Who the fuck do we owe, the Martians? How long before we just accept that money is made up and free ourselves of this make believe game? Just give people what they need to survive and let the unwieldy and inefficient private sector die, we're propping them all up with tax money already anyway and they still barely tread water.
This headline includes private sector debt. Most of that number is private debt.
If you have a mortgage or a car loan or a credit card, you’re part of that number. And you certainly owe real money to real lenders.
Likewise, government debt is still real debt. A not insignificant part of your taxes goes to servicing interest on government debt. That’s because it’s still a real debt owed to real people who expect real interest payments.
Money isn’t some made up concept. We can’t simply print more and declare it all good. Don’t confuse money with wealth, which is a separate concept that underpins this system.
> If you have a mortgage or a car loan or a credit card, you’re part of that number. And you certainly owe real money to real lenders.
Yes and on an individual scale like that, it makes complete sense. It's borrowed against my future income, and that I will someday pay off (I mean probably not I'll buy a different house but you know what I mean.)
I'm saying, on a scale of Nations and megacorporations, it's fucking bananas nonsense. According to the Goog, US national debt is 27 trillion. Who do we owe? How did we qualify to borrow that, apart from being if not the center, at least a good chunk of the center, of the world economy? Is anyone in a position to say we can't borrow it? Is there a credit check? Who fails that check, if there is one, because we haven't despite the last several decades of absolutely racking it up.
At this point to analogize the US to a single person (which is reductive and useless but bear with me, I'm making a point), we'd be someone with hundreds of thousands in credit card debt, making a lot of money to be sure, but also carrying four mortgages and making interest only payments, and the bank in question is just still handing us money. And like, I don't think that's great, but also, it's been chugging along more or less fine for as long as I've been around. So... why don't we just stop pretending it means anything? We "owe" some foreign banks... do we? Says who? Who's gonna enforce that? Are they gonna foreclose America? The only time I've ever seen countries actually brought to their knees by banking is when a tiny one gets too uppity about getting screwed on the global economy scale, at which point we send in Marines to remind them who's in charge. Who's gonna do that to us?
Government debt is literally sold. You can go buy it and invest in America, and you will receive your interest payments right on time like clockwork.
Likewise, when you pay your taxes, some of that goes to servicing that debt. You can look up how much of your federal tax bill went to paying debt holders.
The system only works as long as its trusted. If we just stopped paying interest on our debt, that trust would vanish overnight. As a result, the price of borrowing would skyrocket because who would invest in something that has demonstrated it doesn’t care about paying you back?
Likewise, if we do too silly monetary policy stuff, the trust will also disappear. Despite what the memes say, we can’t literally print infinite money and call it good. Fiscal policy isn’t a secret, it’s done in the open. The buyers of our debt know what they’re buying.
You can look this up. 21T is owned by the public (think retirement funds, pensions, etc., a lot of which own treasuries). Simply blowing off paying them would wreck the US economy and destroy lots of people. So it's real money owed to real people.
Foreign govts own around a third of the debt - same thing - they invested in US treasuries and those assets are intertwined in their economies, just like ours. Of this Japan has 1.3T and China 1T.
State and local US govts own around 1T for their pension funds.
So we owe it to any actor that has purchased US Treasuries, and that's a lot of people, big and small.
>it's fucking bananas nonsense
No it's not. It's simply big, but then again, so is the US and world economy. There is no goofy, ill-conceived, wholesale ignorant corruption going on.
> Is there a credit check?
Yes, it's the rate at which buyers willingly buy Treasuries on the open market. If enough people/institutions lower their trust, rates go up. It's as simple as that.
The main question is not how much debt the US carries, but can it afford to service the debt, and so far, that is a yes. Servicing the debt is around 10% of federal receipts, which is a decent chunk, but by no means debilitating.
American assets can be repossessed abroad if a judgement is served - look at what happened to Argentina in NY. Plus you want Americans to be free from money but everyone else use our currency at gunpoint?
> American assets can be repossessed abroad if a judgement is served - look at what happened to Argentina in NY.
Yeah, that happened to Argentina, who is not America. I'm saying if that's the consequence, which you seem to agree it is for nonpayment, then America is immune from that consequence. If someone tried that shit on a US Naval ship, they would be bombed out of existence.
Mind you, this is brutally unfair to the Global South. That's my point. Global capitalism just exploits countries to small too play the game like we do, and the countries that do play said game, do so largely with stolen wealth from those same exploited countries.
If America owes money but the mechanisms to enforce that don't exist, then why do we owe it? We owe it exactly as long as we agree we owe it. And this is not to say America should just move on, this is to say the world should move on.
> Plus you want Americans to be free from money but everyone else use our currency at gunpoint?
And we've been doing it for as long as I've been alive. I'm certainly never going to make enough to pay it down, and nobody else in my generation is. So like... who's paying it and when? Or again, do we just acknowledge this whole thing is just a Ponzi scheme to direct more money to the same boardrooms who already have more money than they could ever conceivably spend?
Take all of Bezo's wealth away, and just leave the number there. He'll never know nor will anyone else, because there is nothing you can do with that much money. There's nothing to buy.
I’ve responded to some of your other comments with corrections. You’ve been stating falsehoods as facts throughout this thread. If you really believe that we could “take all of Bezo’s wealth” or that it would improve the situation rather than worsen it (seizing private assets to punish business owners is the fastest way to ensure no business owners want to operate in your country) then it’s clear that you don’t understand how basic economics works.
We’re not going to get anywhere productive as long as the goal is to punish the rich no matter the cost. The economy isn’t a zero-sum game where every dollar of Bezos’ net worth is a dollar subtracted from the poor. Amazon had created value across the economy, far beyond Bezos’ net worth. Likewise, arbitrarily destroying Amazon or Bezos would likewise destroy value across the economy, as well as destroy the institutional trust that enables the economy in the first place.
> I’ve responded to some of your other comments with corrections. You’ve been stating falsehoods as facts throughout this thread. If you really believe that we could “take all of Bezo’s wealth” or that it would improve the situation rather than worsen it (seizing private assets to punish business owners is the fastest way to ensure no business owners want to operate in your country) then it’s clear that you don’t understand how basic economics works.
Your imagination is limited. I don't care about business or business owners. I'm exploited by every business I interact with, either as a consumer or an employee. They don't have my loyalty.
> We’re not going to get anywhere productive as long as the goal is to punish the rich no matter the cost. The economy isn’t a zero-sum game where every dollar of Bezos’ net worth is a dollar subtracted from the poor.
