I think bolder88 has a problem with the idea that an IPO creates intrinsic wealth, or somehow increases the overall "wealth" of the entire system (either global or within a given country).
Yup, and now the word "wealth" is just a random series of letters when I read it.
As far as I can work out, the IPO does not "create intrinsic wealth", the value is generated by having a successful startup, and this value is then recognised by the market at the IPO - If there was no success in the company already, there would be no wealth at the IPO. But this could be a semantic difference between "creates" and "recognised".
How has $25B of wealth not been created? The market believes that the price of the stock is a price such that the total company would be valued at $25B. What asset can you own other than the dollar that is not based on market pricing? Is $25B worth of gold today worth $25B of wealth? What if the world woke up tomorrow and thought gold was worthless.
Yes, because it could be exchanged for other goods and services. You could buy gold or land (if you printed enough money). Is that not "wealth" to you?
Just printing money in the absence of a reason is generally regarded as a bad idea. More money in the system casing the same quantity of things to buy just causes prices to go up to compensate. In short, inflation. this is very basic economics.
So the short short answer to "If you print some more money is that wealth?" is "No".
edit: Deleted due to the overwhelming amount of Guardian readers/conspiracy nuts in the comments section, who aren't able to listen to reasoned debate.
Could you give an example of the sensitive information that we definitely should not be talking about? I can't think of anything from the Guardian's reporting of this matter that falls into that category right now.
Edit: You say "Guardian readers/conspiracy nuts in the comments section, who aren't able to listen to reasoned debate". That's a well-reasoned rebutal right there to the people who replied to you with facts. Could you expand on it? I'm listening.
The type of person that supports these sorts of activities is the sort of person I would also expect to delete their message instead of standing their ground regardless of adversarial opinions.
Agreed, though I don't want to see people merely stand their ground, I want to see them engage with adversarial opinions. I want both of us to have the possibility of learning where we got it wrong. Leaving in a huff is even worse than standing your ground.
The idea that this makes one "Guardian readers/conspiracy nuts" is laughable.
The NSA said they prevented 54 attacks but it was widely reported supported by evidence that that was not the case. Not to mention that they repeatedly lied to Congress. If you trust these organizations so much, good for you. But this bogeyman of "terrorism, drug dealers" is not acceptable by most people who understand this. The probability of me getting killed just randomly on the street is far far higher than me getting killed in a terrorist attack in the US. Statistics are important. Why should the government go overboard to prevent this? Have you realized that gun violence in the US for example causes more deaths than all terrorism attacks combined? And yet even a slight mention of this has gun lovers cry about how their second amendment is being violated. Let's not forget that there is a fourth amendment also:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There is a reason that democracies around the world don't allow police to just randomly walk into your house and arrest you. A good reason.
Just because terrorism has to be prevented, doesn't mean that our basic rights have to be violated. By that logic, let's go even further and install CCTV cameras and microphones in everyone's homes. All crimes can be prevented. And perhaps the next step can be to have thought control devices even.
We don't make things "easy" for law enforcement on purpose. Search warrants, constitutional rights, due process, and even the adversarial system more broadly are all designed to make things more difficult for them at a fundamental level. Empowering a bunch of Judge Dredd wannabes would make things far easier than the status quo. Oddly enough, we don't pursue such options.
As for the assertions about terrorists moving to other communication methods, that horse already bolted years ago. Osama Bin Laden's reliance on a hand courier made that crystal clear. They've known that their communications were at risk for years now. In that sense, the Snowden leaks revealed nothing new to terrorists.
It was widely reported that OBL had removed all forms of communication from his compound well before the leaks as he was fairly certain that they were all being monitored anyway. A serious terrorist wouldn't be using an unencrypted communication method to start with anyway.
And if op's were at risk they'd have made arrests immediately or D Noticed the Guardian immediately. As they haven't, it's probably a load of shit.
A claim that they don't monitor that which they don't need to for safety seems unsupported? As in, it seems to me like you are saying something roughly analogous to
"they said that it is neccesary, so we should let them do it"
I would think "we only do it to the extent neccesary" would be what an argument is meant to show, not the argument itself.
I am going to make an assumption that any 'terrorist' that plans their next attack through facebook or gmail is more of a threat to killing themselves by a bomb backfiring, than to the public.
