The thing about free speech is, that you are not entitled to be agreed with.
And it seems, paypal really doesn't agree with the rhetoric on the daily sceptic - just at a glance this looks to be completely understandable. If, as a private company, paypal doesn't want to be associated with a website that thrives on misinformation and fearmongering, you can't really be surprised - that's just bad for business.
I completely get the argument, that free speech shall not be limited by anyone. But as a society we have to decide if free speech should also cover blatant lies and deliberate misinformation.
just as a free society should fight any movement that wants to limit the freedoms of others, sews hate or doesn't follow the principles of a free society, free speech advocates should probably fight against peddlers of misinformation.
It's not all black and white, not all or nothing with this one... we can have nuance in this debate.
> I completely get the argument, that free speech shall not be limited by anyone. But as a society we have to decide if free speech should also cover blatant lies and deliberate misinformation.
I hear this position a lot in relation to free speech and it's one I can't understand for the life of me. I guess I don't know what a blatant lie is, and further I know it's something I've been accused of many times in my life when attempting to speak the truth.
I have two questions for you:
* 1: If I say something that I genuinely believe, but is strongly contradicted by evidence that I may or may not be aware of do I have a right to say it?
* 2: If I say something that I believe is factually incorrect would I not have any right to say it?
Perhaps an example here would help. So something I've noticed is there are a lot of conspiracy theory websites which talk about an invisible man that can cure sick people. As far as I can tell this seems to be contradicted by the evidence and these people seem to be either blatantly lying or just completely ignorant of current scientific data. In some cases people who run these website are causing real world harm by convincing people that they shouldn't seek professional medical treatment for their illnesses because the invisible man will take care of them. My understanding is that in some cases conspiracy theorists are even refusing to get vaccinated because they believe the invisible man doesn't want them to get vaccinated.
I'm just wondering if you believe that websites dedicated to the invisible man conspiracy theory should be banned? And if so should those causing real world harm by lying about the invisible man be held to account for their actions?
What you consider “misinformation” today may turn out to be the truth tomorrow. I am not familiar with this site, but do you have examples of the “blatant lies and deliberate misinformation”?
Imagine if in 2001 everyone used your argument to deplatform anyone who said that Iraq did not have WMDs. Imagine if anyone who claimed that the U.S. recruited Nazi scientists to work in the U.S. government after World War II had their funds cut off. Imagine if anyone who suggested that smoking cigarettes was unhealthy or could lead to cancer in the 1940s was banned. There are countless examples of things like this.
Your line of thinking here is very dangerous because the justification to ban or deplatform people you disagree with today will be the same one used to ban people you agree with tomorrow.
The other thing is, as you pointed out, the issue is not black and white. Neither is the classification about what is considered “hate speech” or “misinformation”. Are you comfortable with big tech giants making those decisions?
I want the right to deplatform people for any reason. It my money I'm using to run my site and I should get to choose who uses it for what, with any rationale, or no rationale.
If society feels there's some gain to be had by restricting this, then let's legislate (because the platforms already ban people to maximize their profit, they're not giving that up willingly). Though, honestly, that's such a minefield I have trouble imagining the form effective legislation would take.
I think there is a fine line between a tech company and a financial services company.
Do you think it is okay for a bank to restrict people access to their own money or deny bank accounts because of opinions they hold or things they say?
It’s really easy to make claims like this when you don’t think the rules would ever apply to you. “Oh they are just targeting some fringe site on the internet. That’s perfectly within their rights”.
The precedent is what is dangerous. Imagine a world where if anyone says anything bad about billionaires, they are no longer allowed to use financial services.
The precedent was already set, but the people screaming about free speech today didn't care then because it was queers and sex workers losing their livelihoods.
I only read the DS occasionally these days, but to accuse this particular site of fear-mongering is really just a knee jerk reaction that shows you don't know anything about it.
The site was originally born as Lockdown Sceptics in ~March 2020 and has historically been devoted to combating fear, not engaging in it. The site's history consists mostly of articles arguing that lockdowns and other COVID countermeasures were an overreaction based on hysteria and bad assumptions by governments/academics. In 2020 of course this was considered incredible heresy and "misinformation" even though a lot of the people writing for it were actual doctors, scientists and researchers themselves.
