Google and Evolution of the Internet

[Vagrant0]

Before the American Civil War, the nation's industry was built upon legalized slavery. During the Industrial Revolution it was built upon companies who owned everything in town, including the debt of their employees as a variation of legalized slavery. After Unions came about, this was moved to illegal slavery by means of working with criminal organizations or hiring illegal immigrants. With trade agreements with Mexico, it eventually just moved south. The Great America you put on a pedestal is, and always has been a lie.

 

The death of American industry has been happening since the 1900's, when educational institutions in the US started regarding manufacturing jobs as "dirty work to be done by the uneducated and minorities". The very notion of a job as a machine operator, or working in industry is one which was used as a threat, pointing to harsh working conditions, unsafe environments, and long hours. While I'm sure you would like to point out our dealings with China, we were doing similar dealings with Mexico and South America long before that. White, well educated people did not WANT to work these jobs, these kinds of jobs were beneath them. Companies meanwhile realized they could not pay the wages demanded by White, well educated workers, and instead hired those who were not. In numerous cases, this amounted to hiring illegal immigrants from Europe and Latin America who could be paid a slave wage without benefits and intimidated into silence about any and all health risks. All this, well before Nixon took office. Consumer culture, much which started in the 1950's, would not have been possible without an abundant and easily exploitable workforce to make cheap abundant products. The only thing that changed since then was that there were developing countries with their own workforce who could be exploited further, for less money, and located far enough away that nobody gives a damn about how many people are being killed, becoming sick from waste, or are being mistreated... Much like the Oil companies and their current operations in Africa. But you didn't see that link I tossed in, and probably fill up your tank without the slightest care about where the oil came from. This is essentially the America that exists, the America that always has existed; if it doesn't stop you from buying what you want, eating what you want, or costing more than you care to spend, most people don't care about what was involved with making those things available. There's no "financial future" left to sell out, it was already gone before anyone here was even a sparkle in their parents eye. The only thing left is a global future... But naturally politicians running in a country where the notion of patriotism has reached unfathomable levels of idiocy would not even attempt to explain this (not that they even had the capacity to, nor the common person the capacity to understand). But hey, keep with whatever notions fit comfortably in your mind, stick with the flock, pay no attention to those ramps at the end of the stockyard, and feel free to choose between ramp A or ramp B as if they didn't lead to exactly the same place.

 

But I digress. Since you admit that Google is not responsible for this particular situation, there is no reason to continue this line of discussion.

[TheMastersSon]

Pop quiz for RattleAndGrind:

 

Why do our history books say that Kissinger's initial trips to Beijing were done in secret? What necessitated this secrecy?

 

If you don't know already, good luck finding an answer with Google. Or Bing. Or Yahoo. You'll find no explanation whatsoever, just a single "history" of U.S.-China trade relations -- that starts with 1971 (Nixon announced the end of our country's 21-year embargo against China's Communist regime on June 10, 1971). Prior to that, no official trade existed, relations weren't even normalized between our countries until 1979, over seven years later.

Edited August 17, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[Vagrant0]

Pop quiz for RattleAndGrind:

 

Why do our history books say that Kissinger's initial trips to Beijing were done in secret? What necessitated this secrecy?

 

If you don't know already, good luck finding an answer with Google. Or Bing. Or Yahoo. You'll find no explanation whatsoever, just a single "history" of U.S.-China trade relations -- that starts with 1971. :D

What's the sense in crying over spilled milk exactly? If you're trying to prove that meetings happened between political leaders without public mention of this, especially during the age of Nixon, you don't. This is already assumed by anyone who has enough sense to know that the Government has been holding secrets long before the Government even existed as an official body (Benjamin Franklin wasn't taking regular, repeated trips between France and America just for the sake of mapping the ocean floor and continuing his numerous sexual exploits... He was also meeting with people from a nation that was an enemy of the British Colonies (a matter that would have him executed as a traitor) in order to encourage them to send military advisers and aid to the Revolution). Conspiracy theories are fun and all, but are nothing relevant here.

 

Please, indulge me, draw a clear, direct line between whatever you think happened in the age of Nixon and how this relates to Google in the modern age. Explain to me how several dozen companies offering internet solutions, using their own proprietary code and file formats protected under patent law, using their own questionable methods (See Ask + Malware, See Bing + Forced Windows 10 install) to get ahead of their competitors is good for the well being of the Internet. Sell me on the premise of a Windows phone being a good idea by any measure of the word... Just try.

