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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t help that wage growth has largely been in the “unskilled” sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.

    But in aggregate, “everyone” is being paid more and “inflation” is down. So at a macro level everyone “should” be happy with how things are going. But human beings don’t live at the macro level.





  • I would bet that every single person commenting here thinks of him- or herself as being deeply invested in privacy, ranting against things like ad tracking, etc. But as soon as someone (or some ones) you don’t like, or have no affinity with, wants to have the same privacy afforded to every single person who drives a car, all bets are off.

    Or are you suggesting that people (including the police!) should be allowed to have real time, constant information about where you drive to every day?

    Just because it’s a plane, and just because it’s a rich person, doesn’t make it any less of a privacy violation.



  • I don’t read the Times anymore. I get my news elsewhere. That said, there are a few things to consider here, when it comes to the relative shittiness of the NYT vs other major papers. We have this notion, unfounded, that the NYT “used to be” better, or more progressive, or what have you. Certainly compared to the other two “papers of record” for the country (Washington Post and Wall Street Journal), it’s a raging pinko rag. But the fact remains that it was founded as a conservative-leaning paper, continued to be a conservative-leaning paper in the 20th century and, surprise surprise, remains a conservative-leaning paper. The lean is more Tower of Pisa than Man Vomiting on Sidewalk, but it’s still conservative.

    Many of its bad takes (and there are many) are squarely in line with mainstream views. At worst, its views lag behind the country by a few years. And like all major news corporations, it is incentivized to maximize its visibility (and therefore revenue). Given the options of 1) publishing something incendiary that will put the paper in the public eye and help in creating more news to print or 2) doing additional work with the anticipated result of the truth not being nearly as interesting and therefore not nearly as attention-grabbing, they’re going to do the less work option.

    Next, the NYT is a victim of the news cycle just as much as the TV networks, if not more so. While the website updates fairly regularly throughout the day, the paper comes out once every 24 hours, and must be prepped hours in advance. This means that breaking news suffers from two issues: 1) it has to be investigated at a speed faster than the TV networks because they paradoxically don’t have the luxury of time and 2) they can’t afford to be tentative when they don’t know something. CNN and Fox especially can get away with saying “we’ll report back when we know more” because that “back” is maybe 30 minutes from now. “Developing stories” exist on news networks. They do not exist for print papers. If you publish, you have to claim to be definitive, or people will stop reading. (“Why should I read the NYT when they just keep saying they don’t know shit?”)

    Finally, and we should take some solace from this, it should be noted that the NYT, despite being one of the “papers of record” for the country, is basically screaming into the void. Almost no one reads it. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, they’re not conservative enough for the people who can throw money at a news organization when there are free alternatives available, and they’re not progressive enough for the rest of us to care. The number of eyeballs scanning the NYT is vanishingly small compared to the eyeballs staring at Fox News - or even CNN, for that matter. Basically, the NYT just doesn’t matter anymore. They can say whatever the fuck they want. They’re not influencing anyone who isn’t already on the same (sorry) page.

    I certainly wouldn’t fault anyone for giving up on the NYT because of its journalistic errors. I certainly have. But we should neither be surprised nor shocked. This behavior is baked into the cake, and it has been since 1851, and got even worse after 1980 when CNN first went on the air. They didn’t suddenly get stupid, and they never betrayed us. We have simply never been their intended audience.



  • I’ve been an Apple fanboy for years, too, and I still am. The alternatives aren’t exactly better. And anyone who is surprised that Apple is dragging its heels and trying to do the bare minimum to comply, well, get back to me when you’re no longer twelve. Companies aren’t your friends, even when they look like they are. Hell, Google’s sudden about-face regarding Right to Repair is 100% intended to fuck over Apple. It’s not about the consumer, it’s about the money. Always, with every company, every time.

    Developers want alternate app stores because they want to make/keep more money. There’s no other reason. Every other reason given just comes back to more money. Is that a more valid argument simply because they’re smaller?

    I’m in favor of Apple opening up iOS to alternate stores. I think it’s going to be a privacy and security nightmare, but the horse is pretty much already out of the barn and the barn is burning, so… whatever. But I’m not so naive to think Apple’s going to fully embrace the ideal concept of alternate stores unless somehow it’s a way to beat Google’s or Samsung’s face in, and take their money.




  • I’m sure there are some “data harvesting” reasons, but honestly, the simplest is likely the truest:

    Most people aren’t computer-savvy, and having an app is much easier for most users than going to a website (either directly or through a bookmark that they probably won’t ever be able to find again).

    One must remember, always and forever: most people aren’t us/you. Just because something is easy for you to do doesn’t mean it’s easy for everyone else.

    Is it dumb for me that T-Mobile has an app that just goes to a webview that I could get through my phone browser? Yes. Is it dumb for my parents? Absolutely ten thousand percent no.

    The value (in terms of money made/saved/protected) that a company gets from having an app instead of a website only is probably ranked in this order:

    1 - ease of use for the majority of customers, reducing tech and customer support calls, angry customers, lost goodwill, bad reputation
    2-99 - same as #1
    100 - data harvesting







  • Under many sane readings of the constitution, this isn’t a power congress has.

    The constitution only explicitly articulates the process for establishing treaties, not ending them. So it’s a bit of a gray area as to whether the president can end them by himself, since he can’t establish them by himself.

    To my mind, it would seem exceedingly weird if establishing a treaty required the consent of the Senate but breaking one didn’t. What’s the argument to be made that the two aspects (establish/break) are so fundamentally different that the rules for the first aren’t also the rules for the second? Why does the president need consent to say yes but does not need consent to say no?

    It’s definitely been done before, but also never directly contested. (In previous cases SCOTUS has avoided answering the question by saying they didn’t have jurisdiction.)