• 0 Posts
  • 1.23K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2024

help-circle

  • They are not bringing anything good back. They were a nice company like 30 years ago.

    That reputation held for damn long, then they killed it and created a new one of “being luxury crap for successful success”, and during the transition used both.

    Now it’s just luxury crap. I don’t know how there still are Apple users who are not after that.

    When some people talk how “but it’s a Unix so you can do Unix things” - with a huge pain in the butt over Linux, and there are plenty of variants of “install once and don’t care after” with Linux. As in “plenty”.

    In general, I think the concept of trademark has gotten old. Same with patents. These allow companies to just abuse their past reputation and also sue anyone trying to do business in the niche their past self has created.

    Or maybe trademarks are fine, but patents … when they were a good thing, new inventions were patented for some period of time. Now they patent interfaces and solutions where no new invention happened.

    All these protections are needed, but the system making them has gone AWOL. We need direct democracy.



  • That might be true, but also a certain revolutionary purging of world politics would do a lot to return to something close to that. The golden age happened after the world war and decolonization, when western countries were full of veterans, and laws governing their lives were much simpler.

    Internet-assisted direct democracy, open borders, open trade, radical changes in patent laws, simpler laws generally - all this can exist.

    We simply have too much legacy everywhere strangling development.

    The bad guys are trying to make it appear that the only legacy that can be stripped is that of French revolution ideals, human rights and civilization. That actually we don’t have to strip, that is all good. Just them.

    It’s normal. Sometimes humans need surgeries, and sometimes a part of an old building has to be dismantled - maybe there’s a pipe in the wall that leaks, or maybe you need to retrieve a human skeleton found using some new technology, whatever. And you throw out garbage regularly.

    So a reform for direct democracy (with ranked choice between variants having, say, 1000+ initial supporters in some incubator to get to the vote itself, because we have computers, storage and connectivity to make everything desirable for such) IMHO would go a long way to fixing half the problems in the world.




  • Bailouts are unacceptable period. Trained workers, factories, factory hardware, logistics specialists, engineers, patents and so on - they all remain in the economy. That a company fails and goes bankrupt is not a bad thing. It’s just that company. Not the industry as a whole. If there are no additional mechanisms.

    Somehow Americans seem to have forgotten that the kind of “capitalism” which gets defended is about this exactly - a company goes bankrupt, too bad. There are other companies which will hire its workers and buy its assets. Possibly new companies created by its former employees. Its shareholders have gambled and lost, well, their problem. That’s what an unregulated market is, by the way, and not bailouts to big fish and horse dicks for small fish.

    If something works differently - workers don’t find a new place to work in, factories go to scrap metal, engineers go flip burgers, patents are collected by trolls, and new companies are not being created, - then something has been broken by an existing policy.

    Patents are the worst of it, but also non-compete clauses, legal impediments for creating new businesses, legal expenses making it harder, - these things have to be removed.

    I mean, people on Lemmy love to dream of something like what you list, those things are good, but maybe fixing some basic things about what you already have is no less useful. Especially since these fixes do not cost any money to maintain, while, well, pensions and healthcare do.





  • I have an idea - make this issue solved via direct popular vote. Ranked choice, variants range from “Apple owns your butts” to “Apple should be punished with its monthly margin for failing to deliver hourly orgasms with its devices” to “Apple open sources and PD’s everything or Apple leaves”.

    They’ll be interested themselves in making the OS as convenient for normal usage as possible. Including the walled garden part. OK, just a thought experiment.




  • They at some point boasted that their stuff can be used without hoops and intentional impediments. In Hypercard and such times.

    It seems crazy, but they even paid authors of kinda sci-fi or futuristic stories featuring their hardware.

    They made it seem they are almost an anarchist company.

    They also, which is even harder to believe now, aimed at advanced usage. As in - “works out of the box” and “even a child can use it” and “everything graphical”, but at the same time in that spirit, which Hotline and KDX and PureData still reminisce. A user-friendly application which is not dumb.

    It’s actually useful to see, to understand that modern commercial claims of “user-friendly == dumb” are aimed at nothing else than centralized control and obscure shit under the hood.





  • They didn’t stop handing out harsh punishments. Just in a highly unpredictable, unequal and arbitrary pattern.

    I’ve read someplace that the main difference between modernity and middle ages in legal practice was that in modernity punishments were relatively small, but unavoidable, while in middle ages most criminals avoided punishments, but here and there some poor idiot would be made an example of in a highly disproportionate way, like being quartered for stealing some shit and being rude to a priest.