[HN Gopher] Is the big tech era ending?
___________________________________________________________________
Is the big tech era ending?
Author : dash2
Score : 208 points
Date : 2021-12-04 12:21 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wyclif.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wyclif.substack.com)
| sh4un wrote:
| It's funny how you think voting for the same idiots will save
| anything.
| Causality1 wrote:
| We're just now noticing the edge of the cliff rapidly passing eye
| level as we fall. Every time tech gets easier, its users get more
| ignorant. Microsoft can take a shit in our mouths with Windows 11
| because the average Windows 11 user doesn't even know what an
| operating system is, let alone that they can change to a
| different one. Facebook and YouTube can do whatever they want
| because their only competitors are even more toxic than they are.
|
| Who do you think could make big tech fall? The politicians who
| think it's perfect the way it is or the ones who think it needs
| to be much worse?
| [deleted]
| hanniabu wrote:
| The web2 era is ending while the web3 era is just getting started
| _alex_ wrote:
| web3 just needs to come up with some problems for all it's
| solutions
| pm90 wrote:
| There are 2 major things the author fails to mention or address:
|
| 1) Even if Big Tech is not allowed (or chooses not to) compete
| directly, they've invested massively in creating platforms that
| power everything, especially other tech companies. eg Every new
| company starts off in AWS/GCP and most mature companies run their
| services on the cloud. It seems unlikely that they will be
| displaced here.
|
| 2) They've created an unprecedented concentration of skills, both
| in building and operating systems at scale. We do see a lot of
| scholarly material coming out of eg Google that has inspired OSS
| tools (not to mention directly to OSS like K8s or Android) and a
| bunch of SRE principles by employees (current or former) but with
| their lucrative compensation and career growth opportunities it
| looks like Big Tech will do just fine in attracting and retaining
| this talent.
|
| Which makes me somewhat skeptical if the big tech era will end
| anytime soon.
|
| One thing I have noticed is friends quitting big tech to join
| startups and many that remain saying that it's quite boring; If
| big tech culture does change in a meaningful way, I see that as a
| much bigger threat to their dominance.
| axegon_ wrote:
| Well... This [1] kinda answers it. Mind you, it is in the process
| of evolving into new products and markets. As I said a few days
| ago, I'm not sure what is next but somehow I'm gravitating
| towards IoT and embedded devices.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Nope. Not even close. It will change, for sure, but won't end.
| Look at other industries that have gone through massive
| consolidation. There are only a few large players in energy
| space, or cars. Now look at tech? Doesn't even have to go through
| consolidation, FAANG is already there.
|
| Until the government finds a way to cap the size of companies, or
| keep them split up... companies will continue to grow.
|
| Maybe big tech will end with the era of megatech....
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI
| mrkramer wrote:
| It's not ending it is only the beginning because all antirust
| lawsuits will fail to do anything meaningful.
| crdrost wrote:
| The article was not about antitrust but about vulgarity. Like
| the old school vulgarity, "the speech of the common folk."
|
| The claim is that computation right now belongs to the
| _nobilis_ and _eruditus populus_ , and things like Excel and
| Hypercard that bring these things to the _vulgus_ are
| pathetically limited... But, the story goes, maybe these new
| tools to wire a bunch of components together--payment gateways
| with wysiwyg website editors with email--constitute the
| beginning of a new world where the _vulgus_ can also spread
| their wings and fly, rather than having to remain in the nest
| while us mature birds sail the updrafts of programming.
| cryptica wrote:
| I hope so. Out with big tech, in with small decentralized tech.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| [0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I think it is ending, and I like the magic analogy used in the
| article.
|
| You've seen it before, with IBM, blockbuster, the entire music
| industry. Business entities get big and think their size protects
| them from disruption, they begin to implement abusive policies
| that pay off short term and don't worry about long term because
| they think their size protects them. This gravy train could go on
| forever it appears in the moment. Of course we have the advantage
| of hindsight.
|
| I think the same thing is beginning to happen to big tech.
| They're beginning to abuse users. Simultaneously, there are _lots
| of_ alternative options to all of their products being developed.
|
| I see either them being supplanted by new companies (with a
| couple of course adapting and surviving), or the industry being
| disrupted heavily by novel ideas. I'd prefer the latter of
| course, but I will take either.
| hackthefender wrote:
| > big tech firms got big and stay big, not because of network
| effects or political power, but because of their rare expertise;
| and that they cannot keep their advantage in expertise forever
|
| I am pretty sure Facebook got and stays big primarily because of
| network effects. You could create a website with all the
| technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because
| their friends aren't on it.
|
| In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to
| stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all. The hope
| that everything will just magically get better now that your
| local coffee shop can deliver beans to you with off-the-shelf
| software seems slightly optimistic.
|
| But I hope I'm wrong.
| dash2 wrote:
| Yes, there's a strong case for Facebook. But consider Skype: it
| was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom.
| Facebook's strength isn't just a network, it also has a lot of
| people's recorded history. So, the power of network effects
| varies. I think if e.g. Signal came up with features that
| Whatsapp lacks, it would have a good chance to displace
| Whatsapp.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to
| Zoom_
|
| Only because Microsoft probably assigned two interns to
| maintain Skype in the last 5 (if not more) years. I do agree
| with your point though.
| bostik wrote:
| If Skype had remained as useful and easy to use as it was >10
| years ago, Zoom would
|
| A) probably never have picked up steam, and
|
| B) had a much steeper uphill battle
|
| Before the plague hit only startups really used Zoom. The
| corporate video call space was dominated by things like Webex
| (awful), BlueJeans (awful), whatever MS morphed into current
| Teams (only slightly less awful), or if you were lucky,
| Google Hangouts (also just slightly less awful). Skype wasn't
| even a contender, and even against the kind of all-star field
| I just listed, it was a shitty experience - which says a lot.
|
| There was a big void for real-time video business
| conferencing that "just worked", but until early 2020, the
| space was cornered off by giants who saw it, at best, as
| barren ground. Enter global, mandatory remote working and all
| of a sudden the existing players had _nothing_ to offer. The
| market had stagnated, and beancounters had driven out all
| expensive innovation. All of a sudden, the space blows up and
| the neglected main tech in use is no longer fit for the new
| purpose.
|
| Zoom has a lot of problems, but what they did have was a
| product that "just worked" in almost any setup, coupled with
| architecture and infrastructure that at least COULD respond
| to insane, long-lasting spike in demand.
|
| Skype had become a rotting corpse nobody wanted to look or
| smell, but that was too heavy to move and too putrid to
| touch. We needed big enough a fire to burn it to ashes to
| make space for someone less atrocious. Zoom just happened to
| catch the tailwind, mostly because all the existing players
| had also abandoned the space but would not dare to leave it
| unguarded.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I've used google hangouts and then Meets at my work and
| it's fine. It does not require any special training to use,
| it works as you'd expect, and basically gets out of your
| way.
|
| I've used Zoom for online classes (as a student) and don't
| see any difference or advantage between it and Meets. You
| still click a link and and a window open ups, your camera
| turns on, there is a chat box, etc.
| bostik wrote:
| I use Zoom and Meet daily too. They are both functional
| on the bare-bones level but fail miserably with anything
| more complex - such as a 10+ person meeting. Or screen
| sharing.
|
| Meets craps its UI dimensions when you open chat. Zoom
| pops the chat window up in the middle of the screen,
| which is only slightly less bad. Both have problems if
| you have detachable video camera(s) in addition to
| laptop's own. And don't get me started on the audio path:
| even if you do manage to pick the right input and output,
| there's no guarantee the audio actually gets routed
| through. Expect to restart the video call software 25% of
| the time and pray it reconnects the streams all the way
| through.
|
| Oh, and Zoom's screen sharing experience on multi-monitor
| OSX setup is unforgivable. When you choose to share a
| screen, it triggers a sequence where the audience sees
| your shared view but you do not. The window you chose to
| share gets hidden locally.
|
| Whoever thought that would be an acceptable user
| experience needs to have their head examined. Possibly
| with a trepanner.
| izelnakri wrote:
| However there is no good alternative for Meta's Facebook,
| despite its degrading web UI over the years. I dont think its
| that much of a problem growing at 1-2% per month instead of
| 20-25% for any new social network.
|
| People should ideally stop using whatsapp and move over to
| Telegram as it seems to be the only one that has whatsapp UX
| parity. Thats what I did, and I also have signal, discord etc
| and I own no shares of Telegram.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I use Zoom and Skype but Zoom has not come close to
| replacing Skype for me. I have skype-in with multiple
| landline phone numbers in multiple states. Zoom does not
| offer this yet.
| sofixa wrote:
| > People should ideally stop using whatsapp and move over
| to Telegram as it seems to be the only one that has
| whatsapp UX parity.
|
| UX parity?? Telegram's UX blows WhatsApp out of the water.
| Stickers, message edits, polls, location sharing, bots for
| public channels, audio chats, etc etc. It's not even close!
| Ekaros wrote:
| And I don't really want any of that. I want just send
| textual message to group of people for free. Maybe add an
| image, but that is it. I don't really care about anything
| extra.
| sofixa wrote:
| But even that Telegram does better, because you can edit
| messages you've sent to correct typos, you can pin them
| in channels, and there are extra nice things which might
| come in handy ( when do you want to meet? A pinned poll
| and it's easy).
| orlovs wrote:
| Did not thread fully, but I get your point. I know large
| portion hacker news audience dont like Sowell (and other
| Chicago school econs). In Basic Economy he defines that
| monopoly cant be defined "market share", but how hard is to
| migrate off/open new competitors. Seing how tiktok eating
| userbase for fb. Its hardly defined as monopoly in social
| media angle. There should be more
| root_axis wrote:
| > _You could create a website with all the technical features
| of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren 't
| on it._
|
| Much easier said than done. FB is a _massive_ product, I don 't
| think anyone can realistically predict how something that
| really had all the features of FB would actually fare. Beyond
| that, we know that new networks are created all the time
| despite the existence of other big ones. Based on your premise,
| tiktok shouldn't have existed, nor insta, nor snapchat. Network
| effects matter but if the product actually does something
| useful or better and is well designed, people will come.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| The best thing that regulators can do is to enforce common
| protocols. The only things that have survived becoming a walled
| garden by big tech are big protocols that existed before them
| (e.g. email)
| civilized wrote:
| Facebook stays big because nobody else seems to have the magic
| combination of (1) a more compelling product vision for a
| social network, (2) capacity to execute and scale that vision.
|
| Come on, can't anyone make a product that connects friends
| better than FB? I'm sure it's technically amazing, but from a
| product perspective, my god, look at the thing, it's an
| absolute garbage fire. You can tell from the notifications it
| sends that it wants you to watch shitty videos and read shitty
| news articles alone, not connect you with your friends.
|
| Make a social network that feels like an actual social space
| and not an ad-infested media shithole, and I'll sign up, my
| friends will sign up, everyone will sign up, and FB will be
| toast in a couple months.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I agree with you, but queue the responses implying that
| without adtech stalkerware there is no way to pay for it.
|
| My response to that tired theme: you don't need a mega $B
| valuation to pay for a simple social network for sharing baby
| pics with friends and family. A non-profit or a benefit corp
| structure would be just fine.
| civilized wrote:
| Check out RStudio PBC. Incredible tech company. Doing just
| fine.
|
| And people pay $10/mo for Netflix, why wouldn't they pay a
| few bucks a month for an actually good social network?
| Heck, make it free for a month or six, no credit card
| needed, and when people see how good it is they won't
| leave. I pay for Disney+ just to let my kids watch Disney
| movies BECAUSE THEY'RE GOOD.
| ziml77 wrote:
| You need a lot of people using the service for people to
| find it worth paying for. I saw this with Pillowfort;
| intended to be a place for the people who had been forced
| off of Tumblr to go. They require a one-time $5 payment
| to create an account because they don't want to bring in
| investors and be forced to exploit their users to
| maximize earnings. This payment stopped a lot of people
| from joining. They are used to being able to share their
| art and socialize online for free. And they had no
| guarantee that others would join and stick with the site.
