Water pipes, phone lines, and electrical lines are built into your house too and you're not usually forced to sign up for the monthly services if you don't want them. Fiber would be the same way, the lines would be in the ground before the buildings are erected, and you'd be able to sign up for service if you want it.
You don't typically call publicly owned infrastructure a monopoly. Public utility companies are created to prevent exactly what's going in broadband internet service.
If the city owned the lines, it would put all ISP's on a level playing field and enable broadband competition for the first time. They wouldn't be able overcharge you 10,000% mark up for the price of bandwidth anymore, and they'd have to compete based on the quality of their service.
Typically, no. But it meets the literal definition of one.
My concern is that government often does not have any incentive to innovate and often operates extremely inefficient due to bureaucracy.
As far as opening up for competing ISPs I'm all in favor of that.
However, I would be much more in favor of a building tenant being the owner of the last mile line and contracting out work to a 3rd party company. That way the tenant has the option to lease or purchase outright. Let the tenant decide the level of quality and the price they are willing to pay.
With taxes and the gov't providing it you take away choice and force people to pay for things they may not need. Or if they want to pay more for higher quality, they don't really have that option either.
If the city owned the lines, do now have to fight [concerned parent] on getting internet upgraded to 2gbit/s in the future because billy will download porn/music/guns?
> leap frog to mars rather than sending a shuttle through earths atmosphere.
But you still have to get the human through Earth's atmosphere and out of orbit anyways. Once you're out of Earth's orbit you might as well coast all the way to Mars because landing on the Moon doesn't gain you anything.
I really don't feel sorry for anyone who work(s)(ed) for Zynga. This company milked the whole "social gaming" bubble for every drop it was worth. Every game they made was a clone of this or that, and they used every spam trick in the book to get more clicks, and every single employee at that company knew 100% full well that they were part of a modern day ponzi scheme that would blow up once Facebook become uncool.
This is so incredibly wrong in so many ways. Many developers were seduced into social games because people loved them and it seemed like a new frontier and a new market with shorter development cycles and interesting challenges. It is easy to have great hindsight but a few years ago the game industry looked very different. Zynga has had a few games be reviewed quite well, but nobody ever seems to remember them.[1][2]
As a former Zynga employee that came in through acquisition, I find it repulsive that people assume we are all responsible for the poor decisions of a few at the top. Most of us worked our asses off to try to make something awesome, but ended up having to compromise in the worst possible ways to satisfy the top brass or poorly understood metrics.
It's easy to say 'Oh sure, I work for the Evil Empire, but my division makes interesting things which people actually quite like...'
...but then you've got to be prepared to take it on the chin when someone says, "Yes, but that whole company is Evil, which, kind of by association includes you."
When you work for someone, their reputation does, absolutely, 100% reflect on you personally regardless of what your role in the company is (to some degree, obviously).
Just food for thought.
If you don't like it, don't work for people you don't want your personal reputation associated with.
When you work for someone, their reputation does, absolutely, 100% reflect on you personally regardless of what your role in the company is (to some degree, obviously).
I don't understand this rationale at all. You are not your company. Calling someone evil because you dislike their company (I'm not defending Zynga, but they're the #firstworldproblems of "evil") is incredibly sophomoric.
You've basically got a very mild variation on the Wernher Von Braun thing going on here.
Engineer of prolific impact and talent, working for the worst possible people, indirectly exploiting people in the worse possible way to do shit work that is related to his pure and commendable goals and interests. The engineer feels as though he is powerless to resist the the exploitation that is demanded by his employer. Eventually the bad guy employers go down in flames to everyone's delight, but the engineer still has the technical chops to make himself valued.
The question, does the previous employer reflect poorly on the engineer?
To be honest, Von Braun is one of those ambiguous figures in history for me. I don't really know how I feel about him. However, the fact that he is ambiguous at all means that I have to admit to myself that his affiliations during the war do tarnish what I think of him. I don't think it is possible for that not to be the case.
Ex-Zynga software engineer? Obviously the ambiguity is not going to be "is this guy a war criminal or not?" But would there be any ambiguity of any sort? Yeah, I think for me there would be.
I don't think an engineer of any caliber is evaluated in a vacuum, past employers shape how we view them, for better or worse. This (particularly how I feel about Von Braun) is something I have thought about hard in the past when considering what I want to do as an engineer.
d : a chartered commercial organization or medieval trade guild
e : an association of persons for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise
You are your company. That's the very definition of the word. One might be given a dispensation to the evil-by-association if you were working at Burger King because that's the only job you could get.
But you're presumably an incredibly smart and capable (and thus sought after) tech professional who could no doubt have placed his labor wherever he chose.
If you are the company, but the company is not you (assuming other employees and shareholders), but the company is a person itself, does this mean that you and the company are conjoined siblings?
I totally understand. Most major "evils" happen through a combination of very small steps towards the cliff. It takes a very vigilant stance, permeated through the company structure to prevent this fall into the abyss. In this light, constantly questioning the ethics of your employer company, as a whole, is healthy.
