baddox

That may very well be true, but making arguments that conceal your true world view or "axioms" is intellectually dishonest.

But of course, that interpretation of 2 Timothy is a post hoc defense of biblical inerrancy. There are much more obvious reasons for religious authorities to emphasize the absolute authority of religious scriptures (particularly when they also claim exclusive authority to interpret those scriptures).

It's also important to note that "inerrancy" means very different things to different people. I remember one evangelical preacher who informally explained it as essentially "God made sure that nothing got into the scripture that he didn't want in the scripture," which is a much weaker claim and is essentially synonymous with what it means for something to be scripture.

> Of course not. Genesis, Revelation and Job are 3 books of the Bible that don’t document events as observed. I believe (not 100%) that all the rest do.

The Book of Ezekiel has a lot of pretty wild stuff, but I guess you can say it's supposedly documenting Ezekiel's visions (but isn't that also true of The Revelation?). The Book of Daniel is also apocalyptic literature, much of which was likely not intended to be read as a document of observed events. There's also a ton of poetry (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.) that I wouldn't consider "documents of events as observed."

> That's the whole point: some people value purpose more than they value explanation.

Sure, but I don't think the debate is over whether creationists derive a sense of purpose from their beliefs. I have no doubt that they do. You'd never need to discuss things like fossils or evolution or cosmology to determine whether one derives a sense of purpose from one's beliefs.

My assumption was that these debates are about the epistemological status of these claims, which is largely independent of whether one derives a sense of purpose.

It’s still not a good explanation to say “humans must have some purpose, therefore this one very specific made-up thing must be true.” What about all the other made-up things which also purport to explain the purpose of humans?

Explanations of this form are extremely easy to vary, which is why they are not good explanations.

Maybe I’m just out of the loop, but I haven’t heard that one, and I find it hard to believe it’s anywhere near as widespread as QAnon.

It implies that they are analogous, not that they are similarly dangerous.

Apple’s market cap is 15 times bigger than Nike’s. That’s all I meant.

Perfect competition is definitely taught as a concept, mostly as a benchmark to measure real-world markets against, but I don’t think it’s literally an assumption of everything you learn in Econ 101.

No one said anything remotely close to that.

I think just the difference in the "mass" part of "mass-market."

That's roughly equivalent to asking "if someone drives drunk, will they kill someone else or not?" Many times, they won't hurt anyone, but I hope it's not controversial that driving drunk is still extremely dangerous.

> Things you can't do without.

This gets tricky. Of course we know that when there's a fire, a firefighter is often imminently essential. But it's trickier to imagine a society where all "non-essential" jobs are banned indefinitely. You wouldn't die in a matter of minutes like in the fire example, but you'd also probably find such a society unrecognizable to the extent that you might reconsider what types of jobs are and aren't "essential." There'd be a lot of poverty, a lot of hunger, and yes, it would cause a lot of people to die.

Right, but planning a terrorist attack isn't "they can't satisfiably prove he's done anything wrong."

How can you “catch a terrorist” without proving that they have done something wrong?

It's certainly plausible, but it still feels like something is missing. How did the boss hear about this? "Someone told him." This all just sounds so very odd.

Yeah, I hate to reflexively take the side of a huge corporation here. I don't doubt that Apple has abusive employer relations, but it really does feel like there's something missing from this story.

That is an absolute monster of a page, and while the JS is slow, that's not even where the problems begin. This thing is 1.5 MB of HTML, which takes 3-4 seconds just to download on my gigabit connection (it doesn't appear to support compression, which might help a lot).

Right, and as discussed in this thread and others, Apple does not have a smartphone monopoly under any remotely reasonable definition of the term.

Don't some modern high-end residential HVAC systems have separate air conditioners and dehumidifiers to provide more granularity (and perhaps effectiveness or energy efficiency) between the two effects?

> which is to consider whether it would be anticompetitive for Google to ban other app stores from Android

That's what I'm getting at. Is it anticompetitive to deliberately make your product worse by removing a key differentiator between your product and its closest competitor?

Or come at it from another angle: would it be "anticompetitive" for Apple to (in new iPhones) completely remove the App Store and thus all reasonable expectation to be able to run third-party software? Is it anticompetitive to sell a handheld computer than can do email, play music and videos, etc., but not run third-party software?

