> It’s eerily parallel to the situation with Ukraine today, in fact.
I'm sorry, but this is not a realistic view of what transpired. Russia was and continues to be an opportunistic colonialist. They keep moving territory markers overnight in Georgia. Crimea/Donbass didn't happen because of some breakdown in some peace treaty. The last minute deal offered and wasn't accepted right before the 2022 invasion that some blame Ukraine on was awful in every possible way. It would have neutered Ukraine militarily and required a puppet government subservient to Russia be installed.
> Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there.
Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.
I'm sorry but I don't understand and I think I need a longer answer.
I could interpret this three ways:
1) "Leftist Activists"; are a mixed group with some supporting pro-LGBTQ rights and others supporting Palestine.
2) "Leftist Activists"; are a homogenous group, including LGBTQ people, of which they support Palestine (and thus, support a regime that would wish them harm)
3) "Leftist Activists"; are a homogenous group, including LGBTQ people, who will always attempt to ally to the downtrodden, even in cases where the downtrodden would wish them to not exist.
Are any of these correct or is there another interpretation I missed?
It's mostly 2. The harder point to prove, though I think it's true, that much of the pro-Palestinian rhetoric is as much anti-Israel, i.e anti-Semetic. It's hard to discuss subjects like this without nuance so most of my observations/opinions tend to be around trends. But a good comparison could be Ukraine and Russia. Much of the US widely supports Ukraine's plight and fully believe that Russia is a belligerent, colonialist nation fully at fault for the war. Nothing gray about it compared to the Israel/Palestine conflict. And yet you don't widespread hate and mistreatment of ethnic Russians in the US. You can't say the same about the treatment Jews, even those born and raised in the US.
> The harder point to prove, though I think it's true, that much of the pro-Palestinian rhetoric is as much anti-Israel, i.e anti-Semetic.
What? My view is totally different.
Most of the pro-Palestinian people intersect with the same anti-fascists under fire from newly pro-Israel people that previously criticized anti-fascists for punching Nazis.
When alt-right people defaced Jewish synagogues before this conflict I find the people arguing for it to be publicly acknowledged as a hate crime are the exact same people that are pro-Palestine now.
Accurate or not, the perception of someone being a Nazi made them punchable. It's not hard to argue people desiring to punch Nazis are probably not anti-Semetic.
Of course it's hard to argue that. Nazis are the great bogeymen right now, wanting to punch them might have little to do with feelings about Jews, and everything to do with just looking for an outlet to attack "the bad people" however defined.
When we read historical cases of witch trials or executing "demons" or "possessed people", it's the same thing.
This goes back to the oppressors and the oppressed. In the case of Punching Nazis, the way I read it is the meme of the anti-fascist that punched Richard Spencer during an ABC interview in 2017[1][2]. The post-modernis in me also like to point out that before then Punching Nazis was endorsed by Steven Spielberg when he directed Harrison Ford to do that as Indiana Jones[3]. And—of course—the supreme glorifies of violence against Nazis Quentin Tarantino who doesn’t let a movie go by unless a Nazi, a rapist, KKK members, etc. get severely tortured, bombed, burned with flamethrowers, etc.
Back to 2017, Richard Spencer is an actually nazi. He is a white supremacist that routinely spouts hate speech against Jewish people. In the case of the ABC interview the oppressed were Jewish people, and the oppressor was Richard Spencer. The Anti-facist very much cared about the Jewish people when he punched Richard Spencer. If Richard Spencer weren’t an oppressor of Jewish People, he wouldn’t have gotten punched.
I think you are mistaken that you cannot logically support both LGBT rights and Palestine. For example, I support LBGTQ+ rights and would not want people who opposed them in America to be treated the way Palestinians are.
30,000 Uyghur women and children weren’t indiscriminately bombed to death via advanced drones, nor were hundreds of innocent civilians massacred at hospitals in China and buried in mass graves. It’s happening in Palestine as we type.
Instead over 1 million of them are sent to concentration camps, abused and killed to harvest their organs. It's genocide eitherway.
The issue isn't covered is really the difference here.
Beware that reasoning. We only knew about the holocaust very late into the war and there were denials just as you claim right now.
And indeed, when the Nazi's were losing they tried quite hard to hide the evidence, however it was so total and immutable in many cases that it could not be hidden, mostly because the allied powers controlled their lands and had free access to their previously governed population..
Without such access proof rarely escapes and when it does the total brutality is considered impossible; this is exactly what happened during world war 2.
Exactly, yeah. What's happening there is awful and very sad, but there's almost nothing I can do about it, whereas our government provides billions in weapons to Israel
... and trillions in trade to China. US could cut trade ties with China.
