How many acres are you personally willing to farm to let others eat without payment “in a just world”?
How many days per month are you willing to pick up trash, sit in a fire station, or teach elementary school?
It’s not slavery (if you) that other people won’t give you their output without payment. In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…
> In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…
This sounds a lot like you've been conditioned to think there can't be an alternative to the current system. Even if I don't know what a better system would be, I can absolutely imagine that there are better options than what we've got. We should all want that and push for that and ask ourselves what it might be until we find it.
I can tell you this much about what I think would be part of that better system: we wouldn't leave people to sleep on the streets and we wouldn't have for-profit healthcare.
> I genuinely don't know why I would ever generate a salary key so I can let someone know how much money I made.
I value my financial privacy as well, but when I go to someone to ask to borrow a million dollars to buy a house, it seems reasonable that I’m going to have to give them some information pertinent to assuring them I’m likely to and capable of paying them back.
Just this morning, my old Latitude failed to boot with a “this charger is only giving 20W and that’s not enough to boot this laptop” error. (I was testing a new USB-C charger that’s obviously going back.)
Weirdest part was it was 100% charged, so could have booted with 0 Watts of charger but decided not to boot with 20 Watts more.
Oh, refusing to boot at all is evil. I've never seen that.
Sure, you or I would just unplug the charger and run on battery but bad UX decisions like that generate a support call to me from my 95 yr old mom. It should not only warn and continue to boot, it should use whatever power is on offer to reduce the rate of battery drain.
If you read the first line as “make a handsome profit”, I get it, but if you read it slightly more charitably to mean “this service [permanent backup] costs real money to operate, so you need a way to fund that somehow”, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Servers, storage, power, networking, and cooling aren’t free; therefore neither is reliable indefinite storage of family memories in digital form.
> I'd love to release a lot of it but I'm torn between releasing artifacts created with expensive software I paid for and thinking that many of those things should really be freely available to anyone
Release it or not, but either way you’re almost certainly going to get paid back the same amount of money: $0.
This is getting a ton of hate here, but I think it feels like a pretty reasonably balanced response to competing concerns: protecting literally billions of non-tech-savvy users from potentially malicious social-engineering attacks while allowing devs and tech-savvy a path to bypass that protection if they’re sure they want to.
What concrete change to the policy would be a strict Pareto improvement keeping just those two concerns in mind?
I'm pretty surprised at the amount of hate here. All the "just build it ourselves!" and "Google wants your data", and almost no top-level comments even discussing the difficulty of dealing with malware and social engineering.
There are at least three moral arguments that can be made:
- Google, as a capitalist company, is ignoring the privacy and FOSS implications, and is guilty of screwing the customer due to greed
- Regular, non-tech folks are constantly being robbed of their privacy, money, and/or identity through malware and social engineering attacks, and Google is guilty of not doing enough to protect them
- Enabling malware delivery and use props up criminals and known bad actors (e.g., north korean), and by not stopping this Google is guilty of supporting these bad actors
I'm not seeing either of those last two points being made strongly. Maybe it's just not the target audience — people here aren't as likely to be scammed, and few of us are regularly thinking about north korea — but I'd expect to see more consideration for the costs of inaction here.
It’s pretty common for techies to overestimate how widely their opinions and desires are shared. If you think a good chunk of the population wants to sideload apps, then this feels like an attack. But it’s really just a decision not to cater to a tiny fraction of the market. It’s the same thing in discussions about headphone jacks or small phones. People act like it’s nefarious, when really it’s just that their desire for those things is pretty uncommon.
Personally I think there should be a lot more work done on how to secure arbitrary apps from arbitrary sources so that they are unable to hurt people, rather than focusing so much on on preventing random apps from being installed in the first place. This would help the average person as well, since these walled gardens still make mistakes. But it’s not realistic to put a box in everyone’s pockets that’s three taps away from sending all their money to some dude in Laos.
There are many cases where swerving will avoid an accident that braking cannot and cars unexpectedly pulling out from the side are often among these. It’s not a majority, but it’s not at all rare.
How many days per month are you willing to pick up trash, sit in a fire station, or teach elementary school?
It’s not slavery (if you) that other people won’t give you their output without payment. In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…
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