Rather than go after accounts, you’d go after the hosting facilities. The hosting companies are more likely to be able to identify related accounts so working with them will give more scalable results.
My issue with this version of explaining the lack of severity of Y2K is that there were lots of countries that were being derided for not taking the issue seriously but did not seem to suffer any ill effects.
It's also possible that in some places there were a few issues, but people looked at bills for 100 years of electrical service and said "Yeah right," and fixed the now-easier-to-find code that still used 2-digit dates. If that only happened a few times, the extra work involved in working out the January bill by hand (or waiting until February then billing for 2 months) wouldn't cause too many issues in the economy, and anyone looking in from outside wouldn't even realize there had been an issue. If it happened everywhere the economic impact would be more noticeable from outside.
> A lot of it also had to do with declining market power: when Google was universally on top, they felt like they could do the right thing without serious negative consequences, but when they were fighting for control of a market, they felt they had to make compromises lest some other firm (being honest: Facebook) would end up in power and do the wrong thing anyway.
I would argue it's not a real value if you are not willing to lose something in order to hold on to it. It is admirable to want to do the right thing when you can get away with doing the wrong thing. It is only a true value if you are willing to do the right thing when you cannot get away with doing the right thing.
> I would argue it's not a real value if you are not willing to lose something in order to hold on to it. It is admirable to want to do the right thing when you can get away with doing the wrong thing. It is only a true value if you are willing to do the right thing when you cannot get away with doing the right thing.
I don't think it's that simple.
For example, let's say your desire is to minimize harm in Area X. While you're on top and in control of Area X, then you can do that easily enough. Suddenly a competitor comes whose values show they're willing to do lots of harm to Area X. And if they beat you in the capitalistic marketplace and gain more control, they'll be able to do lots of harm. In order to beat them, you may have to do a little bit of harm to Area X, which goes against your values. But in doing so, you retain control, and prevent even greater harm to Area X. Is that not a "real" value?
Would it be a "real" value to staunchly refuse to do a little harm to Area X, even if you know that this will result in greater harm in the long run?
This is why I distrust simple ideologies. The world is not simple.
My main issue with your logic is less whether it makes sense or not and more that, in practice, it tends to be self-serving. Somehow, people tend to only apply it when doing the “minor” harm benefits them. Humans, myself included, are remarkable good at rationalizing their behavior.
Your logic doesn't hold up well to simple escalation logic.
Company A founds itself on doing 0 harm to Area X. Competitor B shows up and starts finding success doing 10 harm to Area X, so Company A makes a "moral" decision: If we do 9 harm to Area X, we are preventing 1 entire harm. Isn't that real value? then Company C shows up and starts finding success doing 100 harm to Area X, so Company A changes it's moral stance to "unless we do 99 harm to Area X ..."
I know an old lady who swallowed a fly kind of logic going on here.
> then Company C shows up and starts finding success doing 100 harm to Area X, so Company A changes it's moral stance to "unless we do 99 harm to Area X ..."
I mean yes this is technically possible. But I think in many cases, especially "winner-take-all" markets like online search engines, social networks, etc., you don't get this large number of repeated threats. Fending off a competitor or two might be enough. And just as it's possible for there to be some advantage that opens from doing 99 harm to Area X, it's also possible that it never happens.
But also, let's pretend the hypothetical you say _did_ happen?
What should occur? Should the company just NOT do 99 harm to Area X and instead allow 100? If so, why? Unless you break the hypothetical by adding some alternative option C, as much as we don't like the preventative-99 option, it's still better than the allowing-100 option.
> Unless you break the hypothetical by adding some alternative option C
That is kind of the point, isn't it? That my hypothetical scenario isn't realistic.
Let's imagine two worlds. A world where individuals refuse the false dichotomy and search for option C. And the world where someone accepts the false dichotomy and justifies evil.
I would argue that anyone that advocates for the justification of evil is actually using motivated reasoning. It breaks my original premise "Company A founds itself on doing 0 harm to Area X". Clearly they didn't and their embracing of evil shows that their principles mean nothing.
As a moral test, ask yourself: If I said "you must kill 99 people otherwise I will kill 100", would you feel morally justified to kill those 99 people? If your answer is "yes", then you are manipulable by those who want you to commit evil on their behalf. They don't have to commit any murders, just convince you that you have no other choice.
I mean, your proposed logic seems to be quite consistent from a basic game theory perspective. Defecting in a prisoners dilemma and races to the bottom are both well observed phenomena.
We have 10,000+ years of human civilization at this point. There must be some other active ethical maxim operating other than "choose the lesser of two evils" to explain why there is so much cooperation amongst humans. Evidence is not on the side of the preeminence of races to the bottom.
You should investigate the repeated prisoners dilemma.
> You should investigate the repeated prisoners dilemma.
Well aware. Obviously, the entirety of human civilization is a bit more complicated than a prisoners dilemma, iterated or not. Yet prisoners dilemma's and races to the bottom still exist, and it makes no sense to argue against them in the abstract.
I think we are very disconnected on the topic of conversation here. Somehow you've confabulated my point with an attack on the prisoners dilemma or races to the bottom?
