wredcoll

What? Since when? What are you talking about?

Don't vague post. Either be specific with names and examples and citations or don't waste our time with generalities about unnamed bad people who did some unspecified bad thing.

It's a narrow connector and sideways force acts like a knife on the shell. blowing out the sides.

But the port is contained with any the body of the device and the cord is just dangling so wouldn't that kinda thing break the cord first?

I mean, everything breaks with enough use/bad luck/whatever, I've just never seen a usbc port break like that.

The other day I was using a magnetic usbc connector to a headphone and it broke by ripping the part of the connect that inserts into the port away from the body of the plug, but the port itself was fine.

Ok I'm not going to try breaking it but my intuition says it would break the cable first, not the port?

How do you "wear out" a usbc port? Is this phone like 15 years old? My imagination is boggled.

If apple had made lightning an actual standard everyone was using then the eu might have chosen that instead.

But they didn't. Every single other company/device was using usb(c) and it probably wasn't because of some kind if irrational dislike of words starting with the letter L.

I think you might need to brush up on your historical studies. There's no such thing as a generic "feudal serf" that applied across multiple cultures and times.

People who might qualify for the label "serf" had all sorts of differing rights and responsibilities and cultures across the literally thousands of years of history we have access to, anything from slaves in all but name to people who had (the equivalent of) bills of rights and legal protections for things they owned and produced and what duties and obligations they had were enforced by contracts laws and judges.

Musk and I both have "the right" to build a factory to produce electric cars for sale, but one of us is going to have a considerably easier time exercising that right.

It's illegal for both Steve Jobs and I to to park in a handicapped space, but when he gets a fine for doing so, it doesn't affect him in the slightest and he (used) his power to avoid suffering from any consequences, whereas I am meaningfully impacted by the punishment.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

Are things better "now" than "then"? Yes, of course. I wouldn't trade places with basically anyone from more than 100 years ago. But that's irrelevant to the point that people like Musk and the thousands of similar but less famous people have too much power and that power is used to corrode our society.

Living in a house you rent and working at someone else's factory has a number of downsides. It's not all bad, but it's still worth actually considering what is good and what is bad so we can improve things.

I agree about the company stores thing, but it's pretty common (right now in america) for someone to work at a factory, that they do not own, and live in a house, that they also do not own.

The distinction between that and some kind of stereotypical medieval serf living on a farm he was granted by a lord and producing crops that he uses to pay his rents and so forth seems somewhat minor.

Yes in general a modern american has more government enforced rights and protections, but at the end of the day a lot of rights aren't really all that relevant if you can't afford them in the first place.

Musk and I both have the right to build a factory to produce electric cars, but one of us is going to have a much harder time exercising that right.

(Not to say that we aren't living in a better world, we absolutely are, I would never trade places with basically anyone from "the past", but the point isn't that things aren't as bad as they used to be, the point is how do we improve what we have today)

That did occasionally happen but I don't think it was the majority case by any means.

That being said, if we're talking about the lord owning the mill you labor at, how is that different than tesla owning the car factory you work at?

Broadly speaking, I think most people would agree that Maria Hernandez the world renowned neurosurgeon who does 200 surgeries a year makes dozens or perhaps even hundred of times the amount Joe Smith the housr cleaner makes.

Even if they perhaps work the same number of hours a year, Maria has more training and (maybe) some kind of rarer aptitude and as a result we have a lot more house cleaners than neurosurgeons (in america and other places there a whole bunch of other factors like who gets access to the training and so on that causes some of these imbalances, but that's a whole 'nother comment).

The people, in general, are probably considerably less happy with the idea that jk rowling the ultrarich author gets to use her money to try to pass laws taking rights away from people she doesn't like.

Look at the difference between Ellison and Musk. Ellison is probably has similar levels of power to Musk, but he (afaik) mostly uses it to buy giant yachts and annoy other fortune 500 companies, and as a result most people don't really care that he's a billionaire.

Musk, on the other hand, tries to use his power to screw with government services and publically attack minorities and so on.

The article literally brags about how loud the car is (and makes it sound likr it was modified to be louder?) so it seems like a reasonable point to take issue with.

Fortunately or unfortunately, driving a car is a public activity and even as a hobby, other people are going to be exposed to it in a way that you just don't get from, say, building model boats out of toothpicks.

I'm a big fan of people having hobbies and enjoying them, but we live in a dense and crowded world where stuff like a loud car can negatively affect literally hundreds of other people.

The idea of the web-router "owning" the database fills me with a visceral sense of loathing.

Data is always the important part of any real program.

I would more simply define that as "wealth inequality" rather than capitalism (or more broadly, power inequality) and perhaps go on to say that the real problem is that, while you can't realistically prevent/remove all inquality, most systems do a poor job of preventing the people with more money/power from using that to consistently increase their own share.

