If something ever seems like a popular but illogical set of actions by people, the best way to understand it is to look at the incentives that drive it (thanks Freakonomics).
In this case I'd wager two things. As a kid I had family who worked a receiving center for Goodwill. Fairly affluent part of our town near the beach. I remember two distinct things being odd to me then. The items people would bring would sometimes be questionable as to how they'd be useful to the needy, either from wear or function. The other part was most people wanted and received a receipt for their donation. Cue Mitch Hedburg receipt for a donut routine. I was told then when I asked this was an approximate value of their donation and it was used for tax purposes. So one is probably tax write offs.
Throwing things away costs money. When my wife and I moved recently we cleaned house. A second trash can was around 150 a year with limited volume. Trips to the landfill are charged by weight differential. Charity donation is free with the added bonus of someone coming to pick it up if the donation is big enough. We both commented at the time that if we were a little less moral we could easily pack the rubbish in with the donations and save a ton of money. So second is probably convenience with some working the system added in.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's something there, but I do have a hard time lining those theories up with my past interactions around the subject.
For example, a long time ago a roommate of mine wanted to get rid of some furniture, so he had a thrift store send a van to pick it up. It had all been pretty severely damaged by his dog. Having previously worked at a thrift store, I was pretty confident that they wouldn't want any of it, and mentioned as much to him, but he was sure they would be able to find a use for it, and so we schlepped it out to the curb.
After the van had left without taking much of any of it, and we were carrying it all around to the alley for the garbage trucks to pick up (which is free in our city, even for furniture), the thing he expressed remorse about wasn't the donation receipt. It was that he thought it was wasteful to throw all this furniture in the trash just because his dog had been chewing on it.
I still have similar conversations with my partner about this. Her bias is, she wants to hold on to even the slightest glimmer of hope that someone might find a use for an item. I lean toward not wanting to make the staff of the thrift store throw out my trash for me. I think it might just be hard to see if that way if you haven't been there. Neither of us cares about donation receipts, which we don't bother to collect, and still live in the same city that will take anything that will physically fit inside a garbage truck for no extra charge.
Tangentially, if you haven't seen one swallow a full-size sofa, put it on your bucket list. It's a fascinating spectacle.
> Her bias is, she wants to hold on to even the slightest glimmer of hope that someone might find a use for an item.
I have this same problem. It's actually taken me a lot of effort over the years to get away from this mindset. Not that I try to be wasteful, it's more of just forcing myself to be realistic about the likelihood of me being able to repurpose a thing. Sure a thing might be useful to someone but unless I'm really interested in the effort required to find them and facilitate the transaction, that thing is just going to sit around. I have finite space available so unless I really want something or really want to make a donation happen it's going in the trash.
I'm finding that I get a lot more utility out of framing it thus: the trash isn't created when I put it in the bin, the trash is created when I buy it in the first place. Once that happens, it's going to get pitched. Could be today, could be in 30 years, but someday it will happen.
Where that pays extra dividends is in limiting the accumulation of clutter. I used to buy electronic gizmos I didn't, strictly speaking, need, at a fairly regular pace. But I was storing up a bunch of crap I'd eventually have to throw away the next time I declutter. And I had a lot of clutter. Reminding myself that every consumer product is future trash helps limit the accumulation of clutter, which, in turn, limits how often I have to feel bad about throwing it away.
That's a good way to frame things which is something I now do a better job with. My clutter problems were/are mostly from old me not thinking in that way.
The big question here is how to minimize transaction costs.
You often have an item which in good condition would be worth e.g. $55, but it's damaged. If you ask someone how much they need to repair it, they say $50. So in a frictionless plane you would make $5.
But in order to pay them, you would have to fill out tax paperwork, and they would have to fill out tax paperwork, and you would have to pay payroll tax, and they would have to pay income tax, and in the end you would pay $60 and they would receive $30. So instead you throw the item away.
Whereas what you should do instead is to just give it to them. They were willing to fix the item for what in practice was $30. If you gave it to them, they would do the labor they valued at $30, or at $25 because they can omit the labor of doing the tax paperwork, and then they have a $55 item instead of the item going into a landfill.
