Speaking as someone who moderated a torrent site forum in my teens, there's unfortunately so much truth in what you said in that first paragraph. Especially the part about adolescent morality as policy.
Are you referring to Facebook like pages? They've been essentially pointless for a while now, since you only get onto your followers feeds if you "boost" a post, money that for a "poor" or "just starting up" new venture is better spent elsewhere.
What they did was genius - encourage everyone to make their Facebook following central to their online marketing strategy, then lock them out unless they cough up.
> since you only get onto your followers feeds if you "boost" a post,
Actually most people and new ventures on Facebook get plenty of buzz without paying a cent. This is done by relying on your friends and getting happy customers to repost stuff from your page, thereby reaching new audiences organically.
I've been told by people who do this sort of thing that an algorithm change in the last 6 mos. or so has made organic buzz much harder to get going on FB without paying.
To a small extent. Yes, they make you pay to "promote" a post higher in a user's timeline who simply liked your page.
But I'm talking more about organic buzz, whereby for instance your friend shares something from a page or talks favorably about it. There is no option to pay to promote those shared posts. The priority of those shared post depends more on how good of a relationship you have with your friend and how much engagement facebook thinks it will get form it.
"Windows is my favorite desktop OS ... I really enjoy the ease of use that I get with Windows where everything that I need to do just works."
I was in 100% agreement with this up until maybe a year or two ago, having flirted between Windows and Ubuntu for at least a decade. But now, I find Ubuntu 16.04 (MATE being my variant of choice) to work better out of the box than Windows, even with third party peripherals.
As one anecdotal example, I've a basic EPSON printer / scanner combo on my network. It's always been a fiddle to make work with Windows - you need to go to their website and download their driver and proprietary application so that Windows can find it and produce scans, and it's not all that reliable. The other day, I needed to scan something, and typed "scan" into my MATE menu fully expecting there to be a problem to solve. I opened up the Simple Scan application and not only was the scanner detected and online, but it just worked immediately with no quibbles. I get these sorts of pleasant surprises all the time now, to the point that I can honestly say it's easier to use than Windows.
All of the Applications I use have native Linux support (Firefox, Thunderbird, Spotify, Steam, Unity with VS Code, etc) and work as well as their Windows counterparts. Lots of things I find are easier to set up compared to Windows such as Python programming with virtualenvs, CUDA support for TensorFlow and so on.
Plus - no UWP, no forced updates, no dodgy telemetry, no obnoxious adverts for OneDrive and Office popping up in Explorer... add all that up and it's a done deal. No Windows in this house.
Personally I'd really love to move off of Windows, but I've never had this supposedly "good" experience with linux that people talk about. Everything is overly complicated and inflexible unless you want to strip it down to the kernel and start over, which is probably why there's a thousand distros out there.
You can take the "precog" metaphor used in Minority Report and replace it what's actually happening - dragnet surveillance combined with predictive modeling algorithms to assess each individual's threat level. This is happening so openly that the DHS have done a public Kaggle competition to improve their algos for body scanners at airports. Now extrapolate a very short distance from there and think about what they're doing that's classified. Even the most unimaginative of us can see what's happening here.
Over the past several years I've seen the automatic reflex response to this concern go from "well if you've got nothing to hide" to "well, I mean they're not watching me or you specifically, they don't have the man power". Well, you're right, but not for the reason you think. The fact is they don't need man power any longer. The algos are watching you.
It is amazing how on the one hand people can detest Nazis and Soviets saying things like "I can't believe they could have been so stupid to have gone along with that" and then on the other hand, aid and abet the police state in a Kaggle competition of all things! I know it is naive of me to think that if I don't assist that it won't happen because someone will step up if for no other reason than bragging rights.
A long time ago I made a decision about my career and that was that I would not work for the MIC. It was a tough choice at times because so much US industry is involved with government one way or another and even private companies have governments as their major customers so it is all intertwined. Not all government is bad, though, but the shit like body scanners and all that--that's your technocratic police state writ large.
I don't imagine the future is going to be very rosy. It is top down control forever.
The Stalin, Hilter, Mao, etc. created secret police and whatnot to enforce their continued rule. They are despised mostly for what their rule entailed, not for having secret police.
We're* creating secret police but in the absence of an oppressive government for them to act on the whims of nobody much cares.
It'll get worse before it gets better.
* We = most nations formerly on the "right" side of the iron curtain
The bottom-up control scenarios aren't really that much better. The scary part is the power of AI itself.
If a twitter mob gets a hold of it, or a non-state terrorist network, or just some lone wolf, then the results can be as bad or worse than any Big Brother scenario.
Depressants don't necessarily make you depressed. The term depressant just means that they depress the nervous system, as opposed to stimulating it like coffee or cocaine. There's a link between depression and drug use because many drugs, depressants and stimulants alike, provide a short-term release of neurotransmitters such as Dopamine and GABA, which makes you feel happy and relaxed.
I'd say that Ubuntu MATE (16.04) with the redmond layout and advanced menu enabled is the best alternative to Windows 7 I've yet seen in a Linux distro.
> I might be biased, but I realized in the few years I lived in the UK that the services, health care, and general quality of life are overall better down there than up here. I obviously have only anecdotal proof of that.
You said you live in Birmingham. It's not a city known for it's fantastic services, health care, and quality of life. The UK is a very varied place in all of these metrics. I've known and worked with many EU nationals who've come to the UK, lived and worked in one place for a few years, and formed a strong opinion on things. You might not have a complete perspective.
Well, that clears the doubt on whether I'm biased or not ;-) Birmingham is the only UK city I've lived in.
Still, Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK, so its low quality of life affects a large number of people. Moving to a place like York or Oxford is infeasible for many.
