Threads for cooler_ranch
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I don’t see anything on the screen with Firefox Beta, and trying Edge gets it to load, but the framerate is measured in seconds per frame. What am I missing?
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It’s Mario, but goopy.
I was able to find a video from an earlier version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5d7G0tgMhA
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singpolyma
5 years ago
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ActivityPub (decentralized social web standard) is now a W3C Recommendation
Ugh. ActivityPub makes me sad – we have so many good, deployed solutions to 80%+ of the social networking stuff, and ActivityPub just ignores all prior art (including prior art by its creators) and does everything from scratch.
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Why in your opinion did ActivityPub “make it” while others have failed?
Disclosure: I contributed to Rstat.us for a while.
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How do you mean “make it”? You mean mastodon? Because mastodon got popular before it had implemented any ActivityPub, so that’s unrelated :)
OStatus and IndieWeb tech are still the most widely-deployed non-mastodon (and are partially supported by mastodon as well)
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OStatus mostly described a best practice for using other standards in a way that created a decentralized social network – so it never really needed standardization on its own. That + that the people behind it moved towards a next generation standards instead, eg. identi.ca moving to pump.io
IndieWeb though is getting standardized by the very same group as has published this recommendation and eg. WebMention and Micropub has been recommendations longer than this one even.
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Atom, PubSuHubBub (now WebSub), and Webmention are all standards with various bodies
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PubSuHubBub
Seeing some silly things they did with regard to best practices I can’t really say I feel bad about this. Things like using GETs instead of POSTs (if memory serves correctly) because of legacy stupid decisions.
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Yeah, Webmention was a W3C Recommendation for quite a while now even. I still don’t like how W3C standardized two ways of doing roughly the same thing…
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In what way did you think that ActivityPub did not learn from OStatus?
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so many good, deployed solutions to 80%+ of the social networking stuff
For example?
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pleroma
Pleroma either currently supports or is very close to fully supporting AP, and was a pretty important goal from the outset.
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I think I follow you then :) Thanks for writing Pleroma <3
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Mastodon makes me so hopeful. I hope IPFS becomes a bigger protocol too.
Not sure what we can do to limit this meaningfully outside of changing existing laws that apply to trusts to apply to these giants.
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I think a poor-man’s version would be calculating the levenshtein distance (or some kind of edit distance) between the two strings and dividing that by the length of one of the strings.
You don’t get the exact results, but the index falls along how “interesting” the author found the anagrams. It looks like anything under 0.66 is pretty boring.
Here are how some of the pairs match up on the indexing:
zolotink zolotnik : 0.25
cholecystoduodenostomy duodenocholecystostomy : 0.5909
cat act : 0.6666
cinematographer megachiropteran : 0.7333
notaries senorita : 0.75
clitoridean directional : 0.8181
earringed grenadier : 0.8888
[edited for newlines]
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One article–the originating report, which is well-written and gives a lot of information–is more than enough coverage here. We don’t really need pile-on talking heads or navelgazing.
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I really don’t like how you often try to speak for everyone here. I am not a part of your “we.”
I can definitely see how the grandparent post could be grating, but I didn’t read it as speaking for others. Just stating his opinion about what is best for the community (“we”).
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I’d venture that it is a pretty well-established convention when writing and speaking to an audience to prefer the first-person to the second. I’ve had no end of confusion and troubles when people have conflated my use of “you (the general audience)” with “you (particular person I’m addressing)”.
Sorry if that ruffles your feathers, but in my experience it’s the least unpalatable option.
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Why isn’t the least unpalatable option being direct (using “I” instead of “we”)? What you’re saying in the original comment is that you don’t want to see this kind of article posted here. (A reasonable opinion). You also think that the community at large would benefit from not having these articles posted. (Another reasonable opinion).
Those two statements come across very different from, “We don’t really need…”, which talks for the community instead of about the community.
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I disagree. I think phrases like “I think …” or “In my opinion” are important delineations between something that is expressed as an opinion and something that is expressed as fact. I think it’s really important to know when someone is speaking about an opinion and when someone is speaking about facts. In my experience, facts often correspond to assumptions or context in conversations that are taken for granted as things that are true even if they aren’t.
(It’s not about what’s actually opinion or fact. It’s about what someone believes is opinion vs fact. If the language makes it easier to identify what a person believes, then communication becomes much easier in my own experience.)
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People, as a rule of thumb, don’t want the unvarnished truth. They will, especially given the opportunity to do so anonymously (as is the case with our current flagging system), viciously attack anybody who points out their own failings, who questions whatever moral and cultural touchstones they hold dear, who talks repeatedly about something they don’t wish to hear, and so on and so forth.
What you consider “dishonest rhetoric” is something that is pretty useful when addressing problems, in forums or the workplace or wherever. If I have a problem, you may not be able to help and may not even give a shit. If we have a problem, there’s something that we can both work on and that we both have some stake in the resolution of.
Similarly, here, every time “I (angersock)” make a statement about how Lobsters should act, it’s easy to just see “okay okay angersock’s ranting whatever”. If it’s stated as “we (the Lobsters community subset that agrees with angersock)” it becomes both an acknowledgement that whatever is being pointed out may have interest beyond one user’s personal preference and an opportunity to discuss things for those not in the subset.
