The EU can legislate to protect their people from FAANG because these companies do not have Carnegie level monopolistic influence like in the USA. I'm not sure of imperialism, but in congress, the more well-funded candidate wins over 90% of the time. Lobbying is also a legalized system of first world bribery, people talk about "taking the money out of politics", but it has always been this way. Money is a portable form of power, and it is fuel to political machines.
In fact, the Invesco QQQ Trust Series I fund, which tracks the top 100 nonfinancial public domestic and international corporations in the NASDAQ, is heavily dominated by tech. Of the top 10 holdings, 9/10 are tech companies, with the remainder being Costco. In the information economy, these companies have taken the place of the steel, oil, and railroad giants of the 20th century. Instead of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, we have had Jobs, Page, Zuckerberg, and others. Of course this is a rotating cast, but the idea is the same.
So yes, accessing interconnectivity via the internet is more important to Europeans than the corrupted legislation of the US, but it's not like they don't have their own problems. Especially in regards to energy and the current conflict in Eastern Europe. The petrodollar is what props up the US economy, if Western Europe buys energy in anything other than US dollars, then our government cannot continue vigorously printing money without Weimar levels of inflation. That is really where imperialism comes into play, it props up the economy of Western Europe.
I agree that the ideas of exploration, self-education, and the drive of the individual is important to the Western and especially American tradition of technological innovation. In terms of individual empowerment, we also have the ability to delete social media accounts, to boycott companies like Amazon, and to use alternative search engines. In many cases, it is not a preference but a necessity to use an engine besides Google to sift through SEO optimized content and find the information I'm looking for.
This is in response to you and this article, because the narrative of Western decline is peddled so enthusiastically that it brings itself under scrutiny. If it was such a self-evident truth, then why does it have to be constantly pushed on us via mass media, via Wall Street billionaires, via foreign propagandists? Because it is a lie, it is a lie that serves the international ruling class, a global alliance of ultra wealthy oligarchs that are betting against their own people.
Yes, this has little to do with open source, but honestly this article has little to do with open source. It attempts to paint a historical narrative, which is the bread and butter of historically effective propaganda. To touch on this topic as this article has, open source and Linux in particular is great for circumventing tech monopolies like Microsoft and gaining full control and privacy over a machine that you own outright.
Similarly, boycotting tech giants, Amazon included, improves individual quality of life as well as living conditions for the entire nation. That is individual empowerment, speaking truth to power and making conscience decisions with your attention and consumption. Unless another Teddy Roosevelt comes along to bust up our tech monopolies and reign in the political influence of extreme wealth, this is really our only recourse to turn the tides and bring back real innovation.
That is what we need, real innovation, not frantic bids to explore and capture "data as oil" drilling sites. Innovation triumphs over brute force and human subjugation every time. That's what we need not just to protect our livelihoods, but to push the progress of humanity forward. Hewlett Packard, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, was not built on brainstorming ways to addict people to content aggregators and harvest their data.
It was bold ideas, real intellectual labor and not just psychological exploitation. Above all, technological innovation that contributed to the overall lives of mankind as a whole. It wasn't about exploiting, controlling, taking, but exploring, building, and contributing. That's the core idea of open source, passion and freedom. This is really at the core of the hacker ethos, freedom for the sake of freedom and innovation for the sake of wonder. The end result is a more free and open society. At the intersection of capital, the end result is an economy based on improvement and not exploitation. One is sustainable, the other is not.
It is really a revelation that love is what makes life meaningful?
There is a sweet naivete to a study like this, it invites compassion.
Analyzing happiness with this cold academic rigor is just absurd, it is like a depressed species of alien studying our planet to figure out why people have happy lives. "Is it genes?" the cold, analytical mind ponders. It is kind of funny, yet it is tragic, and so it invites a response.
Yes, love makes life worth living. Not just relationships, but love, in its many varied forms. If you are reading this, I love you. To Ivy League scientists and their objects of study, I love you as well. You see, God is love, this is a simple truth found in scripture. Surround yourself in love at all times, and you will lead a life that is satisfying and resplendent in joy.
> It is really a revelation that love is what makes life meaningful?
It does not intends to be a revelation. A study can prove what everyone always believed all along. People believe all kind of things, some are true some are false. A properly designed study shines a dispassionate light at facts in a way which can show if the common belief was false or not.
> Analyzing happiness with this cold academic rigor is just absurd,
You are entitled to think that. The history of humankind is full of people being dead sure of themselves while also being wrong. This is why it's worth to check our assumptions in a dispassionate way. Especially the things we are sure about.
