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Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

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141–150 of 182 posts

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#141
post #109
post #28

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The story with Adobe on Mac in the 1990s is that their apps were so important to the platform that they practically had a veto on the API for Apple’s next-gen OS. When Apple acquired NeXT, the original plan was for the NeXT API (now called Cocoa) to become the only way to build apps on the new Mac OS. But Adobe made it clear they were not going to port everything to Objective-C. In response Apple came up with Carbon,…

I think Apple was the one who was unreasonable here, not Adobe. I loathe the idea of giving Microsoft credit for anything, but one thing they got right was their focus on backward compatibility. Certainly that has frayed at times here and there, but MS generally doesn't ask their developers to completely rewrite their applications to use a new application framework.

And because of that, even as far back as 2005, there were 10 ways to create a string in C and depending on which Windows API you were using, you had to convert between them constantly.

Considering how Microsoft has failed to move past Windows while Apple uses the same OS more or less for watches, phones, tablets, monitors, set top boxes, etc without having to support legacy crap.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#142
post #55

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it's wechat. you really need it in china. it's practically impossible to stay in touch with most people if you don't have it. a phone that can't run wechat is pretty useless.

Actually, it's both. Back in 2022, you have to install either WeChat or Alipay to scan the government's health code literally everywhere.

hmm, i forgot about those. but i wonder if you really needed wechat and if it wasn't possible to scan them with the government provided app that tracks your healthcode too. i think offering wechat support was more out of convenience, and not to push people to use wechat.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#143
post #140

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Yup, Deng literally invaded Vietnam and rolled tanks over dissidents. In Lee Kuan Yew's Biography he recounts talking to Deng shortly after Tiananmen, and Deng by LKY's account just said straight to his face "if I had to kill a hundred thousand students to restore order, I would have done it". I genuinely have to laugh when people tend to say things like "I wish China was as liberal as it was back under Deng", people…

I'm convinced that what make a nation is perceived as liberal is a function of its relative power and subservience to the west instead of its inherent liberal value

Especially the word democracy in the geopolitical context, that's what western politicians mean. E.g, spread democracy, this country should be more democratic, etc.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#144
post #129

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I wonder how much of the USSR’s success (until it wasn't) can be attributed to Marxism-Leninism rather than the fact that the country produced oil. It’s like attributing the success of Saudi Arabia to its theocratical monarchy. Oil is basically a cheat code for countries. If you have oil, you will do OK regardless of political/economical system. Even then, the quality of life in the USSR was pretty poor compared to t…

That’s actually completely not true at all and resource-rich countries actually tend to underperform (by getting trapped in an economy that only does one thing and when that resource disappears it’s gone). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse You can even see shades of this now with Russia… what is going to happen when the gas runs out, or if western countries block international trade of their gas (as they…

I’m not saying oil rich countries necessarily have strong diverse economies. I’m saying that they do OK regardless of their political/economic system.

Saudi Arabia and Russia has been trucking along all these decades despite their less than ideal economies all thanks to oil.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#145

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I'm not sure the average Russian would agree that the precipitous drop in life expectancy in the 90s, the rampant child prostitution, etc., along with what our idea of "democracy" for them turned out to be - you want to talk about election interference let's start with Russia in 1996 - was worth selling off their natural resources so a few oligarchs could get rich.

That’s why I picked 1988.

Bruh, you just admitted to cherry-picking the date

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#146
post #104

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Well, Marxism-Leninism did more good for the Soviet Republics in its first 40 years there (beating back an imperialist invasion, rapidly developing industry, beating the Nazis, putting the first man in space, raising the standard of living nearly to par with the West despite being a feudal backwater in 1917, etc) than capitalism has done for those countries since we finally beat them thirty years ago. And, public opi…

> raising the standard of living Ah yes, you must be referencing the Holodomor here. That sure raised the standard of living. Marxism-Leninism is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamentally evil ideology. > rapidly developing industry What industry are you even talking about (-oh that's right, the Soviet obsession with steel)? Have you ever actually been in the industrial cities of the Eastern Bloc? Have you toured…

People tend to worry about the evils they know or have experienced in their recent past, just as you do. And the US alone has ~300k people per year dying of lack of healthcare (not including heart disease!), and millions sentenced to slave gulags for trivial offenses where their labor is monetized for the personal profit of brutal oligarchs - the largest concentration of slave labor in the world, by a massive factor. And there are just as many famines and other deaths as well - the distortion of crop subsidies on the food export market has repeatedly caused exactly such famines, and that's all a completely capitalistic phenomenon.

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/327/7424/1129.full.pdf

People under capitalist rule tend not to think of it as such, but those are the victims of capitalism, just like the holodomor is victims of communism. And that's not "tu quoque" but rather simply applying the same standards and method of analysis to both systems.

That's why people keep diving into that, it's not that communism was so great, it's that capitalism is the particular set of horrors that they're currently living through, so people tend not to be thrilled about that. They are as entitled to their past experiences and history as you are to yours.

Anyway, it's weird, because we all love these organizations called "corporations" that use exactly the kinds of central planning that is supposedly impossible to execute properly. Companies that treat divisions like a "free market" and force them to compete for resources and attention generally find this works extremely poorly, you actually need collective coordination and human benevolence/good-faith for anything to work. The part about capitalism that's nice (on paper) is that it breaks the collectivism down to a scale that humans can plan and function with, and forces active competition between entities such that inefficiency is pushed out of the market (although of course there is an inherent tendency towards oligoply and consolidation without government intervention).

