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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • It sounds like you’re suggesting that the left should be even more patriotic than the right. That that will win over MAGA defectors. If that’s your strategy, it’s something that has generally failed over the past few decades.

    But I think it should fail because it’s basically evil. If you think America is the best when clearly America is not the best in many important categories, like infant mortality or education, then you have to lie to yourself. Or you have to believe in people who are lying to you. Which makes you vulnerable to cult leaders. Which brought us to where we are today. So let’s have less patriotism and more careful consideration of the policies and who they will benefit.



  • I think your definitions don’t quite match common use. When people think about sideloading, they think about installing apps from a third-party source that are not approved by the primary vendor. That’s precisely what Google is going to block.

    You also mentioned that the rub would be that abandoned projects will be uninstallable. That’s true, but that’s vastly understating the problem. The real problem is not that abandoned projects will be rejected, because they would phase out due to version upgrades within a few years anyway. The real problem is that programs that would take power or money away from Google are guaranteed to be rejected or delayed for bullshit reasons. And even if they are initially accepted, Google can always pull a Darth Vader and reject them later, as soon as they feel threatened. And all of that shouldn’t be happening at all on an open source operating system on a cell phone that we purchased when we’re controlling it ourselves.

    This is also an imperialistic move. What happens if someone from Iran or Palestine tries to create an account on Google’s server? Will they be blocked as a terrorist? I think maybe they will. So then the only software that’s allowed to run on Android phones is going to be software that’s approved by Google, which is subject to pressure from the United States government. But we don’t even have to go that far to find the badness. If a marginalized group has a software developer who wishes to remain anonymous that creates a perfectly good program that will help out that marginalized group, by Google’s new rules they won’t be able to distribute it.

    That’s the real rub. All of that. Google’s strong desire to gain as much control over its own applications as Apple has on the iPhone. This is a massive grab for money and power, and we should never think of it as some minor thing that might mildly inconvenience abandoned projects.



  • fodor@lemmy.zipto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneoxymoron rule
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    3 days ago

    It’s important to bring in the longer history. Before large numbers of Americans were reliant on rising housing prices, there existed these things called pension plans, which would pay out from when you retired until when you died, and you could live on that money. But the capitalists didn’t like that, because they didn’t want to pay people for doing nothing over the last few decades of their lives. So then we got the current system, which has people speculating on property and throwing money into IRAs. In other words, we had a system with guaranteed benefits and we replaced that with one based on gambling and the ridiculous belief that the value of property would always outpace inflation. And this all happened in our parents lifetimes, or in our grandparents lifetimes, depending how old you are.








  • Ah, the future value of equity … sacrifice your life on spec that the venture will succeed when most don’t and that your boss won’t find a way to fuck you over of it does. Bearing in mind that the more money is on the table, the more likely it is that your boss will try to screw you out of it.

    If you want to go to Vegas, go to Vegas. Do an 80-hour stint, see if you get rich, and if you fail then go home. Don’t spend years at some shitty company run by an asshole.