The Myanmar story was definitely the worst (Mark Z + callow execs being willfully ignorant as Facebook clearly inflamed ethnic cleansing there and caused many deaths).
Later in the book, the China story was a close second. In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.
Tons of other weird/bad/embarrassing stuff too. The author, a member of the core executive team, was seriously complicit but redeemed herself in my view with this no-holds-barred account of the complete lack of ethics up top.
In general a damning portrait of the executive team as just not giving a shit about anything except for growth and willing to actively participate in dictatorship in order to make it happen.
I want to point out a few things here because people are going to split hairs about definitions and other irrelevancies
I don't know exactly how they do this in non-english languages, but english speakers have complained that all the posts they see from friends are the most abrasive and inflammatory. Specifically those. So it's not just "a neutral platform". If this was happening in Myanmar then of course it inflamed ethnic tensions
Second, Facebook's barging into emerging markets - with Free Basics, they sent letters on behalf of Indians to the telecom regulatory body (including net neutrality advocates who were very much against it). Facebook in Myanmar would not even be a thing in the first place were it not for their larger internet.org initiative. (I don't dislike "social media". It's fine to connect with people, but not the way FB does it) Whether we ought to have these services wholly decentralized or some sort of KYC system - dunno. But FB (and specifically Zuckerberg) are just bad faith actors
But you're not addressing my fact it was artificial ranked ordering. Also, Facebook (per Sarah Wynn Williams) was told about this and they did nothing about it
> In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.
That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.
It wasn't just Chinese data, though. It was access to all customer data. They also built tools specifically for searching and filtering that data that they told congress were impossible to build...
My biggest takeaway from the book is Zuck is such a brat who got so grumpy and pouted so much when other facebook employees on the private jet beat him at board games that they set up an internal plan to always let him win.
Sheryl Sandberg comes off poorly too, calling her assistant "Little Doll," beckoning her to sleep in her lap during private jet trips and buying her lingerie on business trips. Then on another trip she tried to get a different employee to come cuddle and sleep in the jet bed with her and pouted when this person declined, saying the first assistant always would so why does this person have a problem with it. She also has racist comments, talking about how she likes to always hire Filipino nannies because they are "service oriented."
We can't give up our power just because the situation is difficult. We need to assert as much power as possible. Organize; talk openly about the problem; coordinate plans for voting (yes, I know its early). Pressure politicians. There are things individuals can do, right now. No, it's not enough on our own. But if we don't act as individuals, then we really are screwed.
Republican ID is at around 27% of the electorate and on a downward trend; his support from independents who are much larger than either Dems or Reps is much less.
We're presumably accepting the premise that the country is going to "go rogue internationally and risk going to war with Europe, Canada, or South America?".
Would it similarly have been a horrible thing in your mind if someone had shot Vladimir Putin in January 2014?
Well, ignoring the moral questions around it, here's a good reason.
Trump isn't really the problem. He's the figurehead. The problem is the people who are backing him and using him to further their agendas. If he were to suddenly stop being president, for whatever reason, it wouldn't solve any of the issues we're having.
In fact, it might make them worse. If Trump vanished, Vance is president and Vance is, if anything, even worse than Trump if for no other reason than Vance is actually smart.
Vance would almost certainly not be interested in owning Greenland. In fact, it's very unlikely that anyone but Trump would be, owning Greenland simply isn't all that interesting.
Of course Vance might be worse in other ways, but he doesn't seem all that into starting wars.
The push for Greenland is coming from factions other than Vance, and those factions would remain. I'd expect Vance to go along with their desire just as much as Trump is. Why wouldn't he?
The US taking over Greenland is essentially an entirely new idea that hasn't really been broadcast before by anyone but Trump. This strongly suggests that the idea doesn't originate from any powerful "faction".
The major proponent appears to be Stephen Miller. There are a lot of reports that the tech bro contingent is eager for it as well.
It's not at all true that this is an entirely new idea, though. Greenland's status has been a topic of discussion ever since (at least) World War 2. What's new is that the administration is signalling that they are willing to actually invade. In the past, that was only discussed in terms of war plans should the US mainland be attacked or there's another world war. Purchasing it, though, is a pretty old idea.
> It's not at all true that this is an entirely new idea, though
I meant entirely new for the current generation of people running the white house, not that it's literally never ever been discussed before. The people who were previously interested in this are mostly long dead.