But the thing is countries cannot work like this, and there is no guarantee that a capitalist country doesn't suffer the same "complacency capture" as an oligopolistic market competitor. Nor is there any failure mechanism to replace them when this happens, short of outright political collapse (which may be impossible due to situational factors anyway). Again, we live in a state with millions of political prisoners being exploited for slave labor for oligarchal profit... that's the failure case for communism too, capitalism is just as capable of falling into the same pitfalls. And success is, as always, completely orthogonal to ethical merit - you can be good-hearted and still fail, or act unethically and succeed (and in fact it helps!).

Again, it's not that communism is so great, but pointing at specific bad outcomes while refusing to apply the same standards to specific bad outcomes from capitalistic systems (while chanting "tu quoque") has always been an aggravating feature of american political commentators. The lack of ability for self-reflection is why we live in a prison state and a police state and increasingly a total-surveillance state, we have horrible outcomes here from our system but "it's better than ukraine 1936!". And that's a pretty low bar, why is that always the focus of the discussion?

And why does it have to be "if you like it so much go there", like the only possible choices in the world are US prison state or china/NK prison states. Why can we not choose to be the EU instead, with a generally socialist outlook and many outright collectivist (worker/state owned) enterprises but also a strong democratic system riding herd over limited and regulated market-economics?

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I picked 1988.

Bruh, you just admitted to cherry-picking the date

I cherrypicked "before the fall of the USSR". I could have shown a 4x increase in GDP if I picked the lowest numbers.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#148
post #146
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> raising the standard of living Ah yes, you must be referencing the Holodomor here. That sure raised the standard of living. Marxism-Leninism is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamentally evil ideology. > rapidly developing industry What industry are you even talking about (-oh that's right, the Soviet obsession with steel)? Have you ever actually been in the industrial cities of the Eastern Bloc? Have you toured…

People tend to worry about the evils they know or have experienced in their recent past, just as you do. And the US alone has ~300k people per year dying of lack of healthcare (not including heart disease!), and millions sentenced to slave gulags for trivial offenses where their labor is monetized for the personal profit of brutal oligarchs - the largest concentration of slave labor in the world, by a massive factor.…

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Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#149
post #63

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From what I understand is was more because Tumblr had a much younger user demographic with very ineffective content reporting tools. Allowed NSFW content without a desktop opt-in function. And also being bought by Yahoo who wanted to cash in on Tumblr advertising probably played a huge role in it too. Twitter skews older, requires desktop opt-in for NSFW content, and (before Musk) had decent content reporting functio…

Do you have any information about this? Where did you hear this? I'd always heard it was because some people at Apple used Twitter, but nobody used Tumblr, so Tumblr didn't get a free pass from arbitrary torment.

Do you have any information about this? Where did you hear this?

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#150
post #148
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People tend to worry about the evils they know or have experienced in their recent past, just as you do. And the US alone has ~300k people per year dying of lack of healthcare (not including heart disease!), and millions sentenced to slave gulags for trivial offenses where their labor is monetized for the personal profit of brutal oligarchs - the largest concentration of slave labor in the world, by a massive factor.…

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> I'm excited to read your next post about how Nazi Germany wasn't really that bad.

Not exactly a good-faith reply to a substantial post, and the quote doesn't even work to the thing you are trying to respond to. Hitler’s bad dude, and he’s usually counted as one of those victims of communism. Can you admit that a number that counts hitler and his soldiers as victims of communism might be a little overwrought?

Deaths due to the prevailing political system are deaths due to the prevailing political system. Slaves forced into a life of servitude due to the prevailing political system are just as much slaves in a Corrections Corp of America prison as in a soviet gulag or a north korean camp, it matters not a whit your personal feelings on the moral complications of the death or the slavery and whether you feel the deaths from some systems are "excusable" or not inherently tied to the system (a grace you of course don’t extend).

Again, the simple fact of the matter is that there are large-scale “excess deaths” and slavery and other morally repugnant outcomes that occur in large scale due to the nature of the capitalistic system and the way it treats problems that are not profitable to solve. If you can't accept that simple fact, then there is indeed no basis for a discussion. Can you even acknowledge that the body count of victims of capitalism is (substantially) greater than zero?

I mean Pol Pot alone... analogous to your hitler comparison, can you not even disavow capitalism in such clear-cut cases of literal murder and death camps? Or Thailand and red drum killings? Do such things not taint the entire concept of capitalism, in the same way that you feel communism has been tainted? Even if the other victims of capitalism don’t matter to you…

At the end of the day the “victims of communism” just isn’t a viable framing for the discussion. Atrocities and both high- and low-level oppression occur under capitalism too but people get very upset if you say it somehow represents a fundamental problem with the capitalistic system, but that’s the standard anything else gets held to.

In the neoliberal consensus, communism is bad because of holodomor or NK slave camps (true) but capitalism is not bad because of pol pot or red drum killings or United States slave camps (false). And that means we can’t even have European-style state enterprises or worker-owned enterprises, because that’s all communism and dirty.

Anyway honestly this is the problem with expats in general, people left for specific reasons and the ones who left are the ones who felt most strongly about an issue. Learned experience is one thing but you’re not exactly getting a balanced take on Cuba from some expat who had their family’s plantation expropriated either. Sure, your family lost your sugar farm, but living standards went up hugely for everyone else.

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