Preface: I'm going to sound quite harsh by changing scales, so put your tough skin on before continuing.
This is certainly worse for the individual, but at society scale, the cost being the obvious devaluation of willpower is way too high. Way too high because everything good in that society was built almost exclusively by driven and strong-willed individuals.
I'll give a reply a go - of course we want strong people. That said, we've introduced incredible amounts of weird new things to the world. Advertising, shit food, tech, and a litany of responsibilities. Some of these are very bad and we all paying heavy prices for it.
I don't think we need to treat every bad thing society does as only needing a "toughen up" solution, instead we should fix the root cause.
An extreme example would be if the government poisons your water, maybe some medicine is ok. We should un-poison the water too, but I'm ok with medicine in the meantime.
Then we should start selecting strong willed individuals who do not fit into the “normie” path as those we uphold and show to be role models and examples.
Instead we collectively shit on them and force them into the most useless lifestyles ever devised - effectively pushing paper on rigid schedules or they don’t get to eat.
I’ve thought about this one quite a bit. The world has narrowed a whole lot to define acceptable behavior and who is allowed a seat at the table.
Almost all those “strong willed” individuals of the past who actually built things had lifestyles that would have gotten them entirely shunned from society today.
It’s not impossible but even compared to 30 years ago it’s an entirely different world for such folks. The way I “came up” in life would not be possible today due to the gatekeepers of “respectable society”.
Needing drugs to fit into that incredibly narrow and basic framework of a life should be of no surprise to anyone. Only a few of incredible luck and willpower and probably even naivety will survive that filter.
This whole topic is the epitome of “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome” - entirely predictable, and it’s what society seems to want.
Expanding on what a sibling comment said, we live in an adversarial environment. A successful food product is one you want to eat, whether you need it or not.
Willpower is important, I agree. Almost everyone needing willpower to not eat, though, is a fairly new phenomenon. If anything, the new drugs restore the balance that existed before —and if willpower is a limited resource, actively help society by returning to us what is taken by the relentless grind of profit maximization.
Willpower to not eat really isn't the same as willpower to eat reasonably (in quantity and quality), though. There's even exercise to offset the effects of suboptimal alimentation.
Either willpower is fungible, in which case it doesn’t matter what you use it on because you’re using it up no matter what, or it isn’t, in which case the original point about losing willpower due to leaning on GPL-1 inhibitors for weight loss is mostly invalid, since it wouldn’t affect the willpower to do other things.
Absolute aesthetic relativism is the complete opposite of "thinking about", it's giving up to the cult of modernity, an intellectual shortcut to avoid the complicated and controversial question of "I instinctively know that objective good/bad exists but what is it, to what extent can it be formalized and separated from my opinion, how does it interact with subjective qualities?".
That shortcut leads to a dead end that only contains the rotting corpse of truth and integrity.
The total opposite, large movements like punks or hippies weren't really deviance, it was choosing another large group to belong to. It's conveniently cellophane-wrapped rebellion for people who need an identity but can't bear to stand alone and truly think for themselves.
It could also be a more charitable "I make significant efforts to fight against this and spent years/months of my life trying to convince others to do the same only to be ignored, so fuck them".
Like that RMS meme where the world is finally getting the pointy end of the proprietary software trap and cries for help and he just whispers "Gno".
> I make significant efforts to fight against this
More powerful people, the ones profiting from economic crimes, are fighting to keep scams legal. And they are the ones that create confusing laws that blame victims for falling for scams in the disguise of "personal responsibility". When lawmakers are the scammers, scams become legal and the victims will not see justice.
Personally, I won't pay to stream anime, but if Blu-Rays had subs as good as what dedicated fansubs can output (incl. a possibly optional more literal translation with honorifics) AND SSA subtitles somewhere on them to be used by computers, I'd actually buy them; if they aren't butchered QTEC crap (https://github.com/LightArrowsEXE/QTEC), of course.
I commend you for saying this, but this is akin to saying you would gladly pay me tomorrow for a hamburger today. It doesn’t pay the bills. Perhaps a group could assemble on Patreon or other crowdfunding to acquire rights to make their own releases if they wanted to be part of a market-based solution.
Would you be willing to crowdfund such an enterprise? It’s one thing to say you’ll put your money where your mouth is in some hypothetical future economic situation that may never arrive (as it was never funded by you or by anyone else), whereas it’s altogether another thing entirely to actually do what you say you’ll do in hopes that your investment will come good.
I understand what you're saying, but I'm still showing my disapproval via my wallet and not giving money to people who do a much worse (and/or unsuitable for fans instead of the general public) job than fans.
The amount of laughably bad upscales making BDs worse than the previous DVDs is just the cherry on top showing that they truly don't care about anyone with taste or discernment; they should put the DVD masters untouched on BD and they very rarely do so (Di Gi Charat had that).
There's a direct equivalent in the world of anime: frame-per-frame restoration like the GITS Blu-Ray (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316985) or the '99 HxH anime and LaserDisc scans.
What do you mean? "Old" (up to Sandy Bridge) Thinkpads had no issue with that, it just meant no keyboard backlighting (which is why the ThinkLight exists).
You can destroy the keyboard but they're replaceable and usually contained the spill to just the keyboard so it didn't damage any of the more expensive components like the main board. The goal wasn't an invulnerable keyboard but to limit the damage to a cheap replaceable subcomponent that kept the laptop alive.
Can it be used without a smartphone aka "portable telescreen"? Do they explicitly guarantee this'll remain the case? If not, you're just being hoodwinked via cheap convenience.
