Very interesting read.

> Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren't primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They're designed to keep users swiping.

So they're not very different from porn and Facebook, right? They sell an illusion of the real thing that isn't fullfilling but is addicting.

Does anyone think dating apps sell love? I'm pretty sure everyone who actually uses it within the expected bounds uses it as a way to find people to date, which is very different from love.

How is it different?

Among the many weird things that the U.S. have but real democratic countries don't, the most promiscuous of them is this flow of private money into politics.

Campaign financing, U.S. style, is just legalized bribing. In any healthy democracy it would be illegal. In the U.S. is just the way things are.

Watching things from outside, it feels like the US is a pay-to-win democracy. It's hard to say where exactly the line between lobbying vs. corruption is drawn.

Back in my country, the bribes are illegal and mostly untraceable.

Money will go into politics. Nobody can stop this, and it should be out in the open and traceable.

Obviously, no bribe at all is the best, but is this happening anywhere?

Does anyone still remember when Western countries were scared of Huawei because the Chinese would use their hardware to spy on people?

Well, guess what? The U.S. also has their own Huawei. But, at least, they're "democratic" and follow "the rule of the law" (for whatever these words mean nowadays).

Didn’t we all learn this with the Snowden files? Nothing new unfortunately

It's actually materially better that Google's regulator is the USG and not the CCP. These aren't the same thing.

Both are wrong.

> First Electric Ferrari

This is big. Ferrari, as a brand, is the top cult of internal combustion engine.

For them to release an EV is like Apple releasing an Windows computer or Android phone.

Soon, the last holdout of big oil will be the American government.

They've been doing hybrids for a while now. Not to mention the F1 and LeMans prototype cars. This car is more like the iPhone SE or 16/17e line of phones.

"Ferrari EV"

This is something that we need to read slowly.

The "ferraristas" have been the most ardent sect on the cult of the internal combustion engine.

If these guys can be converted, then, probably, the last holdout in veneration of oil will probably be the government of the United States.

Thank Mr. Flock CEO!

I've never heard about Deflock, but your tantrum motivated me to know it. And I like it!

But the best part are the implications: it is ok for Flock to spy people, it isn't ok for people to spy Flock.

Also The Guardian and The Economist.

The Guardian has turned into Gawker with better spell checker. Everything I have read from them is culture war and extremely shallow lately.

More like a death by a thousand cuts.

In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.

This is it. It's a medium and organizational structure that aged out. Even before social media and Google, people were getting more of their news via 24hr news channels, then came the internet and the citizen journalists, then came social media and now the attention industry. The market was getting smaller and smaller but was accelerated by new technologies and habits.

Same with magazines. There are some niche magazines that still do alright and also what were niche broadsheet publications became online subscriptions where they offered the subscriber an ROI of some kind.

> some environmental regulations work [...] while other [..] do more harm than good

You are (deliberately?) overlooking the elephant in the room: lobbies with money can distort the discussion.

Big tobacco knew for decades that smoking was bad but still managed to block restrictions in smoking. Oil companies knew lead was poisoning. Purdue knew Oxycontin was addicting. Facebook knows their product is toxic.

> The current administration is an outlier, but we all know that.

No, it isn't. This administration is a rupture. It is the beginning of a new normal. Future presidents will try to emulate this guy.

You could say "outlier" when he lost in 2020. You can't say that after he came back. The American people wants this authoritarian populism. The SCOTUS enables it. And the world shouldn't trust both the American people and its crumbling institutions.