Not_mikey

This is just like Canada banning foreign investment in real estate. It admits there's a problem, data harvesting , homes as investments, but just solves a small part of the problem pertaining to "foreign bad guys" while ignoring the larger domestic issue.

All it does is make the government look like they did something without actually confronting the powerful interests that are causing the problem.

Maybe eventually, it has to do with market share and if the service is a "core platform". Signal doesn't have enough market share to warrant it yet, even iMessage wasn't forced to since it's not that popular in EU. The law was mainly targeted at WhatsApp as that's THE messenger in the EU.

What were fundamentally talking about here is cost of human lives. And any cost can be added up for something and compared to the cost of another thing, as long as the units are the same.

Again if you buy a house over 30 years and pay $10,000 a year you can say that house cost you $300,000. You can then compare that to the car you also payed $10,000 a year for but over 4 years and say that the car cost you $40,000. You don't say well since I only payed for the car for 4 years so I should only compare it to the 4 years I payed for the house, so the house actually only cost $40,000. We understand that we should look at total monetary cost over time for things. If you don't than you end up in credit card debt because why would you pay off your $100 debt when you can pay $5 minimum payment, you bought a coffee for $5 the other day and that wasn't that much. Then 5 years down the line you ended up paying $500 in total and are still paying it because you haven't addressed the problem/principal.

If you agree that loss of life, like a dollar, is all of equal value, whether your rich or poor, from the u.s. or Africa, or born 2 years ago or 200, then this argument holds true.

In this sense you can compare old age to cars and old age probably costs more but there's less we can do about it. Just like you can say that buying food will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your life but that's just the price of living, it's necessary. Meanwhile that extra $500 you spent on your credit card is completely unnecessary and could have been avoided if you had decided to solve the problem instead of letting it fester and slowly drain you.

The best way to get to that person with that problem is to show them what they've spent on that problem in total and compare it to something more tangible, eg. you could've bought a PlayStation with that money. That person could realize that they need to fix the issue then, or they could continue to ignore it and end up paying thousands over there lifetime, and we could end up ignoring cars and let 70 million people die over the next century.

Ok, then since 1914 cars have killed more people than WWI, that's the same time frame. We don't look at deaths from WWI that way though because we view it as a discrete event that took place between 1914 and 1918 and look at that event. No one compares wars by deaths per year, it's deaths per war. We look at how many people were killed because of this thing, be that war, disease or technologies, that is the human cost of that thing.

If you look at the cost of things that were paid monetarily you don't look at the cost per year, at least not after the fact. If your comparing the cost of your house that you paid $10,000 a year totalling to $200,000 to a car you bought all at once for $10,000 you don't say they cost the same or they can't be compared, the house cost more.

Do you think statements like COVID was killing more people per day than 9/11 or that it has killed more people than WWII in the u.s. inflammatory?

If so is that a bad thing? A graph showing the amount of malnourished children in the u.s. would be very inflammatory to progressives, just as a chart showing the amount of immigrants entering the u.s. would be inflammatory to trump supporters. Factual agitprop isn't objectively bad it's just subjectively bad depending on what you think people should be angry about.

Subjectively you may disagree that car deaths are something to be angry about but objectively the graph is fine unless it's false or misleading. Its not stating or implying that cars are more deadly than all wars combined, it's stating that cars have killed more than some specific wars. Whether that fact makes you angry is up to you.

wars tend to be a lot shorter than the existence of cars

Yeah but depends on how you define wars. For example the mongol conquests is up there and that lasted a good 60 years. You could say thats multiple wars tied up in a single cause or crisis.

These events can be on a spectrum between the thirty years war, to the crisis of the third century and the three kingdoms period, each around 60 years, to the hundred years war. The longer it gets the more it goes from being about discrete battles in a war, to discrete conflicts in a war, to discrete wars in greater war/crisis.

Either way on the ground these crisis look the same for the common people. Armies repeatedly going back and forth over your land, looting, raping, killing and spreading disease and making your life miserable and after a few decades this becomes normalized. In this sense cars could be a good comparison, a persistent normalized threat constantly killing people.

The casualties for cars even in this context look greater. The three kingdoms period, probably the deadliest of these crisis, caused 30 million deaths. Why it doesn't compare well though is that was half the population of China, whereas 70 million is probably only a couple of percent of the people who live in car centric countries.