Yes, it literally is. Amazon makes money by selling whatever product at a cost higher than it cost them to complete the logistics to get that product to a consumer. That means their profits are whatever they can scrape off of paying people to shuffle boxes through their warehouses, drive their trucks, and write their code. That is exploitation by definition: those employees are not paid what their labor has generated in terms of wealth. Every employee is paid less than they are worth, because otherwise profits would not exist.
> Amazon had created value across the economy, far beyond Bezos’ net worth.
Amazon has also decimated numerous other businesses, and used the resulting holes in the market to grow.
> Likewise, arbitrarily destroying Amazon or Bezos would likewise destroy value across the economy, as well as destroy the institutional trust that enables the economy in the first place.
I don't want to destroy Amazon, necessarily. I want them to pay their workers enough to live. The problem is every time people suggest that, people like you come in and say "well if we paid them a living wage the business would die, do you want that?" To which I say, yes. If your business must pay poverty wages and force people onto Government welfare, that is literally the Government subsidizing your workforce and why the hell should we do that? If we're going to pay, by proxy, for people to work at Amazon, then let's just fucking own Amazon as a public utility and cut out fucking Bezos. We don't need Bezos. He is doing nothing essential at Amazon, he just had the capital to start it, and he certainly doesn't do fucking anything worthy of earning what he does. No human being can EARN 4.5 million dollars an hour.
We saw in the pandemic what happens when the workers can't go to work, but the finance guys, and the CEOs and everyone else can. The economy ground to a fucking halt. Bezos was able to do everything he does at Amazon just fine, just like every other CEO, because what they do is functionally nothing. Their workers, on the other hand, were essential! They were heroes! So they had to go to work, and get sick, and die to avoid this entire ponzi scheme coming crashing down. And still huge sectors of it are on the verge of collapse precisely because the people actually generating wealth are having a hell of a time doing it.
Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? It's tedious, predictable, not what this site is for, destroys the curious conversation that it is supposed to be for, and does nothing to help the ice caps.
Edit: on closer look, I'm going to ban this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. There are already too many signs to the contrary, such as the insult in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168564. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Using HN primarily for political or ideological battle is generally something that we ban accounts for, regardless of which ideology they're battling for. As I said above, it's destructive of what HN is meant to be for.
The debt and the money is not "made up," but the "we" is made up. The owed amount will be paid by our children and grandchildren through their taxes. The money will go to foreign countries, federal agencies, central banks, hedge funds, and pension payouts.
Yet that efficiency has only increased as the money system we have now stabilized, and was adopted by every single country in the world, because it did provide empirical benefits to the populations in those countries.
So the point is correct - stable currencies have allowed vast increases in economic growth and vastly better standards of living than were possible the millennia before it.
Being locked to other forms of money, such as the rate a country can amass gold, slowed growth to that rate. The current system is vastly better.
Your point presumes that the spread of the globalized market is a boon to the countries it touches. Like, fair dues, now people in remote island nations can buy televisions and smart phones, but now they also have Facebook which is being used by their leaders to foster genocides.
"Standard of living" is more complicated than good and bad.
"Money is made up therefore it serves no purpose" is just a bafflingly implication. Care to provide any detail at all about how your moneyless society is going to work?
Oh it absolutely serves a purpose, it's a shared value that speeds the exchange of goods and services. However as the monetary system exists now, is mainly as a tool of oppression to keep people locked in a cycle of working themselves to death. It doesn't work for anyone save a tiny minority of people, who have more of it than they could ever use.
I suppose instead of "moneyless" society, I'm saying we need a money reboot.
We need money that has actual value that can't be manipulated. That is why the gold standard worked. At the same time that is why those in power ended the gold standard.
Without the anchor to gold our money can freely be manipulated for personal or political gain at the expense of the public.
> We need money that has actual value that can't be manipulated. That is why the gold standard worked. At the same time that is why those in power ended the gold standard.
No, the gold standard worked because at that time, manipulating the value of money to tweak the economy was not a practice. And besides-which, gold is a terrible standard anyway. We use tons of the stuff in basic, cheap electronics all the time. We use it on boutique audio connectors. It's not uncommon or rare at all. It's like diamonds, the only reason they're worth a goddamn thing is that everybody just agrees they should be, even though the same substance that sits on the end of a $10,000 ring is ground up and coats the outer surface of saw blades.
> Without the anchor to gold our money can freely be manipulated for personal or political gain at the expense of the public.
As we've seen though, this can be done with virtually any asset now, which is why land remains basically the only thing that holds value, because increasing or decreasing the supply of it is really ridiculously hard.
We owe each other. A owes B, who owes C, who owes A. Sometimes paying off one debt causes a cascade of several debts being paid off in turn, all with the same money.
Please see the history of communist countries for how that works out. Central allocation of resources is incredibly inefficient and highly susceptible to corruption.
Private sector had multiple pharma firms ready to go to create vaccines to cure us from terrible virus. If we had one “efficient” government firm we wouldn’t have anything.
And public sector money props them up each year when they pay little if any taxes, and we also fund their research endeavors because corporations are notoriously shitty at that sort of thing.
99% of private sector "innovation" is repackaging the stuff created under DoD/DARPA research projects. Then once that's done, they corner cut.
I dunno man, you tell me. We're perpetually running out of money every time we're talking about doing things like helping people not die or freeze to death, yet miraculously we always have trillions around to funnel into more tanks that will rust away in a field in Kentucky, but we can't help people survive the deadly plague circling the globe by just paying them to stay home, yet also have the money to just GIVE Wall Street 3.5 TRILLION DOLLARS, like just here, not a loan whatever, it's all good bro. Just 3.5T for 30 minutes-ish of market stability.
You explain how this shit is working for anyone not in the C-level or political classes.
The only time I hear about Supply and Demand is when poor people get fucked. Nobody is worried about the money supply when we're pissing streams of BILLIONS into the military industrial complex, when we already have a military multiple factors larger than anyone else on the fucking planet. Yet in the midst of shitloads of people not being able to afford rent, we can't like, defer mortgages or just give the people money, noooo, that'll hurt the moooneeeey.
They often repackage a shit ton of open source software developed by volunteers, all of which is running on Internet standards originally developed by the Department of Defense for military use. Most of the tech in the servers was developed by various DARPA initiatives surrounding transistors and solid-state memory.
Mind you these things were invented at companies, yes, but almost every time if you dig deep enough you'll start finding the lists of the various grants given to said companies to fund this research, because otherwise they just tend to not do that. This is not controversial stuff, it's very normal.
I don't understand this position at all. Google is by far and away the market leader. Their ecosystem is free and you can do just about anything in it. Their Play store's standards are utterly bare bones. The devices are cheaper. If what you want is an open source (ish) platform that you can hack on, modify, install software yourself, whatever, all of that is available to you, at a lower price, over there. This feels to be the ultimate first world problem, to pay a handsome premium for a top-tier device, then to complain about it's shortcomings. So take it back! Nobody made you buy one.
