This is a point I think needs to made more often. Bad things get way more attention and I think people on both the left and the right, both social justice people and free speech people, have a bias to exaggerate the extent that these things are happening. Sometimes people just need to take a breath and relax.
I'm in BC and we definitely have identity politics and polarized parties. It's not as bad as the US today, but it's there. Comparable to the US in the 90s maybe. Also BC leans heavily left which I'm not such a fan of. Maybe it seems less ideological to leftist but that's just because it's their ideology.*
* Not saying this about OP, just that I've observed that bias generally.
Everything that you buy online, in a Walmart, or is otherwise manufactured a city away from where it's sold?
Trucking costs are built into most products. My grocery store sells apples from California. If the cost of trucking them to me goes down, those apples will decrease in cost and they will potentially sell more apples.
Shipping probably cost less than the plastic container.
Automation of driving is all about making people with lots of capital richer. Efficiency is just the dream -- this stuff will dramatically increase costs of shipping as capacity is constrained.
I don't actually think that sounds heavy handed at all. The reason being a puppet of the USSR is a bad thing is because of how bad the USSR was, not because it's inherently bad to be a puppet. I live in a country that's more or less a puppet of the USA and if someone wrote a sentence like that about my country I'd think it was humerous, not heavy handed.
If a language or tool is officially supported, then that means the project maintainers (Google, in this case) promise to support its use with official documentation, priority bug fixes (for example, if an Android update breaks your app which is written in Kotlin and uses only public, non-deprecated APIs, Google will consider it just as high-priority a bug as if it were written in Java), and first-class access to new APIs as soon as they're created.
JetBrains is doing this, not Google. Google is only going to collaborate with JetBrains to help with the Android support.
> Android update breaks your app which is written in Kotlin
then it also breaks the same app written in java. Because the good thing about kotlin is that it is transparent, it generates bytecode as java does. So from the point of view of the platform there is no difference between kotlin and java.
> first-class access to new APIs as soon as they're created.
This makes me think you don't know how kotlin works. You can mix java and kotlin files in the same app and call methods from one to the other without problems.
> JetBrains is doing this, not Google. Google is only going to collaborate with JetBrains to help with the Android support.
Jetbrains isn't doing anything differently with Kotlin from what they've been doing for the past 7 years. The headline here is "Google officially supports Kotlin on Android," and that is what has HN so excited. Regardless of how the work involved in supporting Kotlin on Android is split, this represents a guarantee that did not exist before. If all Jetbrains employees were abducted by aliens tomorrow, Google will now still have committed to first-class support of Kotlin through the next couple of major versions of Android.
> then it also breaks the same app written in java. Because the good thing about kotlin is that it is transparent, it generates bytecode as java does. So from the point of view of the platform there is no difference between kotlin and java.
They share the same compilation target, not the same semantics and idioms. Just because Go, Haskell, C and LuaJIT all target x86 assembly does not mean a Linux kernel update won't break a properly-written program in one of those languages but not the others. This in fact happens all the time.
> This makes me think you don't know how kotlin works. You can mix java and kotlin files in the same app and call methods from one to the other without problems.
I was answering their question generically. But first-class official support means that, for example, if Google adds a new feature to the [Java] Android Runtime, they will, where relevant, now ensure it's implemented in the official Android Kotlin compiler as well as the Java compiler.
It is JetBrains who support it, Google is only going to collaborate with them to help them out and keep the support up to date.
You don't have any idea about kotlin, the API is exactly the same. It is the Java API for both Java and Kotlin. The support is more related with the tooling, no with the API.
Go, Haskell and C are completely different things. Java and Kotlin compile to bytecode and the JVM runs the bytecode. Both uses the same API in the same language (the bytecode). You only have to guarantee they target the same bytecode version, which is something Google cannot do anything about, it is JetBrains who decide. This is not like Java and C in Android. C has its own API which calls the Java API. Kotlin uses the Java API, and the JVM in the Android device doesn't know if the app was written in Kotlin or Java.
P.S. Actually Android doesn't use the compiled bytecode directly as it make some modifications, but the idea still applies.
American decisions can set precedents which other countries follow, and are often pushed by their trade policies. They also affect American IT companies, which are used by people all over the world.
There's good reason for non-Americans to care about the American Internet.
I'm going to take this a step further. Years ago -- a decade or more -- I was saying that "China is the prototype." Early days of The Great Firewall. Initially built, by the way, with U.S. and "Western" technology and consulting.
As for the Net. It was a frontier. Now, it's settled. And those who've taken up residence are busy turning it and sealing it up, for their own purposes.
As for open, free as in speech communication. Start looking for the next, next-generation physical layer. One that is not in the hands of established and self-serving interests. Yet.
