DENNIS: Oh king, eh, very nice. An' how'd you get that, eh? By exploitin' the workers -- by 'angin' on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic an' social differences in our society! ....If there's ever going to be any progress--
WOMAN: Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here. Oh -- how d'you do?
ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?
WOMAN: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
WOMAN: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we're all Britons and I am your king.
WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. ..... A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
WOMAN: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS: That's what it's all about if only people would--
You're talking like the taxi monopoly was a global monolith when in fact it was a local uncoordinated model that jurisdictions just copied from each other. IOW there was a taxi monopoly in most cities, but they're not all part of one big TaxiCorp.
It's weird in the digital age to say information needs to be "returned" (although they did also say "and all copies"). Still, I'm reminded of the old "getting my song back fucker" quote:
I don't find that very hard to believe considering it's sometimes possible to use something as simple as a mirror to trick the brain into correcting phantom limb pain:
Reminder that this is the same person who attempted to publicly shame[1] Jeremy Guillory out of fighting for his fair share during GM's acquisition of Cruise. This attempt failed, and Cruise ended up having to publicly acknowledge the opposite:
"As part of the settlement, Cruise and its founder Kyle Vogt now acknowledge that Guillory was a cofounder of the company."[2]
On top of that, Sam's post originally included the statement "it’s important to the way Silicon Valley works that such behavior not be tolerated" in reference to Guillory fighting for his recognition, which he later removed.[3]
This is not someone I would support for any sort of public office.
EDIT: He's not above criticism, folks. If you disagree with me, how about replying and explaining instead of down-voting?
Not only is this submission flagged, it is also almost a day old (kinda old by HN standards), but you still felt the need to show up and link to what the public sources say. You have no insider knowledge, and the chances of the publicly known story being accurate are pretty slim. Seems pretty low to me. I almost DV'd you until I saw someone else already did, so I figured I would try providing feedback (I hate drive-by DVs).
> It's been known for a long time that Trump and the FBI director didn't see eye to eye, and the former employs the latter. Still significant, just not surprising.
The president firing the FBI director is huge news. The story is currently at the top of every single message board and news outlet except this one.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
(emphasis mine)
Fact is that submission this is the sort of thing that could be interesting to the HN community and will probably get lost in the mainstream with news of Comey going. Comey going is huge news - there are other places to discuss it.
Disagree with this rule. This forum should not be a place for just showcasing freakin personal tech project only. Yesterday I read someone asking the community share how they spend their work day. One HNer said he works as a professional firefighter. Now I am not sure if he has done any programming or not but that's unexpected for a technical forum like this. I think technolgists like us have the same obligations as everyone else to particpate in civil matters professionally. We don't want to yell out the f word here but marking politics as off-topic is obsurd given privacy is a hot topic we almost never escape from politics. If neutrality has been covered on the news, dont't allow it. But hey I don't run HN so someone is going to tell me read ToS.
HN should embrace submissions either directly or indirectly related to politics. I feel our tech leaders are so silent today to the White House so silent on Trumpcare. Where the heck are they?
I come here specifically because it's not one of the million billion other places where all other stories get steamrolled by alt.gov.trumpdrama. I can think of two dozen places in less than 10 seconds where political news, analysis, and all of the related stone-throwing get top billing, and I utilize many of them regularly... my 1337 dev skills don't somehow make those political resources less useful to me. If there are government related stories with a technical bent, they do just fine here. Just because tech people have a civic duty to be aware of what's going on in the government doesn't mean that all tech communities should be political.
It's called finding people with similar interest. Knowing other technologists are interested in solving social issues isn't something we easy can get on othet sites which are overpopulated. HN is in a good size and the folks are mostly friendly and can the capacity to discuss professionally and openly.
I am disappoited that many of the tech leaders don't speak out hard enough. If I were as powerful as they, I wouldn't stand back. The fact our Congress is a disgrace when it comes to passing the new health care bill, we shouldn't hold back. There is no reason to. Because while that bill may not hurt thousands of Google/facebook employees, it will have impacts on their users and many of their own employees' families.
"It's called finding people with similar interest." That's what we're doing here. It's Hacker News. Those similar interests are technology and innovation. If politics are involved in tech stories, then the stories are here (hence the story we're commenting on.)