It's not like there aren't Android handsets that do all the stuff iOS ones do, occasionally even better, for similar prices. The main reason I stick to iOS is precisely for the locked down OS, and the curated App Store, so to see so many people complaining that they purchased the device when those things are like, the most obvious part of what comprises an iOS device, then complain about those things, is utter madness to me.
Why the fuck must Apple also do that, with a higher priced device, that everyone claims is inferior to Android handsets with their quad core processors and is "just a fashion item?" Android users seem unhealthily obsessed with turning iOS into Android. Just let us do our own thing over here for fuck's sake.
Yet again and again on here and elsewhere, iOS is constantly positioned as this MONOLITH of anti-consumer anti-developer DOOM, absolutely RUINING the mobile market. Again, FOUR. TEEN. PERCENT.
THIS! Say it a little louder for those in the back. I work in IT. I do not want to have a mini IT project in my pocket that I have to fiddle with. I want a device that is dependable above all else that I don't have to work on for my everyday driver. This is the same answer I provide every time someone at work ask my why I carry an Apple phone. To me the curation is part of the draw. I know that this phone will require the least amount of my attention to keep it working day in, day out. That is the feature I wanted most.
But every iOS post I read is along the lines of make it like android, and I have the same prevailing thought. Why?? I would not own a MacOS machine, I wouldn't like it. But I don't feel the need to get on every Mac discussion complaining it should be more like Linux. The fact the differences exist is a good thing.
Exactly. It's the same reason rich people hire people to do their accounting and cleaning and all the other stuff they don't want to do. I want to pick up my phone and use it not mess with it every 3 days because there's something slightly off or there's a bug with the latest mod I installed.
Allowing competition doesn't mean you need to use that competition. Don't install any other stores and don't toggle the flag to allow alternate stores, and you would have and iPhone exactly as it is now.
There's no reason to expect it will be exactly like a PC, which is coming from a completely open past to a future which allows more locking down. The iPhone is locked down now, it's a bit ridiculous to assume they would immediately go straight to allowing anything and everything to be installed without any hoops jumped through.
Even Android requires you to allow unsafe sources to isntall third party packages. Why would anyone expect the iPhone to go farther than this when they're fighting tooth and nail to not even do this much?
Honestly my fear isn't rogue developers. That's always a concern but not one that is going to show up with any consistency. My real fear is what carriers will do with this ruling, as they have the institutional power and collusion ability to force Apple's hand if they really wanted. I'm thinking shovelware and apps that can't be deleted becoming part and parcel with providing a phone service through a carrier.
I'm also considering the transition in the Steam marketplace as a recent example. Their opening from curation started with Greenlight, a fast track program with some but minimal curation. There were a few turds but by and large the games that came through were of some general quality. Enter phase 2, Early Access. The minimal barriers were removed except "will it run", adult content allowed, and a smaller hosting fee used. And in came the parade of low effort hot garbage. Recommendations in their platform are hard to come by now. Random impulse buy while scrolling rarely happens for me now as discovery of actual good games for me is much lower and I feel like the platform as a whole has suffered for it. I could see a similar trajectory for the app store albeit with my value of the services being placed in different categories.
> I'm thinking shovelware and apps that can't be deleted becoming part and parcel with providing a phone service through a carrier.
I would think anything that required Apple to open up the OS would apply equally as well to carriers. Who cares if the carriers put crap on your phone if you can easily wipe what they provide with a clean copy? It's slightly more complicated than Windows in that the carrier is also providing drivers, but not entirely without precedent (much of Dell system innards are their own design, and they re-brand or develop their own drivers for chipsets to better suit their systems). That would be another differentiator to open the market though. IF X provider is hostile to replacing their OS and makes the experience suck, the market can deal with that. At least it's a small chunk of the stack, and not everything from the base hardware to web services all locking you in to one choice.
As for Early Access and opening up Steam, i've actually not found it to be a problem. Some of my favorite games and experiences started out as (and in some cases still are) Early Access. And even the ones that started strong and went to shit, I count 6-12 months of a fun game as well worth the $20-$30 an Early Access game generally costs.
I've also found the Steam ratings, and the reviews people put in that generate it to be extremely useful and accurate. You just have to zero in on the reviews that relate it to existing experiences that you're familiar with so you get a good idea of what it is like. Worst case you find some streamer on Twitch or YouTube to watch for a bit to get a feel for it.
But the existence of competition or lack thereof can have its own effects, some of which are actually desirable and make the iPhone have the draw that it does.
If Facebook had a worthy competitor for example, surely you'll agree Facebook would be a considerably different product now.
You might say that doesn't help my case, because it would actually be a better product, but it's not an inevitable outcome in every comparable scenario.
> If Facebook had a worthy competitor for example, surely you'll agree Facebook would be a considerably different product now.
No, I don't think I would. The vast majority of people are not going to leave facebook as long as they can't take their social contacts with them, and Facebook knows this. They'll let you have your pictures and videos, but the graph? No way, and they know most people won't leave entirely because recreating all those links is a large undertaking for most people. Even young people that originally shun Facebook as their parent's social network eventually join because the network effect is too large to ignore.
The fact that Facebook very quickly buys anything that looks like it might have a draw that could possibly affect this in any way doesn't help it. Neither does that they blatantly lied to congress about things they would/wouldn't do with some of these acquisitions when asked about it.
>I do not want to have a mini IT project in my pocket that I have to fiddle with.
Having the ability to install apps not available on the app store does not make your entire phone something you 'have to fiddle with'. If you want to live in the walled garden, you of course can do so, just as many people do on Android.
>But I don't feel the need to get on every Mac discussion complaining it should be more like Linux.
This is an interesting take, seeing how a big reason Macs are so popular amongst developers is the similarity to Linux (which the vast majority of us are going to be deploying to).
>If you want to live in the walled garden, you of course can do so, just as many people do on Android.
I've had both device types through the years. I've had to support both device types in different form factors. As a developer I love Android. I've learned to code some Java and lightweight game development for Android due to that openness of the platform. But the pros of the walled garden concept do not shine through on Android as they do with Apple due to the lack of how tightly integrated and compatible the hardware & software are from being developed together and approved by a sole source.
As a purchaser of an Apple product, I feel fairly confident that I am Apple's customer. With Android, the customer is the manufacturer\carrier combo that runs my phone, and I am their customer. That distinction carries an important difference and it shows through the development tracts of both companies and how they deal with issues.
Let's be honest here. If this goes through to force Apple to allow competitors to their app store, that decision will go further than developer sideloading (which is already possible). It will not happen in a vacuum and as soon as the courts hand down such a decision the carriers will be next in line to shovel as much horse manure down the line as possible.