> it is like a depressed species of alien studying our planet to figure out why people have happy lives.
That is your projection. One can be full of joy, happiness, and love while still applying logic and dispassionate reasoning to study a question.
“Love” is not a singular concept, the word refers to a whole lot of different things, and it’s also different from happiness and longevity (what the study measured). The article also doesn’t mention meaningfulness. What you wrote therefore seems like a non sequitur.
> Yes, love makes life worth living. Not just relationships, but love, in its many varied forms. If you are reading this, I love you. To Ivy League scientists and their objects of study, I love you as well.
Well, the point is, not all love is equal and some love is greater than others. At that point, it's up to you to prioritize accordingly since love requires energy and we all have finite energy.
You see, I don't believe in God at all. And I think religion is generally more harmful than helpful. And yet... while the study was kind of boring, and most of the comments here too, there is something in your comment that touched me very much. You put a smile on my face after another difficult day. Thank you.
> It is really a revelation that love is what makes life meaningful?
Yes. The original researchers considered all kinds of things that might correlate to long term health and happiness. They did not consider quality of relationships as one of them.
>You see, God is love, this is a simple truth found in scripture
I have read my fair share of traditional religious scripture and I haven't concluded this at all from the text. I've found what they call "God" to be at times a very spiteful, cruel, and unloving entity. If this is what "love" means in these texts, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
> God is love, this is a simple truth found in scripture
I'm not sure which scripture you are talking about. If you are talking about the Abrahamic line of scripture, you can find anything you want, as Shakespeare famously said. Because you are apparently a good person, you focus on the positive aspects of the message, and that is great.
But there are people who focus on different parts of the scripture, or interpret the same passages in a different way, that lead to injustice and suffering. The fact that there are so many religious denominations reading the same documents but coming to different understandings shows that this message is anything but simple.
Famously, the Torah describes God's special relationship with his chosen people. Many people love to take excerpts from this as God's universal truths, but in fact these were only for the Jewish people. God had no problem commanding them to commit rape and genocide against out-groups. The claim that "God is love" is true only if you erase large parts of that document, or redefine "love" to be whatever God has commanded there.
I'm not one to memorize Bible passages, but I believe there are a few places where the Israelite were told to lay waste to other tribes, though they could keep the virgins for themselves.
This is the first I found via google, I'm sure you can find more:
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
There is not a chemical solution to a spiritual problem.
New concepts are exciting, but the Indigenous Mexican use of psilocin in treatment of things such as depression, addiction, and other ailments of the soul are fundamentally integrated into their Christian beliefs and practices.
If the tech bros of San Francisco are seeking a cure to their existential despair, they should turn to San Francisco the man, the legend whose works were rooted in his unwavering faith to Jesus Christ. Undoubtedly the inspiration to the city's famous love for Bohemian living.
If the proliferation of psychedelic drugs from Haight-Ashbury was the answer to the ills of our nation and the ills of the heart then it would have worked already. Instead of trying more and more drugs, why not try something that really works? Before the 1960s, San Francisco in its free-spirited glory was closer to the light of God. It's not too late to turn things around.
Evolutionary biology is sincerely beautiful, the biological history of our species is a meta-history to human history.
On a grander scale, the biological history of life itself weaves the career of the human race into a context of profound interconnectivity.
It's natural to contemplate your origins, the place and culture you come from, your ancestors and the history of your family. It's even more profound to contemplate your biological origins, your ancestry into species unrecognizable from your own.
It really is a humbling experience to trace a path thousands and even millions of years into the past. The end result is an increased appreciation for the beauty of nature and for the inseparable unity of the human race.
But also remember that billions died so you could exist. Natural selection is what it is... selection, and those that are not selected.. are silenced.
Be awed by the beauty but also be wary of the horror that is existence.
Awe, beauty and horror are human concepts. Do not let that bias cloud your logic. When something is beautiful to you, you become blind to the horror. When something is horrible to you, you become blind to the beauty. Best way to view something, is to ignore both, and judge it dispassionately.
Nothing is beautiful, nothing is horrible. That is true understanding.