| tim333 wrote:
| >Facebook ... stays big primarily because of network effects
|
| And trying to buy anything that competes. If they'd been
| blocked from buying Instagram and WhatsApp they'd be in a much
| weaker position. Antitrust stuff could in principle stop them
| doing that.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Antitrust won't end big tech. It will just kneecap the US and
| Europe. They will take the only part of the new economy they
| have a foothold in and hand it to someone else. China's tech
| companies, supported and subsidized by the government, will
| take over. This is blindingly obvious.
|
| The thing that is amusing is that US/Europe seem to think they
| will be able to deal with this and effectively regulate them,
| despite not succeeding at this at all in the past (see China +
| IP, etc).
|
| One major reason is that China is willing to play "unfairly" to
| support its companies. US/Europe will be unable to ban these
| services entirely because their citizens depend on them too
| much. They will attempt what they do now, which is to regulate
| them in various ways to "ensure competition"
|
| But when you go to do that to a chinese company, the government
| will find a way to make it hurt for you. You make it hurt for
| Chinese Search Engine Company, they will ban the chip companies
| from making chips for you, etc. They are much better at this
| game than the other governments.
| karmasimida wrote:
| > China's tech companies, supported and subsidized by the
| government, will take over.
|
| This is going to be unlikely, when the Chinese government is
| actively kneecapping its own big techs.
|
| Data is going to be regulated like money, and not everyone is
| going to have the privilege to operate data on one's soil
| moving forward. No western companies could do in China, or
| vice versa.
|
| > US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely
| because their citizens depend on them too much.
|
| They can just ask it to sell, which was happening to TikTok,
| or setting up joint venture capital. They are many ways to do
| such things, government can make you bleed if they want to.
| ksec wrote:
| >This is going to be unlikely, when the Chinese government
| is actively kneecapping its own big techs.
|
| Not really, just taming them. Which is pretty much all done
| at this point.
| DannyBee wrote:
| The chinese government is not kneecapping them, it's
| carefully forcing them to fall in line, and doing so in a
| way that won't hurt its own interests.
|
| Remember that in China, the government is the kingmaker. In
| the US/EU, the companies are the kingmakers. China is
| simply reminding some of it's companies that this is the
| case.
|
| As for the last, good luck. You have a coherent long term
| strategy that they are willing to sacrifice short term for
| on one side, and a completely incoherent mess that changes
| every 4-6 years on the US/EU side.
|
| After they are finished kneecapping the US/EU companies,
| they will need these chinese companies more than china
| needs them. Not exactly a great negotiating position -
| there will come a point where you say "sell", and they say
| "nah, that's okay, we're good".
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It depends on what we are talking about in regards to "big
| tech".
|
| It's not clear to me that products like Facebook that are
| primarily driven by _cultural_ rather than _technical_
| dominance are something that the Chinese are likely to be
| able to dominate in. Facebook dominates because your friends
| and family and hobbies and whatever are on there, doing their
| thing. When they stop doing that, Facebook won 't dominate
| anymore.
|
| Now if Han culture becomes internationally dominant as the
| "cool" culture which North Americans Europeans aspire to
| emulate (like how American culture was internationally in the
| post WWII era through, say, the early 90s), then all bets are
| off -- but I think the trend is actually going opposite to
| that now.
|
| Until then, there will be social networks that dominate in
| China and there will be social networks that dominate in
| Europe and North America; because culturally (and
| politically, obviously) and they will rarely overlap as these
| are still two very distinct entities.
|
| I think it's likely that the same argument applies to a
| lesser degree to the ads space, and maybe even to commerce.
| Something like AliExpress feels worlds apart from Amazon
| despite the latter become increasingly a wild west of knock-
| off discount Chinese products anyways.
| leadingthenet wrote:
| Counterpoint: TikTok.
| ipaddr wrote:
| All big movies have random Chinese culture or star
| included. Han culture may become part of hollywood's core
| which will spread the culture
| cma wrote:
| The US funded EUV technology (the tech behind 7nm and below),
| and have used that DARPA funding to prevent Europe's ASML
| from selling to China. It seems to be almost exactly what you
| are warning about in reverse.
| agumonkey wrote:
| facebook also caught the social internet first wave.. humanity
| never had a global website to 'exist' .. facebook came,
| everybody thought it would be teh future and wanted to try.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| that s not true. many different social networks existed, and
| many were very close to facebook. there were even blogs etc.
| Facebook was the only one willing to ruthlessly go after
| people's contacts lists, and get them to use their real names
| so even non-internet users would undestand it. After it had
| picked up exponentially more users it was basically
| impossible to match for others.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Afaik there was nothing like Facebook. Blogs and even
| MySpace don't count. They weren't integrated like Facebook
| (you could interact with people in a lot of ways).
| tibyat wrote:
| you must be young :)
| xg15 wrote:
| > _The great dark towers of the necromancers, which tried to do
| everything magical under one roof, suffer the usual problems of
| conglomerates: weak incentives, and no specialist expertise.
| Eventually their empires shrink._
|
| Except we went through this a few times already. E.g. on the
| consumer side, there was dot com (open), AOL (conglomerate), web
| 2.0 (open) and now FAANG (conglomerate).
|
| This looks more like going in circles than one distincive trend.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| No, it's just that, like banking in the en of 2000's the tech
| sector gets way more scrutiny from the media, the public and
| politicians, a convenient scapegoat to blame for all the
| problems. It's interesting how all the same politicians stopped
| talking about Wall Streets and "fat cat bankers"... the new big
| bad wolf is now "big tech", in 10 years it will be something
| else...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| The fact that politicians and the media were talking about Wall
| Street ten years ago during the Great Recession, and talked
| about it less after economies started to recover, is not all
| that surprising.
|
| Similarly, the fact that politicians and the media are talking
| about big tech at a time when social media is being used to
| (depending on your politics) plan insurrections or deplatform
| the most important person in the world, doesn't seem like a
| misdirection from more relevant stories.
|
| I'm not sure what you're suggesting is the purpose of these
| narratives, but I think you need to be careful that you're not
| implying that there is a sinister group of people who control
| the world's media, financial, and political systems, and are
| using that control to direct people towards "scapegoats" to
| distract the public from their own nefarious plots.
| novok wrote:
| "Why work on a cool app or faster database, if Google or Facebook
| will copy your idea and sell it at scale?"
|
| Because if you've worked at these companies, you know you can
| spin circles around them in execution speed alone. Not to mention
| way too many things are too small scale for them to even pay
| attention to.
|
| And if your successful, they would rather buy you most of the
| time than make a competitor because it's probably cheaper for
| them in many cases. In startup world, it's pretty rare they go
| the copycat route. You can cite examples, but that is
| survivorship bias ignoring the many more they do not copy.
|
| The biggest issue with bigtech is actually hiring. They suck up
| the labor market and make it hard to get good people affordably.
| The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go
| work at bigtech, which includes me.
| trabant00 wrote:
| > society starts to learn more about wizardry. Real wizards are
| distinguished from charlatans by their results. A few wise
| wizards keep their power and even extend it. Ordinary people
| still can't cast spells themselves, but they know the names of
| the wisest wizards.
|
| They do not know the wizards. Even the article uses Bezos as the
| target for the "wisest wizards" link. He is a king, not a
| wizzard! The wizzards are beink kept out of sight in the castles.
| And the royal courts issues statements that they do not exist.
| You merely have to use SAFE, Cloud, Containers, etc to have the
| same results.
| gyre007 wrote:
| NO
| boh wrote:
| It's obviously not. Persistent growth requirements for
| corporations will always lead to concentration. You need
| systematic change, not performative censures on popular companies
| to actually make an impact.
|
| Microsoft was broken up and it's still "big".
| api wrote:
| The most powerful disruptor of big tech would be to figure out
| how to escape, sidestep, or easily coopt their network effects.
| slackfan wrote:
| The Amish are the fastest growing population group...
| talkingtab wrote:
| Dinosaurs were doomed because they were overly adapted to an
| ecosystem. They were evolutionary hill climbers, just as big tech
| is currently over adapted to the current environment. It may be
| years before these present day dinosaurs die out. There may be
| some catastrophic event that affects the environment or they may
| just wither. Who knows. But the signs that they are over adapted
| are certainly present.
| mellavora wrote:
| Which particular ecosystem of the 300 million years
| traditionally ascribed to the dinosaur eras where they overly
| adopted to?
|
| Mammals have only made it 200-250M years, humans *far* less.
|
| and it's not clear the dinosaurs are gone (looks at a bird).
| ahdh8f4hf4h8 wrote:
| I don't think traditional companies will subsume technology as
| the article claims - big companies tend to innovate by
| acquisition, and VERY FEW companies are actually good at
| producing software at scale. I don't think we've reached phase 3
| in the article yet - very few companies have figured out the
| "magic" of software, hardware, large scale data mining, hosting,
| etc.
|
| I also don't think tech will have long lasting monopolies, unless
| government regulation makes it so. Who's worried about IBM or
| Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine? All of these were
| dominant at one point.
|
| I do expect a shift in investor mindset - right now tech
| companies are not held to the same profitability standards, so
| the tech stocks are very expensive for even wildly optimistic
| projections of future growth. It's as if the market is already
| pricing in a future monopoly for these companies. Given how
| fragile tech monopolies tend to be, I expect a correction at some
| point (not a good short though - no way to predict the timing)
| seaman1921 wrote:
| > Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using
| myspace or vine?
|
| This statement would be relevant here if these companies hadn't
| been replaced by even bigger monopolies. So if facebook and
| apple is replaced by something even bigger, the folks who are
| afraid of monopolies would have more to worry about.
| ahdh8f4hf4h8 wrote:
| IBM was a much bigger and more domineering monopoly at it's
| peak - there was a time where you effectively could not have
| computers or a datacenter without paying IBM money, directly
| or indirectly. I wouldn't qualify most of the FAANGs as
| monopolies (at least not yet) - reasonable substitutes exists
| for all of them.
|
| The modern market does favor a handful of large players for
| each market - this is true in almost all sectors though. This
| not a monopoly though; as long as the top players change over
| time it is still a working market.
| dash2 wrote:
| Even if few companies "get" good software, big tech might still
| end if good software companies start to sell disaggregated
| services. Shopify is an example from the article.
|
| This wouldn't mean there are no big software companies. But it
| would mean that end-to-end providers like Amazon no longer
| dominated.