In Denmark a similar system (NemID) gave you a piece of paper with long alphanumeric codes to be used instead of the app. Now it's replaced by another system (MitID) which I haven't verified that supports those, but it's highly unlikely that it stopped supporting physical codes.
It's actually quite a good idea to have this, even if you have a smartphone, in case that you lose access to it temporarily.
The Austrian version (which I use an appreciate a lot) allows some hardware FIDO2 tokens instead of a smartphone. Guarantee? Not by law but it will be hard for them to take that away.
It won't be hard at all to take it away if only few people are using it. And I assume the vast majority is using smartphones and won't understand the need for anything else.
I think it will be hard enough to take it away. The current solution also exists because there are lots of elderly people that do not have a smartphone.
> Guarantee? Not by law but it will be hard for them to take that away.
Last year they removed the ability to register[0] yubikey FIDO2 tokens affected by the EUCLEAK 'vulnerability', despite it not posing any security risk even by their own admission, and nobody seems to have cared. The whole thing screams security theater, they require the much more expensive FIDO2 Level 2 keys for no reason (which limited you to just Trustkeys at the time after yubikeys got banned) while their own sites crashes[1] if you give it a secure password.
At the end of the day, if not it's required by law the only other guarantee you have is a broad userbase that will complain if it's taken away and at least at the moment it's clear that no such userbase exists.
You don't have to tell me, I absolutely hate that passkeys support attestation. But there is pressure to support a non smartphone based sign in, and it does exist.
In Portugal, our version can use the smartphone app, an (open source) desktop app that supports reading your ID with a smart card reader, and you can also get the codes via SMS. The smartphone app is purely a convenience if you don’t have your wallet with you.
Everyone has a smartphone lol - i can tell that living in a country with great digital services is a lot less stressful than in country with no digitization and old school paperwork i have gone through both.
If smartphones are to be a requirement for participation in civil society, privacy- and freedom-preserving smartphones are needed at the very least. People shouldn't be required to submit to some company's Terms of Service in order to participate in society.
Meaningful regulation would mean e.g. air-gapped infrastructure so they can't make inadvertent privacy mistakes. And guaranteed service levels, and a service of last resort.
Google have based built a business model without accountability and transparency. Which is fine, as long as we're not forced to use them by the state.
Telcos are licensed. Mobile phone manufacturers and, crucially, OS providers, are not. Although in the EU they are now subject to some Digital Markets Act control.
And telco licensing isn't even really relevant. Afaik, licensing condition only has to do with their use of the airwaves and other such technical stuff. It's got nothing to do with ensuring the rights of the telco users.
> Should everyone be required to use private banks to access e.g. foreign exchange?
Maybe so, I don't know. Though it is worth remarking that "private" banks in the US really are only semi-private. The (admittedly imperfect) regulations that banks are subject to starts to blur the lines between public and private. Not to mention that there are far more banks than smartphone handset-and-OS makers.
> No modern society is going to maintain a parallel government economy to serve the vanishingly small minority who live in fear of private companies.
This is not the only option (though it would potentially be an option for some sufficiently-powerful societies). Other options could include:
1. Multilateral coalitions to do some combination of specify/design/build smartphones and/or their OS
2. Specify a set of user rights and regulate smartphone handset and OS manufacturers accordingly
As a sibling commenter said, this isn't about living in fear of private companies as such. It's about not wanting to be coerced into a system of products that don't preserve liberal rights.
Not everybody wants to carry a smartphone around all the time.
If the ID becomes about more than proving right to work, and becomes a daily carry, it's not hard to see the appeal of a government down the line tapping into an always on-hand microphone, GPS, internet enabled device.
Even putting the tin foil hat aside, I and many people like me enjoy leaving the phone at home, and want as little time spent on the thing as possible.
Yup. Look at train tickets in England. For now it's a convenience but you'll notice the law hasn't kept up with the push to have tickets on phones: the law still says you must produce on demand a ticket when requested. So if your battery runs out or your phone crashes or the app glitches or you've annoyed the "safety" department of Google/Apple... it's entirely your problem
A moody ticket inspector is under no obligation really to give you a few minutes to sort it out
Or, if like I experienced yesterday, the most popular train ticket app stutters during peak rush hour and you cannot display the ticket you have actually bought to the conductor and exit gates at the destination.
Digital is more convenient at the loss of privacy. And no, absolutely not, NOT everyone has a smartphone nor can use one. Go read the thread on teaching iPhones to seniors.
Not everyone has a smartphone. A substantial number of especially older people don't. Plus poor people, and just.. well, offline people whose lives are much more communal than ours. The requirement for a hundreds-of-units-of-currency device to prove who you are is bonkers.
But this isn't a conversation about people being excluded from the latest JS framework, this is a conversation about people not using a smartphone being increasingly excluded from pretty fundamental things. App only tickets for public transportation? Grandma can't do that. E-voting? Grandma can't do that. Online banking? Grandma can't do that, because grandma struggles to send a text message much less to navigate a modern app with five different dickbars that is outright designed to get people to sign up for marketing trash.
Having an option for digital ID is great, and there are many potential benefits to it. Requiring a modern smartphone for it is wildly out of touch.
>Second, you're on the wrong forum complaining that people need a device to do things in life.
I think it's exactly right forum, because we know how unreliable and unmagical are those things and are in a good position to judge the risk of relying on them too much.
Or Win 3.1 looking for whatever shibboleth was in MS-DOS and popping up a scary-looking message if it found another DOS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
This is certainly worse for the individual, but at society scale, the cost being the obvious devaluation of willpower is way too high. Way too high because everything good in that society was built almost exclusively by driven and strong-willed individuals.
reply