At this point in my life, I’m ready for something serious and meaningful. I’m ready to settle down and commit to creating a great relationship. It really difficult to tell who' actually out there searching for a real relationship. If your wishy-washy, flakes and going to ghost me, don't reply to me.
There’s no question I’ve come to despise more is the question you just asked me. It’s basically asking, “What’s your value and worth?” within the first time of meeting someone. I just don't think it matter. I just don't thing that is the best question to start off with a total stranger. I am more than my job. What type of physician I am shouldn't matter as long as I am a kind, caring responsible individual? Right??? Would I not consider you a good candidate for a relationship because you are real estate lawyer instead of enternamaint lawyer or if you were first grade teacher instead of sixth grade teacher?
Lately, I am meeting women who do not want a serious relationship. They just need a man to enjoy a few moments with and walk away from at will.If you can't make any adjustment to our lifestyle.That is a sign of a woman not ready to take dating seriously.By and large, women always relinquish part of their freedom for them to be taken up by a man.A woman after a serious relationship will try to adjust to a man’s whims, or even pretend to, as she works to restore her independence within the relationship. If Never responds to calls or texts promptly that is another sign that she not interested
You're always one decision away from a totally different life. If you dig a bad boy, that’s your prerogative. But please stop complaining about never finding good guys while simultaneously continuing to date the same type of person over and over again! When an attractive woman keeps repeating she has abysmal luck dating, I… well, I don’t exactly sympathize
Single is no longer a lack of options — but a choice.Your perpetual dissatisfaction is paired with incredibly high standards and over-focusing on “Chemistry.Character is more important. If you think you “deserve” a certain kind of partner – and yet you’ve NEVER gotten him, you need to start considering another kind of partner.The key is in letting go of the image you’ve been holding onto.When Did Being “Too Nice” Become a Character Flaw?It’s terrible to realize that you confused excitement, passion, and anxiety for love, and then tried to build a life with a self-centered, impulsive person who made you feel agony, ecstasy and insecurity…. But who was never able to truly love you back.
You are single because of you, not because of the people you date.Single is no longer a lack of options — but a choice.Your perpetual dissatisfaction is paired with incredibly high standards and the illusion of infinite choice
The REAL Reason You’re Still Single:You don’t want the people who want you.The people you want don’t want you in return. You have a choice to find an amazing partner and create an amazing life – if you give up that IMAGE that you have of dating a men who was Just. Like. You.If you’re single, and never find anybody “good enough,” chances are that you do the this. If you ever wants to get married, it would probably make sense to start appreciating the 6s and 7’s and choose the one that shares the same values and can be your best friend for life.
If you only likes 9’s and 10’s… but those same men always a) prefer younger women or b) ultimately break her heart because they’re egotistical, selfish narcissists who only want younger women and aren’t ready to settle down… should you keep holding out for them? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to marry one of the devoted 7’s who think she’s the bee’s knees?Apparently not. Because that would be settling. And settling is bad. That is why you will remain single indefinitely
If you think you “deserve” a certain kind of partner – not just someone who is rich, hot, and brilliant, but a rich, hot, brilliant partner who STICKS AROUND – and yet you’ve NEVER gotten him, you need to start considering another kind of partner.The key is in letting go of the image you’ve been holding onto.By thinking you’re “better” than everyone who wants you, you’re eliminating the greatest source of love around – the person who wants you! And you may be surprised to find that you can be EXTREMELY happy with someone who doesn’t meet your preconceived image of your ideal mate.
So many woman are over-focusing on “Chemistry. They actually believe that ‘chemistry feeling’ is a reliable source of information as to whether someone is going to be a good long-term partner for them..Never prioritize chemistry over character.In fact, the exact opposite is often true: The people who are most likely to make you feel “chemistry”.are often the ones who are the most emotionally (or literally) dangerous for you to get involved with.Trust me: It’s terrible to realize that you confused excitement, passion, and anxiety for love, and then tried to build a life with a self-centered, impulsive person who made you feel agony, ecstasy and insecurity…. But who was never able to truly love you back.
For example: A mercurial, highly sexual, unpredictable woman will make your heart pound in a way that the loving, kind kindergarten teacher with a fondness for Dansco clogs will probably not. Likewise, a rakish, troubled bad-boy will light you on fire, in a way that the earnest CPA who cares enough to iron his shirt and show up on time won’t. But who do you want to try and build a life with?
Finding Something Better Than a Chemistry.Sparks burn out quite quickly; what you want in a relationship are coals. They may not be as easy to recognize but they build a much stronger flame that lasts a lot longer
Monday, September 2, 2019
Sunday, May 12, 2019
ARTICLE :It's Time to Break Up Facebook - The New York Times
The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg was in the summer of 2017, several months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. We met at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and drove to his house, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood. We spent an hour or two together while his toddler daughter cruised around. We talked politics mostly, a little about Facebook, a bit about our families. When the shadows grew long, I had to head out. I hugged his wife, Priscilla, and said goodbye to Mark.
Since then, Mark’s personal reputation and the reputation of Facebook have taken a nose-dive. The company’s mistakes — the sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users’ data into a political consulting firm’s lap; the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news; and the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention — dominate the headlines. It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.
Mark is still the same person I watched hug his parents as they left our dorm’s common room at the beginning of our sophomore year. He is the same person who procrastinated studying for tests, fell in love with his future wife while in line for the bathroom at a party and slept on a mattress on the floor in a small apartment years after he could have afforded much more. In other words, he’s human. But it’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic.
Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.
MARK’S INFLUENCE IS STAGGERING, FAR BEYOND THAT OF ANYONE ELSE IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR OR IN GOVERNMENT.
Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.
The government must hold Mark accountable. For too long, lawmakers have marveled at Facebook’s explosive growth and overlooked their responsibility to ensure that Americans are protected and markets are competitive. Any day now, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to impose a $5 billion fine on the company, but that is not enough; nor is Facebook’s offer to appoint some kind of privacy czar. After Mark’s congressional testimony last year, there should have been calls for him to truly reckon with his mistakes. Instead the legislators who questioned him were derided as too old and out of touch to understand how tech works. That’s the impression Mark wanted Americans to have, because it means little will change.
We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.
It is time to break up Facebook.
We already have the tools we need to check the domination of Facebook. We just seem to have forgotten about them.
America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They didn’t need to foresee the rise of Facebook to understand the threat that gargantuan companies would pose to democracy. Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, who believed that monopolies prevent the competition that spurs innovation and leads to economic growth.
A century later, in response to the rise of the oil, railroad and banking trusts of the Gilded Age, the Ohio Republican John Sherman said on the floor of Congress: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies. More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable. The Department of Justice broke up monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T.
For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.
Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.
This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations. In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
The same thing is happening in social media and digital communications. Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.
In 2005, I was in Facebook’s first office, on Emerson Street in downtown Palo Alto, when I read the news that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation was acquiring the social networking site Myspace for $580 million. The overhead lights were off, and a group of us were pecking away on our keyboards, our 21-year-old faces half-illuminated by the glow of our screens. I heard a “whoa,” and the news then ricocheted silently through the room, delivered by AOL Instant Messenger. My eyes widened. Really, $580 million?
Facebook was competing with Myspace, albeit obliquely. We were focused on college students at that point, but we had real identities while Myspace had fictions. Our users were more engaged, visiting daily, if not hourly. We believed Facebook surpassed Myspace in quality and would easily displace it given enough time and money. If Myspace was worth $580 million, Facebook could be worth at least double.
From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility. Back then, we competed with a whole host of social networks, not just Myspace, but also Friendster, Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal and others. The pressure to beat them spurred innovation and led to many of the features that distinguish Facebook: simple, beautiful interfaces, the News Feed, a tie to real-world identities and more.
FROM OUR EARLIEST DAYS, MARK USED THE WORD “DOMINATION” TO DESCRIBE OUR AMBITIONS.
It was this drive to compete that led Mark to acquire, over the years, dozens of other companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014. There was nothing unethical or suspicious, in my view, in these moves.
One night during the summer of the Myspace sale, I remember driving home from work with Mark, back to the house we shared with several engineers and designers. I was in the passenger seat of the Infiniti S.U.V. that our investor Peter Thiel had bought for Mark to replace the unreliable used Jeep that he had been driving.
As we turned right off Valparaiso Avenue, Mark confessed the immense pressure he felt. “Now that we employ so many people …” he said, trailing off. “We just really can’t fail.”
Facebook had gone from a project developed in our dorm room and chaotic summer houses to a serious company with lawyers and a human resources department. We had around 50 employees, and their families relied on Facebook to put food on the table. I gazed out the window and thought to myself, It’s never going to stop. The bigger we get, the harder we’ll have to work to keep growing.
Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category. This explains why, even during the annus horribilis of 2018, Facebook’s earnings per share increased by an astounding 40 percent compared with the year before. (I liquidated my Facebook shares in 2012, and I don’t invest directly in any social media companies.)
Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
Dominating the Market
The total number of users across Facebook’s platforms far exceeds the number on any rival platform.