Mass surveillance is not the solution.
Also, their claim that 'they operate fully within the law' is just a claim without any public evidence to back it up, if all three of them were subject to a polygraph during this then I might take it a bit more seriously. Otherwise, why should I be inclined to trust the words of a organisation that clearly does not trust me?
Good. This recent war against cookies is futile and silly.
If you visit a website (Assuming you don't go via some anonymizer proxy), they can track you, and they can pass your details to any 3rd party who wishes to also track you.
Cookies are the easiest way for them to do that, but its absurdly naive to think that if you block cookies then people won't track your browser activity online.
If you don't want to be 'tracked', stop generating HTTP requests, or do them through an anonymizer service. And good luck getting any website to work properly.
A single website can only track you inside their own pages. The problem with third-party cookies is that they enable cross-site tracking, which is much more privacy invading. First-party cookies don't help with that, since a cookie dropped by siteA won't be sent to siteB.
Now, sure there are other ways of doing cross-site tracking, like Etags, fingerprinting and such, but why shouldn't we try to plug those leaks too instead of giving up?
No, we shouldn't bother trying to plug those leaks.
Current situation:
* You request website A, which includes 3rd party code from C. C drops a cookie
* You request website B, which includes 3rd party code from C. C knows you previously visited A.
New situation:
* You request website A, which includes 3rd party code from C. Website A sends details of your visit via a backchannel to C.
* You request website B, which includes 3rd party code from C. Websites B sends details of your visit via backchannels, and C knows you previously visited A.
Wouldn't you rather such tracking to be out in the open and easily blocked - stop accepting cookies, rather than them creating backchannels to track you instead?
Yes - You should give up if you think you will able to continue sending websites HTTP requests directly, whilst not being tracked.
I'm not sure. Those backchannels would be enormously more expensive and technically challenging for the commercial entities to do right.
So, yeah, I see your point, but maybe I _would_ rather make it much more expensive to do that, and much harder for them to do it succesfully rather than messing up a technical detail.
On the other hand, I guess eventually they'd get it right in commodity software that everyone can use. Eventually.
Really, I don't know why anyone that wants to do the kind of tracking we're talking about is using cookies anyway, instead of user-agent fingerprints that have been shown to be pretty much unique anyway. So the cookies is perhaps all a distraction. The browser makers don't need to invent a new cookie-less browser fingerprint tracking system, they've already got it with the over-specialized user-agents.
If you block third-party cookies, C has no longer has a reliable way to know that you are the same visitor on both requests. (Unless you're suggesting that C is stuffing a UID in the cache or something?)
C can already infer that. Google probably does that on their free CDN stuff.
you have unique combination of IP+UserAgent+extra Headers. That is enough. A and B does not even have to send anything. And this will continue to work even without cookies.
Requiring an IP address already eliminates cross-network tracking. For example, lots of people browse both on their PC on a cable/fiber connection and on their phone/tablet on 3G, with different IPs. They also often browse from their work network (yet another IP).
Same with User Agent: not useful if you're using Chrome on your laptop and Safari on your phone.
This move is to prevent you from being tracked against website A and B will.
For example, google provides jquery CDN. website A and B uses that to save some cents on bandwidth. Google now knows you visited which pages on website A and B. and if A was a backpack store and B was a pressure cooker review, expect the NSA :D
>If you visit a website (Assuming you don't go via some anonymizer proxy), they can track you, and they can pass your details to any 3rd party who wishes to also track you.
Sure, server-side logging is always possible, but (AFAIK) advertisers and data miners have little interest in this information because it requires trusting the website owner not to forge results, which is obviously a very stupid idea when your business revolves around purchasing and selling ad impressions. Precluding the practical methods of this type of data mining (ideally by requiring whitelisting of Javascript and all access to third party resources, but disabling third party cookies is a good practical step) could greatly reduce the amount of surveillance that users are subject to, by eliminating the most common incentives to perform it.
>If you don't want to be 'tracked', stop generating HTTP requests, or do them through an anonymizer service.
