Outside of the "how to pay for it" question (which has never been addressed beyond vague "tax the rich" promises) there's another problem: how to save people from themselves. One could think of this as an annuity, and try to cash it in for total cash value today (e.g. lump sum payment): get $200k today, and sign over the rest of the checks you get for life. Then what do you do with bankrupt folks? Sorry, you had your chance, now you starve in the streets? Of course not -- so you still need another safety net for those people.
> Then what do you do with bankrupt folks? Sorry, you had your chance, now you starve in the streets?
The institution of bankruptcy already answers, in general outline, the question of what to do with bankrupt folks: in short, cancel debts that aren't payable without excessive hardship. UBI should obviously be payable only to the beneficiary (except in the case of legal incapacity), who might contract to pay an equal amount to someone else, but such a contractual liability would be as subject to cancellation in bankruptcy as any other debt.
"Apple provides a black box with iOS, they have full control. Maybe the next iOS update comes with privacy intrusion because it's more lucrative."
This is true, but it's also potentially worthwhile to consider that Apple has positioned themselves as a hardware company (i.e. the majority of their money is based on selling units of hardware), whereas their main competitor here (Google) is an ad company (i.e. the majority of their money comes from selling their users' data). Apple has chosen to highlight their commitment to privacy partially because they feel it helps their market position, whereas for Google, it would hurt it.
Certainly it doesn't mean that Apple is infallible, just that I think it makes it easier to accept that Apple is more likely to protect privacy more than Google.
I'm pretty biased towards Apple, so obviously this may not work for everyone; if you need source code to feel secure, then by all means, go for it. For people who are looking for less work but some of the benefits, I think that Apple is a decent way to go.
> This is true, but it's also potentially worthwhile to consider that Apple has positioned themselves as a hardware company (i.e. the majority of their money is based on selling units of hardware), whereas their main competitor here (Google) is an ad company (i.e. the majority of their money comes from selling their users' data). Apple has chosen to highlight their commitment to privacy partially because they feel it helps their market position, whereas for Google, it would hurt it.
But this is all just marketing, whereas the reality is that Apple could also be hoovering up location data and you may never know.
You may have good reasons to trust Apple more than Google, which is great. Others may reverse that position of trust (perhaps they had their iCloud account hacked into and photographs leaked on the internet).
"But this is all just marketing, whereas the reality is that Apple could also be hoovering up location data and you may never know."
It isn't just marketing.
This is how the alignment of incentives works.
A company's incentives are aligned with the people who pay them. Apple's are aligned with those that buy phones. Google and Facebook's are aligned with those that buy ads.
The parent argument is that without transparency it's difficult to actually know.
Apple's true incentive is to provide value for their shareholders.
If they can improve the value provided to shareholders by hoovering up information while also maintaining consumer confidence and sales then why would they not?
I think that Apple's incentives are better aligned with my desires for privacy, but it's only an assumption.
Because this sort of thing inevitably leaks? Apple has a formula that demonstrably works, a formula that everyone can directly observe making them an utterly stupid amount of money. It would be the height of stupidity to risk their unparalleled monetary successes to pursue a few dirty little crumbs.
Exactly - especially when you are employing privacy-conscious developers, it would be nearly impossible to keep it contained. Someone would leak it to the EFF. It's better business strategy for Apple to not defect.
Guys, this is all just plain old wishful thinking. Neither you, nor me, nor most people here have any real clue what decisions are being done behind closed doors of Apple, or other companies. All the high profile cases are mostly PR-oriented, see how PRISM was handled (not that they had any choice, but it is what it is).
Don't attach these emotions where they are not appropriate. Apple is a for-profit company. If they will be pressed hard by US government behind closed doors, they will bulge and you won't know about it, why should you (maybe in 10 years as part of some leak). If they will decide to change their strategy, they will. They have 0 moral issues hiding gazillions of cash offshore from IRS. Just like any other company out there.
Simple fact is, most people don't care about security. I work in IT, and I have numerous friends with iPhones, but exactly 0 of them cares about extra potential security when choosing phones, most have no clue about these issues. Regular people choose Apple because of Apple and how things look and feel, and how they are perceived among others as a status indicator.