I've never purchased an Apple phone with pre-loaded software as part of a deal with a carrier, aka Bloatware. I have from Android manufacturers on several occasions. Lower standards of entry from 3rd party sources often mean lower standards for bugs, resource usage, and privacy concerns. Higher risk of malware. Lower chance of software to OS compatibility. Apple phones with whole disk encryption made the news when the feds couldn't break it as easily as Android devices.
>Macs are so popular amongst developers is the similarity to Linux
Then I rescind the poor choice of analogy and go straight to fundamentals. These two different tools are purpose built for different things from different principles and that is ok. Homogenizing the mobile space in a way that would detract from those differences would be a net negative in my opinion.
> I've never purchased an Apple phone with pre-loaded software as part of a deal with a carrier, aka Bloatware. I have from Android manufacturers on several occasions.
I am fully in agreement with your position, but it is really funny that you mention this specific detail, as it hits much closer to reality than most people realize.
Mostly because as a part of the anti-trust settlement that MSFT had to enter back in the day, they were forced to allow laptop manufacturers to preload bloatware on windows laptops. And I would definitely hate to see that on iPhones, as that was one of the major reasons I ended up switching from Androids (yes, I know, you can root your Android device, install custom Android distro, and get rid of the carrier bloatware, but not having to deal with all of that is precisely why I switched).
The big difference between MSFT and AAPL is that MSFT licensed their software to integrators. MSFT didn't have the option to simply stop selling to those integrators and go it alone.
AAPL can relatively (compared to MSFT back in the day) easily decide to be the sole retailer of their own hardware and software stack, and cease to sell their phones through carriers.
AAPL already offers direct financing solutions, and trade in solutions, through their own retail channels. SIM-only plans tend to be cheaper as the carriers can no longer hide behind hardware costs to obfuscate their plans.
Who loses in this equation? AAPL might, through reduced sales. The carriers might, through reduced margins. Is either of those things bad to the consumer?
Doesn't AAPL already sell carrier plans as part of their iPhone retail experience?
When did MSFT sell hardware as part of their software licensing retail experience in the 90s?
Also a good point and not something I had considered. Thanks for that. I agree this wouldn't hurt my feeling either and would make the most sense. Problem being when it goes before the court as it appears it will soon, there is no telling where regulation might fall especially with this kind of money involved. Hopefully a rational outcome like you've stated will prevail.
This is a very good and poignant point and probably my biggest overarching fear of the fallout from this decision. My post was already thick and didn't want to get into setting context for this but you are exactly right. I am surprised more folks here don't realize that about the MS antitrust stuff. Except the carriers in this case have the ability to remain as gatekeepers of these requirements where the laptop manufacturers were much more limited in scope once the device left their buildings.
Do you also support cars only being allowed to be repaired at specific dealers, only using tires sold through the manufacturer with a 30 % cut? Luckily this is illegal in most of the world. In the EU I can change the battery, tires and oil and the manufacturer can't deny it or remove the warranty. With an iPhone i can't even have a pro technician work on my phone without Apple taking away warranty from me and calling the cops on the technician's shop for importing refurbished Apple parts. They will be either forced to open up or they will be split up in tiny unrecognisable pieces.
You are stretching equivalencies here pretty hard with regards to capital investment of a product vs. expectations but I'll play along.
If I was told this plainly and openly up front then I wouldn't buy the car to begin with -IF- that is what I value in that specific vehicle. My car? Not a chance, I like my sports car and working on it is part of the fun I get from it. My wife's people carrier? If those repairs are close in line with other repair shops even after the 30% AND they'll come pick it up or tow it so I don't even have to mess with it? Absolutely, where do I sign up? Different tools have different uses and value propositions.
A better analogy is a resort. It's got beautiful beaches, gets the top acts to perform at the club, and the food is Michelin 3 star. The resort has armed security, so no one needs to worry about being mugged, or having their rooms robbed while they're out clubbing. The resort decides who can sell food, who can perform at the clubs, and who can teach you how to surf at the beach.
I would be interested to know what would happen if Apple said “sure — install whatever you want, but your warranty is now void.” How many people (especially the EU) would have a problem with that?
I mean, that’s effectively where this whole argument leads. You could imagine a scenario where using external software could damage things like your battery, so now the user is on their own.
I don’t think that’s a tenable option either.
This is effectively what Google does with Chromebooks and developer mode. But if you’ve enabled developer mode, can’t you go back? But when you get into trouble, you can revert back to the base install (and lose all other data). Again, that’s not a good option either as people would complain about that too.
There is absolutely no reason behind it. Running arbitrary code in user space has absolutely no bearing on the actual hardware, if it can cause harm than it is a hardware bug (eg, a javascript engine vuln. than could brick the phone)
Why is it a bad thing for you that other’s get to use their phones have they see it fit after paying for it quite a bit, while the whole thing won’t case any difference to you?
User-space code can definitely have effects on the hardware.
A program that phones home often with tracking data, thus keeping a data connection open and the processor from sleeping would absolutely have an impact on battery life and longevity. This would be code that Apple would normally block at the AppStore level.
And we saw how mad people were when Apple slowed down processing speeds to extend battery life. Can you imagine the outrage if Apple suddenly said that your battery is no longer under warranty because you installed the Facebook app directly from Facebook?
Ios has a great API and sandbox for apps, and will kill apps in the background unless they explicitly ask for permission to do additional work. It has nothing to do with sideloading apps, this security is the bare minimum for even trusted code.
The ability to run arbitrary software on a computer is not required to call it bug-free. You can't safely run whatever software you want on the computers in your car, for example.
I replied by the logic that forfeiting guarantee is unreasonable since sideloaded apps can only break as much as existing apps can.
There are good reasons to disallow any third party applications on some platforms like cars, but apple allows it and they only have a quick look at applications. The real security is in their sandbox/API.
Why is it hard to understand that a goddamn hidden “enable side loading apps” button for those who want it will not cause any sort of regression in your use of the phone.
But it will, which is the exact problem: Let's pretend for a second that I want the Facebook app, as a lot of people apparently do. At the moment, if Facebook wants to be able to run on iOS devices (which they do), they're forced to go through the app store and all that entails. They're forced by Apple to play ball and do things they most assuredly do not want to do. Tracking notifications, permissions notifications, no using 'private APIs' to get around those restrictions, etc.
If there's a viable third party app store without these restrictions, Facebook will immediately jump on it, and immediately start tracking users with no notifications in probably the most invasive way they can get away with.
The upshot is that thanks to this hidden "enable side loading apps" button if I wanted to use the Facebook app, I would have to use the scummy privacy invading version, and that's most definitely a regression.