There's something so particularly American about gaining so much of your identity from your job. American's are so defined by what work they do.
I am not my employer. My employer pays my wage and that's it. I'm not interested in joining a cult. I'm earning a paycheck.
This is not to say I would feel comfortable working for a company like Zynga. Absolutely not. But I also don't doubt there are many people at Zynga who really do not like the company's direction. Don't blame the soldiers for the fault of the generals.
It's not about your employer being your identity; It's about empathy and whether your choices improve or worsen others' lives.
> Don't blame the soldiers for the fault of the generals.
Since you apparently like military analogies, I'll quote one of the Nuremberg Principles, which---as far as I am aware---are not an American invention:
"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
This is a pretty sensible principle, because it's the soldiers who enable the generals. Similarly, if you're a developer (unless you're really terrible) and you work at Zynga or any other company, you're enabling your employer.
You are misinterpreting the Nuremberg Principles: They didn't charge the rank and file of the German army for the crimes committed by the various officers and SS members.
All that was decided at Nuremberg was that if you have committed a crime, the fact that you have been ordered to by your superiors does not innocent you.
So we agree that anyone who did the spammy deeds at Zynga is "evil", whether their boss asked them to or not. But that does not make everyone else in the company (from the backend developer to the cantine lady) evil.
Zynga may have lost all it's glamour and has a bad reputation now but the same goes for Facebook. I don't think employees should be blamed for the decisions of their heads.
In no way, should this be regarded like military service where your job causes fatalities. For me, as long as you're doing something you enjoy with people you like and developing a skill set, that's reason enough to work at a company. Some people work at jobs they hate all their lives because they need to live and support their families. If you have a career where you can work with smart people and do what you like, you're already pretty lucky.
If the company does something you believe in, wow. You're really lucky. How many people get to do that in the world?
That's so true. In the Eastern philosophy, your work is one part of you, may be a big one, but just a part of you. Your inner being, inner peace is of greater importance. Your friends, family and love matters.
I hear what you are saying but it is NOT simply hindsight. Many of us from the beginning were very critical of sort of games developed by Zynga, it is definitely not a case of looking back. This is not to say that all the developers were there to rip off previous games and create digital crack but Zynga is what it is and we did say it from the beginning.
>they were part of a modern day ponzi scheme that would blow up once Facebook become uncool.
but isn't this like 80% of silicon valley, at this point? I mean even google is now trying to become facebook; and the rest of us are just trying to get acquired by one of the giants, or trying to sell something to the Engineers who are in one of those groups.
I mean, seriously, glass houses; be careful with them rocks.
What? Even assuming that Google is trying to become Facebook and that everyone is "trying to get acquired", why do those situations preclude trying to create something that you believe has actual value (vs the complete, blatant ripoffs and spammy crap that Zynga pushes). You're free to disagree that Zynga's games _are_ spammy ripoffs, but you didn't seem to take issue with that part of the parent comment's post, and saying that the rest of the Valley is engaged in the same behavior is downright silly.
>Even assuming that Google is trying to become Facebook and that everyone is "trying to get acquired", why do those situations preclude trying to create something that you believe has actual value[?]
well, assuming you honestly believe that facebook creates enough real value to justify it's valuation, sure, you are right. My take on the matter is that it's myspace 2.0. I mean, no question, it's worth something, but not nearly what it's valued at right now. I personally have a very difficult time believing that anyone who was working in the industry during the first dot-com can honestly believe that facebook is a sustainable business.
The only people I know who honestly espouse the view that facebook is fairly valued are facebook employees. (Interestingly, I know no facebook employees who were working during the first dot com.)
I mean, maybe these people all really believe exactly what their paymasters want them to believe? Personally, I find that thought far more creepy than the idea that they are just faking it because that's what the employer requires. Certainly there is some selection effect; you are more likely to apply for a facebook job if you believe the company is going somewhere? but it's weird. I remember one guy who is probably the staunchest facebook advocate I know now, he was extremely cynical about facebook before he got the job. Of course, he's also pretty young, too young to have worked through the first dot-com.
The weird thing is that I know a bunch of people who work for defense contractors, too... a place where you'd expect a certain level of brainwashing. None of those people believe their companies are doing good things for the world. Not one. I mean, they generally think the work is really interesting, but they don't believe at all in the end goals. (and I do have some conservative friends... it's just that none of them work for defense contractors.)
But then, what do I know? I find that what I consider to be 'spammy crap' is a pretty good heuristic for what most people want. I don't use facebook because it consists almost entirely of what I would call spammy crap. Spammy crap and baby pictures.
I think this as a terrible way to look at people and the world. People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family. Social gaming isn't a "ponzi scheme" -- you can think its a waste of time, you can think Zynga's corporate policies were bad, but at the end of the day a bunch of people who just wanted to make money building things just lost their jobs.
