lhc-

Uber has a history of sketchy behavior, such as investigating journalists who have written less than complimentary stories. Uber has basically done the Exact thing Fowler is explaining before. To me, that provides a pretty convincing argument that they are more than capable, and more than willing to do it again.

It sounds like the criticism is "I hate that she might change her mind based on new evidence". I'd say its a good thing that they were willing to alter their policy based on whether it would create jobs or not.

Consider the pressure / race to the bottom this puts on the rest of the EU though. The EU has an incentive to try to keep things fair between the states (disallowing sweetheart deals to lure companies away from other members), because this sort of competition is harmful to the EU as a whole. It's not like Apple is going to stop selling to Europe; they'll be somewhere if not Ireland, and the EU benefits as a whole if Apple is not allowed to skip out on paying its share.

There's a whole article above about what laws were not followed and a solution that works for both parties: Apple pays the taxes it owes. If it is unhappy with that burden, it can leave Ireland and the EU, but I suspect that will not happen.

If your cause is to decrease advertising on the web, and these actions diminish its effectiveness and potentially lead to decreased advertising in search of a better revenue stream, well that sounds like effective activism to me.

Except they're pretty clearly private companies, not Public Goods. And as such, they can do basically whatever they want about speech on their platforms.

But the article doesn't argue for NO parking lots; it argues that FREE parking lots are the issue. The stores could stay open with paid parking, and could lower costs for non-drivers because they no longer needed to subsidize that free parking by charging everyone more.

I'm not sure how you can argue drones minimize foreign civilian casualties, given the constant reports of drones bombing weddings and social gatherings based on the location of a cell phone. That's basically just repeating direct propaganda.

I mean, Trump has also talked about banning legal muslim immigration from places like Syria; does that not count as anti-immigration?

Why can't we blame the democratic candidate, who was so unappealing to progressive voters that they preferred Nader? I would suggest it is the fault of that candidate (and his party) that they lost the election. No one is entitled to anyone else's votes, regardless of how bad the competition is. Voters have agency, and have no compulsion to vote for one specific candidate to avoid another evil one (that specific candidate still must earn those votes).

I agree with all of this. a16z and other VC's are pretty clearly on the side of capital, and don't really believe that labor provides any value. Employee's taking lower salaries and investing years of their lives don't provide any lasting value according to a16z. I just cannot believe that he would try to justify taking back fairly given compensation because an employee did not want to continue doubling down and investing more and more money and labor into a startup.

You're saying we should ignore past bad behavior because Google, Facebook, etc. are good guys now. Logically, that would lead us to excuse current bad behavior by smaller companies because everyone does it, and they'll do good once they are big enough.

Do you have a reference for that? Maybe some evidence of why you consider these numbers misleading? I worked in the tax business recently and I'd say both those numbers are actually below average for out customers (who were mostly poor or middle class).

Doing this on LinkedIn would be really bad, because that data would be out there for recruiters, and you'd lose most of your leverage when trying to negotiate at a new job.

Another take on this issue is that the FBI and NSA have a strong opposing interest. While they may not lobby in the same sense as Apple etc., they do represent law enforcement, which is an enormously powerful lobby in the US. So all those private companies are on one side, sure, but US law enforcement is on the other, and that's quite a fight (and one that law enforcement has been winning for a long time now).