It's going to take me a few weeks of research to pick my new permanent browser. I want something far-removed from Google, but with an active enough developer community that it doesn't fall apart after an OS update or turn out to have a back-door hidden in the code base.

I don't care how few users Firefox has. I do care that the product has become a pile of garbage. I already tolerate the dumb tab bar, the update nag screen that interrupts my work, the telemetry setting that doesn't actually disable telemetry, the web services I don't want like Pocket, the ads, the memory issues that hobble my machine when I stream video...

I won't move to a browser like Chromium with a connection to Google, but I'm moving to something. I'm done with Firefox.

  Humans can only focus on one thing at a time. So why are we spending money to display multiple things simultaneously?

I think, deep down, Coinbase wants a tough, driven, mercenary workforce. If that's the workforce they get, POC or not, it has downsides.

If a company has a certain number of employees who are sort of flakey, idealistic types, it probably guards against employee turnover, departmental silos, fraud. You want some employees who sometimes do what they think is the right thing, for its own sake, and aren't so career-driven that they undercut others.

Sometimes people who don't work for, or work with, a company with bad ethics never know better. Other times things get out of hand (like at Enron, Uber, Theranos, etc) and everyone finds out.

It's too early to alter my prediction about Coinbase. A company can thrive for a long time with a gross work environment like that.

What changed my view about the world is thinking about the economics.

Take the US, for example. In the popular imagination, the success of America is all about entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. But the other aspect is... four million square miles of (in a manner of speaking) undeveloped land! Entrepreneurial spirit is great, but literally having more natural resources than you know what to do with (didn't get around to developing California till the 1900s, for example) seems at least as important.

Given the past several centuries were a free-for-all for nations with empires, it doesn't surprise me that the colonized societies, whatever their inherent strengths and weaknesses, wound up in bad shape.

I'm not keen to rebut it at much length because my previous comment already leaves the wrong impression: my point is less about the morality of the past few hundred years than the stupidity of the narrative we built around it.

If I did expand on things, I'd list off the usual examples (Conquistadors and gold, Chinese opium trade, slaughter of native Americans, ad nauseum).

I don't know how to make those points without sounding like I'm appealing to emotion. The actual point is that - though the Steven Pinkers and Hans Roslings might disagree - people subject to those conditions clearly are worse-off than before (and than today, compared to the nations who plundered them).

To the original point of the thread, the colonial powers attained such obscene wealth (ie: by stealing gold, oil, farming cotton with slave labor, etc) that even the poorest among us, until the past decade, was rich compared to the rest of the world.

  I sometimes consider the notion that, socially, 
  Western modernity was just reified feudalism: 
  everybody's a lord now!

For most of my life, people in the 'third world' lived in barely imaginable poverty while the rest of the world walked off with oil, lumber, precious metals, gems, historical artifacts, slave labor, etc. I was well out of highschool before I appreciated the connection between the squalor elsewhere, and the four or five previous centuries of pillaging that contributed to it.

That unpleasant state of affairs tempers my ability to feel triumphalist about 'first-world' nations ridding themselves of feudalism.

If we were capable of appreciating art 200,000 years ago, we also must have been incredibly lazy. How could well over another 150,000 years pass before we left signs that we were improving our technology? It doesn't make any sense.

No, we'll grow meat cheaply in labs, and the companies who produce it won't have much trouble blackening the reputation of real meat. Most people, even today, like to dwell neither on the death of the animals we eat, nor the cleanliness of the factory farms that provide us with our meat.

It probably will appall people in the future that we killed animals just to eat. They won't have first-hand experience of our time. They'll know, on a cerebral level, the technical reasons that fake meat was impractical, but, on an emotional level, our habits will disgust them.

  Every major iOS update adds more functionality that 
  consumes more CPU cycles even in the background. 

The larger issue, in any case, is that Apple prohibits reverting an iPhone to a prior version of iOS.

This inexorably leads users of old devices to one day install that final update that turns their device into a turkey.

At that point the customer buys a new phone, a year or two before they intended, and the old phone, which is too slow to be useful as a back-up device or hand-me-down, goes into a landfill.

  Apple continues to support OS updates on the iPhone 6s, a device released almost 6 years ago

  The Monacelli guy comes across pretty badly