Thread

1. askonomm · 1790329035 · focus · HN ↗

   Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

   1. Thanemate · 1790330307 · focus · HN ↗

      > It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

      It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.

      1. askonomm · 1790330512 · focus · HN ↗

         Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.

         1. noisy_boy · 1790338868 · focus · HN ↗

            The quality of the government reflects the quality of the majority.

            The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.

            No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.

            It is basically downhill from here.

            1. achenet · 1790340574 · focus · HN ↗

               While I agree that the quality of the government is correlated with the quality of that government's people, you do also have other factors, namely the way the government is set up, which matter.

               Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all". Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.

               I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system. Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.

               On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.

               [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Duverger%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Duverger%27s_law

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