rustcleaner

Few talk about the Skinnerian mechanics behind tipping. It's the addictive element which keeps gamers gaming, microtransactors microtransacting, pattern day traders day trading, and gig drivers gigging. The excitement of the gamble. The irrational belief that the next customer may be George Soros and they'll leave $10K on the table.

Could ban tipping by law. Businesses where employees are caught accepting tips get fined. The price on the menu or shelf must be the final price at payment (including sales taxes and other fees).

Time to start the #NeverTipper movement!

I find the best content is free content, made from passion rather than monetary need.

No. All ads, and I mean all ads, must be blocked. Our children must be raised to hate the product and brand that is shoved in their faces by an advertisement. I already keep mental notes of what ads I see alot and never, ever expend money on those brands or products. The fastest way to get me to never ever buy your brand, product, or service is to show me ads for it, and I want to spread my thought process to others so you have to actually make something decent that can spread word-of-mouth... rather than something to advertise.

It is psychological security too. Most ads are manipulative inducements to expend money that could otherwise be more cerebrally spent elsewhere (or saved even). Our goal as individuals is expense reduction, which is an economic strategy that is diametrically opposed by any individual or business reliant on you spending money. Ads are the vector where psychological games can be played to erode our default economic strategy. Ads are an evil most don't recognize, and need more controls than firearms even!

Maybe "content creation" shouldn't be a day job? Maybe "content creators" should get real productive day jobs while the space is open for the creators who do it out of passion and love... for free and without ads? What if some of the high cost of goods we're seeing right now is due to too many non-productive consumers (middle managers, service workers, "content creators," etc.) at the expense of not enough producers (people taking things out of the ground and converting them to useful goods)?

Maybe strong anti-advertising laws are in order? No accepting pay to parrot a message, or at least heavily taxing such arrangements if allowed? IMO the only place I should ever see an ad is when I go to some YellowPages directory, like plumber ads when I look up plumbers. There should be a Nutrition Facts like description of costs, service or product description, etc, in lieu of pretty art and slogans for us thinkers. Never should I see an ad on random web pages, billboards, newspapers, entertainment media, etc. Imagine the ills banning advertising would reduce... like the data surveillance & brokering industry!

>If and when I want a device I can tinker endlessly with, that’s very available to me already.

>What I don’t have is a desire to actively deny consumers a “just works” option that is extremely safe and reliable. No caveats.

False dichotomy. Nothing about the latter means the former can't also be possible. Apple products disrespect customers in the name of the latter, telling them the former is dangerous and must be limited. I am concluding that only iron fisted pro-customer sovereignty "Apple Laws" can stop Apple and similar, as their customers themselves can't muster a wallet revolt against this business model.

>It’s a combination of Stockholm syndrome, having an expensive phone as a status symbol, and corporate worshiping.

Can any amount of pain cure stupid? I am still so baffled that AAPL is as market successful as they are, that I am forced to hate-long their stock while never buying their products (and telling others to not buy them either, which is going about as you would expect).

>rented

Be careful here! Everything will turn to subscriptions and leases, which is why my proposed "Apple Laws" must also apply to leased hardware.

>without making people feel they were crippled

I view Apple platform as crippling, and Google jealously trying to [slowly] pursue the same cripple model. Just because most customers are not educated enough to see the crippling aspects, doesn't mean it's not there. Sleek shiny-ness tends to hide that for normies.

Disclosure: proud GrapheneOS and Qubes OS user and never-subscriber.

We need laws that make Apple's business model illegal. No more walled gardens, including game consoles. If you sell a Universal Machine (or product containing a Universal Machine), then the owner/purchaser/leasee must have full control of the Universal Machine.

Just like the laws against bad cars are called "Lemon Laws," call these new laws against bad Universal Machines "Apple Laws." Forever memorialize AAPL in this negative light to warn its future successors what happens when you act in anti-customer ways even when technically not illegal to do so.

By the same logic, we could also use "Anthropic Laws" to curb the nanny-moralism of model guardrails too!

Really cool! Will we ever construct Babbage's Analytical Engine?

It is not the product's job or role to make the customer act in a socially pleasing manner. It seems to happen because a customer-sovereignty respecting competitor hasn't come in to clean up the moral crusader's lunch.

