Few companies have ever done that(probably not zero, I'm sure at least a few charities have been structured such that they count as 'companies' in legal terms); but any company with a PR budget has wished to appear (at least in part) to be doing that. Given the number and size of the world's PR budgets, I can only assume that a great many companies have wished to appear to do that.

I don't know how much Uber HQ values good PR, though given their zillion-odd entanglements in markets where they are dubiously legal, they probably should consider it; but if they do value it, the case to be made is pretty obvious:

Whatever Team Econ has to say about the wonders of equilibrium pricing and the joyous intersection of the supply and demand curves, it's pretty obvious that 'surge pricing' is not people's favorite aspect of Uber, especially during events that are seen as exceptional in some way(they scored some very acidic headlines during the Sydney hostage incident, as I recall). Even among people who reject economic moralizing, the existence of options markets is a convincing demonstration that people assign value to predictable prices.

On the other hand, it's also fairly evident that Uber's service will be less popular if it is seen as unreliable and more popular if people think of it as always delivering a ride on request.

If Uber wants to improve their image, they have the option of doing so by absorbing some or all of the conflict between these two aspects of their service in situations that would be likely to generate unpleasant attention otherwise. They don't have an obligation to do so(even if they did drop the facade of not being a taxi operation, taxi regulations largely focus on price not on obligating operators to operate at all times); but it is a fairly obvious way to buy more favorable opinion, which is something that profit-oriented companies routinely think is worth doing.

Disagree completely. Windows 8 Metro is closest to iOS if anything. I use Windows 8, Windows 7, XP and OSX daily. OSX's basic interface conventions are far more similar to older versions of Windows than Windows 8 Metro is to older versions of Windows. And since you can't really get rid of Metro satisfactorily without third party help I stand by my statement at least for the time being.

Except that "find and launch" bit is a pain. Do you have any idea how much time I've had to blow explaining the differences between 7 and 8 to people? 8 is designed for touch screens and not a single desktop or laptop computer we use has or needs a touch screen. The apps are the same but I still have to interact with the file system and other OS features regularly so that doesn't mitigate the problem at all for me.

Which most people I know are never going to do. Maybe you work with more computer literate folks than I do (wouldn't be hard) but I generally see the defaults left at whatever they are. Any system that requires that much clean up is something I have NO interest in using.

Personal preferences I guess. I truly cannot stand Windows 8's interface. I find it clumsy, badly designed, and it generally just gets in my way. I'm not the pickiest but it makes even things that should be easy needlessly difficult in my opinion.

The equivalent on a mac is Command-Option-Esc which is identical to pretty much every unix system out there.

Right. Apple sells millions of these things thanks to their "weird and dated" interface. Clearly that is a huge problem for them.

You might have a typo in the last sentence that changed your intended meaning?

That said, trust is a complex topic, so it is hard to generalize. The story of Jesus said he hung out a lot with tax collectors, harlots, and sinners... Not because he wanted to be one, but because that is where he felt he was needed.

http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

I agree some technoligies should be banned or heavily taxed because they create unpaid for externalities like pollution. However, in general, what we need are more efficient technologies, technologies that create new resources out of abundant materials (like fusion of hydrogen), and also technologies that let us expand out into space (or responsibly in the ocean or desert or Antarctic, or underground).

The human imagination is the ultimate resource, The more (educated, well-fed) people you have, the more imagination.
"The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment"
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

If I told you that someone had (really) just invented fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar), and someone else had invented automated indoor agriculture, and someone else had invented 3D printers that can recycle 100% of everything they print in a non-polluting way -- even electronics and houses, and together these technologies could feed a trillion people on the planet and house them and clothe them and so on, would your feelings change about "over population"? BTW, we are not very far from all three of these technologies or equivalents.

Even if for aesthetic or environmental reasons we might want to limit the population of humans on the Earth at any one time, the carrying capacity of the solar system, even just with essentially known technologies discussed in 1980, is probably in the quadrillions of humans (plus much more of everything else in supporting ecosystems).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...

In any case, the bigger issue is that populations of industrialized countries are peaking already with non-immigrant female citizens in most generally having less than two or so kids each, so less than replacement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

As I wrote here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"As with the comment on Ireland, that is why the industrialized globe is facing a "Peak Population" crisis, not a "Peak Oil" crisis, even though people are confusing the two, which is odd given solar is now (or soon will be) cheaper than coal. :-)
    But, think about it, how many of the industrialized world's current problems are better explained by "Peak Population" rather than "Peak Oil"?
    And how much has the "Peak Energy" misrepresentation of the "Peak Oil" fact by people like Catton led to smaller families and made worse the "Peak Population" crisis? Gloomsters and Doomsters are in that sense creating the terrible problems we are facing right now. In Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan talks about despair versus optimist in a culture, in part based on appreciation of the potential abundance energy in the universe.
    The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
    We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essentially had the specific technological ideas in the 1970s we needed to do that, even given refinements since then. So, a focus on zero or negative population growth for the human race as a whole right now, as opposed to just limiting the population currently on Earth (which might be sensible, even though I think we could easily grow 10X on Earth), has created a "Peak Population" crisis that we didn't need to have for 1000 years when we filled up the solar system (and by then, we would have better technology and better social ideology to deal with changing demographics of moving from a triangle to a square of population by age)."

