Apple is simply playing by the rules of capitalism, which are as follows: extract as much value as possible from your customers, employees, etc, for the purpose of enriching capital (shareholders). Apple will follow the law to the letter, but they will do so in whatever way will be maximally best for their own interests. Way she goes.
People keep falling for the just-world fallacy[1], and companies exploit this through the use of propaganda (ads, marketing, yadda yadda) and most people eat it up. No company (not Spotify, not Apple, not the woke-est, most DEI company out there) cares about anything other than profits at the end of the day under capitalism, because capital rules everything and politicians are not exempt from the rules of capital.
> Apple is simply playing by the rules of capitalism
This is reductionist, like saying all biological behavior is about reproducing. Yes there’s a primary goal. No, that does not define or dictate the how. There are people making decisions about what to fight and where to spend the effort. Fighting and weaseling pro-consumer regulations is a choice, obviously, since Apple is being a much bigger crybaby than even other big corporations.
You're trying to add layers of complexity that don't exist. The universe is remarkably uncomplicated, much like biology (which, you correctly assert, only exists to replicate itself). Humans like to anthropomorphize and we have a tendency to see things that aren't there, and we're also highly suggestible and easily manipulated by marketing tactics.
You hang around HN not to reproduce, but i bet if there were a fertile female ovulating near you you would not choose to browse HN instead of impregnating here. (I assumed your gender)
Really? I have not got that impression so far. I sure don't. I would guess, that it is actually more people are here for tech news and reading like-minded people's thoughts. Keeping up to date with development and technologies.
I guess we can all believe what we want to believe. But Y Combinator (who sponsors this website) is a venture capital firm, which seeks to generate returns on capital by investing in companies. This website, therefore, is designed to reflect and encourage the interests of capital. You can pretend Y Combinator is something other than a venture capital firm if you want, but one day you'll realize that they too only care about getting money.
These aren't "the rules of capitalism" they are just maximally self-interested hubristic behaviours by companies with monopolies. Capitalism doesn't have rules; states have rules. Capitalism has market incentives and stakeholders.
Capitalism is just a system based around the belief that capital appreciation is the ultimate end goal, and the ends justify the means. Everything is fine so long as the GDP keeps going up.
But in reality capitalism does coexist alongside other value systems, no?
Purdue Pharma (opiates) is a good example of a company following its incentives that eventually was brought down for violating broader common sense values.
The values Apple are violating come close to being just as widely held ("something I buy should be mine") though perhaps you need some expertise or professional experience with tech to see the violation clearly enough to be as horrified.
Still, values held within communities of experts (like this one) can also have the power to correct incentive-chasing behavior when it runs amok, if only because sufficient misbehavior can make it harder to hire and retain the best experts. So it's wonderful this conversation is happening here!
Yes, which is why I loathe them. They aren't just playing by the rules - they are destroying endless economic opportunity behind them with their rent seeking and desired monopolization. Those things are not compatible with capitalism.
They have decoupled their incentives from their users incentives to extract more profit, and then they lie and use scare tactics to gaslight their users into thinking this what they want.
I don't think capitalism is inherently bad, but the system we have is bad. Adam Smith wrote a lot about this, in particular he loathed landlords and entities that suck value out of the system while offering little in return. Apple is a weird case, because arguably they do create a lot of value, but currently we have a problem where that value isn't returned to the broader society, instead it goes into the hands of a small minority of people and groups.
Asymmetries need to be balanced, such as the balance between labour and capital. Unions help labour, but thanks to a decades-long propaganda campaign against unions, we no longer have that push back against capital.
Personally I think the problem will only get worse, so I'd suggest buying the S&P 500 with as much cheap leverage as you can afford.
This is a really bad take that ignores a variety of things, such as the cost of going out and the general enshittification of everything (i.e., decline in quality of goods and services).
It also ignores the growing cultural divide of our clickbait ad-based economy that preys on fear and outrage in order to profit from everyone's misery by trying to sell them the latest plastic junk from China that eventually goes into a recycling bin and then shipped back to Asia where it's dumped into the rivers and ocean.
If economics took externalities into account then our entire economic order would break down. Thus, it won't happen...until eventually the whole thing stops working.
Externalities have a long history in economics. The concept has always been a somewhat slippery and controversial, but remains an important analytical tool for discussing market failures and government intervention [0].
