You're conflating market economies (that have been around since basically forever and that no one except the most hardcore anarcho-primitivists are attacking) and modern day capitalism (which has been around since the Industrial Revolution and is characterized by its lack of upper limit on wealth accumulation).
Sure, fair enough, I'm conflating the two for the sake of simplicity, and frankly because the idea of a "limit on wealth accumulation" is a fairly muddy distinction. (A limit placed by whom? enforced how? etc. Even with soft limits this would still be called "capitalism" would it not?)
I guarantee that most people, including the the person I'm responding to, do not make a distinction between market economies and capitalism in the manner you just did. He's talking about Star Trek utopia, nothing grounded in reality or history.
I like how absolutist you are about your guarantee. Almost as if even if I did say there's a way forward with changes to capitalism and not necessarily having "Star Trek utopia" is not even an option for me. Do you speak for others all the time?
Fines should not exist. Anything that gets punished by a fine is basically codeword for 'you can break that law if you're rich'. The most spectacular example being Facebook's stock rising after being fined for a few billions because it was pocket money for them.
Alternatively, if you really want to punish minor things, fines could be dependent on your income.
The Genghis Khan thing doesn't really say much - there's a statistical near-certainty that liteally everyone today is descended from every single human that 7000 years ago (whose line didn't die out obviously).
That’s assuming that the human population is well-mixed; it should be obvious that e.g. aboriginal Australians and native Americans will not have a common ancestor that close by
For example suppose you have two containers filled with elastically colliding particles. Over an arbitrarily long time you can say that each particle has surely collided with every other particle, however if each container is closed then clearly particles from one container will not have collided with those from the other container over any amount of time
Genealogical mixing and genetic mixing have little to do with each other - the pool is too diluted at these scales and there can be much local variation.
By the way, the fact that all of us share the exact same set of ancestors from a few thousand years ago isn't new, shocking or controversial, only the exact date is still subject do debate. You may find this link useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point
You're brushing off my point, why no selection on the allele? Why did they all die out? Easiest answer is it never made it.
The simulations are nice, and make a theoretical lower bound but a single remote tribe somewhere on earth would push it back tens of thousands of years.
DNA Sequence an Andaman islander and every bushman and Amazonian, then we'll see.
>You're brushing off my point, why no selection on the allele? Why did they all die out? Easiest answer is it never made it.
Evolution works in more complicated ways than the toy model of sickle-cell disease/malaria you've been taught in high school. Just having an edge in a particular situation is no guarantee for your alleles being selected. But even then, there could very well have been very little mixing while still everyone shares the same set of ancestors. Even a little mixing is enough.
>The simulations are nice, and make a theoretical lower bound but a single remote tribe somewhere on earth would push it back tens of thousands of years.
The subject is well-refined and the results are old news so I'm going to go on a limp and assume that the researchers who did the simulations know how to do their jobs and accounted for that possibility you described.
>DNA Sequence an Andaman islander and every bushman and Amazonian, then we'll see.
Ignoring the fact that the various peoples in the Amazon have not been isolated at all, or that the Adamans have been settled approximately in the time range of the estimated IAP and have known a few exchanges since, that's not how genealogy works. See, if a single outsider gets into the Adamans or Australia and starts having children with locals, and assuming the line doesn't die out, there's a statistical certainty that eventually every current living person in that territory will be descended from that outsider. Just one is enough. It doesn't matter that their genetic contribution is diluted to the point of being barely detectable. I invite you to read the link about IAP in more detail and do some rudimentary math on why it has to be the case (or more accurately, why the opposite is so statistically improbable as to be pretty much impossible).
There should be a moratorium on invoking evolution unless you're an evolutionary biologist. It's quite telling that whenever I read the word 'Darwin' on this site I immediately go 'aw shit, I'm not going to like this' and it never fails.
I don't think there's a single person today that knows all the rules. If you want to annoy any judge just ask about an interaction between 3+ cards involving Opalescence and Humility. On top of that the rules get more complex with every set, though they do attempt to cut things down. Fortunately for competitive play you only need to worry about a few hundred strong enough cards or so.
I don't have anything against online dating in principle, though I do find it pretty weird, but there's got to be a better way than relying on obscure matchmaking algorithms, shitty apps optimizing for engagement and your being single (remember, if you're not single you're not using the app), run by shady companies harvesting all of your data. Americans will always surprise me in their ability to surrender every single aspect of their life to megacorporations, even the most intimate and personal ones.
HNers are quick to sh*t on Microsoft, Google and all for telemetry but will gladly give all their most intimate info to these shady dating companies with no concerns for privacy.