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| There is no soul left in these companies. It has become a day job
| to collect a paycheck. One guy working on ec2 can move to
| internal finance reporting can move to s3 and then move to retail
| (at amazon). Without the soul, at some point the hollowness will
| cause you to implode. Yes AWS can keep selling tech infra, but
| the net new innovation is where they suck. Look at how lackluster
| the reinvent keynotes were.
|
| So what do you do? Innovate with passion. And then what? They
| come and copy you and sell it at a greater scale, with more
| marketing $, growing some VPs pnl.
|
| I do think where you still have a chance is software. Big tech
| still hasn't cracked software. But it can't be tech infra
| software (AWS) and not social software (Fb). So compete where
| they don't play is the safest. Because when they try to compete
| at least they will go through buy or build and will either buy
| you (and kill your soul) or build a shitty version within.
| [deleted]
| pdimitar wrote:
| Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a
| few governments _only started_ cautiously talking about breaking
| apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don 't find holes
| in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take
| _years_ to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate
| legal team defeats it in days.
|
| The big tech era is in fact now just starting. The big
| corporations finally realized nobody is seriously challenging
| them so they will only tighten the grip gradually from here on.
|
| I am actually afraid for _small_ tech now. And that one day me
| using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for
| blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a
| reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my
| internet access.
|
| Keep your guard up, folks, and improve your hardware operation
| skills -- and any physical real-life skills in general. We can't
| all be dependent on the corps, they must always be shown we can
| do without them and we only tolerate them because they are not
| _too_ unpleasant.
| mehdix wrote:
| I'm doing my part:
|
| - Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as
| supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services
| - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and
| applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant
| corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on
| alternative online stores - etc.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Unfortunately you were never the target audience. Companies
| like Google operate on the scale of billions, and the vast
| majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use
| whatever software is easiest.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only
| able to use whatever software is easiest.
|
| Not really "the vast majority" ...
|
| I believe the problem on Google's side is that it is easier
| to do good services on easy stuff, like mail and simple
| search querries like "who is the president in Finland" or
| "when does X close".
|
| So Google prioritizes trivia searches over searches an
| unsophisticated dentist would querry to look up some
| procedure.
|
| Programmers just seem to rely more on websearches where
| other fields have like magazines, workplace courses and
| conferences.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| You don't need everyone to change, the commoners imitate
| the elite.
| randcraw wrote:
| Who will the masses ultimately follow: solitary tech
| savvy geeks who warn of naked emperors? Or armies of
| corporate-sponsored feel-good social influencers who
| entertain by promoting only themselves and the fad-du-
| jour?
|
| I know none of the former who have built self-promotion-
| based $multi-million empires. I wish that were true of
| the latter.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| The masses will do the easy thing, signal was made and
| adopted by WhatsApp for example.
|
| The magic and evil of software and hardware is that you
| don't have to understand it to use it. Elon musk memed
| people into crypto.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yep. Same thougts here. But I feel that a turning point may
| come at some point though
| dane-pgp wrote:
| The point of technically-minded people switching away from
| these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all
| follow our example at the same time. Instead, the goal is
| to support these alternative services financially; and with
| bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests; so that
| those alternative services _become_ the easiest to use, at
| which point the rest of society will switch without having
| to be told.
|
| That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies
| have much greater resources to invest in user experience,
| but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with
| their size being a liability rather than an asset.
|
| For example, large services need to justify their expenses
| by maximising the amount of money they extract from users
| (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]).
| Also, keeping these alternative services running provides
| an existence proof to regulators about how services don't
| need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules
| that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social
| media and messaging companies to make their services
| interoperable.[1]
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429
|
| [1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-
| meps-...
| tartoran wrote:
| Im on the same page but personally I think it won't make a
| big difference.
| reaperducer wrote:
| You don't always have to make an impact on the world.
| Sometimes making an impact on your world is enough.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's not so much about making a difference as it's about
| living by principles.
|
| I boycott Facebook, Amazon, and Disney.
| randcraw wrote:
| I agree that living by principles is worthwhile. But so
| few people do it that it will have so little impact on
| market forces and inequities that they are wholly
| irrelevant to the OP topic. You may as well tell us that
| you've decided to take up flying by flapping your arms.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _You may as well tell us that you 've decided to take up
| flying by flapping your arms._
|
| How is having and deciding to live by a set of personal
| principals, even if there isn't an outcome on "market
| forces" in _any remote_ way comparable to believing
| you're a bird?
| Lich wrote:
| > It's not so much about making a difference
| [deleted]
| hoofedear wrote:
| It's like going technologically vegan
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your
| average corporate legal team defeats it in days.
|
| Cynically I suspect the lobbyists defeat it before it is even
| signed (ensuring the legislation has appropriate loopholes,
| etc).
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| Remember, things are never as good or as bad as you think.
|
| 'Offline' internet can come back, we can put 32g of microsd
| cards in special locations so we can share content and
| /etc/hosts without anyone knowing, maybe go online from time to
| time to get the newest /etc/hosts from your friends and the new
| locations for microsd cards near you.
|
| Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.
|
| Pi zero 2W costs 10$ and with 40$ screen you can watch feynman
| lectures with mplayer -vo fbdev, it boots into vim for 3
| seconds (init into openvt -w vim kinda thing).
|
| Soon the-eye.eu will be back (hopefully).
|
| The new phrack is out.
|
| The social networks are eating themselves, same as google is
| eating itself, the search is garbage, the feed is even more
| garbage, 99% of the content is anxiety inducing miasma.
|
| The web is eating itself, with gazillions of GPT(ish) generated
| articles.
|
| Let it go, life always finds a way.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we
| can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing_
|
| For a short while, when sneakernet was still higher capacity
| than the internet, people used to embed USB drives in trees
| and other public places. You'd walk up, plug in, and download
| the content. Things like full wikis of specialized subjects.
| Or videos of neighborhood events. Ideally, they were always
| made somehow read-only. I wouldn't want to imagine what would
| happen if they were read/write. We'd be right back to the
| internet we have today.
|
| Still, it's something I do wish would have taken off. Maybe
| we could still do something like that today by setting up
| miniature web BBSes on hotspots in or near public parks. Not
| everything in the world should be open to the entire planet.
| As long as you weren't in a tourist district, you could be
| pretty sure the content was at least locally generated.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| i am working on putting a pizero2+solar panel as a hotspot
| in a tree deep in the nearby forest, you will be able to
| connect to it and get content
|
| i will put all kinds of public domain data on it, from most
| of gutenberg books to all kinds lectures encoded with h265
|
| will be so cool to have to go to the middle of the forest
| to download a book :)
|
| the whole thing should cost no more than 30$ (biggest
| challenge is to make sure that the battery bursting in
| flames wont melt the case and set things on fire)
| na85 wrote:
| Spend a bit more and get a quality charge controller, and
| a gel-chemistry battery.
| emptyfile wrote:
| >the-eye.eu
|
| The fat that this website is down and only links to their
| Discord is very ironic.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > /etc/hosts
|
| > Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.
|
| > Pi zero 2W
|
| Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the number of
| people with the skills necessary to use this is low. Not to
| mention that new generations have grown up with the current
| status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it not to search
| for alternatives.
|
| _If_ things get really bad (a debate for which I 'm not
| taking either side), only a very small minority will be able
| to use the aforementioned workarounds and can trivially be
| marginalized and crushed with legislation and its
| enforcement.
| mro_name wrote:
| > number of people with the skills necessary
|
| I repeatedly run the experiment to pitch a low-tech
| solution to a high-tech fund and aim exactly there:
|
| Reduce the required skill to 1) signing a hosting contract
| and 2) copying a single file to that webspace. Really!
|
| So that's several orders of magnitude more people than
| today. Instantly.
|
| But got it the 3rd time officially now, that such would
| have no societal impact and isn't considered innovative,
| either. The time isn't here yet.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| You download a file and run it on your Pi, its literally
| made to teach children computing. You can buy a used
| android phone and do it easier a pi is too expensive or
| hard.
| wackget wrote:
| Questions people will ask:
|
| 1. What is a Pi?
|
| 2. Where's the keyboard/mouse/screen?
|
| 3. What does "download a file" mean?
|
| 4. What does "run it" mean?
|
| And as for using an Android... that immediately defeats
| the purpose since they're basically Google data vacuums.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| I don't see your point. Using the Internet is a data
| vaccum, you will probably google it even and watch the
| lecture on YouTube.
|
| You don't need to do any of this this listen to the
| Feynman lectures.
| e9 wrote:
| It's on this community right here to make these things as
| easy and accessible as possible for everyone to use.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| > Not to mention that new generations have grown up with
| the current status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it
| not to search for alternatives.
|
| Even though this is true, it is not impossible to expand
| their horizon. We still have not figured out the pedagogy
| or even andragogy of how to teach technology.
|
| Check out my progress with my daughter(10):
| https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids, We are
| also making a card game https://punkjazz.org/programming-
| time/easy.html to play with her and donate to other kids
| interested in learning.
|
| Spending time with pi zero and arduino and building
| retropie games, using links2 instead of chrome from time to
| time, she is making great progress. Make the lights in her
| room work after few claps, with arduino nano and sound
| sensor so her code can control the light.
|
| And this is only with 20-30 minutes per day.
|
| You might think that the kids are blind to what is going
| on, but they do see, they know something is wrong, they
| know they are being exploited and cheated to buy lootboxes
| and skins.
| [deleted]
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| her website might spark some nostalgia feelings of the
| early web: https://punkjazz.org/jackie/
|
| :) at least it makes me feel like things are not as bad.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Been a programmer professionally for 20 years now and I
| regret not learning more sysadmin skills. But I'll catch up.
|
| In the meantime, more links about how these things are done
| will be appreciated.
| spc476 wrote:
| I've been programming professionally for 30 years now, and
| I have learned sysadmin skills---the skills required
| changed at least three times and the skills I learned in
| the 90s/early 2000s are largely obsolete, the skills from
| the early 2000s/2010s are on the way out.
|
| You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out
| of the game.
| roody15 wrote:
| Agree feel like we have entered Blade Runner style future where
| mega tech corporations essentially run everything.
| marto1 wrote:
| If anything introducing new legislation clearly helps out big
| tech in the end by raising the bar for their (smaller)
| competition thus deepening their moat even further.
|
| It's no wonder FB is pretty much always positive about this law
| or that law that will supposedly regulate tech in one way or
| another.
| tapan_jk wrote:
| A comment about one aspect of big tech, i.e IT infrastructure
| (think AWS, GCP, Azure, and now Cloudflare etc.):
|
| I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn't be surprising
| if some companies will want to start owning and running their
| own IT infrastructure. Buy your own servers and setup a small
| data-center for a small to medium business. This will be a
| thing again. The pendulum has to swing, but the question is --
| is there money in enabling this for companies that want to go
| this way? I expect some startups in near future to target this
| opportunity and help shift towards decentralization (again).
| 0KnowledgeGoof wrote:
| On a related note, I run noscript on my browser and overall
| it's not a bad experience. The conveniences IMO outweigh the
| inconveniences.
|
| However, Cloudfront, JSDeliver, etc are a pain. I understand
| the benefits of caching javascript locally to me, but I want
| to see companies start hosting their scripts all from their
| own servers.
|
| If FontAwesome isn't already a tracking company, it's only a
| matter of time. Cringy-cool name, tentacles throughout the
| web, all for _fonts_. I'm a senior fullstack dev and I get
| tradeoffs, but the technical-societal-tradeoffs of the web
| are bewildering.
| xuki wrote:
| I was thinking the exact same thing recently. If you can
| setup and manage an infrastructure by yourself, you have
| pretty good advantage in term of cost.
| kazen44 wrote:
| but this is already the case for a LOT of companies. HN seems
| so focused on cloud and sillicon valley that they forget
| there are hundreds of datacenters filled with colocated space
| and connectivity.
|
| Colo is cheap, connectivity is cheaper then it has ever been,
| and most bussiness don't require massive scaling to do their
| bussiness.
|
| Also, owning your own infra allows you to innovate and play a
| game outside of the borders aws, gcp and azure are drawing up
| for you.
| ksec wrote:
| >I expect some startups in near future to target this
| opportunity
|
| https://oxide.computer
|
| But most of the problem isn't with infrastructure. Once you
| start using AWS's services it is the software that is most
| problematic. And that is why all these infrastructure / cloud
| provider wants to do serverless.
| ape4 wrote:
| Are any companies selling a package to make this happen. Your
| Own Cloud Starter kit only $1.5M
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Right now there is a lot of money to be made in moving
| companies to the cloud, I predict that in 10-20 years time
| there will be a lot of money to be made moving them out of
| that same cloud.
|
| I hate having to learn all of AWS, GCP and Azure proprietary
| tech, I'll take a Linode box any day thank you
| taf2 wrote:
| IMO the thing to watch for is regulations around what rules
| you need to follow to be compliant in how you operate your
| data center or physical servers. It's very likely big tech
| will lobby for rules that appear to be anti big tech but
| actually will make it harder to operate independent from a
| big tech provider... think net neutrality (not saying I don't
| think we need it just as an example)
| sofixa wrote:
| Why? Especially for small and medium businesses, the capital
| costs involved rarely make sense, and if you're leasing,
| might as well lease from a cloud provider which saves you
| time and people. There are many smaller players which are OK
| depending on uptime requirements - OVHCloud, Digital Ocean,
| Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, etc.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I don't disagree with you but I wonder if you are
| underestimating how many years of useful service can you
| get out of dual Xeon E-2690v3 systems. Almost no business
| actually needs the latest and greatest -- the only serious
| concern when hosting on-prem is energy consumption and heat
| dissipation. If that can be covered well the rest is much
| easier to cope with.
