Maybe if any of the good features coming out today wasn’t paired with the monkey’s paw that is:
- it’s behind an app
- it’s a subscription service
- it’s planned obsolescence
- I can actually fix it with third party vendors
- it’s selling your data
Maybe then consumers would actually get excited by new developments. All these trends are doing is turning the new generations into luddites.
I love it when people are called “Luddites” for hating the enshittified tech because guess what? The OG Luddites weren’t actually “Luddites”, either. They weren’t afraid of progress per se, but its use against the average person. Unfortunately, the propaganda against them worked too well.
Lol “hoarding”… If they were truly that concerned about a stagnant economy they could sell product at cost and not inflated retail. That would incentivize moving a lot more product while turning all the gears in the supply chain and satisfying a ton of jobs throughout.
But they don’t really care the economy itself, just that it can be harnessed to make a rich guy richer as a byproduct. An economy that isn’t making the rich richer is worthless to them, so they come up with articles like this to shame people.
That’s full-on Newspeak, is what that is.
Can we get a headline about bazillionaires hoarding wealth?
Some journalist should start calling them all Smaug. The problem is a bunch of us asshats would then be like “Smaug did nothing wrong!”
Why should dragons pay tax. He earned that gold fair and square!
#temporarilyembarrasseddragons
Seriously, I remember the days when buying the newest model of phone every year was seen as near parody levels of hyper-consumerism. It was lambasted, mocked, looked down on.
In the meantime EU is forcing manufactures to use replaceable batteries, provide updates for 5 years and spare parts for 7 years.
I had to buy a new phone for work. My current jailbroken one was rejecting the auth app I needed to logon suddenly after an update.
I tried using an older phone using a newer (lineage) OS, no root, but the App kept saying no. I was beginning to lose quite a few working hours on this, and my work said “no” when I asked them for a phone.
So I bought a Fairphone6. Unnecessarily. I’m certain it’s a good phone, with great repairability, and I will probably switch to it at some point in the future if my current phone ever stops working.
But it exists to log me in to work. That’s its sole purpose. I dread to think what I’ll have to buy next if the logon app gets too old on this phone.
Buying an old galaxy s7/s8/s9, oneplus 3/5 or something like that would have cost 90% less and saved a phone from the landfill. Or one with a cracked (but working) screen for 95% less. If all you need is the login process, an old phone with stock firmware would have been good enough.
I have two of those old phones, I flashed the stock but the Android was too low, I flashed the lineage with Android 13, re-locked the bootloader, and the App still fucking said no. Once you’ve opened the bootloader even once, a flag is set in the gsettings.
At that point I wasn’t even sure if my boss was going to let me keep this job, so I just went out and bought a new phone that I knew would be delivered the very next day
If it was a work requirement, it should have been provided by work. Employers passing their own costs down to employees needs to stop.
From the people who brought you… https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/12/26/managing-the-e-waste-problem-will-take-a-much-bigger-commitment.html
Yes, these people are truly insane. I recently read the following headline:
Rheinmetall shares: Fear of peace shocks investors
(Translated from German, source | Rheinmetall is an arms manufacturer)
wtf
This world is fucked.
“Costing the economy”
Thankfully wealth horders aka. billionaires pouring money into offshore bank accounts, unaffordable real estate, government bonds, and inflated stocks are all in our benefit. Only us peasants are being selfish.
If those billionaires wanted to increase the GDP they should pay more so more money circulates.
They can pry my Galaxy S4 with removable battery and IR blaster out of my cold dead hands. (Thank you LineageOS, because Samsung dropped updates for it a decade ago.)
Samsung s20 fe with microsd slot for me. I got comics and audoobooks to download! Let me use expandable storage!
You would need a lifetime of comics to fill even a few dozen gigabytes…
This guy gets it.
What if, bear with me here, what if people just don’t have as much disposable income after the dramatic transfer of wealth to the rich class we’ve been seeing?
The economy is collapsing and the lower classes are feeling it already. The rich investor class isn’t seeing it because the tech industry has been propping up the market with their investments going all-in with unrealistic expectations for AI technology. We are currently experiencing a K-shaped recovery where the richest are on a spending spree while the poorest are cutting back their expenses. How much more obvious must it be that this is what’s going on?
You want the general population to start wasting their money on useless crap again, you’ll have to give them more money to work with.
