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.

I get paying a decent wage but why ban tipping. Here in California there is no tipped wage difference and min wage is pretty high but I still tip whenever I get the chance because I earn a lot more than service workers and that $5 is worth more to them than me. I also appreciate that it goes directly to the workers instead of through the boss who will take god knows off the top. It should definitely not be required and discrete enough so that those who don’t can’t be shamed but banning it just hurts workers.

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.

This is taking the comment out of context, she said the federal minimum wage should be as high as $50 for places like the Bay area, she then went on to say that the national minimum wage should be raised to $20-25 based on affordability but that she’s chiefly concerned with California.

That’s what she was saying, everyone is taking her out of context. She was saying the federal minimum wage should be as high as $50 in places like the Bay area, she then went on to say that the national wage should be brought up to ~$20-25 and base it on affordability.

Because you want a person for president who’s seasoned through and through, but not so damned season he won’t try something new.

This, there are many reasons people do opiates, isolation, doctors prescription, homelesness, economic depression etc. but the only reason people are doing fentanyl is because it’s cheap and available, and it’s cheap and available because the war on drugs makes it so the most concentrated substances are the most easily supplied.

If the war on drugs ends fentanyl goes away just like those high proof moonshines that were making people blind in prohibition. Opiate use won’t because the other underlying problems would remain, but it would be far more safe.

Yeah your right, got it confused with a conference around here that they still have ads up for. Edited

Israel is not even a good geopolitical partner in the Middle East. Nearly everyone hates them so whenever we do operations over there we keep them out because we know even their presence will increase tensions and lose hearts and minds. They’re good for spying on Iran but you have to take everything with a grain of salt because they could be lying in order to try and get us to be more confrontational because they despise Iran.

The reasons the U.S. government overwhelmingly supports Israel is:

• evangelicals think the Jews taking over Israel will cause the rapture, which they want…
• Sheer inertia
• the idea that Israel is “an island of liberal democracy” in a sea of authoritarian Arab states
• Heavy lobbying from organizations like AIPAC, and if you don’t follow their line they’ll spend millions on you opponent’s campaign.
• Military industrial complex loves sales to Israel
• military industrial complex relies on technology and equipment from Israel
• Islamaphobia and the idea that they’re fighting the good fight against the evil terrorists
• residual guilt for the Holocaust and the west’s antisemitic past

I’m all for players getting payed and unionizing but I think getting rid of college sports would only hurt the players. Less people would watch them and therefore the players would get less money. A large part of the audience for college sports is students and alumni, if you take that away there’s not much reason for people to tune in or go up to Hanover New Hampshire to watch their basketball team play and buy merch, especially if they’re not a good team.

It works in England because soccer’s the only big sport so you can make some money even if your a lower tier team.

Not focusing on academics is a problem but if the option is to have to play in a minor league team, earn a middling to low income that’s going to basic neccesities, not make it to the big leagues and be left with no other career prospects or savings; or go to college, make a low income but be able to save it as room and board are covered, not make it to the big leagues but at least have the piece of paper that permits you to even think about having a decent life in this country, I’d go with the latter.

You can disagree with Maduro and his autocratic actions without supporting sanctions that mostly harm the civilian population.

We really need to vote her out this round, San Francisco deserves better than this

Not in California, there’s so many elections. In 2022 a similar situation happened here in San Francisco where a state assembly member retired and there was the same primary, main, primary, main election. Also the primary for everything but the president is open and the main acts as a runoff for the top two, this is why they’ll do a primary on every election whereas in other states the parties would just nominate someone. So in the state assembly race it was an open field for the first primary, than the same 2 nearly identical Democrats for the next three elections.

Then there was also having to vote for newsom twice within a year because of the recall.

It’s nearly all vote by mail these days and they automatically send a ballot to anyone registered though so it’s not that bad.

A publication can be credible and also still be extremely biased. If a right wing publication publishes a story " black people say affirmative action is unfair" the story may be factually correct in that they found a couple black people that said it’s bad and quoted them but at its core it’s just a “people are saying” story. Like any “people are saying” story who these people are?, how many of them are their?, do they represent or have power over the people the article is implying they do? Etc. is conveniently left out.

the fact that they chose the story shows bias as well. If the only justification for calling a story news is the fact it fits your worldview than the publication is biased. The publication is responsible for reporting on stories that are relevant and effect a large amount of people. This story does not as it’s just some anecdotes reported to the IDF. If this was a large scale issue reported by independent aid organizations or shown through polling on the ground than that would be a story as it’s actually effecting a large amount of people.

The u.s. also still holds all their foreign currency reserves, so they’re kinda forced to be friendly if they want to keep their economy a float.

By slightly modifying the output based on a set function

Not if you make the watermark part of the output itself

the primary motivation behind this decision was. Obviously it wasn’t building public housing

That doesn’t mean the intent behind the CCP policy isn’t good, well intentioned, or positive

Can you see how I’m confused, do you think the primary intent is for public housing, or for some political drama?

It could be some political drama, we’ll never know what goes on in the HK city council, but if you read the article you’ll see this site wasn’t selected so much as it’s lease was up and the city would be taking back control of it and they needed to do something with it. Yeah some high official could’ve been waiting for the course to come back into city hands so they could build public housing over it and snub a rival, but I think it’s far more likely that the property fell into the cities hands and they decided to turn it into affordable housing because that’s what the city needs, no sinister or alterior motive is needed.