There are also people who might be willing to use the item as-is without repairing it, if it was free.
So the real problem here is that these organizations aren't allowing people to pick through what they're throwing out. Which wouldn't make them any money, but it would be better for the world.
I can get on board with this, too. Hoarders are kind of the far end of that spectrum and I can see the same closer to home tendencies in my partner as well. She struggles to dispose of clearly broken beyond repair or reuse items.
Difference in perspective down to cultural bias. Living too long in rural southern US has jaded me into looking for selfish intent behind any altruistic curtains.
Hilariously there is a motivation to provide low value receipts for estate executors.
"That old bookcase? It was only worth a dollar so I sent it to Goodwill after his death, it wasn't in the will and nobody wanted it".
Now maybe an antique dealer could sell it for $400, meaning maybe the seller might have gotten $100, and now the estate executor is in trouble. But he died and there's three days to get all the stuff out of the apartment and nobody has set up an estate-paid-for storage unit (how long can you afford to store something only worth $100 anyway? If estate/probate process takes a year...) or prepared a deal with an antique dealer to immediately accept (and who's going to drive it over there, I don't have time?) and if its not disposed of in three days the building mgr will hire a very expensive per hour cleaning crew to toss it in the trash (at some expense) and deliver a hefty bill to the estate. And Goodwill gave him a receipt for a dollar so its documented at least. The Goodwill receipt at least proves the executor didn't steal from the estate by hiding the bookcase in her basement and selling it later on ebay for $400. As if she's young enough to know what ebay is.
An eventual audit that if they hit the anti lottery could cost them more than they could possibly save. Remember that you don't get to just deduct a donation from your taxes you deduct it from your income which lowers your taxes. For example if you ultimately pay about 30% of your income in federal taxes and you lower your income by 1000 you ultimately have reduced your taxes by $300.
Donations 5000 and up require the person you donated to to fill out a tax form for that donation so making up the numbers would require a confederate in the donating org to be willing to risk prison to enrich you.
Also remember that the bottom half of the country pays little federal income tax (because they don't make much of the income in America) and the top 10-20% has MUCH better legal tax avoidance strategies.
It's likely that some portion of middle income individuals could avoid a small dollar figure in taxes by inflating or even fabricating a string of small donations and presumably out of hundreds of millions of people a few do but you would have to make up a LOT of bullshit donations to make much of a difference but before you could actually save much money you would end up sticking out like a sore thumb. Yes Mr IRS auditor I totally donated over 1000 in goods to goodwill on 10 separate occasions over 2021 and I totally deserve the corresponding $3000 deduction!
On net its probably a small issue. At this point we have people making 6 figures + who just don't file tax returns and haven't been addressed.
Depends a lot on the game. If there is nothing to be 'earned' by being competitively better then it is nothing more than street cred. Think simple games or older games. CS 1.6 before rewards, knifes, and skins. A small few players might make some comp scene to get to some incentive but most are ultimately found out.
The bigger issue, and I believe the primary reason for the rise in popularity of these bots, is when your performance does 'earn' you something. As the OP was speaking of TF2, this comes in the form of hats and custom weapons. Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars.
Almost every modern shooter has some sort of rank up system tied to rewards. Some of the worst examples would be PUBG's real world money trading of loot box items or Diablo 3's real world money auction house.
In my mind, these kind of systems turn video games meant for enjoyment into some weird NFT mining system where normal players are manually mining them with pen and paper while the bots have built ASIC devices.
In cases where the items themselves cannot be sold, you have people selling the whole accounts. There are entire middlemen businesses set up around this stuff. It's crazy but there is your primary driver for incentive.
> Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars.
I don't know about TF2, but for CSGO weapon skins & knives (and all drops) never come from gameplay wins. So there's no motivation at all to cheat for any monetary-related reason. Botting was a thing to farm for drops, but those literally just joined a server and spun in place to avoid being AFK kicked - that's it.
So CSGO cheating is purely about the human interaction components (eg, feeling good about winning, taking pleasure in making people angry, the thrill of getting away with it, etc...)
Gotcha. Haven't played CS since source so I wasn't sure. Are aimbots a common thing there nowadays? I don't remember seeing them much back in the day. Sure some of that is due to selection bias from good private owned servers. I would suspect that they exist but are not common.
