I get you. I used to buy Nexus devices as well as some of the first Pixels, until at some point the prices shot up to ridiculous levels for a phone and I went with other brands.
Last year though the Pixel 8a was selling for 350€ and I got one. Luckily, given the recent developments. Will be installing GrapheneOS.
Same. I've been working with and managing thousands of WP sites for over a decade and the only issues I've had have been with sites acquired from 3rd parties with random themes and plugins (and old WP versions) that break if you update something. Those have gotten hacked and have caused many headaches.
Basically no issues with sites built in-house. As you say, only reputable 3rd party plugins (like for SEO, caching, multilang) most others made in-house.
> Or you could pass an EU Constitution that enshrines basic rights including privacy
That, and (somehow) enforce the basic principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, which they are supposed to do already. That would go a long way towards not misusing that centralized power.
I will have to read up on that 2005 event, sounds weird to me that countries would complain about there being constitutional rights at the EU level. Not sure how those rights would conflict with local ones. Unless there were positive rights, like "the right to internet" or the like, which would be ridiculous and not what I'm proposing (just basic negative rights).
> Sensationalist framing aside, how does any government become a body that decides anything?
Powerful people get together and decide that they know what's best for people. Then they claim that there is "consent" because people are given the right to vote and that there is a "social contract" that no one actually has signed, which everyone should still abide by.
What you're describing is how the process in the EU works. So in essence it is "the EU".
It doesn't seem to have any limits or restrictions on what it can do as an institution. It forced idiotic bottlecaps on all of us for shit's sake... and it has little consideration for privacy laws or constitutions of individuals, otherwise this proposal would've been thrown out automatically each time, if there was anything resembling constitutional values governing the EU's mandates.
It's like being governed by a neurotic unhinged monarch.
Problem is that once you've gotten this thing through to begin with it's comparatively easy to make slight amendments later, also of course with the justification of "protecting the children".
It doesn't change anything with their higher tier sales. Those are bought for a reason that a lower tier device cannot satisfy.
My worry (from Apple's POV) is that all the people who buy the cheapest Mac (currently for $1k) will instead go for this new "base model". And I suspect there's a large cohort of people who "just want a Mac".
And so it's just a bill away from the data is suddenly being available for any purpose. For public safety of course. The same people who want Chat Control to scan our messages for sure want to scan and raise alarms for suspicious behaviors in public places too. They just can't implement it all at once or there'd be an uproar. But if it happens slowly like this, bit by bit... frogs getting boiled in the UK (and elsewhere too).
I would guess/assume that work phones of MEPs are restricted to a specific set of manufacturers and models, which makes targeting different from having to consider all options.
They might also have specific software installed across most of them that could be part of the targeting.
Wouldn't "decentralize" or "diversify" be a better term than "democratize" here? I don't really see the democracy involved as opposed to simply having a broader disaspora of education.
One mobile-first cancer that's becoming increasingly annoying is sites highjacking Ctrl/Shift/Cmd+clicking (used to open links in new tabs).
I paused writing this comment/rant to do a quick search about it and found that someone had already done what I intended to do - write an extension/addon to deal with it:
Yeah but you're bringing up a kind of chicken/egg problem, where if we had thought about this properly from the beginning we wouldn't have ended up in a situation where we are now slaves to the technology, as in not having enough farm land for everyone without industrial fertilizers relying on fossil fuels, or not surviving without the car/truck infrastructure like you mention.
The initial adoption of those technologies should've been discussed and decided through a different lens rather than through convenience and monetary profits.
And now that we're past the point, any solution would involve destruction of some sort. That's a large conundrum.
I thought I clearly stated that people tend to choose out of convenience, just like you're pointing out:
> I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow
I never said it would be faster or easier.
> saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”.
Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point.
> Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible
I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance.
This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult.
> why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?
I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski.
But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has.
> To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle?
To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like:
- can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing)
- can I repair it myself?
- what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed?
- etc.
So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide.
If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing!
> Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible.
However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species).
Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we might find that we don't need to perpetually evolve external things in order to be happy.
Last year though the Pixel 8a was selling for 350€ and I got one. Luckily, given the recent developments. Will be installing GrapheneOS.