I hope you realize that the effectiveness of services like Tor is greatly reduced if you aren't using the same techniques to reduce your surveillance "attack surface" that people are advocating for regular, non-anonymous browsing. It's really not hard to see why; considering the tracking cookie example: A unique cookie makes it clear to a site operator that the requests coming from all these different exit nodes are really originating from the same user. A third party tracking cookie can then make it clear to that third party that the same user is visiting sites A, B, and C over Tor. All it takes at this point is small handful of screwups (from mentioning personal information to something as innocuous as reading a news article that is only relevant to people living in a certain location) to greatly reduce the search space required to identify you. "Uses xmonad and likely lives in New York City" could be more than enough to tie a large amount of your Tor browsing activity to a small set of suspects, in this case.
Even if server-side tracking is as effective as cookie tracking (and I would argue it will not be), there’s a difference between the site tracking me, and the site enlisting my browser to aid it in tracking me. If I am to be tracked, let the site do so by expending its own cycles and storage, not mine.
"Since 2007 India has been the world's largest recipient of recorded remittances from abroad. In 2010 these inflows were worth $54bn (£35bn). UK foreign direct investment in India is considerable, reaching £1.8bn in the same year."
You can't really on the one hand claim your country is terribly poor, and needs handouts from other nations, and on the other play at being spacemen.
Thankfully the UK will stop sending foreign aid to India in 2015.
> You can't really on the one hand claim your country is terribly poor, and needs handouts from other nations, and on the other play at being spacemen.
... and you can't really post on HN without showing some basic common sense.
FYI: "International remittances" is NOT foreign aid. It is money sent to India by Indians working abroad.
Foreign direct investment is NOT foreign aid. It is non-Indians buying Indian stocks.
Please read up on these before you criticize. Your bigotry is too obvious.
BTW: India has asked UK to stop the aid. Plus, any aid that UK does send should be considered a payment for all the stuff they looted from India (and the Indian lives lost fighting for UK in WW2).
"Thankfully the UK will stop sending foreign aid to India in 2015". You seem to have a problem with this simple wish but perhaps you can explain what it is? Do you think aid should continue (in spite of India's request) or that the UK should stop. BTW we can read negatives without capitalization.
Many countries including Britain seem to me to get their priorities wrong. India certainly does when one sees the wretched and disgusting (not strong enough!) way in which so many people are forced to live by being deprived of services which have perforce to be supplied by the state.
> You seem to have a problem with this simple wish but perhaps you can explain what it is?
My problem is with the assumption that this miniscule amount of "aid" is somehow significant.
Do realize that when countries give "aid", it is often more for domestic reasons. This "aid" comes with all sorts of strings attached, and benefits the donor country more than the recipient.
Case in point: US military aid to Israel comes right back to the US in the form of weapons purchases from Lockheed, Grumman, Boeing, etc. In other countries, donor countries stipulate that the aid be used to purchase things from the donor country only; or expensive "consultants" are hired to manage the aid, depriving any benefit to the recipient.
India's budget for this year is ~ $270B. So this "aid" from Britain (most of which would be absorbed by British charities buying British goods and hiring British consultants anyways) amounts to about 0.1% of the budget. Sounds pretty miniscule to me; and in terms of impact, would have roughly the same effect as a flea jumping on an elephant.
Remittances are money that Indians working abroad sent back to India. Is that aid??? And the quote again talks about "foreign direct investments". FDI. Does that read aid?
Where are you quoting that from? It is not good form to give a quote without a link. And you make a quote and come to a conclusion about aid. Btw, the UK aid to India is £280m.
No sir, are you complaining about the #280 million aid to India? That's a pittance to the 1.8 trillion dollar and growing economy India is. Sure there are poor people. But we are a growing economy and have a greater need for technology than U.K has. That was always our ticket to prosperity. Who knows, this might open up an Indian empire in the future solar system economy :-)
It is exactly that a country like India, with a growing population, that needs to invest in space exploration. We are going to inhabit other planets if we are to continue our species.
Can you guess which country is the 6th highest in remittances?
France.
Do you want to guess what number 8 is? Germany. Are these poor countries? Are remittances "international aid"? No, not necessarily. They're just an example of extended families spread out across different countries sending different parts of the family money. Should we begrudge France or Germany their remittances? Or their space programs?
Worth noting that there is a lot of investment from India to here in the UK:
"More Indian investment comes to the UK than to the rest of the EU combined. There are over 900 Indian companies in the UK, with Tata being the largest manufacturing employer across the whole country."
