The dev posted this some weeks back, but I found it too off-the-wall to believe. I wish I could go back and append a mea culpa to my old comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500301)
When I was still a Firefox user, I just ended up blocking any domain owned by mozilla. And by 'when I was still a Firefox user' I mean 'until approximately 12 hours ago.' What priorities and values Mozilla has left I don't seem to share.
I'm currently using Brave to reply to this comment because it was already on my drive. I don't like Brave's philosophy and I don't like its proximity to Google. I'm using it as a stop gap till I find something better.
It's going to take me a few weeks of research to pick my new permanent browser. I want something far-removed from Google, but with an active enough developer community that it doesn't fall apart after an OS update or turn out to have a back-door hidden in the code base.
I don't care how few users Firefox has. I do care that the product has become a pile of garbage. I already tolerate the dumb tab bar, the update nag screen that interrupts my work, the telemetry setting that doesn't actually disable telemetry, the web services I don't want like Pocket, the ads, the memory issues that hobble my machine when I stream video...
I won't move to a browser like Chromium with a connection to Google, but I'm moving to something. I'm done with Firefox.
And what browser would that be? Mozilla keeps doing these things because they're desperately searching for a revenue stream that doesn't make them beholden to their biggest competitor. There aren't any other viable options because no one else knows of any better revenue streams for web browsers either
To avoid significant layoffs they'd something like 10% of their user base to donate $20/year. I'm far from an expert on nonprofit finances, but that strikes me as a tough but potentially doable goal
The reason I stopped donating to Mozilla is because they have too many people not doing things I think are important and are paying their executives too much.
None of these projects have enough resources to keep up with web standards, and patch security bugs on their own. So forks are either almost the same as Firefox, or may be less secure and/or doesn't work for as many websites and addons as Firefox.
Try LibreWolf -- it's Firefox with the nasty stuff stripped out. You can use your existing Firefox profile, but be sure to go through LibreWolf's settings as some of the defauts may be different than what you already have set up (they select privacy-protecting options by default).
If you're on Linux, exclude it from automatic updates in your package manager, and it won't interrupt you. On Windows, you should be able to set app.update.auto to false in about:config, but I don't know if that still works.
Humans can only focus on one thing at a time. So why are we spending money to display multiple things simultaneously?
Would the author use that logic to argue that no monitor should have more than a single pixel? While there might be a point where adding more monitors becomes pointless, it's not two monitors. Two monitors still cover a small area, compared to a human's full field of view.
I predicted Coinbase would enter a vicious cycle in which the work culture increasingly promotes ass-covering and discourages conscientiousness.
Sometimes people who don't work for, or work with, a company with bad ethics never know better. Other times things get out of hand (like at Enron, Uber, Theranos, etc) and everyone finds out.
It's too early to alter my prediction about Coinbase. A company can thrive for a long time with a gross work environment like that.
The shift in company culture that I am thinking about is about how strongly people react to react to social justice issues, not really the issues themselves.
I think, deep down, Coinbase wants a tough, driven, mercenary workforce. If that's the workforce they get, POC or not, it has downsides.
If a company has a certain number of employees who are sort of flakey, idealistic types, it probably guards against employee turnover, departmental silos, fraud. You want some employees who sometimes do what they think is the right thing, for its own sake, and aren't so career-driven that they undercut others.
As a Randroid in recovery I find the distinctions between right-libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism as interesting as those between Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism. They're mostly about recondite points of doctrine that mean nothing to outsiders, and in the case of right-libertarians and ancaps it's all about privatizing tyranny. They just argue over how and why.
I sometimes consider the notion that, socially,
Western modernity was just reified feudalism:
everybody's a lord now!
I figure historians of the future will view it like this: there were people in Europe who practiced feudalism domestically for several centuries. Eventually they developed the technology to outsource serfdom to the rest of the world.
For most of my life, people in the 'third world' lived in barely imaginable poverty while the rest of the world walked off with oil, lumber, precious metals, gems, historical artifacts, slave labor, etc. I was well out of highschool before I appreciated the connection between the squalor elsewhere, and the four or five previous centuries of pillaging that contributed to it.
That unpleasant state of affairs tempers my ability to feel triumphalist about 'first-world' nations ridding themselves of feudalism.
If you're thinking that global poverty was invented by European exploitation, you're pretty severely overcorrecting. For most of history, the vast majority of people were even poorer than what we call "barely imaginable poverty" today.
That way of looking at things is mostly wrong, but it is a belief that suited the winners, so it is a wide-spread belief.
I'm not keen to rebut it at much length because my previous comment already leaves the wrong impression: my point is less about the morality of the past few hundred years than the stupidity of the narrative we built around it.
If I did expand on things, I'd list off the usual examples (Conquistadors and gold, Chinese opium trade, slaughter of native Americans, ad nauseum).
I don't know how to make those points without sounding like I'm appealing to emotion. The actual point is that - though the Steven Pinkers and Hans Roslings might disagree - people subject to those conditions clearly are worse-off than before (and than today, compared to the nations who plundered them).
To the original point of the thread, the colonial powers attained such obscene wealth (ie: by stealing gold, oil, farming cotton with slave labor, etc) that even the poorest among us, until the past decade, was rich compared to the rest of the world.
My concern is that people tend to lean into the "noble savage" trope; I've seen a lot of people who imply or outright state that wars of conquest are a uniquely European concept. But I do agree with the narrative issue you're pointing at. It's wrong to see colonial-era violence and oppression as a side show to the "main plot" of history, especially given that the majority of the global population was on the receiving end of it.
Well, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Just to clarify, I don't think I'm particularly prone to romanticize societies that Europeans colonized.
What changed my view about the world is thinking about the economics.
Take the US, for example. In the popular imagination, the success of America is all about entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. But the other aspect is... four million square miles of (in a manner of speaking) undeveloped land! Entrepreneurial spirit is great, but literally having more natural resources than you know what to do with (didn't get around to developing California till the 1900s, for example) seems at least as important.
Given the past several centuries were a free-for-all for nations with empires, it doesn't surprise me that the colonized societies, whatever their inherent strengths and weaknesses, wound up in bad shape.
Either that or we have changed enough that we are now capable of being creative, in terms of both art and theorizing about prehistory. Personally I think it's the latter.
If we were capable of appreciating art 200,000 years ago, we also must have been incredibly lazy. How could well over another 150,000 years pass before we left signs that we were improving our technology? It doesn't make any sense.
I personally eat meat, but I suspect very few people will a century from now - not meat from a slaughterhouse anyways.
No, we'll grow meat cheaply in labs, and the companies who produce it won't have much trouble blackening the reputation of real meat. Most people, even today, like to dwell neither on the death of the animals we eat, nor the cleanliness of the factory farms that provide us with our meat.
It probably will appall people in the future that we killed animals just to eat. They won't have first-hand experience of our time. They'll know, on a cerebral level, the technical reasons that fake meat was impractical, but, on an emotional level, our habits will disgust them.
>It probably will appall people in the future that we killed animals just to eat.
That's extrapolating from the future distancing from nature and sterilization and abstraction imposed over life.
It's also possible that people in the future will get their meat if and when they find it, and fight like crazy to secure it, under more dystopian conditions. If they're not lucky, there will always be ground worms and bugs, seaweeds, and Soylent Green.
Or the population has stabilized quite lower, after climate change impact, famines, wars, water conflicts, etc., and the rest can grow and eat their meat in a more sustainable way...
Yes. I wrote 'probably' but there are too many unknowns to have much certainty about anything a century from now. For all I know, we'll start lobbing nukes around until the planet is a wasteland.