Just as a thought experiment, would you say there are any (societal) negatives to the possibility of thr price of bananas (or the share price of spacex) being able to fluctuate wildly based on semi-abstract economic manipulations, like shorts and futures and such.

What I'm getting at is when does it go from investing, "I think this entity is going to take my money and use it to build a profitable factory that will then return to me a share of the profits", to just gambling "I think this stock price will change by the end of the day and I'm going to bet on it", and what are the positives and negatives of that?

History.com says:

Feudalism is a term often used to describe the social, economic and political conditions that existed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. At its core, it was a system in which a landowner, or lord, granted a piece of land called a fief to a subordinate known as a vassal. In return, the vassal pledged loyalty to the lord, providing labor, military service, payments—or a mix of these.

And then the next paragraph goes on to say that historians think this is way too simple to describe what real people were actually doing.

Either way, unless every single piece of property in the kingdom (including, like, plows and mill stones and spinning wheels) was granted by the king (or someone he had granted to) it seems like there's still a lot of room for buying/selling/investing.

I mean, it's an interesting answer but my basic point is that the "real world" is far too complex for a term like capitalism to be at all useful.

Even stuff like "free market", can a market be "free" if a government exists? What about monopolies? Etc etc.

I just want people to be more specific when they criticize systems!

Maybe we should have elected Hillary Clinton then?

(This is a reference to Bill Clinton's extremely successful "Reinventing Government" initiative which actually balanced the federal budget until the next republican came along...)

I'm not certain you're right, but I think this opinion deserves considerably more (fair) discusson than it's getting.

Lots of replies either personally benefit or just assume the "way things are" is the best, but the stock market has gotten highly abstracted from the original intention of providing capital to grow companies via means other than bank loans.

I get the argument that shorts and friends help make the price the stock is being sold at more accurate, and I believe there's some truth there, but also we constantly see stock prices fluctuate by 10+% in a single day and I have trouble believing the actual value of all these companies changed that much in a single 24 period.

Yes, you can but does that ability benefit the population/nation/market as a whole?

Why was musk/spacex so interested in having the rules broken to include spacex stock? Do you think maybe there was a reason that involved musk benefitting??

What even is "true capitalism"?

The term "capitalism" was literally only created for the purpose of writing criticisms of the (then) current system of markets/trading/taxing/investing.

Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.

Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.

The formalization of the process of buying shares in a company and receiving dividends/profits as a result is a bit newer, but the general concept of "I give you money, you use it to make something and sell it then give me money back" has been around for roughly the same amount of time as currency itself.

Anyways, my point is that there is a lot of things to criticize about our current world/economy, using the term "capitalism" while doing so is too vague to be useful in any way.

(Communism/socialism does have more of an actual definition, but very few people are aware of or use it, so it doesn't help all that much).

thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs.

Surely this is easy to prove, right?

I mean, they're hardly blameless.

Oh hey, you sound like you study in the field, is it truly possible to treat/cure T2 diabetes in obese patients by basically fasting based weightloss? I saw some studies/articles about it a couple of years ago and then nothing recently...

I agree with you on the general principle that we should demand better privacy protection from the government, its agents, and the corporations that claim its citizenship.

Arguing about who has killed more seems mildly pointless since it relies on a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations. Even aside from stuff like the east indies company, Hearst's newspapers helped create a situation where a war was declared, what share of the resulting death toll do they get?

Beyond that, something I've noticed over my years on this planet is that, generally speaking, power cannot be destroyed, only transferred.

What I mean by that is someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life, in ways that range from what color you can paint your house, where you can buy a house, how much you get paid, whether or not you get paid a salary, how much taxes you pay, etc etc.

I would, in general, prefer that the entity with that power be some kind of democratically elected institution, hopefully with lots of various internal and external safeguards.

As you say, we should be worried about the government collecting and storing our private information. But if we stopped them from doing that, then some other entity would just take over spying on people.

Sure, Obama (and friends) got the ACA passed which, among other things, forbade health insurance companies from refusing service to people with "pre-existing conditions" as well as also forbidding lifetime caps on services needed for treatment.

Is it the best most perfect law ever passed in the history of humanity? Obviously not. Is it substantially better than what came before? YES. It's hard to explain just how screwed you were if you started getting hit by the "pre-existing conditions" disqualifier or your health insurance decided that they only needed to spend a million treating your cancer and after that you're on your own.

The parent post adds zero value, why start now?

Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.

Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.

In general I would agree that say, walmart, is mostly interested in encouraging you to shop at their stores more frequently with the information they gather, it's also true that other corporations are currently selling the information they gather to the government.

And, of course, if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power, in the USA this would include things like state governors / attorneys, federal legislators, presidents, etc, all of whom have some level of influence over my information being collected and used.

If I dislike what walmart is doing, my options are considerably more limited. I can lobby for a law to be passed against it or I can essentially wish for it to go out of business.

That's not a hot take, it's just boring old racism.

I mean, the republicans constantly pay for things nobody wants, so uh, what's the issue here?