I just love it - what's the chance that some internet stranger cites some site (pub intended) of another strange on some random forum, and that site/blog's owner immediately chimes in (as a member of that forum, no less) to take up the discussion, and to answer questions and share some (insider/off-the-beaten-track) insights. It is wonderful to see such positive interactions and knowledge sharing of humanity.
In your interview with MegaLag posted in the video, you say something along the lines that civil courts are probably the most likely place any lawsuits would be held (I forget the exact wording used).
If you had used Honey, would you join a civil or class action suit against them?
I believe in class actions as the most efficient way for large groups (of consumers or small businesses) to resolve disputes. Have to think about the specific claim. Yesterday's write-up covers a scheme harming other affiliates (creators, influencers, reviewers, etc.) and also harming merchants and networks. I don't know if users are direct victims of the stand-down violations and concealment.
Capitalism is great at washing its hands of evil. I don't know how much slavery went into making the smart phone that I'm posting this from, but I'm sure it's not zero. I'm ethically complicit in the whole scheme. The C in ACAB stands for Capitalists. Which unfortunately, is all of us.
Culpability is not a binary thing, it’s a scale. A small number of people are far and away the most culpable for much of the evil in the world, and they know it (and don’t care).
We're not fully complicit all of the time. You don't know how many slaves made your phone, but somebody does. If you had a choice between a phone you knew was made by slaves and a phone that wasn't I assume you'd pick the slave free version every time. While it's fine to feel guilty for your involvement in the scheme don't let that get in the way of placing the blame for it squarely on the people who set things up this way and put you in this position.
When you can't escape an evil system you just have to do your best within it, while either working to get out of it or working to improve it however you can. What more can anyone ask of you? Capitalism is pretty much inescapable, but thankfully I'm not convinced that capitalism is an evil system inherently, it just needs strong constraints and regulations to keep it from being used to do evil things.
>If you had a choice between a phone you knew was made by slaves and a phone that wasn't I assume you'd pick the slave free version every time.
At the same cost? Sure.
At different costs? We see that is not the case.
People don't. A few do, but most don't. There are many who would still prefer the more popular phone and an ethical cost is something they only mention when asked but is given only minor weight when it comes to decision making. Some might try to justify it by saying you can't be sure a phone claiming to be ethically made actually is, but how many even considered that much when making the decision?
>While it's fine to feel guilty for your involvement in the scheme don't let that get in the way of placing the blame for it squarely on the people who set things up this way and put you in this position.
Who is really at fault on a systematic level if the population decides lower costs is what they really wants regardless of what sacrifices have to be made. If we look at a less morally challenging area, say air travel, and see how many people claim to want a nicer experience, yet airlines are always focused on cutting costs. Is that the fault of the airlines? Or is it the fault of the consumers who, despite what they say, show extreme preference for lower costing tickets? We can blame any seller at the moment, but we can't ignore the market pressures that picked the sellers who stayed and the ones who went out of business.
> Who is really at fault on a systematic level if the population decides lower costs is what they really wants regardless of what sacrifices have to be made.
It's always the people who are actually forcing slaves to work for them. Always. Consumers will always want lower prices but that doesn't justify slavery. It's not as if a company like Apple is being forced to abuse workers because they'd be bankrupt otherwise. These companies are pulling in massive amounts of profits year after year. It's not "market pressures" that force them to abuse their workers it's just greed.
> see how many people claim to want a nicer experience, yet airlines are always focused on cutting costs. Is that the fault of the airlines? Or is it the fault of the consumers who, despite what they say, show extreme preference for lower costing tickets?
Every customer wants low cost tickets. Of course they do. There's a lot that goes into that though. Almost nobody wants to fly in the first place. It's annoying, expensive, stressful and uncomfortable. What people actually want is to get to their destination. Consumers are basically forced to deal with airlines since it's the fastest, and often the only, way they can get to where they want to go when they need to. It's just a necessary evil that must endured.
That's not the airlines fault, but it does put airlines in a position where they know they can take advantage of travelers at every opportunity and so they do. They overbook their flights, they charge endless bullshit fees, they cram as many people into the plane as they can, their ticket prices change by the minute and airlines aggressively charge people as much as they think they can get away with.
Mergers and the high cost of entry into the airline industry have greatly hurt competition and often most people have only one choice in airline when flying to certain destinations. Airlines have consumers bent over a barrel and they pound away at them relentlessly. That's all on the airlines, not the consumers.