Ios has a pretty good security API and it should be done at that layer.
Also, “pay” with your wallet and don’t download facebook.fileExtension from their own site (and frankly, if facebook wants to be afloat they should put it on the main App Store, because most people will not bother)
Apple is really great at UX, they will find a way to make it hard for the general audience, so that my mother won’t install random malware because for it she would have to go through 3 pages in settings she knows nothing about, and I can run whatever I want on my phone.
> Apple is really great at UX, they will find a way to make it hard for the general audience, so that my mother won’t install random malware because for it she would have to go through 3 pages in settings she knows nothing about, and I can run whatever I want on my phone.
Many of us believe they will not find such a way and that in fact no one will and it is impossible. That's the crux of the disagreement here. You believe this is a possible UX to build. I believe it is not possible to build such a UX.
As many folks have noted, Android does have a number of steps required to sideload. They also have a much more serious and active malware problem despite all the extra steps:
I have no goddamn problem with that. Please do. But that isn't what the article in question is discussing. It's about Epic suing Apple under anti trust and the implications of that decision. For more reading just check out what happened to MS after their anti trust with regards to laptop manufacture bloatware. Except understand that the carriers will hold much more power.
Except that the carriers hold no power in this relationship anymore. They need the iPhone more than the iPhone needs them. And if every carrier in the service area says "we want bloatware on the phone or we won't sell it", then Apple can just start selling the phones via their retail network (which they already have set up to do everything including interest-free loans).
What makes you think Android is a 'mini-IT' project? I have an iPhone now, but I used Android for years. It was always great. It always just worked, no 'fiddling' required. The idea that you have to do work to keep a Android running daily is odd to me.
Now that I've had an iPhone for a couple years, I can't think of single time where the app store 'curation' has benefited me. I'm not even sure what that means. I've released apps on both Google Play and iOS, and sure, it's a little more difficult to get an iOS app passed by Apple. But what does that really get us in the end? Maybe a little more protection from malicious actors, but not much more in my opinion.
I really think the idea that the iOS app store 'curation' is a feature that we benefit from as users is a myth Apple has made us all believe. It's mostly marketing speak & a 'placebo' effect for the end user, and a huge headache for the app developers. As a developer, app reviews take no less than a day or two to clear. And you have to sit there and hope they don't send it back rejected for some vague reason, or some random contractor in China doesn't reject it because they typed in the demo account password wrong (Yes, we had this happen at my job multiple times, and it wasted many days of our time).
I think app store 'curation' and the 'walled garden' get conflated sometimes. In the walled garden, where they have full control over the hardware & the OS, they have chosen to not allow any other method of distributing apps except through them. The idea that this is somehow making my life better I will never get. Either way, that in and of itself doesn't really bother me. What does bother me is that they think they are entitled to 3/10ths of every apps business in the walled garden. There is no way that makes sense.
They charge a yearly fee for developer accounts. I think this yearly fee system is how it should be handled. If their argument is that they are providing the servers and infrastructure and manpower to provide the app store service, then they could make more tiers. For bigger customers like Epic who use more of those resources they could charge more to cover the cost. But there is no way I'll ever be convinced that a 30% fee on every transaction across the board is fair or equitable.
> What makes you think Android is a 'mini-IT' project?
My first one. HTC when 4G first got hot. It was a horrible shitshow and soured my taste ever since. I can see that was a combo of manufacturer, Sprint as my carrier, and early Android OS but that spoke a lot to my understanding of the ecosystem and how incentives were set up. My follow up experience with phones for my kids or staff has been better but I've never gave them the chance for daily driver again. It's a system I tinker with but not depend on. I understand that's anecdotal and YMMV, but then again I'm not looking for validation of my opinion. Is what it is, just stating what colored my purchasing decision.
30% is crazy. I've said the same about Steam for years and you'll get no arguments from me there. Does it makes sense from the standpoint of the developer? Not at all but my opinion there doesn't matter as I don't develop for iOS nor am I very concerned with 3rd party apps. As a customer, I don't care. The idea of curation may be placebo but even the placebo effect is measurable. It may dissuade malware developers from the platform at first principles. That 30% may serve as a soft barrier to entry from race to the bottom competitors even if that isn't its intended purpose. I can admit Play Store has cleaned up its act a good bit since its inception but first impressions are hard to get around.
End of day the reason for me buying an Apple phone as my daily was for reliability. I can't remember the last time I had to restart or tinker with my iPhone to get it to work, but I can't say the same for my kids various Android phones. It wasn't for the robustness of the platform or marketplace cause I would've just bought an Android. Also see my other argument in this thread about being the actual customer and a few other points. Fair payment doesn't really factor in for me, that is a business decision for someone else to make. For me and the choices that I have in front of me, this seems like the best one for my goals even if those differences are limited in scope. The fact that we can choose between them on these differences is a good thing. To get back to GPs point, if this doesn't work for you then don't buy it and let the free market do its thing.
That’s fair. Maybe I tend forget a lot of the issues older Android versions had.
I always had Samsungs, never remember any issues with them getting hot, maybe that was an HTC problem? I think my first android was a Samsung Galaxy S3. Now that I think about it, I do remember a lot of weird bugs and restarts to fix some issue.
After that I had a Note 4 & 5, and I really have high opinions of those. I kept the 5 for over 3 years I think it roped out at Android v8.x and it was pretty good, but still not as reliable a iOS at the time I’m sure. I recently got one of those cheap Samsung tablets & I must say I’m impressed with Android v10.
I switched to iPhone a couple years ago out of curiosity mostly. It’s fine. Doesn’t blow me away, but you’re right. Super reliable. There are things I miss about my Note, and things it did better, but also things about the iPhone I would miss if I went back. Mostly the seamless and sync between my MacBook Pro/ iMac, and effortless wireless file sharing with airdrop are amazing.
As a dev, I do like to use a Linux box for daily use so I’m with you there :)
No worries friend. Point of debate for me is learning about and refining a viewpoint through rigorous defense. Doesn't all have to be topic at hand so long as we're working toward this goal in good faith.
I actually have a Mac too, but I also have Bootcamp configured because Mac doesn't do everything I need. I'm just like, what do I need to do right now, and what's the most reliable tool for that job?
My phone, ultimately, is communications and quick research. I need it to make calls, send messages, send emails, and use the browser. And off-duty, I use the camera to capture memories. I got the big one because I wanted the bigger screen (though ultimately I miss the smaller size one I had before, so that will likely change whenever I get around to replacing it.)
And I also do projects. I build 3D printers, I play with Pi's, I build PC's. I do all kinds of tinkering shit. I just don't feel the need to do it on my phone, and therefore what are cited as "limitations" of it are just irrelevant to me. It does everything I need it to do, and more.