| FpUser wrote:
| I do have some server hardware on premises (well it is in
| my basement and I have fat internet pipes) but I do not
| mind going middle road and renting dedicated servers on
| Hetzner and OVH. They're surprisingly cheap for whet they
| offer. The same performance / resource wise hardware on
| Amazon would make one bleed the money.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Agreed, and that's just what we might end up doing btw. A
| bit more manual sysadmin work which we end up doing on
| EC2 instances currently anyway. And a lot of money can be
| saved by EU dedicated server hosting.
| ericd wrote:
| The capital costs are very easy to make back. For us, the
| payback period was <1 year, and our machines provided
| unbeatable performance with very good transparency into
| issues, which made it relatively easy to track down issues.
| Dedicated machines are really, really powerful now, and you
| can do with a few what it used to take racks. I feel like
| the perception of "it's too hard" or "it's actually more
| expensive" is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the
| myriad companies that stand to benefit - all those hosted
| services, the cloud providers, etc. And they make it easy
| for individual employees to appear more productive, but in
| exchange for costing their companies much more in the long
| run, and introducing a lot of inter-service latency and
| complexity. Misaligned incentives.
|
| The major exception for us is S3, scaling storage seems
| like it would suck terribly.
| FpUser wrote:
| >...is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad
| companies that stand to benefit..."
|
| Not just companies. Web developers love the complexity of
| their stack. Some monolith written in native performant
| language and put on a decent hardware can cover needs of
| the most reasonable size business. This simple fact makes
| them very uncomfy when presented. Many of them would not
| be even aware that such things are possible. They'd
| rather be spoon fed by the likes of the Amazon telling
| them how to develop their wares. The fact that the more
| inefficient their software is the more money said Amazon
| will make is ignored. They'd invent all kinds of largely
| BS arguments to avoid going a simpler route. One can just
| read numerous articles on HN describing "our stack". On a
| client site they have this React atrocity. Sure this
| thing works well for orgs the size of FB. But they're not
| FB and never will be.
| kazen44 wrote:
| this happens lower down the stack too.
|
| Distributed redundancy is a good example. There are very,
| very few situation in which this couldn't be resolved
| with a simple BGP daemon on a server and anycast.
| qchris wrote:
| I believe this has been stated to be the core thesis behind
| Oxide Computer Company's business model.
| [deleted]
| pdimitar wrote:
| Currently I work in a company that's very cost-conscious
| about hosting. They are generous in salaries but are
| mercilessly practical about IT costs and the abilities of
| computers -- especially the latter part is something that
| most of the programmers today have almost completely forgot.
|
| I have 3 spare laptops lying around; weakest of them is with
| a Celeron J4155 and I have put a web app with no caching on
| it (it does have a persistent DB) and hammered it with my
| workstation until it finally started giving up at ~2500 req/s
| (Elixir/Phoenix stack). Again, that's a Celeron J4155 with a
| SATA III SSD in an M.2 factor (so disk speed caps at 550MB/s
| at best; usually 400-460) and 12GB RAM. Most programmers
| wouldn't touch such a machine.
|
| I imagine I can buy 2 more of these laptops and make a
| completely replicated 3-cluster of the entire stack of our
| company and the slowest requests (on admin UI where we have a
| lot of SQL JOINs) would likely never go above 200ms. That
| totals at about 600 EUR (yep, I bought the laptop second-hand
| for 200 EUR). Then 500 more EUR for a good UPS to plug the
| laptops and my routers to. Boom 1100 EUR and several weekends
| later I can likely charge my own employer for hosting at 100
| EUR a month for their _entire_ infrastructure and I would
| likely still be ripping them off even with that.
|
| The only real cost is human time and energy invested in
| making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7
| fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year
| and you're likely never going to have problems.
|
| So yep, I am completely with you here (if my rant didn't make
| it obvious). Infrastructure costs are already being heavily
| optimized by companies out there.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > The only real cost is human time and energy invested in
| making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7
| fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a
| year and you're likely never going to have problems.
|
| If this were true, what made the cloud providers popular in
| the first place?
| pdimitar wrote:
| Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent --
| that would also mean to invest in relations with your
| employees and not alienating them. Shareholders prefer to
| sacrifice a little more of their profit so they deal with
| less potential problems. And the pull of the idea that
| every human in the org must be an inter-changeable cog is
| too strong (even if that idea continues to be absurd, and
| always was).
|
| Hosting apps in the cloud was a fair exchange 10 years
| ago because operational tooling in general was more
| immature. Nowadays it's much easier to self-host many
| pieces of software though.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This isn't it, you might not know or if you haven't been
| in an environment like it.
|
| Without a cloud you're always running up against limits,
| out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of
| hardware. You get new resources by adding to wish lists
| and seeing if the end of quarter budget will agree with
| your request which might be filled in a few months, maybe
| next year, often never.
|
| You hoard hardware that ends up doing nothing most of the
| time so you have it when you do need it. Management
| spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter
| budget.
|
| With cloud you get what you want without asking too much
| and management periodically spearheads savings efforts to
| show off, but ultimately usually spends a lot more than
| they would have otherwise with less friction.
|
| A big part of cloud adoption, according to my theory, is
| getting executives out of the way of computing resource
| needs and freeing up their time to fill with something
| else like bothering employees for more status updates
| (which are easier and require less skill).
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Without a cloud you're always running up against
| limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space,
| out of hardware.
|
| I bet most customers of cloud services are not in a high-
| growth phase, so this is scenario most organizations
| aspire to ("What if we suddenly got popular?" is a
| fantasy that's hard to disabuse someone of internally, if
| you want to be known as a team player
|
| > Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the
| datacenter budget. With cloud you get what you want
| without asking too much...
|
| I fully agree, this is the core reason why most companies
| gravitate towards cloud: management abdicates control of
| costs to engineers, resulting in less friction - but its
| OpEx, not CapEx, so the bean counters are chilled about
| it. If the same low-friction approach were applied to DC
| equipment, you'd get similar results, but cheaper.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > Without a cloud you're always running up against
| limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space,
| out of hardware.
|
| I grew up in this era and keep hearing this repeated but
| it simply wasn't true. Enterprises would plan ahead and
| buy enough hardware for years and it would work fine
| until you bought more. The myth that you need to scale
| your infrastructure 10x in a day doesn't apply to 99% of
| enterprises, and even if it did it's probably a result of
| bad planning on the part of leadership. As a result of
| the current paradigm businesses end up renting servers at
| a substantial markup for fairly obsolete hardware.
| zrm wrote:
| In general it's really the opposite. In 2004 you needed a
| rack full of $3000 servers to run your medium business.
| Now it's two physical machines using 5% of the power to
| virtualize everything that used to run on two dozen.
|
| Over a given period of time, computers get faster/cheaper
| by more than most businesses expand. When you need to
| expand, buying a newer, faster machine may cause you to
| _save_ money because the faster machine uses less power
| than the existing one.
| pdimitar wrote:
| You are talking big businesses here, I've seen people
| just ask the CEO if they can buy 3 brand new servers and
| him agreeing, verbally, and the servers arrived next
| week, and two weeks later were completely setup and were
| useful.
|
| This lasted for 11 years and only stopped because two of
| the 5 senior engineers retired and because the company
| was bought a few weeks earlier.
|
| So again, don't look at this through Silicon Valley lens.
| Most of the companies in the world have a very different
| mold compared to SV.
| heisenbit wrote:
| Then there are service contracts to make surr the systems
| keeps running with little downtime. Which may be
| impossible to get for 11 year old equipment. Then there
| are pesky details like needing a disaster recovery site.
|
| Professional hardware is expensive and server h/w is a
| small part of it.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| I used to be a big proponent of self-hosting. The raw
| hardware cost makes it look like a great deal. However in
| my experience hardware is less than 5% of salary cost and
| having enough admins on hand to make your infra reliable
| is usually going to end up costing you more in the end.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Don't some of those salary costs transfer over to the
| cloud. Someone still has to manage it
| Jensson wrote:
| You need a lot less people per computer when you have
| millions of computers like big tech has than when you
| have 10.
|
| The cost of these services is not because big tech has to
| use that much to run them, but because big tech would
| make less money if they lowered prices. AWS generates
| tons of profits, why lower that for no reason?
| zrm wrote:
| > You need a lot less people per computer when you have
| millions of computers like big tech has than when you
| have 10.
|
| That's not the people we're talking about. Racking a
| server and setting it up to do virtualization takes maybe
| a few hours for one person, if that, over a period of
| years. Maintenance on the host itself is the same.
|
| The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining
| applications for your specific needs. None of that goes
| away by using someone else's hardware.
| Jensson wrote:
| > The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining
| applications for your specific needs. None of that goes
| away by using someone else's hardware.
|
| But AWS does a lot of that for you by offering cloud
| services and not just hardware. That is why people pay so
| much more for AWS than other just hosting solutions.
| zrm wrote:
| That doesn't explain why their pricing for generic VMs or
| bandwidth is so high, or why anybody should want to pay
| them for that.
|
| It also doesn't really work. Some textile company is
| going to have some line of business software to run their
| textile mill. Amazon doesn't provide that. You still have
| to do labor to configure it. These are the hard things,
| because they're custom and don't have a huge installed
| base of people who already encountered and solved all the
| problems you're going to have. But for the same reason,
| they're the things AWS doesn't provide.
|
| What they provide is common things like DNS. But DNS is
| easy to set up and maintain, because it's common, and so
| already has smooth edges. That's not where the labor was
| going.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| What about scaling down? Once you bought hardware for
| self hosting you are stuck with it.
| pdimitar wrote:
| What about it? We're talking small businesses here, this
| will not be a warehouse full of racks worth of machines
| to try and sell. We're likely talking 3 to 10 PC-sized
| machines in a closet or storage room. You can sell those
| on 2nd hand market pretty quickly and even if you sell
| them at 30-40% loss you are extremely likely to have
| already paid off the other 60-70% during the machines'
| service time.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| old laptop is fine then :)
| naasking wrote:
| The costs the OP described are pretty minimal.
| JBlue42 wrote:
| You never know. While working in an ITAM role, I've had a
| manager point out a line item asking why we need 30
| DisplayPort cables. This was in an org with multiple
| sites, 2000+ employees, using dual monitor setups both in
| house and remote. Whether physically, or in the cloud,
| companies whose primary business isn't tech-related see
| the IT side as an annoying cost center rather than a cost
| of doing business in the 21st century.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Interesting. I am not intimately familiar with the
| subject matter, so I will be curious then to see how the
| next 10 years play out.
| kazen44 wrote:
| > Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent.
|
| Also, outsourcing moves the blame to someone else if
| things go wrong. (and things in infra go wrong nearly
| constantly).
|
| The problem with this kind of thinking is ofcourse, that
| there is no risk taking and innovation in suchs an
| organisation..
| Lamad123 wrote:
| This selfish outsourcing culture is killing all the
| Gilfoyles out there!
| nthj wrote:
| AWS lets me provision servers all over the world at any
| point, which is required by customers both for compliance
| and for latency SLAs. Even billion dollar companies are
| going to find that a huge lift to build out themselves,
| and they have opportunity cost while they try to do it.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| I'm curious as a hosting and cloud noob, do you have an
| estimate how much that would cost monthly or yearly if
| hosted on a cloud?
| pdimitar wrote:
| Not really, because AWS costs aren't transparent. You
| can't drill down properly and even where you can, the
| prices are disappointingly high.
