throwaway_9168's comments

Isn't that because we haven't yet figured out how to actually get them to do complex stuff? If you could actually have a bot which could just go out and shovel snow perfectly, would you still prefer the status quo of doing it by yourself?

Big tech has nothing to fear at all. Europe is waging an all out war on companies/entrepreneurship of every size. Big tech will probably face massive losses. On the other hand, a bootstrapped company/MicroISV or whatever you want to call it these days will not face any loss, because it would have been legislated out of even being born. So big tech will probably be secretly cheering on the greater chance of establishing monopoly.

Or it could also be that people who code these algorithms are not quite skilled enough to develop them in the first place? "If it is too big to fail, it is probably too big to exist"

>> The only thing I know is that I'd probably have done the same, as I reckon most would have.

Nothing wrong with that. But then he shouldn't have written blog posts about how WhatsApp cares about privacy, and that there will never be ads on WhatsApp etc.

The real issue is all the lies. And the whiners are correct in whining because they are not (usually) saying they are somehow better people who would have taken a better decision, they are whining that they once supported this company on the basis of the lies it said, and feel like they have been backstabbed.

There is also another problem - Facebook's scummy behavior seems to actually have no end in sight, with employees now hilariously patting themselves in the back and giving themselves good grades with "Remember, what Facebook is doing has never been done before. There are going to be mistakes." [1]. By that measure, should we start throwing the CEO of big tech companies into prison for "massive and systematic privacy invasion". So what if it hasn't been "done before"? Maybe its a mistake to jail them, but that's just a small price for trying new ideas that haven't been "done before".

I think the whiners are not whining loudly enough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321420

So you added to the demand for this otherwise mediocre product (education), and then wonder why the product quality isn't better? I think it is just supply-demand economics.

Why didn't you drop out then?

There was also a time when Facebook was just a random website run from a dorm room. Just like Facebook itself grew, so will the group of people who dislike it. And the trend can only go in one direction, because as Tim Cook said "If I were running Facebook, I wouldn't be in this situation".

>>Most people who work at facebook believe the company is positive or neutral

Yeah, you can be smart without having any guts (to demand change). That many Facebook employees still believe the company is positive or neutral is a good example of this.

>>Facebook doesn't owe anybody a free ad-optional platform to engage with people, they aren't a government entity.

Unless you are just claiming that shadow profiles are not a real thing [1], I think Facebook is becoming more like a government entity in the sense that you cannot "opt out" of Facebook any more than you can "opt out" of your government, or you can "opt out" of having any friends in your life.

Unlike a government, which, even at its most corrupt and inefficient, is actually supposed to be built with a system of checks and balances to help serve its constituents, and in theory can at least be overthrown via coup or elections, the only thing you have with Facebook is this expectation that they don't "owe anybody" anything.

Make no mistake, Facebook is devious enough to know this, and it also knows there are lots of "useful idiots" (and I don't mean you, I mean the others who think this point shouldn't even be up for discussion!) who keep saying Facebook doesn't owe anybody <anything> without acknowledging that we have a phenomenon here which has never been seen before.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor...

I am leaving a link to what I think should now be an obligatory reference to the Facebook Free Business post by DHH every time this topic comes up: https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free-business/

Although I am guessing you would suddenly start arguing for right vs wrong if I took your own idea about defaults and suggest that all governments which want to restrict Facebook's power (which is probably all of them by now) should just default to blocking access to Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp unless people go to some government building and sign a release form saying that they are aware of all the consequences of using social networks and that they should not come to the government for help if, say, said social network swindles their kids of real money.

Unfortunately the same is true for Facebook/USA. But that doesn't seem to stop people from using WhatsApp.

Alright, thank you. Now, if I were to earn, say a total of $1000 [please feel free to substitute this with a more trivial number, however you may define trivial] for the whole year on online courses sold to EU residents (considering its a side gig, not too shabby), should I still register?

>> Sounds pretty great to me.

I see. Do you mind spending another 5 and tell the answer to this question: suppose someone sells online courses. And they don't themselves reside in the EU, but the have customers who do. Should they register for VAT?

The fine print around who actually needs to pay. A very simple example - say you sell online courses. Should you register for VAT?

This reminds me of a horrible tax I came to know of recently - something called the EU VAT MOSS on digital goods. Apparently, it is supposed to target giants like Amazon who route money via multiple countries to evade taxes. Not surprisingly, this ends up affecting the smallest players most drastically. Worst, the glib language used to describe who should pay the tax is utterly confusing. As always, this means the actual target company of this tax chalks it down as yet another thing they need to remember (amongst a million other things), while the tiniest players who are starting out and who don't reside in the EU will have to worry and stress endlessly about the stupidity of dealing with something like this.

Here is what I have learnt about Eurocrats: a) they don't understand economics b) they definitely don't understand unintended consequences c) I am willing to bet not one of them has ever bootstrapped a successful venture and finally d) there is a good reason why no country in Europe is able to create its own Silicon Valley - they are just too busy creating more busywork for themselves.

And to the well-intentioned person who comes along and says "Well, if you are clearly not the target of this, then why do you even worry?" I have a question - if it turns out that you are wrong, are you going to pay the taxes on my behalf? Actually, this is literally what I asked a friend of mine from Europe who expressed that sentiment. Not surprisingly, he wasn't really willing to put his money where his mouth was.

