I have never met a startup founder that wanted to address a problem or improve the world. Instead they all want to make sure that the Series A investors are happy. Nothing else really matters besides doing whatever the investors think will make number go up.
One time I almost got involved with a person who truly wanted to improve the world, but didn't get the job.
Outside of that one person I almost met 15 years ago, literally every founder in tech I've interacted with is just trying to run the ponzi scheme and get to that exit event, consequences be damned, employees be damned, profit be damned.
Maybe there are some good people in tech, but I still haven't met them after a whole career in this industry. Just a lot of people who make number go up like they're told to.
*edit I think this comment will be very poorly received and downvoted to -100000 karma, but honestly typing it out has made me realize I just fucking hate this industry with every fiber of my being. Every new platform and channel and tool gets completely subverted by ever more intrusive and personalized advertising, and the total data surveillance ecosystem of the big tech giants ensures that they will be able to kill or consume any truly good business idea before it gets off the ground. I think I'm done. Fuck tech. Fuck computers. What a waste of a career.
> Fuck tech. Fuck computers. What a waste of a career.
I'm coming around to a the-medium-is-the-message / technological-determinism perspective on the Internet, that it cannot exist as anything like the way it is now and mostly be a force for good. Just can't.
Always on ubiquitous wireless Internet. Decent battery tech so you don't need a power cable to everything. Low-powered cheap computers and sensors (cameras, microphones, those creepy human-body radars Google's about to start putting in phones). Storage so cheap you can collect everything. Algorithms to sift through it.
I don't see any possible way for all those things to exist and for the results not to be, overall, disastrous.
I'm "opesstimistic" about it. I think the average person is simply too stupid to foresee the problems. It takes a broader view to see the parallels with history and how these technologies can (likely will) lead to abhorrent abuse. I don't mean to be arrogant but I think the average person lacks the mental depth to look past the immediate convenience or to be skeptical of the glitzy sales pitch.
Stallman, Snowden, the EFF, and the rest of us are Cassandras. People just don't give a shit. Let alone the future, people are still trying to roll back protections we got in the 18th Century. There just isn't going to be a public consciousness of how we need to limit power from using tech that was invented a decade ago, no matter how many articles or blog posts those weird nerds write about their tinfoil paranoia.
I think we're just doomed to suffer the consequences again and learn from the suffering. It will be hell on earth for a lot of people but the light at the end of the tunnel is that tyranny is an objectively inferior mode of organization, and it always has to collapse eventually.
An interesting irony here is that almost every founder I know who started a company that failed outright or went bankrupt were primarily ideologically motivated.
Whereas the successful founders were the ones who chased the bottom line, improve the world is a benefit.
I fall into the first camp, though I got lucky with an acquisition. However it tainted me on startups and business in general actually having the ability to be ideological. At the end of the day people need to get paid, otherwise it's a volunteer organization, and volunteer organizations don't scale.
Although I get your frustration, I think it's too early to say there won't be a shift in the field. More people are becoming aware of the mass surveillance and globs of data collection which means that someone can make money making a startup that "Does X, but doesn't sell your data". Maybe _I'm_ the one who's too optimistic, but projects like Monero show me that there's people who care about privacy to create/maintain a digital cash equivalent.
I think it highlights two issues with it. One of which is a matter of "outsourcing privacy/trust" being inherently a risky concept and much of it is learned instead of sold. Since all of the perfect VPNs and end to end enceyption won't protect against poor opsec.
Second for business there is a question of "where is the money from with the business model"? Skipping that step leads to a VC acquisition which will subvert it once it gets big enough to "harvest" it at best.
Data-gaming SEO style seems like it would be the logical consequence of the surveillance but that may fall into the legally dodgy on its own.
GIGO spam may be what eventually bursts an ad-tech market. Phone systems are already notorious for being overwhelmed with scam and spam callers. Now imagine click and view farming being similarly leveraged as noise overwhelms signal.
mobile != all computing; agree about many founders in the mobile space. Just met yesterday with a colleague who is a tech manager now for outsourcing facial recognition systems, unsure if he is allowed to know who the clients are during a build. He kept trying to take pictures of me with his phone and laughing at my disdain.. he said "you are too shy" several times.. ugly
Plenty of the startup founders I've worked with want to address a problem and improve the world. They were also working to keep investors happy because otherwise they would not have the opportunity.
I'm with you on the disheartening of the tech industry I held in such high regard 20 years ago. I have a problem though: what else am I going to do for a living?