I have a feeling that non-scientists see science as an invisible ethereal, platonic construct that's slowly being unveiled by hardy explorers, uh I mean scientists, until at last the whole of the Truth and nothing but the Truth fully shines in its enlightening splendor.
Except that's not how it works. In practice, science works by scientific consensus. What is true is what the community decides is true. The community can be convinced otherwise by contradicting evidence (or not) but the process of convincing is then subject to all the biases affecting our feeble human minds: it can be contradictory with other evidence, misinterpreted, misunderstood, deemed insufficient, coming from the wrong person, etc. It takes a lot of time for the consensus to evolve, and it's a rather a messy and political affair. There's often a running joke that a theory's acceptance depends on the old guard dying out and being replaced by the younger, more open-minded generation (relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works)
I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard?
In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.
I'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape navigator -> firefox -> chrome).
At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very confusing, and understanding what would work with which browser was a continual battle, and Microsoft had a good 15 years under its belt of attempting to make the web a windows only affair).
So then Chrome comes along, backed my Google, and people started treating it as a first class citizen. Sites were belt to run with, and tested on Chrome.
Fast forward to now. I actually do want to have a wide array of ad sponsored content on the internet because I appreciate the free content and I'm not going to pay 30 different 5$ per month subscriptions for stuff I might read. Are they tracking me? Yes. When I search for lawn mowers online I get spams (which gmail seems to filter just fine) and my rarely logged into facebook feed is full of lawn mower ads. I use in-cognito when I want to see what a google or linked in search looks like without my user context. I use ABP when sites are too aggressive with their ads.
And it's all fine. I suspect my current experience is common, to answer your question.
> At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war [...]
This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but already losing.
You are correct. For some reason, I keep seeing this history repeated over and over, but even the chart in the article confirms you're correct. Firefox was taking over like crazy before Chrome came along...
... I'm talking about before that. Netscape went from 90% to 6% once IE started bundling on Windows. Firefox "taking over like crazy" is a later comeback.
Netscape Navigator was something like 90% at one point. Netscape fell down to single digits against IE and then started climbing back up. That's the point at which the chart in the article begins. That's what I'm referring to when I say "losing the war". 90% -> 6% is losing.
I'm not like an IE fan - I don't user Windows for anything other than gaming, I just remember what the browser wars were like in the early 2000s.
It's share was definitely stagnating around the time Chrome came out. I advocated heavily for Firefox at the time, but it was not enough. Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google, Firefox codebase was still carrying the burden of old Netscape and it took them 10 years to modernize it.
IE wasn't winning any war against Firefox, it was Firefox which was gaining marketshare from IE, which had a crap reputation at that point.
For this reason and the fact that you think lawnmower ads are the worst that surveillance capitalism can do, I'm skeptical that you are technically minded at all. This is 100% how the average Joe thinks.
I remember when I made the change, must've been 2004 or 2005, I was reluctant at first to change from IE to Firefox, but the killer feature FF had at that time was tabbed browsing.
Kids these days will never know the struggle of having 10 browser windows clogging up the task bar...
While I agree with your point on not willing to pay “30 different $5 per month subscriptions for stuff I might read”, I do not agree that technically aware people who know about privacy ought to have a lackadaisical attitude to tracking and surveillance. At an individual level you could argue that it doesn’t harm you (or better, hasn’t harmed you so far), but at the level of society and the world, we’d be worse off if everybody thought this wasn’t important and hence did nothing about it.
If only user tracking was limited to product ads. Behaviour control and propaganda are a thing, as evidenced many times over with Rohingya genocide, US elections, Brexit, and the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests to name but a few.
The biggest problem is the subtle frustrations if you use Google websites or services at all, since Google builds the Internet explicitly for Chrome, and sometimes works on other browsers okay-ish. reCAPTCHA harassment is particularly egregious too.
I'm a Firefox user, but I've also already excised most of the rest of Google from my life. If you're still using Gmail, you're likely to stick with Chrome.
I'm also a full time Firefox/uBO user, but I've never noticed isues with reCAPTCHA or gmail. The only time I can think of hitting reCAPTCHA is when creating a new account somewhere and gmail seems to work as expected. Photos, maps, Keep, and YouTube all seem to work fine too.
It's possible of course that I just don't know any better since I haven't actually used Chrome with any regularity in the last 5 years or so.
My experience (on macOS, windows 10, and Ubuntu Desktop) is that captchas on Chrome pass seamlessly (frequently without a prompt), and firefox on all three platforms require 3-10 screenfuls of "where's the signal light?" where's-waldo fun and games.
I use Gmail, but through Thunderbird and occasionally Firefox. Works pretty well for me. I keep Chrome around mainly for occasional compatibility testing.
