a handful of companies control immense amounts of the entire economy.
This also distorts governmental systems since extensive wealth means the reach of companies is practically unlimited. Civil servant versus a company sitting on billions of dollars with international connections spanning the entire globe and the best legal and public relations teams that money can buy? That's not even David vs Goliath, that's ant vs foot.
North America's use of slavery was relatively low compared to many other places in the world. Even within the United States itself it's interesting to compare the states where slaves disproportionately ended up to those where they did not. And the Confederate/Union states works as a pretty solid proxy there.
- Confederate: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas
- Union: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and many others.
Suffice to say, slavery does not seem have had a lasting positive effect for the states that most actively utilized it. Ultimately I think the reason slavery is more of a focus for the United States than other countries is not because of any unusual usage of slavery, but because of an extremely unusual outcome.
For instance Brazil alone ended up taking on about 5 million slaves yet, like much of the south, has little to show for it. The point of this is not to say 'what about other countries' but to emphasize that the relative impact of slavery in the US was smaller than in many other places, yet we achieved vastly more than those places. So to attribute the exceptionalism of the United States to slavery, in any meaningful way, seems driven more by bias than logic.
https://www.theroot.com/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us-179...