On the other hand, PUBG does have Battle Point rewards linked to performance. And there it is very common. Almost guaranteed to see a cheater every 10 matches or so. And there was an easy means to sell those rewards. Contrast that against Sea of Thieves. A game specifically about PvP and stealing loot from other players. I don't know that I have ever encountered a cheater there. But there is very little incentive to do so. There just isn't many vectors to turn virtual work into real world profit.
Seems to me that the lower the barrier of entry together with the higher the real world value of the rewards\drops gives you a clear scale of the cheat potential\incentive\effort. I think there will always be a small percentage of those doing it for the LULZ. You can combat that by raising the barrier to entry. F2P games seem to have a higher rate of these types.
When the reward system cultivates an environment ripe for abuse, it moves from occasionally annoying to game killing epidemic.
China and it's 50k USD cap per capita restriction (probably lower and harder still now) practically become in infinite demand side pressure for these too.
They can buy players /cheat to farm, then sell the virtual goods over to those with USD; with healthy discount as profit for the other end. Thereby transfering their asset out of China.
There may be some sampling bias as you point out, but it is still crazy from my perspective. I would suspect that UPS and the other major carriers have optimized this task to death. With the right bundling and route optimization for a specific city or set of parcels I could see some level of improvement due to the things you mention.
But 200-300% efficiency gains over businesses that have been profitably providing this service for years? Its exceptional enough to warrant being called crazy at first glance.
From the article,
"The two Portland delivery companies are demanding a cap at 250 packages and 150 stops per 8.5 hour route"
Which seems to indicate that they realize that some bundling will occur and accept it as long as there is an upper bounds on both metrics.
> I would suspect that UPS and the other major carriers have optimized this task to death.
In the end a great deal of it comes down to volume per delivery location. If UPS is delivering 1 package per day per location, there's nothing they can do to optimize (except skip locations certain days, which nobody wants). It sucks for them.
Then Amazon comes along with 5 packages per day per location, and it changes the economics completely. By 200-300% is not unreasonable at all.
There's a fact that blew my mind when I first learned it -- that apparently UPS actually loses money delivering packages for Amazon, but makes more profit in the end because the added scale makes it even cheaper to deliver packages for other people. E.g., if it's already dropping off an Amazon package at a location, then it's suddenly much cheaper to drop off the non-Amazon package at the same time.
Agreed on your first point of volume and we're not given enough detail around 2 separate and only tangentially related metrics to make any real conclusions. That said; I did consider this briefly but even then the math to make that work still seems extreme. Are Amazon packages making up that much of our parcel these days? 3-to-1 or 5-to-1 would certainly change the economics for this to make more sense, but are they truly responsible for 75%-85% of all parcels these days? Even if we select for residential only I feel like that is super high.
Then again my monkey brain sucks at statistics and considering the last year or so of my own home usage it is probably close to 1-to-1. And we try to avoid Amazon. So probably a lot closer to those numbers above than I'm comfortable to admit.
In my apartment building in NYC, Amazon packages are absolutely at least 75% of total deliveries, no question. Everything's left in the lobby so it's easy to see.
Probably not higher than 85% though. And of the rest, the next biggest category is packages from clothing stores like J. Crew, Nike, Madewell, etc.
(Also this isn't including groceries or DoorDash, just talking about traditional packages.)
Dang. Then consider that the 400+ packages was self selected by Portland carriers as some of the worst examples, and 120 deliveries a route is a national average.. It gets murky quick trying to pull anything useful from this especially with it being Vice looking for an editorial angle.
As with most things like this, the numbers seem scary until you peel back the layers. Not a pass to Amazon as the rest of the article is damning in its own right, but a little less crazy than my initial thoughts.
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.
So you call someone intellectually lazy... and immediately turn around and make an implication that if casinos have failed to be successful then that somehow speaks to the addition qualities of gambling? Something something nonsensical equivalences.
Seems to me around the time that it was ended there were several other things going on.
The advent of cable news networks which gave a massive incentive to sensationalism and strong partisan ties as multiple players joined the space with a need to create a sustainable viewership.