[TheMastersSon]

Vagrant, the mobile market is a separate issue. Microsoft still control the world's desktops, and home access to what's now, properly and finally considered a common carrier utility in our country. Instead of an "information service" as our prostituted Supreme Court claimed (whatever an "information service" might be in the first place, since the term has never even been defined in our laws).

 

To repeat, I'm not claiming Google caused Nixon, but our current situation -- of having 90% of internet searches directed to products made by and in the world's primary facilitator of human slavery, organized counterfeiting and fraud -- was made possible by and only by him. My favorite these days is listening to some of our elected reps (and candidates) spouting tariffs as a fix for our China problem, as if tariffs can or would accomplish anything except to raise prices for everyone. China is the only major trading partner on Earth that dictates the value range of their own "currency" (quoted because even the idea of currency is absurd in their totalitarian Communist state. Private ownership is disallowed and the regime legally owns virtually everything), they'd simply adjust their values to match the tariff amounts and we're all back to square one -- at much higher prices. BTW the above scam is also why 40 U.S. dollar bills bought an ounce of gold in 1970, while that same ounce of gold now takes well over 1000 of these same notes. Meanwhile our buying power today in real terms is what it was in 1970. Hint hint. I often feel like I'm the only remaining American who's capable of basic math.

 

IMO the only possible fix for our China problem is to close the gate that Nixon opened, and the only people who can fix it are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place. The trade deficit charts are extremely ugly and strictly one-way, so our two options are eventual bankruptcy and collapse of our federal government, or to properly restore the integrity of the global free market, instead of artificially and ridiculously forcing free countries to compete with enslaved ones. The exact accurate analogy imo is trying to accomodate a table of chess players at a checkers tournament. Personally I have nothing against either game, but the rules are so fundamentally different between the two that no possibility of accomodation exists. Does anyone reading this thread believe China concerns itself with such things as child labor laws, environmental impact studies and 10,000 other expenses that all businesses in Western countries are required to absorb? They simply wash their hands of all of these expenses, because they're accountable to nobody. Including their own population. This is what our federal government has forced our companies to compete with, since Nixon.

Edited August 17, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[Vagrant0]

And it is at this point I point out that China currently owns a large portion of the monetary debt that Americans have been more than happy to build up over the last 5 decades, buying products made in China as a sole means of keeping the Chinese GDP alive and well long enough for this debt to eventually be forgotten about. For better or worse, we're both in the same boat. We could try to kick them out of the boat by saying that we won't pay back the debt they have already paid us for, but that isn't going to happen. We could try and declare that we aren't going to buy things produced in their country, but given the fact that 3/4 of everything sold in America, including most electronics, are made in China, that isn't going to happen either. On one side, you plunge the US into a war (countless wars have started because of debt afterall, including the first world war) against the most populous nation on the planet, a nation with nuclear capabilities who could quite readily ally with our existing enemies. On the other side you ask Americans to give up the life of abundance and comfort that they've enjoyed for the past 50 years, just before China goes into recession and either brings the rest of the world with it, or opens itself to more dangerous factions getting what remains. We are all in the same lifeboat, that ship has sank. We can either paddle together or reside ourselves to drowning together. I'm sorry, but this is the unfortunate truth of the matter, not that you'll accept it.

 

Regardless what the history books claim, Kissinger's trip to China was for multiple reasons. The first was to open up what was then the prominent Chinese governing power in talks with America and try and create a wedge between China and Soviet relations which at the time were being strained by inaction to Mao's requests in quelling the small local rebellions (mostly local gang leaders trying to claim power and money) which were popping up around the country. The second was to discuss plans regarding a region of China which was close to the then colony of Taiwan which was being seen as nearing the end of the lease period along with some other portion of the country (which I can't be bothered to look up). This region was treated by Mao as an experiment to see how foreign influences would affect the brand of communism that he was trying to develop, and was naturally encountering these influences by means of proximity to Taiwan. This region later became a way for Mao to relocate disruptive elements and create propaganda where his brand of communism could be seen as a glorious alternative to the consumer driven madness while slowly exposing his country to modern advancements (including healthcare which he needed). The plans discussed were related to creating trade agreements with this area to bring in American culture instead of that of nearby Japan and Korea and promote the import of American products and electronics. Kissinger's purpose for this was to help recover the declining American economy as well as try and force some good old Freedom into the country. Beyond that, only those present really know what happened, and it mostly doesn't matter. But of course there are conspiracy theories out there claiming everything from aliens to helping Mao assassinate his wife and vice versa. But you don't strike me as someone familiar with what actually happened during the Great Leap Forward or understanding why those decisions were made in order to bring a country of nearly a billion people from backwards political practices and subsistence farming to become a world superpower in the span of 50 years. Mentioning human rights concerns about China, you also don't strike me as someone who is particularly well versed with the American history of genocide and theft against the native people, or even what kind of conditions are present in American cities today. Don't mistake this as an acceptance of human tragedy on my part... Horrific things still were not only allowed, but endorsed in both cases. But unlike most people, I know full well what sort of price our "Great American Prosperity" had.