When you say your website is 'for' something, the implication is that you're 'not for' something else. This website is for technical news.
The fact that these "leaders" are involved in technology is mostly incidental, which is why some random tech CEO's opinion on health care doesn't get a whole lot of traction here. Unless there is a technological bent to their take on something, it's not really a technical story– it's yet another rich person that has something to say about politics. Even the ones who became notable for technical reasons, when speaking on non-technical political topics, are no more notable to me than Hollywood personalities doing the same.
I'm not saying you're wrong for caring about what they think or thinking that they should speak up more– I'm saying that the story would be newsfeed fodder at every site from Breitbart to Dissent Magazine, not to mention a million specialized sub-reddits. But how many places can I go to see a neatly ranked list of quality techy stories, such as the latest git release, some neat electronic music composition teaching demo, and news about modules in the JDK? Very, very few. The fact that this is a narrow niche makes it a resource for many people. We 'need' this space to discuss this tech stuff which is important to us as technologists, but given equal footing, would get crushed by stories about world-leadership-level politics.
So I fail to see any reason behind your implication that this group of people interacts with political news so differently that we need our own space to discuss them; we're not even unified in having a particular interest in politics, let alone solidarity on specific political viewpoints.
If you're really sure that I'm wrong, then why not leave Hacker News to start your own political-tech website? The hacker news source is available on Sourceforge. Make a fork and make a poli-hacker news. If people are interested, they'll show up. Even just starting a "poli-tech" subreddit to see if anyone bites.
My theory? We're just not that special.
(As an aside, I also think you're greatly overestimating the likelihood that tech CEOs opinions would align with your own, and it's quite likely that's why they're keeping their mouths shut to begin with. I know if I worked for some startup with a CEO who was fine at running a business but REALLY loved Milo Yiannopolis, I'd be pretty happy that he kept his mouth shut so our company would stay afloat and I could keep paying my rent.)
> The mother of his godson Aidan remarked, "Nick didn't care about the stupid politics shit, he'd just laugh at it." Jon Hanna said Nick "became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience."
“We got the whole prison stoned, this is what freedom is really about. It’s not about not being in chains, it’s about not having your mind enslaved,” Nick declared.
An earlier version of this article said something like "BART did not immediately report the incident" (can't recall exact wording). This statement or any equivalent appears to be removed. It looks like newsdiff.org doesn't track sfgate.com, so I can't find the exact change. Regardless, the article originally indicated BART didn't report the incident to the public right away.
That leads me to say: sweeping this kind of crime under the rug will not help. Instead, it will lead to a repeat of the Goetz vigilante incident in NYC in the early 1980s:
That last link in particular contains a stunning statement:
> The crime rate in the dangerous subways plunged dramatically — so much so the authorities even held back the numbers — the truth hurt too much.
The ugly and frightening truth about vigilantism is that it works. Please note I hate the idea of vigilantism and hope with every fiber of my being that things do not come to that, but it at first glance appears that things are headed in that direction, which I am immensely sad and scared to see.
I'm not really sure what point you're making. Or rather I violently disagree with you that vigilantism works. How does it work? Are you saying Goetz shooting people on the NYC subway led to a dramatic reduction in crime? Are you basing your claim from one line from a Huffington post article from this author?
Somehow info from BART officials made it to the various news outlets. The news outlets wrote stories on it. I knew about the incident by Sunday. I read about it somewhere. I was not on the train.
I noticed you replied to me twice (once here and once in another subthread), saying you'd spent time looking and "wasted [your] life". You also seem to be going further down the road of ad-hominem, describing the author of the first article I wrote as an "NRA spokesman". You seem ideologically driven and therefore unlikely to listen. But here goes anyway:
"Vigilante Mobilization and Local Order: Evidence from Mexico"
> Our empirical approach traces the sources of recent self-defense groups to the early twentieth cen- tury Cristero rebellion and, using an instrumental variables approach, we show that contemporary community mobilization has succeeded in reducing a broad range of crimes.
