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Great, that means there is a potential market for it.

When Ford motors started cars already existed, when Facebook started social networks already existed, when Google started search engines already existed, etc.

In my opinion, getting demotivated for not being the first or being “the one” that came up with the idea prevents way too many people from starting their own thing.

In the end, execution and adoption are what really matters. In general is better to copy something and improve on it than trying to invent something completely new.

Which is pretty ridiculous given that everyone needs a social security number, and then if you ever want to rent or buy a place you need a credit score. Then if you want to travel abroad you need a passport. And if you use google, social media or a cell phone, or pretty much just anything online, you are going to get tracked. All of these systems and organizations have already identified you, or they’ll easily do it when needed.

Not having a universal-nation-wide identification system only makes it worse for everyone.

Because the US government wants to maintain access to FBs data. Shutting down FB would be a big blow to surveillance, hence they will never do anything serious against it. They’ll just put on a show, scream publicly in outrage about what FB does or whatever, and then nothing substantial will come out of it, because they never intended to do anything in the first place.

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this.

Maybe they are trying, but also maybe they are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

What I mean is that very likely the proper way to fix things would financially hurt FB, which seems it’s something they really don’t want to do.

I would love to be able to block all calls from Texas. Every day I get 5+ spam calls, starting at 7:30am, almost all from Texas. If I could block all of Texas, then 90%+ of the spam calls I get would go away.

Is not that they can’t, is that there’s no money in it for them, at least not yet.

At the same time that these companies don’t do anything about spam calls, they formed a consortium to push something called A2P-10DLC on services like Twilio, to force smaller businesses to pay more money for the privilege of texting their own customers. They say it’s for protecting the end users from spam, but clearly they don’t really care about that, instead they realized they were not getting a big enough piece of the pie of texting services and want to get more.

Pretty much everyday I get 5+ spam calls, almost all from numbers with area codes in Texas (no idea why). The calls start at 7:30am.

My number is in the federal do not call list. I used to manually block every single number from spam calls, but now I gave up.

I’ll just never answer a call unless it’s from a known number and I’m expecting it. Otherwise I’ll just return it later if it’s important enough.

My guess is that phone network operators don’t care because they haven’t figured out a way to make money blocking these calls.

At the same time, the same carriers are going out of their way to block text messages from businesses that legitimately use services like Twilio to communicate with their users/customers. Why? Because the alternative for these businesses is to pay about $3k setup fee + $3k/quarter to get a shortcode for the privilege of texting the carriers customers - the same customers the carriers don’t care about protecting from spam phone calls.

There’s both.

About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.

YC has a blacklist of people and companies.

Not sure what will land you there, but I know they have it and use it.

504s here

> If we are requiring spouses of elected officials to divest their investment business, we should also require Presidents to divest from their businesses as well, not just wink-wink transfer to his children.

Of course, or some other mechanism.

> In additon there are thousands of elected officials across the country. If we need everyone to abandon/destroy their non-official form of income, nobody will join politics. It is easy to judge from that sidelines.

So you are saying that politics is inherently corrupt and that if you take away the appeal of corruption then no one will participate?

Of course not. In app purchases might make sense for someone that has an app once they already have a pretty good audience, but the issue is how to build that audience in the first place.

I was wondering if the person I was replying to had any insights on that, given they were suggesting in app purchases as an alternative to Google/FB ads. Maybe they were suggesting in app purchases as an alternative to Google adsense? Which wouldn’t apply to my use case.

How would you leverage in app purchases to promote a B2B saas product?