> You can't really on the one hand claim your country is terribly poor, and needs handouts from other nations, and on the other play at being spacemen.
Even if India needed/wanted international aid (see other comments) we are talking about investing 1/1000 of that money into giving jobs to skilled engineers and scientists (and others). Helping poor countries doesn't mean just feeding poor people, it means to give the possibility for development.
I find very offensive treating international aids as if recipients are helpless beggars that deserve that should be grateful and stay put.
I believe this is the bigger question about international aid.
It should enable development, not increase assistentialism.
There are similar parallels with internal welfare systems in many countries. Help shouldn't be cut off as soon as someone reaches the limit of poverty, because there is little incentive to cross that barrier.
If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend watching "An idiot abroad". It's a great travel show with Karl Pilkington. He goes to foreign lands and tells it how it is.
What if those people are still benefiting from other people's sins? If the current British don't want to pay maybe they can dispose of the ill-gotten gains i.e the country estates paid for by black slaves, the textile fortunes paid for by exploited Indian cotton farmers, the Kohinoor diamond in the Crown jewels etc.
Well it was clear from WW2 records that British were not willing to pay India even for the support India gave to them during the war. They only relented in the face of American pressure. Records also show that much of the 'development' in India such as railways was made practicable by Indian capital and labor, while the rewards of it all went directly to finance the Industrial Revolution in the west. The 'why' of this mindset of take-take only became clear to me when I followed events after the British losses of American colonies.
When any side feels the dominant emotion of 'loss', it makes it do selfish things to avoid future losses. But that extracts more losses from the other side and so the cycle can continue.
In the light of all that history, which current Indians being on the receiving side remember more than the British, any help the British give to India is at least perceived by India in a positive way.
As to the extent of the monetary help - its effect is limited by the ability of the recipient to absorb it. For analogy, YC reduced the investment into each startup down from $150k as it made things worse, not better.
[transcript]:"how dare you, little people, to dream, and make the things we, the superior ones, were incompetent to do?"
I wish India the best in its effort to the future and a better life to all of their people. It by their own big dreams and achievements they will create a great and shining civilization (they already has)
Let your light shine through the world, and dont listen to the bullies; it's pure envy
UK's aid is more to massage UK's ego and keep your british raj hangover going than to help India. A rocket launch in 60s and then a nuclear test in 74 should have taught you what importance India gives to this aid. Even our parliamentarians are on record that we don't need it. But well...
Besides, I suspect that except in cases of natural disasters, most aid in general is a not-so-subtle bribe to buy influence. We can see front-pages demonstration of these facts quite often, all you have to do is follow the itinerary of John Kerry.....
As for remittance, I think you have misunderstood the meaning of the word. So let's ignore that part of your outburst.
I agree and so does the finance minister and now president of India. He calls it "peanuts" compared to the Indian economy. I should say they should use the aid for Scotland or other god forsaken places in UK. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/441263/India-sends-a-spa...
As everyone has already mentioned, remittance is not international aid. This is very weak. Last time I checked, India asked UK to stop giving them aid (I could be wrong).
> The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else?
Not that greatly. Birth rates in near enough every country are dropping after having peaked. 7 billion in 2011, 8 billion in 2025, 9 billion in 2043, 10 billion in 2083 is what UNFPA predicts. As education improves and the relative value of each life, and as people live longer on average, the Malthusian catastrophe is one I would think we will avoid. In fact it is this stabilisation of the population that worries me because without any immediate pressure from something else, with no race, no competition and no Sturm and no Drang in progress, will we be destined to find the answer to the Fermi Paradox through our own fate?
Look at this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Populatio... and then consider that while the case of Japan seems about to be a portent for other countries. Doesn't this scare you even more - the thought of the human race ending with a whimper? Or will each of us be, by our current standards, a god among machines living a life a hundred times more valuable than those of their ancestors in their grasp over the earth. If anything these kinds of questions should probably keep you more awake than the thought of a Malthusian catastrophe at this point.
>Saving people from dying is no good at all if they still have a shitty life and die from something else anyway.
Wow. That's ultra-elitist.
So, let's say you are diagnosed with a rare disease and the doctor gives you two weeks to live unless you get a medicine that costs $1000 which let's assume you can't afford. And you're going to die someday, anyway. Does that mean you have a shitty life and you deserve to die now?
