"If you delete your account, we will delete your data within 30 days, except we may retain a limited set of data for longer where required or permitted by law."
"where required".... hmm, that seems OK. We don't want to violate the law!
"or permitted".... er...
[I wonder why this comment is being voted down. Do people here think it's NOT OK to comply with the law with respect to retaining data? Or is the reason somehow the opposite of that? Not sure. But my point was that the "where required" clause seems moot if they are going to retain data where "permitted", which in my book, is NOT OK.]
I'm 70. Most of my high school and college friends are on Facebook, and some other friends. So I use it (including its Messenger component) a lot to keep in touch! I know it's a generational thing. Just thought I'd mention it.
> Whether any one country should be global police or not is a very difficult question to answer, but at the same time I could easily see situations where some of these could be beneficial for the greater good.
I would argue that it should be the UN that does something like this, if it's done at all. I would like to see a world in which there was a top-level body that would arrest a dictator, the same way the US government would arrest someone who tried to become dictator of an American state.
But it wouldn't be up to the governor of one of the other states to do it without the agreement of the rest of the country. That would be chaos.
> I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out.
Let's change that here and now! :)
I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it.
I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005 a version was published in a more academic context:
“Why the Internet is bad for democracy.” Communications of the ACM 48(10): 57–58 (2005).
Short, densely packed and to the point. It does seem very prescient, although I may be underestimating how clearly these tendencies could already be seen 20 years ago. I, for one, was definitely still in the techno-optimist camp back then.
"Free access to information is indeed helpful, which is why the internet undermines totalitarianism. But it undermines pretty much everything else, too, including democracy."
It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
> POTS = Plain Old Telephony System
I worked for NY Telephone for years in the '80s, and it was referred to there as "Plain Old Telephone Service" not System. Not that it's a big deal at this point!
If you try 2N times to succeed in ventures which each have a 1/N chance of success, as N increases the probability of such as success quickly converges on about 86.5%.
(The limit is 1-e^(-2).)
So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.
> So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.
But that perfectly highlights why the "startup gamble" is a great bet for VCs but a horrible bet for most employees. Let's say N is, generously, 50 (i.e. 1 in 50 startups are a resounding success, which seems probably a bit over-optimistic but reasonable). VCs can easily spread investment around to 100 startups, but employees get a few swings at bat at most when it comes to where they work.
For most things in life, you often just don't have that many chances. E.g. most people don't date a hundred people before finding their spouse.
"where required".... hmm, that seems OK. We don't want to violate the law!
"or permitted".... er...
[I wonder why this comment is being voted down. Do people here think it's NOT OK to comply with the law with respect to retaining data? Or is the reason somehow the opposite of that? Not sure. But my point was that the "where required" clause seems moot if they are going to retain data where "permitted", which in my book, is NOT OK.]