Plus, it’s just plain impolite to go on and on about “I this, I that, I the other thing”. One ends up sounding like a tinpot dictator or puffed-up jerk.
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We definitely need more people using the “we need” form over the “I need” form. It shifts the discussion away from a conflict of interests to a conflict of beliefs and values. Or at least I believe so.
It is only useful to you. Only you gain something from pulling the entire community into the problems you have with this post.
Only because angersock has the interests of the community on his mind.
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I’m not sure I get your point even after you elaborated it. If you’re not interested in further discussion, why did you even post a comment, which also can be interpreted as “pile-on talking”? If you find this article boring, why does that make it inappropriate for lobste.rs?
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If you’re not interested in further discussion, why did you even post a comment, which also can be interpreted as “pile-on talking”
That’s referring to other articles saying the same thing or related things–our own commentary (mine here being somewhat meta in nature) is a different kettle of fish. :)
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Blogposts can contain comments about other blogposts too. I see neither a difference nor a problem. Arguably this submission isn’t particularly interesting or contains new points, but saying “we don’t need it” is speaking for other people (as /u/Gracana pointed out) and something the voting system is supposed to answer.
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The voting system is prey to all of the normal issues of democracy and mob rule, and unless people are willing to go out and occasionally make posts articulating policy alternatives and standards (even at the risk of downvotes and argument) one cannot expect any better outcome than “ooh shiny, upvote–oooh mean, flag–oh thing i don’t understand, ignore or random”. This has been borne out time and time again on other aggregators.
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The part of this post that seems to add something is the degree to which he shifts from discussing the specific allegation and rants about the industry as a whole and the way it protects bad people all the way up the food chain.
Agree or disagree, this does feel like it is adding on to the original report rather than repeating it. Naturally, to make such a rant stand alone, he has to introduce the subjet, which is repetitive at this moment when it is dominating the social media discourse.
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Why not?
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Assuming that you’re asking this in good faith, here are the basic problems I have:
- The original article was long and detailed problems that many of us may have and may yet experience in our work. For people who want to manage, it is an informative read on things not to do to reports. For employees, it is a solid example to point to if you start getting gaslit or made to feel uncomfortable. For business owners, it shows some interesting ways that HR can be used and how bad middle-management strife can ruin a culture. There’s a lot to be learned.
- In direct contrast, this sort of shallow talking point (summed up as “stop buying things from bad people, even though the SV culture has normalized their behavior. staaaaahp.”) isn’t going to really change our daily practices in any meaningful way beyond the villain of the week.
- Even the original article is basically hearsay until corroborated and sourced. If we have multiple submissions covering the same thing, it creates additional noise to whatever weak signal was already present. In an age where everybody is complaining about fake news, maybe we shouldn’t be part of the problem.
- Duplicate submissions on the same fragment discussion across multiple threads, increase cognitive load for users and mods (“Is this covering the same points? I’ll have to read it and find out ughhh”), and displace other stories that could be more useful to everyone else (not a huge problem here right now, but if you look at the constant churn of things on other sites where people submit the same news stories it most emphatically becomes so.)
- News submissions are the mindkiller, because their core value is in novelty (“Have you heard about <X>?!”) instead of quality, longevity, or actionability. Seldom, seldom, will news submissions either be downvoted (because they tickle the “oh hey nifty we should share” part of the nerd brain) or something that impacts our daily lives as practitioners (as an example here, because few if any of us work at Uber, fewer still in upper management, and generally it devolves into me-too me-too signalling “oh this is awful upvote for solidarity).
I’ve got various other reasons, but those are probably enough for you to get the gist.
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In direct contrast, this sort of shallow talking point (summed up as “stop buying things from bad people, even though the SV culture has normalized their behavior. staaaaahp.”) isn’t going to really change our daily practices in any meaningful way beyond the villain of the week.
What you’re trying to say here is “No ethical consumption under capitalism”.
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Assuming that I parse you correctly as having this viewpoint, and further assuming that I’ll agree with it for discussions sake–my complaint becomes pretty obvious: there is no real way to opt out of capitalism in any meaningful way for the vast majority of us.
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Can you explain that further? Why can’t you opt out of capitalism? Capitalism doesn’t force people to engage with it just by virtue of the fact that it exists; you’re just usually better off if you do. You can feel free to join a commune or go live in the woods or something; your biggest barrier will be that the government might still expect money from you. If your answer is “because I want a high standard of living”, then yes, that’s why everyone else chooses to interact with capital markets as well.
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Capitalism is implemented as a universal/global system and is defended and further imposed by the capitalists themselves. At this point, capital controls (ostensibly) the whole world. Any state that attempts to opt out of capitalism also receives stiff retaliation and punishment, typically enforced by the United States.
When kept under some form of social/democratic control, capital markets can be harnessed to better the lives of society at large. However, that benefit is only through collective intervention and not a property of capitalism itself.
