Its wasteful and sloppy ultimately and makes it hard to be familiar with their actual range of products in tangible way
It's interesting that Orwell got this one wrong: turns out that endless war isn't necessary as a sink for meaningless production after all. We can do that just fine on our own.
> War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
-- George Orwell
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
> This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
> This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
-- Dwight Eisenhower, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwighteisenhowercr...
Meanwhile Russia can't generate domestic demand. They got their GDP growth from their war industry.
Its not only possible, its happened multiple times, but downplaying it (Syria recently) or outright pretending it wasn't happening when both sides were fully aware (Korean war air combat) have been part of managing escalation risk.
Since then U.S. waging wars and launder money out of pockets of tax payers into conflict zones it created and back into its own industrial military complex. Here is some punchy whataboutism for your, deal with it.
Shareholders: I would prefer to not watch my kid die of leukemia. And it would be nice not to have to replace my dishwasher every three years. And while we are at it...
First, to make it easier to reason about, assume that with any given thing, what you go along with becomes commonplace and is done by everyone, all the time -- and if you resist, it is not done by anyone. (On smaller scales, especially 1-on-1 relationships, this might be literally true, so)
So, for example, you can increase profits a bit by making your website take 2 seconds longer to load for the benefit of JavaScript fuckery. Never mind privacy, just load times. Now, in the universe where everyone mirrors your actions, now every website you load takes 2 seconds longer to load. In some cases that means going from 20 seconds to 22, so no big deal... but HN goes from 0.1s to 2.1s, hah. Can you imagine how much time that would take up, for maybe not even that big amount money, that can't buy you time?
Or advertising, propaganda, etc. Yeah, you can sell your thing for more, or to people who don't really need it or would be better off without it... but unless you have a huge corporation, you don't even have that many products, yet now you live in a world full of advertising, and the pollution, waste of energy, and bad choices of people you love, or maybe people who end up hurting you because of the shit choices they made based on propaganda.
You can make "sponsored content", sure. But now philosophy and deep thought are dead, because everybody else is lacing whatever they say with a nod to some sponsor.
I really wish I could describe what feels like this hugely important thing that is kind of invisible to us, because we have nothing to compare it to, or the time or resources to carve out a large enough space in which to be different and then compare the results. If we only could see (I can't, it's more like a hunch, something I can't put my finger on but also not shake off) how all these things add up, with a kind of bird's eye view...
I imagine it would look like a local optimum, right next to a HUGE optimum. Like thirsty people fighting over a stone to suck on, next to a lake with clear, fresh water, unbeknownst to them.
I just cannot fucking prove it and that hurts :/
This is what government is for. Should be for: should be doing.
I don't mean at the micro-level of regulating website loading times: that would be ludicrous. I mean at the macro-level of guiding society away from harmful equilibria. I can't suggest policies which will accomplish all of these, and reasonable people can disagree about implementations. That's OK: so long as we are aligned on that purpose we can iterate on attempted solutions. With that said, here are some harmful equilibria to address, and at least a top-level approach to take, or goal to set:
- Carbon (and other pollution and waste) taxes which internalize costs that are currently born by everyone, in order to profit a few.
- Privacy protections which make business-models built around surveillance and micro-targeted advertising impossible.
- Corporate governance and financial market models which discourage short-term "line goes up" thinking.
- Tax structures and business regulations which encourage research and development instead of stock buy-backs, and increasing workers' wages instead of executive compensation.
I'd bet that at least a couple of those would improve website loading times, too.
And it makes a ton of money!
I agree with all the complaints about the state of a lot of software today but users don’t care enough to start boycotting companies that make apps in Electron. Until they do shareholders won’t give a toss.
If the average person understood how shit tier software is today, they would care.
Nobody likes dropping a couple Gs on a new laptop because the software has become so utterly shitty that their 2 year old I7 and GTX 3090 with 32 gigs of ram can no longer run a web browser.
I think if the general public knew that their stuff getting super slow super fast was a product of software rather than hardware degradation, theyd definitely care.
But my point is this: they don’t.
With all that said, I think the corps are happy to have both. All the appearances of new New NEW and for anyone who’s paying attention, we will upgrade when necessary. But in between are a bunch of people who can scrape up 2k for a new phone every year. Like buying a Cadillac when you can’t afford a house.
Nope, it was the three camera lenses. Oooh. I liked me some photography.
This a byproduct of a much larger issue that affects all faculties, not just the tech sector. This won't change unless we as a nation choose a different economic model.
The thing that capitalists get wrong is to simply project the present into the future, forever.
Let's say you get 30% returns in 10 years, that is 2.65% interest. But we might be talking about a one time investment that only existed for those ten years. What happens before and after can diverge arbitrarily. Meanwhile a capitalist would just keep projecting 2.65% interest into all eternity, giving ridiculous numbers within 1000 years.
The thing about simple interest is that it gets consumed. No exponential growth necessary.
Stop taking away my skills. I have to relearn everything all the time, for no damn reason.
And get off my lawn.
So that people who have bought an iPhone and buying a Mac for the first time can change their computer settings in the same way they are used to on their phone.
It’s as if knowing how to use Apple products efficiently has developed into requiring a very specific domain knowledge, and Apple continues to develop for these pseudo experts that know the quirks rather than improving the intuitiveness and usability for those less familiar.