I wrote a long rant in response to this but decided to spare you and instead just say this:
Shareholder capitalism has fucked up the minds of so many people (especially Americans) where they think the purpose of a company is to extract maximum value for the shareholders. Sorry, no. The purpose of a company is to either a) fulfill their mission to the best of their ability (which is never “maximize shareholder value”), or b) provide quality goods/services at a fair price.
I would think they have to keep the commitments in the charter, and only the board can propose changes for shareholders to vote on (because they own it all).
I think all OP was getting at is that they miss when the internet was fun. Nowadays everything is either serious business or a cynical grift. Or both.
For me, Stealth Mountain is a much more whimsical form of art than the diarrhea taco stand. But there are plenty of uncomfortable works out there that firmly fall within the category of art. I’ve seen a literal shit machine at a gallery [0], and it would only take a few seconds of searching to find dozens of performance art works to make one uncomfortable.
Disclaimer: I know very little about long covid, so speaking more generally here. I’m also not a doctor.
While that is indeed a logical fallacy, doctors are in the business of evidence-based care. How could a doctor responsibly recommend a course of treatment for something which has little evidence, as something unproven would have. Many treatments have both positive and negative effects, and a doctor would typically only recommend a treatment when the good outweighs the bad. On the flip side, there many unproven or proven ineffective treatments patients frequently self-prescribe/self-administer which a doctor would let slide on the basis of it also being harmless. After all, the placebo effect is powerful in and of itself. Taking a wholistic view, medicine is about maximizing the quality of life for patients, as opposed to just being about curing everything. It’s not clear to me how a doctor could responsibly recommend any treatment with potential downsides to a patient with an unproven diagnosis. Such a treatment might indeed help the patient, but it’s a risk/reward tradeoff that needs to be balanced, and while the patient should absolutely be involved in deciding where to draw the line, the vast majority are simply not knowledgeable enough to accurately assess the situation.
The problem is some doctors think they know more than do. You are ill. You go to the doctor. They run tests. The tests come back negative (ie no evidence of illness). The doctor insists you are not ill. But you know you are.
But... new tests are being developed all the time. Maybe in 5 years a test will find that you are ill.
But for the 5 years up to that point the doctor will insist you are not ill.
A better logical position for the doctor would be "you may be ill, but we can't figure out what it is".
I don't want to read a newspaper where the owner is suppressing -- well, anything -- because of concerns for how it might affect his fortune. I want the owner walled off.
Well you have been. The consent was always being manufactured. A certain controversial fellow by the name of Chomsky pointed out decades ago that media would inevitably reflect biases of their owners and staff, and the needs to be a for profit business.
It would seem you didn't care or notice because there previously wasn't an opinion conflict with the owners.
What’s the reasoning behind hiding content upon request? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of archival?
My intuition would say there are 3 cases when content ceases to become available at the original site:
- The host becomes unable to host the content for some reason (bankruptcy, death, etc.) in which case I assume the archive persists.
- The host is externally required to remove the content (copyright, etc.) in which case I assume IA would face the same external pressure? But I’m not sure on that.
- The host/owner has a change of heart about publishing the content. This borders more on IA acting as reputation management on the part of the original host/owner. Personally I think this is hardest to defend but also probably the least common case. In this case I’d think it’s most often to hide something the original host doesn’t want the public finding out later, but that also seems to make it more valuable to be publicly available in the archive. Plus, from a historian/journalist perspective, it’s valuable to be able to track how things change over time, and hiding this from the public prevents that. Though to be honest I’m kind of in two minds here because on the other hand I’m generally of the opinion that people can grow and change, and we shouldn’t hold people to account for opinions they published a decade ago, for example. I’m also generally in favor of the right to be forgotten.
It’s all about copyright. Copyright law in the US gives a monopoly on distribution of copies of things (hand‐waving because the definitions are hard, basically artistic works) to their author. Of course authors usually delegate that right to their publisher for practical and financial reasons. There are some fair use exceptions, but this basically makes it illegal for anyone else to make and distribute copies of the author’s work. Again, hand‐waving because I don't want to have to write a dissertation.
When IA shows you what a website looked like in the past, they are reproducing a copyrighted work and distributing it to you. In some cases, perhaps many, this is fair use. IA cannot really know ahead of time which viewers would be exercising their fair use rights and which would not. Instead, IA just makes everything available without trying to guess whether the access would fall under fair use or not. That means that many times, possibly most of the time, IA is technically breaking the law by illegally distributing copies of copyrighted works.
But _owning_ a copy of a copyrighted work is never prohibited by copyright. It doesn’t matter how you got the copy either.
Therefore, pretty much any time someone asks for something to be hidden or removed on copyright grounds, they go ahead and hide it. They don’t bother to delete it though, because copyright doesn’t require them to. If a copyright holder asks for it to be deleted then they are overreaching, and should know that any sane person would object. But as far as I am aware IA doesn’t actually bother to object in writing; they just hide the content and move on.
