Q: What can we do to make life uncomfortable for a country invading another country.
A: Close fashion boutiques.
The fact that companies have sat idle all the way to the point at which nuclear threats are being discussed and still haven't closed is a moral abomination. We have directly seen how much of a motivator the prospect of being conscripted into the Russian army is, with people protesting and criticising the government that previously supported them, at least publically. There is a class of Russian who is comfortable, and they have no right to be. When they are uncomfortable, they will demand change. Westerners should not facilitate that comfort.
Personally I'm not convinced that continuing to take it out on the russian people in hopes that what, they voted Putin out, or stage a coup, is the best way forward. I'm sure there's been lots of thought put into this already. But like as an extreme, I don't hold the North Korean people, who by all accounts have a very poor standard of living, accountable for not overthrowing their government. I don't think that pushing Russia towards anything like that is good for anyone
It seems like you genuinely think that closing fashion boutiques will stop Putin from using a nuclear weapon, and you seem to be comparing the loss of these boutiques to being conscripted into the army.
The Russian people will do it themselves when their lives are stripped of everything that makes them worth living. The prospect of being held to their imperialist beliefs and conscripted is enough to turn nationalists against their own government. It can be done, it's merely a question of motivation.
Closing fashion boutiques isn’t going to do anything to “strip away everything that makes their lives worth living”. It’s a bizarre suggestion that a lack of access western clothing brands could have this effect.
There are in fact Russian clothing brands and tailors, who are just as good.
Sure. But you think that losing fashion boutiques is going to motivate them? I mean sure, it may supply an infinitessimal increment of motivation. Do you think it's really going to be enough to matter?
I bought a box of beyond meat burgers. They taste terrible compared to 4oz of beef with a little salt, and you have to keep them frozen and get the ones you want to cook out to thaw the night before.
I am probably not going to be able to finish the box.
Edit: Most veggie burgers that don’t pretend to be meat are better than these things in my opinion. They are in the uncanny valley.
You could just defrost them in the microwave in a few minutes.
I know much of America is incredibly excited to see these fail, but I'm a huge fan of Beyond Meat. I don't really care what the stock price is or how many other people are buying them, my freezer is always going to have a few Beyond burgers and sausages, they've become a staple for easy to cook meals for me.
Quite a few changes over the past few years have been reducing access to data that can be used for fingerprinting, and requiring apps to ask permission for access to user data.
This is squarely the fault of developers abusing the users trust.
This is just wrong. Some older APIs are simply insecure or inefficient for example, and of course there are things that apps must now ask permission for where they didn’t in the past.
Apple can’t make these things compatible, nor should they try.
That’s not a reason, unless the platform is changing in incompatible ways, which is exactly the problem, and a largely avoidable one, as other platforms demonstrate.
There are ways to still maintain API compatibility in that case (Windows does it all the time), and it’s also not a reason to require projects not affected by those changes to recompile with the newest Xcode version each year. I’m maintaining a Swift library/framework that doesn’t use any iOS APIs at all, only basic Swift standard library calls, and I still have to produce a new build each year from unchanged source code so that the library can be consumed with the new Xcode version. That’s just insane.
Testing with a new OS version shouldn’t (and usually doesn’t) require rebuilding the project. The need to rebuild is imposed primarily by the Xcode releases here, not by the OS. And that seems entirely unnecessary. Note that breaking compatibility and having to rebuild for new Xcode versions are two independent and orthogonal issues here.
I won't continue this discussion about maintaining compatibility. This is fundamentally a philosophical issue. I agree with the sibling comment that it is the job of an OS to provide stable APIs across versions. It requires some effort (as a long-term library maintainer, I'm very well aware of this), but it is not an impossibility at all.
New features in the API indirectly benefit the end users (once apps start using them). But those new features don't have to be breaking, and that part doesn't help the users at all. It does help Apple spend less resources on maintenance, though.
If I'm aware of an issue (be it tracking, or power consumption, or ...) with the older version of the app and want to run it despite that, that should be my prerogative as a user.
That's not all that a smartphone is, but it is most of what a smartphone is.
Most applications basically just need:
- a canvas to paint some bitmaps on
- some way to tell what part of the screen the user tapped on
- a way to get TCP/IP or HTTPS traffic in and out
- some sound output
- some persistence
- some way to show notifications
- a few other odds and ends like GPS, sometimes
Almost the entire list been supported on every major platform since the late 2000s. Yes, rich multimedia apps that make good use of additional APIs and hardware features do exist. But it's inappropriate to nuke most old "normal" applications just because old rich multimedia apps stopped working over time.
A: Close our remaining fashion boutiques.
Seriously?