This seems to apply to many conflicts, e.g. Sudan. The US could intervene. Now you might say "US tried something similar and that was not exactly a good experience", but the US certainly can intervene. Or, in Lebanon the US, and all countries in the UN security council promised to intervene (and disarm Hezbollah), but just don't do it.
Not intervening is different than actively supporting. We have given ~ a hundred billion and are about to give tens of billions more in no strings attached military aid. We used our UN Veto dozens of times to prevent calling for a ceasefire
Should we intervene for the Uyghurs? Maybe! But this one seems way more obvious
If that were truly the reason there are protests there wouldn't be any support in Europe, when in reality the movements there are far bigger than in the US.
I mean, sorry, but the black flags and open hostility towards Jews shows what at least a large percentage of the movement is really about. Especially in Europe.
The rest of the movement is the same as leftist movements, imho. It's also not about supporting Palestinians it's about fighting the power, ie. attempting to have political impact by "campaigning" for something SO immoral, unacceptable and unrealistic that there is bound to be a fight. It's about the fight, NOT about a solution. And by campaigning I don't mean campaigning in the sense of political campaigning, or even the vitriol spouting semi-threatening Trump is doing, but being so in the way, sabotaging people's lives, that normal people pretty much have to react with violence (because that's the point of blocking, for example, the Golden Gate bridge: to threaten people's livelihoods, and get a strong reaction that way).
It's not about saving tax dollars ... Yes, there's 1% fringe rightists in there. But seriously? It's not about that.
> It's not about saving tax dollars ... Yes, there's 1% fringe rightists in there. But seriously? It's not about that.
That's missing the point about money. Buying the murder weapon is not in the same category as all the inactions that may go into knowing a murder will happen and not ultimately stopping it.
First, no its not about tax dollars, you're right. It's about the US actively participating. Its something we have the power to easily stop doing. If what's happening in Palestine is comparable to the Uyghurs you're conceding that there are human rights problems.
As for antisemitism is Europe, I can't say. You might be right there. But in the US, most of it as far as I can tell is being horrified at pictures and videos of what's happening and feeling responsible. A lot of people hate what happened in the global war on terror and this is very comparable. I won't say that there is Nobody in it for antisemitic reasons here but I think that's a terrible awful reason, I disavow any antisemitism, and i believe that the vast majority of US people in the movement aren't.
The fight vs solution thing, I'm a little baffled by. Yeah the point of blocking the golden gate bridge is to show that things aren't stable in the status quo, that's how protests work. But it sounds like you're saying that getting a reaction is the entire goal and that's uncharitable and untrue
> It's about the US actively participating. Its something we have the power to easily stop doing.
The same goes for the Syrian massacres. US was very clearly providing support for one side of the conflict.
No protests.
Central Africa. Same.
No protests.
Nigeria. Same.
No protests.
Or how about a HUGE ongoing us involvement resulting in lots of dead? Ukraine.
No protests. (and, no, Minimal Thinking Girl protesting by herself doesn't count)
Lebanon. Yemen. Kashmir. Hungary. Finland ... the list goes on and on. What makes this case of support different? We all know what makes it different ...
The difference is extremely clear: Israel is viewed as a key US ally. We give them more foreign aid than any other nation. We got to bat for them very frequently, and almost all of our UN Vetos have been used preventing things from being said to them. The two countries are very connected. When Nigeria eg. does something, we don't rush to approve more weapons immediately.
The closest equivalent imo is South Africa, which the US government was similarly close with and people were Very Mad in almost the exact same way.
& Finally, I truly do not understand the viewpoint that we should give aid to Israel and not Ukraine. I can see the arguments for both or neither or for just Ukraine but this one's baffling. They are currently being invaded by a much bigger power. They are required to use the weapons they get purely defensively.
Armenia and Lebanon have the same problem in the UN, but it only lasts weeks, and then they fail to defend themselves, and the muslim voting block in the UN is happy when they're militarily defeated, and they just don't care about themselves: not about human rights violations by muslims against anyone else. Not even about disgusting human rights violations by muslims against muslims. Look how much effort people put into getting attention for Sudan, and it's just not getting anywhere, and it won't.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a licensing issue more than a data one. Atmos support for my Xbox headset, for example, has a monthly subscription cost.
Yes, but in a weird way: Apple doesn't allow competition for phone manufacturing for their ecosystem, so the equivalent of "deals with manufacturers" are entirely internal. Fostering a phone ecosystem that overall has more competition has hurt Google here.
Google didn’t need to pay these companies either. They chose to do it so they could keep their play store monopoly. And they may have just burning billions in profits because of it
I'm sure they did their own stuff, but Apple got away with a very nasty one. So I don't think competition law works. Results look completely random, like tossing a coin.
