Caro covers this pretty extensively in his LBJ biography series, but it's reasonably clear from the evidence that LBJ won his senate seat by some pretty crude paper voting record manipulation after the fact - changing a '7' to a '9' by writing over the number with a pen - almost certainly with LBJ's knowledge. Given that his senate seat eventually put him in the presidency, it's probably the most consequential voter fraud ever committed in American history (that we know about, I suppose).
From the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article: "Six days after polls had closed, 202 additional votes were added to the totals for Precinct 13 of Jim Wells County, 200 for Johnson and two for Stevenson."
Those numbers alone should make anyone suspicious. If you have an urn containing about 20,000 balls in two colors, red and green (this election happened in 1948 and the 1950 census listed that county's population as 27,991; let's assume that roughly 20,000 people would have been old enough to vote in 1948) and you randomly draw out 202 balls (about 1% of the total number in the urn), you would expect the number of balls you draw out to be roughly proportional to the red-blue mix in the urn. (1% of the total is big enough to expect a roughly-unbiased sample). So if you draw out 99% red balls and 1% green balls, then either you have a very very skewed proportion of colors in the urn, or else someone is cheating. Given the TINY margin of victory in that race (87 votes out of nearly a million, 988,295 to be precise), it's very very unlikely that precinct 13 happened to be skewed 99% towards LBJ when the state as a whole was so closely balanced.
I really encourage interested folks to read the biography (though it's an undertaking).
According to Caro, part of the background is that the relevant southern Texas precincts were well understood to have vote counts up for purchase; over the course of election counting, both sides would have their controlled districts release counts based on what the other side was reporting to stay in the race. These counts would vary in legitimacy and how skewed they were based on the precinct and need of the candidate that had swayed the boss to their side. But tactics like having armed guards supervise the casting of votes to ensure the favored candidate got a large majority, or simply distributing vote receipts to people who never voted at all and recording votes on their behalf, or making numbers up entirely, were quite common. Typically, though, Caro argues that because both sides did this, and they did it incrementally, it usually wasn't enough to sway an election one way or another, but rather was just part of the cost of doing business. He even says that LBJ lost his Senate election earlier that decade because he got cocky and told the bosses of the districts he had bought to just release all their numbers right away, letting his opposition then juice their numbers just enough to win.
It's really the timing, more than the margin, that makes it clear what happened (and the crudeness of the forgery); after every other precinct reported and finalized, they corrected their number by barely more than needed to win. The 100 to 1 vote margin was actually not that far off from the vote margin that the precinct reported in the first place (... which, of course, really tells you that the whole thing was made up from whole cloth).
> Reduce price. Reduce the abominable resource usage. Allow E2E encryption. Increase performance so it doesn't trickle at tens of kilobytes for hours when I have 100Mbps upload and half a terabyte left.
How do you imagine that any of these things would strengthen Dropbox's business at a scale relevant to them?
Reducing price would be straightforwardly bad; most users do not understand resource usage complaints (though I'm not conceding that problem exists - it's a non-factor on my machine); E2E encryption is an anti-feature for a consumer audience who will lock themselves out and demand refunds far above the rate at which anyone will pay for E2E specifically; most users do not have half a terabyte all at once to store nor upload speeds such that the Dropbox app performance is the limiting factor, even if those performance problems are true.
> The lack of any major competition
Dropbox's core product faces substantial competition from multiple tech giants (Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) who have incentive and ability to eat losses on a sync product to sell other services or devices. If they don't find other lines of business to sell alongside sync they will die, and building an incrementally better sync product will not save them.
(I worked at Dropbox a ~decade ago and no longer have any insider insight nor financial stake in the company, but I sympathize that they're in a brutally difficult position in building a sustainable business)
The problem was them going public. Honestly looking at the fact that it's a 20 year old company that's really good at one thing, take it private if you can, slim the company down and offer more competitive prices. The other user is right on that. Accept that you're Jetbrains instead of fancy big tech giant.
If they offered a competitive 100 Gig tier or a cheaper 1 TB tier I'd instantly switch my entire family back from Google Drive because at a technical level Dropbox is just simply better. Insync + GDrive is much worse than the block based sync. If they just focused on this they have a good business. The headcount expansion and desperate horizontal creep into other services just makes miserable products.
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the random upload slowdowns.
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the software.
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the cost, and is looking for alternatives, but the marginally-better software keeps them there for now (gdrive and onedrive have a fair number more issues).