Also I note that you're pushing back against my statement regarding things being swept under the rug (e.g., your statements about "somehow" this making it to the news). Did you also notice that the link to this article is gone from the HN front page? My intuition is that the public in general is going to turn a blind eye to this topic, until they can't any more (that's usually when something really bad happens). Note again that I am very unhappy with that idea and wish it were not so, but it strikes me as unfortunately very likely. I'd love to be wrong, but I see nothing to indicate otherwise. There is always hope I suppose.
> describing the author of the first article I wrote as an "NRA spokesman"
Go read the 1,000 articles Richard Feldman wrote for the NRA and his own gun lobbying group.
> "Vigilante Mobilization and Local Order: Evidence from Mexico"
Comparing current conditions in America with the Cristero Rebellion or the Mexico drug war is odd. I argue we're not there yet.
What I really wanted from you is evidence that Goetz shooting people on the NYC subway resulted in lower crime rates.
> Also I note that you're pushing back against my statement regarding things being swept under the rug (e.g., your statements about "somehow" this making it to the news).
You were claiming BART was deliberately not informing the public about the robbery incident, just like Richard Feldman was claiming that the NYC subway system was deliberately not informing riders that crime plummeted because of the Goetz shooting.
I argue that BART was not withholding details of the shooting. As evidence of this, I maintain that there are tons of newspaper articles about the robbery out there. If BART was suppressing the incident, they're not doing a very good job of it.
> Did you also notice that the link to this article is gone from the HN front page?
No I don't pay attention.
> My intuition is that the public in general is going to turn a blind eye to this topic
I realize that, but vigilantism is not always driven by a rational view of crime statistics. Fear can be a very powerful force. If people fear crime and feel they are being ignored and not protected by the state, they may take matters into their own hands, quite often irrationally. See for example the reaction to terrorism, despite the vast statistical unlikelihood of being a victim of it.
I notice that several people are responding to me as though I am advocating vigilantism even though I am doing the opposite, so I feel I must reiterate once again that I am fully opposed to it. Instead, I am trying to raise the alarm that if highly visible crimes like the one described in this article are not addressed sufficiently, the public may react with vigilantism. That is an outcome I want to avoid.
You're justifying writing "The ugly and frightening truth about vigilantism is that it works" by including a link to an article written by a NRA spokesman that basically says "The ugly and frightening truth about vigilantism is that it works", without backing it up.
I've actually spent the last hour looking for statistics to back or not back you up. I've wasted my life.
> that basically says "The ugly and frightening truth about vigilantism is that it works", without backing it up
That's a quote from me, not from the HuffPo article. The article says "The crime rate in the dangerous subways plunged dramatically…", as I quoted originally.
> I've actually spent the last hour looking for statistics to back or not back you up. I've wasted my life.
I replied to you here with a source that only took a few minutes to find:
You seem very emotional about this topic. I would urge you to look at it more dispassionately. As I already stated (but it bears repeating), I absolutely do not want vigilantism to be the result of crimes like this, but I fear unless there is an open and honest conversation, things may end up there anyway. I believe the best (and perhaps only) way to avoid such an outcome is to consider the possibilities that may result from various actions (or inactions), unpleasant as they may be.
It really makes me sad to read the part about counting pennies and having to stretch such tiny advances while writing the books, especially when she describes her frustration at how much a framed copy that was sent by the publisher must have cost, compared to her frugal situation. It is a shame that writing down useful knowledge in a clear way is not better rewarded.
I wish more people on HN felt this way. I often see the opposite attitude expressed here towards writers: That it is not the audience's problem whether or not the writer eats. They should pick a different job if that sort of thing matters to them. (Granted, this is typically in discussions about online content, but I think it is kind of a class divide thing. Programmers seem to often not get how fortunate and well paid they really are.)
Guitar and video game players aren't well paid either. But they don't expect to be - they do it for fun.
Isn't that fair though? Writers could do it for fun and give away their work for free. Or they could get a job doing what the market wants and not enjoy it so much but get paid more. It's very much the same situation for programmers except programmers don't have the expectation that their work must be worth money just because they spent a lot of time on it. That's life for most people - our hobbies aren't usually worth as much money as our less enjoyable jobs.
"Isn't that fair though? Writers could do it for fun and give away their work for free."
No.
When I read this I think of Bruce Perens and BusyBox. [0] BusyBox, created by Perens as a floppy rescue/boot/installer disk for Debian, written as a single binary. [1],[2] Real handy if your partition failed or you needed to install an OS or update.