Being sued for different things - yeah you tend to get different results.
And what is the definition of nasty here? It's very subjective. Apple doesn't own the mobile market and are below 50% control of it so they are not really a monopoly. I'm also not sure how you can use anti-trust or anti-monopoly against them when they have been found again and again to not be a monopoly.
Banning competing browsers is illegal and Apple should have never gotten away with it. Not only an abstract absolute monopoly is a problem. Apple has a lot of leverage on the industry and is causing harm to the market with anti-competitive behavior.
For a second I thought you just posted the same link but that was very informative. It's just me but I think Google deleting all the chats automatically about the topics involved would have had me planted deep suspicion about motive in my mind.
This is a wonderful speech full of noble platitudes. None of this actually answers the question of why Apple (or really anyone) should let anyone have free and open access to something they paid and keep paying a lot to create, deploy, maintain, and iterate on. It’s their stuff, not the public’s. Nobody should expect corporations to be charities.
We force companies to incur costs for the public's benefit all the time. In special cases we even require them to serve loss generating customers as a condition of operation. No one is forced to operate a power company, but if you do you are bound to provide power to customers regardless of their individual profitability. Similarly, dominant vertically-integrated messaging systems could be required to provide interoperability at a reasonable charge (or even no charge!). Apple could then decide whether or not they want to operate a system under those terms.
If Apple should be expected to open up iMessage, then why shouldn't Facebook be expected to allow interoperability with Messenger, and Telegram and Signal forced to open those up, too?
Or, if you wish to take it a slightly different way: Why shouldn't the New York Times be expected to give everyone a copy of their paper for free? Information and good journalism are a public good, after all.
Why shouldn't pharmaceutical companies be expected to make all life-saving medications available for free?
Why shouldn't ISPs be expected to make Internet access available to all for free?
I mean, we could structure our society so that everything wasn't arbitrarily gated but that would be gasp socialism.
Also, Telegram and Signal are already open and can be bridged from anything to anything so yeah, we should force Messenger and Imessage to accept, at a minimum, bridging as well.
To be honest, I personally agree that we should be forcing at least some of these things for the common good (and, to the extent necessary, funding them with significantly-more-progressive taxes). My point is primarily that it's not particularly logical to single out Apple for this treatment if that's your principle.
Good to know about Telegram and Signal—I don't use or know much about them. IMNSHO, my argument still holds even removing them from the equation.
1. Would be nice but that can potentially cause inflation to rapidly grow again. It should go down but it would need to be gradual once inflation has fully stabilized. And it’s not just the US that’s suffering heavily under high inflation.
2. Dropping support for Ukraine would signal to China that we wouldn’t have the stamina to support Taiwan if they were attacked. It was only a few years ago that a massive chip shortage hamstrung our economy and nobody wants to repeat that. Dropping support won’t have much significant fiscal impact, either. Most of the billions spent thus far is really the US clearing out older inventories.
3. We already do with tax incentives and other mechanisms. What exactly are you asking for unchecked COVID loans that were forgiven en mass?
4. Do you have figured that indicate ESG-based investing is a net negative and costly to the US? That redirection of such funds would have a notable economic impact?
> 2. Dropping support for Ukraine would signal to China that we wouldn’t have the stamina to support Taiwan if they were attacked. It was only a few years ago that a massive chip shortage hamstrung our economy and nobody wants to repeat that. Dropping support won’t have much significant fiscal impact, either. Most of the billions spent thus far is really the US clearing out older inventories.
It's even worse than this IMO. What this acquiescence would signal to "lesser" nuclear powers is that Pax Americana is truly over. That is a problem. I believe the most likely outbreak of nuclear war is between Pakistan/China/India instead of the classic USA/Russia/China. If you want peace, keep Pax Americana. It's the least evil of all evils.
Call of Duty will be available for Switch under Microsoft. Halo and God of War are platform exclusives. But so are Tears of the Kingdom and various Mario titles. Elden Ring is the only game listed that's not available for Switch but is on both others.
Even then, there are a ton of games that are available across all platforms, including some AAA ones:
Mortal Kombat 11
The Witcher 3
Assassins's Creed (multiple)
Skyrim
Resident Evil (multiple)
Monster Hunter Rise
Overwatch 2
etc...
The Switch runs plenty of previous generation games, because it’s capable of supporting them. The Switch wouldn’t support MW 2, and Microsoft have not announced any plans to release that game, or any upcoming CoD game on it.
The reason Microsoft and Sony sign exclusive deal is mostly the keep games off each others platforms. Graphics-intensive “AAA” games aren’t going to run on the switch. Nintendo undeniably operates in a distinct segment, even if it’s capable of supporting some limited amount of overlap with the other vendors.
