amarkov

Sure. But if European countries can insist on globally de-indexing truthful information because they feel its continued propagation is harmful, that seriously undercuts any moral high ground available when China tries to do the same.

There's always a reason for expanding government bureaucracies. Some worthy problem, which the government plausibly could solve if it had just a little bit more power to intervene.

That doesn't change the direct consequence of the intervention, that there's now yet another area where the government sits there telling everyone what to do. If we believe that government ought to be limited, at some point we have to balance against that.

Surely you understand how it creates bad incentives, if feedback about individual productivity can be delivered bluntly but feedback about prioritization can't be given at all.

Fingers crossed for sure, but there's such a thing as growing too fast for your own good. Github famously stopped being profitable the year after it got a $250M round.

I'm sure it's a nightmare for a professional journalist. And I don't mean that as an insult - it'd be a nightmare for me too.

But you know what's more of a nightmare? Driving around to every retail outlet in a 30 mile radius, trying to convince them that you can be the most submissive and obedient out of the 200 applicants. It's hard to begrudge the gig economy for providing an alternative to that.

Schemaless databases are good for scenarios where the database isn't a source of truth. If you have a table full of e.g. per-second heartbeats from a bunch of deployed services, there's no fundamental underlying truth anyone's trying to gather from it, and you can't afford to run a full schema migration every time someone adds a new metric.

I recognize some people do try to use schemaless databases in the way you're describing, and I agree that's weird and dangerous.

Certainly, but that doesn't mean the schema has to be a strict validation encoded into your storage format. It's a perfectly well-defined programming model to say "well, I'm reading query X with schema Y, and if some rows don't match Y give me nulls instead".

Certainly not. But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms? It seems like there's a big difference between handing over lists of users and restricting information.

Most business ideas aren't rejected for any kind of compact reason. The decisionmaker typically has other things that are higher priority, or they just kinda avoid giving a green light until it's interpreted as a rejection.

There's a sense in which summary views are the real data. If I asked Spotify to share my data, and they just sent me a 250 MB file of every interaction they've ever recorded, I would conclude they're trying to obfuscate which data they actually use and how they use it.

It seems to me that these kinds of authors always see the alternative as a Silicon Valley with their politics. This article describes a bunch of concrete things that tech companies ought to do: ensure the poor aren't marginalized, bring local communities together, and don't provide mechanisms for creating echo chambers. But what neither Turner nor Khan discuss is how tech companies will realize they ought to do this.

What if Amazon politicizes in the direction of libertarianism, and decides its only social responsibility is to increase the world's GDP?

What if Facebook politicizes in the direction of social justice, and determines that segregating people into identity-based safe spaces is the way to go?

What if Google politicizes in the direction of some political party, and decides it's duty-bound to tweak its search algorithm to hurt opposing candidates?

When you've been kidnapped, you have good reasons to think that the kidnapper might just kill you if you don't go along with what they want. I've heard a lot of abusive police interrogation practices in the US, and none of them go so far to make you worry you'll be taken out back and shot.

You're drawing an equivalence that just isn't there, and I think you know that.

But arbitration didn't fail here. He never tried it in the first place.

The traditional American dream is that you change your status through making friends and simple hard work. If you're the hardest working and most dedicated Walmart sales associate, you'll quickly become a manager, and you can iterate on that at least until you're a regional director or something.

From that perspective, it's weird to look in on a typical Silicon Valley company, where it's understood that only people with specific technical knowledge are qualified to make important decisions. And it's downright scary to look at Uber, where the drivers have no internal mobility even in theory.