This didn't stop unscrupulous companies installing BusyBox charging for it and violating the GPL licensing agreements. [3] At no time did these companies chip in to help in the development of BB. Yet they wanted (needed) the inclusion of this useful software.
This is HN, a place where smart people hang out at the intersection of technology and commerce. I posted the article as an experiment to see what possible commercial possibilities could be imagined.
SVG is too important to the web
to let it whither and die.
There must be some other way to continue this kind of work sustainably. What else can you think up?
I don't see what this has to do with the argument that "Writers could do it for fun and give away their work for free."
You can argue the point 2 ways
1. Bruce Perens did BusyBox for fun and gave it away for free. After words some people were bad and got sued. So what does his making it for fun and free have to do with after words people got sued
2. Bruce Perens did Busybox and fun and gave it away not for free. His price is that if you it in a product (or portions of it, details don't matter to the point) that product (or portions of it) must also be GPLed.
If you take this interpretation then we're back to the same thing, what does this story have to do with "Writers could do it for fun and give away their work for free."
> If you take this interpretation then we're back to the same thing, what does this story have to do with "Writers could do it for fun and give away their work for free."
Why should writers be relegated to only ever being allowed to "do it for fun" while programmers are not?
I mean, that depends on what you are writing and programming.
If I want someone to pay me for programming, I have to write something they want. The same is true for writers.
The point the original post was making is that if not enough people want what you are writing (code or text), you can do it for fun and give it away free. You can't expect to get paid for doing something you love. It's amazing if you can, and I'm incredibly lucky that I do, but it's not something I expect.
Hopefully in the future with enough automation people can just do things for fun, and all the jobs we need can be automated. We aren't there yet - but most people can work a job and have time for hobbies in modern developed countries.
Now, arguably, there is a lot of value in this work and we should be supporting it. That may be true, but that is a separate problem. The solution to this may be getting enough people to take note and care, and this post might be a start on that.
> If I want someone to pay me for programming, I have to write something they want. The same is true for writers.
Yes, although the argument in this particular thread is that writing is ~broadly~ underrewarded and that is OK because markets. Attempting to influence a market to reward people better is considered to be a bad thing - the only way people should be able to do that is by not participating in the market, according to many. Unless it's to do with programming. But not game development.
"Selling used bubblegum also suffers from being underrewarded. I spent all this time chewing gum and nobody wants to buy it? How's that fair for me? I chewed the gum - I deserve to be paid!"
Just because you do something (regardless of the value of doing that thing) doesn't mean you deserve to be paid for doing that thing. Especially if nobody is interested in paying you to do that thing.
So yes. It is "OK because markets". If you expect to be rewarded for your writing, make sure there is a marketable interest in what you will be writing. You may have to make an MVP (maybe the first and second chapters) to test the waters, but that isn't different from a programmer needing to make an MVP to test the waters for their potential product.
The issue is that the exact same communities which decry writers for asking that they get paid what they think they're worth, will cry that the entire software development market outside the SV bubble is "unfair" to developers because it's not paying SV market prices.
They also cry about immigrants taking their jobs at lower rates, outsourcing, people choosing to hire the new grad instead of the expert, and plenty of other things that could be responded to with "it's OK because markets".
Well firstly, most of the best writing isn't produced by people that are having fun the whole time. Most of it is the result of authors showing up to work, day after day, whether they felt like it or not.
Secondly, authors aren't the only people behind a good book. As evidenced by the typical "Acknowledgements" section, there's also the reviewers, editors, typesetters, artists, as well as long-suffering spouses and kids.
But crucially, people produce their best work under some kind of coach; and coaching is not generally fun. So coaches need to be paid, which means that performers need to be paid.
Yes, that's all true. But I'm talking about the case where authors aren't making much money compared to the effort they put in. What if the end product is so unuseful or so interchangable with thousands of similar free products that nobody wants to pay for it? In that case, I think it's wrong to ask somebody to give money to such an author. They're generating a product that costs more to produce than what it's worth.