It’s something MS has been saying numerous times, including in the FTC court case.
The number of games that are exclusive to a platform that are paid to be that way is actually quite small. Almost all platform exclusives come from companies that are subsidiaries of their respective platform company (343 Studios, Naughty Dog, etc).
The argument of graphic capabilities as something that defines the Switch to be in a different market that’s that of Sony/MS is a straw man argument, IMO. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it’s still competing for peoples’ video game time.
Sorry buddy, you’ve fallen for fake news. Microsoft has said they’ll bring it to Nintendo, not the Switch, and the timeframe they’ve announced for this is sometime in the next 10 years. Most non-tabloid commentators seem to think this means it will either be delivered by a streaming service, or to a yet-to-be announced new console. In any case, if it happens it will have to be accompanied by a shift in Nintendo’s position in the market.
> As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it’s still competing for peoples’ video game time.
Penguin and Scholastic are both competing for peoples book reading time, yet they quite clearly compete in different market segments. Your argument is contrived and ignores the fact that consumers understand how these products are differentiated to appeal to different preferences.
All market segments have subsets and supersets. Why should the line be drawn where you imply?
Is Sony monopolizing the God of War market because God of War fans understand how those games are differentiated to appeal to their preferences?
The FTC's case that PS and Xbox exist in their own "high-performance console" market is the contrived argument. Honestly, it's dated to even consider consoles their own market. Product planning practice in the games industry these days pretty much looks at 2 markets: the mobile market and the "HD market" (PC + console).
I didn’t invent this segment, the market did when Nintendo had the insight to gamble on there being demand for lower-powered consoles (and more recently with an added focus on portability) to play less graphically demanding games on. A decision consumers subsequently validated by buying over 100,000,000 of them. Granted it wasn’t that much of a gamble, as by the time they made the Switch, this had already become Nintendo’s entire brand identity.
The Switch simple can’t do the same things that an Xbox or PlayStation can do. Many of those consoles top selling games would not be playable on a Switch, because they’re high performance games that require high performance hardware, and the Switch simply isn’t a viable substitute for that. Even for the most graphically demanding games that can run on a Switch, they can only do so with comparatively low resolution and frame rate, which in case you didn’t know, are major selling points for the segments that Microsoft/Sony are competing in.
If you don’t want to accept these plainly obvious facts, why don’t you go and inform r/NintendoSwitch that it’s a viable substitute for a PS5, and see how many people you can convince?
>The Switch simple can’t do the same things that an Xbox or PlayStation can do. Many of those consoles top selling games would not be playable on a Switch, because they’re high performance games that require high performance hardware, and the Switch simply isn’t a viable substitute for that. Even for the most graphically demanding games that can run on a Switch, they can only do so with comparatively low resolution and frame rate, which in case you didn’t know, are major selling points for the segments that Microsoft/Sony are competing in.
Absolutely no one is arguing this and it's not the point. You should give the commentators on this forum more credit than thinking we aren't aware of the power/capabilities differences.
The "high-end console gaming market" is what is what people are taking issue with. It's such a limiting segmentation and is arguably not a very good definition. There's a console gaming market as a whole, with a subset of it being high-end, that competes on user's gaming time. In my view, that's how it should be defined. There's also the mobile gaming market. Are we to now say the Switch shouldn't belong in the mobile gaming market because of screen size and power capabilities? It doesn't make sense to define the Switch in its own, standalone market. What would it be? Mid-tier portable gaming market? One that has no competitors and it has a monopoly in? That's not practical nor reflective of gaming purchasing habits.
Segregating the market based on capabilities breaks down in many ways. The argument shouldn't be that the Switch should belong in its own category because many people who own an Xbox or a Playstation also happen to own a Switch. Nearly half of Xbox owners also happen to own Playstation console (myself included) so does the fact that there's an overlap now mean that Xbox and PlayStation should be somehow in their own category? Of course not. Nor should the argument be about how it's played. One can that the Switch can be played in a portable manner but I just as easily play on my Playstation or Xbox through my iPad locally or even the cloud. Yes, it's not a popular option but the capabilities are there. All that's left is arguing about whether or not something can play AAA games in higher fidelity. If fidelity is something a gamer is truly after, they'd be buying a PC.
I'm sorry, but this is not a realistic view of what transpired. Russia was and continues to be an opportunistic colonialist. They keep moving territory markers overnight in Georgia. Crimea/Donbass didn't happen because of some breakdown in some peace treaty. The last minute deal offered and wasn't accepted right before the 2022 invasion that some blame Ukraine on was awful in every possible way. It would have neutered Ukraine militarily and required a puppet government subservient to Russia be installed.