Android and iOS in my mind aren't really even in competition. They're two very similar products that should appeal to two entirely different userbases. They're pickups and sportscars, both great for what they do, but utlimately trying to have a pickup that's also a sportscar just means it's probably going to be lousy at both.
Anti-trust law is entirely irrelevant despite how often it gets brought up in this discussion. Entering into the restrictions of an iPhone is 100% voluntary. You do not currently have the right to run whatever code you want on anything you own.
This fails every commonly held definition of a monopoly. We're not even talking like, cable company monopoly here that's entered into by virtue of buying or renting property in a given space, which at least you have a lot of friction there to claim "I can't reasonably be expected to go elsewhere just to buy from a different cable provider." You literally just buy an Android phone, and you're free of the restrictions imposed by Apple, immediately.
Here is the government released statement on these types of topics. "Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power"
That is from the US government. For any other further comments you have on the topic of anti-trust law, or market power, please read this government statement first and see how it applies to your statement.
> Entering into the restrictions of an iPhone is 100% voluntary.
If a company has significant market power, then anti-trust law can apply.
> This fails every commonly held definition of a monopoly
Anti trust law does not require a literal monopoly. So I am not sure why you are bringing that up. Anti-trust law only requires significant market power. And Apple has 50% of the US smartphone market, which is within the realm of what courts have considered to be significant market power.
> You literally just buy an Android phone, and you're free of the restrictions imposed by Apple, immediately.
Apple still has 50% of the US market. That can be significant market power, as the courts have ruled in the past.
In the late 90s Microsoft was IMO, pretty clearly a monopoly while Apple survived as a beacon of "See guys - we're not technically a monopoly" - having a competitor isn't enough to not be participating in an anti-competitive market, the manner in which Android and Apple have a complete dominance of the market is pretty insane and it makes both of their business decisions fair game for anti-trust arguments.
I have apps I want to publish, but why would I even begin to work on them knowing that Apple could pull the plug on me at any time?
And yes, the Cydia store is for jailbroken phones because that's the only way to load your own software onto your phone, but there are plenty of useful apps on there that aren't security issues and are only there to get around app store restrictions.
Apple doesn't have to restrict which apps I run to keep it secure. They do just fine securing MacOS, which allows one to install whatever they want.
The billions of dollars paid out does not disprove that at all. There are many articles, often posted right here on HN, of apps getting pulled from the app store for random reasons. Lots of articles about apps that push an update and then get removed from the store because they found something else objectionable that was previously approved.
I made an app to show the books you have lend at a public library
And to make sure it can be used with all existing libraries web sites and all opacs, you can enter any url and an xpath expressions, and then it runs the xpath expressions each day and shows the result as list of books.
And since I wrote it 15 years ago, there were no tech libraries for headless browsers available. So I wrote half of my own browser, and an XPath interpreter. (Modern XPath is actually Turing-complete, and with the EXPath file module, it can read and write to any file)
So, if the store does not allow custom browsers or Python interpreters, those are two reasons it would not allow my app.
Rendering engine is not the issue. It's the JIT - firefox could publish a browser, it would just need to have interpreted javascript and it'd be useless.
Well, then it is good, I did not make a JIT (only XPath AST, not even bytecode)
Although I have been thinking about making a JIT. Building on for x86 is easy enough, but then it is useless for ARM. I would not want to build two JITs. Or four with 32/64-bits.
This is just wrong. Apple disallows apps that duplicate existing functionality, i.e. browsers. You can write whatever wack headless browser you want, and there are tons of frameworks for this exact purpose, too: All manner of methods to do network things without invoking Safari.
This is a jawbreaker of hyperbole around a chewy gum center of truth.
Why do you repeat market share? It is completely irrelevant and unless you understand this it is no wonder you are confused. Abuse of market position has nothing to do with monopoly. You can abuse your position without having a monopoly. Even if Apple had 1% they could still abuse their position. You can disagree that it is a problem but talking about market share is missing the point.
>Just let us do our own thing over here for fuck's sake.
No one is forcing you to do anything. There can be 10 app stores and you could still use one the one. Just like many PC gamers have done for decades. I own hundreds of games and I only use GOG and Steam. Pretending you are forced to do anything is disingenuous. People have more right to use their bought hardware than you and Apple have to deny it. It's not a matter of if but when Apple will be forced to allow people to own their owned hardware.
This brings up an interesting question: should companies be held accountable for the network effects generated by their products on users (not competitors)?
I’d argue not, as long as users can still achieve the same goal in a different way, and it doesn’t worsen their quality of life.
For instance, in this context, the OP’s mother can still do a phone call, or agree to use a different software - which, by the way, is probably free.
But I literally can email somebody from email-provider a to email-provider b. But, lets be realistic, if the email would be discovered/invented today, that would not be the case ;-)
You can, though. Email is interoperable, which is why you don't see a bunch of people calling for gmail to be "broken up" (though there have been complaints about the weird anticompetitive stuff they've done to try and build a moat around gmail, I haven't seen anything come out of it)
Companies have exclusive control of their own products basically by definition. Claiming that there's some sort of monopolistic behavior inherent in a company deciding where and how you can buy their product is absolute shark-jumping.
Sure they are; look outside the USA and you'll find many the world over. For instance, Canadian telecoms must provide access to their networks at minimal wholesale prices for competitors to enjoy.
The USA simply isn't a leading innovator in this regard.
This is an incredible jump. By this logic, literally any format or given protocol can be called into question if it isn't 100% transferable between all platforms. That basically renders everything newer than line telephones, email and SMS as monopolistic.
Hell, even the different cellular carriers fail this definition because you can't use a Verizon sim card to access AT&T.
> The way I end up reading the situation is that some people want to aid the police to find package thieves but they don't want to aid police in finding people suspected of crimes during protests.
Well that depends highly on what's considered a crime in a protest, who determines that, and whether or not the person in question agrees with the protest.
I have no problem at all catching porch pirates. I have big, big ethical concerns with surveillance footage being used to track public organizers who haven't committed any crimes.
I think these sticky situations are always going to be a problem as long as the Police insist on operating in opposition to the people they claim to want to protect. Police do not feel like they are part of my community, they feel like an upper class of citizen who are permitted to, well, police the community by any means necessary up to and including violence, with basically no oversight.
That's not someone to look to for help. That's someone to fear.
> If someone hits 12 of the 14 markers, does that make him a fascist? What about six, or three, or one? Am I 1/14 fascist because I critique various aspects of modernism?
> To the extent they someone does match the list, all that really does is note that he'd match the characteristics of a few governments in the early 20th century. But that's only one kind of totalitarianism, and obsessive focus on it allows other kinds to slip through the cracks.