It's not just Google. I've had helpdesk tickets with multiple services automatically assume I'm on mobile if I mention something doesn't work in Safari. I will even say "Safari on Mac OS 10.xx" and they will still assume mobile. The idea of desktop browsers that aren't Chrome seems to be fading away among even the marginally technically aware people.
I mostly use Firefox, except I use Chrome for certain tasks at work [1]. There is one thing about Firefox that occasionally has me on the verge of ditching it for Chrome.
It has a terrible spell checker. I find about as many errors in its spelling as it finds in mine.
There used to be one other thing that really irked me, but it looks like they recently fixed that (I'm on the beta channel, so not sure if everyone has this yet). That was handling of keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts, such as OPTION-HOME to go to the home page, did not work if the focus was in the address bar, the "search in page" field, or a text entry field on the page.
[1] Chrome's dev tools seem more responsive and better organized, and it handles multiple profiles better.
Profiles provide separate bookmarks and add-ons per profile. I don't think containers do. Containers seem to be more about making it so you can appear as different people to different sites. Profiles are more about letting you separate roles.
For different things I do during development, I want different sets of cookies, bookmarks, history, and add-ons. With profiles, I get that, effectively getting a separate browser that I can extensively customize to its particular task.
Those were actually what I was thinking of when I said Chrome handles profiles better. Firefox has the functionality, but it doesn't have as nice an interface to it. Chrome, for example, on MacOS puts the available profiles on the right-click menu on its dock icon.
Do Containers support segregated browsing history yet? That's what I've liked most about Chrome profiles. I can have a "personal" profile and then a "work" profile that doesn't comingle the browsing history. It's convenient when on a screenshare--the URL bar's type-ahead won't reveal your personal browsing history.
You can have multiple profiles in Firefox too. If you start Firefox with the "-P" flag, it brings up the profile manager, which allows you create/delete profiles or start Firefox with a selected profile.
You can also start/manage profiles from inside Firefox by navigating to about:profiles.
I am on a MacbookPro and would love to use Firefox, however because of this never-solved bug [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042], I have to stick to Opera or Safari or.. Chrome (and probably I am not the only one).
Firefox is losing a lot share just because it gets our fan/cpu crazy on macbooks.
I use both. The firefox interface still freezes when the page freezes. Hung anything should never stop me from closing tabs. Quantum/Electrolysis was supposed to be a savior, but the problem remains for now.
I want to like Firefox, and I use it regularly, but I just veer back to Chrome. I still prefer the UI and extensions (which Chrome still has the 'edge' in).
Out of curiosity, what extensions do you miss?
I've never really used anything beyond the usual privacy extensions (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and HTTPS everywhere). All of which seem to be as well or better supported in FireFox.
Same here. I use Firefox+adblocker on mobile for some sites. I don't know why it is, but i just dislike the UI of Firefox. I want to like it more, but it just doesn't work out...
Ublock origin can be added to Palemoon and it makes a great browser. If a website doesn't work in Palemoon then too bad for them. I've had a great break from twitter since their new UI doesn't work. And recaptchas can go captcha themselves.
I run NoScript + UBO in Pale Moon(1) on the desktop. UBO Legacy does not block Javascript. On mobile, PM is dead and Waterfox w/ newer JS blocking UBO works great.
(1) it's a PIA to manage both extensions, I'm using WF more & more on Desktop these days. I hope Pale Moon can survive, evolve or one-up their lack of Web Extension APIs.
I stopped using it (after many, many years) because it has bugs where the hamburger menu (and, often, tabs) stop working, and it was frustrating to deal with.
It also had some weird issues with remote desktop, and I remote to my desktop from meetings fairly often.
It runs fine on my Mac, the only time it seems to spin up the fans is for Youtube videos. It wouldn't suprise me if Google has done something to make Firefox not work as well on Youtube as they have done before.
First, a lot of technically minded people run Linux and want to have hardware-accelerated video decoding for performance and Firefox isn't focused on supporting this for Linux, but it does work on multiple distros for Chromium.
In terms of mobile, me guesses you haven't got the news about Mozilla doing away with extensions for newer versions. Plus there are other open source browsers with extension support, even based on Chromium.
It's slower, which is practically all I care about now that all browsers have the same extension API.
>In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.
On Android, Blokada, or any browser like Brave. On iOS, Safari has a builtin content filter.
DNA is nothing like source code. Why do people keep repeating this analogy.
At any rate, cell differentiation/compartmentation within a tumor has been observed, so things do get blurry indeed. It's also worth noting that there isn't a single definition of 'species' and it's all just semantics that changes depending on your field. (The traditional 'inter-fertile over two generations' you learn in high school is helpful but doesn't stand up to many observations.) Ultimately a species is what biologists say is a species.
