1. web is too slow compared to any decent desktop client. thunderbird navigation/deletion/message opening is basically instant from human perception, web version operations are visible to human eye.
Many from linux crowd are slightly paranoid and ideological.
I'm as a linux user very reluctant to install anything proprietary that has such sensitive info as my network traffic and would rather use opensnitch or any other foss fork.
The same time I don't mind to pay for open-source, I donate several thousands USD per year to FOSS projects. But I guess I'm in a minority here and if you make the whole stack open-source you're not going to make many sells really.
You call it paranoia, I call it zero tolerance for enshitification.
It's like the Nazi bar problem. You need to be vigilant to prevent the thing you rely on becoming yet another platform for Microsoft to exfil your personal data to NSA servers.
Just in one particular country. That hurts their labs, but there are ~190 other countries in the world for Chinese to sell their products to, just like they do with their cars.
And businesses from these other countries would happily switch to Chinese. From security perspective both Chinese and US espionage is equally bad, so why care if it all comes down to money and performance.
Do you imply that it's not possible for the US intelligence agencies to request this data from google per person of interest and deliver some information from the metadata?
Yes. The point in the post is that it's very American to assume that every adult has a credit card. I'm in my thirties and I never had nor plan to have a credit card. I always have had only debit cards. In countries I've been raised and lived it's a sign of a poverty and total dependency on the bank with additional tax on your living, not an everyday tool like Americans perceive it.
Debit cards can be given to an underage, so I suppose they don't accept it for this reason.
In the UK, having a credit card is an overwhelmingly good move even if you never use the facility for credit. You can set up a direct debit to pay it off in full every month, making it effectively a debit card, but you get what are known as Section 75 protections on all purchases. So if you’re buying online and the firm goes bust (or you for any other reason don’t receive your goods), the credit card firm has to compensate you in full. For this reason I always make larger online purchases on credit card.
For many, obtaining a credit card just for the purposes of age verification, and not using it for shopping, feels easier than giving away their legal identifying information to a random third party.
In the US you're usually inundated with offers to open a credit card (often pre-approved) right in your mailbox. Even if you're a poor recent immigrant, or something.
Probably, but making a non-used CC just for using your own phone sound a bit weird, don't you think?
And I don't criticize US way of living here, but Apple is an international company and could do better adjusting to local cultural habits. But maybe they just punish people for this stupid law in the first place which is totally understandable.
Banks are subject to much more scrutiny (regulations, audits) than a random company. Or maybe even a highly established company which you'd rather not give your identity to, something like Pornhub.
You must live in an especially civilized place to be able to get by without a credit score. I wish I could close all my cards, but doing so would harm the score since card count and age are part of it.
Credit cards are a sign of poverty? Now that's a hot take.
I feel in Europe having a credit card means the complete opposite, only "rich" people have credit cards.
I have a credit card, I use it, I pay it off every month. Why am I seen as poor just because I have a credit card? It's just a tool.
It spares me from needing to maintain a 10000$ emergency fund in my checking account.
And in post-soviet countries you blink and you owe 15+% interest. I know many people who couldn't meet basic needs and pay a never-ending percentage. Or forgot to close the debt and lost more than ever gained from this tool in one payment. So people who can pay from their pocket just pay from it instead of endlessly tracking the grace period and counting the money.
I don't imply that's the same everywhere. Also probably depends on a local regulation and interest rates.
Also people here don't generally like to owe to somebody, that feels insecure.
Would be great if true, but that doesn't really correspond in reality truly, especially in intellectual products. Compare even Linus Torvalds fortune with e.g. snapchat founder. Not even talking about thousands of 0 profit open source projects with millions of installations versus some saas hustler - usually the former provide much more value to society than some guy who is just good at selling stuff.
UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.
Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.
I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.
The original post laids out why it's not possible to do well: privacy apps, sanctioned countries, apps made by people for themselves to avoid clouds and third parties, etc.
Simple example: I have a foss VPN app running on my phone to avoid censorship and surveillance in some countries I visit. While using this app is no problem, non-anonymous development might carry consequences to the developer in some dictatorship jurisdictions (which are plenty of). I'm not sure all devs of such system would be willing to give their ids.
Another example is that this way US can cut out countries and people they don't like from mobile usage (which basically equals to modern social life). Look into sanctioned judges of international court because US protects war criminals.
That's not universally true, there is a class of privacy coins whose txs are not (at least in theory) traceable.
I'd argue that's actually a more anarchist original view and transparent ledger is a bug of the first implementation, not a feature, and creates problem of the original money people are trying to solve (i.e. have electronic money without a government overreach, US using modern banking system as a political pressure tool, etc)
2. doesn't cut trackers
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