I think this comes down to Fascism just being a bit of an odd duck in the political discussion. Fascism seems to be an ever-present undercurrent of basically all Democratic and Republic-style societies, always there but not always apparent. There is always a subset of the population that believes their Government doesn't work, for any number of reasons, and to any given extent: Fascism plays well with a certain subset of those people. And the appeal is very easy to understand: if you perceive the systems that rule over you are fatally flawed, wouldn't it be so much better and easier to circumvent those systems and put in place people who would break the rules, but improve the nation?
But that of course alone does not constitute Fascism. I was listening to one of Robert Evan's podcasts where he and his guest (I'm sorry I forget the episode and show) were remarking that Fascism is less an ideology or even a movement, and more of just, an aesthetic that could be adopted by basically any ideology or movement, if the appropriate leader comes along, which is one of the reasons it gets thrown around so much, besides just the historical connotations to the Nazis, of course. They theorized that the values of most Fascist movements (appeals to tradition/a mythic past, hatred of weakness, hatred of the other) make them more compatible with those of a conservative bent, but leftists are not immune from it either.
People tend to forget that most of the Axis powers, save perhaps for Imperial Japan, were also extremely Fascist. Italy especially. And, prior to the United States' involvement in WWII, Hitler and Mussolini were renowned for their invigorating of their respective countries and their abilities as orators.
> This is a bit ironic, no? He's amalgamating aspects of different cultures into a generalized descriptor of a culture that's still being referenced decades later.
I mean, it keeps showing up. There are authoritarians seemingly all over the place at our particular moment of world history, many of which tick off numerous boxes on Eco's list. Does this mean they are all Fascists? I would say, yes, to a degree. I don't think one must wait for all the boxes to be checked before asking some questions. Does that mean they all merit interventions ala World War II? No. I just think it's something worth keeping in mind. And besides, America, the world police, are currently ticking far too many of those boxes ourselves to be throwing any stones out of our glass Fascist house anyway.
What makes you think Japan wasn't Fascist ? It was a military dictatorship. All the Axis powers were explicitly Fascist, as were neutral Spain and Portugal.
I dunno if I'd qualify a military dictatorship as Fascist though, since the typical hallmark of a Fascist government is the singular leader who enthralls the public. Which I guess you could say the emperor, but I dunno, it doesn't hit the same way for me.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
I will never understand the pearl clutching that goes on when things like this happen.
As a person you are judged constantly by others, as a public figure this increases exponentially. You are judged on everything: the clothing you wear, the way you speak, and yes, the company you keep. In the age of social media influencing, each of us has a platform built upon the platform we choose. Each of us via that platform can spread influence, be it marketing, ideas, or (dis)information.
If you utilize your platform upon a platform (or just your platform) to spread bad ideas, purported by bad people, it is a perfectly rational reaction by your audience to reclaim the social capital they have given you. This is not wrong. This is not censorship. This is how social networks have worked since long before any of us had a smart phone, or indeed, when the social network was a fire in a cave, we have operated this way.
And reading this summation, yeah that sounds about right. It sounds as if he is embroiled in a social space that is spreading bad ideas. He has denounced one person who was in that social space, but he is still in contact with two others spreading similar ideas. This calls into question the sincerity of his denouncement.
I.e. if you say you're done drinking, and resolve to quit, and refuse to spend time with your alcoholic friend, but still spend time around two others who drink regularly, people would be right to question your sincerity in that resolve.
> If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
This impulse to boil this activity into a set of always absurd sounding "rules" is probably comforting to those who would call themselves Rationalist, the sorts who fetishize facts and logic, while usually having a dearth of both in the things they say. But ultimately this isn't hard to understand: If you associate with people known to believe and spread bad things, you will in turn be viewed as possibly endorsing those things.
And all of this comes up against the simple and obvious truth that all someone in this position has to do is speak what so many would like to hear; that they didn't understand what this person was doing, that it isn't what they believe, and to create distance. But they won't. I wonder why?
> And all of this comes up against the simple and obvious truth that all someone in this position has to do is speak what so many would like to hear; that they didn't understand what this person was doing, that it isn't what they believe, and to create distance. But they won't. I wonder why?
The thing is we have lots of perfectly good examples of people associating with conservative people with a few noxious views. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, for example, were well known as family friends of Kanye West but they managed to go years asserting they were personal friends and disagreed with his political views and hoped he would come around. Eventually Kanye went a little overboard and they started distancing themselves further, but pointedly that was Kanye’s fault and not the Teigan-Legend family’s.
It really is not that hard to adopt a “love the sinner, hate the sin” position. But when people adopt this position of hemming-and-hawing any time someone asks “do you really hate the sin though?” it understandably raises some questions. People have blogs where they engage with bad ideas all the time. There’s a style in how they present and engage with the ideas that doesn’t leave much room for doubt.
I also don’t think advocates for “places to debate” these things really understand the purpose of debate. These arguments for scientific racism are well known and understood and mostly debunked by actual well-regarded experts in the associated fields. There is no value in debating bad ideas ad nauseum with randos online. You’re not learning anything from that, you’re just engaged in a sort of rhetorical sparring match. Is society well served by you trading bad faith arguments with strangers? Maybe. At the expense of exposing impressionable spectators to arguments with poor empirical grounding that are nonetheless seductive for taking advantage of common misconception and flattering peoples egos? Not so sure about that.
>As a person you are judged constantly by others, as a public figure this increases exponentially. You are judged on everything: the clothing you wear, the way you speak, and yes, the company you keep.
Not everyone is a rich socialite looking to be viewed well at the finest private dinner parties. In fact, I dare say that anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers are the opposite of that.
Maybe you should go try judging someone with actual responsibility and a real role in public life. You know the Senate will vote to acquit Trump today, right?
By the way, I thought "social morays" was absolutely brilliant and I will certainly be using it myself, but it's spelt "mores". It's a direct import from Latin.
>These social morays have applied to everyone, everywhere, forever.
Any claim that any particular social more is eternal or universal is ahistorical. This is the clearest finding of the fields of anthropology and history. Everything about human life varies throughout time and space.
The culture you're describing is just utterly foreign to many people. It's certainly not how my social networks work; nobody's ever asked me to denounce my friends for believing bad things, nor would I ever ask someone else to do so. What you're reading as "fetishizing fact and logic" is an earnest attempt to understand what your unfamiliar cultural standards are.
> nobody's ever asked me to denounce my friends for believing bad things
Probably because you aren't in a position of social influence, and/or your friends aren't propagating dangerous ideas? That's all the more reason to skewer those that do and are, precisely because of the platforming effects they have.