|
| It gets _really_ tempting to setup a backup /failover
| node on one of my spare laptops lately...
| mindslight wrote:
| Infinite scale up (direct fan-out to mass market), high
| margins (able to overpay for commodities), and
| outsourcing production work to stable businesses are all
| facets of the Hollywood business model that Surveillance
| Valley adopted. Once the concept was socially proven,
| then nobody gets fired for buying IBM.
| rossmohax wrote:
| Beancounters love OPEX and avoid CAPEX
| abecode wrote:
| Curious, can you explain why? In my experience (just one
| company where I had some interaction with accounting),
| there was a preference toward CAPEX. The costs of
| building a product, ie software development, was prefered
| over OPEX, in this case, analytics. Since I was doing
| both development and analytics, they preferred me to
| account part of my time as CAPEX. Not sure if this is
| normal but for context it was a non/pre-public company.
| xunn0026 wrote:
| OPEX is just an expense in the current fiscal year. CAPEX
| depreciates over N years. This alone means that a one-
| time payment is much simpler on the books.
|
| I don't think your salary counts as CAPEX, it's a normal
| monthly expense for the company.
| kazen44 wrote:
| beancounters are not in charge of the direction of the
| company. In a lot of cases, it makes a ton of sense to go
| for capex vs opex.
|
| My old employer had a strategy which basically boiled
| down to owning everything inside this company expect for
| the coffee machines and cleaning crew. His reason being?
| This made it possible to run on very thight margins when
| the economy takes a downturn without having to scramble
| for money because of leased/loaned equipment etc.
|
| In the 2008 crisis, this is how he stayed afloat with his
| company, and even made a pretty profit during a time of
| crisis too.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Surely the beancounters can also see the effects of capex
| on the valuations of the cloud providers.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If they're publicly traded, no one's going to give Bob's
| Consolidated Widgets a 65x PE or 2x+ PEG ratio, even if
| they have the best IT strategy in their market.
| nicoburns wrote:
| That human time happens to be quite expensive.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Not in small companies.
| rcpt wrote:
| What if the cheap guy quits?
| pdimitar wrote:
| I'm aware of the risks. That's why I said a culture of
| long-term relationships must be fostered if you want to
| pull such operations off.
|
| Where I work right now people don't just quit two days
| later. They like the company and if they feel they want
| to go someplace else they're not being difficult about
| it. They cooperate in passing down their knowledge to
| colleagues before they go.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's _most_ of the cost at small companies. A lot of
| people underestimate the total cost of having employees
| perform tasks at unpredictable scale with unpredictable
| problems versus just writing a check each month.
|
| It's true that cloud providers aren't reliably cheaper as
| some assumed at one point. But there's something to be
| said for cutting out the fully burdened costs of some
| number of employees (especially given everyone is saying
| tech talent is expensive and scarce at the moment) and
| just letting AWS deal with it even if you could
| theoretically do it cheaper yourself.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Not only that, but if you have a business that actually
| makes, sells, and ships something, your AWS bill is
| probably a tiny fraction of your expenses. Switching to
| physical servers would be a little like getting solar
| installed on your house - great in theory, but if the
| most expense it will displace is $150/month, is it the
| right problem to focus on?
| nicoburns wrote:
| True. Although I'd argue most companies are small enough
| that AWS itself represents more overhead than is optimal.
| They'd be better of on Heroku, or even just a single VM.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly you can overcomplicate things with any of the
| big public cloud providers. As you say, many smaller
| companies would be better off with a SaaS, maybe a PaaS,
| and some VPSs, whether from one of the big guys or
| someone else.
|
| I had to laugh at someone's comment around re:Invent last
| week that just because Amazon has to offer 17 types of
| databases for its customers (or whatever the exact quote
| was) doesn't mean you have to collect them all as if they
| were Pokemon.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Keep in mind that most big clients of cloud providers are
| startups running on VC money. It's not their money and
| they don't care about wasting it, and VCs don't
| particularly care either.
|
| This has now created an entire ecosystem of developers
| and "devops engineers" (what we used to call sysadmins)
| who know little beyond the cloud and have to keep using
| it for career-related reasons. This in turn pushes
| companies to use the cloud as finding talent for old-
| school on-premises infrastructure is difficult.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| I like where you're going with this but you could take it a
| lot further with little expense. Amazon and MicroCenter
| have a huge stock of refurbished HP mini PCs with i5s, 16gb
| of ram and an M2 slot for about $350. Throw in a small m2
| ssd in each (~$50) and keep your UPS, that's about $1700
| you have a decent cluster for an efficient stack like
| phoenix.
| _alex_ wrote:
| that works as long as there are enough of you for every
| team/app/service/whatever to build and operate all that
| around the clock and without bus risk.
|
| A lot of these threads end up talking about "scaling" from
| a pure hardware perspective. Once you start talking about
| medium-to-large companies, the real scaling headache is
| people, process, and organizations.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Not sure if I made myself clear but I definitely meant my
| above as aimed at small businesses (which my current
| employer is).
|
| Obviously from one scale and on the cloud is very much
| worth it. IMO the discussion has to be shifted to "before
| which point you can easily get away without the cloud?".
| makapuf wrote:
| At some point, an internal cloud starts being interesting
| and gives a clear org boundary, using cloud-based
| software and interfaces.
| pdimitar wrote:
| That's true as well. It all depends on how much is the
| employer willing to invest in their employees in the end;
| if they foster longer-lasting relationships then many
| interesting internal projects become feasible or even
| desirable.
| ghaff wrote:
| Those invested-in employees will probably still leave,
| especially if they're very good and you can't match big
| tech salaries. And, in any case, you need redundancies
| for when they're on vacation, out sick, etc. Not to say
| you shouldn't develop in house competencies but you
| should do so deliberately because there are probably a
| lot more costs and risks than are obvious.
| pdimitar wrote:
| We're not blind to the tradeoffs. It's a long process to
| both change culture and nurture the necessary skills in
| your staff, AND take care of having human redundancy.
|
| My point never was to idolize on-prem; I have agreed in
| other comments that from one point and on the cloud
| absolutely wins.
|
| I'm mostly pointing out that there is a lot you can do
| before bowing your head to Amazon and accept $30_000+
| monthly bill for infrastructure that I can fit in my 1
| square meter food closet and which would likely cost me
| (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to
| setup.
| ghaff wrote:
| Absolutely. I'm definitely not in the "You're crazy if
| you don't just use AWS/GCP/Azure" camp. I'm just also not
| in the "See how cheap it is to just stick a system under
| my desk" camp. Totally dependent on use case and
| circumstances.
| pdimitar wrote:
| True. It's not a religion or a credo. We're simply
| evaluating our options because our cloud bill is way too
| high for what we do.
|
| Time will tell but IMO it's super important to reserve
| the right to take a deeper look if you don't like your
| costs.
|
| We're not as helpless as big tech wants us to believe.
| ghaff wrote:
| And figuring out those costs can be really hard. People
| like Corey Quinn have built a whole business out of
| helping people make sense of their AWS bills.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yep, but it's all self-interest. At one point you ask
| yourself: must I really go down this rabbit hole?
| GabeIsko wrote:
| You are vastly overestimating the IT capabilities of most
| companies. The human time and energy cost that you
| handwaved away is a real killer because that is expert
| knowledge capability that is highly valued by the market.
| Maintaining an IT staff and infrastructure to support a
| large organization that has to perform any kind of
| reasonable SLA for services eventually puts you in direct
| competition with Major Cloud Providers at scale. A scenario
| where you can outcompete them with their large customer
| bases becomes very difficult to imagine under current
| technological and market conditions.
|
| It's not a matter of outsourcing culture. Cloud providers
| really do provide computing in a cost efficient matter
| since they practically provide IT infrastructure at
| wholesale, and it produces an anti-trust risk because, as
| you pointed out, the actual hardware that can make it go is
| not nearly as expensive.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I am not handwaving anything away. We're a company that
| has less but very strong programmers (we don't even have
| DevOps / sysadmins, our CTO is doing it and I'll likely
| be taking part of his responsibilities at one point).
|
| And we don't have the requirements of most big Silicon
| Valley companies that you reference. It boggles my mind
| why so many commenters IMMEDIATELY assumed we're a hyper-
| growth startup or whatever. We're an expanding data
| provider and our growth is super predictable, and our set
| of requirements changes like once a year.
|
| So really, not sure why you and others keep repeating
| things I already agree with. The cloud wins from one
| point / scale and on, absolutely; otherwise it wouldn't
| ever take off. I am saying that people give up way too
| quickly and run to the cloud long before they need it --
| that's all.
| dash2 wrote:
| But you yourself admit that you have an unusual setup
| with a few very strong programmers. Few are like this
| even in Silicon Valley. As for other industries, they're
| not even close. So your company's setup won't transfer
| well to the rest of the world.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I would not be so sure of your last. The SV mold is the
| outlier but most USA programmers can't see it because
| they don't work for non-US companies. Everywhere I was
| all around the EU in my 20 years of career so far, the SV
| way of doing things has not been the norm.
|
| So it pays off to be wary of filter bubbles. The SV way
| of doing things assumes a ton of VC money to burn,
| something that, to this day, is still not a wide trend in
| the EU (even if it happens here and there).
|
| Plus that company's setup is not unusual in any way per
| se; the only "unusual" thing is "we don't run to the
| cloud at the first IT problem". A ton of other companies
| are like this, I'd bet even in the US.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| How much money would your company save by hosting on some
| old laptops instead of in the cloud?
| pdimitar wrote:
| 5 digits of USD per month. Whereas normal on-prem hosting
| can be started with almost no dollar cost, tomorrow.
|
| Right now they/we can't do it though, the talent is there
| but that talent is super busy reworking software that's
| no longer well-adapted to their new requirements. We'll
| see if the topic becomes more relevant in the future.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| Not to forget - there are more choices than big-cloud and
| host-everything-yourself.
|
| One can rent VMs from Hetzner at 1/3 the price of AWS
| (and 1/10 the data transfer fees). No managed services,
| like Dynamo or S3, but will full convenience of on-demand
| scale-up
|
| Or, for mid-sized corporations - buying a rack of
| computers, wiring them together, and installing OpenStack
| to make an internal cloud - that isn't some black magic
| wizardry either
| pdimitar wrote:
| Oh yeah, completely agreed. As mentioned in another
| comment we might just go Hetzner and buy a singular
| server in another provider for backup and failover. We'd
| likely be just fine with 6-7 of the smaller Hetzner
| servers, too.
| capitalsigma wrote:
| What happens when your local internet connection goes out
| and you can no longer serve traffic for your business? What
| if there is a power outage? Who will spend the time
| replacing disks as they fail? Where is the data backed up
| to, so that a failed disk doesn't lose business data?
| zcw100 wrote:
| It's like saying, "Oh no they're _talking_ about breaking up Ma
| Bell. Telecommunications is over. " Sure Bell got broken up but
| the industry as a whole ballooned.
| varelse wrote:
| So apparently the US government is very responsive to the
| concerns of anti-competitive behavior when it's between one
| corporation versus another.
|
| But they seem particularly apathetic to the privacy
| considerations, robocalls and all things telemarketing, junk
| mail, insane product placement, and the blatant manipulation of
| our dopamine system by such corporations.
|
| Does that sound like something that's going to end the big tech
| era or just keep driving it further?
| becuz99h wrote:
| It's on a path to contraction due to the environment.
|
| Cashier-less grocery stores are to get people used to not
| dealing with the traditional finance system, which is
| environmentally toxic.
|
| ML generated multimedia is coming to implode commercial sales.
|
| A 3D printed home community is being built in the EU soon.
|
| 3D printed metal, wood, and synthetic material parts machines
| are being installed in UPS hub warehouses to distribute parts
| on demand.
|
| Industrialization must be scaled back for environmental
| stability.
|
| Once commercial jobs of little real utility are gone, and
| people are used to coming and going without paying, why money?
