A repairability index is about as objective as can get: a list a components and their modes of failure along with a checklist of:
* what can be repaired by the owner using spare parts, instructions and common tools
* what can be repaired by an independend third party
* what must be repaired by the manufacturer
* when must something be junked and how much of it can be recycled
These are not "opinions". At some point we need to start calling out the criminal indifference of vested interests (and their shills) to the sustainability question
A freedom index is about as objective as it can get: a list of categories and their rights along with a checklist of:
* what kinds of guns can be owned
* what kinds of cars can be owned
* what kinds of speech is allowed
* what proportion of income one can keep
These are not "opinons". At some point we need to start calling out the criminal indifference of vested interests (and their shills) to the freedom question
I feel you are trying to make some kind of point but I am not getting it.
Sure, start a democracy index by the methods you stated and compile a list and put it somewhere online and I'm sure people would find it useful. Those facts are useful for people looking into the freedoms of different places.
We are talking about repairability here though.
What is the complaint?
I think some confusion here is about "a number" people keep mentioning. Is it a single number that has to be objectively weighted by the facts? Or are we talking "a list of..." or data points which _are_ just facts can people can make their own opinion of?
The irony is that they are defending the right of a manufacturing cartel to limit the options of what these valiant freedom fighters can do with stuff they own (with the "hard-won" money they managed to rescue from the evil "taxman" :-).
But assuming they indeed want the "freedom" to have unrepairable cars, what about my freedom to want a market that offers them. Same with a market for cars that are not surveillance devices etc. Are their needs more important than mine?
Political extremism turns people into ugly entitled morons. Alas its not a sad circus to watch from afar. They are taking society down to their sociopathic dark world.
Is it a fact that the United States is the most free country? Your index isn’t called “index of phones by number of parts replaceable”, just like mine isn’t called “index of countries by gun ownership”. Like I said, you attached a number to your opinion and want to present it as a fact.
> Is it a fact that the United States is the most free country?
Probably not? Who said it was or wasnt? Maybe if we had a list of facts about each country we could determine for ourselves, no?
This was my above comment.
I don't think anyone wants a single number "index".
Just give the facts.
Its not called "index of phones by number of parts repalceable" its "here are the facts on these 5 axis about the repairability of various phones" go make your own choice. Its not called "index of countries by gun ownership" its "a list of freedom facts about the country, one of which is gun ownership"
I actually don't think that's why they're getting downvoted, nobody is arguing that freedom isn't subjective, it's not a very insightful point.
I think they're getting downvoted (note: not by me, I downvote very little) because they've introduced a controversial strawman around a much more ambiguous topic than one about the repairability of mechanical and electrical consumer goods. It is not some sort of flight of fancy to think we could define what is important about repairability for consumer goods and have at least some objective criteria that is communicated to the consumer.
It doesn't seem like cities need to coerce anyone to live in them. But when visiting cities it is better for the city, it's inhabitants and their visitors if they don't bring their negative externalities along from elsewhere.
They do need to coerce people for funding, which might as well be the same thing. That’s like saying “people aren’t forced to attend public schools” - well yeah, but by forcing them to pay for it anyways you leave many with little other option. Meanwhile a quarter of American roads are private. Private transportation would exist with or without force. And in anything other than a big city, private transportation continues to be superior than even the most well funded public transport.
Care to provide link proving your assumptions? Every time I checked stats for that for some particular country it was always cities subsidizing countryside/suburbs, not vice versa.
Care must be taken when evaluating those statistics because all the ones I've seen are done only in dollar terms and entirely discount the economic beneficiaries of the movement of people and goods.
For example, consider a paved rural road into farmland. In dollar terms paving that road is a subsidy from the nearest city to the people living in that rural area. However, in part the road is paved rather than gravel only to support heavier trucks to more efficiently transport agricultural products destined for the city. It is also paved in part to support larger, faster, heavier agricultural equipment which brings economies of scale to agriculture and reduces the per-unit price of the result -- again destined mostly for the city.
Residents themselves don't need the more expensive paved and it isn't their relatively light private vehicles causing most of the wear on the road in the first place.
Considered this way, a not insubstantial fraction of the cost of non-city areas is the city indirectly subsidizing itself. The full costs could be incorporated directly into the goods sourced from the supposedly subsidized areas, but that would be less efficient overall. For example, good roads reduces the cost of agricultural products for, say, three months a year. Instead of directly paying capital costs to pave the rural road the city could pay operational costs in higher food prices while missing the other cost advantages of the paved road the rest of the year in reduced recreational costs, policing costs, education costs, etc. If those other costs were higher there would be less of them and people would be less willing to live in those areas, increasing wage and commuting costs.
That is one way to look at it. Another way is that you are paying (indirectly) for infrastructure and (directly) with subsidies for some people to lace your soda with high fructose corn syrup. Or to dry up the land by siphoning all water to make some stupid almond milk.
Yes, the web of subsidy is wide and complex, but not all subsidies are for the same reason.
For example, the fructose corn syrup subsidies exist, as far as I can tell, in order to on-shore agricultural profits and ensure sufficient slack in the domestic agricultural system to ensure that restrictions on imports of food, such as in the case of war, would not seriously affect the USA. That is, it's a subsidy towards food security.
Which assumptions? I said nothing about subsidizing cities or suburbs. I said cars and roads would exist without the government, but anything resembling public transport would not.