Some musicians hire expensive guitar coaches, have help from friends, hire producers to record their music and in the end they're made something that nobody wants badly enough to pay for, so it's an overall loss. I'm talking about these cases. Why should we insist that somebody pay them for their time rather than how desirable their product is?
its simply lazy thinking to assume that people are paid what they deserve. not that your point isnt generally fair, but i always feel like we go too far in the direction of assuming people are paid what they deserve.
Why has every response to my comment misinterpreted it? Do you all have an axe to grind against someone and you thought I was that someone?
I'm simply saying that many writers produce work with very little value to other people, and that those writers shouldn't expect to be paid for their "work". Nobody pays me to eat food, even though I enjoy doing that.
How is going to school, starting up a career and writing books is any different than going to school, starting up a career and writing code?
Do you think that the code we write add that much value to society? Unless you are a computer scientist and pushing the boundaries, our code will simply rot away in 4 years and nobody will remember one line of it.
The equivalent in writing for what most programmers do would be marketing, PR, journalism, or technical writing. You can get a paying job to write, it's just going to be that kind of writing - not for your Next Great American Novel. Likewise, I get paid a salary to bolt together shitty enterprise software and automate call-center workers out of jobs - not to tickle my fancy writing video games or exploring the corners of computer science.
Who needs a book about SVG? When I needed to build charts I took couple tutorials plus searched answers on stack overflow. It's way more efficient than reading huge book.
So, such books are needed by very small group of people. And this defines the pay.
> Who needs a book about SVG? When I needed to build charts I took couple tutorials plus searched answers on stack overflow.
The people out there who pride themselves into being able to do their work without relying on googling everything? What if you have an idea or a requirement that has never been done before?
How does what people deserve have anything to do with it?
A programmer might provide $100,000 of value to a company over a year, but that doesn't mean they deserve that much, or even any given fraction of that much. People are and should be paid exactly what they can get for their work. Selling things itself is work.
"People are and should be paid exactly what they can get for their work" what? to see how this thinking makes no sense, ask yourself- chronologically, when did this become true? was it after the great depression? was it during communist china? was it before we had fiat currency and had to barter? did it happen some time recently? why? people have been paid vastly differently, including not at all, for the same work. or maybe you have a pure, survival of the fittest mentality (for lack of a better phrase), and think it has it always been true? if always... then how do you feel if stealing gets you paid more? what if lying gets you paid more? what if fucking over other people gets you paid more? having slaves was incredibly profitable. you shouldn't be paid more for that, right?
What about things that are for the public good but doesn't have an immediate market demand, like government-funded research grants for scientists? The market is only concerned with short-term profits, it's not the optimal allocation of resources like some would have you believe. Projects that contribute to the commons should be funded, as long as the necessary check and balances are in place.
You know these aren't representative at all. Almost every video gamer and guitar player earns nothing for their activities. Those millions of 0's won't be included in the guitar player salary graph.
Yes, I am aware of that. But you are just confirming my original observation here. You are acting like writers have no right to earn a decent living. Just because people might enjoy their work does not mean they should starve or be required to get some other job they don't enjoy to pay the bills. I get tired of that insinuation.
There are programmers who enjoy their work. They don't get told they have no right to the high salaries typical of programmers because they aren't suffering enough.
You're talking to the wrong person. I entirely agree with J. K. Rowling's right to earn millions from her writing. Because that's what people were willing to pay her for it. How else can we decide how to take money from one person and give it to another besides the market? Who do you want to pay that money? The taxpayer? Are you wanting free income for every author, artist, game player or hobbiest so they don't have to suffer unpleasant work? That might well be a valid idea but it's quite different from what you said. How do you "earn" a living when you're supported by charity?
Edit: What are you proposing instead of the current market situation? Do you want publishers to do something different? Governments? GoogFaceAzons? Readers? The general populace?
These are different problems. We're talking about authors and artists here. How and why should authors be paid for producing work that nobody wants? Should somebody else pay authors to pursue their hobby even when it doesn't provide much value to others?
i agree its hard to know what to pay. but i think you would rather have a contented artist producing work that you were indifferent to, than a highly paid patent troll, right?
> You are acting like writers have no right to earn a decent living
Correct.
Writers, programmers, football players all do not have a _right_ to earn money.
Instead, _people_ have a right to get a job to earn themselves a decent income to make a good living. If I choose to do something that doesn't result in a good enough income, then that's on me.