It wouldn't be too hard if you take it from the starting point of you need to prove that you need it, and that could basically just be answering the following questions

• do you need it for your job, is it on this list of jobs that require a large vehicle?
• do you have a disability that requires a large car?

Maybe add in another exception for large families but station wagons filled that niche fine before SUVs came in. Either way these are very discrete and definable definitions.

We even already have the framework set up, semi trucks require different licensing and registration so that some random person can't just buy a vehicle that can easily kill a ton of people accidentally. The way trucks are headed that argument continues to get more applicable.

You aren't gonna get one with union labor in the u.s. and even if it was made by non union labor either the workers would be horribly underpaid and/or the quality would be lower.

It's not right to compare prices between countries with vastly different price levels. Are u.s. farmers doing the country a disservice by not selling pork for $0.50 a pound? No we accept that we make more and that we should pay our fellow Americans more so they can have the same quality of life we do. Ideally this solidarity should extend internationally but we should at least preserve it in the U.S.

China needs a $10,000 vehicle because that's all there middle class making $20,000 can afford. The u.s. doesn't, plenty of middle class Americans are buying new $30,000 cars, they just aren't buying electric ones, they're getting huge SUVs and pickup trucks. What the u.s. needs is to disincentivize or even ban people from buying large gas cars that don't need them.

Eventually if everyone's forced to get evs the used stock will turn into evs too and you'll get your $10,000 ev without destroying the American auto industry and millions of good paying union jobs.

I think you misunderstand what apples value proposition is, at least nowadays. The app store and not being able to use other app stores is not a reason people get iPhones. Maybe back when app stores were first created and the threat of malware was greater people might have considered it but nowadays no one cares. Even the idea of a unified ecosystem isn't as much a selling point any more because Google and Samsung offer similar seamless integrations with their accessories. You can see this in their marketing, they aren't focused on how all the apple products work together easily any more. In their marketing you can see what they think their value proposition is, and what was their big Superbowl ad this year, longer battery life ...

Apple at this point knows it doesn't have much of a value proposition for switching from android. So the only way they're gonna sell new phones is to get the kids who don't have a phone and convince the people who do have an iPhone to get a new one.

They convince the kids through their tried and true aesthetics and lifestyle marketing, this is about half there marketing these days. This along with iMessage in the U.S. and the general fear of being in the out group and obsession with brands that younger people have moved them towards iPhones.

They convince the current users with incremental upgrades, eg. Better battery life, better camera; and maintaining the walled garden and keeping exit costs high so they don't turn to androids for those incremental updates.

All this is to say that apple having a single app store isn't a sign of consumer sentiment, but a sign of apples desire to milk as much profits out of their current users as they can. Other app stores can only benefit the consumers, either they do get them for lower fees or don't because they put some value on the "ecosystem". From a company's perspective yes your right that they want to be able to do anything to their product they want, but the goal of regulation is to step in when the companies desires are at odds with the people or the consumers desire, this is one of those cases.

If anything this was worse under the old system. Making art previously costed a lot of money, you had to pay the artists for their time and money, and better artists cost more. So in the past that oil company could commission 100 top quality artists to make corporate propaganda while a person who cares for the environment but has no money could only make a drawing limited by their own personal technical artistic ability, which could be just stick figures.

This is why "high quality" consumerist and capitalist "art" and branding in the form of advertising is so abundant meanwhile anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist art is rarer, no one's paying to get it made.

Now any cause, regardless of money, can create at least mid art to get there message across. Those causes can also have way more people behind them then an oil company can reasonably hire

It's sort of like how the gun changed how power worked. Previously a king could use there resources to pay for a smaller army of well equipped highly trained knights to subjugate a group of people. Then when the gun came training and equipment didn't matter nearly as much and it became more of a numbers game, and to get those numbers rulers needed to give more power to the masses in order to be able to marshall them for their cause. Those rulers who didn't got overthrown in revolutions.

Why would real meaning and messages be harder to find, does AI generated art inherently have less meaning?

Let's say I wanted to convey the message that oil companies are destroying the environment so , throwing subtlety out the window, come up with an idea of "a vampiric oil baron draining mother nature of oil", does the picture that is generated from me putting that prompt into an AI generator have any less meaning then if I actually drew it myself?

For all the advances in AI it still lacks intentionality, and always will under these current models, that has to be supplied by the person in the form of a prompt. I'd say that intention is the source of messages and meaning in art. AI just allows people without technical abilities in art to express those intentions, feelings and messages.