I'm not so sure they deserve the sympathy though. Nearly every game released for the past several years has been a literal clone of another game- usually so wholesale, so completely devoid of any innovation or new content, that it was indistinguishable to the lay man.
When you're literally being told to copy another company to create your product, so brashly? You honestly deserve what's coming to you. I'm okay if you try to innovate at least a little, but they never did. They just used their platform and size to bully smaller companies(and sometimes, stupidly, larger companies like EA) into irrelevance.
I'm tempted to agree with you. "They're just trying to support their family" can only be an acceptable excuse up to a point. I don't know if Zynga reached that point or not. I just think it's important to keep in mind that you can only do so much evil before "providing for your family" is no longer a valid excuse.
Of course, this all sounds ridiculous in comparison to "real" evil, like mass murder. So I'm also tempted to disagree ;).
> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.
No, these people were seduced by promises of a big payday for copying other people's work -- plain and simple. There are so many tech and gaming companies to work for in Silicon Valley that I just don't believe it's possible to pick the most egregious one simply by accident.
Zynga has poached a lot of talent from the real game industry. People don't need to resign and join Zynga - it's a choice they've made. And with the requirements Zynga had - even if you had been unemployed and got an offer from Zynga you could get another one everywhere else: they had not been exactly scrapping the bottom of the barrel, quite the opposite.
I'm curious as to how were they able to poach. Money, equity, working conditions, all of these, none of these...?
Working conditions in some of the big companies in the real games industry sound pretty bad to me, but I am only going on lazy reading of articles like "EA spouse", I have no experience in the industry itself. I think I'd be pretty outraged to be on a Farmville death march, for sure.
I'd guess equity and money. Zynga does not seem to have conditions different from EA (not surprisingly as it's managed by the same people) and EA is not really able to poach somebody with its working conditions.
> People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family.
That may apply to the administrative staff, or people in sales and marketing. Maybe even managers.
But not to the developers that had options and chose money over ethics. It doesn't make them "evil", but it puts them very low on the list of people to feel sorry for.
you are guaranteed nothing important is only stored locally.
That's what scares me the most. Unless I have the option of not using Google's infrastructure, and can run my own "ChromeOS Storage/Auth Server" on a computer of my choice, then I'd never trust the OS. Google is expecting a surreal amount of trust that no single corporation should be given.
This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. Everyone knew that once Homeland Security was created it would become a sprawling, pervasive, and never-ending drain on the country. Eliminating it now is probably out of the question because it would be substantially more costly (politically and economically) than keeping it running.
Basically they've taken the script of the TV series "24" and used it to turn the entire government into a giant anti-terrorism organization that cannot locate or defend the country against any terrorists. But year after year the programs are always "underfunded" and so the bureaucracy grows and gets worse at doing its job... It's a perfect storm of stupidity and ignorance that has no benefits other than keeping the system going for no reason whatsoever.
this is completely of topic, i know. But could not not think about Obamacare when reading about "This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. "
... I would also add to that: undemocratic.
Yes, conflate healthcare policy (that in many ways is fundamentally different) with Homeland Security. I apologize for my sarcasm, but this just seems like knee jerk partisanship.
In addition, we are not a democracy (per se), but a constitutional republic, and as such, our elected representatives decide public policy. In the case of Obamacare, Democrats had been overwhelmingly elected the prior year (and Obama ran with healthcare reform as a campaign pledge). So, I don't quite see how it is "undemocratic" either.
I think the analogy is perfectly valid. Regardless of the goals of a policy, its implementation via bureaucracy can still be so hopelessly complicated that it's a net drain on society.
It reminds me of a quote I once heard, possibly by Ron Paul (though I am not sure), that went along the lines of "Politicians mention 'tax reform' all the time. But unless they're talking about simplifying the tax code, they're not talking about tax reform."
The DHS and Obamacare both tacked on additional rules to an already overcomplicated and opaque set of systems, rather than streamline the underlying systems and their interactions. Our political process makes adding bureaucratic complexity easier than removing it. For under-regulated areas (like anti-trust laws in the early 20th century), this can solve problems. But otherwise it's more likely to make the underlying problems worse.
Obamacare and DHS removed plenty of regulations streamlining many things. What people really complain about is regulating new things not the overall complexity.
Don't jump to conclusion, both side of the establishment have been contributing to bloated bureaucracies, Obamacare is just one of the latest (and the one I last read of).
My undemocatric comment was around bureaucracies in general, not obamacare specifically.
Why stop at Obamacare? It's much, much smaller than Medicare, Social Security, the US armed forces, DHS (+ all the related bureaus), the Federal Reserve, IRS, US Treasury... essentially the entire US government is a collection of dysfunctional bureaucracies that extract wealth from citizens in the form of taxes, give it back to corporations in the form of subsidies and tax refunds, and give citizens next to nothing in return.
That's quite a lot to "eliminate". Granted there seems to be quite some overlap there. Where and what programs would we want to specifically cut? Doesn't congress appropriate a budget for DHS? They should be able to make changes long term, right?
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