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Any state that attempts to opt out of capitalism also receives stiff retaliation and punishment,
It’s not really critical to my argument, but I’d like to point out that the language you’re using has connotations of voluntary withdrawal, despite the fact that a state “opting out of capitalism” involves forcibly preventing all of its subjects from freely engaging in market interactions. It’s also usually synonymous with drastically lowered quality of life, famine, etc., so there’s a very obvious humanitarian case for preventing states from “opting out” of the free market.
However, what I asked about wasn’t states, but individuals. Why can’t you, as an individual, opt out of capitalism? I’m willing to grant that government tax and bureaucratic requirements make it practically challenging, but that’s not capitalism’s fault.
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I think that the OP’s comments linking Trumpism and Uberism are original and deserve discussion.
Since Paul Graham’s mid-2000s essays Made Startups Great Again and convinced a bunch of well-intended, smart, middle-class nerds to pile into business programming not knowing that that’s what they were doing, we’ve had a win-at-any-ethical-cost business culture (Uberism) that has expanded beyond tech and taken over the whole corporate world. And, as that movement grows, we also see a win-at-any-ethical-cost political movement with no coherent ideology beyond “When you’re a star, you can do anything.”
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I was complaining recently about the lack of strong types in Elixir (which runs on the Erlang VM). I love purescript, so I would love to give this a try.
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This might be a naive question, but have you looked into or used Dialyzer? It’s a tool that does type analysis and it ships with Erlang–can be used easily with Elixir. While it’s not as air-tight as a statically typed language could offer, Dialyzer can help your type-checking conscience rest a little easier.
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Capitalism is killing us in a very literal sense by destroying our habitat at an ever accelerating rate. The fundamental idea of needing growth and having to constantly invent new things to peddle leads to ever more disposable products, that are replaced for the sake of being replaced. There’s been very little actual innovation happening in the phone space. The vendors are intentionally building devices using the planned obsolescence model to force the upgrade cycle.
The cancer of consumerism affects pretty much every aspect of society, we’ve clear cut unique rain forests and destroyed millions of species we haven’t even documented so that we can make palm oil. A product that causes cancer, but that’s fractionally cheaper than other kinds of oil. We’ve created a garbage patch the size of a continent in the ocean. We’re poisoning the land with fracking. The list is endless, and it all comes down to the American ethos that making money is a sacred right that trumps all other concerns.
One can get into a big debate about this, but the concept of externalities has existed for a long time and specifically addresses these concerns. Products do not cost what they should when taken their less tangible environment impact into account. It’s somewhat up to the reader to decide if the inability of society to take those into account is capitalism’s fault, or just human nature, or something else. I live in a country that leans much more socialist than the US but is unequivocally a capitalist country and they do a better job of managing these externalities. And China is not really capitalistic in the same way the US is but is a pretty significant polluter.
Indeed, it’s not the fault of the economic system (if you think Capitalistic societies are wasteful, take a look at the waste and inefficiency of industry under the USSR). If externalities are correctly accounted for, or to be safe, even over-accounted for by means of taxation or otherwise, the market will work itself out. If the environmental cost means the new iPhone costs $2000 in real costs, Apple will work to reduce environmental cost in order to make an affordable phone again and everyone wins. And if they don’t, another company will figure it out instead and Apple will lose.
Currently, there is basically no accounting for these externalities, and in some cases (although afaik not related to smart phones), there are subsidies and price-ceiling regulations and subsidies that actually decreases the cost of some externalities artificially and are worse for the environment than no government intervention at all.
The easy example of this is California State water subsidies for farmers. Artificially cheap water for farmers means they grow water-guzzling crops that are not otherwise efficient to grow in arid parts of the state, and cause environmental damage and water shortage to normal consumers. Can you imagine your local government asking you to take shorter showers and not wash your car, when farmers are paying 94% less than you to grow crops that could much more efficiently be grown in other parts of the country? That’s what happens in California.
Step 1 and 2 are to get rid of the current subsidies and regulations that aggravate externalities and impose new regulation/taxes that help account for externalities.
I have talked to a factory owner in china. He said China is more capitalist than the USA. He said China prioritizes capital over social concerns.
Ok? I can talk to lots of people with lots of opinions. That doesn’t make it true.
It’s just impressive that a capitalist would say. If China was even remotely communist, don’t you find it interesting that most capitalists who made deals with China seem ok helping ‘the enemy’ become the second largest economy in the world? I prefer to believe the simpler possibility that China is pretty darn capitalist itself.
I did not say China was not capitalist, I said it’s not in the same way as the US. There is a lot more state involvement in China.
Is your claim then that state involvement means you have more pollution? Maybe I’m confused by what you were trying to get at, sorry :-/
No, I was pointing out that different countries are doing capitalism differently and some of them are better at dealing with externalities and some of them are worse. With the overall point being that capitalism might be the wrong scapegoat.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
I think the consumer could be blamed more than capitalism, the companies make what sells, the consumers are individuals who buy products that hurt the environment, I think that it is changing though as people become more aware of these issues, they buy more environmentally friendly products.
You’re blaming the consumer? I’d really recommend watching Century of the Self. Advertising has a massive impact and the mass of humans are being fed this desire for all the things we consume.
I mean, this really delves into the deeper question of self-awareness, agency and free will, but I really don’t think most human beings are even remotely aware.