|
| Sorry/not sorry but one nerd on HN does not get to hold their
| social avoidance strategy up as a reason the species should
| stick to species endangering over consumption. Big tech isn't
| going away. Personal computing as we know it is.
|
| The systems I mentioned are being deployed now. You're the
| past. The future is the 20-something's building the startups I
| mentioned.
|
| They're onto more interesting tech than Rpis and phone apps.
|
| Formal language is only 5,000 years old. We know of entropy
| generally now. The words and whines mean nothing.
|
| The end of our society is coming due to our coming death.
| That's how it goes.
| yyyk wrote:
| >I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me
| using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used
| for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become
| a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my
| internet access.
|
| Big tech is unlikely to attack that way. It's far better for
| big tech to stop these things via new technology, rather than
| try a political process which will require expensive brib^W
| lobbying and is subject to backlash. Big tech have a far bigger
| advantage on the tech front than the political front.
|
| PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS
| server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't
| some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow
| some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple
| software).
| darepublic wrote:
| I think big tech will attack that way once they start to feel
| threatened enough by competing innovation, or they can't hang
| on to their advantage through softer means
| dasil003 wrote:
| Right now big tech just acquire all threats. If anti-trust
| starts to get more teeth, and shifts towards regulating
| scale and power more directly with less focus on ham-
| handedly trying to regulate specific outcomes based on
| political fashion or poor analysis of feasibility or
| second-order effects then we will likely see the lawyers
| come out in force. Which is okay if we can find the right
| political leader, because the facts on the ground for small
| business is hanging right there for a savvy leader to craft
| a killer narrative. The problem is democrats have
| completely lost the thread on what benefits real people,
| and the republicans are still hungover from an era where
| facts were meaningless so they really have no platform or
| principles at all anymore. I do have hope that a grassroots
| leader can emerge though.
| pdimitar wrote:
| IMO they attack on all fronts, the one both me and you
| mentioned included.
|
| Gmail is pretty much a standard right now (even if there's no
| public technical standard involved; only Google's apps can
| communicate with Gmail). That's monopoly dressed as "new
| technology".
|
| In the meantime the pressure in the EU is mounting between
| the both camps of the encrypted messaging ecosystem.
|
| So yeah, both things are happening in parallel.
|
| > _PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the
| DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security
| (Didn 't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS
| could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened
| with some Apple software)._
|
| Yeah, you're sadly correct. I dread the day when this will
| start becoming the norm. But it's also true that many common
| citizens can stop using service X or Y and it would cost them
| nearly nothing (with some prominent exceptions like Gmail or
| Whatsapp).
| [deleted]
| jcun4128 wrote:
| > PiHole might get criminalized
|
| That would suck, I hate ads but also just like split up
| subscription shows, not sure if I'm willing to pay for that
| either. There's so many I am currently subscribed to 3
| different shows and maybe watch 1% of their content. I wanted
| to watch a movie and I would have had to get Paramount Plus
| like wtf... at least a lot of things show up on YT where I can
| rent it there.
|
| My response is primarily about YT and mobile phone usage (where
| I don't have a browser extension adblocker). On mobile I don't
| open websites, just scan the suggested articles.
| lowwave wrote:
| >Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that?
| Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about
| breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't
| find holes in any new regulation literally the same week.
| Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your
| average corporate legal team defeats it in days.
|
| In some way wish it is ending. As human society, we don't need
| any more mega big company. Everything ought to kept local and
| small and diverse, so there is no central control, it is only
| resilient way to thrive for tech and innovation.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I wish that too, believe me, but the interests of the corps
| is to pull us towards a cyberpunk future when they can stop
| your (artificial and cloud-connected) liver from working if
| you post something vaguely anti-establishment somewhere. They
| have been very trigger happy lately.
| snek_case wrote:
| This is why we need to protect free speech.
|
| IMO the far left challenging free speech is a bit of a
| trojan horse. Yes, you can use censorship to suppress
| distasteful ideas, but it's also obvious that if you give
| corporations the power to censor whatever they want, they
| will also use it to censor anything you say to criticize
| them. Look at what the Chinese government is doing, they
| can basically erase anything that makes China look bad from
| the internet in less than 30 minutes. Is that what we want
| here too?
|
| Free speech is not a "far right" idea. It's the basis of
| democracy.
| clairity wrote:
| it's a truism that free speech undergirds democracy, but
| you get to it via a false dichotomy (left vs right)
| handed down to us by surrogates of power (political
| scientists, in this case) to distract and divide the
| populace. the only useful (but not wholly accurate)
| dichotomy regarding political economies is the one
| between the powerful and the powerless. this is the
| timeless and unending conflict, not left-right, liberal-
| conservative, or any of that other bullshit. free speech
| is one tool of the powerless populace to keep the
| powerful in check.
| 0KnowledgeGoof wrote:
| Absolutely agree. There are powerful politicians
| promising all sort of ideologies. There are weak
| politicians promising all sorts of ideologies.
|
| In the end the powerful remain powerful, and the weak
| remain weak. IMO much of democracy is a smokescreen. With
| apologies to Marx, the opiate of the masses is democracy.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Turning important society-wide (and hell, world-wide
| even) problems into yet another "us vs. them" diatribe
| seriously does not help anyone and it's just a
| distraction.
|
| I don't care if I group up with "lefties" or "righties"
| to make important societal changes happen. If they are on
| board with the vision, let them believe in Santa if they
| need that to sleep better.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| But what if one of those local, small, and diverse
| communities doesn't conform to the globally approved
| ideology? Diversity in modern culture means physical window
| dressing. True diversity of communities might lead to people
| with no-no values living with others with the same no-no
| values. How can that be allowed?
| cute_boi wrote:
| Hmm, Many corps, government, humans etc. aim to become bigger
| and global. So, there is no easy way to keep them local,
| small and diverse. And once they grow big most of them turns
| blind eye on small local companies just like how amazon is
| doing now.
|
| This is a problem that will prevail forever and can't be
| solved easily. We can experience today too in china the
| government do crackdown but most of us hate it right? If they
| don't regulate they grow beyond party.
|
| (Taking example of china because I don't know other country
| which does crackdown on big giants like this)
| Retric wrote:
| You can largely achieve this by barring companies from
| managing or owning even pieces of other companies directly
| or indirectly and taxing based on number of employees. Add
| a scaling tax on assets including IP and it becomes very
| hard to have Walmart sized mega corporations.
|
| It's a more interesting question to ask if this would be
| more economically efficient.
| clairity wrote:
| > "It's a more interesting question to ask if this would
| be more economically efficient."
|
| it's almost self-evident that it would be more efficient.
| the more interesting questions are how and why. fair and
| efficient markets at steady-state would largely be
| composed of a few medium-sized companies and a bunch of
| small companies, with new entrants occasionally. that
| would enable healthy competition that would drive
| progress while keeping chaotic upheavals mostly at bay.
| it would also distribute wealth more widely, which means
| we'd get more diverse ingenuity and more interesting
| entrepreneurship, rather than having the capable simply
| stowing away at large companies taking their safe and
| boring little toll on the income river.
| Retric wrote:
| I don't think it's clear because economies of scale do
| exist. Honda can simply spend more on R&D than a company
| 1/10th it's size. Large companies definitely have their
| own issues, but there isn't some clear maximum size where
| companies universally become less efficient at say 1,000
| employees. It's more a question of management overhead
| and flexibility etc.
| clairity wrote:
| economies of scale taper off because other effects (like
| coordination problems) tend to overwhelm it with scale.
| also, capital becomes less efficient at scale due to
| opportunity costs and the innovator's dilemma, for
| instance. there are many more reasons why economies of
| scale aren't the be all and end all of market economics.
| Retric wrote:
| I agree, my point was it depends on industry. You can't
| build a modern Fab for a 100 million it simply takes
| billions to be competitive. Further, you need a pipeline
| of Fab's to afford the R&D etc. At the other end a
| McDonalds franchise can be as profitable as their
| corporate restaurants.
| clairity wrote:
| there's no intrinsic reason a capital-intensive industry
| can only be winner-take-all. capital-intensiveness is
| primarily a finance issue, and assuming capital finance
| has been corralled into being a competitive market, it
| isn't a particularly insurmountable problem. tokyo public
| transportation is an example of a capital-intensive
| market that still has competitive dynamics.
| zo1 wrote:
| I'd like to just see them distribute their actual profits
| instead of being allowed to "hoard" it. That would also
| go a long way in fixing the stock markets supposed
| "growth by any means" criticism. I'd argue that the
| hoarded profits are one of the main drivers of all these
| acquisitions that reduce competition and lead to
| consolidation.
| Ginden wrote:
| > So, there is no easy way to keep them local, small and
| diverse
|
| I was lately thinking about some kind legislative action
| against network effects. Let's make it easy to migrate to
| other platforms.
|
| Obvious way to do this is to require big companies to
| implement "data export" feature with specification.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| The GDPR pretty much requires that already. You need to
| be able to export your data and another service must be
| able to parse them automatically, if reasonably possible.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| This has limited utility in practice because the data
| models reflect the underlying implementation and
| architectural details, particularly in the kinds of
| scalable systems big companies have. Specific tradeoffs
| are made in data models that reflect the tools available
| to the designer that might not apply to your environment.
| Moving data models between two systems that were not
| designed together can create a several order of magnitude
| difference in performance, cost, etc in using that data
| model.
|
| It is a common problem for data model migration, even
| outside the context of the big tech companies. I've had
| cases where the systems were effectively not replicable
| even though the data was made available because the
| source system relied on some bespoke piece of data
| infrastructure software that no one else was likely to
| replicate. (Even hypothetically open sourcing this
| infrastructure isn't that helpful because it is usually
| extremely specific to the operational environment for
| which it was designed -- you can't drop it into your
| operational environment.)
|
| All of which adds so much asymmetric friction and cost,
| which the source provider does not incur, that merely
| making data models exportable tends to generate limited
| user value in data models that inherently encode network
| effects.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Not easily, I agree, but it could be done. For example,
| there could be higher taxation rates for larger companies.
| ixnus wrote:
| I wonder how this would work, considering higher tax
| rates hurt the profitability of a company.
| 0KnowledgeGoof wrote:
| Sure, but do we want to optimize for creating trillion-
| dollar companies? They can hardly even find ways to spend
| their fortunes; we could tax quite a bit from them before
| anyone except accountants notices. And that money could
| be used for social good.
| adventured wrote:
| The interesting thing about big tech in that regard, is a
| 50% income tax rate wouldn't be enough to stop them.
|
| Big tech piles up large amounts of cash as it is and they
| have no idea what to do with it (other than shovel it
| back to shareholders). They have far beyond the margins
| they need to keep expanding, even with a 50% income tax.
| So the first thing it would do is cut into shareholder
| returns (less cash), their multiples would contract as
| investors would find them less appealing. Half of America
| is invested in big tech (in one form or another), and
| those are by far the most active voters. If they see
| their portfolios tank due to a huge hike in corporate
| income taxes, they'll promptly punish the politician/s
| that are responsible for it. Big tech would keep growing
| at 50%, so what's the alternative? 70%-80%? It's unlikely
| to ever have the support required to get it passed, it
| just plain sounds very egregious as a policy. At very
| high levels it comes across as: we like to punish
| success; and that's how it would be run against
| politically by the other side (Republicans).
| mgaunard wrote:
| 50% income tax is the standard upper echelon tax rate for
| individuals in the developed world.
| oauea wrote:
| It's always interesting how people view taxation as
| punishment, as if the money just disappears into a black
| hole instead of being used for bettering the lives of
| everyone in the country. America could easily fund
| universal health care, which would be a massive boost to
| quality of life, if they taxed bigtech a bit more.
|
| Instead you have Americans refusing to go to the doctor
| because they're afraid of the bill.