Since the UK PM leadership contest, several high ranking members of the Johnson administration have walked back their previous support for lockdowns and judging from the Spectator/Telegraph the feeling inside the ruling party is now much more aligned with the Daily Sceptic's writers - the Cabinet woke up to the fact that SAGE were feeding them misinformation and the scale of the problem was being regularly exaggerated. E.g. Rishi Sunak said the Treasury had someone on SAGE conf calls for a while who didn't speak, so they didn't realize she was there, and she fed notes back to Sunak who then compared then to the official minutes the government was being sent. What a surprise, the official minutes expunged any mention of dissent or disagreement with whatever the most extreme proposals were.
At some point Lockdown Sceptics became the Daily Sceptic and it branched out. Since then it covers not only COVID topics but also generic anti-woke stuff, debate about the situation in Ukraine (with Ian Rons and Toby Young taking up the more conventional side of the argument and others arguing against), and a bunch of other stuff I'm not so interested in.
Nonetheless the idea that they spread misinformation let alone "hate" is absurd. The writers are mostly a bunch of middle aged academics and journalists making various counter-cultural points, who use graphs and data tables 10x more than the average journalist does.
Who exactly decides what misinformation is? Remember when Twitter started banning people for discussing the lab leak theory, which turned out to be true?
> If we believe that you’ve engaged in any of these activities, we may take a number of actions to protect PayPal, its customers and others at any time in our sole discretion. The actions we may take include, but are not limited to, the following:
> Terminating this user agreement, limiting your PayPal account (and any linked Balance Account), and/or closing or suspending your PayPal account (and any linked Balance Account), immediately and without penalty to us;
I just bet the PayPal terms also included words to the effect of "We can alter this deal, already couched in the vaguest possible terms, whenever we please without any notice other than this."
Given the Paypal "contract" (T&Cs) is longer than most published works, I suspect there are 4,122 "outs" specifically written into the contract that let's Payal do practically whatever the hell they want.
By your own logic, Paypal may decide not to be associated with anyone based on any random criteria, including opinions, race, sex, age etc. It can be black and white, of course, just not today.
No, state and federal law explicitly create protected classes, and describe the scope of protections granted. A service provider would be opening itself up to huge liability if it cut someone’s service based on, for instance, race or gender.
You are missing the point: PayPal does NOT provide any specific reason for the termination, so there is NO protected class as you cannot prove they terminated an account for speech, race or gender.
Giving no reason, absent a contractual or legal requirement to provide one, falls far short of offering up a blatantly illegal explanation. Even so, companies have clearly been found guilty of illegal discrimination, even when they went out of their way to hide their unlawful motivations.
But not political stance? Seems a glaring oversight. Unless the people who wrote the regulations like being able to request a payment processor shut off campaign donations to any newcomer with better ideas than them.
But that would make them beholden to the business interests that actually control the money, and leave them helpless to enforce any real regulations on the same. Surely no elected representative would be so shortsighted ;o)
To clarify: Samsung didn't directly force ifixit to take the article down. It was apparently a case of "do as I say or I'll shoot the bunny!" (the bunny being the supplier).
I guess that's exactly what they are after: funny (or otherwise "engaging") three word combinations that are: (a) easy to remember, and (b) promote their service. - the default square when looking up the town i live in is leber.abhilfe.schnell (german), translated "liver, relief, quick", so maybe that's what their algorithm is optimized for?
Either way, the whole system seems pretty stupid: why 3x3m (way to high res for normal street addresses, much to coarse for anything else)? what is the problem supposed to be that W3W wants to solve? I sure dont see it...
location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough.
>location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough.
So in one setting I have to email myself a link to get the map on another device. In the other I just type three words from one screen into my phone.
Why? The subscription model made their software much cheaper. CS used to cost something like 3.5k, now it's 720 a year including all updates. Sounds OK to me....
By your reasoning you're not expecting people to use the same software for more than ~4 years.
I bought Adobe Master Collection CS4 (student edition, for $1000) way back in 2008 and have been using it for the past ten years. It runs even better than it did back then because of the better hardware available now! The subscription model would have been much more expensive for a user like me.
You were lucky. Apple doesn't guarantee long-term compatibility of applications on Mac OS. You bought just after the latest Mac transition, so your ten years didn't happen to cross any big one (OS X, 2001; x86, 2006).
