Because everyone who likes how Apple has made it easy for users to manage their subscriptions and enjoy the overall user friendliness of their products we are thus cultists who just blindly do as we’re told. Maybe some people don’t agree with your views; that doesn’t make them cult followers for having a different opinion.
Edit: fuck I just got trolled. According to jillyboel profile we are all just fascists. And dang is preventing him from spamming his trolls on HN.
There's no law against you overpaying Apple when you could get more value by going off app. If you want to spend $14 for something that's $10 on Epics website, your welcome to do so. Epic will still get their $10, and you can gift Apple $4 for making it easy to cancel your future subscriptions.
Having a carbon tax seems to be the most fair way to combat climate change; unfortunately in practice it is political suicide. Australia had a carbon tax in 2011 and was quickly repealed in 2014. Likewise Canada also implemented such a tax in 2019 and was repealed this year prior to their election. People like to say that they want to help the environment, but when it comes time to vote they vote against such policies.
The Australian implementation had a lot of problems. Instead of being (something reasonably loophole free like) a tax levied on fossil fuel consumption it was a scheme that applied to the 500 largest emitters. These emitters then (crucially) estimated their own emissions minus offsets and paid tax on that.
The issue with this is that it creates a whole parallel (and largely fake) carbon accounting world. Fake estimates, fake offsets, a complex web of compensating subsidies - but real public money.
The field of carbon taxes is tricky because we can imagine simple schemes which handle a few scenarios in a fair way (ok, fuel! we know how to tax that) but once you start thinking about agriculture or construction you quickly get into complex estimation. You then end up with armies of carbon accountants who spend all day looking for loopholes and rorts.
Canada ultimately repealed the carbon tax because it was used as a political cudgel against the Liberal party that enacted it by the Conservative opposition in a sustained fashion for several years.
Which is dismaying because carbon taxes are a conservative solution to this problem and IIRC the first political entities to suggest the implementation of them in Canada were Conservative.
At the end of the day you have a nontrivial amount of the population, and many in positions of power who just outright deny environmental concerns and climate change as an existential threat.
They aren't going to approach this problem in good faith and it isn't obvious what the solution to their nefarious influence on policy should be.
1. The textbook implementation involves 3 parts: tax, rebate and tariff. Canada only did the first 2. They were in talks with Germany/EU to create a carbon tariff zone, but that never happens. Without the tariff the carbon tax is massively unfair to local producers.
2. The rebates were almost invisible. If they would have been cheques in the mail it would have had much more impact psychologically.
But I agree, the main problem was denialism and its use as a political cudgel. It should be hard to argue that carbon tax is stealing money when all of it is given back, but they successfully did that.
Broadly agreed. IMO the Canadian carbon tax had a marketing problem. It should have been called a Carbon Dividend. First, it would have replaced the negative connotation of the word "tax" with the positive connotation of the word "dividend -- and it would have been more accurate to how the program actually worked.
Second, and probably more important: the rebates showed up in your bank account with a description that didn't make the source obvious enough for laypeople. Had people seen monthly "CARBON DIVIDEND" credits in their bank accounts, they would have noticed.
It was never called carbon tax, but carbon pricing. It being knows as carbon tax was the result of of opposition efforts. The same efforts and results would have happened had it been called dividend or anything else.
What makes "rebate" terrible but "dividend" good? They accomplish the same thing in my mind. In fact I think calling it a "dividend" would be a pretty unconventional and contrived usage of that word.
I agree with avoiding AI generated opinion pieces, but in this case was this article really “LLM junk”? At the bottom it attributes:
> This article was written in collaboration with AI. The tool helped shape the words—but the questions, the direction, and the discomfort it carries are human.
If I take their disclaimer at face value it could mean that the author used AI to fix their grammar. Does this make their arguments invalid? If the author wanted to just post LLM junk then wouldn’t they omit the disclaimer altogether?
I think it’s important to attribute the use of AI when submitting an article, but I’d be less inclined to do so if readers would label my writing entirely as LLM generated. Maybe the only solution is to not use LLMs and just get gud at English.
> Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position.
This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They’re conditioned to feel outrage at whatever social media tells them to.
On the other hand, I don't think most citizens care deeply about most white-collar crimes unless they're directly impacted. If you don't own stocks, why care if the stock market crashes? Heck, it might even be fun to watch all those richies with spare money to invest turn suicidal en masse.
There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the resistance since 2017.
I don’t think it has anything to do with whether it was a white collar crime or not. If it was the other team that committed the crime there would be endless outrage from his supporters whether or not they understood the crime.
Look at the email server debacle, did the supporters understand what the crime was? Then Signalgate occurred and it’s crickets in the news now. Freedom of speech now means freedom to spread misinformation.
Haha, those yokels getting a laugh from all those richies losing money in the stock market, but jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds. And those coming tax cuts, who will be benefiting the most from those? Haha, the joke keeps getting funnier…
I understand what the email server thing was about. I also understand what the signal thing was about. I don't think it's possible to compare the two. One involved a device/software "helpfully" adding a phone number to group chat because it "helpfully" added the phone number to a contact that was not that contact's phone number.
