Yeah. The idea that tracking should require explicit consent sounds pretty good at first, but we now the result is that users are constantly nagged and harassed and annoyed until they finally “consent” - at which point everything becomes silky smooth.
So yeah, I agree that this kind of thing should be simply banned, to remove any inconvenience or confusion from the whole thing.
It’s not really an authoritarian impulse. It’s about collectively pushing back against a power imbalance. Supermarkets and large companies have a lot more money and resources than most individual people, and so they are able to leverage that power to make individuals do things that benefit the company but harm society. Laws and regulations are official organised ways of the general public collectively pushing against unwanted behaviour from powerful entities, such as supermarkets.
If it was illegal, there would not be a higher price vs a lower price at any particular store; there would only be the one price. And obviously all prices change over time for all sorts of reasons. So it doesn’t really make sense to say “everyone pays the higher price”. Higher than what?
Maybe it’s a bit unfair to say ‘part of the problem’. But yeah, it isn’t really helping.
Yeah, Australia has that law. However, in recently years it has started to erode a little.
Cashless one-tap card payments have become very popular, because they were fast and no cost. Pretty convenient… except that more recently there are now transaction fees associated with them, and the fees vary from place to place. … So when it comes time to pay, often the price is a couple of percent higher than quoted. It isn’t much, but it is does make it harder to know what you’re actually going to pay. And it also feels like a bait-and-switch, since it built popularity by being free and now starts to increase nickle-and-dime people.
Anyway, that’s all minor small-fry stuff compared to the tax-excluding price bullshit in the USA.
Products already aim to have attention-grabbing / attractive packaging. So I don’t think that is going to get any worse if general advertising is banned.
I’ve also been saying for years that unsolicited advertising is wasteful and harmful and unnecessary - and should be banned. (Well, it’s ‘necessary’ from an individual point of view, because you need it to be viable vs other products. But that would not be the case if it was banned. The massive work and resources spend on advertising are only necessary because of advertising. Killing it would free up those resources for something actually productive.)
There are obviously a lot of tricky issues and edge cases that would need to be ironed out for an advertising ban; but that doesn’t make it impossible. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be an improvement, and it’s not hard to imagine some basic guidelines that would work reasonably well. … That said, it’s complete fantasy that this would happen, because there is too much money tied up in it. The only realistic way forward would be a very slow gradual increase in weak rules about what kinds of advertising can be used.
You may not like a feature, which is fine, but a lot of people do.
Sure. I agree with that. But I think you’re seeing this in reverse of the point I was trying to make. My point is that you might think this feature is mission critical, but a lot of people do not. The purpose of my previous post was to imply that you are over-emphasising its importance.
I understand that you personally want a fancy clipboard with lots of features; but for me, I actually explicitly deliberately only want a single item clipboard. I want the predictable simple certainty of what is and what is not stored in the clipboard. And if I ever had a multi-item clipboard with a UI interface, I’d be calling that confusing bloatware and looking for how to delete it.
So I don’t think we should rank each OS by how fancy its clipboard is.
In which case average Joe needs people like us to push back against coercive bullshit so that it doesn’t become entrenched.
I get by alright without a smart phone. Over the years I’ve seen more and more “just scan this QR code to do such-and-such”, and I ignore them. I think you’re right that it is a lot of added friction compared to using a phone. A lot of stuff is instantly at your fingertips with your phone.
But to be honest, I really truly think that a bit of friction is a good thing. Without it, we just slide helplessly into oblivion. Or, less metaphorically speaking, the friction turns an automatic decision into a deliberate one. The friction pushes people to think about their actions and choices a little bit. And that’s generally a good thing - even if its a little bit harder.
<insert "GNU + Linux" copypasta here>
Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.
Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.
It’s not so much an aversion to algorithms as it is a version to corporate controlled algorithms (which are often targeting highly questionable metrics).
So what you’re saying is that if we just keep switching to different data sources, we could get above 50% in less than two months!
Even better, aspire to not use a car. Commute via bike or public transport.
Everyone has better things to do then sit in traffic, and its always tempting to blame someone else - eg. some old guy that you wish would have gone shopping at a different time. But if you are on the road in your car then you are traffic. You’re holding people up. You’re delaying people. And as the previous person said, you have no more right to use public roads than anyone else. So rather than wishing and hoping that other people will do something different, take initiative to do something different yourself.