Even when people want to quit Facebook, they don’t have any meaningful alternative, as we saw in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Worried about their privacy and lacking confidence in Facebook’s good faith, users across the world started a “Delete Facebook” movement. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter deleted their accounts from their phones, but many did so only temporarily. I heard more than one friend say, “I’m getting off Facebook altogether — thank God for Instagram,” not realizing that Instagram was a Facebook subsidiary. In the end people did not leave the company’s platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?
Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved. In one of the government’s few attempts to rein in the company, the F.T.C. in 2011 issued a consent decree that Facebook not share any private information beyond what users already agreed to. Facebook largely ignored the decree. Last month, the day after the company predicted in an earnings call that it would need to pay up to $5 billion as a penalty for its negligence — a slap on the wrist — Facebook’s shares surged 7 percent, adding $30 billion to its value, six times the size of the fine.
The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging. Now, the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp have left the company after clashing with Mark over his management of their platforms. But their former properties remain Facebook’s, driving much of its recent growth.
When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.
The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network. The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.
Snapchat posed a different threat. Snapchat’s Stories and impermanent messaging options made it an attractive alternative to Facebook and Instagram. And unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it.
Facebook’s version of Snapchat’s stories and disappearing messages proved wildly successful, at Snapchat’s expense. At an all-hands meeting in 2016, Mark told Facebook employees not to let their pride get in the way of giving users what they want. According to Wired magazine, “Zuckerberg’s message became an informal slogan at Facebook: ‘Don’t be too proud to copy.’”
(There is little regulators can do about this tactic: Snapchat patented its “ephemeral message galleries,” but copyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)
WOULD-BE COMPETITORS CAN’T RAISE THE MONEY TO TAKE ON FACEBOOK.
As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum. So despite an extended economic expansion, increasing interest in high-tech start-ups, an explosion of venture capital and growing public distaste for Facebook, no major social networking company has been founded since the fall of 2011.
As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).
I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur. Yet he has created a leviathan that crowds out entrepreneurship and restricts consumer choice. It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisiblehand. How did we allow this to happen?
Since the 1970s, courts have become increasingly hesitant to break up companies or block mergers unless consumers are paying inflated prices that would be lower in a competitive market. But a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination. It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.
As the Columbia law professor Tim Wu writes, “It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”
Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.
WE PAY FOR FACEBOOK WITH OUR DATA AND OUR ATTENTION, AND BY EITHER MEASURE IT DOESN’T COME CHEAP.
Facebook’s business model is built on capturing as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be. We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.
I was on the original News Feed team (my name is on the patent), and that product now gets billions of hours of attention and pulls in unknowable amounts of data each year. The average Facebook user spends an hour a day on the platform; Instagram users spend 53 minutes a day scrolling through pictures and videos. They create immense amounts of data — not just likes and dislikes, but how many seconds they watch a particular video — that Facebook uses to refine its targeted advertising. Facebook also collects data from partner companies and apps, without most users knowing about it, according to testing by The Wall Street Journal.
Some days, lying on the floor next to my 1-year-old son as he plays with his dinosaurs, I catch myself scrolling through Instagram, waiting to see if the next image will be more beautiful than the last. What am I doing? I know it’s not good for me, or for my son, and yet I do it anyway.
The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.
Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.
The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.
Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.
In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate. In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”
Facebook has responded to many of the criticisms of how it manages speech by hiring thousands of contractors to enforce the rules that Mark and senior executives develop. After a few weeks of training, these contractors decide which videos count as hate speech or free speech, which images are erotic and which are simply artistic, and which live streams are too violent to be broadcast. (The Verge reported that some of these moderators, working through a vendor in Arizona, were paid $28,800 a year, got limited breaks and faced significant mental health risks.)
As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns. When I look at my years of Facebook messages with Mark now, it’s just a long stream of my own light-blue comments, clearly written in response to words he had once sent me. (Facebook now offers this as a feature to all users.)
The most extreme example of Facebook manipulating speech happened in Myanmar in late 2017. Mark said in a Vox interview that he personally made the decision to delete the private messages of Facebook users who were encouraging genocide there. “I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call,” he said, “and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, ‘Hey, there’s about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.’ And then the same thing on the other side.”
Mark made a call: “We stop those messages from going through.” Most people would agree with his decision, but it’s deeply troubling that he made it with no accountability to any independent authority or government. Facebook could, in theory, delete en masse the messages of Americans, too, if its leadership decided it didn’t like them.
Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.
No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.
Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control. Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.
Late last year, he proposed an independent commission to handle difficult content moderation decisions by social media platforms. It would afford an independent check, Mark argued, on Facebook’s decisions, and users could appeal to it if they disagreed. But its decisions would not have the force of law, since companies would voluntarily participate.
In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.
FACEBOOK ISN’T AFRAID OF A FEW MORE RULES. IT’S AFRAID OF AN ANTITRUST CASE.
I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.
We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.
In the summer of 2006, Yahoo offered us $1 billion for Facebook. I desperately wanted Mark to say yes. Even my small slice of the company would have made me a millionaire several times over. For a 22-year-old scholarship kid from small-town North Carolina, that kind of money was unimaginable. I wasn’t alone — just about every other person at the company wanted the same.
It was taboo to talk about it openly, but I finally asked Mark when we had a moment alone, “How are you feeling about Yahoo?” I got a shrug and a one-line answer: “I just don’t know if I want to work for Terry Semel,” Yahoo’s chief executive.
Outside of a couple of gigs in college, Mark had never had a real boss and seemed entirely uninterested in the prospect. I didn’t like the idea much myself, but I would have traded having a boss for several million dollars any day of the week. Mark’s drive was infinitely stronger. Domination meant domination, and the hustle was just too delicious.
Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years. The F.T.C. should have blocked these mergers, but it’s not too late to act. There is precedent for correcting bad decisions — as recently as 2009, Whole Foods settled antitrust complaints by selling off the Wild Oats brand and stores that it had bought a few years earlier.
There is some evidence that we may be headed in this direction. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for reversing the Facebook mergers, and in February, the F.T.C. announced the creation of a task force to monitor competition among tech companies and review previous mergers.
How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded. Facebook shareholders would initially hold stock in the new companies, although Mark and other executives would probably be required to divest their management shares.
Until recently, WhatsApp and Instagram were administered as independent platforms inside the parent company, so that should make the process easier. But time is of the essence: Facebook is working quickly to integrate the three, which would make it harder for the F.T.C. to split them up.
Some economists are skeptical that breaking up Facebook would spur that much competition, because Facebook, they say, is a “natural” monopoly. Natural monopolies have emerged in areas like water systems and the electrical grid, where the price of entering the business is very high — because you have to lay pipes or electrical lines — but it gets cheaper and cheaper to add each additional customer. In other words, the monopoly arises naturally from the circumstances of the business, rather than a company’s illegal maneuvering. In addition, defenders of natural monopolies often make the case that they benefit consumers because they are able to provide services more cheaply than anyone else.
Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.
Still others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.
While serious, these concerns do not justify inaction. Even after a breakup, Facebook would be a hugely profitable business with billions to invest in new technologies — and a more competitive market would only encourage those investments. If the Chinese did pull ahead, our government could invest in research and development and pursue tactical trade policy, just as it is doing today to hold China’s 5G technology at bay.
The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.
Even Facebook shareholders would probably benefit, as shareholders often do in the years after a company’s split. The value of the companies that made up Standard Oil doubled within a year of its being dismantled and had increased by fivefold a few years later. Ten years after the 1984 breakup of AT&T, the value of its successor companies had tripled.
But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit. No one knows exactly what Facebook’s competitors would offer to differentiate themselves. That’s exactly the point.
The Justice Department faced similar questions of social costs and benefits with AT&T in the 1950s. AT&T had a monopoly on phone services and telecommunications equipment. The government filed suit under antitrust laws, and the case ended with a consent decree that required AT&T to release its patents and refrain from expanding into the nascent computer industry. This resulted in an explosion of innovation, greatly increasing follow-on patents and leading to the development of the semiconductor and modern computing. We would most likely not have iPhones or laptops without the competitive markets that antitrust action ushered in.
Adam Smith was right: Competition spurs growth and innovation.
Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.
The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time. The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.
Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media. This idea may seem un-American — we would never stand for a government agency censoring speech. But we already have limits on yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, child pornography, speech intended to provoke violence and false statements to manipulate stock prices. We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.
IF WE DON’T HAVE PUBLIC SERVANTS SHAPING THESE POLICIES, CORPORATIONS WILL.
These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation. I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak. But sticking with the status quo would be worse: If we don’t have public servants shaping these policies, corporations will.
Some people doubt that an effort to break up Facebook would win in the courts, given the hostility on the federal bench to antitrust action, or that this divided Congress would ever be able to muster enough consensus to create a regulatory agency for social media.
But even if breakup and regulation aren’t immediately successful, simply pushing for them will bring more oversight. The government’s case against Microsoft — that it illegally used its market power in operating systems to force its customers to use its web browser, Internet Explorer — ended in 2001 when George W. Bush’s administration abandoned its effort to break up the company. Yet that prosecution helped rein in Microsoft’s ambitions to dominate the early web.