You made some good points.

Of those hundreds of years there has only been thirty where large numbers of people can communucate and plan operations without ever meeting. The criminals are allowed to use modern technology by the police are not?

The police can use the same technology - they can cooperate with their counterparts the world over, they can communicate with their agents in the field, they can send video and images around the world in seconds. Being able to use modern technology and being able to subvert its use are completely different things. Bank robbers used dynamite to blow open banks and their safes - by your logic you have no problem with police using dynamite to blow up your house looking for robbers.

Surveillance does not make people less free. Does an audience at a theater make an actor less free? If repressive things happen with the gathered data then that would be a problem but not the surveillance itself.

So you'd have no problem with government-sanctioned cameras in your bathroom filming everything. Good to know. After all, if nothing bad will come from the recording of your personal activities, nothing bad happened.

Physically intrusive searches are very different than electronic surveillance.

Electronic surveillance is intrusive none the less. You can play games of semantics if you wish, but when the state rifles through your private property, you not only risk them finding things you've done which they might not like (either now or in the future), but you give them the opportunity to put things there for them to find. Once that barrier is down you can no longer be sure of what is what, and what was once your property becomes property of dubious origin.

Thanks, AC. Yes, that is a typo, sorry, and should be "1775", not "1175".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"The Invasion of Canada in 1775 was the first major military initiative by the newly formed Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. The objective of the campaign was to gain military control of the British Province of Quebec, and convince the French-speaking Canadiens to join the revolution on the side of the Thirteen Colonies. ... The British sent several thousand troops, including General John Burgoyne and Hessian mercenaries, to reinforce those in the province in May 1776. General Carleton then launched a counter-offensive, ultimately driving the smallpox-weakened and disorganized American forces back to Fort Ticonderoga. ..."

Even in Finance, they've done that. Look at PayPal. The only reason that it exists is that the banks and credit card companies dragged their feet with online payments. They're now doing free electronic person-to-person transfers, but it's still expensive to take credit card payments online.

We could have both perhaps. But in general, this is sad, since with a few trillion invested in R&D, we could have fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar, coming anyway, but more slowly) and automated indoor agriculture and near 100% emissions-free recycling of all consumer goods, and so on. And many actions of the wealthy (especially those invested in oil) have essentially blocked these sorts of efforts politically. As Bucky Fuller says, whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Whatever the legality, for those in charge of much of the world's wealth for whatever reason to cut-and-run from the very problems they have helped create is morally irresponsible and very selfish.

And it probably won't end well -- even for them. A private airstrip in New Zealand (or "Elysium" for that matter, even backed by a large force of security robots), will not protect you against nuclear fallout or rogue nano-tech or air-born plagues or a bunch of other things -- including just "drone" cruise missiles with conventional warheads we have had for decades. Those missiles are getting cheaper and easier to make; there way a Slashdot article years ago about a DIY cruise missile for about US$5K. The damage from such things will of course fall mostly on the poor as with all disasters, but cheap drones will be another destabilizing force if we have a social meltdown (which history shows, happens again and again, see Daniel Quinn's book "Beyond Civilization" for example). A better approach is to work to prevent the meltdown in the first place (like Bucky Fuller worked towards), or at least protect everyone you can (Schindler's list).

That is why I have invested all my (potential, mostly never realized) wealth (as far as primarily time) into trying to make the world work for everyone, and also trying to make it possible for everyone to build any scale lifeboats/ships they want.

After all, I did graduate from Princeton with Michelle Obama, and in the next year were Jeff Bezos, the late Phil Goldman, and many others. I could have picked a different path. I also worked for a short time as an undergrad with someone investing the Princeton endowment, who told me the reason a big investor does better than the typical small investor was more information, cheaper trades, and faster trades (enough to discourage me from trying to be an individual investor).

But more than that, I read the book, "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips when I was a teenager. I had gone to the library to read around books on how to become a millionaire. Of about six or seven there on the topic, all but one told me how to do it (the first million is the hardest; start a small business, work hard, be responsive to customers, hope you get lucky -- most small businesses fail in a few years, but keep trying and maybe you'll get lucky when you have enough experience from your failures). But the last book asked me, "Why do you want to be a millionaire?" And that is a very good question to ask yourself...