I agree. In fact I have often said that I think the internet was a mistake. And I mean it. It seems that right now the only point of the internet is to deliver adds and take more and more ownership from people so as to put everything in the cloud. And I am tired of micro payments.
I guess this is surveillance capitalism at it's best.
Maybe this is just a generational thing, but I still have never clicked on an ad. I hate ads. I don't know anyone who likes them. I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them.
I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being. It is the garbage we all just sort of accept exposure to as some sort of fee for existing online.
Who are all these people that subverted technology and turned it into advertising-tech?
The kind of person who clicks on ads also buys stuff. The negative, "if you don't click on ads, you don't buy stuff," may not be true in the strictest sense, but may be true for so many ways that matter.
Facebook is full of ads, you know Facebook users. Instagram has the most effective ads on the planet, maybe the only inventory on Earth where brand advertising works. You know plenty of Instagram users. YouTube's ad value is an open question, but I think their brand advertising also works. You can't block their ads in the apps, which is how people use them.
Sure, I get it, you're talking about banner ads. The kind of person who clicks on banner ads buys stuff!
> The kind of person who clicks on ads also buys stuff.
Everybody who has money buys stuff. People that click on ads are probably more easily persuaded into buying shit they don't need. I don't have any data on this, but it's highly questionable whether an ad-clicker buys more stuff in general.
Yeah I think Facebook and Instagram ads work great because people are there trying to fill empty time. They don't mind where it leads them. Whereas on YouTube they often want to watch that particular video and they will view advertising as a greater annoyance.
In my experience (helping a family member with a small niche e-commerce store) FB advertising works. To the point that if the ads stop, the revenue stops almost entirely. We tried it last month when stock ran low and sales dried up until the supplier came through and the ads started again.
I wish ads were better or more relevant, I find myself spending unreasonable amounts of time looking for things which should be more easily found - a problem which could be solved with better advertising.
You could advertise books/shows/movies to me (based on your current search, your wish list, your past purchases, you might be interested in ...) because I'm certain there are plenty of books I would be interested in which I don't know exist ... but you would have to actually have a good model for what I would like and not just some NYT best seller / top 40 / whatever crap is popular and overpromoted.
The problem there is I'm generally only going to be interested in long tail items, and those are much harder to target and often nobody is interested in promoting them.
If I'm searching for restaurants or coffee shops, likewise I would be happy to see paid advertisements along with organic search results.
If I'm reading an electronics design blog, I would be happy to see ads for electronics tools, new components, suppliers, etc.
There are lots of potential ads I would click, many I wouldn't mind seeing at all. The problem I have with advertising is that what I get exposed to most is either completely irrelevant (become a member of AARP today!), promoting obvious products (drink Coke!), or promoting shoddy products or outright scams.
>Who are all these people that subverted technology and turned it into advertising-tech?
Microsoft who started bundling "free" things with Windows to squash their competition. Everyone else who had to find a way to compete with them (and in turn everyone who wanted to compete with those companies, etc). Every customer who expects things to be "free".
I honestly don't. I actively don't want ads to be tailored to me, and not just because doing that requires spying on me.
In the past, most of the value that ads have given me have been as indicators of the target audience for content. For instance, I can leaf through a magazine I've never heard of and know, based on the ads, whether its a magazine I'm likely to enjoy.
Targeted ads completely destroy this value proposition, leaving ads without much value to me at all.
> there are plenty of books I would be interested in which I don't know exist ...
> The problem there is I'm generally only going to be interested in long tail items, ...
Yup. For that problem, did some original applied math based on some advanced pure math prerequisites and wrote the software for the math and for the corresponding Web site -- software appears to run as intended. Need to add some data and do an alpha test.
So, I am regarding your problem as a need for better Internet content (yes, including information about books, etc. not strictly ON the Internet) discovery and recommendation, and I'm regarding those as special cases of a much more general approach to Internet content search.
My work is to give you the content with the meaning -- artistic, utilitarian, political, technical, etc. -- you have in mind. So, I believe I've made progress on the meaning of content; a key here is some of the pure math.
Yes, my techniques should do much better at getting you the meaning YOU (extreme personalization) want than any top 40 style lists.
My view is that Google and Bing do REALLY well on about 1/3rd of the problem; I'm going for the other 2/3rds. Where Google and Bing work well, my work is NOT better. My work should be better in the 2/3rds.