Similarly, the Justice Department’s 1970s suit accusing IBM of illegally maintaining its monopoly on personal computer sales ended in a stalemate. But along the way, IBM changed many of its behaviors. It stopped bundling its hardware and software, chose an extremely open design for the operating system in its personal computers and did not exercise undue control over its suppliers. Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”
We can expect the same from even an unsuccessful suit against Facebook.
Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next. If the government were to use this moment to resurrect an effective competition standard that takes a broader view of the full cost of “free” products, it could affect a whole host of industries.
The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.
I take responsibility for not sounding the alarm earlier. Don Graham, a former Facebook board member, has accused those who criticize the company now as having “all the courage of the last man leaping on the pile at a football game.” The financial rewards I reaped from working at Facebook radically changed the trajectory of my life, and even after I cashed out, I watched in awe as the company grew. It took the 2016 election fallout and Cambridge Analytica to awaken me to the dangers of Facebook’s monopoly. But anyone suggesting that Facebook is akin to a pinned football player misrepresents its resilience and power.
An era of accountability for Facebook and other monopolies may be beginning. Collective anger is growing, and a new cohort of leaders has begun to emerge. On Capitol Hill, Representative David Cicilline has taken a special interest in checking the power of monopolies, and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz have joined Senator Warren in calling for more oversight. Economists like Jason Furman, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, are speaking out about monopolies, and a host of legal scholars like Lina Khan, Barry Lynn and Ganesh Sitaraman are plotting a way forward.
This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, is a co-chairman of the Economic Security Project and a senior adviser at the Roosevelt Institute.
Since then, Mark’s personal reputation and the reputation of Facebook have taken a nose-dive. The company’s mistakes — the sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users’ data into a political consulting firm’s lap; the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news; and the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention — dominate the headlines. It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.
Mark is still the same person I watched hug his parents as they left our dorm’s common room at the beginning of our sophomore year. He is the same person who procrastinated studying for tests, fell in love with his future wife while in line for the bathroom at a party and slept on a mattress on the floor in a small apartment years after he could have afforded much more. In other words, he’s human. But it’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic.
Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.
MARK’S INFLUENCE IS STAGGERING, FAR BEYOND THAT OF ANYONE ELSE IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR OR IN GOVERNMENT.
Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.
The government must hold Mark accountable. For too long, lawmakers have marveled at Facebook’s explosive growth and overlooked their responsibility to ensure that Americans are protected and markets are competitive. Any day now, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to impose a $5 billion fine on the company, but that is not enough; nor is Facebook’s offer to appoint some kind of privacy czar. After Mark’s congressional testimony last year, there should have been calls for him to truly reckon with his mistakes. Instead the legislators who questioned him were derided as too old and out of touch to understand how tech works. That’s the impression Mark wanted Americans to have, because it means little will change.
We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.
It is time to break up Facebook.
We already have the tools we need to check the domination of Facebook. We just seem to have forgotten about them.
America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They didn’t need to foresee the rise of Facebook to understand the threat that gargantuan companies would pose to democracy. Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, who believed that monopolies prevent the competition that spurs innovation and leads to economic growth.
A century later, in response to the rise of the oil, railroad and banking trusts of the Gilded Age, the Ohio Republican John Sherman said on the floor of Congress: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies. More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable. The Department of Justice broke up monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T.
For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.
Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.
This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations. In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
The same thing is happening in social media and digital communications. Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.
In 2005, I was in Facebook’s first office, on Emerson Street in downtown Palo Alto, when I read the news that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation was acquiring the social networking site Myspace for $580 million. The overhead lights were off, and a group of us were pecking away on our keyboards, our 21-year-old faces half-illuminated by the glow of our screens. I heard a “whoa,” and the news then ricocheted silently through the room, delivered by AOL Instant Messenger. My eyes widened. Really, $580 million?
Facebook was competing with Myspace, albeit obliquely. We were focused on college students at that point, but we had real identities while Myspace had fictions. Our users were more engaged, visiting daily, if not hourly. We believed Facebook surpassed Myspace in quality and would easily displace it given enough time and money. If Myspace was worth $580 million, Facebook could be worth at least double.
From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility. Back then, we competed with a whole host of social networks, not just Myspace, but also Friendster, Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal and others. The pressure to beat them spurred innovation and led to many of the features that distinguish Facebook: simple, beautiful interfaces, the News Feed, a tie to real-world identities and more.
FROM OUR EARLIEST DAYS, MARK USED THE WORD “DOMINATION” TO DESCRIBE OUR AMBITIONS.
It was this drive to compete that led Mark to acquire, over the years, dozens of other companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014. There was nothing unethical or suspicious, in my view, in these moves.
One night during the summer of the Myspace sale, I remember driving home from work with Mark, back to the house we shared with several engineers and designers. I was in the passenger seat of the Infiniti S.U.V. that our investor Peter Thiel had bought for Mark to replace the unreliable used Jeep that he had been driving.
As we turned right off Valparaiso Avenue, Mark confessed the immense pressure he felt. “Now that we employ so many people …” he said, trailing off. “We just really can’t fail.”
Facebook had gone from a project developed in our dorm room and chaotic summer houses to a serious company with lawyers and a human resources department. We had around 50 employees, and their families relied on Facebook to put food on the table. I gazed out the window and thought to myself, It’s never going to stop. The bigger we get, the harder we’ll have to work to keep growing.
Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category. This explains why, even during the annus horribilis of 2018, Facebook’s earnings per share increased by an astounding 40 percent compared with the year before. (I liquidated my Facebook shares in 2012, and I don’t invest directly in any social media companies.)
Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
Dominating the Market
The total number of users across Facebook’s platforms far exceeds the number on any rival platform.
Even when people want to quit Facebook, they don’t have any meaningful alternative, as we saw in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Worried about their privacy and lacking confidence in Facebook’s good faith, users across the world started a “Delete Facebook” movement. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter deleted their accounts from their phones, but many did so only temporarily. I heard more than one friend say, “I’m getting off Facebook altogether — thank God for Instagram,” not realizing that Instagram was a Facebook subsidiary. In the end people did not leave the company’s platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?
Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved. In one of the government’s few attempts to rein in the company, the F.T.C. in 2011 issued a consent decree that Facebook not share any private information beyond what users already agreed to. Facebook largely ignored the decree. Last month, the day after the company predicted in an earnings call that it would need to pay up to $5 billion as a penalty for its negligence — a slap on the wrist — Facebook’s shares surged 7 percent, adding $30 billion to its value, six times the size of the fine.
The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging. Now, the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp have left the company after clashing with Mark over his management of their platforms. But their former properties remain Facebook’s, driving much of its recent growth.
When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.
The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network. The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.
Snapchat posed a different threat. Snapchat’s Stories and impermanent messaging options made it an attractive alternative to Facebook and Instagram. And unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it.
Facebook’s version of Snapchat’s stories and disappearing messages proved wildly successful, at Snapchat’s expense. At an all-hands meeting in 2016, Mark told Facebook employees not to let their pride get in the way of giving users what they want. According to Wired magazine, “Zuckerberg’s message became an informal slogan at Facebook: ‘Don’t be too proud to copy.’”
(There is little regulators can do about this tactic: Snapchat patented its “ephemeral message galleries,” but copyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)
WOULD-BE COMPETITORS CAN’T RAISE THE MONEY TO TAKE ON FACEBOOK.
As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum. So despite an extended economic expansion, increasing interest in high-tech start-ups, an explosion of venture capital and growing public distaste for Facebook, no major social networking company has been founded since the fall of 2011.
As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).
I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur. Yet he has created a leviathan that crowds out entrepreneurship and restricts consumer choice. It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisiblehand. How did we allow this to happen?
Since the 1970s, courts have become increasingly hesitant to break up companies or block mergers unless consumers are paying inflated prices that would be lower in a competitive market. But a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination. It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.
As the Columbia law professor Tim Wu writes, “It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”
Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.
WE PAY FOR FACEBOOK WITH OUR DATA AND OUR ATTENTION, AND BY EITHER MEASURE IT DOESN’T COME CHEAP.
Facebook’s business model is built on capturing as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be. We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.
I was on the original News Feed team (my name is on the patent), and that product now gets billions of hours of attention and pulls in unknowable amounts of data each year. The average Facebook user spends an hour a day on the platform; Instagram users spend 53 minutes a day scrolling through pictures and videos. They create immense amounts of data — not just likes and dislikes, but how many seconds they watch a particular video — that Facebook uses to refine its targeted advertising. Facebook also collects data from partner companies and apps, without most users knowing about it, according to testing by The Wall Street Journal.
Some days, lying on the floor next to my 1-year-old son as he plays with his dinosaurs, I catch myself scrolling through Instagram, waiting to see if the next image will be more beautiful than the last. What am I doing? I know it’s not good for me, or for my son, and yet I do it anyway.
The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.
Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.
The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.
Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.
In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate. In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”
Facebook has responded to many of the criticisms of how it manages speech by hiring thousands of contractors to enforce the rules that Mark and senior executives develop. After a few weeks of training, these contractors decide which videos count as hate speech or free speech, which images are erotic and which are simply artistic, and which live streams are too violent to be broadcast. (The Verge reported that some of these moderators, working through a vendor in Arizona, were paid $28,800 a year, got limited breaks and faced significant mental health risks.)
