Those folks should speak to the russians, they seem really good at bringing oligarchs and windows together…
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Broken Sash dot com, really good at bringing oligarchs and windows together…
Broken Sash dot com, where the search ends…
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And then there’s that secret third kind of damned. Mush has moved into the hearts of the far right. It would be Qanon 2.0 Deluxe Edition if he were bumped off; I mean, it would literally have been a conspiracy.
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“… early this morning Mr Musk, drunk on rum and Diet Coke, shot himself in the head several times with a plastic video-game prop gun and perished”
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Why indeed would a purveyor of car insurance want to overestimate the risk of an insurable catastrophic car problem that occurs only quite rarely?
Remember that when you take out comprehensive car insurance, you’re betting against the insurer that your car will catch on fire (among other possible problems). If you lose that bet because cars in fact don’t catch on fire all that often, good for the insurer because they get your premiums but never need to pay out.
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| — | — |
|---|---|
| Vicar | It’s about this letter you sent me regarding my insurance claim. |
| Devious | Oh, yeah, yeah - well, you see, it’s just that we’re not…as yet…totally satisfied with the grounds of your claim. |
| Vicar | But it says something about filling my mouth in with cement. |
| Devious | Oh well, that’s just insurance jargon, you know. |
| Vicar | But my car was hit by a lorry while standing in the garage and you refuse to pay my claim. |
| Devious | Oh well, reverend Morrison…in your policy… here we are. It states quite clearly that no claim you make will be paid. |
| Vicar | Oh dear. |
| Devious | You see, you unfortunately plumped for our ‘Neverpay’ policy, which, you know, if you never claim is very worthwhile…but you had to claim, and, well, there it is. |
| Vicar | Oh dear, oh dear. |
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Imagine being an Elon yes man at Tesla and sweating bullets at having to design a phone because Elon is an insufferable liar for clout.
Yes, there’s a market that certainly been tapped.
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Yup. I fuckin’ love my Blackview.
I’ve found mine to be a bit buggy to honest, the touchscreen randomly deactivates and the audio strobes on and off at random unless the alarm volume is maximised.
That is one way to view insurance. The other philosophy is more of “well, one of us is going to have their car catch on fire, so let’s all chip in now to pay off that unlucky person, and hope it isn’t me.” But that way of thinking often runs afoul of how bad we are at judging odds combined with selfishness, so the betting angle is the one that gets employed more.
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Well that, but the capitalist nature of modern insurance screws it up. Imagine if we cut out the profit and Executive salaries and just went single payer for cars too
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… wait, wait, hear me out—how about a RECTANGLE
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Elon will head the design team. So…
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I usually don’t wade into this conversation because it’s such a religious one for so many, but everything you’ve said here is correct and I appreciate it.
I am also not defending Apple- they have been aggressive at creating their walled garden, no question.
What people get wrong is that Google is more noble because the walls of their garden are lower. That is not by design. Google is trying desperately to create the same walled garden cash cow that Apple has, they just aren’t as good at it. Same goes for Amazon and Samsung. There are no heroes here. Everyone wants what Apple has.
I was a mobile developer on all platforms for ten years at a major company and we saw all the internal press releases, and had in person meetings with Google engineers and product leaders. Their strategy was clear- try to do what Apple does. Google has always wanted that, but Google is really bad at building ecosystems. Their company is fragmented, with very disparate groups that don’t talk to each other. They created a platform that is badly fragmented and has questionable ownership from the beginning, and they’ve been trying to claw it back ever since. They struggle to even release new OS versions because the platform requires carriers they don’t control to agree to push patches and those carriers won’t let them obsolete ancient phones. They also don’t control the hardware or the drivers, so they’re at the mercy of what the hardware makers do. It’s a mess that Google themselves hates and it’s impressive that they have managed to raise the walls as much as they have on that garden. They don’t want third party app stores, side loading, Wild West hardware and everything else that Android zealots love. They just can’t stop it easily.
So yes Google is in many ways less of a walled garden, but not because they want to be. Don’t assign nobility to them because the current appearance of the ecosystem appears to align better with your belief system. They’re “fixing” that as fast as they can.
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Gah, so much this. I honestly think the world would be a better place if Twitter died. I don’t understand the literati and mainstream journalism’s obsession with it. It’s like they’ve all forgotten how to do their jobs without it. Every other news story now is a rehashing of some tweets.
Meanwhile it’s well recognized that a tiny portion of the world is on Twitter and within that platform 97% of the content comes from 25% of the users.
It’s a terrible sampling of humanity that is very unrepresentative of anything except self-absorbed celebrities and billionaires. It doesn’t deserve a tenth of the ink it gets as a platform. Yet it’s now treated as the highest form of journalistic sourcing.
ETA Aside:
No need to imagine! Many places have socialized car insurance, including British Columbia and Saskatchewan in Canada. It works great! My rates are way lower than they ever were in California and when I make a claim it doesn’t feel like a battle against an enemy who doesn’t want to pay that claim.
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I am an American. The best that we are allowed to do is imagine socialism.
(Oh, and fight like hell for it, but we are really breaking some unspoken rules when we do that)
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Thanks for that - I could never figure out where Google was going with Android, apart from “several directions at once”. I didn’t know the back-story to why, and now I feel a lot less confused looking at where they are and how they got there.
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I vividly remember, peaking around the Tahrir Square demonstration, journalists wouldn’t shut their holes about Twitter. The part about how the internet had changed mass politics, fine, but the other thing I kept seeing over and over was how Twitter’s user base was older than other services.
It really stood out how much that was mentioned, and it struck me as a tell at the time. This was old-media people resolving that Twitter was going to be their lifeboat – it was how they were going to maintain their ownership of What People Are Saying in the 21st century.
I’m convinced it’s all about the personal insecurities of people who say stuff for a living. What is the point of them if they aren’t ranked on the stuff-saying leaderboard?
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In many ways, this is their own doing, and the idea that a hardware maker should write their own operating system is the very core of Apple’s product philosophy, going back to the Apples Woz designed.
I have this theory that Google’s Android was originally supported by Apple as a way to steal the oxygen from Microsoft’s Windows Phone project, just as Palm and WebOS was foundering, and Nokia being eaten from within by former Microsoft execs. Jobs’ famous tantrum at Google betraying them was carefully staged theatre, in my eyes, Apple doing little things to make sure Google was in the limelight and favored by rival handset makers, not Microsoft.
Now Google has the most popular operating system, but doesn’t really want it any more since it doesn’t bring the big license fees bucks like Microsoft gets from its OEMs, and since it’s mostly open sourced companies like OnePlus other Chinese manufacturers can fork from it.
And this is the game Elon wants to enter, after both Jeff and Mark have tried and had their devices laughed at?
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