Engineers, people on Lobster, et. al do really want standard devices. Fuck ARM. Give me a god damn mobile platform. Microsoft for the love of god, just publish your unlock key for your dead phone line so we can have at least one line of devices with UEFI+ARM. Device tree can go die in a fire.
The Linux-style revolution of the 2000s (among developers) isn’t happening on mobile because every device is just too damn different. The average consumer could care less. Most people like to buy new things, and we’re been indoctrinated to that point. Retailers and manufactures have focus groups geared right at delivering the dopamine rush.
I personally hate buying things. When my mobile stopped charging yesterday and the back broke again, I thought about changing it out. I’ve replaced the back twice already and the camera has spots on the sensor under the lenses.
I was able to get it charging when I got home on a high amp USB port, so instead I just ordered yet another back and a new camera (I thought it’d be a bitch to get out, but a few YouTube videos show I was looking at the ribbon wrong and it’s actually pretty easy to replace).
I feel bad when I buy things, but it took a lot of work to get to that point. I’ve sold or given away most of my things multiple times to go backpacking, I run ad block .. I mean if everyone did what I’d did, my life wouldn’t be sustainable. :-P
We are in a really solidly locked paradigm and I don’t think it can simply shift. If you believe the authors of The Dictators Handbook, we literally have to run our of resources before the general public and really push for dramatically different changes.
We really need more commitment to open standards mobile devices. The Ubuntu Edge could have been a game changer, or even the Fairphone. The Edge never got funded and the Fairphone can’t even keep parts sourced for their older models.
We need a combination of people’s attitudes + engineers working on OSS alternatives, and I don’t see either happening any time soon.
Edit: I forgot to mention, Postmarket OS is making huge strides into making older cellphones useful and I hope we see more of that too.
I second the recommendation for The Century of the Self. That movie offers a life-changing change of perspective. The other documentaries by Curtis are also great and well worth the time.
Century of the Self was a real eye opener. Curtis’s latest documentary, HyperNormalisation, also offers very interesting perspectives.
Capitalism, by it’s very nature, drives companies to not be satisfied with what already sells. Companies are constantly looking to create new markets and products, and that includes creating demand.
IOW, consumers aren’t fixed actors who buy what they need; they are acted upon to create an ever increasing number of needs.
There are too many examples of this dynamic to bother listing.
It’s also very difficult for the consumer to tell exactly how destructive a particular product is. The only price we pay is the sticker price. Unless you really want to put a lot of time into research it is hard to tell which product is better for the environment.
It’s ridiculous to expect everyone to be an expert on every supply chain in the world, starting right from the mines and energy production all the way to the store shelf. That’s effectively what you are requiring.
I’m saying this as a very conscious consumer. I care about my carbon footprint, I don’t buy palm oil, I limit plastic consumption, I limit my consumption overall, but it’s all a drop in the ocean and changes nothing. There are still hundreds of compounds in the everyday items I buy whose provenance I know nothing about and which could be even more destructive. Not to mention that manufacturers really don’t want you to know, it’s simply not in their interest.
You’re creating an impossible task and setting people up to fail. It is not the answer.
“It’s ridiculous to expect everyone to be an expert on every supply chain in the world, starting right from the mines and energy production all the way to the store shelf. That’s effectively what you are requiring.”
I don’t think it is what they’re requiring and it’s much easier than you describe. Here’s a few options:
People who are really concerned about this at a level demanding much sacrifice to avoid damaging the environment should automatically avoid buying anything they can’t provably trust by default. The Amish are a decent example that avoids a lot of modern stuff due to commitment to beliefs.
There’s groups that try to keep track of corporate abuse, environmental actions, and so on of various companies. They maintain good and bad lists. More people that supposedly care can both use them and join them in maintaining that data. It would be split among many people to lessen each’s burden. Again, avoid things by default until they get on the good lists. Ditch them if they get on the bad ones.
Collectively push their politicians for laws giving proper labels, auditing, etc that help with No 2. Also, push for externalities to be charged back to the companies somehow to incentivize less-damaging behavior.
Start their own businesses that practice what they preach. Build the principles into their charters, contracts, and so on. Niche businesses doing a better job create more options on the good lists in No 2. There’s entrepreneurs doing this.
So, not all-knowing consumers as you indicated. Quite a few strategies that are less impossible.
@ac specifically suggested consumer choice as the solution to environmental issues, and that’s what I disagreed with.
Your point number 3 is quite different from the other three, and it’s what I would suggest as a far more effective strategy than consumer choice (along with putting pressure on various corporations). As an aside, I still wouldn’t call it easy - it’s always a hard slog.
Your points 1, 2 and 4 still rely on consumer choice, and effectively boil down to: either remove yourself from modern civilisation, or understand every supply chain in the world. I think it’s obvious that the first choice is neither desirable nor “much easier” for the vast majority of people (and I don’t think it’s the best possible solution). The second is impossible, as I said before.
“consumer choice as the solution to environmental issues”
edit to add: consumer choice eliminated entire industries worth of companies because they wanted something else. It’s only worsened environmental issues. That’s probably not an argument against consumer choice so much as in favor of them willing to sacrifice the environment overall to get the immediate things they want.
“either remove yourself from modern civilisation, or understand every supply chain in the world”
This is another false dichotomy. I know lots of people who are highly-connected with other people but don’t own lots of tech or follow lots of fads. In many cases, they seem to know about them enough to have good conversations with people. They follow what’s going on or are just good listeners. Buying tons of gadgets or harmful things isn’t necessary for participation. You can get buy with a lot less than average middle or upper class person.
What you said is better understood as a spectrum to be in like most things. Lots of positions in it.
I think we might actually be mostly in agreement, but we’re talking past each other a bit.
I agree with this. But even when consumer choice is applied with environmental goals in mind, I believe its effect is very limited, simply because most people won’t participate.
Yeah, but it was derived from your points :) I was just trying to hammer the point that consumer choice isn’t an effective solution.
Totally. I’ve been doing that for a long time: avoiding gadgets and keeping the stuff I need (eg a laptop) as long as I can.
“But even when consumer choice is applied with environmental goals in mind, I believe its effect is very limited, simply because most people won’t participate.”
Oh OK. Yeah, I share that depressing view. Evidence is overwhelmingly in our favor on it. It’s even made me wonder if I should even be doing the things I’m doing if so few are doing their part.
The blame rests on the producers, not on the consumers.
Consumers are only able to select off of the menu of available products, so to speak. Most of the choices everyday consumers face are dictated by their employers and whatever is currently available to make it through their day.
No person can reasonably trace the entire supply chain for every item they purchase, and could likely be impossible even with generous time windows. Nor would I want every single consumer to spend their non-working time to tracing these chains.
Additionally, shifting this blame to the consumer creates conditions where producers can charge a premium on ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ products. Only consumers with the means to consume ‘ethically’ are able to do so, and thus shame people with less money for being the problem.
The blame falls squarely on the entities producing these products and the states tasked with regulating production. There will be no market-based solution to get us out of the climate catastrophe, and we certainly can’t vote for a green future with our dollars.
That’s not true even though it seems it is. The consumers’ past behavior and present statements play a major role in what suppliers will produce. Most of what you see today didn’t happen overnight. There were battles fought where quite a few companies were out there doing more ethical things on supply side. They ended up bankrupt or with less marketshare while the unethical companies got way ahead through better marketing of their products. With enough wealth accumulated, they continued buying the brands of the better companies remaking them into scumbag companies, too, in many cases.
For instance, I strongly advise against companies developing privacy- or security-oriented versions of software products that actually mitigate risks. They’ll go bankrupt like such companies often always did. The companies that actually make lots of money apply the buzzwords customers are looking for, integrate into their existing tooling (often insecure), have features they demand that are too complex to secure, and in some cases are so cheap the QA couldn’t have possibly been done right. That has to be private or secure for real against smart black hats. Not going to happen most of the time.
So, I instead tell people to bake cost-effective security enhancements and good service into an otherwise good product advertised for mostly non-security benefits. Why? Because that’s what demand-side responds to almost every time. So, the supply must provide it if hoping to make waves. Turns out, there’s also an upper limit to what one can achieve in that way, too. The crowds’ demands will keep creating obstacles to reliability, security, workers’ quality of life, supplier choice, environment… you name it. They mostly don’t care either where suppliers being honest about costs will be abandoned for those delivering to demand side. In face of that, most suppliers will focus on what they think is in demand across as many proven dimensions as possible.
Demand and supply side are both guilty here in a way that’s closely intertwined. It’s mostly demand side, though, as quite a few suppliers in each segment will give them whatever they’re willing to pay for at a profit.
I agree with a lot of your above point, but want to unpack some of this.
Software security is a strange case to turn to since it has less direct implications on the climate crisis (sure anything that relies on a datacenter is probably using too much energy) compared to the production of disposable, resource-intensive goods.
I parse this paragraph to read: we should blame consumers for buying what’s available and affordable, because suppliers are incapable of acting ethically (due to competition).
So should we blame the end consumer for buying a phone every two years and not the phone manufacturers/retailers for creating rackets of planned obsolescence?
And additionally, most suppliers are consumers of something else upstream. Virtually everything that reaches an end consumer has been consumed and processed several times over by suppliers above. The suppliers are guilty on both counts by our separate reasoning.
Blaming individuals for structural problems simply lets suppliers shirk any responsibility they should have to society. After all, suppliers have no responsibility other than to create profits. Suppliers’ bad behavior must be curtailed either through regulation, public education campaigns to affect consumption habits, or organizing within workplaces.
(As an aside, I appreciate your response and it’s both useful and stimulating to hear your points)
“I parse this paragraph to read: we should blame consumers for buying what’s available and affordable, because suppliers are incapable of acting ethically (due to competition).”
You added two words, available and affordable, to what I said. I left affordable off because many products that are more ethical are still affordable. Most don’t buy them anyway. I left availability off since there’s products appearing all the time in this space that mostly get ignored. The demand side not buying enough of what was and currently is available in a segment sends a message to suppliers about what they should produce. Especially if it’s consistent. Under vote with your wallet, we should give consumers their share of credit or blame for anything their purchasing decisions as a whole are supporting or destroying. That most won’t deliberately try to obtain an ethical supplier of… anything… supports my notion demand side has a lot to do with unethical activities of financially-successful suppliers.
