• 0 Posts
  • 190 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 14th, 2023

help-circle
    1. “Handset” is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

    2. I’m no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

    3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers


  • Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.eetomemes@lemmy.worldThe seven sins
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    edit-2
    23 days ago

    A “boys club” scandal a couple years ago where the male higher-ups only hired women who would tolerate being sexually abused. Some ex-employees described it as “company culture” that propagated for a decade or more. There was an investigation after some women spoke out that led to a lawsuit, several top level managers being fired, and a couple CEOs being scrutinized really hard.

    All of this is off the top of my head and maybe somewhat inaccurate, but that’s the gist of it.

    Edit: Here’s an article for you





  • Being self righteous about doing nothing is worse.

    Despite your own brand of defeatism in insisting the outcome is the same no matter what, one side actually is better. Even if the metric of “better” pales on the grand scheme of what we deserve or should be doing.

    I’m not trying to project self-righteousness by recognizing that there are only two real choices. I’m asserting that advocating non-action or pointless action is such a tired trope that what you’re doing is circlejerking for dopamine instead of applying what little influence you have as an individual to work toward the avoiding the actual worst outcome.


  • When the American populace as a whole is brainwashed into believing the only choices are red and blue, you have to accept that whining about it and voting green (or not voting) is going to accomplish nothing.

    So make your colorful allegory and feel good about yourself on the internet. In the end, you are accomplishing less than the people you look down on who recognize the shitty reality of our situation.



  • People here seem to be mistaking stupidity as a measure of intelligence. Stupidity is a measure of wisdom.

    An abundance of information doesn’t fix stupidity in the same way that shoveling water out of a boat with a leak won’t stop it from sinking.

    You have to address the leak before shoveling water becomes productive. Or to circle back around, you have to address how someone learns, parses, and applies information before feeding them more information becomes productive.






  • This is incredibly disingenuous. The US might not be a true democracy, but it’s not an authoritarian regime. Xi and putin disappear people who have an opinion on whether they should be forever-rulers.

    The fact that independent parties exist and hold seats at all three levels of government mean you are fundamentally wrong in saying there are only two choices.

    The US is a flawed democracy. That’s still better than an authoritarian regime.



  • The paradox of tolerance applied to this situation suggests that in order to keep a community where choice is preserved, we need to be intolerant of bad actors with the ultimate goal of killing that choice.

    Meta absolutely is a bad actor looking to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse.

    They’re pivoting the overwhelming userbase of Facebook/Instagram into a sort of federated Twitter alternative that their users as a whole don’t understand but do generate content for, in an attempt to steer the federation architecture into something they can control and make money off of. It’s not subtle.

    Whether it will work or is even possible for meta to do remains to be seen.

    But, yes. To answer your question, we need to “deny the choice” of federating with what amounts to a wolf in sheep’s clothing to preserve what we have, because that wolf is looking to destroy it.

    This post demonstrates that all of the major instances on lemmy but one understand this concept. If lemmy.world doesn’t want to acknowledge what meta is doing, then they’re also a bad actor in enabling meta to do it.


  • For people who consider this a sign of social status

    Ok well,

    1. Anyone who considers apple products a status symbol already has bought in and won’t be swayed one way or the other by windows becoming worse.

    2. Anyone who actually understands technology knows that regardless of how many different apps or environments apple OS’s provide, you are always operating in a closed system with the tools they allow. Whereas an operating system like android, or Linux, or (at least for now) windows, your options for the capability of a tool are limited only by what exists or what you have the capability to write.

    In short, apple isn’t an OS that technologically literate people flock to as an exclusive option.


  • In addition to the other great points in this thread, Apple has a cost barrier that other operating systems don’t.

    In an economic climate where everything is getting more expensive, a consumer isn’t going to fork out $800+ on a MacBook or an iPhone without first actively wanting to be part of the ecosystem, especially if the hardware they have gets the job done.

    The reason Apple isn’t growing as fast as it’s competitors right now is exactly that. Apple is expensive to get into. No amount of enshitification on other OS’s is going to change that.



  • They don’t go after lemmy. They go after the users. There are several ways, the easiest of which is to make using a federated network an implicit crime.

    Like how downloading or talking too loudly about tor or tails puts you on a watch list.

    They don’t even have to follow up on that more than a couple times for the chilling effect to drive people away from using it. Without a large enough user base, we’re spread too thin to affect change.

    If the current system ever identifies federation as a threat, it’ll happen.