The purchase of Greenland was most recently the topic of intermittent but somewhat serious discussions between 1940-1955. After the cold war the US government largely lost interest in Greenland, pulled out almost all staff and closed all but one base. If some kind of Greenland acquisition had any significant backing, the US would at least have maintained a more significant presence there.
> The major proponent appears to be Stephen Miller. There are a lot of reports that the tech bro contingent is eager for it as well
It's really really hard to imagine Trump's successor being particularly interested in pursuing Greenland, especially since they wouldn't even have a complete term to work with. There's no indication that some powerful faction exists that'd be particularly interested in Greenland, and there's no obvious reason as to why such a faction would exist.
Unfortunately, this didn't get a lot of attention, but they also threw a flash-bang grenade and tear gas at a car filled with six children. A six month old baby had to get CPR from her mom. Two kids were hospitalized.
None of this is acceptable. And their overtly violent behavior has nothing to do with enforcing the law.
This has always been true of gas vehicles as well. They're banned for not having some safety feature or otherwise complying with FMVSS or some other regularity body, not because they are "affordable".
The US gave $7500 per car sold in the US to any manufacturer, with the "Buy American" restriction added only in the last two years of the policy.
I'm also curious to hear your source for the subsidies - from what I can see China has spent anywhere from 3x to 5x propping up the domestic EV industry as the US has over the last 15 years. The US had Tesla which almost went bankrupt multiple times despite the subsidies; China has a dozen EV manufacturers, half of whom are on life support now that the government is withdrawing subsidies.
The Chinese spent more money on an absolute basis, yes. They gave less per car, but built > 10x as many cars, so your number of 3-5x sounds about right.
The best source IMO is the commission that came up with the European countervailing duty of 17%.
I think that it is reasonable for the magnitude of Chinese subsidies to be cheaper per-car. Even ignoring any arguments about purchasing power and government aid, I would expect China to spend less per-car simply because the foundational technical problems in building a good consumer EV had already been addressed by the time they got started.
I'm not trying to attack the impressiveness of the Chinese EV industry, because it's going to be an important part of the future. But saying that Chinese EVs are banned in the US purely because they are too good is incomplete. A big part of why they are banned, and why the US and China have such a frosty relationship, is because Chinese trade tactics are not fair to non-state-backed competitors.
Chinese EV development started in 2001. They started from a clean sheet.
Your point about fairness is interesting because that's a position the US has given up on, especially since 2025. The European EV tariffs of 17/34 percent are fair-ish. The 100% American tariffs never were
That is insane. Smaller vehicles are safer at a social level because they do less damage when they hit something - especially a pedestrian. Regulatory bodies should be encouraging them for that reason alone (let alone all the others).
Manufacturers might prioritise the safety of their customers, and people are likely to care more about their own safety than that of others, but regulators should be looking at overall public safety which is definitely improved by encouraging small cars.
The regulatory bodies aren't specifically discriminating against smaller vehicles, they're discriminating against vehicles that haven't proven safety to passengers in crash tests acceptable to the FMVSS. The vehicles may or may not also be missing mandatory internal safety features like airbags in all the right spots, etc.
If Chinese EV manufacturers put their vehicles through these tests, include all the mandatory features, and strip out the forbidden telemetry (certain manufacturers are banned in the US for reporting to the CCP- most notably but not exclusive to Huawei) then they too can be sold here.
If anything is preventing Chinese EVs from the US market, it's almost certainly their electronic components.
This is likely confounded by the dealership model. Dealers have practically zero incentive to sell affordable cars, and especially not EVs that they’ll make almost no servicing money on. Some dealers also stock only a handful of EVs (or none) so they may not even have them to sell in the first place.
It’d be nice if affordable EV models were available from direct to consumer companies. If one could go online and buy a $22k electric hatchback that shows up in your driveway with zero haggling, it’s difficult to imagine it not selling well.
Suppliers really hate working with Costco. They're slow to pay, allow for only small margins, and often need too high of a percentage of a businesses revenue, all of which is not friendly towards suppliers.
Not true at all. Costco uses the industry-standard Net 60 for supplier payment.
Companies have to be fairly large to be Costco suppliers. What suppliers lose in margin they more than make up for in scale. It's better to sell 10 million at 5% margin than 1 million at 10% margin.
