clusterfish

Yeah right that's why devices with cameras always looked like this, that certainly didn't start when one company made this particular design moronically hip, and the rest of the sheep followed. Lenses were apparently square before that, what do you know.

The market for large groups of people is called politics. If you like unregulated markets so much, you should like monopolies, including that of political power.

Yeah banning stuff is silly. I should be able to drive and practice medicine without a license, sell toxic baby formula, build houses with asbestos. The magic market will provide a solution for anyone who wants different. #Murica

PS we should ban the Wikipedia article on market failures though, can't have people reading that.

With this kind of design (black holes for cameras and sensors), I wonder if they considered that it might trigger trypophobia ("fear of holes"), and if they did, what does it say about your design if you need to analyze it such concerns. I mean phobia or not, these round voids as an element of design are getting ridiculous.

I'm not sure if this is the original, but here: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

They can certainly, say, ban Apple and Google from hosting such P2P apps in their app stores, then any such apps are useless to most people. They could also go after developers, forcing them to either install backdoors or shut down - see what kind of laws Australia passed about that, as an example.

Remember they only care about most people, they don't need to get every last one of us. Their point is to make default methods of communication unencrypted.

As a general rule it's unwise to hope for some unintended side effect of bad legislation to solve unrelated problems. The goal of this legislation is surveillance and control. If passed, it will achieve that goal. If it has a side effect of significant number of people starting to use encrypted P2P communication (doubtful imo), they will pass more legislation to make that illegal too, since "child abusers are obviously using P2P encryption now", and most "normal people" don't. And that time it will be even easier than passing the original EARN IT act.

Government overreach must be fought every step of the way, otherwise by the time it finally gets you personally, it will be too late.

Let's not get blinded by our dislike for centralized platforms. This is not the way to solve their problems, this way only creates more problems for people.

FFS read about it. It burns clean at use site but causes tons of largely unmeasured methane emissions at extraction site, to the point where it's 50%-70% as bad as coal. Except it's worse because clueless people think it's great so they're building even more gas plants which will work for decades to come, whereas coal at least is being shut down.

If you live in a jurisdiction where you need to pay sales tax, you will pay that sales tax, it will be on top of anything that the seller would normally charge you. You can't escape this tax by going to a different seller in your same jurisdiction. You can choose to move to a different jurisdiction if you don't like paying that tax, but a seller who sells in both will charge you the same subtotal (+ different tax).

Same with Apple's 30% fee - it's unavoidable on their platform so it acts as a private sales tax on their platform. Some developers might choose to essentially subsidize their apple users by charging them the same price on Apple and on tax-free platforms like the web. That may be out of fear for Apple or out of cultural inertia or whatever, but it doesn't make sense, they're the ones leaving money on the table, not the ones who charge people taking into account the cost of doing business with those people on their preferred platform. They could get more profit selling their app for cheaper when not subject to the 30% platform tax, if they think that their pricing with that tax is optimal.

If you don't want do do one thing do another unrelated thing, great logic, very insightful.

Lol sure let's invalidate all patents for starters, if you want a free market. Copyright next. See how much will be left of Apple's hegemony. Or just admit that regulations are a thing we use to get socially optimal outcomes and not get trapped in market failures like monopolies, duopolies, and negative externalities. Your fetish for unregulated capitalism is not as popular as you think even in the US.

Nobody's saying that this has anything to do with legality under current laws. Neither does whataboutism that this is usually in response to, for the record.

"A general purpose computer is a computer that is designed to be able to carry out many different tasks."

"There's an app for that"

Seems pretty straightforward that they did. Them doing their best to lock down the ecosystem for profit does not make the device non-general-purpose.

Right because you have data to show that piracy takes away more than 30% of small devs' desktop games' revenue? Given that most pirates wouldn't actually buy it if they had to pay?

Smaller developers publish PC games just fine, you know, choosing whichever store they like most, or choosing to entirely self publish. This is how it should be everywhere.

That's just ideological propaganda that ignores the last 200 years of economic theory and observations.

Nice whataboutism, except Mobile Safari is intentionally crippled to not support PWAs well.

In EU credit card fees are capped by law, and the duopoly is surviving just fine, just with less obscene profits. Should do the same with mobile app stores.

Users have no choice, the market is a duopoly, and Android app store has all the same problems (because it's a duopoly). You can't feasibly escape platform tax on mobile.