The prospect of ecological collapse has drawn a lot of attention to the idea of negative externalities, but it's worth mentioning that positive externalities are also important in economic theory. For example, positive externalities to knowledge creation have been modeled as the engine of long-term growth by endogenous growth theorists since the 1980s (starting with Paul Romer and Robert Lucas), based on precursory work from the 1960s (e.g. Kenneth Arrow and Hirofumi Uzawa), and ideas reaching-at least-back to the work of Alfred Marshall in the late 19th c.
Still, let's hope that the global economic order doesn't depend on what economists are doing in their models :)
So long as we keep polluting unchecked, we are in big trouble. Staying below 1.5C is a pipe dream at this point, and we've already (briefly) hit 2C[1]. We're also producing and consuming more fossil fuels than ever before, and the pollution rate is increasing exponentially[2].
Exponential growth has a tendency to creep up on you, and then all of a sudden things are out of control. Plus, there are the significant lag effects, where we don't feel the effect of today's pollution until much later (which is usually decades later, depending on the nature of it).
People should be panicking about this, but most prefer to just pretend everything is fine or we'll somehow invent some magic technology that will defy the laws of physics.
Phones are easy to blame here, but nobody wants to talk about speeding and dangerous driving, which seems to have become totally normalized. People treat speed limits as a minimum speed suggestion. There's also close to no enforcement of traffic laws from what I've seen, yet lots of people are outraged about too many bicycles (even though the number of people killed by bicycles is a tiny fraction of those killed by cars).
Do you also believe the laws of physics are just an opinion? If physics is an opinion, then I believe that F = ma, which means that more of m and a means more F, which means more injuries and death.
Speed limits aren’t the problem because people ignore them and drive by feeling. The correct solution is not more enforcement but rather better design to reduce the speed that feels right. Narrower lanes, chicanes, barriers between pedestrians and vehicles, roundabouts instead of stop signs, the usual playbook that people ignore because it’s expensive.
More enforcement is what we tried with drugs, how’d that go?
I agree with you, for example, traffic calming devices (speed bumps, roundabouts, chicanes) are incredibly effective. However I think enforcement needs to be rethought, cars are essentially just computers now and they know what the speed limit is, so why don't they automatically limit the speed of cars?
If you want to race, that's fine, but don't do it on public roads. Go to a race track that's designed for that.
And also agree on drugs, we should just legalize everything IMO. Prohibition has never worked, anyone who wants to do drugs are going to do them, and we're better off helping than harming people by filling up the prisons.
If you look into what those metric changes are related to, you’ll find that it’s almost entirely uncorrelated with stiffer incarceration and zero tolerance policies, which was my point.
The people doing that don’t care about the speed limit already. Set it whatever you’d like you aren’t making the road any safer or affecting these people’s speeds.
Incredibly smart people are unlikely to get hired by most big tech cos these days because the truth is that they don't want very smart people, they want pliable drones who will push the buttons per their boss's demands.
People generally don't want to hire those who are smarter than them, because they need subjects below them in the pecking order in order to make themselves look better. There are occasional exceptions, but the people who filter the resumes generally operate under these principles. It's unusual for exceptionally smart or talented people to work as recruiters.
I'm not sure why you think that hiring less intelligent people will make a manager look good? Quite the contrary; less intelligent people make more mistakes that make you look bad, and need more hand holding, which is just more work.
It's certainly true that hiring managers won't want someone massively overqualified for a role, as they will simply be bored and will likely not stay.
But never seen anyone filter out someone suitable for a role because they seem more intelligent than them though.
Humans are weird, and they don't behave how you might expect. But once you've lived for a while and seen it first hand many times, it starts to make sense in a weird way.
I think recruiting is potentially one of the best roles for a smart person (depending on level of extrovert) who can suss out bullshit and domain expertise rapidly; your comp is maximized by your ability to sorting hat folks into roles, tied to per candidate placement fees. Far more enjoyable than grinding out code 8-12 hours/day 5 days/week imho.
Insightful comment btw, more true than people admit.
Recruiting is so, so important. I generally agree with the idea that the most important attribute for startup founders is to be great at hiring/recruiting.
Sadly, this is not something that the big tech cos focus on these days. Employees are viewed more as cattle than pets these days.
Also true! But I argue employees are cattle in all cases. With founders, “you will help make me rich!” With BigCos, “you will help me build head count to build my empire!” Like poker, if you don’t know who the sucker at the table is, it’s you. Importantly, be self aware as the cattle and ruthlessly self optimize.
This is one of those tough life lessons that I have also suffered. First, the vast majority of startups failed, and unless you have something to fall back on (like rich parents), you should _not_ take on the risk of starting a company unless you have adequate funding.