I intend to announce an alpha test here on HN ASAP. Will look forward to the HN reactions.
At least initially, my site won't be very comprehensive. I intend to concentrate initially on fine arts, finance, nature, and a few more.
Yes, my Web site will be free to users and ad supported with my unique (methods and data) and hopefully especially effective ad targeting.
Yes, my work stands to be relatively good on user privacy: There are no logins; I make no use of HTTP cookies; and search results for a user have nothing to do with any history about the user; e.g., any two users doing the same search at the same time (before I update the data, say, say once a week) will get the same results.
I’ve first read posts about your website many months ago, and I’ve been intrigued ever since. Could you share a planned release date, even if approximate and preliminary?
Also, it’s seems that your product has been “almost ready” for some time now, just out of curiosity, what are the main blockers?
I got interrupted by unpredictable exogenous events. Somehow when I get the last one handled, some more come along.
None of these events have anything to do with the project. The project is in good shape, and the work on the project that is uniquely mine has all been fast, fun, and easy.
I had a motherboard fail. I moved. And many more.
I better understand the advice to entrepreneurs -- "Never quit". Well, I don't want to quit, and I don't have to. Actually now my bank balance is growing nicely.
Most recently I've been setting up my new office -- it was a lot of work but looks good, efficient, functional, etc.
I'll get the nonsense out of the way and get back to the work.
The work to do now is reasonable. What has not been reasonable are the unpredictable exogenous interruptions.
When people say that advertising doesn't work on them they are generally only focused on being immediately motivated to action by the ad. However advertising serves a wide range of functions beyond that. No one sees one Mercedes ad and goes out to purchase a $75k car. That doesn't mean that Mercedes is stupid for still buying TV ads. The ad is instead meant to do things like keep consumers updated on the latest product line, establish the brand of the company, and to keep that brand in the back of consumer's mind when an eventual buy decision does come up potentially years down the road.
Aspiration is a large part of advertising.
It's not just that you won't go out but that Mercades, most of us never will be able to afford one, but we all know its a luxurious product, a sign of wealth and 'doing well'. That's in large part because of the brand image, if you bought the same car with a Ford badge would they be able to charge as much?
Yes, and it would be good to try to measure that effect also, and for that the statistics and optimization stand to be more difficult and advanced. E.g., the main input is not just some ads and clicks but a stochastic process, that is, random variables indexed by time.
Uh, go measure something and get a number. You now have the value of a random variable. The sense in which the number is random or unknowable in advance, unpredictable, independent of something else, etc. is left open. Collect such data once, say, over 3 months, and now have a sample path of the stochastic process. Do it again and get another sample path, etc.
That effect seems highly relative to the context in which you see an ad, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was intentionally exaggerated when studied. Certain contexts increase credibility with certain people, others decrease credibility.
What it does do is actually put the product in front of your face. People won’t buy your thing if they’ve never seen or heard of it. So I agree there’s value to ads even if people don’t click on them in that moment.
>I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being.
I like ads -- but only if they're relevant to my interests. There lies the problem: 99% of all ads are not relevant to my interests. For online ads, 99.99% of ads are not relevant to me. So, I use a DNS blocker to filter out ads.
> For online ads, 99.99% of ads are not relevant to me.
This is what pisses me off about ads based on user tracking and surveillance the most. Google (and others) have been building very detailed profiles of us for two decades now and the ads still suck.
The ads that work are the ones that pop up when you search for a particular topic (e.g. "plumbers in austin"). They don't need a user profile to serve those.
I like ads if they're relevant to my interests AND they match the mental mode I'm in at the moment. If I'm flipping through an outdoorsy magazine and I see an ad for a neat new camping tool, I might be happy to have seen that ad. If I'm perusing a photography website and I see an ad for a cool new camera, I might be happy to have seen that ad.
I'm not happy if I'm reading a tech blog and I see ads for a car I was researching yesterday. I'm not happy if I'm checking my local newspaper's website and I see ads for the necklace I just bought my wife. These are like the non-chill guy who loudly approaches you at work, "HEY I HEAR YOU'RE LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB!".
The other problem is in order to figure out which ads are relevant to your interests, advertisers have to collect, store, and analyze tons and tons of data about you. Personally, I'd rather see ads that are not relevant to me.
>If everybody used a DNS blocker to filter out ads, would online advertising exist as a business?