Um, no, cost of doing business affects the equilibrium market price. There's no Apple tax outside of Apple's walled garden, so everyone competing outside of it has lower costs and can thus offer lower prices (outside of the walled garden). If you don't, your competitors will, and you'll lose customers.

Natural gas as a source of energy is a lot less clean than advertised, almost as bad as coal, even without gas stoves, (due to fugitive methane emissions, yes, but not in your home)

Why? Because how much you have to pay is determined by how much the platform owner can get away with. There is no fundamental logic to it other than market power. Why don't you compare to better, open platforms instead - desktop apps, the web. Why does everything has to be as shitty as something else.

There was "immense value" in every monopolist that was rightfully broken up or restricted. There's "immense value" in every monopoly / duopoly market. So what. The richest company in the world is swimming in money, pays little taxes, and gouges every developer who made its products successful. They are nothing without the developers, they're simply in a good position to abuse them, a position that they carefully crafted for themselves.

> Facebook is right now taking a huge loss due to the fact the walled garden is working.

Facebook is hitting a huge loss right now because they saturated the world, ran out of markets to expand to. Not because of Apple's minor restrictions on cross-app tracking, jeez. Their growth in US stalled long ago.

> That complex legislation is not going to happen because ad-tech has the money to stop it.

And tobacco companies had the money to prevent anti-smoking regulations, and the oil industry had the money to deny climate change, and big tech had the money to keep their app store monopolies. Well some of those are WIP but it's clear that things do improve despite the money, albeit slowly.

> People compromise their privacy because they didn’t have a choice.

Nobody's stopping you from using DuckDuckGo and Mobile Safari, not today, not if this legislation goes through. Nothing that Apple does will change that, and nobody will code websites for mobile without supporting the default browser on their target platform, unless that browser is IE-level terrible, which Mobile Safari is not, despite its many deliberate shortcomings.

If you're all about choice you should stop telling other people that they should pay for services with money rather than with ad impressions, and that they should pay Apple's 30% tax for your privilege to see one monopolist shove it to another in a superficial way.

And if you think "don't use Apple" is valid advice for these people, then it's also valid advice for you for when this legislation passes, if you really can't live on a platform that isn't completely locked down.

Bunch of FUD. OS features and permissions aren't going anywhere. Even if coercing users into providing permissions became a real problem, Apple could have the OS provide fake data to apps not whitelisted by the user.

If you don't want to be tracked, don't use Google, Facebook, and other ad techs. Doesn't matter whether you installed their apps or not. Even today Apple can't meaningfully shield you from their tracking if you choose to use their free ad-supported services. (And if you don't, there's not much value in tracking you since they can't sell your attention to the highest bidder)

I'm not defending ad tech, but it will take complex legislation to reign it in. You can't just hide from it in Apple's walled garden, it does not work.

They can also keep current exobirant fees and see how that works out for them, when their app store monopoly is inevitably legislated away.

They wouldn't be subject to legislators' interest in the first place if they charged reasonable fees.

Pretty much all Apple has to do to keep apps in App Store in the face of competition is drop their fees to less than 10% for all apps and drop bullshit like "you can't even link to your website if it lets users pay from there", and almost everyone except the most brazen will stay on App Store.

We'll see what actually happens but I personally I doubt that Apple values user experience more than it values gouging developers for profit. The Apple that would, is long gone.

I mean that money is the benefit, not the work itself. Our wealth distribution system is not suitable for significant levels of automation at all - that is the root of the problem, not automation itself.

Theoretically yes, but in practice the given industry as a whole often does not need much more output even if the per unit cost of the output declines. Like, you don't need significantly more accounting just because you can use spreadsheets now.

And not all automation increases worker productivity, lots of it just eliminates workers from certain jobs altogether, e.g. self driving cars / trucks.

> who benefits most in that equation?

That depends on how the extra profit is distributed, aka taxation and social welfare. Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se.

You are correct, but I dislike the offended whataboutism tone. That other countries did the same 100 years ago, or even some other countries still do today, is not the point.

The point is it's typical of China to steal IP. It's a problem because it gives Chinese companies an unfair advantage as they grow big by stealing all they want from others, but have their own IP protected in other countries.

It would be nice to live in a world without patents, but that's not the world we live in. So if you're ok ignoring reality, might as well go on a tirade how stealing cash is "not immoral" because you don't believe in government issued tender or something.