My open-and-acknowledged but not fixed Apple feedback items for very basic issues would disagree with that. (Apple 1st party software crashing on startup, settings search just not working at all, smartcard auth randomly failing, ...)
Until you want to tile 3 windows on the same workspace, which Apple couldn’t fathom someone doing. Meanwhile gnome looks astronomically better with a bit of theming and has nicer animations and window control and resizing behaviour. Must be embarrassing to be even less intuitive than Linux.
Pointless comment: I can't help but feel that the nicest animations are no animations. I think it's just that each time I see animations I try to imagine what Star Trek would look like if each tap on an LCARS panel took 300ms to do something.
Why are you comparing default behavior of macOS with Linux after “a bit of theming”. You can easily install a tiling window manager on macOS if that’s your thing.
Installing a tiling WM on macOS (in this case, Yabai) requires disabling system integrity protection. I tried Yabai for a while without disabling SIP (since I can't on my work machine) and it just did not work well. Not the fault of Yabai I'm sure, but there's still a ton of tinkering and tweaking you need to do to get Yabai really working correctly.
But you don’t need to disable SIP just for tiling. I find it works extremely well.
> there's still a ton of tinkering and tweaking you need to do to get Yabai really working correctly
This is pretty much true of basically every tiling window manager on Linux, too.
For me, using Nix-Darwin for MacOS and NixOS has drastically simplified my tiling window manager setup after initially doing the work to figure out my ideal config.
Refusing to give you something of mine is not taking something of yours.
There would also be less refusal in the first place if taxes were actually proportional to the percentage of public services you use, but some people are against paying their fair share.
> but some people are against paying their fair share.
You're right, but you also left it as an exercise to the reader about who the "some people" are. Those "some people" are mostly large corporate entities, like Amazon, that do all sorts of tricks to keep their losses inside the US and their gains outside the US so they can avoid paying taxes on income that was made from US consumers. While I'm more anti-tax than the average person, it's important to understand that anything which sends US consumer spending outside the US en masse is ultimately a detriment to the US society because it enriches other countries while depriving the US of that money continue to flow through the economic cycle. Dead money sitting in accounts in Ireland, Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau reduce the velocity of money in the US and directly contribute to economic slowdowns as well as increasing income inequality within the US society.
It's the biggest reason why, despite being relatively anti-tax, I'm also very much pro buying things made in the US, locally if possible, because it's important that a dollar coming into the community gets spent many times over in the same community to actually improve community welfare. As soon as that dollar exits the community, it's likely lost.
The fair share is proportional to your use of the service. That’s means the USPS model, not the income tax model. Many people are against adopting the USPS model for other public services because they do not want to pay their fair share.
Are you against making comments towards someone’s race/sexuality or not? “Well it depends on their race” is not one of the two options. Learn to be honest instead of responding to a yes or no question with an essay just because it would put your consistency into doubt.
The cleaning and cleaning fee issue came to a head and went off a cliff after Covid. To maintain their business, AirBNB wanted to guarantee guests that places had been disinfected. Hosts didn't want to pay for that out of their end, so fees were added.
I moved cross country and around for a time in that period and I ended up staying in many many airbnb's. I was asked to clean up after myself, and I was paying a hefty cleaning fee, and ... and I would walk barefoot in my AirBNB for 5 minutes and get filthy feet, so the place wasn't ever actually being cleaned at all.
I switched to hotels, which were a complete bargain during Covid anyway. Also, if you're living free-n-easy, extending your hotel stay is generally easy; extending your airbnb because you are liking the location, if it's a nice airbnb, nope, somebody else rented it for the weekend.
Also, the whole "5 star rating system" (and this goes way beyond airbnb) where the host gets punished for ratings imperfection, puts a lot of pressure on calling out a grubby but really nice host elderly couple. These rating systems should always be on a curve, 5 out of 10 means average and most of what you are offered is 5 out of 10, pay more to get more, or something.
I remember some the earlier days of airbnb which were days of innocence, friendliness, and unique experiences.
Ehhh. I’ve seen some pretty egregious cleaning instructions. Obviously it’s wildly subjective, but there’s a line.
I’m totally happy to take out the trash on my way out, or strip the linens and leave them in the laundry area!
Scrubbing toilets and showers, or hand-washing all the dishes I used (both real requirements I have personally seen)? And then charging a multi-hundred dollar cleaning fee? Yeaaaaah, that’s a little ridiculous.
When you pay a several hundred dollar “cleaning fee”, it tends to make you feel a little put out when you read instructions asking you to empty all the trash cans, strip the beds, do the dishes etc…
If something is being presented as the equivalent of a B&B, charged a cleaning fee, and being asked to do a full cleaning--yes, I think that's ridiculous. AirBnB isn't presented as couchsurfing or spending a weekend at a relative's house.
AGPL, on the spectrum of “I’m allowed to do whatever I want” to “they heavily restrict what I can do” sits firmly on the right side, alongside patents and other forms of heavy handed government intervention. It sucks how free as in freedom came to mean freedom to make rules about others.
So what is the selling point for writers and artists now? Being more expensive, much slower and less capable than a machine? At the rate these things are progressing, there’s not going to be any point in keeping them around.
How much something is valued is determined by how much others are willing to give up for it, and looking at artist salaries it’s already not much. Whether or not I browse artwork would make little difference. Trying to attack me for pointing out that something else does the job better doesn’t improve your value proposition at all.
The point is that you are required to have poorly refined taste if you feel that machine learning's literary output is remotely competitive with skilled authors.