Absolutely. Companies would get more clever about cloaking advertising with inscrutable domain names that's hard to filter with regex. Youtube is a good example of ads that are hard to block using pure DNS. (But that doesn't stop people from trying new variations of regexes for pihole that youtube eventually breaks.[0])
The other technique is native advertising. (But native ads are actually more "relevant" so somewhat more tolerable and more people would actually pay attention to them.) E.g. I just saw a Linus Tech Tips (the computer tech channel) and the pre-roll ad is for D-CON mouse traps (not relevant to me since I don't have a mouse infestation that requires rodent traps) or girls dolls[1] -- but the native ad is Linus acting as spokesperson for the Ring Doorbell Camera Kit[2]. That's more relevant since it's a techie gadget. I won't buy the Ring kit but it's more relevant than the mouse trap ad.
If you really do like ads, there are plenty of platforms that will let you input your interests and customize your ads — Facebook, google, and I believe even Hulu will let your do so (I think there’s a 3rd party service called AdChoice or so that will do the same across smaller networks).
Something tells me that still won’t be enough to have you undo ad blocking...
> I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them.
Hi there! Glad to meet you. My name is Jeremy!
I click on ads when I see something that makes me want to click on it. Could be a retargeting pixel picked me up after I left some random ecomm site after not buying (but still intending to), or more likely a new direct-to-consumer brand that looks appealing (allbirds, freshly, barkbox, etc).
I don't hate ads. I don't like ads. Ads are ads. If I didn't get ads, I would really have no way of knowing that something out there exists that I had no idea I might want.
You have to keep in mind how cheap advertising is. An ad campaign that affects one in a hundred thousand can be successful.
In some areas, you'll find a ton of billboards for personal injury lawyers. Right off the bat, maybe only one in several thousand people is a potential client, and it's totally irrelevant to the remainder. Of the relevant population, most of them have the common sense not to hire a lawyer purely based on an advertisement. But those billboards are still worth it. They know because they ask people how they learned about them, making it simple to calculate their value.
I'm not sure what generation you're a part of but I appreciate ads when they actually tell me something I didn't know about that I do want to buy. For example I've been shopping for beds and dont mind ads for brands I hadn't heard of. Some of them I would have bought had they been in my budget but this to me isn't so much a problem with ada in general as it is about as targeting.
If I'm diving into buying something like a bed, I'm never looking at regular advertising. I'm trawling through forums and old message boards, looking at sites that do direct sales, reading reviews, looking at pictures, going to an actual store to touch and see a thing. Advertising is a skewed view of something I want to buy where they try to convince me it's 110% beyond my wildest dreams and expectations. It's not, never will be. I just want something that's about 80% there and to confidently know it's good enough.
I’m way past accepting ad-network ads. If an ad shows for a product I’m really interested in I’d rather google it on a different browser/device than click the ad. But mostly I’m disappointed that the company in question even uses ad-network (ie tracking/targeted) ads.
(I’m from the 70’s and TV didn’t have ads when I grew up, that could make a difference I don’t know?)
I want to be shown no ads or ads for products completely irrelevant to me because seeing (well-)targeted ads makes me feel watched and tracked.
> I appreciate ads when they actually tell me something I didn't know about that I do want to buy.
I can't remember the last time I even saw an ad that did this (at all, not just online).
Oh wait, I lie, I do remember -- ads for electronics and computers in the technical journals of old used to do this, because they included actual information about the products they were selling. I haven't seen a useful ad in decades, though.
It's not really generational; people have always hated advertising. They hated it in the newspapers, on buildings, on TV, before movies, inside of movies, in magazines.
I don't really see advertising in general going away short of legislation preventing it; that doesn't mean that online advertising will always be as profitable as it is now, but there's a question of "where else will people advertise?" People advertise where people are; online advertising will lose its value when people spend time elsewhere.
I have clicked on an ad now and then. I can't remember the last time, though. Probably cars, but of course I can't buy a new car every day.
The thing is, though, if something is truly new to me, even if it seems like just the thing, I'm not going to buy it without doing market research. It's ingrained in me that anything that is brought to you is almost certainly garbage.
But, you like accessing content for free, correct? That content doesn't exist and then ads are layered on, the context exists BECAUSE of ads. Like, no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads.
This is how mass media has worked from the get-go. Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising. Entire genres of popular music wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Online advertising did not create the notion of advertising being the predominant media funding model.
And, just because you'd rather ads not exist, it doesn't mean there's something "evil" or whatever about a business promoting itself. I'm going to guess that if you ever find yourself needed to market a business you'll be happy if there's an option to advertise effectively.
