Linux users yesterday: “I hate websites that use Flash. They’re slow and awful. Let’s hear it for open web standards!”
Linux users today: “Apple is evil for not pre-installing Flash, a third-party, proprietary web plugin. How dare they encourage the use of open web standards. I’m going to mention Steve Jobs by name and rant about how I’m able to do apt-get on the command-line to install Flash, which is somehow the same as having it pre-installed. That’s proof that Apple is evil. Wake up, sheep!”
If you wanted to catalogue the shit-eating complacency and pretentiousness of Web 2.0, infographics would be right up there with the damn TED conference and people who put “rockstar” on their business card.
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And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn’t so much a philosophy as what someone who has never actually encountered philosophy imagines a philosophy might look like: good hard axiomatic absolutes, a bluff attitude of intellectual superiority, lots of simple atomic premises supposedly immune to doubt, immense and inflexible conclusions, and plenty of assertions about what is “rational” or “objective” or “real.” Oh, and of course an imposing brand name ending with an “-ism.” Rand was so eerily ignorant of all the interesting problems of ontology, epistemology, or logic that she believed she could construct an irrefutable system around a collection of simple maxims like “existence is identity” and “consciousness is identification,” all gathered from the damp fenlands between vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error. She was simply unaware that there were any genuine philosophical problems that could not be summarily solved by flatly proclaiming that this is objectivity, this is rational, this is scientific, in the peremptory tones of an Obersturmführer drilling his commandoes.
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A simple point illustrates this: several of the leading figures are evangelical atheists, with a highly contemptuous view of religion. How will NCH teach history, which cannot be understood without an extremely sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon? What place, and what guarantees, will there be for any young, untenured, historian with a more nuanced view?
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These buttons aren’t there for the sake of user experience, they’re for engineering teams who’s performance is evaluated on metrics. I’m certain the data from all these different buttons is used somewhere, for something. And sure, they are presented in ways that are moderately functional, but for a company the size of Google, I’d argue that cohesive user experience across all products would be a huge asset for driving engagement and improving their social ranking algorithms.
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When a kid is presented to a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist is pressured, obligated, to do something pharmacological. If a psychiatrist looked a single parent a joint away from a nap right in the eye and said, “nope, he’s acting out because of X, Y, Z, and medications aren’t going to fix this” that doctor will get his head handed to him by parent or by lawyer. Justice will be done, you negligent elitist.
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Groupon is essentially holding a portfolio of loans backed by the receivables of small businesses. If a business goes under, consumers will come back to Groupon for their money back. Unless Groupon is actually doing credit assessments on businesses that it chooses to feature, this is a big risk for Groupon.
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Groupon is not an Internet marketing business so much as it is the equivalent of a loan sharking business. The $21,000 that the business in this example gets for running a Groupon is essentially a very, very expensive loan. They get the cash up front, but pay for it with deep discounts over time. (This post applies to Groupon operations in the United States and Canada; it’s different in other parts of the world.)
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