I bought some Adobe software in 2001, and it was a gigantic pain to get it working under early OS X (hours on the phone with Adobe), and wasn't usable under Rosetta, 5 years later.
If the rumors and historical trends are to be believed, we're on the verge of another transition. I would not buy an expensive binary blob for Mac today without an assurance I could get an upgrade, if/when there's another architectural transition.
I ran into this yesterday. I use Illustrator infrequently, in spurts, to do mapping work for a non-profit that donates our volunteer time to work on mountain bike trails in parks. I last purchased CS6 on a non-profit license because my of minimal use --- a week or two at a time every six months or so --- which really doesn't fit with the subscription model.
I hadn't fired it up since updating to Mojave, and last night when I went to update one of our maps I found that Illustrator CS6 pretty much isn't usable. It's so ridiculously slow that trying to type out a string of text on a blank artboard beachballed and took almost a minute for the 20 characters to display.
The workflow can't move to Affinity Designer because it's not really compatible with AI files[1], and I really don't want to get into the subscription model because even the non-profit license is $200+/year. Thankfully the CS6 perpetual license is for Windows as well, so I can spin it up in a VM... And MS is really good at backwards compatibility.
But it really sucks not being able to use it natively as I have for years.
[1] It'll open the PDF portion, but for a map with lots of complicated lines, these get changed from single paths in Illustrator to lots of curves in PDF. It's a mess trying to put these back together.
Their pricing is way too high as developer tools just because they have near monopoly.
Top of the line programming tools like Jetbrains give you their entire list of about 10 apps for $12 or so a month from 3rd year (Starting from about $20 a month for the 1st year) and of course individual apps are even cheaper.
Heck, even MS gives you the entire office suit for $10 a month with 1TB of cloud storage which I think is a good deal.
We need more competitors to drag Adobe's monopoly down. Their apps are built on ancient code, the performance is so bad compared to apps like Affinity Photo and they put folders and icons all over the Application folder on Mac I can't believe its annoyance.
I do find it somewhat rich that on a forum where the overwhelming advice for entrepreneurs is "Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.", people complain about pricing. I guess it's different when you're on the other end :)
I don't know, man. I guess they will charge what the market lets them get away with. It's a for-profit business, and if they do one thing right, it's marketing & sales. You might be pissed off about the pricing, but the market stands behind it - there was a lot of skepticism even internally on the subscription model, but I think the executives were proven right on this one. You may hate them for it, and anecdotally it's easy to find Adobe haters... but not all the market does. AFAICT, far from it, there are still way more promoters than detractors. And the subscription pricing opened up a large market that nobody even thought existed - not to mention the fact that it made revenue streams more predictable. At this point, I think it's really hard to argue that the pricing is hurting the company in any way - if you look at the numbers that is, not at anecdotes about how one particular person/ set of persons feels about it.
Assuming an 8 hour day and two days worth of billable work, that assumes you are making or your company is billing you out at $45/hour. Not exactly highest average salary.
But if you aren’t a professional designer, you no more need Adobe’s high end offering than a non professionally developer needs to spend thousands on an MSDN license.
not even close. Maya and 3dsmax start at $1500 a year. I'm pretty sure most other professional 3d software is in a similar ballpark or more. The apps are complex and the market for them is arguably not large enough to support the development costs at a lower price point. AutoCAD is another example. Even Unity is $1500 a year. Pro Audio tools are in a similar category.
A lot of people and small businesses updated very rarely. Often only when forced to by something like an OS upgrade. It’s only cheaper if you were a person or business that could afford an annual upgrade cadence.
While you are right in practice, your reasons are wrong. It’s not because these companies can’t afford it, as mentioned it’s actually cheaper. The part you referenced, about forced upgrading, is often more costly than simply having a subscription that routinely keeps the software updated. The problem is three fold:
1. Small businesses don’t upgrade because they fear change in general. Buttons disappearing, functionalities changing and new things like cloud integrations scare/confuse a lot of them. They also don’t want the pain of paying people for time to relearn what used to work just fine.
2. Subscription costs are very much more visible on P&L’s than one time expense charges. When the eventual tight times come, recurring costs are the first thing on the chopping block.
