My current Mac may be my last, but I can’t commit to it, because boy have I enmeshed my life in their ecosystem. I’ve just managed to escape Adobe, thanks to Affinity. I don’t touch Meta products, except i have to use WhatsApp because it’s the global phone company now. 1/
I don’t have much experience with Chinese branded devices or software, so maybe that’s the only reason I’ve not experienced much lock-in. Obviously WeChat in China is lock-in extraordinaire. Still, in the global market, it’s remarkable how American the big lock-in ecosystems seem to be. /fin
we’ve got your back, dagger in hand.
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do you in practice experience locking, in the sense you continue to use a brand / consider alternatives at a severe handicap because the overhead of switching would be high due to mutual dependencies among devices? are you locked into a xiaomi ecosystem?
no. Apple DOES require registration to the same login to interoperate. your Apple Watch won’t interact with your iPhone unless both are logged into the same Apple ID, and non-Apple products are not permitted to login and therefore not permitted to interoperate as richly. 1/
i agree a lot of lockin can be constructed from a myriad of small inconveniences, but Apple is much more brutal than that. /fin
account registration requirements aren’t lock-in per se. they may serve lock-in, if for example products refuse to interoperate with products without the same vendor-specific registration.
sometimes the iresome gets tiresome.
(i have a view!)
have you ever experienced vendor lock-in from a Chinese product? how often from a product not sold by an American firm? is vendor lock-in an an usually American business model? not uniquely. spotify has obviously gone for lock-in via two-sided marketplace network effects. who else?
a bit wild to argue that customers using your product as advertised should be liable for trespasses of which they may be unaware. not sure you want to be the customer, then. ht @anthonymoser.com
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good to know our commanding heights are captained by sober non-narcissists.
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cold, man. faint praise.
i’m glad to hear it. (i’m probably more and more wobbly!)
a man who has starved and/or withheld lifesaving medical assistance from hundreds of thousands of people thinks Joyce Carol Oates is mean.
Text: I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants. It might not feel that way but that's because psychopaths have a structural advantage: normal people aren't obsessed with climbing hierarchies and dominating others. Look around you. The world runs on kindness and empathy. Hardly anything in our daily life would function at all if complete assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of the population. It actually takes a vast machinery to suppress this fact, and to reward evil behaviour.
“It’s Difficult To Overstate How Concentrated Wealth Is In The US” by @ianwelsh.bsky.social www.ianwelsh.net/its-difficul...
It’s Difficult To Overstate How Concentrated Wealth Is In The US
Link Preview: It’s Difficult To Overstate How Concentrated Wealth Is In The US: These two charts tell a story. First, the top .1%. Next, the top 1%. This chart is only to 2023. Now what you'll notice is that the top .1% holds about half the wealth of the top 1%. It's like this al...
i feel like dementia is aspirational now, given how many famous powerful people now have it.
that’s precisely what distinguishes social insurance from market insurance. people buy market insurance voluntarily, knowing everything they know. 1/
social insurance is compelled or subsidized, because the people who participate already know whether they’re more likely to get better deals or worse out of it, but collectively we have an interest in compressing outcomes, so we compel participation. /fin
Really? Here are the Michigan Consumer Survey questions from 2015. data.sca.isr.umich.edu/fetchdoc.php... 1/
Do they capture what we care about, in terms of long-term economic welfare? Are you financially better off or worse off than five years ago? How are business conditions? What do you expect of inflation? How's the housing market? 2/
Is that "economic welfare" in any meaningful sense? If you have more savings than five years ago, but you're struggling to make ends meat 'cuz your kid's in college and rent's gone up, are you "financially better off"? 3/
If you think gas prices are going to decline, what's the relationship between that and economic welfare? 4/
These measures were never intended or designed to be used in the manner you are using them. They are intended to help make short-term predictions about the business cycle. That's what they were developed for. 5/
I agree the suicide rate is a very dirty measure. But it is more condign to the task of measuring welfare, the object of economics, than short-term consumer sentiment surveys. Yes. It's a bad measure! All the measures are bad! That is real life. 6/
You don't get to trump an argument because you have a measure, a very bad measure, but it is quantitative and you can find it on FRED! That is cargo cultism, not intelligence. /fin
The first Trump term was a cyclical uptick among a secular downturn. You'll object, by what measure? It's a hard question! Consumer sentiment surveys are weak predictors of anything, designed to capture cyclical not secular changes. Here's a measure, also dirty. www.nimh.nih.gov/health/stati...
I never said people were always upset and anxious. I said a lot of people have been upset and anxious since at latest 2016, and it's obviously true. 1/
There are all kinds of "measures if economic optimism", but we had a national debate over deaths of despair during that period, and an election in 2020 where one major political party's primaries were devoted very disproportionately to the cost of health care. 2/
Trump's first term may not be by some measures the worst of times economically, but we've been in a period of widely expressed dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the US economy since at least the financial crisis, through the volatility of the business cycle. /fin