As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns. When I look at my years of Facebook messages with Mark now, it’s just a long stream of my own light-blue comments, clearly written in response to words he had once sent me. (Facebook now offers this as a feature to all users.)
The most extreme example of Facebook manipulating speech happened in Myanmar in late 2017. Mark said in a Vox interview that he personally made the decision to delete the private messages of Facebook users who were encouraging genocide there. “I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call,” he said, “and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, ‘Hey, there’s about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.’ And then the same thing on the other side.”
Mark made a call: “We stop those messages from going through.” Most people would agree with his decision, but it’s deeply troubling that he made it with no accountability to any independent authority or government. Facebook could, in theory, delete en masse the messages of Americans, too, if its leadership decided it didn’t like them.
Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.
No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.
Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control. Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.
Late last year, he proposed an independent commission to handle difficult content moderation decisions by social media platforms. It would afford an independent check, Mark argued, on Facebook’s decisions, and users could appeal to it if they disagreed. But its decisions would not have the force of law, since companies would voluntarily participate.
In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.
FACEBOOK ISN’T AFRAID OF A FEW MORE RULES. IT’S AFRAID OF AN ANTITRUST CASE.
I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.
We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.
In the summer of 2006, Yahoo offered us $1 billion for Facebook. I desperately wanted Mark to say yes. Even my small slice of the company would have made me a millionaire several times over. For a 22-year-old scholarship kid from small-town North Carolina, that kind of money was unimaginable. I wasn’t alone — just about every other person at the company wanted the same.
It was taboo to talk about it openly, but I finally asked Mark when we had a moment alone, “How are you feeling about Yahoo?” I got a shrug and a one-line answer: “I just don’t know if I want to work for Terry Semel,” Yahoo’s chief executive.
Outside of a couple of gigs in college, Mark had never had a real boss and seemed entirely uninterested in the prospect. I didn’t like the idea much myself, but I would have traded having a boss for several million dollars any day of the week. Mark’s drive was infinitely stronger. Domination meant domination, and the hustle was just too delicious.
Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years. The F.T.C. should have blocked these mergers, but it’s not too late to act. There is precedent for correcting bad decisions — as recently as 2009, Whole Foods settled antitrust complaints by selling off the Wild Oats brand and stores that it had bought a few years earlier.
There is some evidence that we may be headed in this direction. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for reversing the Facebook mergers, and in February, the F.T.C. announced the creation of a task force to monitor competition among tech companies and review previous mergers.
How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded. Facebook shareholders would initially hold stock in the new companies, although Mark and other executives would probably be required to divest their management shares.
Until recently, WhatsApp and Instagram were administered as independent platforms inside the parent company, so that should make the process easier. But time is of the essence: Facebook is working quickly to integrate the three, which would make it harder for the F.T.C. to split them up.
Some economists are skeptical that breaking up Facebook would spur that much competition, because Facebook, they say, is a “natural” monopoly. Natural monopolies have emerged in areas like water systems and the electrical grid, where the price of entering the business is very high — because you have to lay pipes or electrical lines — but it gets cheaper and cheaper to add each additional customer. In other words, the monopoly arises naturally from the circumstances of the business, rather than a company’s illegal maneuvering. In addition, defenders of natural monopolies often make the case that they benefit consumers because they are able to provide services more cheaply than anyone else.
Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.
Still others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.
While serious, these concerns do not justify inaction. Even after a breakup, Facebook would be a hugely profitable business with billions to invest in new technologies — and a more competitive market would only encourage those investments. If the Chinese did pull ahead, our government could invest in research and development and pursue tactical trade policy, just as it is doing today to hold China’s 5G technology at bay.
The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.
Even Facebook shareholders would probably benefit, as shareholders often do in the years after a company’s split. The value of the companies that made up Standard Oil doubled within a year of its being dismantled and had increased by fivefold a few years later. Ten years after the 1984 breakup of AT&T, the value of its successor companies had tripled.
But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit. No one knows exactly what Facebook’s competitors would offer to differentiate themselves. That’s exactly the point.
The Justice Department faced similar questions of social costs and benefits with AT&T in the 1950s. AT&T had a monopoly on phone services and telecommunications equipment. The government filed suit under antitrust laws, and the case ended with a consent decree that required AT&T to release its patents and refrain from expanding into the nascent computer industry. This resulted in an explosion of innovation, greatly increasing follow-on patents and leading to the development of the semiconductor and modern computing. We would most likely not have iPhones or laptops without the competitive markets that antitrust action ushered in.
Adam Smith was right: Competition spurs growth and innovation.
Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.
The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time. The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.
Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media. This idea may seem un-American — we would never stand for a government agency censoring speech. But we already have limits on yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, child pornography, speech intended to provoke violence and false statements to manipulate stock prices. We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.
IF WE DON’T HAVE PUBLIC SERVANTS SHAPING THESE POLICIES, CORPORATIONS WILL.
These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation. I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak. But sticking with the status quo would be worse: If we don’t have public servants shaping these policies, corporations will.
Some people doubt that an effort to break up Facebook would win in the courts, given the hostility on the federal bench to antitrust action, or that this divided Congress would ever be able to muster enough consensus to create a regulatory agency for social media.
But even if breakup and regulation aren’t immediately successful, simply pushing for them will bring more oversight. The government’s case against Microsoft — that it illegally used its market power in operating systems to force its customers to use its web browser, Internet Explorer — ended in 2001 when George W. Bush’s administration abandoned its effort to break up the company. Yet that prosecution helped rein in Microsoft’s ambitions to dominate the early web.
Similarly, the Justice Department’s 1970s suit accusing IBM of illegally maintaining its monopoly on personal computer sales ended in a stalemate. But along the way, IBM changed many of its behaviors. It stopped bundling its hardware and software, chose an extremely open design for the operating system in its personal computers and did not exercise undue control over its suppliers. Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”
We can expect the same from even an unsuccessful suit against Facebook.
Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next. If the government were to use this moment to resurrect an effective competition standard that takes a broader view of the full cost of “free” products, it could affect a whole host of industries.
The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.
I take responsibility for not sounding the alarm earlier. Don Graham, a former Facebook board member, has accused those who criticize the company now as having “all the courage of the last man leaping on the pile at a football game.” The financial rewards I reaped from working at Facebook radically changed the trajectory of my life, and even after I cashed out, I watched in awe as the company grew. It took the 2016 election fallout and Cambridge Analytica to awaken me to the dangers of Facebook’s monopoly. But anyone suggesting that Facebook is akin to a pinned football player misrepresents its resilience and power.
An era of accountability for Facebook and other monopolies may be beginning. Collective anger is growing, and a new cohort of leaders has begun to emerge. On Capitol Hill, Representative David Cicilline has taken a special interest in checking the power of monopolies, and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz have joined Senator Warren in calling for more oversight. Economists like Jason Furman, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, are speaking out about monopolies, and a host of legal scholars like Lina Khan, Barry Lynn and Ganesh Sitaraman are plotting a way forward.
This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, is a co-chairman of the Economic Security Project and a senior adviser at the Roosevelt Institute.
Sunday, March 24, 2019
PERSONAL: RELATIONSHIP IS A MIRROR
Relationship is a mirror. Every moment the other reveals you, exposes you. The closer the relationship, the clearer is the mirror.Many people seek this in external objects or people. I’m sure you’ve heard people proclaim: “I’ll be happy if he did this or she said that” or “If I only got that job, new house, baby.” If a person seeks a partner to complete them, conflicts arise.
It is not your partner’s job to make you happy. It is your job to make you happy. It is your partner’s job to make themselves happy.
Understand that it is up to you to make yourself happy, it is NOT the job of your spouse. I am not saying you shouldn’t do nice things for each other, or that your partner can’t make you happy sometimes. I am just saying don’t lay expectations on your partner to “make you happy.” It is not their responsibility. Figure out as individuals what makes you happy as an individual, be happy yourself, then you each bring that to the relationship
A lot is made about “sacrifices” in a relationship. You are supposed to keep the relationship happy by consistently sacrificing yourself for your partner and their wants and needs.There is some truth to that. Every relationship requires each person to consciously choose to give something up at times.
Shitty, codependent relationships have an inherent stability because you’re both locked in an implicit bargain to tolerate the other person’s bad behavior because they’re tolerating yours, and neither of you wants to be alone. On the surface, it seems like “compromising in relationships because that’s what people do,” but the reality is that resentments build up, and both parties become the other person’s emotional hostage against having to face and deal with their own bullshit
A healthy and happy relationship requires two healthy and happy individuals. Keyword here: “individuals.” That means two people with their own identities, their own interests and perspectives, and things they do by themselves, on their own time. Don’t try to change them. This is the person you chose. They were good enough to marry so don’t expect them to change now.Don’t ever give up who you are for the person you’re with. It will only backfire and make you both miserable. Have the courage to be who you are, and most importantly, let your partner be who they are. Those are the two people who fell in love with each other in the first place
There is no 50/50 in housecleaning, child rearing, vacation planning, dishwasher emptying, gift buying, dinner making, money making, etc. The sooner everyone accepts that, the happier everyone is. We all have things we like to do and hate to do; we all have things we are good at and not so good at. TALK to your partner about those things when it comes to dividing and conquering all the crap that has to get done in life.