> no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads.
What is your plan? You just produced content, on a site with no ads, and no links to other ways to capitalize off it. I'd argue most content is created by people who just want to share something they are passionate about. Maybe a lot of it is low quality, and "you get what you [or someone else] pay for" can apply, but a world without ad-supported distribution models would not be without content.
> Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising
Radio stations and other traditional mass media also require substantial investment and resources; putting a web page on the internet does not (unless we make it, by putting all our "pages" on a couple giant sites, who then need revenue to provide those services, hence serve ads).
> But, you like accessing content for free, correct?
Meh. The best online content's fully paid, donationware (Wikipedia), or simply free. 100% of the ad-supported stuff could go away tomorrow and my quality of life would suffer not at all. Hell, might go up. Meanwhile spyvertising-paid "free" services & software are sucking the air out of the room for paid and open-source alternatives (and protocols—god is that ecosystem bad for protocols) alike, for a variety of things I might like to buy or use or contribute to.
I don't get the "but think of what the Web would look like without ad money!" doom & gloom. It'd be fine. Go ahead, outlaw them. I do not care even a little.
So I see two takeaway questions: would we be fine/better off without mass media funded by advertising(it's obvious what my answer to this would be since I don't generally listen to it or watch it, though I acknowledge it going away won't likely happen).
And the second, would content we like to consume/ be worthy of consumption be produced anyway, and my contention is that it would still, just like it did in the past and continues in the current (some free, some paid for), as can be seen in the history of books, early internet, street art, leisure, bloggers, hobbyists, cinema, documentaries, etc.
There might be a third point of mine, which is that we're actually suffering from a glut of content and competition for eyeballs: so to me, worrying about that content disappearing is a bit like worrying about dying of thirst while drowning in a freshwater lake.
I don't know, really. I don't want to go back to a time where artists struggle to eat, to make a metaphor. Independent creators are using advertising revenue now too.
> But, you like accessing content for free, correct?
I'm really not sure about that anymore.
I pay for The Athletic, I was hesitant at first but now I really enjoy getting access to top quality sports articles with no ads and a nice clean experience.
I pay for Google Play Music (for however long that lasts) and I'm really happy I can just listen to music without needing to hear more fucking ads in my life.
I support a few Youtube channels on Patreon because the advertising money on Youtube isn't enough for them to cover their bills. At this point there's a good number of channels I would rather pitch a few dollars at each month than have to sit through ads (which are adblocked anyway, whoops) and have their content threatened by what Youtube determines advertisers care about.
I pay for Netflix and never have to watch ads (so far) while watching TV. Whenever I watch live TV it drives me crazy how many breaks they take to show me the same stupid commercials over and over again for stuff I will never buy.
You see it with online sports packages that don't have the rights to show TV feeds online -- so when it's time for commercials, it just switches over to a silent image saying "Commercial Break in Progress". I pay $20 a month for DAZN and I'm not sure how much longer I can stand watching the awful commercials that keep getting shown at every break.
I donate a small amount every once in a while to Wikimedia and in return we all get access to a free encyclopedia that stays eternally relevant without advertising.
We can live in a world where we pay for content and be happy. We can live in a world without advertising. It's really not that bad paying a little to get a much better experience.
Actually, that's not (historically) the case. From The Attention Merchants (a great book, by the way), page 12:
>"Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny...he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky...was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What Day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood--more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him--was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product" (emphasis original)
His paper ended up being the New York Sun.
Just something to think about. It wasn't always like this.
Actually, I'm aggressively looking for higher quality content that I can pay for, like (e.g.) nzz.ch for news. I was also a Google Contributor subscriber, before it required an opt-in for site operators.
What I would really like is to pay for the Google Feed (aka Google Now) on my Pixel instead of having to ignore the ads that have recently started to show up there.
Does Google Now still not respect "I'm not interested" flagging?
I've tried to use it many times, but I'll keep seeing the same stories I've marked as not interested. One easy example is any Marvel release. I'll say not interested in "move title". Then the same story will pop up in the Marvel category. I'll repeat the process for Marvel, and the same story will show up as entertainment, repeat until I close the app.
I've had good results from consistently tuning my feed over the last few years, particularly by excluding low quality sources altogether.