Yes, I think it matters. But they exploded their headcount and now they have to compete in areas they aren't anywhere near as good in (document management, etc) to make the higher profit they need to keep going, and raise the cost for everyone who doesn't use it.
Basically they went B2B and have been coasting in a gradual decline on their consumer side. A tale as old as time.
For the better part of a decade people have been buying Teslas under the promise that the cars would drive themselves better than their owner could, or would offset their cost by participating in a self-driving taxi service while their owners were not using them, none of which has come remotely true.
The last third should have been a short epilogue or a full sequel. It's too much of a pivot in terms of tone and focus, and feels incongruous and mismatched with the first two sections (which are excellent). He clearly had a bunch of ideas that didn't fit into the main body of the work and grafted them on anyway; it wasn't bad, it just didn't fit.
The comparison would be Orson Scott Card writing Ender's Game to set up the universe of Speaker for the Dead, but instead making Speaker for the Dead a third of its size and calling it the last few chapters of Ender's Game. They should just be different works in the same setting.
This only happens because he was inside a computer simulation of the universe created just for him, so the Vortex shows him he actually is important. Had it happened for real it would have destroyed his mind just like everyone else.
The year that I took AP Physics, every single piece of study material and practice test exercised only really simple math - small numbers, everything cleanly worked out into integers, etc etc. I did almost everything in my head or with quick notes on paper. This pattern was so consistent I almost didn't bring my calculator into the actual exam because I hadn't needed it all year, and grabbed it only at the last second "just in case".
Turns out that was not a design goal of the real exam and basically nothing worked out to neat, small integer solutions - I probably would have hard failed without the calculator. I'm still sort of confused why prep materials and the real exam diverged so much.
I had a university exam where my calculator literally didn't work. I put a note on the paper to that effect and worked out as far as I could by hand without actually giving any of the final answers. Given the test was about knowledge and not the precise answers, I don't think it harmed me any (my grade was over 80%).
I passed my physics classes refusing to evaluate the final expressions, after all that's what calculators and computers are for. I don't feel that had a huge impact on my grades either and my sanity/stubbornness went unharmed.
The above was referencing stopping on a city street ("Powell between Bush and Sutter"). You're talking about stopping on a highway. These things are not particularly comparable.
In the California Vehicle Code section 360, a "highway" is defined for the purposes of the vehicle code as "a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street." [0]
Presumably Efani accomplishes that additional protection by maintaining a human support staff they put more resources into training than the average carrier. That's expensive, especially when you consider that it's a relatively niche service (so small user base to amortize that cost over) and presumably only used by people that really care about sim swaps, likely because they are frequently targeted for sim swaps, and thus the training needs to really work. They also have no other lines of business like device sales/financing that could help cover those human operational costs.
That, plus the fact that it's a premium service that is mostly only useful to higher net worth / higher income people, makes it seem reasonable that it would be quite expensive relative to a regular provider.
>Presumably Efani accomplishes that additional protection by maintaining a human support staff they put more resources into training than the average carrier. That's expensive, especially when you consider that it's a relatively niche service (so small user base to amortize that cost over) and presumably only used by people that really care about sim swaps, likely because they are frequently targeted for sim swaps, and thus the training needs to really work.
According to the BLS "Computer User Support Specialists" get paid $30 on average[1]. Whatever training they give to staff to resist sim-swap attacks, I can't imagine they can't be more complicated than the certifications that "Computer User Support Specialists" have to get through, so I think it's reasonable to model their support costs at $30/hr per person. With the premium they're charging over a budget MVNO they can afford two support people per customer. How many fraudulent sim swap attacks could the worst client possibly attract? Is it really that hard to train someone to deny sim swaps until they go through 11 steps of verification like their website says?
>That, plus the fact that it's a premium service that is mostly only useful to higher net worth / higher income people, makes it seem reasonable that it would be quite expensive relative to a regular provider.
I mean yeah that's the more reasonable answer. It's a luxury product and priced accordingly.
Caro covers this pretty extensively in his LBJ biography series, but it's reasonably clear from the evidence that LBJ won his senate seat by some pretty crude paper voting record manipulation after the fact - changing a '7' to a '9' by writing over the number with a pen - almost certainly with LBJ's knowledge. Given that his senate seat eventually put him in the presidency, it's probably the most consequential voter fraud ever committed in American history (that we know about, I suppose).