| smus wrote:
| The us government already could fund universal health
| care and chooses not too. People in the US are wary about
| taxation because we already have a comparable tax rate to
| other developed nations, with more prosperity, and yet we
| get comparatively far fewer public goods in return. It's
| a raw deal. Where's our high speed rail, our public
| transit, our health care, our public bathrooms? Why is
| that money going to Raytheon instead?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Could it?
|
| > https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-federal-budget-
| breakdown-3305...
|
| Total Revenue is $4T, Total Spending is $6T, and
|
| > Social Security will be the biggest expense, budgeted
| at $1.196 trillion. It's followed by Medicare at $766
| billion and Medicaid at $571 billion.
|
| That is $1.35T spent on healthcare just for old people
| (over 65) and poor people. And it is not even the whole
| amount, since most 65+ people still have to buy
| insurance. Even if you cut out the 5% profit margins of
| managed care organizations, or even 15% assuming their
| function is wholly unnecessary, it still seems unlikely
| universal health can be offered without increasing tax
| revenues.
|
| In 2019, total healthcare spend for all of US was $3.9T.
|
| https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That is $1.35T spent on healthcare just for old people
| (over 65) and poor people.
|
| Aged, blind, disabled, and poor, plus less poor children
| and pregnant women.
| leetcrew wrote:
| it's not that weird. no one talks about raising taxes for
| the people who would see a net benefit from more public
| services.
| dash2 wrote:
| Apple sells billions of iPhones, all with the same hardware
| and OS. As a result it can afford to spend a lot of money on
| design.
|
| You would not enjoy an iPhone made by your local electrician.
| 0KnowledgeGoof wrote:
| I agree that there are things that are possible only from a
| giant organization.
|
| However, IMO both Apple and Microsoft are at best
| indifferent to their customers. Not fixing bad UIs even
| when people complain, putting ads in products you paid for,
| requiring centralized accounts just to install free apps.
| You've heard it all before.
|
| I wouldn't enjoy an iPhone made by my local electrician,
| but I want software to respect me. Linux DEs have genuine
| flaws and yet I truly miss nothing and gain everything when
| I move from my work Macbook or my gaming Windows partition
| to my Linux desktop.
|
| I don't think the decision is between a vertically-
| integrated big-corp device and a vertically-integrated
| small-corp device. Even just the current iPhone hardware
| (which is absolutely incredible engineering) with free
| software would be a big improvement.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Not local, but small and competitive was nice. Electronics
| were so much more fun twenty years ago. Nowadays a company
| is a bold risk-taker if their glass sandwich has an extra
| button on top.
| dgemm wrote:
| Consumer stuff sure, but we didn't have today's
| proliferation of hobbyist platforms back then either. The
| fun things are still out there, they are just different.
| EB66 wrote:
| Have you tried the Framework Laptop? It's a great example
| of how small start-ups can build better devices than the
| giants. Difficult, yes -- impossible, no.
| dash2 wrote:
| It's a niche product for hardware hackers. (That's why
| its sales are so low.)
| pdimitar wrote:
| It doesn't really matter that it's a niche product. The
| mere fact that it's out there does show to less tech
| savvy people what's possible. That's very important
| because many of them are not even aware things can be
| done differently.
| EB66 wrote:
| Whether it's a niche product or not is beside the point.
| The point is that a small entity can build a device that
| is arguably better designed, better reviewed, affordable
| and readily available for purchase.
| dash2 wrote:
| Me, an economist: if it's better, why does nobody buy it?
| EB66 wrote:
| People are buying it... so much so that Framework has
| been struggling to keep up with the demand. All of their
| early batches sold out well in advance. I placed my order
| two months ago and it was backordered for a month. Batch
| 6 (the current batch) is the first batch they've had all
| year where they haven't been massively backordered.
| dash2 wrote:
| I'm glad, but Apple ships millions of Macs every quarter.
| When Framework catch up, then I'll agree they're better
| and not niche. Of course as a hacker I might prefer
| Framework, believe it is better, even evangelize it.
| That's a different use of the word, though.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The Framework is only better than a MacBook Pro if you
| care about repairability, customizability, freedom, etc.,
| which most people don't. It's also worse in many ways --
| less polished OS UI, worse screen resolution.
| EB66 wrote:
| > The Framework is only better than a MacBook Pro if you
| care about repairability, customizability, freedom, etc.
|
| Those are three pretty huge things... For me personally,
| repairability is secondary to their very convenient
| modular IO port system.
|
| > Less polished OS UI.
|
| You can have them install Windows without the typical
| manufacturer bloatware or you can put *nix on it. For me,
| that's better than macOS.
|
| > worse screen resolution
|
| The resolution on the MacBook Pro 13 and the Framework
| are nearly the same: 2560 x 1600 vs 2256 x 1504.
| pxc wrote:
| Imo people overstate how good the macOS UX is. It's fine
| if you're used to it, but when I started using it for the
| first time there were lots of little unpleasant surprises
| and inconsistencies. The way people talk about macOS'
| design gave me expectations that macOS did not meet.
| dexter89_kp3 wrote:
| Framework laptop is not possible without the supply chain
| investments made by large conglomerates.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Even if that's true, what does it matter and what are you
| implying? No innovation because the big good corps paved
| the way before that?
|
| Imagine what would happen if Rome made those big and long
| roads all across Europe and then nobody used them out of
| respect of all the labor that went into them. :D
| EB66 wrote:
| True, but is that relevant? All companies, big and small,
| depend on all manner of services, materials,
| infrastructure, etc that are provided by other entities.
| darepublic wrote:
| Agree that it's small tech in danger
| mojuba wrote:
| > _The most important ones are that big tech firms got big and
| stay big, not because of network effects or political power, but
| because of their rare expertise; and that they cannot keep their
| advantage in expertise forever._
|
| The tech giants are not only good at whatever they're doing but
| are also capable of refreshing their expertise every 5 years or
| so, or even reinventing themselves as necessary. Neither Google
| nor Facebook are the same companies as they were 15 years ago.
|
| I worry that like some of the major [evil] banks that survived
| world wars and major crises, the tech giants aren't going away,
| and neither will it be easy to compete with them.
| thrav wrote:
| Or, ya know, just buying whatever hot new thing that gets
| invented and has traction.
| amelius wrote:
| For BigTech, the era is just beginning. For the small guy, yes,
| the era is ending.
| atemerev wrote:
| The point of the article is exactly the opposite.
| amelius wrote:
| The article is wrong because knowledge won't help you much in
| a world where you need money, connections and manpower. E.g.
| even with all the knowledge, a small company cannot run a
| silicon fab. You are always dependent on Big Corps, who are
| just starting to figure out how they can become modern age
| feudal lords.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Article is selling false/misguided hope
| summerlight wrote:
| Big techs are relevant primarily because there are no other
| companies that can 1. execute its business reasonably well 2. at
| the planetary scale. There are some other factors including anti-
| competitive business practices but that won't work without its
| own edge; MS was not able to stop Google and the same thing for
| Google to FB as well.
|
| I've seen many HN readers claiming they can build a FB clone
| overnight, but that's not even the tip of iceberg. Serving your
| service to billions of people across hundreds of different
| languages, cultures geographical areas with different legal,
| financial, logistical infrastructures is at the fundamentally
| different level of complexity than building a toy project. This
| is not just for big techs, there are literally thousands of
| uninteresting but extremely profitable businesses simply for this
| very reason. And big techs owns platform which brings them to
| another level...
| gusbremm wrote:
| But I bet the early versions of facebook wouldn't scale as
| well..
| wreath wrote:
| They aren't going anywhere. We used to be told what to think and
| what to do by the Church, then by the State and from now on by
| Big Tech. It's only starting, baby. So buckle up.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's only going to get bigger unless governments put limits on
| it. I don't see how you can reach any other conclusion given
|
| 1. historically institutions get larger and larger until busted
| up
|
| 2. they tend to buy out anyone who has a better technology and
| swallow it up
|
| 3. technology isn't going anywhere.
| wayeq wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| Jensson wrote:
| People have known how to make large internet services for 15
| years. You see less diversity in services people use today than
| back then. Everyone knew how to do magic before big tech started
| dominating, todays state is the steady state where a few big
| companies who mastered the current formula is dominating, little
| is happening. You'd need a new big cultural shift like the
| internet or the smartphone was for things to get upended again.
| No, crypto isn't it.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Much of big tech has no physical inputs or outputs. It's mostly
| network effect holding companies the big tech companies together.
| There is some gained efficiency at scale when it comes to
| software as a service, but the actual barrier to entry can be
| scaled by an individual or a small collective (open source).
|
| The main input of the social networks is US, and our consent. If
| they break our trust, we start looking around for alternatives,
| and it might take a while, but we all hold grudges, and will
| route around their damage.
|
| We _must_ retain access to general purpose computing, if we do
| that, we can keep routing around their mistakes, accidental, or
| not.
| yalogin wrote:
| This is a tricky subject and I don't think the big tech era is
| ending unless three things happen at once -
|
| 1. Split all big tech
|
| 2. Introduce regulations to clearly specify interoperability
| rules between networks and ecosystems
|
| 3. Regulations to protect privacy of individuals
|
| The problem is if they don't happen together the big tech will
| have time to work around them and so the effect will not be as
| good. We don't have the political will in this country to make
| that happen.
| bernardlunn wrote:
| hell yes and here is why: Here's a concrete example: in last
| year's lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans.
| They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment
| with Stripe or Square. The owner's kid brought the beans round on
| his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they
| had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now,
| it's a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components.
|
| Regulators are NOT the key!
| mooreds wrote:
| Seems to me that Shopify, Stripe and Square all are members of
| BigTech. What am I missing?
| bernardlunn wrote:
| Hell yes and here is why: Here's a concrete example: in last
| year's lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans.
| They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment
| with Stripe or Square. The owner's kid brought the beans round on
| his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they
| had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now,
| it's a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components.
|
| It is NOT about the regulators!
| atemerev wrote:
| Now, in the world of crypto, we are exactly at stage one.
| "Ordinary people are profoundly ignorant about the wizardry that
| has appeared in their midst. They know it is powerful, but they
| don't really know how it works. Rich people throw money at any
| wizard, hoping they will have the secret to eternal youth, or a
| bottomless sack of gold. Naturally, this generates a crowd of
| charlatan conjurers in fancy robes and hats. Only true wizards
| can tell a true wizard from a charlatan - but the true wizards
| are too busy selling spells of their own."
| nodemaker wrote:
| Thats interesting. Is this from a russian novel of some kind?
| reboog711 wrote:
| Isn't it from the linked article?