 

Regardless, with or without Google, these products would still be made, advertised, and sold. The internet didn't even exist as the consumer marketplace it currently does back in the 80's 90's and early 2000's, but still most everything was made in either China, India, or parts of the Middle East. The truth you're missing here is that consumers already decided with their wallets long before Yahoo was anything other than a colloquialism for sex.

[TheMastersSon]

The free market's former exclusion of enslaved countries is specifically what allowed higher standards of living in our and most other Western countries. Nixon had to send Kissinger to Beijing secretly, because the visits violated our then-current and then-21 year-old trade ban against the PRC. His repeal of the ban legitimized his own existing and clandestine relations with the Communist regime in Beijing (and Kissinger's, who is still with us and defends this catastrophic treason to this day). As mentioned, the trade ban was lifted in mid-1971, well after Kissinger's secret visits and as soon as the goals of the multinational interests behind Nixon's actions were already secured in Beijing. Concurrently Nixon also put the final nails in the coffin of our gold standard in 1971, thereby converting our currency from something tangibly useful into eventual and inevitable toilet paper.

 

What's most astonishing to me is that Nixon succeeded in "opening the gates to" a country that had just finished providing most of the munitions to put over 58,000 of our kids to death in Vietnam. In 40 years I've never read a satisfactory explanation of how he got away with it, other than to blame it on national moral collapse. Artificially cheap labor was and still is our only interest in China, with their potentially huge but entirely inaccessible markets still being held out as bait for treason. The claim that millions of kids tethered to workstations and legally unable to leave their country qualify as a "free market" was so abhorrent to our country that not even the possibility of legitimized relations existed. And now even some of our elected reps are claiming it's somehow impossible to entirely shut the gate that Nixon opened. It's not only possible, it's the only solution to our problem other than eventual bankruptcy and collapse of our federal government. If you want ugly, wait until the IMF shows up, starts claiming America spends too much and pushes for "austerity". Three-quarters of U.S. families are now subsisting from paycheck to paycheck, and it's not because we're spending too much. It's because we're being forced by our own federal government to compete with enslaved countries and labor forces.

[Vagrant0]

 

You talk as if Vietnam as a good idea to even begin with rather than a failed attempt by the French to attempt to establish a colony that lost out due to the sweeping influence of communism (which only managed to gain a following because of the turmoil and corruption that followed the forced surrender of Japanese conquests between the end of WWI and the end of WWII and the power vacuum followed... Which we mostly ignored because of our own policies that regarded Europe as Europe's problem and Asia a third world backwater of no consequence). You talk as if the very country you presumably live in wasn't already built upon the death of people who came before. Not to discount the service and sacrifice offered by those who lost their lives to a cause that should never have been... But you talk like the only thing that matters is the American price, or that the American price wasn't just another dozen drops in the bucket over the course of a dozen years. Or that we aren't perfectly fine having an even more people die annually to preventable causes like alcohol, suicide, medical mistakes, American poverty. Nevermind the part where many more deaths among Vietnam veterans occurred because of increased levels of suicide, joblessness, drug abuse which was allowed to occur by both that administration and every one since. Or the part where our current returning service members are facing a very similar situation. You talk like the sort of person who protests at the funerals of our fallen service members as if their death was just a matter of politics that can be quickly reversed by putting a mark in a box. You talk like someone who has never left the country, or actually taken a look at the complex mess that is our foreign relations with not just Asia, but Europe, Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and just about everywhere between. But I'm sure that somewhere in your mind you are able to justify to yourself that all these problems will vanish once we close our trade relations with China, and foil the plans of Google. Good for you, you've gotten it all figured out. Congratulations boys, the world is saved, here's your gold star to bring home to mommy and a voucher for a free trip to Disney Land. :psyduck:

 

*edit* But thank you for prompting my outrage which led me to look up some people I went to school with who served. To be reminded of those who have been lost, those who have given this country more than you can imagine, and reconnect with those who are still alive... To protect your right to claim that they were all in on the scam.

