It's simply discounting the fees for that one user to zero.
(It's not writing off a bad debt, which is technically different)
So: your costs are still X but now your revenue is Y instead of Y + (that one user's fee which likely wasn't going to get paid anyway)
You pay taxes on Y - X (profit).
So, really, their costs just increased by whatever it cost to deliver that data (likely zero depending on how they're billed for it), and their revenue didn't change at all.
Turning a no-collect situation into a PR positive.
To be fair: it really depends on their datacenter environment; if they're physically hosting, this is probably a rounding error. But, if instead, they're actually running on top of AWS or another hyperscaler and paying 9 cents per gigabyte for traffic, then their bandwidth bill could actually be quite substantial and they're just passing that along to the customer. In that case, this could be actually quite generous of them.
I can help you restore from backups if you will tell me where you backed it up.
You did back it up, right? Right before you ran me with `--allow-dangerously-skip-permissions` and gave me full access to your databases and S3 buckets?
But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power method as well. (OTOH, to your point: how you describe other countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is well taken in that respect.)
I know this isn’t a popular opinion, and yeah, I will also miss it, but I’ve always thought the World Factbook was a strange thing for the CIA to be publishing in the first place.
Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm)
That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential.
It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever.
The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral.
Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda.
During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there.
However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.
This is also kinda funny and ironic: 'This is not, as I have labeled it, a flood, deluge, or avalanche. It's an earthquake. A rupture. Quiet in 2022, five-alarm fire in 2023.' (ibid)
Basically, serving a small business whose key app they use got sold to private equity, has been turned into a subscription, support is now tickets they never get fixed, and the subscription goes up 20% a year.
I think parent was referring to how challenging it is to move data (files like photos and other types of files, all of which are only accessible through apps with those specific capabilities) out of the Apple mobile ecosystem and to something non-Apple-ish.
This is still true even if you use a Mac as an intermediary (if you have one), which also implies that you're probably going to be using iCloud to sync those as well.
Bottom line: it's exceptionally difficult, even for tech-forward Apple-philes, to move your own data off your iPhone without actually going DEEPER into the Apple ecosystem, and Apple has been actively removing capabilities and neutering apps like NextCloud etc (always for 'privacy' or 'security' reasons) to make it MORE difficult to exfil your own data.
The CEO pay for Wikipedia doesn't bother me, I mean, Wikipedia is singularly successful. Those donation nags are annoying and I am sure you can find all sorts of things wrong in a big project like that, but Wikipedia works. (I only wish we had fewer deletionists and more detailed pages on subjects like [1])
Mozilla is a different story, that really is an organization that is drifting, bleeding market share, and indifferent to the 99% of web users and developers outside the bay area. On the other hand, if they moved their headquarters to Dublin or Denver or even Bakersfield or San Luis Obispo I'd be happy if the CEO got 10x the pay. So long as they are an hour's drive away from Facebook and Google they just won't listen to "the rest of us"
(It's not writing off a bad debt, which is technically different)
So: your costs are still X but now your revenue is Y instead of Y + (that one user's fee which likely wasn't going to get paid anyway)
You pay taxes on Y - X (profit).
So, really, their costs just increased by whatever it cost to deliver that data (likely zero depending on how they're billed for it), and their revenue didn't change at all.
Turning a no-collect situation into a PR positive.
To be fair: it really depends on their datacenter environment; if they're physically hosting, this is probably a rounding error. But, if instead, they're actually running on top of AWS or another hyperscaler and paying 9 cents per gigabyte for traffic, then their bandwidth bill could actually be quite substantial and they're just passing that along to the customer. In that case, this could be actually quite generous of them.
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