I am frankly astonished by all the people from EU who come in and comment things like "Oh, you don't really know how European laws actually work. If you did, then you wouldn't be worried". Do you not have nothing better to do in life than trying to understand the nuances between the "letter of the law" and the "spirit of the law" in every country around the world?

Oh, and by the way - HN will be very interested to know this: right now, there is a company called Paddle which is a Stripe competitor - and this one law (EU VAT MOSS) seems to have single handedly revived this company. It was (and apparently still is) a painful software to use, and Stripe is faaar superior in terms of API and integrations [1], but Paddle has now become the defacto choice [2] for everyone who actually cares about the EU VAT MOSS because Paddle handles all the annoying crap on your behalf. My guess is, Stripe - which is too Silicon Valley focused - is going to be blindsided by EU VAT MOSS, hand over a lot of their next generation of customers to Paddle, and won't even know what hit them in a few years if they don't pay careful attention to what is going on here.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/anyone-using-paddle-for-s... [2] https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/how-do-you-handle-vat-mos...

To counter your point, you might remember the React team's about face when probably their largest benefactor in terms of free goodwill, Wordpress, threatened to drop ReactJS for its ambiguous license. I would think it matters a lot to FB right now that they don't do anything remotely annoying to the community.

I would be willing to bet that if Facebook adopted an attitude of "screw it, lets just stop responding to these idiots" that will make even fewer people want to work at Facebook right now, given all the bad press these days. I bet if you ask people why they are still continuing at Facebook these days, a fair number would say something like "Yeah, at least I can work on open source projects".

If anyone at Facebook reading this wants to go for a dare, why don't you try dropping support for a high profile open source project like ReactJS and see if that affects the candidates entering your pipeline.

The "most common outcome" is probably a superficial way to analyze this. Considering all this surveillance is being done in a pretty underhanded way (else why so many dark UX patterns?), and it is basically impossible to get the full picture (are FB, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn etc going to allow audits of the data they collect?), and companies cannot stop lying to their advertisers (e.g. fake video views), to governments (the lie that FB + Whatsapp data cannot be mapped to each other), to people (getting children to click on innocuous looking buttons and charging them money), I think the need of the hour is a wildly speculative analysis of all possible worst case scenarios.

Also, have you noticed the general "oh, what can we do now? It is too late" response to a lot of outrageous things because we didn't see what was coming? More correctly, we refused to consider worst case scenarios? For example, if people knew Facebook was calling outright theft as "friendly fraud", what would have happened to their IPO? Would advertisers have been willing to trust FB with their money? Would the governments be OK with allowing them to acquire whatever company they wanted? Why is there such a long lag between the occurrence of an event and the time when it comes to light? When companies have this kind of a track record, the last thing you want to do is to look at the most common outcome and decide "Oh, everything is fine".

>> WWII was a thing, the Nazi party came to power and started pushing their agenda, and the holocaust actually happened

Indeed it was, but many people act like the whole thing just sprung up from a vacuum. There was an entire history which went before, and at least libertarians seem to attempt to dig a little deeper. If you don't want to hear out the prologue to these kinds of dastardly events, there isn't much difference between your acceptance of propaganda and your supposed adversary's.

"Because the politics of Europe so clearly had nothing to do with America, it took a massive propaganda campaign to solidify American involvement. This allowed an overwhelming victory for the allies and the disastrous peace agreement that followed. So much of the ensuing horror of the 20th century, Scott and Woods contend, resulted directly from Wilson’s foreign policy."

https://scotthorton.org/interviews/11-12-18-tom-woods-on-wor...

Yes, I am sure someone will come and point out some nutty thing some or the other libertarian said. You don't have to be in complete agreement with someone's viewpoint just to hear out their views.

As someone who neither resides in the US (or its supposedly adversary countries), nor works at BigTech, I don't think I have any bias here except I hope humanity doesn't end up obliterating itself with nukes.

But your comment is, at best, a fraction of the full picture.

1 No country has ever been as ready to "spread democracy via force" as the US

2 No country has borrowed as much money to run its spendthrift military budget to carry out #1. You combine #1 and #2, and the money lenders are wondering, "Wait, WTF are you doing with all my money?"

3 No country has a tech sector with tentacles that spread as far. That's all fine (for the other countries) if you happen to be, say, neutral and generally non-aggressive Switzerland, but not so if you are a bonafide empire and keep trying to continue being an empire.

4 No country has so many immigrants working in their tech sector. Some of these immigrants are probably wondering "Wait, so I am developing weapons so people I don't know are going to bomb and kill people I actually know?"

5 Last, and certainly not least, "The first casualty of war is truth". A nerd is a nerd because he/she probably knows this very deep in their psyche somewhere. So this nerd ends up in a massive state of cognitive dissonance when asked to develop weapons of war. Its like telling them "Yeah, we won't actually tell you what we might use it for. And you have to just believe any spin we put on the whole issue. Not to mention, we might end up attacking your kith and kin. But its all OK, because WE are the country of DEMOCRACY and FREEDOM".

>> its companies can be counted on to be supportive and/or loyal in the event of conflict.

That's probably a smaller question, as seen by a neutral. A bigger question at this point is, can the USA, which managed to elect Donald Trump, by counted on to be a stable and reliable superpower or should all the other countries already start taking an "every country for itself approach", which is what I think is happening?

"Oh, we actually meant advertisers/governments/Bing and other partners will have a tool which will provide a clear view of your internet history"