Satellite feeds became common ensuring a single message instead of having a layer of abstraction in the form of a local or regional newscaster; instead of relaying facts, they can relay a highly opinionated version.
Local and independent news stations were being purchased and consolidated into national telecom companies with their own partisan editorial bends, a la Nexstar and Sinclair.
I have to believe that all of the above had a much greater influence on news discourse in the past few decades than the elimination of the fairness doctrine. Furthermore, if you give government the power to regulate anything; always expect the current party in power to use that regulation as a weapon. Can you imagine what our leaders would do given even more power to control and manipulate the media narrative? Ending this was a good decision.
I was just reading through this sub thread and I agree. I immediately started comparing the statements against Russell's Teapot ("...can't get bogged down...") and God of the Gaps ("...lack of explanatory power physical theories...") type issues.
When I say can't get bogged down I mean I don't have the energy to get into a big long discussion.
You baited me into starting one... but I'll be brief. The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain. I could imagine myself as the same person except for the perception of two colors swapped. All this is summarized in the question, "What canvas does the brain's neurons draw its images on?" I can't imagine any answer that is material.
Also, saying that physical theories lack explanatory power is not the same thing as saying there is NOTHING can offer explanatory power, or even that physical theories cannot augment any theories. But I strongly oppose the blind optimism of those believing pure physical theories will explain consciousness when it is has so far failed abysmally. That is not the same thing as saying no such physical theories exist, but that I wish more people realized just how optimistic they sound without real reason to be.
Glad to have pulled you back in, however unwillingly. =) It's an interesting topic to kick around.
On the first, could we not say the same about how an image is rasterized from a set of points, to a polygon, to a shape, to a set of pixels displaying the images on your very screen? Before it was displayed, way down the stack, it was just a series of switches being turned off and on. Electrical impulses that viewed from an ignorant outside source would just appear as random noise. And yet we can easily ascribe the material manner in which it made its way from one to the other. Just because we currently can't directly encode\decode the exact means in which the mind creates these scenes, it's not hard at all to build mental models that a network of synapses could be responsible for a very similar thing from my perspective.
Also decoupling 'blue' from it's physical properties would inherently remove any relevance of the color between us. I agree with and also wonder do two people see 'blue' as the same color sensation, but the only means we have to compare that experience between two separate minds is both looking at a light source in the 450nm spectrum. We have no means to convey the experience itself, only the relation of understanding any further experiences with the first. I'm not sure that it matters much though. Another computer analogy, although Linux and Windows differ a good bit on how they would internally configure a PDF document to be displayed on the screen from it's initial bits, the end result should be close enough that we can both agree on the information the screen displays.
On the second, I'd stand beside my original complaint. This to me draws from the God of the Gaps issues, that somehow if the way we've described the world in every other recognized way is unable to put forward a valid reasoning for a phenomenon with our current level of understanding, we should instead ascribe a non material or physical level of power to explain it that has never been shown or proven to offer a provable valid reasoning for anything. That to me sounds rather optimistic.
> The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain.
Why is it your assumption that the sensation of seeing something is anything other than simply the network of neurons in one part of your brain firing in concert in response to visual stimuli? Why is the color purple, which is a mix of blue and red, also perceived as an intermediate between blue and red if the sensation of seeing a color is not linked to it's actual, physical properties and how they interact with your visual sense organs?
In this case I'd wager two things. As a kid I had family who worked a receiving center for Goodwill. Fairly affluent part of our town near the beach. I remember two distinct things being odd to me then. The items people would bring would sometimes be questionable as to how they'd be useful to the needy, either from wear or function. The other part was most people wanted and received a receipt for their donation. Cue Mitch Hedburg receipt for a donut routine. I was told then when I asked this was an approximate value of their donation and it was used for tax purposes. So one is probably tax write offs.
Throwing things away costs money. When my wife and I moved recently we cleaned house. A second trash can was around 150 a year with limited volume. Trips to the landfill are charged by weight differential. Charity donation is free with the added bonus of someone coming to pick it up if the donation is big enough. We both commented at the time that if we were a little less moral we could easily pack the rubbish in with the donations and save a ton of money. So second is probably convenience with some working the system added in.