Everyone has an image in their mind of how a relationship should work. Both people share responsibilities. Both people manage to finely balance their time together with the time for themselves. Both pursue engaging and invigorating interests on their own and then share the benefits together. Both take turns cleaning the toilet and blowing each other and cooking gourmet lasagna for the extended family at Thanksgiving
Then there’s how relationships actually work.
Messy. Stressful. Miscommunication flying everywhere so that both of you feel as though you’re in a perpetual state of talking to a wall.
The fact is relationships are imperfect, messy affairs. And it’s for the simple reason that they’re comprised of imperfect, messy people — people who want different things at different times in different ways and oh, they forgot to tell you? Well, maybe if you had been listening, ***.
PERSONAL: WHAT MAKE RELATIONSHIP REALLY WORK
Love is a funny thing. In ancient times, people genuinely considered love a sickness. Parents warned their children against it, and adults quickly arranged marriages before their children were old enough to do something dumb in the name of their emotions.
That’s because love, while making us feel all giddy and high as if we had just snorted a shoebox full of cocaine, makes us highly irrational. That is what chemistry does for us.. It’s nature’s way of tricking us into doing insane and irrational things to procreate with another person — probably because if we stopped to think about the repercussions of having kids, and being with the same person forever and ever, no one would ever do it. As Robin Williams used to joke, “God gave man a brain and a penis and only enough blood to operate one at a time.”
Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other’s faults long enough to get some babymaking done. It generally only lasts for a few months at most. That dizzying high you get staring into your lover’s eyes as if they are the stars that make up the heavens — yeah, that mostly goes away. It does for everybody. So, once it’s gone, you need to know that you’ve buckled yourself down with a human being you genuinely respect and enjoy being with, otherwise things are going to get rocky.
True love — that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy — is a choice. It’s a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances. It’s a commitment to a person who you understand isn’t going to always make you happy — nor should they! — and a person who will need to rely on you at times, just as you will rely on them.
That form of love is much harder. Primarily because it often doesn’t feel very good. It’s unglamorous. It’s lots of early morning doctor’s visits. It’s cleaning up bodily fluids you’d rather not be cleaning up. It’s dealing with another person’s insecurities and fears and ideas, even when you don’t want to.
But this form of love is also far more satisfying and meaningful. And, at the end of the day, it brings true happiness, not just another series of highs.Happily Ever After doesn’t exist. Every day you wake up and decide to love your partner and your life – the good, the bad and the ugly. Some days it’s a struggle and some days you feel like the luckiest person in the world Many people never learn how to breach this deep, unconditional love. Many people are instead addicted to the ups and downs of romantic love. They are in it for the feels, so to speak. And when the feels run out, so do they.
When you commit to someone, you don’t actually know who you’re committing to. You know who they are today, but you have no idea who this person is going to be in five years, ten years, and so on. You have to be prepared for the unexpected, and truly ask yourself if you admire this person regardless of the superficial (or not-so-superficial) details, because I promise almost all of them at some point are going to either change or go away.
It’s important to always realize you have a choice. The love you seek is obtainable only if you are patient enough to wait for it and courageous enough to move on. Remember the first time you rode your bike? You fell off didn’t you? And I bet you got right back on and eventually you just kept going. It’s okay to get hurt, the bruises will only remind you of how far you’ve come.
I began finding comfort in being alone. I no longer had a desire to “have” someone in my life to keep me occupied, to love me, or to bring me happiness. I was going places whenever I wanted to, doing things however I wanted to and creating memories in the process. In essence, I was creating my own happiness without someone else. In doing so, I’ve been able to identify what i want in a woman and have made certain that I’ll never settle for anything less than what I truly deserve and desire. Mind you, there might not be a single person in this world who wants a family more than I do. I’m just not willing to settle in order to have that. I believe that God and patience will bring me everything I’ve dreamed of and more.
I have a totally different perspective on relationships today than I did even few years ago. See, I think of relationships with the same lens as I do my career. If I am going to invest my time into something, it’s because I know I am getting the same investment back in return. Why would you put time and effort into something that doesn’t put the same time and effort into you? And then be naive enough to believe it will bring you happiness? Men and women wake up everyday and go to work to be successful. Most have this obsession with making more and more money. Imagine they felt the same way about your feelings and happiness? Giving more and more effort each day because it’ll bring them closer to that next step. Why shouldn’t they? Money doesn’t bring happiness, hell I would rather be broke and in love than rich and miserable.
Being older, I am very selective with whom I choose to offer my time and heart to. People always ask me why I’m single; I’ve chosen to be. I don’t look for perfection, and definitely don’t need just a pretty face. I’m an extremely confident man and I’ve never needed a pretty woman on my arm to feel secure, instead I’m attracted to the qualities of a woman; her vision for her future and the kindness of her soul. That’s what I look forward to falling in love with and that’s what I build my future for. I’ll be patient until the day I find it …. and when I do, I’ll show her a love she’s never experienced before; a love that will never hurt and never quit.
I am not a serial dater. So many woman I have talked to have gone on so many dates and never find someone they want to be with....even if that guy is a nice guy....there will always be a but......something wrong.....something missing. You will have something I lack and I will have something you lack. I usually will meet someone who I feel want me to be with them. Someone who want me in their life. If you don't show interest in me, I won't show interest in you. I don't believe in chemistry. I believe love takes time to grow.
How do I know if I want to meet you? By your action...but also by talking to you. Yes talking to you. I want to be able to talk to my parnter about anything. If something bothers you in the relationship, you must be willing to say it. Saying it builds trust and trust builds intimacy. It may hurt, but you still need to do it. No one else can fix your relationship for you. Nor should anyone else. Just as causing pain to your muscles allows them to grow back stronger, often introducing some pain into your relationship through vulnerability is the only way to make the relationship stronger.
Behind respect, trust was the most commonly mentioned trait for a healthy relationship. Most people mentioned it in the context of jealousy and fidelity — trust your partner to go off on their own, don’t get insecure or angry if you see them talking with someone else, etc.
But trust goes much deeper than that. Because when you’re really talking about the long-haul, you start to get into some serious life-or-death ***. If you ended up with cancer tomorrow, would you trust your partner to stick with you and take care of you? Would you trust your partner to care for your child for a week by themselves? Do you trust them to handle your money or make sound decisions under pressure? Do you trust them to not turn on you or blame you when you make mistakes?
These are hard things to do. And they’re even harder to think about early on in a relationship. Trust at the beginning of a relationship is easy. It’s like, “Oh, I forgot my phone at her apartment, I trust her not to sell it and buy crack with the money… I think.”But the deeper the commitment, the more intertwined your lives become, and the more you will have to trust your partner to act in your interest in your absence.
The key to fostering and maintaining trust in the relationship is for both partners to be completely transparent and vulnerable:Make promises and then stick to them. The only way to truly rebuild trust after it’s been broken is through a proven track record over time. You cannot build that track record until you own up to previous mistakes and set about correcting them.Trust is like a china plate. If you drop it and it breaks, you can put it back together with a lot of work and care. If you drop it and break it a second time, it will split into twice as many pieces and it will require far more time and care to put back together again. But drop and break it enough times, and it will shatter into so many pieces that you will never be able to put it back together again, no matter what you
I was married before....and I got divorced. This is what i learned from that experience: You are absolutely not going to be absolutely gaga over each other every single day for the rest of your lives, and all this ‘happily ever after’ bullshit is just setting people up for failure. They go into relationships with these unrealistic expectations. Then, the instant they realize they aren’t ‘gaga’ anymore, they think the relationship is broken and over, and they need to get out. No! There will be days, or weeks, or maybe even longer, when you aren’t all mushy-gushy in-love. You’re even going to wake up some morning and think, “Ugh, you’re still here….” That’s normal! And more importantly, sticking it out is totally worth it, because that, too, will change. In a day, or a week, or maybe even longer, you’ll look at that person and a giant wave of love will inundate you, and you’ll love them so much you think your heart can’t possibly hold it all and is going to burst. Because a love that’s alive is also constantly evolving. It expands and contracts and mellows and deepens. It’s not going to be the way it used to be, or the way it will be, and it shouldn’t be. I think if more couples understood that, they’d be less inclined to panic and rush to break up or divorce
I think the most important thing that I have learned in those years is that the love you feel for each other is constantly changing. Sometimes you feel a deep love and satisfaction, other times you want nothing to do with your spouse; sometimes you laugh together, sometimes you’re screaming at each other. It’s like a roller-coaster ride, ups and downs all the time, but as you stay together long enough the downs become less severe and the ups are more loving and contented. So even if you feel like you could never love your partner any more, that can change, if you give it a chance. I think people give up too soon. You need to be the kind of person that you want your spouse to be. When you do that it makes a world of difference
Relationships exist as waves, people need to learn how to ride them. like the ocean, there are constant waves of emotion going on within a relationship, ups and downs — some waves last for hours, some last for months or even years. The key is understanding that few of those waves have anything to do with the quality of the relationship — people lose jobs, family members die, couples relocate, switch careers, make a lot of money, lose a lot of money. Your job as a committed partner is to simply ride the waves with the person you love, regardless of where they go. Because ultimately, none of these waves last. And you simply end up with each other.