3. As you know, cutting most subs means cutting functionality as well. For small places like photography studios, they don’t want their core software to be beholden to a required recurring expense. They want to own it, so if all else goes away, at least it still gets the job done.
It’s often simplified to be a cost thing, but it almost never really is. They can afford it, but they don’t like what they give up in the model.
I think people fear change in software because updates have a habit of making the user experience worse. Think of the troubling trend in web design where they take away customization options and add more padding to everything to be "mobile friendly".
This is a valid concern but your comment really highlights a big problem with these discussions: your wording implies that this is universally bad but your examples are both things where it's impossible to say whether a given move is a win, loss, or wash without fairly detailed data. An increasing percentage of people are either mobile-only or mobile-primary, so making things mobile/tablet friendly is probably a good idea for most sites. Similarly, customization has significant training and support costs and removing infrequently used features to add things more people care about is a classic business trade-off.
There's no real reason for a customer to care about these trade offs. They want to get work done, nor worry about the business model behind one of their tools.
That's looking at the problem backwards: if you have one customer who has a bunch of customization requests you need to weigh their business against what other work you could be doing with the same development time. It's not a win if you keep one customer but lose others to a competitor whose product is easier to use or cheaper to develop, especially since I've probably seen at least a 1:10 ratio for arcane features and customizations which a customer swears up and down are mission critical to things which actually are — usually it's more like one guy doesn't want to consider changing the way he works in the slightest until forced.
Adobe software became notably worse (IMO) shortly before they went to subscription model. I remember the change from Illustrator CS2 > CS3, they totally ruined the flow. It feels like they make changes just for the hell of it sometimes.
It depends on how quickly they add things which matter to you. The break-even point for their pricing was a little over a year – e.g. Lightroom used to cost $150 new / $80 for upgrades and it's $10/month so if they are regularly shipping improvements you want the subscription is a good deal but if it's fluff or support for hardware you don't have you're still paying.
Yeah, that was basically my point: if you actually use most of what you get it's a good deal. If your usage has been stable for awhile you're probably overpaying for the possibility that your usage will change.
Most of those resources only cover text-heavy books in paperback format. i currently write an astronomy book (many high res images and illustrations) in a large A3(ish) format. the whole process is completely different.
for example:
- you should NOT let a third party print the book for you without any control over the quality of the final product. amazone print on demand does a decent enough job with paperback text books, but should probably not be used for printing anything else.
- unfortunately there is no real (OSS)alternative to CS software like illustrator and indesign when it comes to actually creating the book. yes, you CAN do it with other tools - but if you want to keep your sanity, DON'T. ( I tried and ultimately gave up on the idea of using anything but adobe software....)
- color management is a nightmare. prepare for some real headaches when the first test prints come back and everything that should be "100% black" comes back in different shades and color variations of dark grey.
- if you want any layout-heavy book to be easily translatable into different languages, plan for it from the get go. text like small info-boxes underneath images tend to vary in length a lot from language to language. some languages produce much longer texts than english, others are more compact. this can become a significant problem if all your layouts rely on character-perfect text placement and fixed lengths.
- binding techniques vary from one printing company to the next. it is advisable to choose a company early on, so that you can adjust your layout process accordingly. a simple change to color management, paper format or line characteristics can become a huge problem, when you have to change dozens or hundreds of embedded illustrations.
- you dont need amazons print on demand at all: most printing companies let you put in a small initial order (like 200 books). sell those first, then use the money to order more. margins are great if you actually publish yourself, so you can easily scale up your orders without risk of financial overextension. if you do it with the same company this should not take longer than 2 weeks. that kind of response time is totally acceptable.
Edit: I should add that this only works for books with a high retail price (like 50+ dollar)
And it seems, paypal really doesn't agree with the rhetoric on the daily sceptic - just at a glance this looks to be completely understandable. If, as a private company, paypal doesn't want to be associated with a website that thrives on misinformation and fearmongering, you can't really be surprised - that's just bad for business.
I completely get the argument, that free speech shall not be limited by anyone. But as a society we have to decide if free speech should also cover blatant lies and deliberate misinformation.
just as a free society should fight any movement that wants to limit the freedoms of others, sews hate or doesn't follow the principles of a free society, free speech advocates should probably fight against peddlers of misinformation.
It's not all black and white, not all or nothing with this one... we can have nuance in this debate.