I agree, but I gotta point out the area you’re wrong. It’s the internet after all. So don’t take my hyper-focus to heart.
The investors are absolutely aware. They don’t care if AI has any material value. They will happily invest in a bubble and inflate far beyond what anyone believes is possible. The capitalist system has only evolved to be BETTER for capitalist when the bubble pops. They know this. They literally have lobbies dedicated to ensuring their wealth is protected.
I think we confuse the “irrationality of the market” with the investors being irrational themselves. They are doing exactly what any rational investor would do in an economic system that has been built to favor them.
I’m sure you’re aware of this given your perspective. But I think it’s important to use the right vocabulary to describe this. The problem is not a “broken system” with irrational actors. The system is working EXACTLY as intended and the investors are acting completely rationally within the economic system that has been created for their benefit. This isn’t “bad capitalism” that needs regulation. This is just capitalism.
Bubbles and crashes are not something that investors are working hard to avoid. They are a feature of the contradictions of capitalism. Capitalist are very much aware of them and have ensured they can benefit from them while the working class takes the losses.
They’ve also been propping up the market with some sketchy circular deals, swearing up and down they’re not like Enron.
In an age where phones get seven or more years of software support theres very little reason not to use your phone until it breaks
I have an iPhone 10, which is now locked to iOS 18.7.
I still won’t upgrade it, because fuck planned obsolescence. This device works and works very well. If I face any software/security issues in the future I will jailbreak it. Haven’t done so thus far only for the sake of banking apps.
This is my last bastion and the phone I’ll be using for the rest of my life, or until it decays to crumbs between my fingers.
Not just phones. Except for PC hardware that’s the approach I take with everything. Why would I throw away clothing if it isn’t full of holes or doesn’t fit at all? And even then, there might be other alternative than just throwing them away.
There just can’t be endless growth with limited resources.
Brought to you by rich boomers who bought a new car every 2 years. True story.
I never know what kind of car my dad drives because he seemingly always has a new one.
If my new car don’t last me 10 years I’m going be petty pissed off.
Had an uncle who did that, learned it from his dad. I never understood that.
Not doing that either, but from what I understand after two years cars get you the most bang for buck. So economically it makes most sense to trade it in after two years for a new one. But of course you’ll need to keep doing so to keep that *advantage "…
It only works if you paid for the very first new vehicle in cash. Save up for 2 years and cash out the subsequent vehicles as well. Then the numbers pencil out.
If you to take a loan out it’s fucking stupid.
After 2 years at 10k miles per year, historically you have lost 20% or so of the value of the car. With a 5 year loan you have paid the principle down to around 63-64% of the original value.
This means you can trade in the car for more than what you owe on the loan. The difference is a partial or total down payment on a new vehicle.
Lenders strongly encourage this behavior. Due to the amortization schedule 2/3rds of the interest is paid during the first 2 years. So people who do this with loans are always paying the highest intereston their vehicle.
The best thing to do finacially is to buy a car with 20-30k then run it for as long as possible. Once the cost of a common major repair is more than the value of the car, get another low mileage used one.
from what I understand after two years cars get you the most bang for buck
If you mean buying a two year old car, maybe. If you mean buying a new car every two years as implied by the previous commenter, absolutely not. Cars lose a ton of value in the first couple years.
Pretty sure he means after 2 years it gets a lot harder to sell. So they’re selling at the moment when they’ve had a “new car” longest.
Not saying it’s a good idea, just that there’s a logic to it.
That movie always wilds me out because it was so much better back then for this shit, and it was still recognized that it’s insane we live like this.
“some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses.”
“Those who died are justified; by wearing the badge, they’re your chosen whites”
These problems have been seen forever. Everyone is comfortable working through controlled opposition so we just chill on the ratchet. Its only going to get worse until people grow a spine and stop being tolerant, which is never going to happen.
Man, I know. Too many people didnt understand the point of these events or the cultural icons that spoke about them, and instead chose sides of an imagined political spectrum in North America. Abbie Hoffman and Fred Hampton are rolling in their graves.
…hindsight, for some reason, always appears in 20/20…
Oh, man…they must absolutely love my Dad. He buys a new phone every 6-9 months. He has dementia and thinks every new phone is “broken” because he doesn’t remember how they work anymore.
Maybe it’s time for a jitterbug phone instead
Sweet mother of God…I did not know that was a thing. I am going to have a serious look at that. Thank you.