You can work through anything as long as you are not destroying yourself or each other. That means emotionally, physically, financially or spiritually. Make nothing off limits to discuss. Never shame or mock each other for the things you do that make you happy. Write down why you fell in love and read it every year on your anniversary (or more often). Write love letters to each other often. Make each other first. When kids arrive, it will be easy to fall into a frenzy of making them the only focus of your life…do not forget the love that produced them. You must keep that love alive and strong to feed them love. Spouse comes first. Each of you will continue to grow. Bring the other one with you. Be the one that welcomes that growth. Don’t think that the other one will hold the relationship together. Both of you should assume it’s up to you so that you are both working on it. Be passionate about cleaning house, preparing meals and taking care of your home. This is required of everyone daily, make it fun and happy and do it together. Do not complain about your partner to anyone. Love them for who they are. Make love even when you are not in the mood. Trust each other. Give each other the benefit of the doubt always. Be transparent. Have nothing to hide. Be proud of each other. Have a life outside of each other, but share it through conversation. Pamper and adore each other. Go to counselling now before you need it so that you are both open to working on the relationship together. Disagree with respect to each other’s feelings. Be open to change and accepting of differences
That’s because love, while making us feel all giddy and high as if we had just snorted a shoebox full of cocaine, makes us highly irrational. That is what chemistry does for us.. It’s nature’s way of tricking us into doing insane and irrational things to procreate with another person — probably because if we stopped to think about the repercussions of having kids, and being with the same person forever and ever, no one would ever do it. As Robin Williams used to joke, “God gave man a brain and a penis and only enough blood to operate one at a time.”
Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other’s faults long enough to get some babymaking done. It generally only lasts for a few months at most. That dizzying high you get staring into your lover’s eyes as if they are the stars that make up the heavens — yeah, that mostly goes away. It does for everybody. So, once it’s gone, you need to know that you’ve buckled yourself down with a human being you genuinely respect and enjoy being with, otherwise things are going to get rocky.
True love — that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy — is a choice. It’s a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances. It’s a commitment to a person who you understand isn’t going to always make you happy — nor should they! — and a person who will need to rely on you at times, just as you will rely on them.
That form of love is much harder. Primarily because it often doesn’t feel very good. It’s unglamorous. It’s lots of early morning doctor’s visits. It’s cleaning up bodily fluids you’d rather not be cleaning up. It’s dealing with another person’s insecurities and fears and ideas, even when you don’t want to.
But this form of love is also far more satisfying and meaningful. And, at the end of the day, it brings true happiness, not just another series of highs.Happily Ever After doesn’t exist. Every day you wake up and decide to love your partner and your life – the good, the bad and the ugly. Some days it’s a struggle and some days you feel like the luckiest person in the world Many people never learn how to breach this deep, unconditional love. Many people are instead addicted to the ups and downs of romantic love. They are in it for the feels, so to speak. And when the feels run out, so do they.
When you commit to someone, you don’t actually know who you’re committing to. You know who they are today, but you have no idea who this person is going to be in five years, ten years, and so on. You have to be prepared for the unexpected, and truly ask yourself if you admire this person regardless of the superficial (or not-so-superficial) details, because I promise almost all of them at some point are going to either change or go away.
It’s important to always realize you have a choice. The love you seek is obtainable only if you are patient enough to wait for it and courageous enough to move on. Remember the first time you rode your bike? You fell off didn’t you? And I bet you got right back on and eventually you just kept going. It’s okay to get hurt, the bruises will only remind you of how far you’ve come.
I began finding comfort in being alone. I no longer had a desire to “have” someone in my life to keep me occupied, to love me, or to bring me happiness. I was going places whenever I wanted to, doing things however I wanted to and creating memories in the process. In essence, I was creating my own happiness without someone else. In doing so, I’ve been able to identify what i want in a woman and have made certain that I’ll never settle for anything less than what I truly deserve and desire. Mind you, there might not be a single person in this world who wants a family more than I do. I’m just not willing to settle in order to have that. I believe that God and patience will bring me everything I’ve dreamed of and more.
I have a totally different perspective on relationships today than I did even few years ago. See, I think of relationships with the same lens as I do my career. If I am going to invest my time into something, it’s because I know I am getting the same investment back in return. Why would you put time and effort into something that doesn’t put the same time and effort into you? And then be naive enough to believe it will bring you happiness? Men and women wake up everyday and go to work to be successful. Most have this obsession with making more and more money. Imagine they felt the same way about your feelings and happiness? Giving more and more effort each day because it’ll bring them closer to that next step. Why shouldn’t they? Money doesn’t bring happiness, hell I would rather be broke and in love than rich and miserable.
Being older, I am very selective with whom I choose to offer my time and heart to. People always ask me why I’m single; I’ve chosen to be. I don’t look for perfection, and definitely don’t need just a pretty face. I’m an extremely confident man and I’ve never needed a pretty woman on my arm to feel secure, instead I’m attracted to the qualities of a woman; her vision for her future and the kindness of her soul. That’s what I look forward to falling in love with and that’s what I build my future for. I’ll be patient until the day I find it …. and when I do, I’ll show her a love she’s never experienced before; a love that will never hurt and never quit.
I am not a serial dater. So many woman I have talked to have gone on so many dates and never find someone they want to be with....even if that guy is a nice guy....there will always be a but......something wrong.....something missing. You will have something I lack and I will have something you lack. I usually will meet someone who I feel want me to be with them. Someone who want me in their life. If you don't show interest in me, I won't show interest in you. I don't believe in chemistry. I believe love takes time to grow.
How do I know if I want to meet you? By your action...but also by talking to you. Yes talking to you. I want to be able to talk to my parnter about anything. If something bothers you in the relationship, you must be willing to say it. Saying it builds trust and trust builds intimacy. It may hurt, but you still need to do it. No one else can fix your relationship for you. Nor should anyone else. Just as causing pain to your muscles allows them to grow back stronger, often introducing some pain into your relationship through vulnerability is the only way to make the relationship stronger.
Behind respect, trust was the most commonly mentioned trait for a healthy relationship. Most people mentioned it in the context of jealousy and fidelity — trust your partner to go off on their own, don’t get insecure or angry if you see them talking with someone else, etc.
But trust goes much deeper than that. Because when you’re really talking about the long-haul, you start to get into some serious life-or-death ***. If you ended up with cancer tomorrow, would you trust your partner to stick with you and take care of you? Would you trust your partner to care for your child for a week by themselves? Do you trust them to handle your money or make sound decisions under pressure? Do you trust them to not turn on you or blame you when you make mistakes?
These are hard things to do. And they’re even harder to think about early on in a relationship. Trust at the beginning of a relationship is easy. It’s like, “Oh, I forgot my phone at her apartment, I trust her not to sell it and buy crack with the money… I think.”But the deeper the commitment, the more intertwined your lives become, and the more you will have to trust your partner to act in your interest in your absence.
The key to fostering and maintaining trust in the relationship is for both partners to be completely transparent and vulnerable:Make promises and then stick to them. The only way to truly rebuild trust after it’s been broken is through a proven track record over time. You cannot build that track record until you own up to previous mistakes and set about correcting them.Trust is like a china plate. If you drop it and it breaks, you can put it back together with a lot of work and care. If you drop it and break it a second time, it will split into twice as many pieces and it will require far more time and care to put back together again. But drop and break it enough times, and it will shatter into so many pieces that you will never be able to put it back together again, no matter what you
I was married before....and I got divorced. This is what i learned from that experience: You are absolutely not going to be absolutely gaga over each other every single day for the rest of your lives, and all this ‘happily ever after’ bullshit is just setting people up for failure. They go into relationships with these unrealistic expectations. Then, the instant they realize they aren’t ‘gaga’ anymore, they think the relationship is broken and over, and they need to get out. No! There will be days, or weeks, or maybe even longer, when you aren’t all mushy-gushy in-love. You’re even going to wake up some morning and think, “Ugh, you’re still here….” That’s normal! And more importantly, sticking it out is totally worth it, because that, too, will change. In a day, or a week, or maybe even longer, you’ll look at that person and a giant wave of love will inundate you, and you’ll love them so much you think your heart can’t possibly hold it all and is going to burst. Because a love that’s alive is also constantly evolving. It expands and contracts and mellows and deepens. It’s not going to be the way it used to be, or the way it will be, and it shouldn’t be. I think if more couples understood that, they’d be less inclined to panic and rush to break up or divorce
I think the most important thing that I have learned in those years is that the love you feel for each other is constantly changing. Sometimes you feel a deep love and satisfaction, other times you want nothing to do with your spouse; sometimes you laugh together, sometimes you’re screaming at each other. It’s like a roller-coaster ride, ups and downs all the time, but as you stay together long enough the downs become less severe and the ups are more loving and contented. So even if you feel like you could never love your partner any more, that can change, if you give it a chance. I think people give up too soon. You need to be the kind of person that you want your spouse to be. When you do that it makes a world of difference
Relationships exist as waves, people need to learn how to ride them. like the ocean, there are constant waves of emotion going on within a relationship, ups and downs — some waves last for hours, some last for months or even years. The key is understanding that few of those waves have anything to do with the quality of the relationship — people lose jobs, family members die, couples relocate, switch careers, make a lot of money, lose a lot of money. Your job as a committed partner is to simply ride the waves with the person you love, regardless of where they go. Because ultimately, none of these waves last. And you simply end up with each other.
