They hired Robinhood's UI team to develop the front end.

If you're not aware that communism and capitalism can coexist quite happily, let me introduce you to an obscure country called China.

The point was that even if you go out and build your own service, if you do not conform to the dictates of the government or the big, rich, "capitalist" corporations, they can shut you out of Internet and banking services. "Good!" you might say, if this insidious form of corporatocracy suits your ideology. Just remember how much you loved it when it comes gunning for you.

Lexis/Nexis is an example of a specialized case, but its idea is one that could be expanded into other spheres.

I'd happily pay for a search engine if it's good and protects my privacy. I won't pay Lexis/Nexis prices, but I think there's plenty of room below that tier.

The scary thing isn't even the ads. To be honest, I'd turn all my adblockers off if it meant that the people who are creating the content I like are paid, and if the ads were at all relevant to me. If there's some new dingus that's in my bailiwick, I'm happy to know that it exists. I'd even be happy to submit an anonymous profile of my interests and age if it meant I don't get ads for Tampax or John Deere tractors.

What concerns me is the other things that might happen with this data that's collected. And that's the primary reason I block ads and trackers whenever I can. God only knows what monstrous thing could be done with this data in 5 or 10 years.

I like your CAPITAL LETTERS. It reminds me of my CRAZY AUNT and how she WRITES EMAILS when she's RAILING ON about LIE-BURALS and OBUMMER.

With your SEVEN DIGIT UID, I rather suspect you like VODKA with your BREAKFAST of BLINIS. Am I right TOVARISCH?

I agree with pretty much all of your post. Crime is definitely correlated with poverty, but I suspect it's more complicated than "if they're not poor they won't commit crime." But your fundamental point that I quoted is 100% on the mark.

The right tends to point out that even the poorest Americans have it a hell of a lot better than the poor around the world, but that's true while also being meaningless. You might as well say that a guy with a $28K/year job is rich compared to the rest of the world as well. The fact is that we have somehow built a society so lopsided that the most wealthy and the most connected have an outsized say in how the country is run. The two parties remain in power through divisive means whereby they turn Americans against Americans to hide the fact that they are really pretty shit at doing their job of running the country for the benefit of all Americans.

This should be where the press steps in and levels the playing field, but the media is so converged and compromised--where it isn't actually complicit and corrupted--that it only serves to further divide the country.

There are solutions that can be tried, but I fear that the only path forward is to (figuratively) kill our heroes and start over. The people in power now will only fight to keep their power, not push through needed changes.

Hey, did you also know that Pepsi is the Choice of a New Generation?

You either know that Antifa is branding for a related, but very different movement or you don't. If the former, you're lying; if the latter, you're ignorant.

This is my big beef with Dropbox, the double-dipping on quotas. If one team shares a big folder with 3 other teams, that big folder counts against ALL teams' quotas. There is no technical reason for this. It is simply a way to force you out of the free tier and into a paid one.

As the article says, Dropbox moved on from satisfying users to satisfying their financiers and shareholders.

Because when you're being sold a narrative it helps to know something about the salesman.

The rule is: when right-leaning people protest and there is video evidence of misbehavior, there were far-right troublemakers in attendance; when left-leaning people protest and there is video evidence of misbehavior, there were troublemakers on both sides.

This always comes up. It's basically a way to cram environmental talking points into a conversation where it isn't required.

It's also silly. Did you have a better plan to get from upright monkeys to landing on the Moon? I mean other than the path we took through the industrial revolution, western civilization, etc. that apparently has brought us to the brink of extinction at least a half dozen times that I can recall in my lifetime.

The number of alien civilizations is 0 according to the best data we have. The number of intelligent civilizations is 1, ours, based on the best data we have. Any other response veers off into philosophy and politics.

Wow, check out that P/E ratio.

End to end encryption is fine, except it has to be decrypted at some point. And wherever that is, you now no longer control the encryption. If you CC somebody on an encrypted email, that person can forward the email unencrypted to whomever he wants, and you can't control that.

Email was never designed to be a secure transport. That's why it's so popular. That, and the fact that it's distributed, or supposed to be.

These are people in the second camp applying a healthy dose of confirmation bias to reduce the cognitive dissonance. They'll sing a similar tune when the next set of words are decreed to be verboten.

You mean those people over there, the racists.

It's amazing to watch cult behavior at work.

Things certainly were different when it took a certain type of person to get online. Having to learn the Hayes command set filtered out a lot of people. Similar to how a ham license required a Morse code test.

I wonder how much improved the Internet would be if you could get kicked off for misusing apostrophes or confusing "their/they're".