The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

This would then block the future as depicted in Minority Report.

"Hi there! Would you like to buy another [highly personal and embarrassing item]?"

There's a relief.

I visited Activision in the mid 1980s, when it was a shoe-string operation. Games for the C64 were coming along and quite impressive, including Little Computer People, which was running on a desk over a weekend to check for stability.

Seems it's all about IP these days.

They pay for it. I don't beg the supermarket for food, I don't beg my landlord for an apartment, I don't beg my ISP for Internet.

Used needles are dangerous and sharps containers are cheap compared to dealing with a used needle stick.

If 2 people a day needed it, it's probably worth it.

They're coming for the upper bands which were available to Ham Radio enthusiasts. FCC doesn't care about us anymore.

Such a useless post and reflecting lack of actual knowledge of Fry's.

20 some years ago I bought my first laptop (still have it) at Fry's in Sunnyvale. It was still in the little grocery location, the shelves (and even former refrigerated goods) aisles has resistor and capacitor models sticking out of the floor. It's long since become some health club or other business after Fry's moved to a big store a couple blocks away.

In the hey day of the stores on E. Arques, E. Brokaw and E. Hamilton had about 40 or 60 cashiers, the queue moved pretty swiftly and they didn't take American Express. I tried to buy my first digital camera there and found that out. Went over to Wolf Camera to pick it up. Anyway, over the past few years I've visited the number of cashiers has dwindled down to only a handful. Few floor walkers, where once they were all over you, asking if you needed any help. Last visit I didn't see one at all.

At the end Fry's probably only had a dozen people working in each of their giant stores, a far cry from the hundreds they employed a decade or two before. The downsizing has been happening over time. Weep not for droves of employees losing their jobs, weep for the few who worked in desolate stores, with unstocked shelves who knew the writing was on the wall. They've been circling the drain for years.

The main hurt here is losing a chain which once carried just about everything the home hobbyist/maniac could ever want. That's been going on with the closure of Weird Stuff and Halted Specialties. I'll have to look to see if there's anyone left who sells components, wire, cable, solder, special tools, etc. I'd say they failed to plan well and we've known the eventual source of stuff is going to be our mailbox.

Additionally, they were looking to prevent cold symptoms in a hospital. I don't think very many people go to the hospital for colds (whereas COVID-19 patients are filling hospitals to capacity), these people are going to be exposed from their co-habitants, the people they come across running errands, and people they socialize with.

I clicked the paper, it's not formatted like an academic paper, and is not a review in the most commonly used sense of the word. It is a small selection of papers that agree or can be twisted to agree with the author of the review.

A philosopher might as well be a strawman. I didn't watch the YouTube debate, but I read the paper, that's why I gave it a review of terrible rigor. I have worked in labs, edited papers that were published (not on epidemiology), and regularly read scientific papers. That was the worst paper I've ever seen.

Let's start with their review of the first paper.

Mask and no mask groups were formed using block
randomization of subjects within their respective job
categories: nurses, doctors, and comedical personnel.
Those in the mask group wore a face mask while on
hospital property serving in their role as a health care
worker. The hospital-standard disposable surgical
mask MA-3 (Ozu Sangyo, Tokyo, Japan) was used.
Subjects in the no mask group refrained from wearing
a face mask while on hospital property unless required
to do so as part of their job duties (eg, surgical nurse in
the operating room).

So the no-mask group is still wearing masks. The mask group was not fully compliant, and that's based on self-reporting, and their exposures were not measured.

Additionally, it does not seem to be peer-reviewed. The PDF version of the paper http://philosophers-stone.info... Has a broken link to where it's supposedly published, and I can't seem to find any results for the DOI reported, so I can't see where it's purportedly peer reviewed. If you search Google Scholar for the paper, you can find it's hosted on philosopher-stone.info which lists the first article as "HARRY VOX EPIC RANT â" THE JEW MEDIA IS TRICKING THE GOY INTO TAKING THE JEWISH NEEDLE". Is that the site who did the peer review?

> Contrary to what you apparently think, Parler did moderate in a nonpartisan manner.

no. https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

> So you probably think Facebook should be removed from the Internet because their moderation proved to be completely ineffective.

I mean, it'd be nice.

> But I have an alternative for you. Instead of being short-sighted and failing to see where censorship of your political opponents leads, please use your brain to think about where similar situations from world history have lead in the past when this has occurred.

Germans have a ban of a lot of type of content and they seem to be doing fine. I'd love to see posts you made after sex workers were deplatformed due to FOSTA and SESTA.

> did the silencing of a political opposition tend to move the nation's political system toward democracy, or did it move toward authoritarianism?

Trump isn't silent, he could give a press conference at any point in time and every single network will cover it. He just can't use Twitter and Facebook. Trump is going to get coverage anywhere he speaks, by no means has he been silenced.

They have a very limited placeholder website with no functionality. I wouldn't consider that back up.

Yes, it was because Trump joined and had nothing to do with it being used to coordinate an insurrection at the capitol.

It also has nothing to do with them heavily moderating anything but the extreme right views.

It's because Trump joined.

That review is done by a physicist and the rigor is terrible. If this is your best evidence, then it speaks a lot to the quality of the debate.

The 'debate' is 100 minutes long, and the argument against masks is by the same person you just quoted, the one with a very clear agenda and a very low quality analysis against a Ph.D in philosophy?

Vaping while wearing a mask is done by people who produce enormous clouds. Have you seen what they do without a mask? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

People shouldn't be sneezing into their hands at all, ever. I have allergies and I have sneezed many times into my mask. Not all sneezes leak snot everywhere, and if they are snotty, then snot in the hand is not good either, people should sneeze into their elbows.

In the US they can make reasonable accommodations like allowing you to send a shopping list and for them to bring it out for curbside pickup at no charge.

They do not have to allow you to put all their customers and staff at risk because you can't be bothered to give a shit about the health of people around you.