The truth about starting a business is that the vast majority fail, and those who succeed typically come from privileged backgrounds. It's very rare for legitimately poor people to succeed because you cannot take the same risks if you have nothing to fall back on.
My suggestion to you would be to get a big tech job and collect as much money as you can. Once you're self-sufficient, you can go full YOLO.
I live in New York City where it's not unusual to see cars going places they're not allowed, including parks. The problem is not the ruleset, it's the fact that automobile operators don't comply with the rules and nobody enforces them. Every day I see an automobile on a sidewalk or driving through the blocked off sections of the park I live next to in order to bypass traffic.
Cars are weapons and should be severely limited on public roads, especially in terms of speed (all cars should have speed governors).
NYC is not an example of a place to raise a family. There are so many things that make it very inconvenient for families it is exactly why people tend to move out.
Of course it can be done and happens every day. But it is a horrible example for anything family related.
NYC is the greatest place to raise children IMO. The best of everything: you can live car-free, high density of opportunities, educational services, activities, art, culture, etc.
EDIT: Okay, arguably some places like maybe the Netherlands (which has excellent anti-car infra) are better, but I've seen it all at this point and I am convinced NYC is still the best, even though there are too many cars and too much surface area is dedicated to cars.
Eh, that's a pretty big vehicle. Does that still actually count as a _car_? ;-) It's fine for regular European or Japanese vehicles, of course.
But... people do drive American trucks like that out in the countryside as utility vehicles. Where there's a bit of room to maneuver, it can be done.
And of course, outside Amsterdam city center: you've got all-paved-roads even in the countryside (well maintained with few potholes), reasonable speed limits, highways that stay dry even when it rains, traffic lights that let you through the moment they see you coming (at an empty intersection at least), traffic jam detector systems, highway entrances and exits that you can take on cruise control -as opposed to trying to kill you- (I'm looking at you, Germany ;-) ), and much much more!
* https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=437 (business parks... people in the comments were kind of riled up about this particular traffic light. Would work fine with an F150 ;-) )
> Eh, that's a pretty big vehicle. Does that still actually count as a _car_?
The 2 best selling vehicle models in the USA are the Ford F-series and Chevy equivalent (Silverado), according to some sources[1][2]. I agree they're absurd for what are effectively overpowered wheelchairs that make you fat and reduce your IQ[3], but it is what it is.
You should try getting out of NYC and understand how the rest of the country actually works. Try visiting Nebraska or Ohio and learn where your food comes from. Ask one of the multi generational farmers who drive a truck and ask about their IQ.
Thoughts and posts like yours are why conservative popularity is increasing, why so hostile?
90% of the people who salivate over these giant death machines aren't using them for hauling goods or farm work. Where I grew up, people get very excited about owning pickup trucks because they view them as status symbols (bigger is better mentality). Thankfully I escaped that terrible culture, but NYC still has too many unnecessary cars.
>90% of the people who salivate over these giant death machines aren't using them for hauling goods or farm work.
Sorry for being blunt, but where you grew up brainwashed you. Or you are young and very naive or like to speak in hyperbole.
The most sold vehicle in the US is being used for work purposes and has been since the truck was invented. There are many people that drive trucks outside of work, but you are very misinformed.
I lived in NYC for 20+ years without a car. On a hot summer night walking close to Holland tunnel brought rage to me as well. Hopefully the much needed congestion pricing will help.
Cars are obviously not weapons, they are vehicles. The definition of weapon is something which primary use case is to kill or maim. The primary use case of a car is transportation.
Do you say that a pencil is a weapon? You could stab yourself by accident with a pencil.
If you use a pencil to stab someone, yes it's a weapon. If I use a shovel to kill someone, it's a weapon. If I use a pillow to suffocate someone, it's a weapon. If I drive a car into a person and kill them because I don't feel like following the rules, yes it's a weapon.
Cars not only have the direct immediate effect as weapons (i.e., using them to drive into/over people), but they also have significant second and third order effects such as the pollution from emissions, tires, production and supply chains, destruction of the environment from road construction, cement production emissions, and so on and so forth. There are also the health effects of people forgetting how to use their bodies to move themselves, being isolated inside an insulated box such that nobody interacts with those around them, which leads people to be hostile, aggressive, violent, and so on.
People keep falling for the just-world fallacy[1], and companies exploit this through the use of propaganda (ads, marketing, yadda yadda) and most people eat it up. No company (not Spotify, not Apple, not the woke-est, most DEI company out there) cares about anything other than profits at the end of the day under capitalism, because capital rules everything and politicians are not exempt from the rules of capital.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis