I'd rather buy a browser as a company's primary product, not donate to Mozilla which makes a browser and does many other things, many of which I disagree with and would rather not fund.
I'm confused here. Seems to me that if you want these kind of features in a browser you want exactly what funds. Also, even if you paid for software with these features, it's likely a good portion of the money you pay will also go towards things you disagree with as well.
Controversial != useless. I don't like they wasted money on Firefox OS or Persona; I don't want to donate to them if my money goes there instead of to Firefox. In fact, why not let us decide where exactly our money will go if we donate?
Just to be clear: other than the Mr Robot promo your main criticism is that their politics don't align with yours?
Because I think when people ask about Mozilla controversies they're thinking about situations in which Mozilla has "broken character" by e.g. risking users' privacy, not activism that is absolutely in line with Mozilla's stated goals (whether you personally agree with them and their interpretation thereof or not).
Opera started as a paid browser and nearly went bankrupt. They even had ads on the free version. Barely anyone paid for it and the ads killed adoption.
Heck, even Netscape Navigator started out as shareware. It was "personal use only" but most commercial users never bought a license. It was eventually defeated by Microsoft Internet Explorer, which was free for commercial use even before it shipped with the OS.
If there is any chance someone will attempt a paid browser again, it will most definitely be based on Chromium (or maybe Firefox) rather than written from scratch and no website will make any effort to test on it (just like barely anyone ever tested on Opera).
At that point the pollsters may as well conduct a public service announcement. "Be aware that Google tracks and stores basically everything that they can. By the way, did you know this?"
> There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments.
Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.
A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.
The cakeshop very much did not "refuse to serve gays", and really there is absolutely no self-consistent way one could agree with FB deciding that certain content is "racist" and banning it while insisting that Masterpiece Cakeshop is in any way obligated to make wedding cakes for someone whose wedding plans they do not agree with.
I'm not speaking about Facebook at all, never mentioned Facebook anywhere in my comment or in this thread, and have not made any statements about the validity of speech restriction in any context so I'm not sure why you're mentioning that. I'm speaking to a general issue brought up by the parent.
As for your comment, the cake shop has a product they are letting people buy (in effect, serving them). They are willing to produce that product for a certain group of people for a certain activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on their identity. They are not willing to produce that product for another group of people for the same activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on that second group's identity. Now you can argue that the shop is within their rights to do that for religious reasons and the Supreme Court would agree with you, but it's still refusing service based on identity and you know it. If you want to split hairs and say they "refused to provide COMPARABLE service because they were gay" as the buyers may have been able to buy other products then so be it.
This is a thread about Facebook, isn't it? And the parent,m or GP by now, very much alludes to it, or platforms in general.
In the bakeshop case though, I do not think it has ever been alleged, that they ever refused to serve anyone cakes just for being gay. I think the whole case hinged on the question whether making a wedding cake is significantly more than just selling a cake off the shelf to anyone who comes in (I am really not sure if, as a matter of principle, private entities in a free society should be compelled to do business with anyone they do not want to, be that marrying gays or cynical coders who go by "Fins" though). So no,I don't think saying that they "refuse to serve gays" is a proper characterization.
May I suggest reviewing the history of the civil rights movement? That sort of discrimination used to be normal in large parts of the US and was overcome through a combination of civil disobedience and legal challenges.
> which creates an incentive to maintain currency under the mattress.
Continuing the thought experiment, consider what goods and services people would continue to spend money on, in spite of the expected increase in the value of money.
> Today, in most open economies, nobody controls the supply of money, ...
With all due respect, this is demonstrably false. The Federal Reserve and its member banks control the supply of money.
"Continuing the thought experiment, consider what goods and services people would continue to spend money on, in spite of the expected increase in the value of money."
I love this comment. Everyone just blindly says "People will put money in their mattress. Economy will go down" and then it's case closed.. but then what happens next? They just won't buy food? water? won't go to the mall? They just stay at home and hunker down? They won't even be watching entertainment since they won't be paying for a Netflix subscription too, apparently.
The proposition is not that people won't spend money. The proposition is that they won't invest the money that they're not spending. Keeping money under the mattress is not competing against groceries and Netflix, it's competing against government bonds and/or interest-bearing bank accounts.
If people sudddenly hoard money, they're essentially reducing the supply of money, which means the value of money will go up (as there's less of it), effectively acting as a transfer of purchasing power to the people who are actually spending it at that time. Imagine for instance I do something that generates a lot of value (money), then burn that money (or hide it under my mattress 'til I die of old age). This essentially means I gave "value" to society for free, as I created "value" but did not consume any "value" in return, leaving that "value" I could have consumed with my money to be consumed by others.
Nope, the problem isn't people hoarding money, the problem is doing so outside of a banking system, where such money is put to work in investments.
If the economy is growing in the long term and the supply of money is constant, the value of money (vs. goods) will always increase, and everyone has an incentive to hold currency instead of investing in the economy.
The result is that you can't raise capital for a startup or for an infrastructure project.
To earn money, somebody has to have created value (people are paid for creating value). Spending money is consuming value. Imagine there is $100 worth of total value in existence. Somebody creates $5 of value, they're paid $5, and total value existing is now $105. They could immediately consume or invest this $5 of value, leaving society with $100 of value, and if they invested some productively then they'd have increased the rate at which society's able to generate value in future. Or, they could do nothing with that $5, leaving society with $105 of value. How does society access this extra $5 of value? The person who choose to hoard the $5 effectively removes that money from circulation, which decreases the supply of money and hence increases its value. This means the purchasing power of other currency holders is increased. Those who then decide to spend money can consume or invest the $5 of value that was left unused.
Gold wasn't a deflationary currency, not only that, the supply of gold increases over time, and some times suddenly such as when the Spanish empire started extracting gold and silver from the new world resulting in the Spanish Price Revolution.
Seriously, please go take some economics classes...
The deflationary argument is about a difference in degree, not in kind. A deflationary monetary regime does not stop all commerce, it just creates incentives to defer or forgo discretionary spending and investment. That, by traditional economic measures, is Bad.
I'm not talking about spending, I'm talking about savings, capital accumulation and re-investment. Your entire point (and your parent's) isn't even wrong.
And no, the federal reserve doesn't control the supply of money by any means.
> Continuing the thought experiment, consider what goods and services people would continue to spend money on, in spite of the expected increase in the value of money.
Sorry, but you didn't understand how capital accumulation works.
People work and so on, get paid and so on. Then they spend part of it on their living expenses and save part of it (that's the domestic savings rate).
The money saved doesn't just sit under a mattress, it becomes the stock of capital in a country (plus and minus capital imports and exports and so on), which is then invested in projects (startups, infrastructure, etc.) that need capital.
Banks are the intermediaries in this market, taking capital from savers and providing investments and loans to projects that need capital. That's why so many emerging countries are desperate to get people into the banking system and to move their savings to the banks (the US did it by Executive Order 6102 for example).
Without this stock of capital, it is impossible to start a business, or to fund large infrastructure projects. It is a key and necessary component of a healthy economy.
>The money saved doesn't just sit under a mattress, it becomes the stock of capital in a country (plus and minus capital imports and exports and so on), which is then invested in projects (startups, infrastructure, etc.) that need capital.
Money doesn't become the stock of capital; money isn't capital. Money is a proxy for value. Capital is created by consuming less value than is produced, so the non-consumed value can be invested, which savings can achieve even if the money itself is not invested. This is because saving/hoarding essentially reduces the money supply, thus increasing the value of money - transferring purchasing power from the saver to people currently spending money. If I create x dollars of value, then burn the money I recieved in compensation, I've essentially gifted the value I produced to other currency holders, which they can consume or invest.
The US experienced deflation through much of the 19th century, yet saw higher growth rates then than in the 20th century. For instance, from https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040715/were-there-a... (don't have time to find a more formal source): "The period between 1873 and 1879 saw prices drop by nearly 3% per year, yet real national product growth was almost 7% during the same time." And overall "the price level (the average of current prices across the entire spectrum of goods and services produced in the economy) was actually 50% higher in 1800 than it was in 1900." So clearly it's possible to have strong economic growth during deflationary times.
While it does have a shared, immutable ledger and chaincode, what is really interesting is the coordination and integration of business entities and processes. This is something a database does not facilitate like a blockchain.