For a quick example, there are often coops and farmers markets in lots of rural areas or suburban towns in them. There’s usually a segment of people who buy from them to support their style of operation and/or jobs. There’s usually enough to keep them in business. You might count Costco in that, too, where a membership fee that’s fixed cost gets the customers a pile of stuff at a promised low-markup and great service. There’s people that use credit unions, esp in their industry, instead of banks. There’s people that try to buy from nonprofits, public beneit companies, companies with good track record, and so on. There’s both a demand side (tiny) and suppliers responding to it that show this could become a widespread thing.
Most consumers on demand side don’t do that stuff, though. They buy a mix of necessities and arbitrary stuff from whatever supplier is lowest cost, cheapest, most variety, promoting certain image, or other arbitrary reasons. They do this so much that most suppliers, esp market leaders, optimize their marketing for that stuff. They also make more money off these people that let them put lots of ethical, niche players out of business over time. So, yeah, I’d say consumer demand being apathetic to ethics or long-term thinking is a huge part of the problem given it puts tens of billions into hands of unethical parties. Then, some of that money goes into politicians’ campaign funds so they make things even more difficult for those companies’ opponents.
“Blaming individuals for structural problems simply lets suppliers shirk any responsibility they should have to society.”
Or the individuals can buy from different suppliers highlighting why they’re doing it. Other individuals can start companies responding to that massive stated demand. The existing vendors will pivot their operations. Things start shifting. It won’t happen without people willing to buy it. Alternatively, using regulation as you mentioned. I don’t know how well public education can help vs all the money put into advertising. The latter seems more powerful.
“(As an aside, I appreciate your response and it’s both useful and stimulating to hear your points)”
Thanks. Appreciate you challenging it so I think harder on and improve it. :)
This is ignoring reality, removing cheaper options does not make the other options cheaper to manufacture. It is not shaming people.
You are also ignoring the fact that in a free country the consumers and producers are the same people. A dissatisfied consumer can become a producer of a new alternative if they see it as possible.
Exactly. The consumers could be doing more on issues like this. They’re complicit or actively contribute to the problems.
For example, I use old devices for as long as I can on purpose to reduce waste. I try to also buy things that last as long as possible. That’s a bit harder in some markets than others. For appliances, I just buy things that are 20 years old. They do the job and usually last 10 more years since planned obsolescence had fewer tricks at the time. ;) My smartphone is finally getting unreliable on essential functions, though. Bout to replace it. I’ll donate, reuse, or recycle it when I get new one.
On PC side, I’m using a backup whose age I can’t recall with a Celeron after my Ubuntu Dell w/ Core Duo 2 died. It was eight years old. Attempting to revive it soon in case it’s just HD or something simple. It’s acting weird, though, so might just become a box for VM experiments, fuzzing, opening highly-untrustworthy URLs or files, etc. :)
Which alternatives would make people happier to consume less – drive older cars, wear rattier clothing, and demand fewer exotic vacations? Because, really, that’s the solution to excessive use of the environment: Be happier with less.
Unfortunately, greed has been a constant of human nature far too long for capitalism to take the blame there.
Why do people want new cars, the latest fashions, and exotic vacations in the first place? If it’s all about status and bragging rights, then it’s going to take a massive cultural shift that goes against at least two generation’s worth of cultural programming by advertisers on the behalf of the auto, fashion and travel industries.
I don’t think consumerism kicked into high gear until after the end of World War II when modern advertising and television became ubiquitous, so perhaps the answer is to paraphrase Shakespeare:
OK, maybe killing them (or encouraging them to off themselves in the tradition of Bill Hicks) is overkill. Regardless, we should consider the possibility that advertising is nothing but private sector psyops on behalf of corporations, and should not be protected as “free speech”.
If there was an advertising exception for free speech, people would use it as an unprincipled excuse to ban whatever speech they didn’t like, by convincing the authorities to classify it as a type of advertising. After all, most unpopular speech is trying to convince someone of something, right? That’s what advertising fundamentally is, right?
Remember that the thing that Oliver Wendell Holmes called “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater” wasn’t actually shouting “fire” in an actual crowded theater - it was a metaphor he used to describe protesting the military draft.
I agree: there shouldn’t be an advertising exception on free speech. However, the First Amendment should only apply to homo sapiens or to organisms we might eventually recognize as sufficiently human to possess human rights. Corporations are not people, and should not have rights.
They might have certain powers defined by law, but “freedom of speech” shouldn’t be one of them.
IMO, Hedonistic adaptation is a problem and getting worse. I try to actively fight against it.
It would be a start if we designed cities with walking and public transportation in mind, not cars.
My neighborhood is old and walkable. I do shopping on foot (I have a bicycle but don’t bother with it). For school/work, take a single bus and a few minutes walking. Getting a car would be a hassle, I don’t have a place to park it, and I’d have to pay large annual fees for rare use.