I think you massively overestimate the power of the US government. What would they do if Apple said no? Shut them down? Put Tim Cook in jail? Never going to happen. That perception of power might exist against mere civilians, but not against the big multinationals.
Apple has engineered their products to be unbreakable by Apple. That says a lot about their desire to cooperate!
Apple's billions held internationally aren't hidden, everyone knows where it is. And it was never money destined to be "on-shore" in the first place – it's profits from retail sales which occurred in Europe and elsewhere. Their offices in Ireland have the Apple logo on them and they're one of Ireland's largest taxpayers. Everything they do is on the public record. That money wasn't expatriated from the USA, the IRS isn't owed any of it.
You underestimate the power of the NSA, CIA, FBI and in general the US government. They don't need to imprison the CEO or shut them down, there are subtle yet nefarious ways of getting what they want. Anyways let's forget this part, it's just speculation from both of us.
According to their privacy policy[0], they comply with requests by the government for user data and inform the user unless gagged.
> In the second half of 2016, Apple received between 5,750 and 5,999 National Security Orders.
If their products are unbreakable, how can they provide this data to the government?
The data stored on newer iOS devices with hardware security enclave are unbreakable even by Apple, but the iCloud backups are accessible by Apple. That’s probably how the requests are fulfilled.
I think it would have much greater repercussions over time, eliminating one of the few concrete advantages of Apple products. But for now let's assume it only lost them a tiny share, perhaps one percent. Even that is a massive fortune compared to the money Apple could possibly make selling a bit of marketing data under the table.
I’d be pissed for an hour but at the end of the day my phone, laptop, watch, TV and car all syncing my music and crap with no effort is too appealing to scoff at.
Hell if I found out they had a meat locker of dead kittens hidden in the basement of 1 Infinite Loop Id probably stay loyal.
It would be a ballsy play of limited utility. For one, you're talking about Apple risking epic legal liability if they got caught. For the other, they'd be doing so for limited upside. They can only sell ads on the premise that they don't have all this inside information on their users.
What makes you so confident? How do you know Apple thinks of itself as a hardware company whose incentives are aligned with those that buy phones? Their marketing certainly has made a lot of people think that, but, well that's just marketing.
Apple hasn't exactly always stuck with one identity. In 2007 one could have easily said that Apple is "a computer company" and not "a phone company" like Nokia.
Ultimately though, Google and Apple are incentivize to collect data for a lot more reasons than just selling ads. A lot of software functionality on phones benefits from rich user data. Apple may well be collecting data to drive better software experiences, and how much of that data they'll keep in-house vs sharing with third-parties is anybody's guess.
Even if you only consider advertising and hardware in simple terms, Apple is very directly incentivize to advertise new iPhones to current iPhone users. They want you to crave new models as soon as they come out, and to think your current model is kind of lame and old. Why wouldn't they be tempted to leverage user data to do that?
Finally, the vast majority of iPhone users probably aren't so sensitive to data security (the market of people who are is pretty small). So I doubt Apple cares that much about their perception among security-conscious people.
"A company's incentives are aligned with the people who pay them"
That sounds great but it can not be further from the truth. So are you saying that Comcast and the telcos of the world incentives are aligned with their users?
Telcos in the US have localized monopolies. Their customers are a captive audience. The incentive in that situation is for the telcos to wring as much money out of its customers as possible since they have nowhere else to go. Apple is very far from a monopoly. It sells in highly competitive markets and as such, is incentivized to appeal to its customers so that those customers do not choose another option for their hardware purchases.
Ok, the example still holds where they do not have monopolies but let's move to a better example.
Gaming. Highly competitive market.
You buy a game, do you think that it means that the game producer has your best interest at hearth? Apple is filthy rich not because they have users as top priority, but because the extract as much as they can from them.
They have a very clear lock-in policy where they try to avoid their users moving to other platforms if they wish so (iMessage anyone). Is that really in their users interest?
