• 0 Posts
  • 82 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle








  • I am morbidly curious to see what happens over the next generation or two. The innate anti-intellectualism that seems to be a required component of right-wing policy will heavily affect red states, but blue states are still prioritizing their school systems. Is the “states’ rights” party going to sic the fed on state-controlled school systems in blue states to prevent the spread of thoughtcrime?

    If it’s only blue states that continue funding education, what does that do long-term in a nation that has shifted away from being a manufacturing superpower to now primarily making its capital on knowledge industries? It is already the case that college applicants from states like Massachusetts and Connecticut get inherent bonus points in their transcripts just by virtue of where they graduated high school, because earning an A in Boston means more than earning an A in Baton Rouge. We’ve got a brain drain of doctors and nurses, and teachers and college professors, all leaving red states because the laws there are getting too oppressive for them to work. Most of the finance and technology sectors remains in the (blue) northeast and west coast states as well.

    What is the long-term plan for the Republican party to empower their own constituents in these red-state strongholds when their old industries are gone, never to return, and they refuse to invest in the education and welfare of their citizens?





  • Stovetop@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldA step too far
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    18 days ago

    I still can’t get over the militant grilled cheese vs melt arguments that were common online a year ago.

    If food tastes good, who cares what the hell it’s called or how “authentic” it is. No food is authentic from the get-go; someone tries something new one day, other people like it, and it catches on and becomes a thing. If it’s not your thing, or if you think it could be done better with x, y, and z, that’s fine, everyone has personal tastes and you don’t have to like everything.





  • The popular argument I’ve heard is that they have a vertical integration model which has been deemed monopolistic within other industries in the past.

    The common example that would have been used is the old Hollywood studio system, when studios not only owned their lots where the movies were made, but they handled all of the distribution, owned most of the theaters where the films would premiere, owned their own film formats, and locked their big-name stars into contracts which had strict non-compete agreements.

    It wasn’t impossible to be an independent theater owner and have the ability to choose what films you wanted to show, but it was very hard and required accepting a number of conditions:

    • You will pay more for movies than the studio-owned theaters effectively do, which means your tickets need to be more expensive to pay your costs.
    • You are subjected to “block booking”, where you can’t show only popular movies, you are also forced to buy a studio’s less popular films as bundles and give them appropriate screen time or the studios won’t sell.
    • You also need to buy a studio’s proprietary projection equipment, because it is made intentionally incompatible with the formats of other studios.

    The studio system was eventually deemed monopolistic by the US Supreme Court in their ruling US v. Paramount, and that allowed independent theaters to thrive and for artists to switch to contract work without the strict non-compete agreements. But I have to say “the common example that would have been used,” because the conservative-stacked Supreme Court revisited their ruling in US v. Paramount that banned the vertical integration model in Hollywood and decided it was no longer needed, so studios are once again free to resume those old practices if they wish.

    So in the case of Apple, the monopoly criticism applies to their vertical integration model which draws some parallels to the old Hollywood studio system that was once deemed monopolistic:

    • Apple designs and produces their own devices.
    • Apple produces their own operating systems, which are exclusive to those devices.
    • Apple produces their own suite of core apps, which are given preferential treatment by their operating systems.
    • Apple develops their own technology standards, which are not available to third parties without additional licensing fees (e.g. the Lightning connector, up until the EU forced them to start adopting USB-C).
    • Apple hosts their own app store, which is the only app distribution method allowed on their mobile platforms.
    • Apple requires third-party apps to agree to their store’s terms to be published on the platform, which prohibits any pricing model in which Apple does not get a cut.

    For third-party app developers, it means that even if you have your own revenue model beyond Apple’s involvement, you are not allowed to extend that to your iOS app without giving Apple their cut, which is why you see so many apps now just declaring that they are “for subscribers” without allowing you to subscribe in the app or giving instructions for where to subscribe. And it’s not possible to publish an app on iOS without going through Apple’s store and agreeing to their business model because Apple does not allow third-party app stores and heavily restricts sideloading.

    Because Apple also gives preferential treatment to their own apps, it is hard to be “as good” as their own offerings, and there will always be a risk of Apple deciding to make some new category of app for a use case that third-parties currently satisfy but may get shut out of.