Newer neighborhoods appear to be planned with the idea that you’ll need a car for every single task. “Residential part” with no shops at all, but lots of room for parking. A large grocery store with a parking lot. Even train stations with a large parking lot, but no safe path for pedestrians/cyclists from the nearby neighborhoods.
The new features on phones are so fucking stupid as well. People are buying new phones to get animated emojis and more round corners. It’s made much worse with phone OEMs actively making old phones work worse by slowing them down.
There has been no evidence to my knowledge that anyone is slowing old phones down. This continues to be an unfounded rumor
There’s also several Lobsters that have said Android smartphones get slower over time at a much greater rate than iPhones. I know my Galaxy S4 did. This might be hardware, software bloat, or whatever. There’s phones it’s happening on and those it isn’t in a market where users definitely don’t want their phones slowing down. So, my theory on Android side is it’s a problem they’re ignoring on purpose or even contributing to due to incentives. They could be investing money into making the platform much more efficient across devices, removing bloat, etc. They ain’t gonna do that.
In my experience, this tends to be 3rd party apps that start at boot and run all the time. Factory reset fixes it. Android system updates also make phones faster most of the time.
Hmm. I’ll try it since I just backed everything up.
I’m still using a Nexus 6 I got ~2.5 years ago. I keep my phone pretty light. No Facebook or games. Yet, my phone was getting very laggy. I wiped the cache (Settings -> Storage -> Cached data) and that seemed to help a bit, but overall, my phone was still laggy. It seemed to get really bad in my text messaging app (I use whatever the stock version is). I realized that I had amassed a lot of text messages over the years, which includes quite a lot of gifs. I decided to wipe my messages. I did that by installing “SMS Backup & Restore” and telling it to delete all of my text messages, since apparently the stock app doesn’t have a way to do this in bulk. It took at least an hour for the deletion to complete. Once it was done, my phone feels almost as good as new, which makes me really happy, because I really was not looking forward to shelling out $1K for a Pixel.
My working theory is that there is some sub-optimal strategy in how text messages are cached. Since I switch in and out of the text messaging app very frequently, it wouldn’t surprise me if I was somehow frequently evicting things from memory and causing disk reads, which would explain why the lag impacted my entire phone and not just text messages. But, this is just speculation. And a factory reset would have accomplished the same thing (I think?), so it’s consistent with the “factory reset fixes things” theory too.
My wife is still on a Nexus 5 (great phone) and she has a similar usage pattern as me. Our plan is to delete her text messages too and see if that helps things.
Anyway… I realize this basically boils down to folk remedies at this point, but I’m just going through this process now, so it’s top of mind and figured I’d share.
I’ll be damned. I baked up and wiped the SMS, nothing else. The phone seems like it’s moving a lot snappier. Literally a second or two of delay off some things. Some things are still slow but maybe app just is. YouTube always has long loading time. The individual videos load faster now, though.
Folk remedy is working. Appreciate the tip! :)
w00t! Also, it’s worth mentioning that I was experiencing much worse delay than a second or two. Google Nav would sometimes lock up for many seconds.
Maps seems OK. I probably should’ve been straight-up timing this stuff for better quality of evidence. Regardless, it’s moving a lot faster. Yours did, too. Two, strong anecdotes so far on top of factory reset. Far as we know, even their speed gains might have come from SMS clearing mostly that the reset did. Or other stuff.
So, I think I’m going to use it as is for a week or two to assess this change plus get a feel for a new baseline. Then, I’ll factory reset it, reinstall some apps from scratch, and see if that makes a difference.
Awesome. Please report back. :-)
I’ll try to remember to. I’m just still stunned it wasn’t 20 Chrome tabs or all the PDF’s I download during the day. Instead, text messages I wasn’t even using. Of all things that could drag a whole platform down…
Sms is stored on the SIM card, right? That’s probably not got ideal I/O characteristics…
I thought the contacts were but messages were on phone. I’m not sure. The contacts being on there could have an effect. I’d have hoped they cached a copy of SIM contents onto in-phone memory. Yeah, SIM access could be involved.
Now, that’s fascinating. I don’t go in and out of text a lot but do have a lot of text messages. Many have GIF’s. There’s also at least two other apps that accumulate a lot of stuff. I might try wiping them. Btw, folk remedies feel kind of justified when we’re facing a complex, black-box system with nothing else to go on. ;)
Official from apple: https://www.apple.com/au/iphone-battery-and-performance/
They slow phones with older batteries but don’t show the user any indication that it can be fixed very cheaply by replacing the battery (Until after the recent outrage) and many of them will just buy a new phone and see it’s much faster.
Wow, so much to unpack here.
You said they slow old phones down. That is patently false. New versions of iOS are not made to run slowly on older model hardware.
Apple did not slow phones down with old batteries. They throttled the CPU of phones with failing batteries (even brand new ones!) to prevent the phone from crashing due to voltage drops. This ensured the phone was still functional even if you needed your phone in an emergency. Yes it was stupid there was no notification to the user. This is no longer relevant because they now provide notifications to the user. This behavior existed for a short period of time in the lifespan of the iPhone: less than 90 days between introduction of release with throttling and release with controls to disable and notifications to users.
Please take your fake outrage somewhere else.