Wow cool! I did not know about this! All that's needed now is an enhanced route calculation routine that avoids Surveillance and Speed Camera POIs. :DDD

>... or enjoy the fruits of modern design

Those fruits are fermented enough to score a DUI.

Sounds like Hyphanet (aka Freenet).

It's time for trust busters to mandate the gardens have open standards based authentication-less protocols for scraping and viewing the content behind their walls. If that bankrupts them then so what? That's what they get for being web-destroying walled gardens!

I wish Qubes Domain-0 was a customized Gentoo with OpenRC. Fedora with systemd was a poor choice to base off. Nobody should have let Poettering have the influence he was given over userland, systemd is an almost irrevocable mistake.

>watermarks

Whatever happened to just delivering the best product or service? Why must tech be full of ninnying nannies that act against their users, "for their 'safety'‽"

The wealth taxes on hexamillionaires+ can't come soon enough! Return to the '50s and implement 90% income taxes too on >$X MM/year, and on corporations after operating cost deductions but before dividends and buybacks. The Golden Age of the 20th century wasn't just because of America's post-war industrial monopoly, but also its laws and tax codes that kept a hard check on massive wealth accumulation.

I am lucky to be in a city which has not rolled any of this out, but it's surrounded by cities which have gone whole-hog on rollout. I use DeFlock app to see camera locations (but do not route or give it GPS because it has Network permission), then manually create a route in OSMAnd~ (no Network permission) to avoid the cameras. OSMAnd really really needs to roll out an addon for ALPRs just like it has for speed cameras, like yesterday!

Guardrails are a product-quality smell. Boycott guardrailed models. Punish guardrailed model providers with reduced revenue and bankruptcy. "I'm sorry Dave" must become a subscription-cancelling response or the nannying will never stop!

>I'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought.

I'm in your boat. Molecular biology looks quite analogous to something like Conway's Game of Life, but a particle automaton with freedom in 3D space rather than cells in a fixed 2D aetheric grid.

Conway's Game of Life is Turing complete, the fundamental laws/algorithms are simple. Per Wolfram (NKS), you don't need complex algorithms in order to exhibit complex behavior. GoL is just four rules and a[n infinite] grid. Wolfram's automata are simpler.

I will go even further out 'there' and state that we are the equivalent to Greek "city-gods" which arise out of the polity/demos composing them, except our polities are little biological von Neumann machines acting in concert to emerge us in their aggregate. What most people think of as 'god' being some top-down omniscient/omnipotent creator entity, I think is wrong and reverses the true heirarchy of nature. The fabric of spacetime, the quantum field, or whatever emerges it from a lower level with its fixed simple rules, is the primary force driving the universe's [and our] existence. If there are gods, we are categorically much closer to them in form than the pious fanatics say!

(Disclosure: I am petulantly Atheist.)

I hope this is true! Consumer credit is a serious problem. How much better would it be if only corporate entities could take on debt? That goes for school, home, and car loans too. Imagine the return to sanity in pricing when Big Finance can no longer scam time-preferenced and desperate buyers! Society might have a real savings rate again!

If it's a VW, pick up a Ross-Tech VAG-COM + VCDS, locate your Telematics unit (OCU, online communications unit) and remove it; mine was behind the instrument cluster. Then use VCDS on a laptop plugged into your car with VAG-COM, and code out the OCU from every module giving fault codes for its absence. You will probably lose the microphone, as in my Mk7 the microphone line goes through the OCU. Finally, optionally, you can code out your infotainment module's bluetooth features thus taking away another avenue for passive surveillance.

Cloud is an unnecessary evil, in the Stallmanesque sense.

I really like Mullvad Browser, which is Tor Browser -Tor +uBlock Origin, for clean & ephemeral browsing.

Sponsorblock (FF extension) is neccessary for YouTube, as well as Seal (GUI for yt-dlp) + BravePipe (fork of NewPipe, integrated Sponsorblock) for Android.

Also, adding `Before: YEAR` in search takes you back to a more wholesome time.

I use Mullvad Browser, which is Tor Browser -Tor +uBlock Origin.

No you don't need Mullvad VPN to use Mullvad Browser.