Ah as long as Brookings Institute tells me it's a myth, I'll ignore the people selling basic toiletries right outside of drug stores, or bike messengers riding with suspicious taped up bikes that are poorly suited for heavy city use, or the videos of people coming in as a group, loading the bags and making off in get-away cars. Ignore what's in front of you, or the fact that nearly a third of shoplifting can be tracked down to ~300 people. These people maybe just have really big families to feed!
But you might ask why are stores closing? Why is deodorant behind lock and key?
> Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities.
Ah yes, evil corporations like to close stores and forgo profit for ... reasons.
I have to deal with the same kind of bugs all day long, doesn't mean I get to refuse to do my job for years at a time until someone I like is voted into office.
You can acknowledge both the fad phenomenon and the usefulness of LLMs at the same time, because both are true.
There's value there, but there's also a lot of hype that will pass, just like the AGI nonsense that companies were promising their current/next model will reach.
The US disappeared a local business owner down the street from me in a sleepy suburb because he happened to be walking to his business one morning while brown.
ICE/BP was looking for someone else, but saw another brown person while waiting, and took the opportunity to grab him, too.
He was imprisoned for more than a month and shuffled around the country before anyone bothered to look at his identification or acknowledge their validity.
Are you aware of what's going on in the US right now?
NYT: Those Deported to El Salvador Were Shackled, Beaten, and Sexually Assaulted[1]
And if you're saying to yourself, "what do I have to worry about, I'm not brown", well, do you have kids who you don't want to have abducted and zip-tied naked in the middle of the night by paramilitaries using grenades and rappelling from helicopters into your home[2][3]?
> Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
> "They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'fuck them kids.'"
> “It was heartbreaking to watch,” she said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
> "They just treated us like we were nothing," Fisher said.
To speak to this importance, it wasn't long ago that the sentiment I heard about the country was that it isn't, or wouldn't be, ascendant due to their "culture".
It's the Schrodinger's cat of cultures. Or maybe generalities about culture aren't to explain for economic and political velocity.
Yeah, also it shows the comment is ignorant of history.
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean war, the North was actually more prosperous than the South. That changed with time, dramatically so, but initially it'd be reasonable to see the north as having better economic prospects.
Imagine paying $100 a year for the privilege to develop apps, only to have your revenue confiscated to the tune of 15% - 30% and for the same entity to spam users who are looking for your apps, on the only place they can look for apps, with ads for your competitors, or with scummy ads that make you look bad by association.
If such a platform can get your business billions of dollars I think they are happy to have access to such a platform. Businesses are free to partner with other platforms if they don't like the agreement.
Yes, they can go to the 1 other option, where they've boiled the frog completely by matching the App Store's policies, practices and advertising schemes. The entire mobile app and mobile app distribution markets are captured by two entities, including Apple.
I'd buy your suggestion when Apple's duopoly status is rightfully fixed, perhaps by breaking out the App Store into its own independent business, along with the rest of Apple.
They are not free to do that when there is a duopoly and in most countries the platforms don't even allow competitors for that market (especially true for Apple).
Seriously, playing the "free market" card in the tech (especially mobile) space is really brave.
No one is forcing people to make businesses that release ios apps. A business could be based off of a Windows app. Or they could even not have an app and do business through an existing one like Discord.
Reality forces people to do that. When 90% of people do whatever they use programs for via mobile, you (as in, a business who wants to succeed) are forced to make an android and an iOS app.
Plenty of apps are Android only or iOS only. The only "force" is that businesses see these platforms as worth it to make enough money to be a return on investment.
Yes, accessing more than half of the market in US and about 25% of the worldwide one is surprisingly something businesses want to do.
Of course businesses do it because it's profitable. The point is that the market is ridiculously controlled while you are pretending that businesses can make _free_ choices, while for many of them they are not free or in some cases not even choices.
Well there's only a single other mobile platform and it has the same pricing as the other one (I'm sure it's a total coincidence, nothing to see here!)
Yeah, and no way of using a browser with ad blocker for a decade or to avoid them in apps. If anything, the iOS experience has always been more ad-riddled than Android.
The App Store came out in 2008, ad blocking in browsers came out in 2016.
I have exactly one ad supported app on my phone - Overcast. Mobile games have become so enshittified they aren’t interesting.
The only reason I haven’t paid for ad free Overcast is just because when I was about to in order to support an indie developer, the author introduced his own ad platform that wasn’t scammy and its ads for other podcasts in the same category for the one you are actually listening to. I found his ads good and I found other interesting podcasts because of it.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/retail-theft-in-us-cities...
reply