This means that researchers can visit the archive in person and request permission to see those copies. For example if you are studying the history of artistic techniques in video games using emulated software on IA, you might eventually notice that all the games from one major publisher are missing (except iirc the original Donkey Kong, because they don’t actually own the copyright on that one). You could then journey to the Archive in person to see the missing material and fill in the gaps in your history. Or you could just ignore them entirely out of spite. This is no different than viewing rare books held by any library, or viewing unexhibited artifacts held by a museum, etc
Thanks for the detailed response, very informative. This sounds similar to DMCA takedown requests, though I’m not knowledgable enough to know the distinction. It’s a shame that to view hidden archives one needs to visit the archive in person, but I guess if IA were to respond to email requests for such archives they would be guilty of breaking the same distribution rule. The major difference between the rare books or museum examples and content on IA is that the digital artifacts are infinitely reproducible and transportable so the physical visit required to view them seems totally unnecessary on its face.
It’s a shame that to be able to run an above-board _Internet_ Archive one needs to bend to the whim of anachronistic copyright law and forego all the benefits of the internet in the first place. This seems like it would inevitably mean that any _internet_ archive that is truly accessible over the _internet_ would be forced to operate illegally in a similar manner to SciHub.
I know I hold a rather strong opinion regarding copyright law (I’m not looking to debate it here as I know others hold different opinions which is totally fine), but IMHO copyright law has been a major blight on humanity at large and especially the internet. Major reform is in order at the very least, if not total abolishment.
I like this a lot. Great for autodidacts like myself. Often when entering a new topic I’m faced with many unknown unknowns. I don’t know _what_ I should be learning. So having an LLM effectively lay out a course of study would be very helpful.
> Employers purposefully seek out non-U.S. citizens as they know they're happy to work for a lot less, especially if gets them into the U.S.
This is commonly stated but is not true. US companies are required to pay the "Prevailing Wage" [0] to H-1Bs, so they cannot use foreigners to undercut US citizens.
However, foreigners whose presence in the US is dependent on their employment are certainly more likely to be abused by employers
The prevailing wages are comically low though for most jobs that I've seen (like half of the real reasonable salary for the job we're offering). And employers have the option of 2 data sources so that they can selectively pick the lower of the 2 depending on the jobs they typically apply for.
> US companies are required to pay the "Prevailing Wage" [0] to H-1Bs, so they cannot use foreigners to undercut US citizens.
This is laughable. I do not know how the government calculates those wages, but as someone who got to US on H-1B visa this year I'm making more than 2x the "prevailing wage" listed on my LCA application.
Just to clarify: my job is a Software Architect, in one of East Coast states, and the prevailing wage listed in my application was $84k. So it is not that my salary is especially good, it's this government-mandated one that is a joke.
I'm lucky, because I came here to work for the same company I used to work in my home country so I got offered good terms (somehow H-1B was easier to get than L-1). If some company offered me a job for the "prevailing wage" I would laugh in their face, but I'm sure for some people that would seem like a lucrative offer.
I just checked my own LCA. My listed (and actual) salary on the LCA is 1.07x the listed prevailing wage, but it doesn't include stock or bonus which are part of my total comp. Including those, my total comp is 2.06x the listed prevailing wage.
I know from talking to my American colleagues that my total comp is around the same level as theirs, so at least at my company they don't undercut US citizens.
Your listed PW does seem quite low, and I don't know how they actually measure it. I certainly agree that companies will do whatever they can to lower wages for all worker, and not including stock or bonus in the prevailing wage is ripe for abuse. Perhaps some reform for this law is in order.
That's another thing: my compensation is basically all salary, no stock options of any kind. I think the trick might be that my immigration lawyer listed the PW for "entry level" Software Architect job (is there even such thing?), while I have around 20 years of experience.
Could it be that the prevailing wage is a national average, ie not adjusted for a high col city? I feel like tech salaries especially must swing a lot between flyover states and big coastal cities.
Well, maybe. I mean, my city is really not that high col city: median house price is $450k and the rent outside city center is just $1300 for one bedroom. But salaries in IT are pretty good here, my salary is actually the average for my position that I found on Glassdoor (I used that as a reference point when negotiating relocation with my employer).
I'm not a US citizen, but you might find that most US citizens would prefer their government to prioritize the interests of US citizens over foreign nationals. Just as I would expect my home country's government to prioritize the interests of its citizens over foreigners.
Shareholder capitalism has fucked up the minds of so many people (especially Americans) where they think the purpose of a company is to extract maximum value for the shareholders. Sorry, no. The purpose of a company is to either a) fulfill their mission to the best of their ability (which is never “maximize shareholder value”), or b) provide quality goods/services at a fair price.