For all we know, that's what they want you to believe. The fact that you are so certain this is how they are incentivized could just mean that they did a fantastic job at marketing and making their users believe this image of themselves they've worked on.
But do you have counter examples? Because here, we see one more from Google, while Apple has had a much better track record so far that confirms this view that they are walking the talk, too.
I feel that people mostly don't care to check the correctness of Apple's claims. Yesterday i asked a question about security (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15751571) and no one replied.
A submission without replies doesn't necessarily mean nobody cares. Some links get submitted and receive zero comments, then a week later it gets submitted again and receives dozens or hundreds. It's a crapshoot.
...and yet they comply with ~80% of government requests for user data?
At the end of the day, they still have a way to break their own encryption; they just don't want to set a legal precedent or create tools to allow a third-party to have unfettered access.
Everything they say in public releases is just, "face". It's better than the Facebook or AT&T models of charging for access as a subscription service, but nonetheless I do not believe them when they claim their hardware is opaque to themselves.
That's not scalable to the entire market of people wanting mobile devices, in case you didn't realise.
The question the GP was almost certainly asking was "how can the public confirm that security of their data is high on the agenda of Apple (and by extension any company), what systems are in place". Without third-party review of open systems and practices I can't see it being possible.
That's assuming if there is an disgruntled employee with knowledge of this happening and if there is, that there isn't an NDA good enough to make him or her to think twice about leaking anything should they leave on bad terms. That's a large if to place your hopes on.
That's smoke and mirrors. What guarantees you that Apple isn't collecting your location right now? It's proprietary software, so you wouldn't know, and it's perfectly within the terms of their EULA. You're just gonna trust that they don't (even though they are a business and that can potentially make them more money)? Or are you gonna know your phone isn't spying in you by installing free software on your device?
If we only made decisions based on whether we could absolutely be sure of something with 100% certainty, we would all be paralyzed. Until a fully open-source phone is released that is comparable in quality to an iPhone, we can look at all of the available data and make reasonable decisions.
Aside from Apple’s strong stance and history of protecting the privacy of users, we also have security researchers MITM’ing the traffic sent from iOS devices to Apple, and every jailbreak gives an opportunity to look deeper; if they were acting badly, someone would find that out soon enough.
I agree that asking for 100% guarantees isn't useful. Realistically, the danger with Apple is that its absolute power over what regular users can install on their iOS devices is easily exploited by governments.
If some surveillance happy government bans some VPN software then Apple is going to enforce that ban much more thoroughly than Google or Microsoft ever could.
Did you check and compile every line of code that runs on your phone? If not, than that's also smoke and mirrors. I guess it's easier to get evil patches into any open source component on a "free" phone than to get them into an iOS release.
OpenSSL proved to me that being open source doesn’t mean anyone actually checks what it’s doing. It could be checked, but it would be trivial to sneak in things.
Good point. But I still prefer open free software, because there you HAVE the OPTION to inspect it!
If you paid someone (even multiple people/companies) to do professional audit over OpenSSL, it would be prevented.
Now, with closed software you are lost and the only thing you have is a TRUST the SW developer. Because inspecting blbs is much more difficult. And I don't trust them.
Actually, it would be against their Privacy Policy; and they would get a fine of up to (5%? 10%?) of their annual turnover fined by the EU under GDPR if they did.
How will the EU audit Apple to confirm the privacy policy is not being breeched, or how will people know about such a breech on Apple's part in order to notify the authorities?
You've got to do a lot more than installing free software if you're that paranoid. You've got to check the code, ensure the code that you're installing is the same code that you've read, etc. etc.
Apple is a lifestyle and fashion company moreso than a software or hardware company; yes, Nike makes shoes and Ralph Lauren sells shirts, but they are not best described as shoe or clothing manufacturers first and foremost. Jobs understood this.
Yes, that is exactly their goal. Google services, from the Play store to search to Google plus is all designed with exactly this in mind. What most people don't understand is "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. When I use Gmail, I know what I'm signing up for.