You can work through anything as long as you are not destroying yourself or each other. That means emotionally, physically, financially or spiritually. Make nothing off limits to discuss. Never shame or mock each other for the things you do that make you happy. Write down why you fell in love and read it every year on your anniversary (or more often). Write love letters to each other often. Make each other first. When kids arrive, it will be easy to fall into a frenzy of making them the only focus of your life…do not forget the love that produced them. You must keep that love alive and strong to feed them love. Spouse comes first. Each of you will continue to grow. Bring the other one with you. Be the one that welcomes that growth. Don’t think that the other one will hold the relationship together. Both of you should assume it’s up to you so that you are both working on it. Be passionate about cleaning house, preparing meals and taking care of your home. This is required of everyone daily, make it fun and happy and do it together. Do not complain about your partner to anyone. Love them for who they are. Make love even when you are not in the mood. Trust each other. Give each other the benefit of the doubt always. Be transparent. Have nothing to hide. Be proud of each other. Have a life outside of each other, but share it through conversation. Pamper and adore each other. Go to counselling now before you need it so that you are both open to working on the relationship together. Disagree with respect to each other’s feelings. Be open to change and accepting of differences
Sunday, March 17, 2019
ARTICLE: Before the World Wide Web — which turned 30 this week — we wasted (and enjoyed) time in so many other ways By Mary Schmich
Have a seat, little children, and let me tell you about a time long ago when life was very strange and hard but also oddly beautiful.
I’m talking about 1989.
No, that’s not when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
It was in that distant time, 30 years ago this week, kids, that a man invented the World Wide Web and changed, well, everything.
Imagine. No Google, no Facebook, no Amazon. No email, no tweeting, no streaming. No Skyping, no Snapchat, no Airbnb. No online trolls.
Imagine a world in which it was possible to travel and know little about what was going on back home. In which it was possible to go many hours without hearing directly from the president. In which you didn’t feel pressure to broadcast your life to the world if only because you had no way to do it.
Such was life before the World Wide Web.
How did we communicate back then? How did we fill our time? Sometimes it’s hard to remember.
We stayed in touch through letters. We wrote them by hand or typed them on typewriters. We put the letters in the mailbox and we waited — days or weeks or months — for a reply.
In the world before the web, we spent a lot of time waiting.
In that slow pre-web world, phones were made for talking and we talked on the phone for hours. We bought long phone cords so we could move around with the part of the phone called a receiver.
We read books, meaning something with paper pages that was obtained at a bookstore or the library.
We ordered nothing online because there was no online. Almost nothing was delivered to our doors, except the phone book and the printed newspaper.
In the evenings in that web-free age, we relied on network TV news shows to learn, in brief, what had happened in the world that day. Then we watched whatever show the networks decided we’d watch, at precisely the time they decided we’d watch it.
Would we have watched that much “Falcon Crest” if there had been a Netflix? Such are the existential questions we ponder, children, when we think of life before the web.
We made reservations for hotels and flights over the phone.
We kept appointments on paper calendars.
We took our photos to a shop to be developed. As I said, we spent a lot of time waiting.
And maps. We learned how to read them, how to fold them. We kept them in the car. We set off on trips knowing we might get lost.
We kept track of people in our address books. We lost track of many. Letters came back marked “No longer at this address.” Distant relations, high school boyfriends, co-workers faded into memory, to be resurrected only decades later by Facebook.
Without Pandora and Spotify and iTunes we listened to music on the radio or the stereo.
In 1989, if we wanted to watch a movie at home, we could — but only if we went to one of those new places called Blockbuster, rented one of those VHS tapes and brought it home to play in the VCR.
We got our celebrity gossip the old-fashioned way, from magazines at the grocery store checkout.
And when we had a weird rash or an ache that wouldn’t quit? We fretted about it, guessed about it, consulted a friend who knew next to nothing. There was no Dr. Google to help us self-diagnose.
I could go on, children, but the web has shortened our attention spans. So let me conclude with this:
We use our time differently than we did 30 years ago. The web has saved us time and sucked it from us.
We spend less time now booking a flight and balancing our checking accounts. We spend far more posting on Facebook, answering emails and arguing on comment boards. We are more engaged with the world and more overwhelmed by it.
Were we less anxious before the web arrived to connect us to everyone and everything all the time? Maybe. Or maybe just differently anxious.
The truth is, we’re still trying to figure out how these 30 years have shaped and reshaped us.
But this much is for sure: Thirty years from now, you’ll think back on this era and try to explain to a new crop of kids that even though 2019 seems primitive to them, it wasn’t so bad.
I’m talking about 1989.
No, that’s not when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
It was in that distant time, 30 years ago this week, kids, that a man invented the World Wide Web and changed, well, everything.
Imagine. No Google, no Facebook, no Amazon. No email, no tweeting, no streaming. No Skyping, no Snapchat, no Airbnb. No online trolls.
Imagine a world in which it was possible to travel and know little about what was going on back home. In which it was possible to go many hours without hearing directly from the president. In which you didn’t feel pressure to broadcast your life to the world if only because you had no way to do it.
Such was life before the World Wide Web.
How did we communicate back then? How did we fill our time? Sometimes it’s hard to remember.
We stayed in touch through letters. We wrote them by hand or typed them on typewriters. We put the letters in the mailbox and we waited — days or weeks or months — for a reply.
In the world before the web, we spent a lot of time waiting.
In that slow pre-web world, phones were made for talking and we talked on the phone for hours. We bought long phone cords so we could move around with the part of the phone called a receiver.
We read books, meaning something with paper pages that was obtained at a bookstore or the library.
We ordered nothing online because there was no online. Almost nothing was delivered to our doors, except the phone book and the printed newspaper.
In the evenings in that web-free age, we relied on network TV news shows to learn, in brief, what had happened in the world that day. Then we watched whatever show the networks decided we’d watch, at precisely the time they decided we’d watch it.
Would we have watched that much “Falcon Crest” if there had been a Netflix? Such are the existential questions we ponder, children, when we think of life before the web.
We made reservations for hotels and flights over the phone.
We kept appointments on paper calendars.
We took our photos to a shop to be developed. As I said, we spent a lot of time waiting.
And maps. We learned how to read them, how to fold them. We kept them in the car. We set off on trips knowing we might get lost.
We kept track of people in our address books. We lost track of many. Letters came back marked “No longer at this address.” Distant relations, high school boyfriends, co-workers faded into memory, to be resurrected only decades later by Facebook.
Without Pandora and Spotify and iTunes we listened to music on the radio or the stereo.
In 1989, if we wanted to watch a movie at home, we could — but only if we went to one of those new places called Blockbuster, rented one of those VHS tapes and brought it home to play in the VCR.
We got our celebrity gossip the old-fashioned way, from magazines at the grocery store checkout.
And when we had a weird rash or an ache that wouldn’t quit? We fretted about it, guessed about it, consulted a friend who knew next to nothing. There was no Dr. Google to help us self-diagnose.
I could go on, children, but the web has shortened our attention spans. So let me conclude with this:
We use our time differently than we did 30 years ago. The web has saved us time and sucked it from us.
We spend less time now booking a flight and balancing our checking accounts. We spend far more posting on Facebook, answering emails and arguing on comment boards. We are more engaged with the world and more overwhelmed by it.
Were we less anxious before the web arrived to connect us to everyone and everything all the time? Maybe. Or maybe just differently anxious.
The truth is, we’re still trying to figure out how these 30 years have shaped and reshaped us.
But this much is for sure: Thirty years from now, you’ll think back on this era and try to explain to a new crop of kids that even though 2019 seems primitive to them, it wasn’t so bad.
Sunday, February 17, 2019
DATING: IF YOUR INTEREST LEVEL IS LOW FROM THE GET GO
-If your interest level is low from the get go, this won't go anywhere. I am not here to chase anyone. “The chase” is a game. Here’s some truth: If a woman wants you, you will know.If a woman wants you, she won’t play games. If a woman wants you, you won’t have to chase her. A woman wants to be pursued, she wants to be courted. What she doesn’t want is
If a woman wants you, she won’t play hard to get…but she won’t be too easy either. She won’t play by bullshit societal dating rules of waiting for you to call, or never sending two texts in a row. If she wants you, you’ll know where you stand. If she’s thinking of you, she’ll call, and if she wants to hang out, she’ll ask. If she wants to kiss you first, she will. Her intentions will show through her actions, and she won’t be afraid to express her feelings or show you she cares.
What happened to the old-fashioned notion that it should be quite simple if two people like one another? The simplicity of elementary notes asking “do you like me, check yes or no,” is long gone. We’ve made things so complex that modern dating just messes with our heads. Unsure if we should call first because we don’t want to seem needy, refusing to use labels, overthinking text messages, and always trying to play it cool? What have we come to?
