Nevertheless, a crime is a crime.
I'm so over this shift in America's business model.
Original Silicon Valley model, and generally the engine of American innovation/growth/wealth equality for 200 years: Come up with a cool technology, build it in your garage, get people to fund it and sell it because it's a better mousetrap.
New model: Still come up with a cool idea, still get it funded and sold, but the idea involves committing crime at a staggering scale (Uber, Google, AirBnB, all AI companies, long list here), and then paying your way out of the consequences later.
Look some of these laws may have sucked, but having billionaires organize a private entity that systematically breaks them and gets off with a slap on the wrist, is not the solution. For one thing, if innovation requires breaking the law, only the rich will be able to innovate because only they can pay their way out of the law. For another, obviously no one should be able to pay their way out of following the law! This is basic "foundations of society" stuff that the vast majority of humans agree on in terms of what feels fair and just, and what doesn't.
Go to a country which has really serious corruption problems, like is really high on the corruption index, and ask the people there what they think about it. I mean I live in one and have visited many others so I can tell you, they all hate it. It not only makes them unhappy, it fills them with hopelessness about their future. They don't believe that anything can ever get better, they don't believe they can succeed by being good, they believe their own life is doomed to an unappealing fate because of when and where they were born, and they have no agency to change it. 25 years ago they all wanted to move to America, because the absence of that crushing level of corruption was what "the land of opportunity" meant. Now not so much, because America is becoming more like their country.
This timeline ends poorly for all of us, even the corrupt rich who profit from it, because in the future America will be more like a Latin American banana republic where they won't be able to leave their compounds for fear of getting Luigi'ed. We normal people get poverty, they get fear and death, everyone loses. The social contract is collapsing in front of our eyes.
I agree with you, except that you’re too positive. The United States is already a banana republic.
The federal courts are a joke - the supreme court now has at least one justice whose craven corruption is notorious — openly accepting material value (ie bribes) from various parties. The district courts are being stuffed with Trump appointees with the obvious problems that go with that.
The congress is supine. Obviously they cannot act in any meaningful capacity.
We don’t have street level corruption today. But we’ve fired half the civil service, so I doubt that will continue.
It's bad but I think it's important to recognize how much worse it can get. Otherwise why would you work to save anything? I'm "positive" because I come from the US and I now live in an actual banana republic and I see firsthand how much worse things will get in America if the trajectory doesn't change.
Imagine a future where election results are casually and publicly nullified if the people with the guns don't like the result, and no one can do anything about it. Or where you can start a business but if it succeeds and you don't have the right family name it'll be taken from you and you'll be stripped of all you own and possibly put in prison for a while. That's reality in some countries, the US is not there yet, but those are the stakes we're playing for here, and why change needs to happen.
You realize that 1500 people were just pardoned for storming federal buildings, trying to kill elected official and trying to overturn an election?
Right now, the President is sending federal troops and occupying cities and just bombed a ship in Venezuela
Please see this comment and don't respond to me in the future. Since you people are all exactly the same, and can only talk about one idea, until you become capable of other thoughts, you're not worth engaging with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149981
I asked you the question before that you didn’t answer. By what objective measure is the median US citizen better off than any 1st world country?
You said it in one word - it’s corruption.
Not creative destruction. But pure corruption.
Creative corruption?
If we were to use an entirely neutral term for it, in the case of something like Uber, really it's the privatization of control. The regulation around taxi cabs was a matter of public policy, Uber brought in its own version of this, broke the laws where it saw fit, spent money to get new laws written, basically the decisionmaking was no longer in the hands of a public institution.
Now there is a fair criticism to be made that the public institutions governing taxi cabs were sclerotic and shitty, but if you trust Uber for one nanosecond to do what's in your best interest when it doesn't align with theirs, you're a fool, and giving a private company such a huge global footprint in what was formerly a public affair is probably going to lead to tears. They absolutely will seek rents, find them and charge them to you sooner or later, that is what's in their DNA as a private company, barring effective regulation this only ends in one way.
Where we are now is we are so deep down the rabbit hole of profit chasing that there is zero interest in maintaining or strengthening our public institutions. Why would you do that? How does it get you paid? It doesn't and everyone thinks society and culture are just big jokes that don't get you paid. So no one really cares to uphold them anymore, everyone's feasting on the corpse of the civil society while it rots.
> *and generally the engine of American innovation/growth/wealth equality for 200 years: Come up with a cool technology, build it in your garage, get people to fund it and sell it because it's a better mousetrap.”
So exactly when was there “wealth equality” in the US? Are you glossing over that whole segregation, redlining, era of the US?
And America was built on slavery and genocide.
Honest question: what's with the penchant some people have to turn every conversation into a referendum on how horrible America is?
You realize there are countries that are even worse to their citizens right? Like I'm really asking, why do so many people online seek to eliminate all conversation that isn't a simple and un-nuanced condemnation of America?
I am able to have criticisms of America while also thinking there are good things about it and that there are also worse places, but some people seem incapable of holding those three ideas in their heads simultaneously. Especially the idea that there actually are countries worse than the US, they just can't fathom that it seems, or don't consider it a fact that should receive any attention.
It’s the BS “American exceptionalism” like this country was founded on “hard work” and the idea of “equality” when it was literally founded on slavery and enshrined in the constitution that an entire race of people were considered 3/5th of a person.
Right this very second, the same Republican Party who fights tooth and nail for the right to bare arms is trying not to let transgender people carry guns.
Which industrial country has a higher rate of incarceration than the US? A higher infant mortality rate? Less people covered by health insurance? A lower life expectancy?
There is absolutely no objective quality of life measurement that you can name where the median American citizen is better off than a country in Europe or in Canada or the UK.
Womens suffrage was also not part of the deal in 1776.
Do you guys really not see "I hate slavery and suffrage matters" as a tangent to the original point which was the problem of Big Tech not following the law?
I mean we all hate slavery, there was a funny bit about that in Bad Teacher, but not every discussion has to be about it
I mean, it's a total derail, but this isn't Metafilter. Threading means we can have totally useless side conversations and anyone that doesn't like that particular sidebar can just click the [-] and move in.
Welcome to the age of grift.