I don’t remember where I first heard this, but increasingly “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the training data.”. (Doesn’t invalidate your point, which I agree with)
"What he basically did was say, "don't ever print anything negative about a billionaire because they can take down your entire business""
No, he didn't. Gawker died on its own merits; in an alternative world where Gawker continued to flaunt the law because someone couldn't afford to fund a lawsuit, I'm OK with this outcome. Not to mention, Gawker did themselves absolutely no favors, from ignoring a federal judge to flippantly answering questions under oath, they garnered no pity from me.
I agree, Gawker was awful and deserved to die for many reasons.
But it's important to remember that the judgement was only the death blow -- defending the lawsuit was what gave them a slow death. Even if Gawker was right and won, they still would have died.
Just-world fallacy. If I had an axe to grind with you and had unlimited funds - how many of your negative interactions with (contractors|coworkers|neighbours|acquaintances) in the past couple of years could be escalated to financial ruin? If you survive the first suit, how many more could you stomach before declaring bankruptcy?
By accident or design, the fact that legal action is expensive acts as a brake on suits without much merit (to a degree).
It may be an interesting exercise to think of how this can be turned "against" you. If you wanted to play armchair politics, you could spin this:
- Highly paid engineer walked away from a 6 figure salary
- Takes a job at a small company where he gets equity that could potentially be worth millions.
- Complains that he may have to pay taxes on a significant portion of his compensation.
Put those together, and you have someone probably still making more than double the national median wage complaining that his favorite tax loophole is being closed. Meanwhile the local plumber / school teacher / single mom is struggling to make ends meet; why shouldn't you pay your fair share so that they can get a tax break?
FWIW, this is just an exercise, I'm not saying this is true. Just something to keep in mind though, that many (most?) of the people on HN are being paid significantly higher than most Americans, and complaining that their stock is being taxed differently isn't going to garner much support.
I think the "easy" rebuttal to your third point/counterargument is that's not what's actually happening: you're being forced to pay taxes on vapor. No one is objecting to paying tax when stock is sold; that's normal and reasonable. It's just crazy to expect people to pay taxes on something that cannot be sold.
"Net loss for the nine months ended September 30, 2017 includes $2.5 billion of stock-based compensation expense, primarily due to the recognition of expense related to RSUs with a performance condition satisfied on the effectiveness of the registration statement for our initial public offering."
I believe the vast majority of that was due to issuing stock to Evan Spiegel for successfully executing the IPO at given metrics.
No, it won't. The sensationalism all around is just infuriating; I know it's basically politics in a nutshell, but this sort of crap is getting really old. It's not going to destroy higher education; it might raise the bar a bit of who goes to graduate school, and force schools to do more to entice top tier talent to come to their school, but it's not going to destroy it.
A bit? I know people whose taxable income would increase by 200% without these waivers. This translates to a tax increase of ~500% and ensures that people making 25k in stipends are paying 15k in federal taxes.
Can you provide any specific details on how the new suggested tax plan will raise the bar? It seems as though we should be encouraging Graduate and PhD students. It seems as though it would force additional students into taking out loans if their tuition is not waived?
If the only thing standing in the way of a student continuing on Graduate or PhD studies is grant money, they shouldn't have trouble finding a job. In that case, if the university wants to attract those students from the private sector, they'll have to find a way to increase a student's stipend to cover these expenses. At top-tier schools where tuition is the highest, their endowment is likely large enough to support this move.
Alternatively, the schools could adjust what they charge students for tuition. As the article states, the cost of a year at Princeton's grad school is $49k/yr. Somehow I suspect that this sticker price is not tied to much in terms of their cost, but if it means charging less to students if that allows them to attract top talent, they could probably do that as well.
In terms of raising the bar, to me this would mean that if graduate schools want top talent, they'll have to find a way to do it: raise the stipend, lower the cost of tuition or something else. In this case, a very bright student who can't afford graduate school will either have to go into industry or the schools will have to find a way to keep them.
On the downside, if we follow the pattern of the last 30 years, the reaction will go something like:
1) Students struggle to afford college tuition
2) Government steps in to make large cheap-ish loans available beyond what might be reasonable ().
