There's a law against that. There's currently no law against making a website so fun that kids will waste all their time playing with it if their parents let them.
I'm not saying I'm against passing laws on this subject. My point is that no such laws currently exist, but a bunch of lawyers and judges just decided Facebook owes $17B for breaking these non-existent laws anyway.
This isn't regulation. If it was regulation, Meta could just read the regulation and comply and they'd be in the clear. This is the judicial branch making up and enforcing regulations that don't exist based on their own personal opinions about what causes "harm". No way to know what you need to do to comply until after you're already getting sued.
> personal opinions about what causes "harm
"
Source that it was their personal opinion?
I've personally read multiple research papers, worked in the field, AND read the transcripts where people at Meta told their leadership that their choices were causing harm. For years.
Sorry, but have you read the details of the case, or am I missing something?
So if a person at your company claims you're "causing harm" in a vague, indirect way that's not explicitly against the law, you're legally obligated to both agree with them and change your whole business model to accommodate that? Apparently yes, but I personally think that's pretty dumb.
And no I haven't read all the details, it's an extremely broad settlement that apparently covers everything from vague allegations of harm caused by social media addiction to Cambridge Analytica's misuse of data obtained through Facebook's API. There are too many claims to investigate all of them individually in detail without making that a full time job, so I'm speaking in broad terms here about how I think our legal system ought to function.
What in ?
> Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
This is researchers and internal teams finding causal evidence of harm from their products. Not just once either.
This case is one of the most significant cases of our time. None of this is based on some random person at work having an opinion.
Separately, How does it not being your full time job, save you from having to back up your opinion or your own thoughts?
I fully recognize you don't have to be an expert on my neck of the woods, so sharing info is natural.
But you are doubling down after I am giving you information. Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
What were they legally required to do after their research uncovered this "causal evidence" in your opinion? Shut down?
Cars get into crashes and kill people everyday, yet I don't think it would be appropriate to sue car manufacturers for this harm, solely under the grounds that they "knew about it and ignored it", even if they conducted a study finding a clear causal link between the existence of cars and roadway deaths.
In general, I think our legal system ought not to punish people or organizations for failing to do things that they have no clear legal mandate to do. This is a general claim that I don't feel I need to know all the details of the case to make, though you're certainly welcome to provide specifics if you think they would change my opinion about this specific situation.
> Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
No, because unfortunately our legal system doesn't work the way I'm saying it should. If someone feels you have injured them in some way, they can sue you even if you acted in good faith and broke no laws, and if they can demonstrate harm, even indirect harm, they have a good chance of winning. It makes for a very unstable legal environment.
You don't need a law to force people to pay for resources they consume; basic economics already ensures that. If there are externalities not already accounted for by that (increased demand for water/electricity driving up costs for others, noise, "eyesores", etc.) you could pass laws to ensure those costs are paid by the responsible party but that's not a datacenter-specific issue.
How does that work in a market where you are bidding amongst other participants and capacity is constrained? Supply is limited and demand is growing, the market response is to charge more.
Well, just off the top of my head... if you wanted to treat the increased prices caused by the spike in demand as an externality (and I agree that's not exactly the right way to think of it, but people seem determined to in this case and I can't really fault them for that given the practical effects of such price increases) I think the way to do that would be to give existing consumers futures contracts for water for the next ~10 years proportional to their existing usage.
People could then either use the futures contracts to keep the price they pay for water the same as it was, or voluntarily reduce their water usage and sell the contracts to the datacenter for a profit. Same deal for power.
This would of course be a bit complicated for most people to manage, so maybe instead of giving consumers the contracts directly you could have some intermediary manage the contracts for them with approximately the same result.
Alas, we do, because in the case of water, basic economics are stymied by pre-existing water-rights laws that are batshit insane. As such, we need legislative action to (at minimum) clean up that mess.
It is needed for basic operation, because unlike with a A-to-B cable, power bricks plugged into a USB-C cable have no way of knowing whether the other side is also a power supply that will short out if you try to feed it power instead of drawing power from it. A couple resistors in the sink is probably the cheapest possible way of signaling this information to the supply. This isn't PD, it's just a basic requirement to allow having the same connector on both ends of the cable.
Netflix has a larger market base (far more people watch TV and movies than read books, particularly at a level high enough to justify a subscription) and a market base that is far less likely to already be aware of the free alternative (most serious readers of the sort that go through that amount of books are already aware of their local libraries, whereas serious movie/TV watchers are less likely to be so).
Additionally, modern Netflix is a streaming company, and even DVD Netflix was sending the materials directly to your house, which is a differentiator versus the library, whose materials need to be picked up. There's a convenience factor as an incentive to pay. Library streaming exists, but it's awful - very limited library and very limited watches - versus Netflix where once you sub you can watch as much as you want.
I don't think you understand the problem. Unlike a USB-A power supply, a USB-C power supply cannot just assume by default that the device you plugged into it is not another power supply. That would risk causing a short and potentially starting things on fire.
I suppose that instead of a $0.01 resistor to request power they could have mandated some kind of (probably more expensive) circuit breaker that detects the short and shuts things off before it causes a fire, but I suspect then instead of broken devices having missing resistors you'd get ones with missing circuit breakers...
It pretty hard (maybe impossible) to design a spec that still works when manufacturers randomly omit critical components for no reason.
It's not the cable that's the problem here; it's the device you're plugging into the cable.
You don't need a cable tester to detect this problem; just plug the device into a spec-compliant USB-C power brick with a USB-C cable and see if it fails to charge.
$0.50 to get it manufactured somewhere in Asia, $4.00 to get it shipped to the US, tested, packaged, put on a shelf, retrieved for your order, and put in a box to ship your way.
You're not paying for the PCB, you are paying for an American warehouse worker to do their job without having to pee in a bottle and walk around dead coworkers.
Yeah, I once had similar (with a different purpose, but very alike) boards of my own design produced and paid $22 total for 5 assembled boards, including shipping from China to Europe and all taxes/customs. Unlike this one it had SuperSpeed passthrough too, so you could probably go cheaper :)
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