I think it is wrong to force Apple to support various "open standards". Other device manufacturers should make better devices and have people switch naturally to them because they are better.
Like Google cried to every possible regulator that Apple is the big bad wolf that doesn't want to support RCE. Why? If it was that good, more people would use Androids for that.
The problem, as I see it, is that everyone else besides Apple spends very little on physical devices build quality and software polishing, and you end up with crap devices that are slow, with weird interfaces and so on.
> Other device manufacturers should make better devices and have people switch naturally to them because they are better.
That doesn't work when they're a monopoly. Did the whole robber baron era just not happen in your world?
I'd flip it around: Apple should make better devices so that they can retain customers on their merits, rather than because their friends' phones are going to "accidentally" lose their text messages if they dare try a non-Apple phone.
I compare iPhones with Samsung flagships such as the S line.
Tge iPhones are simply better made: they don’t feel light or plasticky, the UI on Android is way worse compared to iOS and so on.
And the whole SMS thing is just ridiculous: iMessage and SMS are two differrent things, hence they are highlighted with different colors so you know you can’t send pictures via SMS and most likely you have to switch to other apps such as Whatsapp, FB Messenger, Telegram and others. It does not mean you have to buy an iPhone to talk to your friends that prefer Apple products.
More than half the country was against the wars in Vietnam or in Iraq (2003), but they still happened. And if the current administration decides they want to invade Canada, Canada will be invaded no matter what the country thinks. Same goes for Mexico. How it ends, it is a completely different story and another administration's problem.
A great deal changed after Vietnam. Iraq was only possible because the country had a general blood lust against Muslims after 9/11, who were easy for a mostly white christian country to "other".
Nothing like that exists for Canada. Proposals to invade Canada aren't taken seriously by the public. Those who pretend to support it are just trying to piss people off with how stupid they can be.
The heartland of this mostly white christian country is currently busy othering their mostly-christian non-white neighbours (Against whom they are weaponizing ICE) and their mostly-christian mostly-white city dwellers (Against whom they are deploying the army).
For anyone who can stand behind that, a bunch of foreigners in another country won't even register as someone to have any empathy towards.
> The problem is, the US sea power is being dwarfed by China rapidly, who have now surpassed the size of the US Navy and are quickly going to be even larger.
The thing is that size matters in wars of attrition, but experience almost always wins.
China's problem is that they lack the experience the US Navy gained over decades of pretty much non-stop war even if they did not go up any significant adversary since the Vietnam war.
> I’ve never really understood how the logic of the second amendment doesn’t extend to tanks and nukes.
Probably because if people could buy tanks to protect themselves, then the police would also need tanks to deconflict a situation where someone with a tank is upset and the damages are a bit higher when tank rounds start flying around. Imagine two neighbors getting into it in a a town, not to mention a city.
Even portable nukes are a stretch in the logic of "I need to protect my home" from intruders, not to mention the hundred kiloton yield ones.
The second amendment to the US Constitution doesn't concern itself with home defense justifications, but only with "we need to scare up a military force, right now". The "right way" to forbid tanks and tac nukes as arms that the people can own would have been to amend the Constitution with something that specifies the limits in some way, but instead we got creative interpretations of "shall not be infringed" to mean "can be infringed as long as a law or agency regulation is produced at either a federal or state level". Which is odd, as GP noted.
> or $0? Probably not. For $40m/year, I bet you could create an entire company
No sane commercial entity will dump even a cent into supporting an unused technology.
You have better luck pitching this idea to your senator to set up an agency for dead stuff - it will create tens or hundreds of jobs. And what's $40mm in the big picture?
There is this idea in Europe (and I think it is taking shape in other parts of the world) that content providers should also pay the ISPs for the traffic to/from them. Basically ISPs want to double-dip in making money from both sides of the pipe.
And this needs to be put to rest, otherwise we'll pay for the Internet access like we pay for cable TV: Netflix - $5/mo extra, HBO - $3/mo extra, Facebook - $2/mo extra.
I am all for capitalism, but greed needs to have a hard cap at some point.
Like Google cried to every possible regulator that Apple is the big bad wolf that doesn't want to support RCE. Why? If it was that good, more people would use Androids for that.
The problem, as I see it, is that everyone else besides Apple spends very little on physical devices build quality and software polishing, and you end up with crap devices that are slow, with weird interfaces and so on.
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