[RattleAndGrind]

Pop quiz for RattleAndGrind:

 

Why do our history books say that Kissinger's initial trips to Beijing were done in secret? What necessitated this secrecy?

 

If you don't know already, good luck finding an answer with Google. Or Bing. Or Yahoo. You'll find no explanation whatsoever, just a single "history" of U.S.-China trade relations -- that starts with 1971 (Nixon announced the end of our country's 21-year embargo against China's Communist regime on June 10, 1971). Prior to that, no official trade existed, relations weren't even normalized between our countries until 1979, over seven years later.

 

My memory and my history books also tell me that at the time of Henry Kissinger's 1971 trip to China, America was still involved in a war with the Soviet Government (NOT Chinese) backed Peoples Republic of Vietnam; AKA North Vietnam. Since the American government had no direct diplomatic ties to North Vietnam, a good number of historians believe that the trip was an effort to get China to act as a intermediary in negotiations with the North Vietnamese government. Since China was attempting to extend their influence into Vietnam and reduce the Soviet influence, and the Chinese and Soviet governments were at odds over Vietnam; China was persuaded to take the meeting. But it was China insisted on secrecy to avoid being seen as cooperating with the Decadent Imperialist West. Nothing sinister. Just diplomacy. And two years later, the Vietnam Peace Accords were signed.

 

Have you ever heard of the "Rule on Unintended Consequences"? Trade and open relations with China occurred to get China's cooperation with North Vietnamese negotiations. Good ol' tricky Dick needed Chinese help to keep a campaign promise to get America out of Vietnam. The long term results where neither anticipated or planned.

 

PS. I must disappoint again. Just as a test, I went back to google again and verified my memory via google searches.

[tartarsauce2]

the old forest of great trees is rotten and dying, a horrible wreck overshadowing the area all around it choking life out, keeping us in the dark, when it falls we'll lose our cover and have to fend for ourselves in the open, but as time progresses new trees will emerge and a lighter more inviting forest will begin again - instead of that dark haunted realm of ghosts and wolves, but to get there one needs to deal with the harsh sunlight and unfettered winds
the weeds are already strangling it, one might as well take some of them down now to start the process in a few places while there's still cover here or there, to keep the forest going on instead of falling apart all at once in disaster

the entire reason I had a days long near panic-attack state of mind around 2003-4 was because when I saw what google was up to I figured mass surveillance would be coming in the future and that it spider web crawlers would be a method how, and while I didn't have the name for it that others do (I didn't really have a name for it at all) I knew how dangerous metadata could be for a democracy

ever since that day I've put a huge amount of effort into what are now called memes and taking advantage of time sensitive context with breakneck speed developments of new situations in an attempt to drive society to go so fast the mass surveillance state couldn't keep up

so, basically if I can figure out what google's up to in 2003-4 would lead to this, and I knew it was bad, well that says a lot I guess

the other thing is that hideo kojima and other people had already come to a similar conclusion about the problems of these kinds of issues, modern times with charlie chaplin, 1984 with george orwell, the nazis and radio broadcasts, north korea with its communications networks, the great firewall of china...
the creele commission
they all came to the same conclusion I did, they wanted it though, I'd rather not
thing is, except the one about the nazis and radios, I didn't know any of it existed when I came up with the nightmare scenario, which means that either me and every totalitarian society in the world are wrong as well as hideo kojima, or it's google's a real problem

Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary

con·text

noun

the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.

the solution I'm afraid is essentially the consistent degradation and destruction of those centralized networks supremacy over others through, wearing them down, and the emergence of other newer networks, in other words to avoid a god complex laced palace empire, we're going to have to bring about the jungle again, nature red tooth and claw

Horace Smith's "Ozymandias"

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Edited August 21, 2016 by tartarsauce2

[sheemer1]

 

There was definitely enough evidence for our FCC to justify Title II protections for internet traffic.

 

 

 

Yet to enforce consumer complaints that ISPs are violating the FCC’s proposed privacy rules, the agency will need expansive access to data traffic, not only of the complaining consumer but of other consumers. Providing technical back-doors for governments, however, is precisely the outcome Apple, WhatsApp, and other participants in the internet ecosystem are spending so much political capital to avoid. If history is any guide, it’s clear that once government agencies gain access to personal information, the likelihood of that data leaking elsewhere — the NSA, but also the IRS, the INS, and other regulators — is nearly 100%.

The same situation applies to any other service.

 

I know I'm not going to answer your points to your satisfaction... I doubt such a state can be achieved at this point. But I did address them, which is more than you have done.

 

Well I think the Internet lets us watch myth-making in action!