The basic concepts from that book :
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
http://seeingmoney.org/SevenLa...
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Comm...
"THE SEVEN LAWS OF MONEY
The following laws were published in 1977 in 'Seven laws of Money' by Mike Phillips. Mike, a Bank of America banker, was instrumental in developing Master Charge.
1. Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing. The first law is the hardest for most people to accept and is the source of the most distress. The clearest translation of this in terms of personal advice is "go ahead and do what you want to do." Worry about your ability to do it and competence to do it, but certainly do not worry about the money.
2. Money has its own rules: records, budgets, savings, borrowing. The rules of money are probably Ben Franklin-type rules, such as never squander it, don't be a spendthrift, be very careful, you have to account for what you're doing, you must keep track of it, and you can never ignore what happens to money.
3. Money is a dream - a fantasy as alluring as the Pied Piper. Money is very much a state of mind. It's much like the states of consciousness that you see on an acid trip... It is fantasy in itself, purely a dream. People who go after it as though it were real and tangible, say a person who is trying to earn a hundred- thousand dollars, orient their lives and end up in such a way as to have been significantly changed simply to have reached that goal. They become part of that object and since the object is a dream ( a mirage) they become quite different from what they set out to be.
4. Money is a nightmare - in jail, robbery, fears of poverty. I am not expressing a moral judgment. I am making very clear something that many people aren't conscious of: among the people we punish, the people we have to take out of society, 80% or more are people who are unable to deal with money. Money is also a nightmare when looked at from the opposite perspective - from the point of view of people who have inherited a lot of money. The western dream is to have a lot of money, and then you can lead a life of leisure and happiness. Nothing in my experience could be further from the truth.
5. You can never give money away. Looked at over a period of time, money flows in certain channels, like electricity through wires. The wires define the relationship, and the flow is the significant thing to look at. The fifth law of money suggests that by looking at the gift in a larger or longer-term perspective, we will see that it is part of a two-way flow.
6. You can never really receive money as a gift. Money is either borrowed or lent or possibly invested. It is never given or received without those concepts implicit in it. Giving money requires some payment; if it's not repaid the nightmare elements enter into it. A gift of money is really a contract; it's really a repayable loan, and it requires performance and an accounting of performance that is satisfactory to the giver.
7. There are worlds without money. They are the worlds of art, poetry, music, dance, sex, etc. the essentials of human life. The seventh law is like a star that is your guide. You know that you cannot live on the star; it is not physically a part of your life, but rather an aid to orientation. You are not going to reach this star, but in some sense neither are you going to reach your destination without it to guide you."

Between that book plus many other shaping influences including years of Sunday school, :-) as well as a love for the craft of technology itself, I made a choice as to what route in life to pursue instead of "finance". That choice included co-creating a garden simulator to help everyone learn to grow their own food; the idea of OSCOMAK/Stella as a FOSS technology library accessible by all; ideas for self-replicating habitats in pace, the ocean, and on land; the Pointrel system as explorations towards better ways of storing and retrieving distributed information; writing related essays; and other things including my sig ("The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."). Granted, I have not succeeded that much at any of these efforts (including because of working in too much isolation and maybe being too ambitious at the start, and also alternating work on those with a need to earn a living doing mostly unrelated things). However, I still feel it was the right choice to make -- if I could do it all again, I would -- just hopefully better and more effectively. I hope, even as failed examples, those projects can help inspire others with more resources or skills or connections to do a better job of implementing those ideas in a big successful way.

The bottom line: it takes a skillful healthy community to survive in this world. You can't do it alone. Even one rich person (or one rich family) trying to live isolated in comfort needs essentially a community of robots around him or her to survive, and what do you do when the community of robots go wrong or turns on you or just leaves you behind? And more so, what kind of life is that really? How much fun is it to live that way? What kind of life is that for your kids and grandkids and great grandkids? A funny take on that is the outcome of the first wish in the movie "Bedazzled" where the tech nerd protagonist asks the Devil for "wealth". :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Contrast planning to run away with with, say, advocating for a basic income for all, given the research that shows countries with less wealth inequality are overall much happier places to live -- even for the wealthiest. A related essay I wrote after talking to a wealthy neighbor (unconvincingly) about a basic income:
"Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

