There is no one so ignorant, as someone who is quite sure they know all they need to.
I would encourage you to study the writings of your enemies as well as your friends. I have found it most useful.
Have a good one!
SirEDCaLot
joined 1 year ago
privacy as a luxury good
Sounds like what Apple is trying to do...
Sadly wanting privacy is kind of a niche thing, not a large # of people buying iPhones to avoid surveillance. And most TV buyers DGAF... If a large # of them opted out of content recognition we'd still have dumb TVs on the market.
Unfortunately I think without some kind of regulation that makes personal info a liability / hot potato, it will still be treated as an asset to be collected:(
I think it's telling that monetizing the operating system is the immediate place one jumps to with this, rather than earning more profit by selling more products which are better for the consumer.
Please don't take what I said as a suggestion that what we have right now is great. Like anything, capitalism requires checks and balances. In my opinion the heyday of modern capitalism was the mid to late 1900s, because industry was operating at full efficiency but regulation also insured that the average person was able to benefit from that. All three factors of production, land labor and capital, all had a seat at the table.
We have moved a good distance away from that. Capital dominates the conversation, land has made some advances in the form of environmental protection, but labor still takes a distant back seat. And so you get ridiculous situations like a company gets hundreds of millions in tax breaks and subsidies while the CEO gets paid hundreds of millions and the guy who mops the floor is on food stamps. I don't see this as good capitalism. Labor needs a bigger seat at the table. If a business cannot afford to survive without paying ALL their workers a living wage that allows upward mobility, that business does not deserve to survive. As I see it, that is part of the very base of capitalism.
That said, your suggestion that businesses don't need a leader is a ridiculous socialist/communist fantasy that doesn't actually work in reality. Take an established business like McDonald's. From where you sit it probably looks like it doesn't need a leader, it just keeps going on its own. But who decides how much the burgers cost? Who decides when to introduce new menu items? Who decides what the promotions will be? Who decides what market segments will they focus on? Who decides whether their next new product will be a salad or a triple cheeseburger? And if you're going to say middle managers can make these decisions, who decides who those middle managers are?
For what it's worth, I'm a big fan of employee owned corporations. That doesn't always work in every segment, but I wish there were a lot more of them. But even an employee own corporation has a CEO, the CEO is just selected by the employees.
As for Elon, your suggestion that he has done nothing shows that you are uninformed. The reason he is not listed as an original founder of Tesla is because of the handful of people who founded it, one already had a business registered and it was cheaper for everybody to buy into that than pay to have it dissolved and pay again to register a new business. I have actually been following them very closely more or less since they started, so I know this better than most. In the early days Tesla was headed by a guy named Martin Eberhard and Elon was just an investor. Eberhard insisted on a design with a two-speed gearbox. This is extremely difficult in an electric car because of the high amounts of torque and extremely high RPMs involved. They went through a couple different versions of this, trying to get one that would last the life of a car, and burned a year or so trying to make it work. If you dig through the archives, you'll find several news articles of journalists who got to drive the original Roadster, but it was locked in second gear because the shifting didn't work. Eventually, Elon realized this wasn't going to work so him and the other investors pushed Eberhard out. There was no love lost, Eberhard fought back, eventually they came to a settlement and Elon became CEO. Please understand I'm not saying this because I like Elon, I'm saying it because I was literally reading the blogs of both sides as it happened. The two-speed gearbox went right in the trash, they went to the one speed reduction gear Tesla uses today, and upsized the motor to give better acceleration. Elon was right about that decision, and he was the one who made that decision, all EVs today use that design.
As for SpaceX, Elon basically started that from the ground up. As I recall the guy who designed the Merlin engine was his first hire. I personally know people who worked for SpaceX and worked directly with Elon. Everyone I've talked to says the same thing- Elon is kind of an asshole to his employees, he has absolutely no sense of work-life balance and he wants employees who are 120% committed to the cause and will work late nights and weekends without complaint, he is opinionated and stubborn but in the end he's right more often than not, but however hard he pushes his people, he pushes himself even harder. Most people don't last very long in that environment, they put in a handful of years and when their stock options vest they quit, or if they don't have equity they work until they have a family and can't put in 60 hour weeks anymore then they quit.
So you want to say Elon is an asshole, you want to say he treats his employees badly, you want to say he doesn't create a positive environment at his company's, I will probably agree with all of these things. But you say he doesn't do anything of value, that is just uninformed.
That's when an operating system is supposed to do. They make mistakes when they make it worse. Usually, the operating system starts worse and eventually gets tolerable. That happened with Windows 10. Initial versions were far inferior to Windows 7, but now it's at a pretty good state. Windows 11 is a pile of fucking garbage. There is no compelling feature in Windows 11 that would make anyone want to upgrade. There are compelling reasons not to upgrade, such as advertising, menus that require more clicks to get the same shit done, forced use of Microsoft account, etc.
There's also the fact that Windows 11 refuses to run unless you have a handful of specific hardware in your computer, such as TPM 2.0, and a relatively modern processor. There is no technical reason for this requirement, it was discovered very early on that if you override the check it will install and run just fine. But Microsoft seems determined to get people to throw away their older but still perfectly good computers.
That is a very big part of why Windows 10 is still so popular. If you have a computer from six or seven years ago that you've upgraded once or twice, it's probably still perfectly good. No reason to throw it away for Windows 11 when you can keep on trucking with Windows 10.
Of course they can't. It's gotten so bad they ship their TVs with antivirus on them. The only reason anyone uses their Android phones is they have the best hardware, most of their add-on software is just useless gimmicks people turn off. Tizen on watches was never going to work. Apple has a large enough ecosystem to attract app developers. Google has a large enough ecosystem to attract app developers. Samsung does not. Smartest thing they could do now is shut down their remaining software development. Ship the TVs with vanilla Google OS like LG, strip the bloatware off their phones, etc. They would lose face but their products would become way better.
I know, right? This seems so fucking obvious to me. Maybe I'm just old school, but I still believe if you come out with a new product and it sucks you should pull it from shelves and go back to the older better one that people liked before you drive all your customers away.
That doesn't seem to be the attitude of modern tech tho, SOP now seems to be if you come up with a new version and it sucks and everybody hates it, you double down, keep telling people why it's actually better and your customers don't know what they want and refuse to change course until either you fix it or all your customers leave. This apparently is better in some way. Not sure how, but most of the companies seem to be doing it.
My thought exactly. If this was back in like 2010, it would be a real oh shit moment, The key to the kingdom has been leaked. Now I don't think anybody really cares other than SEO spammers who will game the system even more than they already are.
Google search is crap and has been crap for some time. Not sure any others are better. But it started going downhill with the Google Plus social network, when they removed "+" as a search operator so you could better search for 'Google+' that was the first time they messed with Search to further some other business goal. It wasn't the last time. Back when Google was good, they publicly said their goal was to get you off their site as fast as possible. Now the results reek of engagement algorithm bullshit.
50% more energy so it can tell me to superglue my pizza together and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge? Not seeing the value.
There should be an AI-free 'eco' option... I can live without the AI.