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Remembe Fuller's quote "You never change things by fighting the
| existing reality. To change something, build a new model that
| makes the existing model obsolete"
|
| Big tech is the existing reality and it can only be changed by
| making it obsolete. The digital technology for doing so is
| actually available (or can be refined rapidly). What is not
| available is the _social technology_ : the attitude of
| governments and regulators, solid, honest-to-goodness business
| models, the education of the populace etc
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| I agree with the article's thought about phase where "everyone
| understands the magic", and I agree with your point about
| making reality obsolete. Problem is, Big Tech amasses great
| amount of resources to survive this event and delay own demise.
|
| Good luck competing when your innovation can be copied by tech
| giant in a matter of months, your price tag could be beaten
| overnight with dumping, and your business could be bought out
| to suffocate in the basements of Alphabet.
|
| Fortunately, our society both understands the dangers of
| monopolies, and has tools (regulations) to balance them out.
| Could anti-monopoly lawsuits happen that would force break big
| tech? That has happened in the past, see Bell System[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
| 58x14 wrote:
| I fully expect our next cycle to be one of de-platforming, with
| this quote in support.
|
| Decentralized technology is rife with fraud and noise, but ENS
| is an exemplary preview of a Web3 future. Like SSO without a
| middleman. It's a far superior user experience (no password
| requirements, email verification, data leaks), and allows
| developers to bypass account management altogether when
| building a webapp. To me, it's glaringly obvious this is one of
| the most significant milestones in our transition to a better
| web.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| After cursory googling, it sounds like more blockchain
| nonsense. Just throwing buzzwords together and solving either
| a nonexistent problem, or solving it fundamentally worse than
| anything that already exists.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Yes, this.
|
| Implementing centralized application rules on completely
| decentralized compute/networking foundations is now a thing.
|
| Let's say you want to build something like Mars Coin. It's
| gotta work reliably at the scale of billions of nodes,
| separated by minutes of transit time, at billions of aggregate
| transactions per second, at a cost below micro-cents per
| transaction. Without the possibility of being shut down by a
| government-scale bad actor.
|
| This is now becoming possible:
| https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/mars-coin/
| bernardlunn wrote:
| Hell yes: Here's a concrete example: in last year's lockdown, my
| local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick
| web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square.
| The owner's kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other
| words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years
| ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it's a matter of
| plugging in off-the-shelf components.
|
| NOT about regulators.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Amazon does not care about competing with small margin retail
| operations. That is why you cannot filter for items shipped and
| sold by Amazon.com. They are more interested in the 15%+ profit
| margin business of being a platform.
|
| Their market cap is $1.7T because of AWS and the commission
| they collect from third party sellers and the recurring revenue
| from high margin streaming services. The sourcing and selling
| physical things to customer business is worth much less, as
| indicated by Walmart's market cap of $390B.
| elwell wrote:
| It's interesting how AWS has taken so much of the market. I
| suppose it's just a better product + the free tier.
| streetcat1 wrote:
| Big tech started with expertise but moved to rent seeking. Amazon
| is not in ecommerce but in a seller market place.
| google/facebooks are in ads, etc.
|
| The problem is not that you coffee store can do ecommerce, but
| that nobody can find your coffee store if it is not in amazon, or
| does not buy ads from google/facebook.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > Here's a concrete example: in last year's lockdown, my local
| coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web
| store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square.
|
| Are Shopify, Stripe, and Square not big tech? Maybe medium-big
| instead of mega-big?
| dash2 wrote:
| It's a good point. Large companies aren't going away. But the
| _market dominance_ of a few large companies might go away.
| jonas21 wrote:
| It seems to me like this is a case of new large tech
| companies coming to dominate new markets while the existing
| tech companies continue to dominate their old markets.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Additionally, from some quick googling, it looks like Stripe
| and Square both run on AWS? Shopify used to but now runs on
| GCS?
|
| Is OP mainly just talking about Amazon's dominance of online
| consumer shopping specifically, rather than a general thing
| about "big tech"?
| kazen44 wrote:
| to be fair, there is very little reason why shopify or
| stripe couldn't run on a couple of racks of servers in a
| couple of datacenters across the globe.
| Buttsite wrote:
| So why don't they do that anymore? Just the love of
| migrating thousands of app instances and signing
| contracts with cloud hosts?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| And yet...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| No. The big tech era won't stop. IBM got replaced by Microsoft.
| Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs, FAANGs will get replaced by
| other more ferocious animals.
|
| The article correctly states that monopolies aren't going to last
| long. But what the author didn't realize is there will always
| gonna be monopolies because the way society is constructed and
| the markets works incentivizes building monopolies.
|
| We are in the game of Monopoly. If a player lasts until the end
| of the game he is doomed to build a monopoly.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs
|
| Microsoft is still there with a $2.4T market cap. In the
| context of a discussion about big tech, Netflix is not really
| part of it. Although the FAANG acronym kind of stuck.
| yyyk wrote:
| MAGMA is a better acronym nowadays, as Microsoft is far
| larger than Netflix, and Facebook renamed to Meta.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What about google > alphabet?
| yyyk wrote:
| Alphabet is more like a holding company which Google was
| put under, right? Google kept its name and its trademark.
| Compare https://about.google/ with
| https://about.facebook.com/ . The first is all about
| Google not Alphabet, while the second is about Meta and
| Facebook is not mentioned aside from the URL address*.
|
| Besides, I didn't see any good acronym with only A and
| M...
|
| Edit: I earlier didn't notice the Facebook name and logo
| turning dynamically into the Meta name and logo, but that
| doesn't actually make the argument weaker.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| In what universe did Microsoft get replaced ? Did you see the
| recent stock performance and jump in valuation of the company ?
| It is still a beast.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Have you written a document or spreadsheet for a company
| lately? Microsoft is happy that nobody thinks of these things
| when discussing antitrust, but do you remember when there were
| choices other than Word and Excel?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs,
|
| Uh, what? Microsoft is currently the 2nd largest company in the
| world, sometimes it's the largest. Do you have any idea how
| many people use say, Office 365 in a given week?
|
| Netflix is 1/10th of the size by market cap, I don't understand
| why it's even a part of the acronym.
|
| Personally, I hold individual shares of MSFT and AAPL and no
| other big tech company exposure outside of index funds.
| reboog711 wrote:
| > I don't understand why it's even a part of the acronym.
|
| Because the amount it pays developers. The acronym is used in
| conversations about high paying tech / programming / IT jobs.
| [deleted]
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > My coffee shop is not an existential threat to Amazon, which
| retains huge advantages of scale. But before, Amazon was the only
| firm that could really do ecommerce. Now, everywhere can.
|
| This is not a good example. In 2000 , it wasnt harder for the
| coffee shop to make a website than it was for amazon, and their
| challenges were similar: how to accept payments and how to
| deliver. Amazon solved those through scale, the coffee shop did
| not solve either of them (the author admits they send their kid
| to do deliveries). Accepting payments problem is easier today,
| but still not easy, and still not comparable with the world of
| cash where everyone everywhere has equal access to payments.
|
| Without some massive new tech that will break the moats of
| bigtech (payments, logistics network, lock-in via identity) i
| dont think bigtech will unbundle
| tibyat wrote:
| US govt is far too incompetent to reign them in. We would need to
| fix that first. Essentially, tax big tech to fund regulating them
| and improving the tech literacy of our laws. I think this list
| would be helpful in order to get there:
|
| - Term/age limits for congress
|
| - Eliminate first-past-the-post voting
|
| - Some kind of voter weighting system. Normalize a zoomer's vote
| weight to match a boomer's based on voter turnout demographics.
|
| - In the same vein as the previous point, maybe account for the
| duration of a law's effects. If a law is going to destroy the
| planet 50 years from now, why should a 90 year old have equal say
| as a 20 year old?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I really like the author's writing style, so much so I just
| subscribed to their sub stack feed.
|
| I agree with the author that the future is unclear. I think it
| possible that the current tech megacorps might suffer a decline
| but if I was betting money I am not sure what fair odds would be.
| Tossing my own prophecy into the discussion: I think that we will
| see a combination of smaller distributed decentralized tech and
| businesses, but some of the giants like Google, Amazon,
| Microsoft, etc. will continue to do well as long as they keep
| enough customers happy.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| The shameless party in the open might be starting to start to
| end, nothing else.
|
| They'll need to become more discreet and pay the right people
| more. Legally different companies will be controlled by the same
| group of people like some pseudo shadow board. Nothing new,
| nothing innovative.
|
| Don't get me wrong, things will change but be the same where it
| really matters.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Beyond network effects (i.e. Microsoft's mortal grip on
| enterprise IT), there is also concentration of capital (i.e. many
| or most of Google's products were acquired, including
| Advertising!). You can't disrupt a monopoly from within.
|
| I think disruption occurs at certain watershed moments where a
| rapid paradigm change occurs: www, bitcoin, mobile, social,
| ecommerce, PC, internet. At these moments, growth is so fast and
| belief is so strong that a movement of previously untapped energy
| forms around it and this becomes a focal point for investment,
| concentrated at a single point in spacetime which is powerful
| enough to penetrate a monopoly.
|
| But only if growth is so abrupt that it can't acquire you first.
|
| And the capitalists are not going to fund the disruption as by
| definition capitalists operate at a scale where they can't
| understand it.
| afterburner wrote:
| We just had a big-tech surge. Maybe the massive surge will calm
| down to not-as-insane growth, but that doesn't feel like an era
| "ending" to me.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Big tech is big because we are globalising - because an app /
| website written in one country can be used in dozens of others,
| 192 if your i18n-fu is good enough.
|
| Scale is something we have not really taken on board as we head
| to 10 billion humans. And when we look critically at the Big in
| big tech now, they are really bit-players with leverage. News
| aggregators, search engines, publishing platforms. The
| traditional "media" have had outside _influence_ and this new
| globalised generation has that, but compared to what 's likely to
| come it's nothing.
|
| Global pharma, energy, transportation, new manufacturing, supply
| chain observability, consumer friendly finance. These things and
| more will have huge impacts - and all will have software at their
| hearts.
|
| If that (software) is what we mean by Tech, then yeah, Google is
| a minnow to come.
|
| But there is hope. Software (and observability) are incredibly
| amenable to democracy and independent monitoring, to smart
| regulation and smart outcomes.
|
| It's a political challenge to manage the wealth to come - but
| look at how the USA handled the robber barons. It took massive
| system wide political change if it happened.
|
| Don't give up. But Vote Harder.
| cryptica wrote:
| Globalization overshot. It was mostly artificially propped up
| with the global fiat monetary system. Now that the fiat
| monetary system is running out of steam and heading into high
| inflation territory, we will revert back to a more localized
| world which most people will be happier in.
|
| Many people nowadays were essentially 'forced' to move country
| or cities because of purely financial reasons driven by the
| money printers. This is all artificial and it will unwind.
| opportune wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense. Parent is talking about how you
| can make a single product with a TAM of ~all of earths
| population. What does that have to do with money
| printing/fiat, besides perhaps causing an overvaluation?
|
| Even if those companies were overvalued, it doesn't change
| the fact that technology and free trade enable hyper-scaling
| businesses.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| People have been moving into cities since time immemorial.
| Small farmers would move to Roman cities in search of higher
| paying jobs, or the dole. The Industrial Revolution greatly
| accelerated urbanization. All of that predates fiat currency.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Globalizing democracy means that increasingly , half of the
| population of the earth will be oppressed by the other half. At
| least the division of nations leaves people with the option to
| leave one democracy and go live in another that fits them
| better. We can't leave earth for something else yet. Global
| democracy controlled by global media is a bad outcome.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| If I understand you, you are saying that in a democracy the
| majority "oppress" the minority(ies).
|
| It maybe a "no true scotsman" argument but a society that
| legally oppresses a minority is hard to call a democracy- it
| is quite possible to argue that America was not a democracy
| until 1965.
|
| And it is highly unlikely we will all become some homogeneous
| voting lump - there are enough modern democracies that are so
| distinct in just their voting processes, let alone choices in
| fiscal policy, culture and so on to keep diversity alive.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| IIRC during the trump era people said the same thing. And
| intuitively, it is a sort of oppression , but it lasts only
| 4 years. I 'm not saying we should abandon democracy, but
| we should be looking into ways to expand people's freedom
| of action, and uniting everyone under one government is not
| the way.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Globalizing democracy means that increasingly , half of the
| population of the earth will be oppressed by the other half
|
| History shows the very opposite. Oppression goes hand in hand
| with empires, dictatorships and colonial powers.
|
| > At least the division of nations leaves people with the
| option to leave one democracy and go live in another that
| fits them better
|
| You are confusing nations borders, democracy and
| decentralization.
| clement_b wrote:
| Had fun checking where the hyperlinks of that article pointed to.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| The article started by making some interesting points but it lost
| me at the wizard stuff.
| wrycoder wrote:
| As usual, the HN commentary is far more interesting than the
| linked article.
| beardyw wrote:
| I think that there is possibility that nation states will awaken
| to the idea that they could do that, and have the power to take
| over. Obviously the idea is particularly attractive to more
| socialist governments, who could see themselves providing their
| own Amazon, or totalitarian governments, who would look to
| provide the rest. But I am not sure that would be the limit of
| it.
| [deleted]
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