I have seen the phenomena you're talking about though. For me it might be a political scandal that I mark as uninteresting, which then shows up again under some peripherally related category.
for some reason, they think I love baseball, so I get a ton of baseball alerts. I need to accept notifications to the Google app because that's how I auth to gmail. Pretty stupid that the same app sends necessary and completely useless alerts, but I'm sure that's intentional.
I literally just tried to order some pants on the internet, and I couldn't because the retailer's site broke when interacting with my ad blocker.
I don't care what conditions someone wants to put on using their website, per se, and agree they have the right. The problem is, that I can't easily selectively interact with the part of the internet that isn't polluted by unreasonable advertising.
The evil part is the mixing of the unwanted or dangerous ads with the general internet. If it was segregated so you could choose which area you wanted to be in, then it would be genuinely voluntary.
> Online advertising did not create the notion of advertising being the predominant media funding model.
True, but online ads did create the notion that spying on everyone should be part of the business model. That's what I object to. If the price to make that stop is that there is no more "free" content (scare quotes because it's not really free), I'm fine with that. I don't think that's the price, though.
This is true for newspapers, pro YouTube channels, etc. But even today, the majority of internet content is created by people for free - this includes comments on HN, Reddit discussion, original Facebook posts, amateur YouTube content, and much more.
>paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle
Ignoring the technology aspects of this for a minute: he's basically arguing directly against the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling, which I find interesting. If we're going to argue that money is too corrupting in online political advertising then it really doesn't have anything to do with being online.
The argument that it is simply too dangerous to provide electricity when it is hot and windy is just so bizarre. What was the point of building all that infrastructure if you built it so poorly it keeps killing people?
> What was the point of building all that infrastructure if you built it so poorly it keeps killing people?
The decision makers may not have fully understood the danger when they built it, or they did and judged that someone else would end up taking the blame and cleaning up the mess.
Yeah, outside of Lee Harvey Oswald this guy was the most important prisoner in the history of the USA. The fact that he just "suicided" in prison and we're all supposed to move on and share links about suicide awareness is utter nonsense.
If the corporate media doesn't get to the bottom of this then someone else will, it's just a matter of time. Everyone is so tired of being lied to by authority figures.
And it's a great letter. Of interest, it's extremely similar to Civil Disobedience which is a letter Thoreau wrote from jail, and of which King possessed a copy of at the time he wrote his own letter. Related, Gandi carried a copy of Civil Disobedience with him at all times. Thoreau's rejection of US taxing authority was far more influential than most realize, leading to cascading revolutions throughout the 20th century.
That's a big part of the problem right? We've stratified information access such that special elite groups get to decide what the lowly commoners are allowed to know. We know what's best for them.
In theory this would be fine if we had a rigorous and well tested process for managing dangerous information, but the whole classification system has just been subverted to just hide whatever embarrasses the rich and powerful. It's an illegitimate farce.
If he had dirt on people would he not arrange so it would be sent out in case of his death? Especially if there was a failed murder attempt just weeks before?
And what stops the victims of naming names now? And what would have stopped Epstein of just not talking and just denying?
The only thing they had to do was to keep him alive, and given his health, it was not a hard thing to do. If there were no benefactors, it would've been criminal incompetence. As it stands, incompetence is as likely as if he got killed by an anvil falling from the sky.
To paraphrase: it's as if I gave you a new iPhone to keep for a day, and you returned empty-handed and told me someone stole it from you... because you left it on the edge of the platform at a NYC subway station for the night and (surprise!) it wasn't there in the morning!
In this scenario, it makes no difference whether your friend took it, someone else took it, or it got knocked onto the tracks by accident. What matters is that you ensured that I don't have my phone back.
And that's what happened in the Epstein case. His keepers facilitated his death. The exact manner is irrelevant.
Funny to see this comment getting downvoted when it really gets to the heart of the issue: keeping Epstein alive was crucial to the cause of justice, everyone knew this and that many powerful people had a huge stake in having him silenced, so even if it was suicide his death was willfully facilitated.
It also sends a clear message to anyone who may know information to keep their mouth shut.
It basically says, "Yeah you can be put on 24/7 security, in a prison cell watched by rotating armed guards and we will still find a way to disable the cameras, get the guards away from you cell, and murder you."
Yes, both cameras that watched the cell and hallway outside it had "technical difficulties" and there was no recoverable footage around the time of Epstein's death.
At least one camera in the hallway outside the cell where authorities say registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself earlier this month had footage that is unusable, although other, clearer footage was captured in the area, according to three people briefed on the evidence gathered earlier this month
The problem is that many jails are designed with lots of corridors and halls basically identical.