So, amount of money = value of life? Is that your point??
So, I own 10x more money than you (assume) and hence compared to my standards, I think you live a shitty life and you deserve to die. How do you feel now?
Life is invaluable. Money has nothing to do with it.
Funny thing is, we "know" relatively good, what the maximum of earths population will be and why. And we know (also relatively good) how fast we will lift people from poverty, given the actual and historical numbers.
I'm all for having less humans around, but actually, educating women, eradicating poverty, and lowering death rates has shown to be the best way to reduce a country's birth rate. It just takes a generation or two. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Middle class (by developing world standards) life is the most effective brake on population. Give people basic health care, Internet, TV, a phone, and literate daughters and watch the population growth rate fall to replacement level or lower.
It's not that simple though. There's quite a few people who are not at risk of ever getting malaria, but who don't have any decent internet access. So for them, curing malaria will make 0 difference to their life.
Also, since when has Microsoft or Bill Gates ever been sold on the idea of the internet as a good thing?
So if the government knocks down on your door tomorrow and says:
"Look, you have two choices, we can help you not get cancer, and we'll supply you with daily pills for the rest of your life, but you will not be allowed to have Internet access ever again, or you can choose Internet access, and we won't give you the cancer-fighting pills anymore".
Having cancer tends to negatively affect one's quality of life. ;) But it's an interesting question--quality of life vs. lifespan. Imagine if there was no possibility of prolonging human lifespan, but instead we had the means to stop aging, say in a person's mid twenties to mid thirties. Having some 50 or 60 years time with your mental and physical faculties in prime, not having to rush, being able to take your time and learn and do practically everything you want. We would live like gods.
Not sure what your point here is, but it kind of reads as if you're saying that the life of someone on the verge of internet access is more valuable that that of someone on the verge of fatal malaria.
From the majority of people from 1st world countries, it is more valuable. I'm never going to meet anyone who has had malaria, or even anyone who knows someone who has had maleria. It's a non issue. But I'll certainly experience and interact with a larger internet population.
> I'm never going to meet anyone who has had malaria
You likely have done so, many times. For many countries malaria is so endemic that most people have had it once or more (malaria is not very lethal if you have access to the right medicines; the problem is a lot of people don't). Except for people living in places with extremely low immigration levels, it is unlikely that you'll go very long before coming across someone who have had malaria.
> , or even anyone who knows someone who has had maleria.
He's being realistic. How many of us are donating even percent of our income towards malaria eradication? Eradicating malaria has been possible for decades. It has not happened because people amongst others continues to prioritize luxuries over other peoples lives.
We can pretend we're not amongst "those people", but the fact we're spending time on HN debating this matter instead of doing something about it pretty much demonstrate that most of us are.
I don't know about "realistic", but it expresses a value other than "all lives are created equal". I think if someone has a value other than "all lives are created equal", then focusing on expanding internet usage ahead of malaria eradication is a conclusion that could be deduced from that (when combined with other values we might all share).
The problem is that all sorts of other whacked conclusions can also be deduced from "not all lives are created equal", so you need a whole other host of values to protect against that.
However, I don't think the converse is true. If someone is focusing on expanding internet ahead of eradicating malaria, it doesn't necessarily mean they don't believe "all lives are created equal". It could instead mean they are simply ignorant, which is not bad if they are open to perspective. That is kind of Gates' point - he's being evangelical about pointing out that if you have that value, you should probably pay attention to things like malaria. Other sources point out the same thing. Check various conversations over at lesswrong, or check out the top-rated charities at givewell.org, or just google the many arguments on efficient charity-giving.
All lives are not created equal. That's just bs. Of course not all lives are created equal. For example if I had to pick between the lives of Einstein and Hitler, I'd pick Einstein.
It's a ridiculous nonsensical law full of gaping holes.
If I visit your website, you'll log details about what I'm doing. That's kinda how it works.
This "pop up a massive cookie warning on every fucking website" is worse than advertising that start up playing sound. Worse than the original 'problem'.
BTW The EU are now planning to ban powerful vacuum cleaners in their ever further reaching quest to limit freedom.
Woah there. I think this is the fundamental issue. $25b of wealth hasn't been created. It's not free money. It's a scam.