What's interesting is if you frame evolution as a system for producing and propagating increasingly efficient (given a context or state) behaviors through time (such that "living things" can amass more energy or manipulate their environment more), and take into account what makes humans unique, it's really eye opening as to the nature of intelligence, learning, emotions, and really just why we are the way we are. It seems the things that make humanity unique is how extremely efficient we are at propagating knowledge through time via means that are not merely genetic, yet our brains are still fundamentally limited by the chemical processes that make them up. What would happen if we were able to find a way to create a self-regulating, autofeedback system that made decisions at the speed of, say, electricity (nearly c)
I'm not much for eating oysters, but these are the kind of leaders we really need. People with the will and means to inspire real, practical hope in our future.
These are the "first movers" who really matter, those with the vision and confidence to make positive changes in their community and surroundings. People with the hope and confidence to give us hope and confidence in our future.
So while I may not be much of an oyster eater, I commend Mr. Malinowski and his successful efforts to restore the waters of our precious land. From the harbors of New York City to every corner of this Earth, our land is worth saving. Our future is worth protecting and our people deserve hope.
People are realizing that social media is draining, predatory, and entirely superfluous.
Of course there are employees here of social media corporations who would want to stem the tide of this mass exodus, but it's useless. Social media corporations have overstepped their boundaries and become a net negative on human society.
Deleting your social media accounts results in an immediate improvement of quality of life and mental wellbeing. These sites are intentionally designed with predatory psychological mechanisms, they are designed by hackers like ourselves, but the hackers who see "social engineering" as a perfectly ethical practice and not simply psychological manipulation.
These services are designed to be addictive, full stop. Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media. Maybe this will bring SV back to its roots, real technological progress for the nation and not desperate bids for data mining based on cheap psychological tricks.
People are growing sickened of the endless scrolls of psychological disturbing viral content combined with the false positivity of human interest stories. It is deepening social divisions, racial conflicts, political partisanship, and general misery. We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections in an increasingly isolated society, and social media stands in the way of this.
> Of course there are employees here of social media corporations who would want to stem the tide of this mass exodus, but it's useless.
Is there evidence of a mass exodus? The parent post seems to me like kind of social media post driven by addictive emotions. It's an expression of strong emotions, but curious, exploratory, or providing knowledge.
> real technological progress for the nation
When was YC's motive to serve the 'nation'? They existed long before the recent surge in economic nationalism (a platform of some very bad people in history, BTW), are an international company in an exceptionally international business - one mainly driven by a free international WAN, and, I would have said, and I long heard from SV in general, a desire to change the world for the better. To help people, not some putative 'nation' - which always ends up meaning 'my power', and by talking about the 'nation' instead of people, they exclude other people from power and basic human rights. The purpose of government is to serve and protect people.
I think social media is just serving people what they want. We can argue if this is a good thing or not.
> Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media.
Maybe I’m an old head, but maybe we need more self discipline in the world? I know this is not pragmatic but I feel there are lots of things that are addictive (even things that were not designed to be).
> We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections
Maybe I’m using social media differently, but what is in today's social media that makes it mutually exclusive to real social connections?
>Maybe I’m an old head, but maybe we need more self discipline in the world?
Quitting and staying off of toxic social media is a great exercise in self discipline.
>>We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections
>Maybe I’m using social media differently, but what is in today's social media that makes it mutually exclusive to real social connections?
That doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive, it means one is overwhelmingly superior to the other, and that the major shift over the past decade has been in the wrong direction.
Even if your take the full libertarian stance that all drugs should be legal, the parent comment did not seem to be advocating for outlawing social media. It was positing that people have realized that social media is an addictive toxin and are deciding, on their own, to bail out. If something is truly addictive, suggesting people develop some self discipline and partake just little seems misguided at best. It's way easier to just abstain completely. Nobody wants to end up like Doug Stamper dispensing three drops of whiskey from syringe onto their tongue.
The Americas are just as old, it is just that people in their arrogance have chosen to overlook the works and achievements of Mesoamerican civilization.
History did not begin with the arrival of the Europeans, that is just when colonization began. The long history of these continents is treated as some sort of lost and mysterious thing of times past, yet the people from those civilizations are still here today.
Cage and Glass both understood this and named a number of their works aptly.
You mean I can get another if I break it, so a clay cup trumps a grail? The attribution is to Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, classical Urdu and Persian poet from the Mughal Empire. I can't see the same meme in the bible, although there does seem to be passing mention of clay there somewhere. No doubt all the ancient cultures valued pottery as it was such an amazing invention!
Making death threats on people's families for writing articles online.
Taking it to the next level by trying to destroy someone's marriage.
Just disgusting, and under the blessing of the top brass as well.
Whatever the judge decides, will avoid giving money to eBay.