WashedOver

I’m impressed. It speaks to the strength of the Apple brand. Meta should benefit if this becomes the next thing despite the differences.

Sure seems like a great way to avoid severance in those places it’s required.

Amazing how the companies that “care about employees” don’t care so much these days…

I recall the early days of PC chat services like ICQ, MSN, AOL and the clients like Pigeon and Trillian to try to have them all in one place. It didn’t always seem to work the best for long.

It’s too bad BBM took way too long to open up to others beyond BB devices. They had some of my favorite emojis and they had for a time a big user base that they could have kept in their services.

I recall some pretty bold statements being made that Apple couldn’t stop this reverse engineering from working ever in the early days of tech reporting on this.

Even as a Android user I thought this was pretty bold claims to make as this whole walled garden is a big part of the Apple brand and they will need to protect this as they really don’t have leading software inovation and they are no longer ahead on tech advances or specs that made the first couple of iPhones ground breaking.

Since they are a couple to a few years behind the Android features and specs, they need to protect the special brand identity above all else so I expected them to tweak things to break anything they don’t want to have happen to their systems.

I can’t blame them at all from a business prospective. While I don’t like or enjoy their products, they had built a great brand that sells itself for those that “want to be different” but actually the same as all of their friends.

Most here will recommend Linux Mint and it’s what I use now after trying many different versions over the years. There’s a simplicity to Mint that just works especially well for those just surfing and doing office tasks. I’ve given away old work laptops with just mint installed as most people just need a web browser and it works great for that.

MS office can be used in your web browser or you can switch to Libre Office which should open most of your office files.

If you have a old laptop or computer I recommend trying to install Mint there first to try it out. It’s pretty easy to start out there first before trying dual boot. You might be surprised at how quick your older laptop works with Mint in the process.

I use dual boot on my machines but most of the use these days is to get to a web browser so I find I rarely boot into windows now.

You will find Firefox is the default web browser but you can add Chrome to Mint if that’s your browser of choice.

Many will say what about the privacy issues with Chrome but many still use it. I’ve switched back to Firefox myself and I like it better for my Android phone.

Good luck on your journey!

I recall at one point Windows 10 was going to be the last version of the OS and they would just maintain that. I’m wondering if they said that to get the last of the Windows 7 and XP users to finally move to 10?

Coming up to 16 years since I cut the cord and hardly anyone I know that is younger has cable. It’s internet and then streaming.

My father when he passed in 2013 was paying $160/mth for old HD cable for his old 35" RCA tube set before I bought him a LCD TV that required a upgrade to modern HD channels. He didn’t have internet with that either. So while they were scamming him for this old 480p HD packages he wasn’t alone I’m sure.

I will say at new year’s I was at someone’s place that only had internet and for the group of us he brought out a HD Amazon antenna to watch the ball drop at midnight on local broadcast TV.

The amount of commercials was jarring. I’m not looking forward to when they bring those to streaming services that are currently hemorrhaging billions.

I wonder if they can also make a vehicle not near the bottom of the reliability rankings next?

Reminds me of movies portraying early Apple and the issues with playing media and the adding of more RAM to the first Mac to get through a similar presentation.

The Macs being presented would never have that much memory when sold in the market but it was portrayed as those production models.

Not sure if it really mattered in the end as the consumer received that new Apple experience they coveted. I still recall those Macs were easier to use than the Apple IIc they replaced in my high school at the time.

Many of my friends and family sent their DNA away to these outfits. Early on I just ruled it out as I heard they were able to link cold cases to people in these databases. Combine that with the grave miscarriages of justice when they railroad people into convictions my “I haven’t done anything to worry about” still did not want to be a part of that machine.

I didn’t even think of this reality which is pretty bad. I’m glad I didn’t sign up despite some interest in knowing more about my fractured family connections.

Google’s customer service has become non-existent and unhuman. I would be leary of trusting their ability to sort out any issues in a fast or logical manner.

I say this as a paying customer of a few of their products. Despite this position with them I’ve been stiffed on Google Play gift cards in which there has been no human recourse within Google to deal with.

They just keep the money and there is no agency or person to investigate the 1000s of people with legitimate issues of redeeming the cards caught up in their AI flags. It’s a nice way for Google to keep all of this money they have collected and never provide services for.

Slowly I’ve been removing their services from my life as I de-google where possible.

They should eat a bag of dildos.

Well that’s a more blatant recent model. Paying $70,000 for a VW wasn’t something many would even consider in the early 2000s and yes Audi existed so it was a really odd double down on line extension of the VW line.

The earlier creep was from the original identity of VW with the it may be ugly but it gets you there marketing. For it’s time was a great way to describe the brand and the place in the market. Think of the older VW buses, rabbits, Transporters, etc. Not beautiful in relation to cars of their day but bloody practical.

Due to markets and human conditioning they weren’t going to show up and copy Ford or GM designs and expect to have a chance at taking market share. Their positioning in the lower end of the market made it their’s for a long time like the upstart Japanese.