The other one was a private email server, set up on purpose.
> jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds
Many of these people don't have meaningful retirement savings to lose. Or they're young enough that time in the market will expect to recover in 30 years.
People on HN have too much to lose. Who is willing to put their personal wealth and livelihood at risk to protest? We are witnessing the fall of democracy and the middle class will stand aside and let it happen.
I like that Nintendo recognises that the mouse is a superior input device, but their vertical joycon implementation seems more like a gimmick than an actually useful device. Balancing and sliding a vertical joycon doesn’t seem like it would be particularly stable. I foresee an actual traditionally shaped mouse sold by Nintendo in the future.
Wow, do you work for these ad-tech companies? You’re totally correct that I don’t want to be tracked and I’m happy that Apple is trying to protect me from these predatory companies. If “hurt[ing] the finances” of these privacy invasive companies is your definition of “companies they don’t like” please sign me up. It’s a bizarre thing to say any one actually wants to be tracked.
Why do responsible parents even allow their kids to play Roblox? Roblox is plagued by freemium style gambling games that are harmful to children. I’m interested to hear from HN parents why they feel Roblox is a safe environment for their kids. For further reading:
It's the networking effect. When all the other kids are playing a game, it's tough for some kids to be the only one not on it. Then it becomes one of their primary means of socializing. To a lot of kids, there are only two games in the universe: Roblox and Fortnite. That's all any of their peers play. They're not in getting into other ones where their friends aren't. It's the same as social networks.
Whether it's irresponsible to let kids play the same games as their friends is of course up to individual parents. I think it's possible to both be exposed to these types of traps and learn how to avoid them. They can't gamble without access to money from parents anyway.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I too have struggled with fighting these network effects. And I am disheartened to see so many parents who just blindly let their children play these harmful games. Then parents like us, who do see the negatives, feel forced to let our children play so that they don’t become ostracised from their social groups.
Fortnite is another excellent example of introducing gambling to minors with their sales of loot boxes, which the FTC has fined for $245M. Recently one of my children asked to play Genshin Impact because their classmates were all hooked on the game. I was firm in saying that I did not want my children to play gacha games which were designed to fool players into gambling on loot boxes and paying to win. Instead I tried to get them to switch to another game without these poisonous mechanics.
I’ve always been hesitant to be too forceful in getting children off these bad game platforms because I didn’t want to be labeled as the bad parent who took away their fun and in turn causing issues for my children at school. But I think my new strategy is just to buy their friends games to play that I feel are more constructive such as Minecraft instead of playing freemium mobile games.
I just hope more parents become aware of the negative and addictive aspects that these games pose to children. I strongly believe that one day we will look back at this industry and it will be compared to the tobacco industry and the harm it caused.
is there any harm in the games if the kids can't spend any money?
that is my solution. i allow my kids to play games, but i am not spending a single cent on them. their accounts never even get the ability to spend money, and so the kids can waste their time, but they can't gamble because they don't have access to money. i know my son tried to earn some robux, but he didn't get far and he focused on games that were playable without. eventually the kids lost interest...
same goes for genshin impact. we even played that together for a while. my oldest made it to level 48 out of 50 by just grinding. money was never an issue because he knew that i'd be firm on that, so he never asked. (i just asked him about that and he found that the benefits from spending money wouldn't really have been worth it. they didn't make the game much easier, so why bother?)
That is a good question, is there any harm to play freemium games if the kids aren’t allowed to spend any money?
My view is that freemium games tend to be engineered to hook people into playing for long periods of time. They use strategies similar to how casinos hook gamblers with behavioral conditioning giving intermittent rewards for long play time; basically timed dopamine hits.
So going back to your question regarding not spending money, even though they’re not spending money now they are being conditioned to find such behaviors in games as a norm and one day when they have a source of income themselves those dopamine hits are just a few dollars away.
But my kids are strong willed and they won’t fall for these tricks, you may say. That may be so but the fact that they’re participating in these game platforms is drawing in other children who may not have the same mental fortitude.
I guess my long winded rant is just to say that we shouldn’t be promoting these casino-like games. We should be promoting games that foster creativity and a sense of achievement without pay to win shortcuts and gambling for rewards.
It is a good question. YouTube is a similar phenomenon. Below that would be cable tv. Everything has been hyper optimized for attention/dopamine reward.
There are some folks who seem to only let kids watch old movies and old shows on DVD.
Also most kids are in school in person which may help mitigate the brain rot.
YouTube is another dangerous vehicle for toxic ideology affecting our children. If you’re not careful with censoring the algorithm it is very easy to fall into a self reinforcing loop of disinformation. And even after blocking a bad channel new ones sprout up daily like weeds. Parenting today has become very challenging.
How does that video show that Apple “should have made a car”? The video spends time explaining Xiaomi’s history, but spends no time justifying the clickbait title other than implying Xiaomi’s rise in stock price as the reason.
Edit: fuck I just got trolled. According to jillyboel profile we are all just fascists. And dang is preventing him from spamming his trolls on HN.