The person I was responding to made the point that if you want to minimize evil in the world, sometimes you have to add evil to a lesser degree. As in my example, if I do 9 points of evil but prevent 10 points of evil then according to OP I've added value to the world in the form of the 1 point of evil I have reduced.
I responded that this can lead to an escalation trap. This assumes that we would all prefer less evil in the world, right? So how do we get out of the escalation trap? Repeated application of the maxim "always do a bit less evil than the worst possible competitor" will not lead to a minimization of evil overall, only a creeping increase in the total amount of evil in the world.
How are you equating this to me arguing against the existence of races to the bottom?
> It is only a true value if you are willing to do the right thing when you cannot get away with doing the right thing.
In reality, neither corporate nor personal values are binary, all-or-none propositions. They are more like springs that push you in the right direction. But if something pulls hard enough in the wrong direction, a spring can be overpowered.
PSA: Don't use Google accounts that you care about when experimenting. If Google takes a dim view of whatever it is you are doing, they shut down all your access (Gmail, Calendar, etc) and not just the service you are playing around with.
Can someone ELI5 Starlink revenue sources? At the core, it's an ISP (but served from space). What does Starlink have that differentiates from any other ISP? Is it because the TAM is global? That may be true at the margin, but I am sure most eligible subscribers would prefer a land-based system (eg no one in SF is cancelling their Xfinity to use Starlink) so how much is really left for them?
It's because they're good speeds in a lot of places that couldn't get good speeds before. It's also great for mobile work sites, i.e. construction sites, drilling camps, other b2b service businesses where a bunch of portacoms rock up to a site. Anywhere it's mildly hilly you can't actually assume you'll get a signal outside of town but a satellite dish basically guarantees that. Even if you can guarantee your in a spot long term the upfront cost of fibre or a tower may not balance out as cheaper than just eating the higher bandwidth costs.
It's also worth remembering that in a lot of places with low density it isn't appealing for competitors to build out to, so there's a lot of markets where it's a no brainer to switch from the local monopoly to starlink because the price was already inflated and it was worse service.
There's a huge number of people in developing countries (think Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, Mexico) where the country just lagged on internet build out. Now in these countries the price of a subscription will be a lot lower, than the >100$ you pay in the US, but since (simplified) the only additional cost per customer is the cost of the end terminal, it's still worth it for the ARR. The break-even point per customer will just be further in the future.
Also I wouldn't underestimate the amount of people living in rural areas of the US, Canada, Australia or Germany.
I think the ISP story is a bit shitty outside some niche markets (mobile internet on airplanes and the like), but the military applications are massive. Everything is moving into drones and Starlink terminals are small enough to fit on them all, while being essentially unjammable, giving you a coarse location signal on top and plenty of bandwidth.
In NZ you can buy add-on so you can text/fb messenger/maps/weather and even apple music thru your phone via Starlink. I can't imagine this being super popular add-on, but if telco just rolls that into main offering I'd assume eventually that will be new norm.
The charitable explanation of this is that "rich guys" opinions often end up shaping reality for lots of people. If what "rich guy" thinks today becomes law, policy or corporate strategy tomorrow, then it is worth giving people a heads up for what is coming. So it is less "rich guy quote" and more "influential guy quote".
That said, I don't necessarily believe this is why quotes like this gets reported. I think it's more the same reason people ask celebrities about topics that are far from their area of expertise - these are widely recognizable people and so stories involving them drive views and clicks.
In the winter, I keep the thermostat at frigid temperatures when I am home alone and jack it up to warm just before any one else gets home. My thinking is that it is wasteful to warm up the entire house when it's just me since I can put on a sweater but I don't want to subject others to my, shall we say, quirks.
I keep meaning to calculate how much I am actually saving by freezing my butt off. My guess is it'll work out to something like $0.75 a day or something equally trivial.
Depending on the kind of heating system you have and the temperature differences you talk about it can be cheaper to heat the house to a constant temperature (because your heating can run more efficiently under lower load).
I once got a programmable thermostat and went through the trouble to set it up for the times we were normally at home and away, and my energy bills went up.
Now I just set a temperature that everyone can tolerate and I forget about it.
Correct, or the people doing this for environmental reasons... it's probably not better to do this. It would be better spending money on better insulation (assuming it isn't up to date).
It probably costs more to do that than to maintain a constant temperature. When you turn the setpoint down, everything inside your house and also your house itself starts losing heat. When you turn the setpoint back up, the cooled off house and items inside of it will suck up most of the heat until the stuff is warm again, and then the air warms up.
This is much more noticeable when you go into a freezing cold building and turn on the thermostat, it takes almost an entire day to heat up the stuff and building.
Thermodynamically, the heat lost to the outside is roughly linear with the temperature delta between inside and outside.
All else equal, setbacks do reduce energy lost to the outside; whether that saves money depends somewhat on the recovery strategy of your equipment; whether it’s desirable depends on your individual preferences.
There is likely 2-orders of magnitude demand for more software than currently exists. Speaking for myself, I have so many different apps I would like to have but would not be commercially viable to build because the problem it solves is very specific to my circumstance. The ROI now makes sense now that I can spin up Claude Code and build apps for these use cases in an a couple of hours so I have a suite of apps that are really just for me.
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