When someone wants you, man or woman, they will show interest. They will pursue you. I like to be pursued and I PROMISE I WOULD PURSE YOU AS WELL.
So ask yourself before you even sent a message....am i what you want? If i am then show me...give me attention and make things easy and I will do the same. I am not here to play games.
-One of the way to show me that you are serious is actually give me your number. I am not there to go back and forth. I want to actually talk to you and get to know you before we meet.
-Finally, if we do meet. Be ready to commit to a relationship from day one. I am not here to go on hundred dates. I was thinking that I have tried traditional way before and it didn’t work out and I was thinking: ‘Why not have that commitment to actually making a relationship work from the very start?’ I’m not interested in just going on dates looking for things I don’t like about that person. I’m committing to making this relationship absolutely work – like they did in the old days. “It’s traditional, older generations might have only met their partner once or twice before getting relationship.
You think you know people, but it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been with someone for, they can surprise you and not in a good way I was with my ex wife for five years and she turned out to not be capable of treating me right. You just don’t know.
ARTICLE : Warren Buffett, Melinda Gates and Sheryl Sandberg agree: This is the most important decision you'll ever make Kathleen Elkins
the HBO documentary, "Becoming Warren Buffett," the Oracle of Omaha says that there were "two turning points" in his life: "One when I came out of the womb and one when I met Susie."
"What happened with me would not have happened without her," Buffett said of his first wife, who died in 2004.
In fact, the billionaire says, the biggest decision of your life will be who you choose to marry.
"You want to associate with people who are the kind of person you'd like to be. You'll move in that direction," Buffett said in a conversation with Bill Gates at Columbia University in 2017. "And the most important person by far in that respect is your spouse. I can't overemphasize how important that is."
Melinda Gates, who runs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with her husband, agrees.
"If you choose to have a partner in life, whoever you choose is probably the most important decision you make," she said during a conversationwith her husband Bill and hundreds of high school students in New York City on Tuesday. It's "even more important than what career you have, where you go to college, where you go to high school."
That said, if you don't make the right choice initially, don't panic. "You can have a do-over. People do have a do-over with partners in life, but it's easier to have a do-over in your job and to change careers a lot than it is to change partners," she said. "So I say, try to pick very carefully and wisely."
Facebook COO and author Sheryl Sandberg, whose late husband, Dave Goldberg, was the CEO of SurveyMonkey, has a similar perspective. "I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is," she writes in her best-seller "Lean In."
"I don't know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully — and I mean fully — supportive of her career."
These claims are backed by research. One study, by Brittany C. Solomon and Joshua J. Jackson of Washington University in St. Louis, shows that having a conscientious spouse can boost your salary significantly.
"With every one-standard-deviation increase in a spouse's conscientiousness, an individual is likely to earn approximately $4,000 more per year," the Harvard Business Review reports.
Additionally, "employees with extremely conscientious spouses (two standard deviations above the mean) are 50 percent more likely to get promoted than those with extremely unconscientious spouses (two standard deviations below the mean)."
Conscientious spouses tend to handle a lot of household tasks, which allows their partner to focus more on their career. And people tend to benefit from mirroring their conscientious spouses' diligent habits, the research team finds.
As Gates put it in NYC on Tuesday: "You will affect a partner greatly in life and they will affect you."
"What happened with me would not have happened without her," Buffett said of his first wife, who died in 2004.
In fact, the billionaire says, the biggest decision of your life will be who you choose to marry.
"You want to associate with people who are the kind of person you'd like to be. You'll move in that direction," Buffett said in a conversation with Bill Gates at Columbia University in 2017. "And the most important person by far in that respect is your spouse. I can't overemphasize how important that is."
Melinda Gates, who runs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with her husband, agrees.
"If you choose to have a partner in life, whoever you choose is probably the most important decision you make," she said during a conversationwith her husband Bill and hundreds of high school students in New York City on Tuesday. It's "even more important than what career you have, where you go to college, where you go to high school."
That said, if you don't make the right choice initially, don't panic. "You can have a do-over. People do have a do-over with partners in life, but it's easier to have a do-over in your job and to change careers a lot than it is to change partners," she said. "So I say, try to pick very carefully and wisely."
Facebook COO and author Sheryl Sandberg, whose late husband, Dave Goldberg, was the CEO of SurveyMonkey, has a similar perspective. "I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is," she writes in her best-seller "Lean In."
"I don't know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully — and I mean fully — supportive of her career."
These claims are backed by research. One study, by Brittany C. Solomon and Joshua J. Jackson of Washington University in St. Louis, shows that having a conscientious spouse can boost your salary significantly.
"With every one-standard-deviation increase in a spouse's conscientiousness, an individual is likely to earn approximately $4,000 more per year," the Harvard Business Review reports.
Additionally, "employees with extremely conscientious spouses (two standard deviations above the mean) are 50 percent more likely to get promoted than those with extremely unconscientious spouses (two standard deviations below the mean)."
Conscientious spouses tend to handle a lot of household tasks, which allows their partner to focus more on their career. And people tend to benefit from mirroring their conscientious spouses' diligent habits, the research team finds.
As Gates put it in NYC on Tuesday: "You will affect a partner greatly in life and they will affect you."
Monday, February 11, 2019
PERSONAL: I HATE DATING APPS
I, like many online daters, have been swiping for years. Whenever I find myself in need of a thumb-twiddling activity, I fire up dating apps and aimlessly trawl through a bottomless pit of faces. I fling messages at a few of the matches I fancy, but things usually fizzle out after an initial flirtation. I stockpile matches like they're going out of fashion, but when it comes to actual meaningful engagement, there's very little going on.
It has become more of a game right now than a tool for looking for a relationship. When I get a match, I tend to message the woman but often they don't reply or if they do, the conversation is usually boring or very one sided, so I stop messaging.You match with someone that you think you could really like and the conversation never takes off because it's easier to not reply to a message or not open an app than it would be to ignore someone if you met in real life or traditional way
So, if swiping's not working, why not just delete the apps? I've had this conversation with a lot of my friends and we all have expressed a dislike for dating apps, but continue to use them because it seems to be the way it works now. For those looking for meaningful connections, the gamification of dating apps can be demoralising... "utterly soul-destroying" due to the lack of interaction. I keep going back in the hope that maybe something might come of it
Someone figure out that it takes 7,500 profiles before connecting with someone 'meaningfully
Feeling an initial spark with someone is thrilling and a sought after experience for many woman. If they don’t have that initial spark with someone, most woman feel as they are settling. If you’re repeatedly dating the same type of partner without success, you may be feeling an initial spark with partners that aren’t a good match.When you’re very attracted to someone, you are more likely to overlook red flags and signs that you’re incompatible with them.
So why am I single?
Do I tell her it’s because “I'm so busy,” knowing damn well I spent all of last Sunday fully in my bed?
Do I say I’ve been “focusing on me,” as if I don’t have six dating apps clogging up storage on my phone?
Or do I tell her that nearly every spark I’ve felt with a woman in the past three years has either led to ghosting or getting the “I’m not looking for anything serious right now” convo?
When I talk to a woman the first question I ask is "So, can you tell me what’s wrong with you now so I don’t have to waste my time here?” without sugarcoating it. Because that’s ultimately what the person wants to know, right? Like, Oh, can I handle that you have an obvious fear of commitment given the explanation you just told me? Probably not. And just like that...
It has become more of a game right now than a tool for looking for a relationship. When I get a match, I tend to message the woman but often they don't reply or if they do, the conversation is usually boring or very one sided, so I stop messaging.You match with someone that you think you could really like and the conversation never takes off because it's easier to not reply to a message or not open an app than it would be to ignore someone if you met in real life or traditional way
So, if swiping's not working, why not just delete the apps? I've had this conversation with a lot of my friends and we all have expressed a dislike for dating apps, but continue to use them because it seems to be the way it works now. For those looking for meaningful connections, the gamification of dating apps can be demoralising... "utterly soul-destroying" due to the lack of interaction. I keep going back in the hope that maybe something might come of it
Someone figure out that it takes 7,500 profiles before connecting with someone 'meaningfully
Feeling an initial spark with someone is thrilling and a sought after experience for many woman. If they don’t have that initial spark with someone, most woman feel as they are settling. If you’re repeatedly dating the same type of partner without success, you may be feeling an initial spark with partners that aren’t a good match.When you’re very attracted to someone, you are more likely to overlook red flags and signs that you’re incompatible with them.
So why am I single?
Do I tell her it’s because “I'm so busy,” knowing damn well I spent all of last Sunday fully in my bed?
Do I say I’ve been “focusing on me,” as if I don’t have six dating apps clogging up storage on my phone?
Or do I tell her that nearly every spark I’ve felt with a woman in the past three years has either led to ghosting or getting the “I’m not looking for anything serious right now” convo?
When I talk to a woman the first question I ask is "So, can you tell me what’s wrong with you now so I don’t have to waste my time here?” without sugarcoating it. Because that’s ultimately what the person wants to know, right? Like, Oh, can I handle that you have an obvious fear of commitment given the explanation you just told me? Probably not. And just like that...
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