Hmm... I'm starting to get the impression this Doug Ford guy is a bit of a hypocrite....
namingthingsiseasy
joined 1 year ago
Honey, check it out you got me mesmerized
With your black hair and fat-ass thighs
I only wish I could find someone someday who will think of such romantic things to say to me...
HO-TEL MO-TEL HOLLIDAY INN!!!!
There's room for both in my opinion. Keyboards are good for accuracy. Touchscreens are good for custom inputs and slightly faster to type on. In an ideal world, we'd have both.
To be frank, I find touchscreens so abhorrently useless that I just use my phone less than I'd like to - for example, I'm much more likely to just flat out ignore messages because of how tedious input is on phones. I don't know if a keyboard would make a huge difference for me since I think mobile devices are garbage in more ways than one, but the lack of a keyboard is by far the biggest issue.
Even without the DMA, the EU and US have very different judicial systems. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really understand the specifics, but if I had to describe it in a very hand-wavy fashion from my anecdotal, non-scientific experiences, US courts are more likely to favor preserving individual/personal freedoms over the common public good, and vice versa in the European system.
Right - they say that they're just going to use it to defend their "property rights". In practice, they're going to use it for a whole lot more than just that....
Of course! I hope you didn't read my comment as hostile. I read yours as sort of a devil's advocate type of argument and was just trying to point out the logical flaws in it. I'm glad that you didn't hesitate to voice a contrary opinion. The points that you raise are interesting... and it's always good to consider both sides of the argument, even because it just helps us hone our own arguments. You could certainly argue that this is just another enforcement mechanism. It's just that it comes with a lot of unintended consequences, which most people will overlook, and they'll inevitably be used in ways that we didn't anticipate, long after the fact that these kinds of mechanisms become commonplace.
Regarding the reduced cost of lending: sure, in theory they could lower the prices. In practicality, will it? Any time we see cost-reducing developments, it usually ends up resulting in higher profits for the vendors moreso than better competition and lower prices for consumers. Look at how car manufacturers are just letting electric vehicles sit in their lots because they refuse to accept what buyers are willing to pay. The corporate types really, really hate to lower prices on anything for any reason. So I would be surprised to see something like that happen, even though it's still theoretically possible....
All your points are sound. The issue that I have with this is that remote disable functionality is not necessary to achieve any of these aims. Before they were connected to the internet, people were still able to rent/lease autos and the world managed to survive just fine. There were other ways for lenders to get remunerated for breaking lease terms - they could issue an additional charge, get a court order for repossession, etc. Remote disable was never needed or warranted.
So let's start by considering the due process here. Before, there was some sort of process involved in the repossession act. With remote disable however, the lender can act as judge, jury and executioner so to speak - that party can unilaterally disable the device with no oversight. And if the lender is in the wrong, there is likely no recourse. Another potential issue here is that the lender can change the terms at any time - it can arbitrarily decide that it doesn't like what you're doing with the device, decide you're in breach, and hit that remote kill switch. A lot of these things could technically happen before too, but the barriers have been dramatically lowered now.
On top of this, there are great privacy concerns as well. What kinds of additional information does the lender have? What right do they have to things like our location, our habits, when we use it, and all of the other personal details that they can infer from programs like this?
There are probably lots of other issues here, but another part of the problem is that we can't even start to imagine what kinds of nefarious behaviors they can execute with this new information and power. We are well into the age where our devices are becoming our enemies instead of our advocates. I shudder to think what the world would look like 20 years from now if this kind of behavior isn't stopped.
He's right. These people are so fantastically wealthy, but it's not enough. They still need more, more more. And meanwhile, actual people, real human beings are going hungry, without heat, without a home. Not only do laid off employees suffer, but their families and their children too. All so that millionaires can continue promoting themselves to being billionaires and even more.
I don't know of anything realistically that can be done about it (in the short term at least). But it just needs to be shouted louder and louder until there's enough public sentiment that real change can start to happen. Greed needs to be shamed louder and louder. We know all the institutional power that the wealthiest people in the world have to suppress economic equality in every country and throughout the globe, but if our voices grow loud enough, eventually it will be too loud to ignore.
Excessive wealth and greed is a mark of shame. Let's just keep repeating it and hopefully we'll eventually have enough power to reverse it.
I hated the trend of flat buttons. Then they removed the buttons. Then they basically removed the entire scrollbar altogether.
At this point, I'd happily go back to the age of flat buttons. That's how bad things have gotten....
It's really depressing how often I have to turn off CSS entirely just to view a webpage. I could of course always go into the inspector and turn off the bad CSS, but Gecko-based browsers fortunately have "View -> Page Style -> No Style" which is must easier and faster.
And seriously, whoever invented the font-weight CSS property can burn in hell. Ditto for whoever decided that we should only be allowed to read light grey text on slightly lighter grey background.
Not only that, what about the downtowns where people actually live? This is basically just picking winners here, saying those downtowns don't matter, but the ones in major cities do. Pretty shameless exhibition of picking winners and losers here...