See also a video parable I co-created a few years ago:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And also, on the problems of trying to cut-and-run, by Michael Ruppert, from his experience of running to Venezuela and then going back to the USA (even if I don't agree with the Peak Oil theory as far as necessary consequences given cheaper solar power and electric cars and recycling and such):
"Evolution"
http://www.fromthewilderness.c...
"... The important distinctions about adaptivity are not racial at all. US citizens come in all colors. American culture is the water they have swum in since birth. A native US citizen of Latin descent who did not (or even did) speak Spanish would probably feel almost as out of place here as I do. They would look the same but not feel the same. And when it came time to deal collectively with a rapidly changing world, a world in turmoil, a native-born American's inbred decades of "instinctive" survival skills might not harmonize with the skills used by those around him.
    Another one of my trademarked lines is that Post Peak survival is not a matter of individual survival or national survival. It is a matter of cooperative, community survival. If one is not a fully integrated member of a community when the challenges come, one might hinder the effectiveness of the entire community which has unspoken and often consciously unrecognized ways of adapting. As stresses increase, the gauntlets required to gain acceptance in strange places will only get tougher. Diversity will become more, rather than less, rigid and enforced.
  As energy shortages and blackouts arrive; as food shortages grow worse; as droughts expand and proliferate; as icecaps melt, as restless, cold and hungry populations start looking for other places to go; minute cultural and racial differences will trigger progressively more abrupt reactions, not unlike a stressed out and ill human body will react more violently to things that otherwise would never reach conscious thought.
    Start building your lifeboats where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are important whether you are thinking of moving from city to countryside, state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you.
    If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone.
    Evolution is guaranteed. Useful knowledge gained by ancestors is incorporated into succeeding generations. It may not be used in the same way that it was when acquired. It may lie dormant for years or decades, safely stored in DNA or the collective unconscious. But it is there, and it will always be available should the day come when it is needed."

What an eloquent rebuttal.

And I own a MBP, a Mac Mini, a Window 7 laptop, a Windows 8 desktop, etc and I disagree with you. What you or I own means nothing. If you disagree that's fine - but explain why. Something more than "nun-uh" preferably.

The new interface they slapped on Windows 8 IS wildly different from the interface in Windows 7 and earlier. It's arguably more of a change than from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 which was a pretty big change. I have had to train plenty of people at work and home (I run the IT stuff at my work among other roles) on the transition between Macs and Windows boxes as well as between Windows versions and to a person I've had an easier time transitioning people between Windows XP/7 and a Mac than between Windows XP/7 and Windows 8 Metro. The Mac and earlier versions of Windows use similar interface conventions and generally do things in similar ways (mostly). Generally if someone is comfortable in one they can pick up the other pretty easily. With Windows 8 Metro they pitched that and lots of people (myself included) took some time to figure out how things work and to be frankly Metro has more in common with iOS then it does Windows.

It's called "intelligence work", and it requires well-trained people gathering intelligence on these targets. They can infiltrate the groups, befriend suspected terrorists, etc, and gather information. This is how it was done for decades, and no-one had to have their entire lives rummaged through by default until they were shown to not be a "bad guy".

It's not a Catch-22 - it's abject laziness on the part of the security services. Plugging in servers is easy. Asking for money to protect people from "scary people who want to kill you!!!111" is easy. Strong-arming ISPs to allow data gathering is easy. That's why they do it - because they can. If they had to return to the old ways of human intelligence gathering, it would be harder work, but we'd not be fucked over constantly.

Your attitude is just as dangerous as the NSA hoovering up every bit that crosses their path. I hope for your sake it was born from a lack of information and not some irrational zeal or compulsion, and that it can be changed through learning.

If "They" are actually "Us", the only thing that changes is that instead of "them" needing to do more to redress the balance of wealth, "we" need to do more. I don't care if it hurts me financially or not - if it's the right thing to do, it's the right thing to do. Selfish attitudes such as your "Fuck you I got mine" are what cause this situation in the first place. Trying to surprise people into realising they're in the top X% is a pathetic tactic which will help absolutely no-one.

The pick a European country and a US state of equivalent size & population. I'll wait. The end result is precisely the same.

Why is it so difficult to admit that internet access in the US is a first world joke? Does it hurt your feelings? There's no rational excuse to have this opinion.

You seem to be forgetting WWII, the repercussions of which are still - to this day - haunting many countries, especially in Europe. The US sauntered through WWII with barely a scratch, owing to its geographical location, a history quite unlike most other developed countries at the time.

Ignoring that little fact kind of puts the rest of your post in doubt... Your anecdotal data set of 1 also doesn't exactly portray you in the most rational of lights...

OK, then compare Sweden to California, as has been done above. If what you say is true, California's internet should be far better than Sweden's, as California is roughly the same size, with a far larger population (and therefore more money to be gained from customers). California's climate is also far more suited to building out utilities, as Sweden's climate is closer to Alaska's.

Wait, what? Internet access in California sucks? No waaaay! It's almost as if you had a knee-jerk reaction to someone criticizing the US and had to put a stop to it, regardless of whether the criticism was accurate or not! USA #1! USA #1! USA #1!