In theory this affects new phones as well, but we know that as batteries grow older, they break down, hold less charge, and have a harder time achieving their design voltage. So in practice, this safety mechanism for the most part slows down older phones.
You claim @user545 is unfairly representing the facts by making Apple look like this is some evil ploy to increase turnover for their mobile phones.
However, given the fact that in reality this does mostly make older phones seem slower, and the fact that they put this in without ever telling anyone outside Apple and not allowing the user to check their battery health and how it affected the performance of their device, I feel like it requires a lot more effort not to make it look like an intentional decision on their part.
Sure, but if you have an old phone with OK batteries, then their code did not slow it down. So I think it is still more correct to say they slowed down those with bad batteries than those that were old even if most of those with bad batteries were also bad which really depended on phone’s use.
The difference is not just academic. For example I have “inherited” iPhone6 from my wife that still has a good battery after more than 2 years and performs fine.
It was in the release notes of that iOS release…
edit: additionally it was known during the beta period in December. This wasn’t a surprise.
Again, untrue. The 11.2 release notes make no mention of batteries, throttling, or power management. (This was the release where Apple extended the throttling to the 7 series of phones.) The 10.2.1 release notes, in their entirety, read thus:
That does not tell a reader that long-term CPU throttling is taking place, that it’s restricted to older-model iPhones only, that it’s based on battery health and fixable with a new battery (not a new phone), etc. It provides no useful or actionable information whatsoever. It’s opaque and frankly deceptive.
You’re right, because I was mistaken and the change was added in iOS 10.2.1, 1/23/2017
https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US
A user on the day of release:
src: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-releases-ios-10-2-1-with-bug-fixes-and-security-improvements.2028992/page-2#post-24225066
additionally in a press release:
Please stop trolling. It was absent from the release notes for a short period of time. It was fixing a known issue affecting users. Go away.
Did you even read the comment you are responding to? I quoted the 10.2.1 release notes in full–the updated version–and linked them too. Your response is abusive and in bad faith, your accusations of trolling specious.
This is untrue. They specifically singled out only older-model phones for this treatment. From the Apple link:
In other words, if you buy an iPhone 8 or X, no matter what condition the battery is in, Apple will not throttle the CPU. (In harsh environments–for example, with lots of exposure to cold temperatures–it’s very plausible that an 8 or X purchased new might by now have a degraded battery.)
You are making a claim without any data to back it up.
Can you prove that the batteries in the new iPhones suffer voltage drops when they are degraded? If they use a different design with more/smaller cells then AIUI they would be significantly less likely to have voltage drops when overall capacity is degraded.
But no, instead you continue to troll because you have a grudge against Apple. Take your crap elsewhere. It’s not welcome here.
You’re moving the goalposts. You claimed Apple is throttling the CPU of brand new phones. You were shown this to be incorrect, and have not brought any new info to the table. Your claim that the newer phones might be designed so as to not require throttling is irrelevant.
Please don’t accuse (multiple) people of trolling. It reflects poorly on yourself. All are welcome here.
You can buy a brand new phone directly from Apple (iPhone 6S) with a faulty battery and experience the throttling. I had this happen.
Google services update in the background even when other updates are disabled. Even if services updates are not intended to slow down the phone, they still do.
I think the consumer who pays for it is stupid.
It’s both. The user wants something new every year and OEMs don’t have anything worthwhile each year so they change things for the sake of change like adding rounded corners on the LCD or cutting a chunk out of the top. It makes it seem like something is new and worth buying when not much worthwhile has actually changed.
I think companies would always take the path of least resistance that works. If consumers didn’t fall for such stupid tricks the companies that did them would die off.
Yep. I guess humanity’s biggest achievement will be to terraform itself out of existence.
This planet does neither bargain nor care about this civilizations’ decision making processes. It will keep flying around the sun for a while, with or without humans on it.
I’m amazed by the optimism people display in response to pointing out that the current trajectory of climate change makes it highly unlikely that our grand-grand-children will ever be born.
s/American/humanYou can’t fix a problem if you misunderstand what causes it.
Ideology matters, and America has been aggressively promoting toxic capitalist ideology for many decades around the world. Humans aren’t perfect, but we can recognize our problems and create systems around us to help mitigate them. Capitalism is equivalent of giving a flamethrower to a pyromaniac.
If you want to hash out how “toxic capitalism” is ruining everything, that’s fine–I’m just observing that many other countries (China, Germany, India, Mozambique, Russia, etc.) have done things that, to me at least, dispel the notion of toxic capitalism as purely being American in origin.
And to avoid accusations of whataboutism, the reason I point those other countries out is that if a solution is put forth assuming that America is the problem–and hence itself probably grounded in approaches unique to an American context–it probably will not be workable in other places.
Nobody is saying that capitalism alone is the problem or that it’s unique to America. I was saying that capitalism is clearly responsible for a lot of harm, and that America promotes it aggressively.
Don’t backpedal. You wrote:
As to whether or not capitalism is clearly responsible for a lot of harm, it’s worth considering what the alternatives have accomplished.
Nobody is backpedaling here, and pointing at other failed systems saying they did terrible things too isn’t much of an argument.