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Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

82mhz.net

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Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#61

Post by InsideOutSanta »

casey2 wrote: post #54
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #22

People have been voting with their wallets since forever, and look where it got us. The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with. The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store a…

Hiring someone to make an alternative. If your country makes labor difficult to buy then that's on your country, not Apple.

The apps you actually need to participate in society (digital IDs, banking apps, etc.) will never run on your homegrown OS. Having a billion dollars changes nothing about the fact that you need either iOS or a Google-blessed Android version.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#62

Post by zugi »

overgard wrote: post #16

Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough. Vote with your vote! Our system is dysfunctional in the united states, but if you look at the political unity behind something like blocking datacenter construction and how much of a headache it's causing for big tech, it's clear we still can have an effect. Most of the problem with big tech are solvable through existing anti-trust in…

Voting with your wallet lets you send dozens of fine-grained messages a day. You support companies you want to support, and don't support those you don't want. Others will choose differently and that's fine for them. The mere existence of businesses you dislike is not a sign that this process has failed, you don't have the right to stop others from getting what they want to pay for.

Voting in federal elections in the US lets you send a message of less then one bit per year. It's a horribly ineffective method.

Apple exists because plenty of people vote for it with their wallets. I don't. But I don't mind that it exists.

I vote against Google when I can. I block ads and use Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. But the results are so poor compared to Google that I switch to use Google often. That's a sign to me that their product is worth my occasional, small "vote", and I'm okay with that.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#63

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

"Voting with your wallet" does absolutely nothing. This is a fallacy and a falsehood repeated by communities online.

People are saying to "vote with your wallet" regarding Sony's poisonous murder of physical games media. I haven't ever owned a Playstation and have "voted with my wallet" for 30+ years. Doesn't stop anything.

If you don't participate, someone else will, or a large investor or some entity will fill the void.

For things like these, change needs to happen a layer above the individual. This article's advice is just false and wrong.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#64

Post by LoganDark »

Noaidi wrote: post #51
LoganDark wrote: post #28

Voting with your wallet is not a thing when what you want does not exist. You get to choose from what's on the market. The only way to vote for anything else is to make it yourself.

Nothing is something that exists. Cancel Apple services, use a linux laptop, they exist.

Finding a laptop with even a keyboard layout I like is difficult. Finding one with both a keyboard and a display I like is seemingly impossible. Then add on performance desires... there will be no such thing. I want portable workstation but with high DPI and no numpad and those don't exist in the PC world.

Now, say I buy a MacBook Pro, and compromise on just a few things I didn't like, but that don't critically impact usability. I mean things like full-size function keys, or only 3 Thunderbolt ports (only one on the right!), small stuff. I don't feel especially limited by speed or memory capacity nowadays (although memory bandwidth is still about an order of magnitude off for local LLMs).

I'm still upset that it won't play games, but at least a capture card lets me pass through my Windows machine, and I heard Nvidia support in SteamOS might happen in the next year or two. Maybe Asahi might also grow to support my hardware before it expires (unlikely but possible)

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#65

Post by LoganDark »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #32
colesantiago wrote: post #7

What alternatives are there to Apple hardware that people like this Theo person would use?

Pixel and Samsung phones now exceed Apple quality (especially with GrapheneOS)

What do you mean by quality? Are you talking about control?

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#66

Post by iamnothere »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #22

People have been voting with their wallets since forever, and look where it got us. The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with. The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store a…

“Regulating” in the current environment just means mandated coziness with intelligence and law enforcement: scanning your files (Chat Control 1.0), backdoors (Chat Control 2.0), suppression of ideas through mandatory moderation, age verification.

What we need is antitrust enforcement, breaking of digital locks, and adversarial interoperability. This can be accomplished through certain forms of regulation, but you need to be specific or you’re going to get the bad kind of regulation.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#67

Post by iamnothere »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #61
casey2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring someone to make an alternative. If your country makes labor difficult to buy then that's on your country, not Apple.

The apps you actually need to participate in society (digital IDs, banking apps, etc.) will never run on your homegrown OS. Having a billion dollars changes nothing about the fact that you need either iOS or a Google-blessed Android version.

Then perhaps we should have regulations to ensure that social participation is not locked behind these gatekeepers.

In particular, government and financial services should not require smartphones. Especially in an era when devices often require an “account” with the manufacturer that can be suspended or cancelled.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#68

Post by iamnothere »

api wrote: post #23

I've been incubating a heresy for years: the free software movement was actually counterproductive. It helped kill user-focused autonomous privacy-respecting personal computing. It created a tech environment where there is no money in good (as in good intent, socially responsible, user-focused) tech. Everyone expects good software (in the social/moral sense of good) to be free. So we get an environment where the good…

You could package and sell a FOSS (and free/open hardware even) device tomorrow. The license doesn’t forbid it. Some have even built businesses on this!

It’s also possible to run service businesses that produce FOSS, like Bitwarden for example.

“Good” businesses get outcompeted on price by “bad” businesses, not by FOSS. Want a powerful workstation that is 100% open POWER architecture? Only $10k from Raptor Computing. Willing to go a little lower spec and use x86? Get one from Purism or System76. Reasonable, but still more expensive than mainstream alternatives, and user support on the software side is still mostly driven by the community.

Most FOSS is still finicky and geared towards either devs or “power user” amateurs who wouldn’t be paying for a license or subscription anyway. It’s getting better in some areas, but it’s generally not there yet.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#69

Post by InsideOutSanta »

iamnothere wrote: post #66
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #22

People have been voting with their wallets since forever, and look where it got us. The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with. The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store a…

“Regulating” in the current environment just means mandated coziness with intelligence and law enforcement: scanning your files (Chat Control 1.0), backdoors (Chat Control 2.0), suppression of ideas through mandatory moderation, age verification. What we need is antitrust enforcement, breaking of digital locks, and adversarial interoperability. This can be accomplished through certain forms of regulation, but you nee…

It's pretty obvious from context and from the specific example what I'm talking about.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#70

Post by InsideOutSanta »

iamnothere wrote: post #67
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The apps you actually need to participate in society (digital IDs, banking apps, etc.) will never run on your homegrown OS. Having a billion dollars changes nothing about the fact that you need either iOS or a Google-blessed Android version.

Then perhaps we should have regulations to ensure that social participation is not locked behind these gatekeepers. In particular, government and financial services should not require smartphones. Especially in an era when devices often require an “account” with the manufacturer that can be suspended or cancelled.

Exactly.
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