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Author Topic: It's the economy, stupid!  (Read 69351 times)

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Thad

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #940 on: March 25, 2013, 11:46:25 AM »

Krugman obliquely argues for the idea of Search Engines as a public utility

He does mention search in the closing paragraph but it's kind of a weird segue from Google Reader, which is the thing he's actually talking about.

The problem is that we depend on Google too much for shit that Google can easily yank out from under us.  On the one hand, I suppose the logical conclusion of this discussion is "Google could take away search and Gmail and then where would we be?", but that's a pretty unproductive avenue to go down inasmuch as search and Gmail are the two things Google is absolutely least likely to cancel.  The very proposition is that Google's not going to yank services that everyone uses, it's going to yank ones that not enough people use to justify the expense.  Today it's Reader, a year from now it could be Google Docs or Google+ -- probably not, but those are more plausible examples than search.

Long-term, I think this moment could prove to be a major misstep for Google -- because they saw "expense" only in terms of the direct monetary cost of keeping Reader up and did not consider the potential negative impact on their reputation from taking it down.  This, perhaps more than anything Google has ever done, is a reminder that relying on them for anything mission-critical is a bad fucking idea, and that Google users are not customers but products.  Google underestimated the backlash here -- they figured they were canceling an unpopular program (how many people even know what RSS is?) and didn't think the nerdrage echo chamber would be this loud or that people in mainstream outlets like the New York Times would actually take notice.

There's every possibility that Google will fold RSS sync functionality into Google+.  That could go a couple of ways -- it could mean this whole thing blows over and people decide to trust Google again, or it could lead to increased resentment that Google continues to try to cram Google+ down everybody's fucking throats whether we want it or not.  I had to sign up for the fucking thing just to post videos on YouTube.  I don't use it, I don't want it, and I resent it.

As for the "public utility" argument, that's an economist's way of looking at what an engineer would probably see as the open-source argument.  It's not that we need government funds or regulation to protect us from software monopolies (though I'm not denying that we do, either); what we need is the opportunity to say "Fork you" when a software company does something that is not in its users' interests.  (Major examples include the mass exodus from XFree86 when its publishers changed the license to something nobody wanted, the more recent forking of OpenOffice to LibreOffice when Oracle decided the best way to treat its developers was with open hostility and contempt, and of course the proliferation of BSD and GNU/Linux OS's all but replacing UNIX System V.)

It is, of course, instructive to look at Google's record as an open-source donor.  It's historically been the biggest financial supporter of Firefox, and it's made major open-source contributions in Android, Chrome the browser, and ChromeOS, not to mention its major sponsorship of legions of projects in Summer of Code and its free hosting on Google Code.  All that's for the good.  But it's also telling that its biggest services -- search, Analytics, Docs, etc. -- are all closed and proprietary.  (And while Android is free, its branding is not -- anyone can use Android, but vendors can't use the Android brand or bundle the standard suite of Google apps without licensing and approval from Google.)  I think it's fair to say that Google's support of open-source software is a razors-and-blades model -- it's happy to deploy its software far and wide, and even support imitators and competitors -- so long as it knows the vast majority of those users will continue to use Google for search, mail, comment section logins, and everything else on the Web.
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Brentai

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #941 on: March 25, 2013, 12:26:25 PM »

The GReader outrage is nonsensical to me.  I use it, yeah, but I probably shouldn't and it's trivial to move that function clientside with the added benefit of Google not watching you shit for once.  What are we losing except for a minor convenience?

I understand the reaction in terms of "waah I just realized that Google can inconvenience me at any time", but even then it seems a little overreliant.  Google enjoys a monopoly on their services via general good reputation, not because they actually provide an indispensable product.  If they closed their search or mail functions then it would stop people for maybe the half hour it would take for them to shuffle over to Yahoo or HotbingliveXboxforWindowswhatever.  Hell, Google search and Gmail aren't even all that good.  One interface is overbloated and the other is hilariously awkward and behind the times.

Google's main problem with this decision isn't that people will trust them less, it's that people are going to get used to the idea that the internet can get along just fine without Google.  Can they actually survive in a world where their service isn't considered the de facto backbone of the global information superstructure?
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Thad

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #942 on: March 25, 2013, 04:00:54 PM »

The GReader outrage is nonsensical to me.  I use it, yeah, but I probably shouldn't and it's trivial to move that function clientside with the added benefit of Google not watching you shit for once.  What are we losing except for a minor convenience?