I assume that recording that nothing happened could be as easy as put a number over a different door, (or pick the equivalent door in a different floor), record for a while, stop, remove the number tag, and swap the records.
Are those the same people that were unable to notice not one, but two cameras broken pointing to a very special recluse for an undefined amount of time?
We could ask the smartest team of architects in the planet to design the most secure jail in the planet and then put idiots at charge. The security of the jail will vanish in a poof of "I couldn't care less about replacing this broken bulb"
> Are those the same people that were unable to notice not one, but two cameras broken pointing to a very special recluse for an undefined amount of time?
Did the people who design the prison also work there as security guards? Is that what you're asking?
> We could ask the smartest team of architects in the planet to design the most secure jail in the planet and then put idiots at charge. The security of the jail will vanish in a poof of "I couldn't care less about replacing this broken bulb"
What does this have to do with what you wrote? This actually sounds that you're arguing that it most likely was a suicide if everyone was so inept. Let me ask, how many times did something like this happen before, do you think, in the last 40 years or so?
>Not being able to do that while in high-security confinment.
Why would he not be able to do that? He had access to his lawyer, right? Or why would he not be even more upfront and straight up tell the prosecution that someone tried to kill him and that he would spill everything for protection?
It's not impossible people are just pointing out it was implausible that the highest profile prisoner in the damn prison was the first person to successfully kill themselves in years and years.
I don't have information that would prove Epstein's death wasn't suicide. Given he was on suicide watch earlier, that doesn't matter much to the situation of those with power acting to conveniently dispose of him.
The Epstein case could still be pursued. But when the government disposes of the star witness, the average person quite reasonably tends to doubt the state is going to give satisfaction, plus the media-driving focus of attention is gone.
> If he had dirt on people would he not arrange so it would be sent out in case of his death?
Considering the circumstances, if you received information from Epstein, what would you do with it? Even if you were brave enough to risk your life in the service of justice, what authority would you even send it to?
Honestly, Glenn Greenwald would probably be where I’d turn to. I’d trust him as a journalist, for sure. There aren’t a ton of them who’ve publicly demonstrated how they handle something of this importance (Woodward and Bernstein are the only other two I can come up with off the top of my head).
Assange - for which I will get hate. He will publish, in full at considerable personal cost. I don't think there are any credible accusations about him doing anything else, ever. You can still hate him for whatever reasons you have and expect him to do just that.
Have you seen Greenwalds thoughts on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
I'm not sure they should still be on that list... Maybe, but there's some doubt. More about them than say Assange, for this purpose which is pretty weird and unexpected to think about.
Is it fair? I mean calling a journalist an agent of the deep state for publishing leaks given to them is quite a leap... especially given that Greenwald is famous in large part for the same.
I don't think there's any evidence of Greenwald publishing leaks provided by russian officials. Unless you go with the "Snowden is a russian asset" line which I find lacks credibility. Especially given how often it's been used. Lately Hilary is accusing Deomcrat candidates of it, which is, well, exactly in keeping with her character. An observation that is less controversial now than it used to be.
Never heard of towerload before, but wow, that article is comically terrible. Don't believe me? Here's a tweet from nobody making the same claim without evidence.
The arc digitial article (deliberately?) conflates all those idiots running around yelling "The President is a Russian spy!" and saying that is idiotic with not wanting Mueller's report at all as if those idiots were necessary for Mueller to perform his investigation and write a report.
So yeah, making the claim against Greewald. I'm going with "Not Fair" if that's the best evidence there is.
I've seen no credible evidence that Assange worked with russia fwiw (but the NYT article making the accusation had the silliest diagram I've ever seen in lieu of evidence - so silly it looked deliberately so - as a covert protest perhaps..? ymmv incompetence is the usual go to). If I saw some evidence I might well change my mind on that but I'm just not willing to see russians pulling strings without evidence. I believed WMD claims and I hope I learned /something/ from that error.
Quoting the actual content of Mueller's report. Yeah, I'm ok with that when reporting on it myself. Pointing out that Trump can be a horrible person and awful president without being a russian spy and that constant accusations of it are silly, counterproductive, a massive distraction from the duty of the fourth estate and just need to stop now so we can analyse reality is from the competent journalist playbook rather than a russian conspiracy IMHO.
