When Grubhub acquired Eat24 from Yelp and removed the group order feature in favor of signing up for a "corporate" account, it sent much of my business to DoorDash.
The style of the art on that page is similar to HBO's Silicon Valley opening[1]. Until I scrolled down I thought the page might be some sort of satire.
I am also a fan of Yong, but "Upends what we know about virues" is a bit sensational. The article interesting for sure, but lately it seems that every book or study "turns Darwin on his head" or puts us in a "post-Pasteur era". I"m not even going to think about Cacner headlines. All overstatement of interesting science findings.
upend (ŭp-ĕndˈ)
v.To stand, set, or turn on one end: upend an oblong box.
v.To invalidate, destroy, or change completely; overthrow: upended a popular legend.
v.To win victory over; defeat.
Sure, but as far as I'm concerned if you get the byline you own the content. Again I like Yong, not faulting him but rather a general trend in media.
I'm being a science curmudgeon.
I said in my initial post that it was interesting. I don't think it "invalidates, destroys, or changes completely what we know about viruses". My gripe is with the sensational, click-bait title.
Just to offer a different opinion, I actually found this article not so easy to read. And the cliche of paraphrasing the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice annoyed me a little.
I was there from 2008 to 2013. This gives a fairly good break down: https://www.mtu.edu/alumni/favorites/snowfall/ I saw a lot of snow storms there over the years.
Neat fact: The houses in the UP actually have doors that lead nowhere on higher floors in case your first floor is buried :).
That's not really the idea that I'm repulsed by. I'm repulsed by the bizarre notion that music format eras should mention a political leader for any reason. It's like saying records really started declining after Nixon (or whenever/whoever is most appropriate, I'm not sure of the timing). It isn't necessarily incorrect, it's just categorically wrong to bring that information into the same thought.
Does limiting government limit the powers of the wealthy? It would limit one channel for them to exercise their power, but other channels like corporate control would exist.
I believe we are going to find it increasingly essential to view corporations as a second government that has a particular relationship with the nominal one.
The choice of opting out only exists where competition exists. Without a government to keep corporations in check, your ability to opt out would evaporate.
A powerful government is also really good at using its power to increase competition, encourage competitors, protect new comers, and so on. And a powerful government in command of its people will do more of that.
What government "power" is required to 'encourage competitors'? If there is business opportunity the market will attract participants all by itself without any need for government intervention.
In my experience, government incentives are generally misguided and force mis-allocation of resources. That is to say the government is distorting the market to favor activity that wouldn't otherwise be attractive to a business.
Yes, imagine how much more competition there would be on the pharmaceutical market, say, if governments didn’t discourage innovation by demanding that products be tested and safe. Think of barriers to entry it creates in the chemical industry that waste must be discarded of in highly regulated (and expensive!) ways. Not to think of air travel, which is so regulated that I doubt we’ll ever see a startup in that market ever again.
/s
This seems to me to be the trap of a false choice between regulatory power without bounds vs no regulation at all. A much more interesting discussion would be about the proper scope of regulation.
To take your example regarding pharmaceuticals, instead of mandating a particular regime of testing and efficacy, why couldn't the government require products that have not passed that particular hurdle be labeled as such?
What sorts of instances of corporate control are you thinking of here? Most examples that come to my mind involve corporations wielding the power of the state over people.
If you're engaged in a voluntary business relationship with a corporation, they're going to have their own terms, reasonable or not. And yes, the more asymmetric the relationship, the less reasonable the terms.
Fortunately, working for any particular corporation is voluntary. And thankfully, it seems that sunlight has disinfected these specific extreme practices. Hadn't heard of either.
Off-topic: This is the first I've encountered explicit citation of negative/positive sources. I like it.
Control of mineral resources, for example. Mining and oil/gas companies are already some of the largest corporations in existence. These are capital-intensive businesses where small entities often can't survive market downturns. Small resource owners get acquired by bigger ones during periods of financial distress, or juniors pre-emptively try to join forces with established companies as soon as they have a proven project to develop. The "natural" tendency, in absence of limits imposed by states, would be to reap maximum economies of scale, control over pricing, and resilience to downturn by combining extractive businesses without limit. A handful of giant corporations could acquire a commanding position over every mineral commodity required by industrial civilization. OPEC could be a very effective price-setter indeed were it a transnational corporation with unified ownership. Its monopolistic aims are actually hobbled by the diverse ownership of the oil fields of its members.
If you picture eliminating the state altogether, including its enforcement of property rights and contracts, then I concede that the powers attendant to wealth would no longer involve a de jure state. I think that the powers of concentrated wealth would remain nonetheless. Wealth would hire private guards to exclude others from their mines instead of using the law enforcement apparatus of a state, for example.
> Its monopolistic aims are actually hobbled by the diverse ownership of the oil fields of its members.
So, "competition"? Cartels in general are unstable because of these internal competitive forces.
I get that corporations with large market share can set prices in the short term. But every resource has a substitute. Even oil. So even price-setters have to operate within limits or risk their power being marginalized.
I am picturing the elimination of the state. And I agree that one can enforce his own property rights.
Where market competition exists it's effective in limiting prices and spurring innovation. But the natural tendency of successful businesses is to minimize exposure to competition. That can happen by buying the competition even if there's no state. (You can argue that regulatory capture is how successful businesses minimize competition by using the state, and I'm sympathetic to that argument, but it's also just another example of the tendency to eschew competition.)
OPEC is frequently divided against itself in terms of production targets; ExxonMobil is not. In a world without states there's no antitrust regulation preventing ExxonMobil from acquiring a market share equivalent to present OPEC, then exercising that pricing power with more effective discipline.
