An alternative universe where the Economist turned out to actually practice introspection

Apple. Not the most evil, for certain, but they have the highest percentage of high level business choices that piss me off. Just so antithetical to my philosophy and consumer preferences. All closed, all hyper controlled, low customization, anti-repairable.

Do it their way or go fuck yourself. Something break? Fuck you, it’s your fault, buy another one. Want to play games on their very capable hardware? Grow up, no compatibility. Want to make their OS work on other machines? How dare you. Thief.

The only thing happening in the industry is the same thing happening in every industry and most of the first world:

The wealthy owners and executive leader roles have learned that COVID, COVID supply lines, interest rates, ‘consumer sentiment’, and inflation, are all very easy scapegoats that both the public and investors will easily buy as reasons for lowering product quality and availability, while also firing employees, squeezing the non-fired ones to death, and raising prices. This has lead to almost 2 straight years of corporations showing record profits (even adjusting for the inflation that they are largely responsible for in the first place).

This downward spiral will continue until some force with nearly as much power pushes back.

This is typically and ideally a representative government in the form of regulation or taxation. But the US government has suffered decades of regulatory capture and congressional gridlock.

So the only other potential option is a large amount of highly populated unions. Which have to fight against nearly 100 years of media and political demonization and nearly 150 years of ‘american independent attitude’.

The perfect modern system has all 3 parties; unions, government, and corporations, equally strong and antagonistic. Just as the perfect modern government would have the executive, legislative, and judicial branches equally strong and antagonistic. Neither could be much farther from the case here.

Stronger bigger unions. Weaker smaller corporations. And a government that actually functions. All are necessary to fix our current shit show.

The fact that it’s Chinese really isn’t even a blip on the radar imo. The censorship sucks and a lot of US platforms do it too ( I mean shit look at YouTubes content rules).

Their content algorithm being really good at showing you what your brain craves in an endless stream is the real big problem. It’s creating such strange micro cultures. Live streams of people slowly filling balloons with food coloring and water, on a bunch of white printer paper. Teasing the water. Like an hour before it pops. 1,200,000 views. It feels insidious in such a weird way.

The country people of the 1890s are not the country people of today. Big city folk were a significantly smaller part of the population then, and the college educated population was miniscule. The ability to become educated is the largest relevant metric here. Now you can hit up khan academy and stanfords YouTube channel and get a world class education for free. Back then you had to be straight white wealthy connected. The excuses for ignorance are gone, for current country people.

But yes, these problems can and should be reversed, and done best communicating outside of the specific “lie-beral pedo demonrat vs racist Jesus warrior firearm creep” paradigm; placing things in terms of labor vs ownership class.

They literally fucking can’t. They tried within a more limited scope and the supreme court slapped it down, there is a zero percent chance they could cancel a more broad selection. Dogshit meme