> For the sake of argument, is there a limit to the number or kind of extra steps before you'd call it unusable?

Surely this comes down to what reasonable expectations are held by the customer. There are microcontrollers you can buy that require a soldering iron and USB breakout board in order to run your own software on them. I think that's pretty reasonable, but it would be a ridiculous requirement for a desktop PC purchased at Best Buy.

The question becomes: what are the reasonable expectations for installing third-party software on an iPhone. Personally, I think the overwhelming majority of iPhone owners expect and even highly value the fact that Apple (supposedly [0]) vets all third-party software on the iPhone, and it's generally more difficult to accidentally install malware or break your device than it is on other computing platforms.

[0] As I've said before, I think Apple actually needs to be more restrictive, because a lot of useless/broken/scammy stuff makes it into the App Store.

I'm not sure why that's relevant. Am I only not dying of thirst because I agreed to the terms offered by the local water company? I think it's not contradictory to believe two things simultaneously: that people should not be held to the terms of a contract they signed when they were dying of thirst, and that it's okay that I needed to agree to certain terms with the water company in order to have running water in my home.

I see your point, but surely it's not controversial that Epic very deliberately broke the rules in order to get its app removed from the App Store, right? Epic is probably just hoping that iPhone owners will take Epic's side and blame Apple for the removal (or even more likely, Epic only cares about the effects of the PR on the court case). I can't predict how every iPhone owner who plays Fortnite will react to this, but it seems like any slightly inquisitive person would look at the situation and think, hmm, it seems like Fortnite existed on the App Store for a long time, so what changed?

> Also, on macOS, you were sold the explicit ability to run whatever software you want. It's purpose is to run software from third-parties.

I agree with that, and I think there would be a much stronger argument if Apple changed MacOS to remove this ability when it is a very well-established ability of the Mac platform. Of course, Apple almost certainly will not remove this ability, not because they want to be nice or they want to dodge antitrust allegations, but because they know that doing so would lose them customers.

But with iPhone, my argument is that this is absolutely not the expectation fostered by Apple's marketing or held by the vast majority of iPhone owners. Apple has always been very proud of its App Store and its (supposedly) strict vetting process to protect iPhone owners from malware, privacy violations, and other junk. Now, I personally think Apple should be much more restrictive about what apps it allows in the store, because there is a vast wasteland of abandoned apps and junk apps. If anything, the iPhone seems to have gotten less and less restrictive over time (the first iPhone didn't even support any third-party software, after all). I have a lot of trouble buying the argument that any significant number of iPhone owners expected to be able to run any third-party software they want to.

> To them, it's a device that is only capable of running games.

And Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, live TV, Plex, home automation, web browsing, Skype, etc. In other words, nearly everything an iPhone can do and probably very near 100% overlap with how iPhones are actually used.

I'm curious how someone could argue that Apple's App Store rules are anticompetitve and that they should be forced to change them, while also arguing that the same doesn't apply to Tesla's media computer(s). Is it just because there are more iPhones than Teslas?

That's fair enough. I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the subjective argument "Apple is really big and profitable now, and I don't like their App Store rules, so let's try to get them to change it." I find it less ridiculous than arguments that attempt to construct some supposedly objective principle like "iPhone are general-purpose devices and therefore they must allow running unsigned code."

Ideally, I'd prefer that this kind of back-and-forth between developers and Apple would happen strictly through negotiation, rather than invoking the court system, but I realize that not all markets are functioning well enough for this to be practical.

This argument seems to hinge on the assumption that two parties are experiencing similar "levels of desperation": a person dying of thirst, and the developers of a video game which is available on half a dozen platforms and is probably the most financially successful video game of all time.

That's a bizarre argument. It seems to imply that Apple could avoid these allegations by either increasing or decreasing the restrictions they place on third-party developers.

> Google doesn't do that because that would be an abuse of their market position and they would get rinsed in the courts.

Are you sure that Google doesn't do that because the Android platform is an extremely viable and lucrative alternative to iPhones, and that people who value the ability to sideload software on their smartphones flock to Android for precisely this reason?