I am picturing the elimination of the state. And I agree that one can enforce his own property rights.
An entity that answers to no higher authority and enforces its own territorial claims with force is a de facto state. I understand and sympathize with many arguments for personal liberty over the power of the state. I don't understand the implication that unbounded private power is more trustworthy. It's an affront to liberty for the State of Delaware to exist and enforce its laws at the point of a gun, but it's ok if a corporation or family can acquire a Delaware-sized, Delaware-shaped parcel of land and enforce its decrees at gunpoint within those borders? That may not fairly represent your point of view. I have previously had arguments where self-proclaimed anarchocapitalists affirmed that it's fine for a small group of people to wield power equivalent to a state government as long as it's not called a state.
> but it's ok if a corporation or family can acquire a Delaware-sized, Delaware-shaped parcel of land and enforce its decrees at gunpoint within those borders?
Since "acquire" implies voluntary vacation of the premises by those who previously owned and occupied it, yes, exactly. I don't see a particularly problem with that scenario.
Consider the British East India Conpany, which at its peak controlled a vast territory and had an army larger than the British government’s.
For smaller, more common examples, look at the history of company towns and union busting.
Companies these days exert control by manipulating the power of the state because the state usually won’t allow them to exert control more directly. Nothing says it must stay this way.
Has this been substantiated? To my knowledge Amazon denies being a part of PRISM and the only thing a quick search reveals is that denial and Snowden criticizing Amazon for not being HTTPS by default on some of their endpoints.
Have you read Snowden's Leaks? All of the major tech companies have been on board for a long time (and that was years ago). How can you believe that a giant like Amazon will somehow magically not be part of it? It's time for the country to sharpen its critical thinking skills.
All of the major tech companies have been on board for a long time (and that was years ago).
I have read the Snowden leaks.
This is one of those times when details matter, and in those details you are wrong.
I wrote this previously[1] about Apple, but it applies here too:
The problem is that PRISM has conflated two separate things, and it is unclear how much of that conflation occurred at the NSA and how much outside.
Apple was (and is) compliant in the "release customer details with a court order" thing, which it seems is part of the PRISM data.
However, there was a second part, where the NSA got bulk access to communications without a court order. It is unclear which companies were complicit in this part. We know Google wasn't (because the NSA slide decks show how they had to intercept Google's inter and intra-data center links which were unencrypted at the time - and Google undertook a crash program to fix that).
Apple's statements are pretty clear: they say they only release information with a court order. That means they weren't complicit in bulk collection - but they may have been hacked at the time like Google was.
Yes, this is a crucial distinction and matches my understanding from what I've read of these public documents: PRISM is a program in which the NSA intercepted Internet and other communications, and then reconstructed the meaning of those communications at a higher level -- that is, interpreting HTTP requests to Google as searches, email views, and whatever else.
I did not see any evidence in the leaked documentation nor the reporting on those primary sources that the companies involved were complicit. If this evidence exists I would be very interested to know, but from Google's actions subsequent to the leaks it did not seem they agreed with the program or were complying with it, and instead took actions to oppose the program by encrypting their communications links internally, and indirectly by advocating encryption in public Internet protocols such as HTTP and SMTP.
I was under the impression that Google gave bulk access to the NSA, and the NSA wiretapped them regardless. I don't have a source to substantiate that claim though.
The US demands - through law - that any company, US and doing business in the US, give access to all it's user data upon simple subpaena by a secret court without notification to anyone, in a situation that can last for years. They're not even allowed to let you delete your data. There is no justification needed and most users are never informed this has happened, not even in the future. If you're a US citizen the time limit is measured in years (and can be extended by said secret court), if you're not a US citizen (or merely suspected not to be one), there is no time limit.
Doing "just" this to their users is what is understood in this discussion under the misnomer "not cooperating" with US spying. One can only assume that the OP has a funny sense of humor.
Given that this is noncooperation, why are we discussing who is cooperating and who is not ? This is WAY over the line, and of course means that no foreign company of any size should trust ANY US company with any amount of data.
And, frankly, it means that given the slightest disagreement in court, you should assume that all your data is public. Famously this facebook/instagram/whatsapp private messages in divorce cases, but not just that. Outlook messages of non-US citizens being picked apart by competitors because of a small non-payment vs non-delivery civil case in a non-US court has happened.
Note that the US government is famous for exploiting private sector relationships for spying and the reverse (exploiting government spying to give advantages to favored US companies).
So you should assume the worst and immediately implement basic security mechanisms (that are standard procedure at most companies now):
1) anything sent to you for any reason gets automatically deleted, especially email, unless specifically and individually prevented
2) any backup system is encrypted and the keys are subject to (1).
3) NOTHING can be put on any cloud system, for any reason without (1) implemented, and you should refuse to cooperate with external parties that insist on such a system.]
4) more strict measures are needed for director level and upward (note: legal definition of director, not just because it's used in company directories). Protocols negotiated beforehand dictate what can only be discussed over secure channels. First item on that list: anything related to any one specific employee.
But the thrust of that article is more suspicion that Amazon is not mentioned in the leaks and questioning the reliability of the company's word. It does cite one source, described in the article as non-mainstream, which asserts that Amazon was a part of PRISM, but that source fails to cite any leak.
Edit: I should mention that the first article casting doubt on Amazon's reliability is published by an independent publishing company, historically an industry that has been at odds with Amazon and harmed by its business practices.
This got me wondering what the AWS services' work load per day was. Best numbers I could find were from this 2013 article about serving ≈95 billion requests per day for just S3. The size and scope of cloud providers is truly cool and fascinating engineering.
This an interesting story of data and infographics. I would be curious to see an updated version that includes other large employers of engineers like Amazon or Oracle.
