Benevolent aliens are planting incompetent people in positions of power so that we are perpetually on the verge of self-annihilation. But this is all to save us from the malevolent aliens who would obliterate us if they thought we had any chance of survival.
I think it is? I have an uncle who made his career in it, he only started hitting 400k+ when he hit the director and C suite level. Meanwhile I started making 400 when I was 28 and that’s considered late for SWEs - it’s less than what Jane Street pays out of college.
Not 100% sure. In argentina it looks like the law for net neutrality was passed in 2013. Free whatsapp being implemented sometime around 2017, but it must have been reverted shortly after possibly due to FSF lobbying, which was quite close to the government.
Radio and TV neutrality was a hot political topic at the time as well, the incumbent government was pro-intervention and regulation, so that helped. But the FSF had a big impact, going as far as getting Linux to be installed as a dual boot in state sponsored Notebooks for Kids programs.
The good thing is that the field is a bit more open if anyone wants to dethrone whatsapp, but since they were first movers and they have the network effects now, it seems like almost inconsequential, a contender could have negotiated zero-rating with a carrier anyways and work up from there.
Mostly donations [1]. The yearly budget is around $30M, which is a lot but pretty tiny for an app so many people use. They only have around 40 employees [2].
Personally I think the small staff, donation-based funding, and security-focused security constraints are a plus: the platform seems way more stable than most and does what it needs to do.
In a lot of developing countries WhatsApp doesn't count against your data plan. Signal data is billed like any other app. It's not easy asking all your friends to pay for something they already get "for free".
Ripe for antitrust litigation. Reminds me of Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, developing countries have bigger things on their plate than going against Meta, especially since I figure the “bribes” and promise to improve the nation’s internet infrastructure are very substantial.
I think you're right, but it's not how I remember it for some reason.
I didn't read the book "Bullshit Jobs" [1] as an attempt to quantify how many jobs were bullshit. The author was an anthropologist with no interest in quantifying the economic impact. It's lots of amusing anecdotes from frustrated workers and a nudge for people to question the efficiency of capitalism.
At least that's how I read it. But reading the wikipedia page it sounds like a lot of people fixated on the idea that society could double its efficiency. Hard to know if there's a correct interpretation of the book's claims, and unfortunately we can't ask: the author David Graeber died in 2020.
> while he claims that 50% of jobs are useless, less than 20% of workers feel that way, and those who feel their jobs are useless do not correlate with whether their job is useless. (Garbage collectors, janitors, and other essential workers more often felt like their jobs were useless than people in jobs classified by Graeber as useless.)
Well, again, there is a huge difference between one's own perception of their job being useful or not. I believe garbage collectors, janitors, and nurses, are not examples of useless jobs. Useless jobs are mainly in the office, called "paper pushers". I mean come on, have you not been to any jobs (nor heard of any) where you had to pretend you were busy just to get paid? I saw plenty of cases.
Wow, I completely forgot about that image! Thank you for reminding me (it is now gone).
It was an experiment a while back and it was inline in order to keep it all in one file.
Actually that made me realize, my site is dynamic: Because I edit this one html file live on the server to make changes, whoever loads my website repeatedly while I'm doing that is going to see changes live.
Not to mention that it assumes assumes lying, cheating, and corruption is just the price you pay for quality products.
Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
Yeah it's pretty essential that construction equipment be pretty easy to construct and deconstruct. There are some videos [1] which are worth checking out.
Benevolent aliens are planting incompetent people in positions of power so that we are perpetually on the verge of self-annihilation. But this is all to save us from the malevolent aliens who would obliterate us if they thought we had any chance of survival.
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