I tend to agree; the "right to earn a decent living" is inherently incompatible with market economy. On the market, you only have the right to accept or refuse a transaction.
On the other hand, I also believe everyone should have a right to decent life - that's why I'm for extensive social security, and would happily support basic income if someone figures out how to do it right.
I feel like people are sometimes using "right to earn a decent living" as a proxy for "right to have a decent life" in order to imply that they want to have people working for living. But I think those concepts need to be clearly separated, because the concept of "right to earn a decent living" directly interferes with self-regulatory capabilities of the market, which is why we want free markets in the first place.
I went into programming because I saw how well paid a profession it would be. I could have done art or linguistics or something else. I enjoy it too, but I don't expect to be paid well for making videogames so I also do work I enjoy less that pays better.
I agree with you that writers of valuable content should be compensated better, but I don't understand this attitude that one should be able to go into any job you want and expect to make a living. If you write something that people want, don't give it to them until they pay for it.
Did the publisher in Amelia's case just screw her in negotiations, or do they always underpay their writers and backload it to royalties?
My company (scripted.com) is looking to add more proven experts to our writer marketplace. We would be more than happy to fast-track the author of this piece through our writer application process, as she clearly has unique domain expertise. Our freelancers work all over the world, and tech writing is in very high demand. No promises but I might be able to convince our marketing department to become her first customer. Our blog could use content discussing the state of digital publishing technologies.
I thought this was sad as well, especially since there are many people who make a lot more than this with self-published technical books.
If I'm completely honest, I hadn't heard of the author before reading her post, even though I try to keep up with the web development scene. This leads me to think that maybe she would've benefited from putting her name out there more, something many of us are hesitant to do.
I've been lurking in the www-svg mailing list for years now (originally subscribed to bring up an issue with rendering I observed). Amelia more or less suddenly appeared in the discussions a while ago, but it was definitely noticeable. Heck, it's hard to miss her name at least at the point where SVG is (was?) standardised.
I do believe, however, that many, many people who use web technologies, never bothered to look up the actual specification, nor are they involved or watching the standardisation process. So it's easy to miss names that only crop up in that area.
2¢ — As someone who is actively working with SVG (at the level of DOM APIs, not just using SVG icon packs), I've found her name and work to be brought up quite often. Discussions of the SVG spec generally mention her in some capacity. I've seen her cited in countless blog posts, and guest on a few podcasts. In my experience she's been as visible as anyone active in the SVG space (like, say, Sara Soueidan or Sarah Drasner).
They also get paid really well because Hollywood makes a lot of money and the national labour board ruled that most of the production companies in Hollywood HAVE to use that guild.
It's not clear to me who this technical writers union would be negotiating with, or why they'd have leverage over that entity. O'Reilly obviously has a limited pool of people it can find to write a book about SVG, but that also implies those people should have leverage to command more than a $4000 advance without needing to unionize.
The tech industry has a lot of money. Probably more than Hollywood, if you define "tech" broadly. Hypothetically, if all the technical book authors, how-to bloggers, and Stack Overflow contributors were to go on strike, they would have considerable leverage over various wealthy software firms.
They'd also have to somehow remove all the old how-to content from the internet and somehow find a way to stop scabs. Any up and coming developer anywhere in the world could find the basic specs and references needed to become a "strikebreaker" expert on a given topic.
The nature of our industry and the widely disseminated information makes me really skeptical that could ever happen, even if there was a strong will to do so amongst developers and technical writers.
I'm not saying it's that likely to happen, I'm just pointing out that all this "oh well, technical writing is just low-paid worthless work and always has to be" fatalism is misguided.
There are proven models for demanding higher pay for writing, but they require labor solidarity (and some measure of accountability from industry)
I suspect many books just wouldn't get written if advances had to be higher, there isn't a huge amount of money sloshing about in technical publishing.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't really matter if individual cases get squashed. The larger issue is that Google has moved away from the stance of "we just give you what you search for, it's up to you to verify it" and is instead presenting some results as "this is the definitive answer". That's bad even if all the horribly wrong results are removed. Does anyone really think it'd be a good idea for a single company to own what is and is not considered "true"?