3) Students now have access to loans to go to any school they want
4) Colleges notice that they can raise price because students don't price shop
5) Colleges raise their prices
() They're government backed loans that are difficult to discharge, mostly because there is nothing to repossess and interest rates would likely go through the roof if students could graduate and immediately discharge their loans.
> 3) Students now have access to loans to go to any school they want
> 4) Colleges notice that they can raise price because students don't price shop
When has this ever been true. I applied to school many schools back in the day and it usually came down to finance and then reputation. Whichever school granted you the most tuition and living expenses, and wasn't steaming pile of shit is where 99% of my working class peers and I attended.
Speaking only anecdotally, friends who complain the most about college loans are the ones who took out massive (~$100k) loans to go to private schools. With some exceptions, private schools are likely not to be worth the extra money; problem is, loans are due later, but awesome "dream school" is now.
A PhD (and sometimes a postdoc) is a requirement if you want to do more than low pay lab-tech work in some fields, like pharma. In the life sciences a PhD is more of a professional degree.
"I feel like the fury over it is very reactionary."
I think this is the current boogey-man to go after. I think it's a useful tool for politicians (DNC, Hillary Clinton, Democrats and Republicans - none of them wanted Trump where he is today) to bury their heads in the sand and say that it wasn't their fault that they got the election so wrong. They can point to Russia and ignore their own shortcomings that in my opinion put people off of voting for what they "should" have voted for. Given the choice of a deeper soul-searching or blaming someone else, humans usually choose to point the finger at someone else.
Did Russia/Russians attempt to influence the election? Absolutely. I'm sure most major powers in the world did, in one way or another. They'd be silly not to at least consider it, in the same way that I'm sure the United States attempts to serve its own interests via other countries' elections. But I don't think it's anywhere near as effective as politicians seem to want to make it appear.
Remember that the Chinese government doesn't have to deal with a lot of what the United States' government does have to: things like local governments and our election system. Our government is not set up to move quickly (by design!): our government can't decide to shut down thousands of businesses for a day without consequences, and for good reason.
Americans have set up their government so that it more or less reflects the will of the people, and the relatively educated American public is not OK with the government taking drastic steps very quickly. For better or for worse, the Chinese government can move extremely quickly because they essentially answer to no one; if the government wants to raze a neighborhood for something, they do it. If they want to build a road, they move whatever's in the way and build it. In some ways it's incredibly efficient. But that's something the US government is not optimized for, and I'm personally glad for that.
>Americans have set up their government so that it more or less reflects the will of the people
I patently disagree with this opinion. Between lobbyist money and "news" agencies blatantly lying to groups of people not educated enough to fact check what they're hearing on the news, the government very much does NOT reflect the will of the people. It reflects the will of a handful of extremely wealthy people, and large corporations seeking profits at the expense of *.
That's part of the will of the people. Their will is influenced by those parties you identified but it's still their will. It's like saying Christians go to church against their will because because their parents brainwashed them when they were children, and them in turn back many generations to a time when it was done for the political power of extremely wealthy people.
If Americans didn't want lobbyists or dishonest news, they would vote to ban lobbyists and not watch the dishonest news. But they choose to keep those things in a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop.
>It's like saying Christians go to church against their will because because their parents brainwashed them when they were children, and them in turn back many generations to a time when it was done for the political power of extremely wealthy people.
You realize that's actually a provable thing, right? That it's significantly harder to break that cycle when it's introduced at a young age because it forces children to remove their parents from the pedestal they're naturally placed on.
You say that as though you think it's just something people make up, when there's actual provable science behind it.
The Chinese very much have local government, and they lack many of the tools we have to centrally manage those local governments, in part because their central government is not at all transparent. The other issue is that only 6% of their government employees are at the central level. The US? 12%. EU? 14%.
The Chinese have a saying for this: the mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away.
Xi actually comes predominantly from the reformer branch of the Chinese political house. I think his biggest challenge is that his precedessors grew China too quickly.
If that's possible, that's probably the right thing to do; if the company is failing, who cares about diluted stock? 0.0075% of $0 is still $0.