If this forces non-US Americans to use US IT company services less, there are less angles the US government can use to spy on the rest of the world.
Plus, data protection laws in other countries (especially European ones) are far more restrictive.
I don't think there's any reason for us non-US-Americans to care at all about the US internet. Just like we don't care about pretty much anything else that's happening in the US.
>"I don't think there's any reason for us non-US-Americans to care at all about the US internet. Just like we don't care about pretty much anything else that's happening in the US."
The "US internet" is the same internet that has allowed Google, Youtube, FB et al to flourish. Do you not use any those? Didn't all of those presuppose an open internet?
Can you really divorce Silicon Valley from you refer to as the "US internet"?
Heck even take a non-US tech company like Spotify. Do you think they would have been able to launch in the U.S 6 years ago if they had to pay ISPs not to de-prioritize their bits?
You say we don't really are about whats happening in the US, but presumably you do care what's happening in the US if you are interested in technology and read Hacker News where S.V. as well as other U.S tech company news features quite prominently.
You do realize that not all technology originates in the US, yeah?
The US isn't the center of the world. You don't have a monopoly on technology or IT and in fact, most of it wasn't even conceived in the US or by US inventors.
You need to get off your high horse about "US-America being the greatest country in the world" because it's not.
And to answer your question, no, I don't use Google, nor Youtube and especially not Facebook. I go out of my way to explicitly block them all to protect my privacy.
I didn't say that all tech originate from the U.S, I even referenced a Swedish company in my comment.
I never said the U.S was the greatest country in the world or even implied that. You are projecting. You also seem to have a quite a chip on your shoulder. You have no idea what my nationality is.
That being said please tell me the country that has produced more successful tech companies than the US? Or what country has more available funding for tech startups and the appetite for risk? What country is that if it is not the US? I would like to know.
How much innovation in other countries was stifled because of the way the US companies operate?
And to get back to Google and Facebook, these two companies are building walled gardens not unlike the way ISPs in the US operate. They either force the competition out or buy them. They do everything in their power to keep you inside their bubble. In a few years down the road, we may just end up with only the services those companies offer and no alternatives to go to, because everything that threatens their dominance will be suppressed with everything they got.
Just like the US ISPs are doing it and the US government is doing it.
The US getting some of their own medicine certainly isn't a bad thing. Maybe it'll wake them up.
You didn't answer the question, who produces the most successful/influential tech companies if not the US?
>"How much innovation in other countries was stifled because of the way the US companies operate?"
So the reason the US leads in tech is because they have stifled other countries tech development? Can you provide some concrete examples of that?
Maybe you aren't aware but foreign talent is a corner stone of U.S tech. More than a third of top US tech companies(Tesla, Qualcomm, Google, FB to name a few) have founders born born outside the US[1].
This has been discussed many times on HN. So why did those people go to the US and start tech companies? Were they prevented from leaving the U.S and starting companies in their native countries?
In terms of companies building walled-gardens and consolidating market share that is called capitalism and it wasn't invented in the U.S. Additionally nobody is forcing anybody to use any of those platforms. You yourself said you don't use them.
I get it, you are anti-American and your entitled to that. But your statements are really naive and seemed to be informed solely by anger. I find your sense of victimization quite sad.
I fail to see how this affects IANA or root DNS servers in any way (not to mention that IANA can be replaced by a non-US entity if it really comes down to that).
As for those companies, they'll work the same way as before outside the US internet. Regrettably, because the world would be a better place without them.
I felt that the commenter was expressing themselves in a way that was particularly unique to Americans.
someone should use it as an academic linguistics example of culture-specific communication!
I believe the example is of such a high quality that it would be useful in an academic context (ie. college/university courses) as an example of communications made within one culture that are unique to that culture versus other cultures speaking the very same language, ie. people born in Scotland or New Zealand would generally never communicate in this way.
The examples list arguably American cultural traits present in the paragraph.
(Edit to explain points: 'psychotherapy' = more prevalent in US culture, 'negative third party social group stereotyping' = ~all those people are <negative-something>, 'pop culture references' = vampires, 'second person framing of self-help advice as casual banter' = grammatical form where "you gotta X", or "you should Y", or "when you X you Y!", 'capitalia' = THIS BIT IS GRATING, 'reformation of compassion in an ego-linked context' = compassion for self, which is fundamentally juxtaposed to traditional not-self usage as linked to eastern meditative traditions (vipassana, etc.) and where increased egocentrism is widely considered a quintessentially American cultural trait).
Except for perhaps psychotherapy^, there's nothing there that would be out of place if someone said it, say, in Russian (I can translate, if you wish).
In particular, there's about 140,000 hits for "emotional vampirism" when you Google it in Russian (pop culture, eh?).