They all came in with smaller, economical to run cars and the big 3 struggled to compete. And when the big 3 tried, they were terrible at it for quite a while. The mini Mustang comes to mind along wth the Monza and the Pinto. Cult vehicles but not market darlings. Cadillac went down market with Chevy products rebranded at Cadillac and they sold terribly. A great way to hurt a upmarket brand.

At least AMC tried different things due to the success of their Jeep brand with luxury 4x4s and 4x4 cars. New markets at the time but they were always hurting for funding. They only survived for so long due to the Jeep brand.

Now all the brands overlap with models and offerings a great deal more but there are still things they are all respectively good at. Full size trucks are mostly a Big 3 market despite excellent product from Toyota. There’s a large segment of the US population that doesn’t consider Toyota products to be real trucks despite many saying they are far better quality. The list goes on…

Yes but at first they tried to release the high end product under the VW brand. The Phaeton was one of the best engineered vehicles failures ever produced as many did not want to buy a higher end car with the VW economy badge on it.

Brand does count for a lot even when a lower economy brand has a superior made product, the masses cannot always move beyond that. I’m sure there are many that loved that VW Phaeton and were happy for owning it, but commercially it didn’t fit the brand expectations on the market in the early 2000s.

That was their identity that made them a high volume seller. It was simple and it was clear what their market position was. The line extensions into higher end never worked and required a new brand for these higher level offerings in the end. They never learned from this lesson. Brand identity can win the day but also lose it all for you when you try to shift from a popular product.

A part of the issue is younger generations don’t necessarily know what goes on behind the scenes of their phones or laptops. They are shiny disposable products and this extends to their cars. If the product looks like the similar tech they interface with daily on their phones, it’s good for them. They won’t have the experience of simpler complex cars that broke down constantly from one thing or another or functions that just don’t work period because they cost way to much to fix.

As much as I think vehicles should be made less complex and easier to service it might not be marketable beyond farmers or trades that do their own work on these things. Shiny and the latest tech is sexy and where sales are driven from.

I’m only left wondering how far of a window should we consider this economic window? A quarter, a year, a decade, a lifetime? How does one factor in all the costs of using a particular style of energy?

Often I see people say look at the cost of making a car battery while ignoring the elimination of many parts of ICE vehicles like the tranny, cooling systems, over the various chemicals like oils and fluids that require constant change for ICE servicing. But hey other types of energy are required to make make car batteries including ICE vehicles in the mines . I say fair, tell me what are the WHOLE costs of using other energy sources, on society, on the environment, and the length of time frame.

Most of our forefathers thought faster horses were the only way to go despite the piles of horse shit and dead horse carcasses they were waiting to dry out so they could be removed, filled many city streets. Some city houses had entrances high up to separate the entrance from these things that filed their streets much like a generations earlier had building designs that sheltered the inhabitants of the city below from those emptying their chamber pots into the streets each morning.

Now I love my ICE vehicles and don’t see myself owning a electric vehicle anytime soon so I do understand the want of keeping my horses around, and my overhangs on buildings to protect me from piss and shit being thrown into the street below, but I also can acknowledge in the long term the world I have figured out for myself is not something that is going to last as the world continues to evolve/devolve around us.

Despite these foreign things to us today, they cried think of the economics and the job losses as Ford was providing new technology and freedom to the masses. Think of the economics of whole horse related industries that were mothballed and in many ways replaced as road infrastructure was required for these new fangled ICE vehicles.

How does one measure the economics of this change? By the quarter its terrible, especially to the individual that needs to shell out for a car, and all the new things it requires over the established upkeep of horses. Think of people unemployed by the lack of horses. Hey we really don’t need to leave our farms that often do we?

By the year it’s not looking great initially either unless you are Ford or a oil outfit. Then by the decades things look a lot different on the whole. Perhaps these cars were a good thing for everyone overall?

At this stage the environment is paying a cost we don’t even understand yet. Even if we do, who cares as it is plentiful in the new world and it seemed like it would never end much like the wood supplies to build the great wooden ships that previous empires use to run the world with. So who cares if yet another Valley or field is ruined? There’s plenty more where that came from! And for many years that was the case.

What are the economic costs to deal with clearcut valleys, tailing ponds, manufacturing waste, abandoned mines, and various other wastes? Often the problem of governments and the taxpayers to deal with long after the initial profits have been taken in those quarters, years and decades. After a lifetime overall is not wonderful but fuck them, I got mine!

So which the economic scale are we thinking?

I recall seeing a show on Bill Gates a few years back and his drive to get modem nuclear going. It seems many of the current plants around the world are based on old designs from the 50s and 60s.

Newer and modern designs are much safer but it was going to take a tremendous amount of effort to get past the nuclear is bad mindset.

There’s no way to easily educate the masses on a complicated scientific subject and elected officials aren’t going to stay around for long pushing that kind of tech, they might as well push solar, wind, and tidal power as they would have better chances at staying in office.