This article reads like the first step in a character assassination attempt. I don't like it.

That's an excellent question. All the questions about consciousness are probably an attempt to better understand (and avoid?) death.

However I still have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can scientifically understand consciousness. Eventually we will understand all about how the mind works. All the various processes and how they lead to higher functions like thinking consciously in natural language etc. We'll be able to manipulate and alter our conscious experience. But even if there was a neural switch to turn consciousness on and off, we would still fail to convince ourselves of the physical nature of it, as we could never experience a state without consciousness.

My personal belief is that although we are painfully physical, we will never explain why we're actually here, experiencing those calculations, or in fact being them. Being calculations of a meat sack. Why would this happen?

I just booked off their platform. It was easier and cheaper, and definitely more private. I also wouldn't recommend anyone to get vendor-locked so hard as to have their livelihood depended on this company's policies.

I mean, I get why an exec or a politician would have to say this in public, but come on, who actually buys this? Facebook is no less of a propaganda tool for an authoritarian elite than it's Chinese or Russian counterparts. And even if you're a nationalist American, don't forget that Facebook isn't really protecting your own interests.

1 billion 100 Byte messages sums up to an almost trivial 100GB. This might be a technical challenge for the neighborhood's web admin but not for any real company.

Because no matter what the audits say, this article caused a widespread feeling of mistrust towards Chinese-manufactured electronics.

Imagine a pre-SaaS Google: You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your doorstep. They include an index of every website in existence, it's owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic flags.

Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in every country, region and industry with their contact information and website addresses.

Imagine what you could do with that...

Sure, today's software capabilities are much more advanced, but you no longer get a physical disk that you can load on you computer and be confident it'll just keep working for years on end without any external dependencies etc.

Honestly the real problem is that they pose as a raw communications medium while they are definitely not one. Facebook has political, cultural and financial interests according to which they filter your communications. Even if they say "we alter your data stream" somewhere in their ULA, they are still dishonest as they do it in a way that convinces you thay the effect is small while in fact it is not.

One more consideration: editorialized newspapers are fine, because all readers get the same paper and and work out the bias. If the bias is extreme or blatant lies are circulated, public discourse will lead to consequences for the publisher. With facebook, filtering is so pervasive, elegant and fleeting that you can't tell what's done on purpose and what isn't (a design goal imho).

So I'd say that even if Facebook publicly declared itself to be a heavily edutorialized publisher, without a way to know the bias, they shouldn't be allowed to operate on a personalized content basis, because unless they publish their feed algorithm and a way to verify it works as it's supposed to, there's no way to know if they are acting maliciously.

Even more so, instead of touching on why facebook should be a host of information but not a communications modulator, this article, like many others, insists that Facebook should brain-wash and manipulate people the way they like, not the way they do now, because that's the "right" thing.

There are issues with trying excessively too hard or sacrificing too much to reach certain goals, there are issues with trying the wrong way or towards the wrong goals, but arguing we should take a casual and passive stance towards fixing our problems and just let them be is really the most counter-productive, lazy piece of advice I've ever heard.

By this I mean you really couldn't get hold of anyone without providing a credit card number. Which is not only invading privacy and creating customers castes, but it's also stupid since I didn't have a credit/debit card yet.

After loudly swearing at the machine, either a quality control person or an emotion identification algorithm forwarded my call to a support worker. I simply hanged up and called the local branch, asking them to cancel my application.

I'm not going to support this kind of businesses. However in the case of monopolies and oligopolies legislation is needed to assure retail customers are treated the same regardless of the race, age, postal code and spending figures unless there are clear terms dictating that higher spenders get better support (ie, providing better support as a paid service and/or having clear rules about prioritization).