Not for the corporations that make money off of extorting a basic necessity from poor people! Won’t someone think of the corporations?

I know you’ve probably heard this about a dozen times by now, but…

Don’t join Facebook.

They track everything they can about you, down to how long you spend looking at something on your screen. I’m fairly certain they listen to what’s going on around you if you put the app on your phone. An ad for something I’ve mentioned in passing has popped up on my feed shortly later too many times to be a coincidence.

They follow you around on your browser, too. They know what you shop for. It’s all specially tailored to sell you their ads.

I keep an account to stay in touch with my family, and it’s appalling how much more information they get from you than any other app. Not to mention the heavy prevalence of MAGA hats and I’ll-kill-you-before-I-consider-your-opinion conservatives.

Instagram isn’t much better, but at least the people there are nicer.

Anyone reading this thread and genuinely interested in it should go listen to the dollop podcast. It’s American history, mostly between the 1500’s and now. But the different episodes they do are stuffed full of this kind of faulty logic from the past.

Look into the death of George Washington. His doctor responded to what could have been a mild cold by taking a liter of blood 4 separate times from him. Washington very well could have recovered if he was just left alone.

Oh, and the doctor somewhat realized his mistake and tried to put some of the blood back after(!) Washington expired, with the logic that if blood loss killed him giving it back should revive him.

So yeah. Pumping blood back into a dead man. That was done on the founding president of the United States.

Was listening to an American history podcast (the dollop) about the radium girls. They wore uranium infused lipstick because it glowed and they thought it was cute. They licked their fingers regularly to help apply uranium dust to things.

While their male supervisors were wearing full lead suits totally for no reason and let those girls do that.

Many of them lost their jaws. There was a suit filed that they won, but every single one of those girls died before they could collect the money.

The suit led to a law establishing workers’ safety rights, so it wasn’t all bad. But that law was definitely written in those girls’ blood.

My argument was that you can’t claim the moral high ground based on legality alone. I understand that nuance exists in the context, but moral high ground does not come from whether or not it’s legal.

I see what you’re getting at, but I think ‘moral high ground’ might not be the phrase you’re looking for.

Laws and morals are explicitly different. That’s why juries exist, so that a law may be put against the morals of a situation and the morals may prevail if need be.

Breaking the law isn’t necessarily immoral. It’s just illegal. So it isn’t like someone breaking the law is seeking to take the moral high ground in the first place, nor does that mean that someone who only ever follows the law always has the moral high ground. Lawful-evil does exist.

Maybe that’s the point. Unity caves immediately to the big lawyers and says “Sorry guys, we tried. Looks like all you little studios will have to pay up after all. Blame Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft”

I bought my oneplus 10 pro for sub $500 during a sale, and it has usb3.1. It’s last year’s model. You can get a pixel 6 with usb3.1 for less than $400. A Galaxy S21 has usb3.2, less than $500.

That’s almost every major android brand for $500 or less with 3.1 or better. The cheapest you can buy an iPhone 15, the one with usb2.0, is $800. What are you on about?

And soon, the carrier pigeon breeders will start tagging them with tracking chips…

Easy to say if you have several thousand burning a hole in your pocket.

Modus operandi for apple, too. “Get one because everybody has one” is one of the biggest marketing tools they push to sell their tech.

I’m not disagreeing with you. But the trade off is price. When you pay $2.5k more for a phone/tablet/laptop/desktop/watch/tv/speaker setup than you would for all of those things individually with industry standard features, they freakin better work together seamlessly.

Well designed and beautiful are two very subjective words for a discussion about objective differences.

I think that iphones are bland and kind of ugly for their caliber of technology. My last phone was the sage-back pixel 5 and I absolutely loved the design of that thing. The thing is, looks alone don’t constitute superiority.

I’m on the same page as you. It should be noted, however, that the kind of exclusivity you find repulsive actually works as a selling point for apple. It’s like, “Buy an iPhone! All your friends have them and you want to be able to talk to them right?” Peer pressure is a hell of a drug

I’m personally so tired of defending android to iPhone users. At the end of the day, it’s personal preference. IPhone is a walled-garden, curated and closed system that has features that are more uniform and well developed across the whole brand. Android has custom options for a huge variety of things that iPhone can’t match simply due to the nature of android’s open system. Android also tends to have significantly cheaper modern options, but iPhone tends to get OS and security updates much longer.

They both have huge market shares and neither can fill the other’s niche well enough to bump the other out. It’s not a competition, it’s just preference. Is it really such a big deal to point out that teens prefer one over the other? Once the next generation comes to an age of owning phones, we might just find that they find iphones lame and old and swap back to android. That’s kind of how generations tend to work.

Get a different keyboard, bro. Changing your default keyboard has been a thing on Android for like a decade and a half. Even so, most keyboards these days have a shortcut that’s basically ‘long press the wrong prediction -> don’t predict again’

Also, the android settings menu has had a search function for a few years now. You don’t have to know where to look to find most things.

Politicians in America have people on both sides hypnotized to equate socialism with bolshevik communism. That’s a major reason why we can’t move any meaningful distance left as a country, but we can move right at the blink of an eye. Socialism is a dirty word here, for no other reason than the fact that big corporations pay politicians to demonize it.

Me either. I left when they rolled that rule out in South America last year to test it. Netflix forgot that we went to them because cable was extorting us. As long as the internet remains a thing, there will always be other options.

“Become profitable” is just their stated goal.

I think that their actual goal is to look profitable for the upcoming ipo so that the CEOs can cash a fat check and leave. They likely don’t care about what happens after that.

So the “become profitable while simultaneously destroying everything that made it valuable” platitude is more like “they’re cutting down the tree for the wood without thinking about the squirrels”