And they don't require a % of supplier's business revenue as that would be illegal in the U.S. Most of the products found at Costco are generally found at other retailers, just in smaller packages or as different SKUs.
People could save so much money if they bought used instead of new more often, especially toys. It's crazy how much garbage we produce basically just because we literally don't share our toys.
In the grand scheme of things, toys are cheap and kids are huge influences on parents. I don't think pinching pennies on toys will change much unless that toy is an iPhone.
I have come away from Christmas with almost the opposite conclusion. I have 3 young kids, and I notice almost an inverse correlation between the number of toys around and how contently they play.
The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.
Toys/gifts are important, but you'll find most of what you need (baby toys to bicycles) for pennies on the dollar at your local yard sale, estate sale, or free as hand-me-downs from an older family.
I would hesitate to include the retail prices for these kinds of goods to a CPI type metric because the price are incredibly flexible.
So many that I can't play with all of them, most of them are broken, and I don't have time to fix them, so I get really depressed because they aren't usable when I want to play with them. Now I'm trying to get rid of most of them.
Mostly sarcastic, but I don't think it's a hot take to realize that the curtain has shifted substantially over the decades in terms of how to raise a child.
Why would you need to replace the batteries? Do they fail outright at around 10 years, become unsafe, or do they just lose capacity?
Curious!
Even if they're at 50% capacity, they would still work, right? But if there are other considerations, especially safety ones, then that would definitely be a consideration. I'm not sure where to learn about this type of thing.
At which point if you're short on capacity (but who knows how your demand might shift over a decade) it's not like you need to replace the original batteries to get that 20% back, you will probably be able to just expand the pack to bring the capacity up.
We have a certain amount of "willpower" that can overcome motivational barriers. This willpower is limited, though. It's very helpful to have clear guidance on where to allocate this very limited resources, especially in situations where people are otherwise struggling.
All of which is to say -- these exhortations can play a useful role. :)
It's also worth noting that willpower in general is constantly being whittled down by how stressful and, for lack of better term, fucking annoying modern life is. I'm reminded of a quote from my favorite article from Ed Zitron:
> In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
And I think one of those psycho-social consequences we're not discussing is everyone is just... fucking annoyed now, constantly, about shit that it doesn't feel right to really complain about. Like, you plus or minus live on your phone, and I'm very much including myself in that statement. Every time you get logged out of an app you use every day to, for example, board your morning train, or park your car, or have to reset a password to pay your power bill, just like, all of that? Every time your day is interrupted with stupid bullshit from Modern Life takes a tiny bit of that energy, and I dunno about everyone reading this, I have a quite well managed and streamlined life, and I still have just... dozens of these. Every single day. I can't fathom being one of the folks who ISN'T as well versed in tech as I am, existing for them must be utter HELL.
And that's the essentials, that's not even going into how most tech products now are constantly begging for your attention, for your engagement, trying to pluck the strings of your psyche into making you angry, or horny, or whatever. Engage with platforms, buy these products, watch 9 TV shows so you're not out of the loop, you've been added to an SMS spam group, and everyone is replying to it saying they're not interested, on and on and on.
Sorry this turned into more of a rant than I really envisioned but yeah. I can easily comprehend a day where I try and go to my gym, and the fucking app doesn't work right and I can't get in, and I just quit because I've already solved 20 fucking captchas today and I simply lack the energy to do another, to help train some goddamned AI, for a company I don't know, you know?
I just got a new phone which meant I had to read-login and set up every app and account.
It was an intense deluge of SMS codes, flipping back and forth to the Authenticator, dismissing welcome popup modals, security email notifications.
I was frazzled by the multitasking and can only imagine how hard it would have been for some senior citizen that was badgered into updating their device.
I wouldn’t phrase it that way. Relying on willpower is a recipe for failure. Humans generally don’t have enough willpower, it goes for most things, even when you don’t have strong physiological forces involved. The key to getting a diet to work is in figuring out how to not require willpower, which means thinking about it differently, forming new habits. Stress and social environment also need attention or they will steamroll your goals.
This goes for coping with a lot of executive function problems and disorders.
Part of how I have to manage my rather severe ADHD is specifically crafting an environment that's as ADHD friendly as possible, much to my wife's dismay.
That means nothing can ever be hidden away or out of sight, otherwise I will immediately forget it exists. It means every bill must be on autopay, or it will not get paid. It also means living as minimally as possible, for me. Even something as "simple" to a neurotypical like washing dishes or doing laundry is a seemingly impossible mountain for me to climb. I solve that by owning as little as possible, and I also remove choices by, for example, just owning multiples of the same exact outfit.
