Comment by bigyabai
1 day ago
> bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube
I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
There is nothing wrong with paying for software. I say this as a professional software developer ;)
iOS/MacOS users are more predisposed to shell some bucks because of their walled garden upbringing.
Devs would usually prioritize iOS releases (early on, when no React Native nor Expo was as common place) only due to this fact that iOS users where much more likely to spend money than Android ones.
This might have equalized since the early days but i bet some of it still stands
Try to make a robust ecosystem of discerning customers willing to pay money for good software look bad.
iOS/Android hasn’t equalized. Depending on the segment, something like 80% of revenue is iOS.
Isn't that like being wowed by people who pay to have their car oil changed, instead of doing it themselves?
Bad analogy imo given doing it yourself isn't that much cheaper and clicking "install extension" isn't exactly a complex maintenance operation
Yes, plus I wonder how "responsibly" do people who replace their car oil, dispose the old oil. One of the reasons I don't do it myself, is.. 'what the hell do I do with the old oil?' I know someone that parks/aims right over a grill that is there for the rain water, and all the bad/old oil goes straight there. I ain't no angel, but that person is an absolute cunt.
So.. I really hope that the garages that throughout my car-ownership years do this, don't just flush them down the toilet, but do something proper about them.
I do some maintenance myself but not oil changes - mostly from a time/cost perspective, I don’t really wish to go down that road and deal with spills in my driveway, etc. However the oil collection part isn’t particularly hard around here. I don’t know if there’s something similar in the US (or wherever you are located) but in Canada we have UOMA (Used Oil Management Association), a nonprofit which partners with garages to coordinate the recycling of used oil and related byproducts. They have a handy map which shows me 5+ garages in a 10min radius from my place which participates, including the shop I already go to - and I’m in a medium sized agricultural town, surrounded by corn fields, an hour from the nearest metropolitan area.
I was curious about what they did with oil when I drove my first car, so I asked my garage. They showed me the tank behind the shop, someone came to empty it once a week or so. I always assumed that was the usual practice, but I legitimately have no idea haha.
In my town, UK, you go to the local landfill and there is a tank to pour it in.
I just leave it in the shed in the bottle until I have enough other stuff to get rid of and do it all at once.
For what it's worth, where I live in New Jersey, automotive shops have to accept used oil - precisely to avoid this sort of issue. (And I trust that someone, somewhere is making sure that all of their oil actually goes somewhere safe, instead of - as you point out - being dumped into the ocean.)
I still don't change my own oil, because I'm at the point in my life where I can afford to throw $100 at that particular problem, rather than spending a dirty and greasy hour+ under my car.
In a capitalist society, paying for software is good, actually.
I don't know if it is that simple. Paying by people who develop software will tend to keep the software in good shape, but there's no guarantee.
Also, the developer doesn't necesarily need to own the code to improve it, or build you a copy.
I mean that paying for software keeps the people who write the software from starving to death, or having to fall back on corrupt behaviour (e.g. accepting bribes from the advertising industry) to survive. It is, of course, not a guarantee of continued work quality, but it helps avert the material conditions that inevitably destroy it.
I am not entirely convinced that capitalism is the best system for producing software, especially established "infrastructure" software like OSes, web browsers, office suites, etc.
I'm open to the idea, and recognize there are problems with non-commercial software, too. But the critical difference between software and physical commodities is that replication of software, once written, has a marginal cost approaching zero.
I suspect that this difference significantly changes the calculus.
My personal feeling is we should really think outside the box here. I like some sort of hybrid system with government-funded software bureaus producing FOSS code to replicate successful and important "infrastructure" commercial products after five to ten years or so. People get cutting-edge software created by the market, and exploitative rent seeking on critical software is minimized.
That's just propaganda. Our society is more like kings and serfs that capitalist these days.
This is absurdly false. The serfs can become kings as evidenced by newly minted millionaires every year. However, the reverse is also true as there are plenty of fortunes lost as well.
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That's what the word "capitalism" was coined to mean – if you ascribe to the theory that Louis Blanc coined it.