The only real thing consumers have any control over is the price of their ticket, and because airlines play so many games with ticket pricing they enable a certain amount of gaming the system to "get a better deal" so many flyers do work hard to limit what they pay for what will inevitably be a shitty service.
There's also a question of how much consumers can even afford. Many consumers would love to pay more to get a less shitty air travel experience but they can't if it means they'd no longer be able to afford their trip. ULCCs are often the only viable options travelers have and even then many people go into debt to travel. Others may figure that going with a cheap airline or putting in the effort to get a cheap ticket will be worth it because while the flights will be a miserable 6-8 hours it means they'll be able to afford a nice dinner or have a little bit more spending money when they reach their destination. Those kinds of choices can be put squarely on the consumer.
The original site is down for me, so going based on the app I was thinking it was about the actual edible Honey product, not Honey the discount coupon thing.
Yeah, I feel like our form of representative democracy is the least bad option. At the very least, office-holders aren't entitled to their office beyond their term unless they're re-elected.
The fundamental problem is that governing is boring, complicated, and unfulfilling to most people. The most impactful elections to citizens' day-to-day lives (i.e., local offices, state legislatures, and primaries for those) have absolutely abysmal participation rates, even in states that bend over backwards with voter accessibility.
Maybe I'm missing something here: the great thing about self-hosting is that you choose if and when you update your back-end software. What's stopping self-hosting admins from simply staying on a known good version and forking that if they so desire?
You don't have to expose your self-hosted services on the Internet to begin with. 0day bugs do exist even if you diligently apply all security updates.
making sure that your system is not exposed to the internet takes effort too. and then you realize you want to share something with friends or family, or access your home server from remote. you also want updates for new features too eventually.
There are different degrees of "exposed to the internet." You don't need to make your self-hosted services fully accessible by anyone from everywhere. VPN, IP whitelists, mTLS, HTTP basic auth, etc. change the calculus of security and feature updates. You can afford to lag a bit behind on updates because you're not running critical enterprise infrastructure at scale.
Pretty much every home router, network firewall, and host-based firewall is set to deny all by default, so the effort is mostly needed to allow exposure to the Internet.
Have the advantage of hosting content on Plex and other media servers that you can play them remotely. I can be on the other side of the Earth and still access my media. This is an extremely common use case.
Where are you seeing that? From what I can tell, the 10k message limit applies to "Mattermost Entry":
> Mattermost Entry gives small, forward-leaning teams a free self-hosted Intelligent Mission Environment to get started on improving their mission-critical secure collaborative workflows. Entry has all features of Enterprise Advanced with the following server-wide limitations and omissions:
What the fuck is this lmao? "a free self-hosted Intelligent Mission Environment to get started on improving their mission-critical secure collaborative workflows".
Sounds like some kind of parody of enterprise software.
Yea, here “we’re happy to pay for it” really means “we’re not happy to pay the price you’re charging, but maybe we’d pay if you fundamentally changed your prices or pricing model.”
The Plex rug-pull from excellent software to commercial gimmick happened years ago when they removed your ability to search your personal media library.
I assumed that they were being forced by the copyright mafia, but they’re perfectly capable of making these decisions on their own.
Yes. It's a slow boiling frog thing. Kinda like a bad relation ship. You get used to the toxicity. But when you get out of it, it's soooo refreshing. Thank you everybody who made Linux on the desktop possible.
That's an incomplete view. Office is a strong incumbent not because it's a good product, but because there's decades of processes built around it. To take a small slice from my world, if you do any kind of government-funded research, you must use Microsoft Office because government funding agencies have in-house templates for budgets and technical reports. They'll reject proposals and contractually-obligated deliveries if you don't use their template. Those templates break in spectacular and unpredictable ways on non-MS-Office suites.
People use MS Office because other people use MS Office. It's network effects.
Well, I don't know how you define it, but here's Wiki's first paragraph[0]:
> A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell') is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.
And Merriam Webster[1]
> exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
Do these hold true for Office? Azure? VS Code? Teams? Windows?
You are using the dictionary definition of monopoly, not the legal definition according to any particular nation’s laws or looking at how it has been enforced/on what basis, which is the only version that really matters in this discussion.