The claim against Woodward has more legs because he gets top secret leaks and there's no investigation, there's no prosecution, there's no outrage and the stories he writes based on the leaks are anything but embarassing to the government. So I guess all that is at least consistent with what Greenwald is saying. I mean an article that embarasses the government based on leaks with woodward as author - that would be inconsistent and you'd have to address that to keep making the case at least. (well it's 1 this way and 5 the other or something - but I haven't seen the 1).
If I wanted to make a criticism of Glenn in the original context it is that he will use whatever you give him for maximum political impact in support of his political views (but will do so with integrity, eg Snowden is a republican and went to Glenn because of his integrity, also Barton Gelmann and deliberately avoided the NYT for burying stories which should have sent alarm bells ringing loud there, I wonder if it did). Is that political impact according to Glenn what you want? But I guess if what you want released embarasses the government, Woodward hasn't got much form since Watergate..?
I believe most of the major (and some of the minor) newspapers offer a SecureDrop instance to transfer confidential information.
So I would send the entirety of the information to every newsroom that could receive it, then pray that I: A) was not the only initial recipient of the Epstein drop and B) that the information I received doesn't contain any content that could be uniquely identified to me.
Afterwards I would sit down and have a long think about how my life got to the point where Epstein is communicating with me personally.
Interesting how Oswald was murdered. And then the murderer conveniently died of cancer soon after. Also interesting how that plot has been made out to be this big mystery with every which way being considered, except for an internal job. The patterns are getting pretty clear now
Every which way is considered because that's what humans do. Everyone wants to be the guy who came up with an original theory to show how clever they are.
Your vague “internal job” accusation is no exception to this.
There are already lots of people investigating this independently and a lot of information has been uncovered. I can recommend a podcast that has really good research and is also a very entertaining listen:
Plenty of crackpot theories abound of course, but the hosts here try to piece things together that are based in fact to get a more plausible understanding of the course of events.
> Everyone is so tired of being lied to by authority figures.
I see very little sign of this. On the contrary, basically anywhere I look I see nothing but rabid enthusiasm for the latest Russia boogeyman story, and utter disdain for any idea that things may not be quite as we're told by the government and media.
I suspect the only reason there happens to be any interest in this story is that it involves children. Considering how relatively carefree the public seems to be on this story, when usually any story involving children and sex results in widespread hysteria and disgust, I think whoever is behind the memory holing of this story is probably feeling pretty comfortable with their ability to control people's perception of reality.
I think we have officially scraped the bottom of the barrel now on ways to increase user engagement with netflix chipmunk mode. That's it. There is no innovation left to find in the realm of increasing content consumed per day. All done here.
Let's try formulating some new goals now. What else can we create outside of trying to make this one metric increase a tiny bit next year?
Not really, by 2005 or so we all knew flash was terribly problematic and making the web much worse. Some people embraced it for sure, but in my experience most people involved with the web at this time had objections to Flash (and Adobe more widely).
Flash was fine for specific purposes .. animations and games mostly. Doing your whole site in Flash was dumb, but Homestar Runner and Newgrounds used it in really good ways.
The adtech industry embraced flash in a big way, youtube was defaulting to the flash player until four years ago. Plus the dozens of flash ads and trackers that were (and still are) placed into many ad networks.
Now that the adtech firms switched to building the browser and the cluster of html5 technologies have matured it's easier to track people natively. That's really the only reason flash went away.
There was no Flash on the most popular smartphone (before Android took over). When ad tech went mobile they couldn't use Flash. So, ad tech shifted to web tech.
AWS is the most true tech company out there I think, I wish there were a way for me to invest in it outside of the Amazon borg cube media conglomerate trying to fight Disney.
One time I almost got involved with a person who truly wanted to improve the world, but didn't get the job.
Outside of that one person I almost met 15 years ago, literally every founder in tech I've interacted with is just trying to run the ponzi scheme and get to that exit event, consequences be damned, employees be damned, profit be damned.
Maybe there are some good people in tech, but I still haven't met them after a whole career in this industry. Just a lot of people who make number go up like they're told to.
*edit I think this comment will be very poorly received and downvoted to -100000 karma, but honestly typing it out has made me realize I just fucking hate this industry with every fiber of my being. Every new platform and channel and tool gets completely subverted by ever more intrusive and personalized advertising, and the total data surveillance ecosystem of the big tech giants ensures that they will be able to kill or consume any truly good business idea before it gets off the ground. I think I'm done. Fuck tech. Fuck computers. What a waste of a career.