The moment any sort of friction or context switching is involved in a task, I am going to fail, so I have to architect my life in a way that reduces friction as much as possible.
I also have ADHD and i also find living as minimally as possible very helpful. Could you elaborate on more of those tactics that work for you? I am also curious how you apply this to your work life
Basically things that eliminate friction. I wear only slip on shoes because having to tie & untie is friction. I replaced our kitchen cupboards with those glass window ones so I can see whats inside every cabinet without opening it. I have multiple laundry bins, so I actually don't put clothes away in a dresser when done. I just leave them in the bin, pull out what I'm going to wear, and then have separate bin(s) for dirty. Eliminates a huge friction point (folding & hanging) when it comes to doing laundry.
For work, that's mostly just luck. I'm a solo sysadmin for a non-tech company, and I work from home so I have a great deal of freedom. Outside of interruptions for help desk level tickets/emails (which suck and do throw off my flow), no one really oversees what I do and I set my own deadlines for the most part so I can work when and however it suits me to take advantage of days where I have good flow state.
Thanks. I'll also add a couple of my tactics for other ADHDrs out there: I only have black same socks, underwear and T-shirts so I never have to bothered by them. I replaced my coffee machine with a simple French press, so the cleaning and maintenance is quick and easy. I add every fixed-date event to my calendar so that I get a notification when something is due and don't have to remember it. I write everything down and make lists so I keep track of stuff. I try to reduce all the fluff from my life to simplify it, and I am extremely weary of getting new things, because each thing comes with responsibilities such as maintenance, cleaning, storing and of course using it. I basically want daily stuff to leave me the fuck alone and I feel like this frees up a lot of mental resources for me
This has more to do with hunger requiring a tremendous amount of willpower to ignore rather than fat people having less willpower than people of average weight.
If you eat poorly, those foods will not satiate and the "hunger" (it's not the hunger of a body starved of calories) persists. Eat for sustenance and the hunger you may feel will be different.
I also know that if I overeat, I have a strong urge to keep feeding (more chips, more pizza, more chipsahoy). Whereas when I eat a proper meal, I'm fine when the eating of that meal ends.
I hope you realize that what works for you and your body doesn’t work for everyone. Your experience is not universal. Your body chemistry and genetics are not universal.
We can argue about whether or not punching yourself in the face will hurt, universally and for all, or we can acknowledge that arguing about this is picking the wrong level of information with which to take issue.
Kids often still need to learn that punching yourself in the face hurts.
Curiously, if I'm busy I don't get hungry. I don't eat before going out dirt biking, and don't feel hungry at all until after the riding is done and the bikes loaded on the trailer and turning on to the road home.
It feels very different. Depressed people lack the motivation/energy to start exercise, fat people seem more in line with addiction in not being inclined to overcome short term craving for more feed.
While at a certain level of abstraction you can reduce both to A -> !B -> C, that generalization seems to obfuscate specific important differences that impact pathways to treatment. Craving is not the same as lacking energy. Craving, while subversive, energizes, depression does not.
The entirety of this thread is people thinking life is easy. Kill yourself or get over it, and I mean in a sentimental way.. (Not literally)
The only thing that helped my depression, apathy and executive dysfunction was realizing I was going to rot anyways, I was never going to be happy, so I may as well start the startup, go on runs, and succeed.
Let go of the expectation you will want to/be in the mood or feel good from it
My suspicion as someone with lifelong weight struggles and having tried GLP-1 medication: overweight people require more willpower to lose or maintain weight relative to those of normal weight.
So the advise or admonishment of the normally weighted that losing weight "just requires willpower" is true but facile.
If we were to medically induce a constant feeling of hunger and insatiability into a person of normal weight, I'm sure they could keep the weight off, but would find that their willpower is highly depleted.
There are medications that cause increased appetite and weight gain (ex: some bipolar depression medications, prednisolone). This effect is so pronounced, that if a doctor sees the patient not gaining weight, they will suspect non-compliance and have to rule it out. Of course, some patients use extreme diet and exercise (willpower) to avoid these effects, but a normal person accustomed to expending a normal amount of willpower to maintain weight will find themselves gaining.
Meta is far worse than most people realize.