SSC and the space around it fundamentally disagrees with you that the thing to do about dangerous ideas is block their propagation. It wants to know about them, understand them, turn them inside out, figure out why people believe them, understand what it’s like in their heads, and learn how not to make similar errors.
“Listen to your culture’s leaders and tastemakers, vigorously punish any heretics” is a terrible algorithm for that. It’s exactly why so many bad ideas have such power for so long.
Part of the idea of presenting bad ideas in such a sympathetic light is to then whack the reader with, “Do you realize what you were just nodding at?” To show that you too are capable of believing terrible things under the right circumstances, to encourage humility and skepticism.
> I mean, they tried that approach with Roko's Basilisk... Let's just say it didn't work very well.
Roko's Basilisk is just Pascal's Wager restated for AI.
It falls to the same counterarguments, e.g. what if a superintelligent AI already exists somewhere in the universe and currently doesn't care about you but deigns to punish you for any attempt to create a competitor?
This whole "dangerous ideas" concept is ridiculous. The obvious connotation is that the peons can't be trusted with these ideas, so the intelligentsia needs to shield us from them; I find this to be more abhorrent than most bad ideas.
> What dangerous ideas would you say Scott Alexander has propagated?
The idea that the "Gray Tribe" is anything but a well-written propaganda effort targeting midwits to keep them supporting the Blue Tribe (and most importantly, to keep the Blue Tribe in power) as the problems mount and the failures become harder and harder to excuse.
Again, you're assuming a lot of cultural context here that isn't universally shared. I truly, honestly don't know what people mean when they say "dangerous ideas". My intuitive interpretation is "ideas which tell people to go be violent", but the term is very frequently used to refer to ideas which don't call for violence, so that can't be right.
I'm just going to issue a prediction that as long as "recompiling components of the OS" remains a satisfactory answer to a technical problem on linux subreddits, this will never, ever happen.
Whenever a solution to a technical problem is "recompile components of the OS", this means the answer to the same problem in a "non-linux"/non-free system would be "piss and moan and bend over and take it up the tail pipe". aka: no solution whatsoever. The developer's way or the highway.
The point is: once your problem is complicated enough that your only resort is to edit the software, free software _at least_ gives you the chance to do that. It's no wonder people actually suggest doing it. Proprietary software does not. It's no wonder people _don't_ suggest doing it.
If it was supposed to be a complain, better rephrase it.
> Whenever a solution to a technical problem is "recompile components of the OS", this means the answer to the same problem in a "non-linux"/non-free system
The kicker being that such problems are so rare as to be functionally nonexistent, and even in such cases, usually contacting the vendor can at least give you some options. A few anecdotes from my own experiences:
1) Windows\MacOS have never simply refused to use a network card, for no apparent reason.
2) MacOS has never destroyed it's own bootloader because it was Tuesday and it was bored: Windows did it once, but it was repaired automatically by the recovery partition.
3) Windows\MacOS have never refused to play audio after resuming from standby until rebooted.
> The point is: once your problem is complicated enough that your only resort is to edit the software, free software _at least_ gives you the chance to do that
But conversely, I don't have to edit software I paid for that's built on a reliable, if imperfect, OS. A reboot fixes almost anything wrong with Windows, and sure, I'd appreciate it if it could be like linux and stretch it's uptime into years, but also, a reboot takes less time than a run for coffee.
That a solution technically exists is less important than the accessibility of the solution.
> That a solution technically exists is less important than the accessibility of the solution.
No, it's not, and I really want to emphasize that. If the alternative is _no solution_ then the accessibility of the solution is a rather moot point. That is the point I was trying to make.
What you want to say is that it does not matter if free software makes it _possible_ to solve your problems, because (you claim) you don't have these problems with proprietary software, or (you claim) you have a simpler solution available for those that is only applicable to the proprietary software.
I am not going to enter that particular discussion.
I just wanted to point out how it is absurd to simply claim that "as long as people keep recommending recompiling stuff open source won't work" when actually A) people recommend it _because you can actually do it_ , unlike alternatives B) being able to recompile stuff is actually a major if not the main strength of free software, so it is a strange argument to point it as a negative.
> I just wanted to point out how it is absurd to simply claim that "as long as people keep recommending recompiling stuff open source won't work" when actually A) people recommend it _because you can actually do it_ , unlike alternatives B) being able to recompile stuff is actually a major if not the main strength of free software, so it is a strange argument to point it as a negative.
And my reply to that is, in the context of mainstreaming Linux to the wider computer using audience, that's ridiculous. You might as well tell every person who owns a car to never pay for repairs again, because you can, via the proper hardware, reprogram the ECM. That "solution" applies only to an interested subculture of (awesome) people who hack shit.
To say to my aunt Doris that Ubuntu can be better for her to use than Windows and then require her to learn a fair bit of bash script and C# to complete that journey is ridiculous.
> You might as well tell every person who owns a car to never pay for repairs again, because you can, via the proper hardware, reprogram the ECM.
No one, absolutely no one is saying that (specially the part about "never pay for repairs again" -- another common nonsense).
What I am saying is that between a otherwise-identical non-reprogrammable ECM and a reprogrammable ECM, the objectively better choice is the reprogrammable ECM. Because even if you don't know how to do it, you at least have the choice to let someone else do it. It doesn't matter if you personally do or don't understand how to reprogram ECMs. The choice is still clear.
> my aunt Doris that Ubuntu can be better for her to use than Windows and then require her to learn a fair bit of bash script and C# to complete that journey is ridiculous.
Your aunt Doris doesn't have to learn C#. But she _has_ the option to, she has the option to follow the instructions from someone she apparently read on the Internet (what motivated this discussion, I thought), AND she has the option to convince/hire someone to do it for her. When your aunt Doris hits the same issue with Windows, .... she's stuck! Better luck with Apple!
I suggest that if you have any interest whatsoever in free software, spend some time to understand this aspect, because it can and does reframe the discussion. If you remove the free part from "free software", what remains is basically just software; the same as any other piece of software, a rotting bug-laden piece of shit. Why deny this feature?
>2) MacOS has never destroyed it's own bootloader because it was Tuesday and it was bored: Windows did it once, but it was repaired automatically by the recovery partition.
Must have been one hell of a hangover from that Mardi Gras ball.
The description at the end about how it's basically a hostage situation but with the hostage takers trying to be fun is the most excellent metaphor for anything I've ever heard.
It's so fucking accurate, and explains why the site's content trends towards a very corporate-friendly "safe quirky" that I personally find nauseating.
>It's so fucking accurate, and explains why the site's content trends towards a very corporate-friendly "safe quirky" that I personally find nauseating.
Haha, all LinkedIn posts do look like if Silicon Valley's Jared Dunn had written them.
