5,077 karma · joined June 14, 2015
I’ll even leave you with a third example: I can’t get shipping notifications about an online order I made without also opting into spam about sales and discounts. Apple could take a pro-user stance here and help us push back against scummy behavior, but they choose not to be helpful. They also happen to profit off of it, I’m sure that’s unrelated.
The battery disposal is not really the point of the conversation, you could make the same argument about the whole phone. The point is that all of the components of the phone last a lot longer than two years, but the sealed in battery will barely make it that long. They obviously benefit financially from the current arrangement because they’ve shifted consumer decision from “should I pay $40 to increase my battery life by 25% on my 2 year old phone” to “should I invest $100 in this older phone or just throw it away and spend $200 (subsidized) on a new one?” The second one makes a lot more money for Apple and has a much larger negative impact on the planet.
As far as waterproof ratings, such phones exist, even in the thin form factor. This argument is a non-starter that doesn’t agree with observed reality. It’s an active choice they’re making because the incentives are misaligned.
As to the argument that users will use bad components, how is this any different than the myriad of bad Bluetooth headphones available that degrade user experience? Should Apple disallow those as well to protect their stupid users? What about cheap chargers? Cases that induce thermal throttling? Screen protectors that greatly degrade visual fidelity?
I’m not upset about phones being different than 20 years ago, I’m upset that the planet is being destroyed to slightly increase profits, all while Apple lies to our face and parades Mother Earth around the keynote stage.
They even invited “Mother Earth” herself to their last presentation to talk about how much they care about the planet! Were they just lying to our faces then?
Another example is my air filter. It’s nice to get a reminder when it’s time to change the filter since it’s so infrequent, but I can’t get that notification without also getting spammed with “news” about new machines I should buy. Apple actively enables this behavior while claiming that spam is against their terms of service.
They are clearly working for the spammers, not the user, because they profit off of their cut.
The secondary effects are entirely dependent on how your microservices talk to their dependencies. Are they already talking to some local proxy that handles load balancing and service discovery? If so, then you can bolt on ssl termination at that layer. If not, and your microservice is using dns and making http requests directly to other services, it’s a game of whack-a-mole modifying all of your software to talk to a local “sidecar”; or you have to configure every service to start doing the SSL validation which can explode in complexity when you end up dealing with a bunch of different languages and libraries.
None of it is impossible by any means, and many companies/stacks do all of this successfully, but it’s all work that doesn’t add features, can lead to performance degradation, and is a hard sell to get funding/time for because your boss’s boss almost certainly trusts the cloud provider to handle such things at their network layer unless they have very specific security requirements and knowledge.
Because it would be extremely profitable if they could. That’s how we’ve ended up in this mess, the promise is just so tantalizing even if it’s not based in reality.
To someone not surrounded by the same aerospace/defence/pentagon welfare state people that you are surrounded by, you come across as very genuine, caring, and hard-working but completely missing the point. Your statements in this thread indicate that you think there maaaaay be an environmental issue but you don’t care because it could never affect you personally. You demonstrate no sense of urgency, which is what the people questioning you are looking for, because that’s what the science shows.
Americans are so resistant to public transportation because the public seriously sucks to deal with. There will be no popular utilization of public transit until we implement strong economic safety nets and extensive support/mandatory detention of people that are mentally ill. Those problems are much harder to overcome while maintaining an American standard of personal liberty than even the complications surrounding building rail. As a native of San Francisco and the surrounding area I have tried for decades to utilize public transit. The infrastructure isn’t great, but it’s also not terrible or anything. But in years where my job/living situation have me using public transit every day, my rate of exposure to human excrement or someone who wouldn’t even be aware that they physically harmed me was greater than once a week. In phases of my life where I’m driving everywhere that rate is practically zero. That stress takes a toll on my health that I have a natural instinct to avoid.