netcan

60 ms·

631.
by netcan 6y ago
malware used by states.
632.
by netcan 6y ago
A lesson to learn is that numbers aren't everything. Yahoo mail was irrelevant well before gmail surpassed them in users. The Yahoo comments sections (on news) were as active as reddit until months ago... but boomerland. A topic might
633.
by netcan 6y ago
Content farming to what end? Yahoo seems to have little SEO presence at all.
634.
by netcan 6y ago
Until they killed the comments section a few months ago, yahoo news (comments) seemed in the same league as a reddit or whatnot for a lot of news. There would be hundreds or thousands of posts on most daily news items. Yahoo slipped into a
635.
by netcan 6y ago
The word "capitalism," in our lifetime has two fairly distinct meanings. One meaning is marxist. Marx popularised the term and he implicitly defined it as an economic-political system and "that which we are fighting against.&
636.
by netcan 6y ago
Fall of Rome is more of a literary trope than an actual reference. Arguably, Rome didn't even fall when Rome fell. A Roman emperor continued to rule over a roman empire from constantinople (which had already been the capital for a long
637.
by netcan 6y ago
I tend to agree, but with some reservations. One difference between centralisation due to monopolies and centralization due to other things (government planning, industry-scale unions, etc.) is that monopolies are highly profitable regardle
638.
by netcan 6y ago
>>" Why are we presenting bigger, badder VPNs as the solution? "... SAAS instead. YOu can think of it as path dependency. Organisations are already structured around a "walled castle." It's possible to run eve
639.
by netcan 6y ago
A depressing aspect of this is that our toolbag is mostly empty. The few rusty old tools we have are not very good. On the antitrust side... Courts and antitrust law are completely ill equipped to deal with modern monopoly. Everything must
640.
by netcan 6y ago
>>" What’s the endgame here? Open-source encrypted messaging software is widely available. The cat is out of the bag. Every country on Earth could outlaw the technology and it would still be trivially easy for criminals to use it
641.
by netcan 6y ago
>>But what do I do for fun once there? IDK... but it could potentially be a lot of fun. Who's to say silicon sex isn't great. I say "potentially" because it depends on who writes the code. Hopefully it's not Z
642.
by netcan 6y ago
You know... All these conversations of transcending, torch passing and such always make me think of all the gods that killed and usurped their gods. Cronus and the Olympians or whatnot. Anyway, to me, a decent working definition of god is
643.
by netcan 6y ago
My first thought is "sign me up." My second thought is "Is we actually we?" Transcending humanity doesn't necessarily mean humanity continues. It just means something does. Sentient ships don't need passengers,
644.
by netcan 6y ago
Civilization and government aren't the same thing, and the rules. The Phoenician civilization didn't have a single government, yet we consider them a single civilization. The definition isn't a hard one with a clear "is&
645.
by netcan 6y ago
The paper policy can stay the same, but the policy policy changes. Call it a norm if you like.
646.
by netcan 6y ago
There's an old pg essay about what the dotcom got right. I don't quite remember the details, but I remember that I did take away a "correct but early" interpretation of the whole thing. "First movers takes the whole
647.
by netcan 6y ago
The geopay stuff seems unstable as a norm... if that's the way we're going. It makes sense atm, maybe, for tech companies. The tech companies, currently, are extremely flush with cash. They don't need to be all that ruthless.
648.
by netcan 6y ago
In a sense, those are the breaks. Companies don't exist to be fair, and fairness isn't built into promotion/advancement necessarily. This might just be another one of those insider edges that you may or may not have. Companie
649.
by netcan 6y ago
This is getting pretty far from the original point... but I'm dubious. First, the internet isn't really distributed anymore. The media part, at least, is controlled by a handful of operators. It is a many-2-many medium, which is a
650.
by netcan 6y ago
Well.... Politicians like to be recognized as "great" and a the Nobel Peace Prize does appeal to many. Trump's desire is a good example. If you avoid controversial figures, you avoid using the prize as a motivator exactly whe
651.
by netcan 6y ago
So far... The prize going to political leaders has been a mixed bag. Aung San Suu Kyi didn't turn out, for a recent example. The Arafat/Rabin choice seems poor in retrospect, but ATT it would have seemed like a similar choice to B
652.
by netcan 6y ago
How would you go about using the historical record to determine that conquest leads to a scientifically advanced culture? How would you formulate the thesis? I want to point out that the concept of falsifiability, largely came around to dis
653.
by netcan 6y ago
I paused at that paragraph as well. It is very possible that the achievements of modernity have changed the game. That said, the game was (is?) rise and fall. Rising civilizations leave a heritage to be mined, so there is an overall direc
654.
by netcan 6y ago
My point is that any such theory is untestable, and we're good at convincing ourselves of "truths" that appeal to us. A 19th century nationalist would have liked your first sentence. A 19th century marxist would have liked y
655.
by netcan 6y ago
He's responding to a comment, which is about the situation now.
656.
by netcan 6y ago
That is exactly the kind of thing one of those crusty, barrel-dwelling ancients would have said!
657.
by netcan 6y ago
The problem with theorizing about such things is that, being untestable, it's very hard to distinguish between our own narrative biases and objectivity. Maybe the golden age was a byproduct of imperialism. Not many naked imperialists o
658.
by netcan 6y ago
I meant chaos in a more casual sense of "disruption of status quo." Old media was a lot less inclined to get behind any old revolution that comes along.
659.
by netcan 6y ago
I don't buy it. Even in North Korea, I'm pretty sure people know quite a lot. Hitchens did interviews in the eastern block during the 80s. Everyone knew Kafka, it turned out, once they felt safe letting you know they knew it. Vice
660.
by netcan 6y ago
It's kind of ironic that people educated in social science tend to have idealistic or just legible, few factor theories about something this complex. I mean complex in the strong sense. Early theories were about "access to inform

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