Nobody is proposing to remove the infrastructure itself.
It's a question of who gets to decide who gets to _use_ the infrastructure.
Imagine that you have a private company that manages all of the toll roads in a city. One day, this company decides that they no longer want John Smith to use their toll roads. John Smith is banned.
Maybe John is a terrible person. Criminal convictions, DUIs, whatever. Regardless of that, should a private company have unilateral right to ban a customer? With no recourse? No appeal, no accountability? There is no elected official to vote out of office if you don't like it. There's no appeals court to hear your claim. John is just banned. He now has to drive an extra 30 minutes every day because he can't use the high-speed toll roads to get to work.
Parler is problematic. For sure. And I'm a big believer in free speech, and that companies, in general, should be able to run their business however they want.
However, there are limits. A sandwich shop can't refuse to serve a customer because they are black, for instance. But cake shops can refuse to serve customers if they are gay, as we recently learned from supreme court cases.
I think that much of the issue here revolves around how much of a monopoly a company has. If my local sandwich shop doesn't want to serve me, because I'm a jerk, that's fine. I can just go to another shop down the street. I'm not that inconvenienced.
But these massive tech companies have enormous ecosystems. They dominate their industries, and are often the only really viable choice in their markets.
I see a constant stream of article about YouTubers that build a massive business with millions of followers, and then one day 'poof', Google kicks them off, and they have no recourse.
Or the guy on Facebook that spent $47 million dollars in advertising over the years, and one day Facebook kicks him off, banned for life. No recourse, no appeal, no explanation, even.
Apple and Google have absolute say over their app stores, and what is allowed. Companies can be ruined overnight because some algorithm tipped from the "ok" to "not ok" overnight.
Credit is different as it’s a loan, not money that is rightfully yours. Due to that, a bank can close those accounts at any point (and still require you pay them down), but checking and savings are regulated in ways that prevent them from holding your money hostage unless a court orders them to. I can’t remember the citation, but these regulations came about over time since the Great Depression.
Anecdotes are data. Quite literally. Each is one data point. A data point is not a conclusion. To draw valid conclusions you need a large body of data. But each anecdote is, quite literally, a single data point.
In general, I think that having knowledge of multiple different tech stacks is good. The IT industry is constantly changing and evolving, and learning to evolve and change is good.
Also, you might want to take a look at Flutter. It's a new(ish) cross-platform mobile development framework from Google. It seems to be getting some traction, and allows you to write truly cross-platform mobile apps. There are other cross-platform mobile frameworks (React Native, ...), but Flutter seems to be gaining momentum.
Anyhow, if you are interested in mobile development, give it a try! It's not you are locked into your choice for life...
Login fatigue. Yes, I use a password manager (1password).
But it means I need to stop going through the sign-up flow, jump over to the password manager, create a new login, change the password recipe from random-letter to random-word (which I prefer), generate a password, then go further modify it to accommodate the site's particular password complexity rules (upper/lower/special/numbers), add the URL, save, then go back to the sign-up flow to finish.
And... 90% of the time, that's what I do, because I prefer to have separate logins for every site.
But sometimes, I just click the 'sign in with google' because it's a hell of a lot faster and easier.
Hear hear. I’m amazed 1PW hasn’t defaulted to random word recipes by now, as well as providing checkboxes to fold in all the upper/number/special character rules, or min/max length. (My passwords usually look like this nowadays: “turtle megaphone house 6@B”)
Right, people don’t want to manually patch their speakers, but people probably don’t want to throw them out after a few years either.
In any case, presumably in this proposed scenario secondary service industries would pop up to do this for them/offer ongoing alternatives. Much like computer maintenance and repair.
Open source doesn't need to be more complicated. There are several open source projects with majority of users with only consumer mindset. VLC comes to mind.
The original producers of the software could be unhelpful even if they comply though. That's another story.
Consider the security aspect, as well.
Apple is generally considered much more secure than Android phone.
For example, see this Ted talk that describes how this security gap is a civil rights issue. Basically, Android phones are cheaper. But, they are much easier for the police to hack into. People with more money buy Apple, and it's much harder to hack them.
As another data point: in the last few years there have been a few high-profile news cycles about the FBI trying to hack into an iPhone of a suspected terrorist, and not being able to. They were pressuring Apple to get access, and Apple was pushing back. But the bottom line here is that the FBI couldn't get in to an iPhone.
I haven't ever seen a similar news report for Android...
There's only been one case like that, so it's not really useful to say you've never heard of one for the Android. And they eventually did hack in, and the firm that did it offers its services to anyone who can pay. During the whole incident there were quite a few police depts that said they had a lot of phones, both Android and iPhone, that they were hoping to get a ruling allowing them to force the manufacturers to make it easier to access.
Of course they managed to hack in before a ruling came down. If iPhone does become unhackable in the future, we'll get a ruling, and if it's in the government's favor it won't matter how secure your phone is.
Firstly, I don't see how she has any legal obligation to pay for the medical care, at all. Your friend didn't get the medical care, her father did. Unless the father is a legal dependent of your friend, she isn't responsible for his medical expenses, at all.
Secondly, it sounds like you are making assumptions about her overall financial status, based on what you know about her current salary.
She might have substantial student debt, medical debt, spousal debt, be upside-down on a mortgage, have other family that she is supporting financially, etc.
Just knowing someone's salary doesn't provide a very clear picture of their overall financial status.
I think what you get out of a book is more about the person reading it, and what they are looking for, than it is about the story itself.
Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the places you'll go" could be read by one person as just a whimsical children's tale. Someone else, though, might see it as an interesting allegory on the journeys that a person might face in their own life.
Likewise, I might look at a squirrel burying nuts in the ground, and see just a squirrel. But a buddhist monk might derive some great wisdom from watching the very same thing.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7834133-intelligent-individ...
- Socrates