I imagine everyone on HN knows that simply linking Wikipedia is generally considered little more than a snarky, passive aggressive response. I don’t need the dictionary or Wikipedia definition of a monopoly for this conversation. I didn’t ask for it and you know that it wasn’t necessary or productive.
If you want to have an actual discussion I’m all ears.
I never said it was Microsoft's problem. I'm just showing you that "oh, switch to something else" is a naive view if you actually have real work to do.
Find any definition of "monopoly" and it should be pretty clear that it's not merely marketshare but the active manipulation of markets and market conditions to produce that marketshare.
> A monopoly is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.
I'd argue it's more than "just inertia." It's that end-users don't have any real meaningful choice. If you deviate from the standard in your field (MS Office in my case), you take on immense costs for minimal gain.
Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position. They may not be a monopoly in the strict sense (and I never said they were), but they're not a passive player either who accidentally fell into this situation. We don't need to give trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt here.
> Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position
For the edification of the readership, please share how Microsoft's business decisions are being made to maintain a monopoly in your space. Are they buying out competitors? Are they using contract terms that forbid the use of other vendors? Are they under-pricing their product relative to the market?
If the cost of migrating results in "minimal gain", doesn't that mean that they have a top product and the market has other competitive products by definition?
If you can provide some evidence of how they actively use business practices to maintain a monopoly, it would go a long way to advancing this discussion instead of showing long-held biases and I'm sure some lawyers out there would be ready to make a name for themselves.
Someones template breaking is not a real problem. The office alternatives work perfectly fine for "real work". If your template doesnt work fix it. You fixed it all those times it broke on office.
The most reliable way you get ahead is boring: small levels of effort, done consistently over time. You don't notice the progress day-to-day. You don't get much to brag about on social media. But it adds up.
I think it boils down to knowing what your values are. If you're constantly saying "no" to your team or organization (or vice versa), then that's a sign of a values misalignment. At that point, your options are to push to change your environment's values, realize your values aren't actually what you think they are, or leave.
It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.
Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)
The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office.
I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”.
But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work.
Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware.
The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.
It is. Our "security manager" has a dashboard that just literally counts the number of "security policies" we've put in place. Anything that isn't a box to tick is completely ignored as irrelevant. So we are essentially counting how many group policies we can implement and just disregarding the effectiveness of them for mitigating relevant threats and ignoring the added complexity and cost it incurs by making everyone's life more difficult. Systems password management/MFA? Who cares, can't make a graph out of it. It's the dumbest shit I've ever had to deal with.
Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.
i'm currently disputing a bill with a parking company. there's a kiosk at the movie theater served by the parking lot, so that you can get free parking if you see a movie. the kiosk has an option for you to describe your car if you forgot your license plate number. i did that and they sent me a bill for unpaid parking.
customer service is unable to acknowledge why that feature is offered and can only assert that if you park you gotta pay. after threatening to complain to the BBB and my state AG they have graciously offered to drop the ticket to $25.
Plenty of people on here looking to disrupt a market with tech...c'mon guys, get on it
Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work (and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money), which is issuing government enforced fines.
Turn time wheel? How do you know in advance how long you stay? Where I live, you start and when you leave, you click stop. You also get reminders in case you forgot to stop.
Not GP, but I guess I'm using the same app. You guess (and then it gives you the price up front). 10 minutes before it expires it asks you if you want to extend it. There might also have been a detect if you drive away and stop feature (don't recall).
Mostly these days all paid parking has registration camera's, and it just starts and stops parking for you automatically. However, there are like 3 or so apps that compete here so you need a profile with all of them for this to work and you also need to enable this on all the apps.
There is no way this is not a degradation compared to a physical meter accepting cash plus whatever. My country doesn't really have parking apps yet here and paying for parking is never a friction.
(Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a good walk anyway.
There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking. If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to spend some quality time at your next city council meeting making yourself a royal PIA.
You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion dollars. The private company made it back in the first decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the parking as revenue compensation.
Sometimes I think, it should be illegal for these government contracts to last beyond 5 years for exactly this reason. Who know what kind of deals are being made. Some administration could sign away the whole country on their last day.
It's straight up corruption, pure and simple. The UK is also full of this crap. The officials and executives who've facilitated and profited from this robbery should be jailed.
LOL. All the city parking spots around here are managed by PayByPhone, and pretty much all private parking spots are DiamondParking paid through ParkMobile.
I raised the issue with my local city council rep. She didn't care.
You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but guess not.
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