I don't know how trivial it is.  There are other web-based RSS services but I don't know of any that can (1) sync your feeds across devices and (2) is actually supported by major clients.  There are clients that'll sync to Tiny Tiny RSS but not very many, and it still requires you to set it up on a server yourself, which might be trivial for you and me but is quite a bit less trivial than the Google Reader method.

I think OwnCloud might be able to do it too; I'll have to look into that.

I understand the reaction in terms of "waah I just realized that Google can inconvenience me at any time", but even then it seems a little overreliant.  Google enjoys a monopoly on their services via general good reputation, not because they actually provide an indispensable product.  If they closed their search or mail functions then it would stop people for maybe the half hour it would take for them to shuffle over to Yahoo or HotbingliveXboxforWindowswhatever.

Even assuming they backed up their contacts, how many have their entire history of Gmail communication backed up?  That's probably something they're going to want.  That's without getting into services like Google Drive and Google Docs that are designed to store your files for you.  And THAT'S without getting into stuff like Android and ChromeOS, which are largely designed to have users give an increasing amount of control over to Google for every task they do on a day-to-day basis.

Then there's Youtube.  And the myriad sites that use a Google account for a login.

None of which, sure, is really indispensable.  But it's irritating that Google can disrupt services that users rely on, and I don't think most people have thought about that much.
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #943 on: April 18, 2013, 09:21:35 AM »

Finally found a link that uses enough plain language to share this: Lynchpin study underpinning austerity programs has been all but demolished by a lone student.

Basically the data that claims high debt slows economic growth is completely false.
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Royal☭

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #944 on: April 18, 2013, 10:12:08 AM »

Well that should stop the global calls for austerity.

McDohl

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #945 on: April 18, 2013, 10:18:19 AM »

 :richiam:
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Brentai

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #946 on: April 18, 2013, 12:42:08 PM »

Ha ha ha, "errors".
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Büge

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Royal☭

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #948 on: April 22, 2013, 02:21:23 PM »

All of these corrected reports seem to be implying that when money and wealth stops becoming easily available to large chunks of the population, economies stall. Weird.

Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #949 on: April 29, 2013, 03:44:34 AM »

What if we never run out of oil?

A good piece from the Atlantic, that manages to be both thorough and pretty balanced.
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #950 on: May 01, 2013, 05:35:48 AM »

This may wind up being spun into it's own thread, but I'll stick it here for now.

New study suggests that not only can money buy happiness, but that there is no satiation point and the relationship is direct and linear

I always thought that the money can't buy happiness studies were a bit off, but I don't think I fully buy into this one either. On the other hand I'm okay with this adding to the calls for greater income equality filthy socialism.
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Brentai

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #951 on: May 01, 2013, 08:33:09 AM »

Studies on happiness itself suggest that it doesn't even quantify the same way for different people.  In particular there are major disparities between people who take pleasure in receiving and people who take pleasure in comparing, and you can probably guess which type is really driving capitalism.  If income distributions were more equal you'd probably see those nice spiky higher ends start to flatline or even dip as the Joneses start to catch up to them.
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #952 on: May 01, 2013, 09:54:28 AM »

Yeah, relativity is huge, but so is variance. I understand that the study is looking at things in aggregate, but happiness is among our more subjective measures.

Still, I do think most people dislike having some terrible winner trying lording it over them in an obnoxious way, whether those winnings are a horse, a sword, and few silver plates, or a platinum-plated custom SUV the price of the Venus.
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Rico

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #953 on: May 01, 2013, 11:49:44 AM »

disparities between people who take pleasure in receiving and people who take pleasure in comparing
There's a low-hanging joke in there somewhere.
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Büge

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #954 on: May 01, 2013, 12:01:12 PM »

If it's as low-hanging as I think it is, there's no need to compare.
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Zaratustra

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #955 on: May 01, 2013, 01:06:49 PM »

Brazil, as usual, does not give a fuck.

Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #956 on: May 14, 2013, 10:11:05 AM »

DHS is trying to shut down BitCoins

This strikes me as among the dumbest, if not the dumbest, thing you could do to discredit or shut down these e-commodity thingies.
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Cait

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #957 on: May 14, 2013, 12:49:51 PM »

What, trying to hold them to the same standards as any other currency site that does business with United States citizens?
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #958 on: May 15, 2013, 01:52:59 AM »

Thing is, these aren't really a currency. Somewhere in between a currency and a commodity. No one really knows what they are yet, other than a way for idiots to lose money.
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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #959 on: May 15, 2013, 03:26:19 AM »

Well, there are people who want them to become the currency of the US, and are shocked, SHOCKED, that this suddenly means the US Government would like them to conform to the standards of regular currency.
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