Glad to see I'm not the one that sees the similarity in "zapping" or channel surfing to what people do nowadays with those shorts...
I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).
Also, remember when telephones started and people who took vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
I still consider them as inconsiderate. You can watch a horizontal video on every screen with more, or equal detail. That's not true for vertical videos.
But at least, we could experience first hand that laziness beats thoughtfulness, when people are allowed to.
Direct propaganda? Not too much. However, the amount of content in the 1980s and 1990s that was in some way funded by the DOD was a bit crazy. Likewise, stuff like NED funded content. If one considers corporations part of the state, then the percentage of content that was propaganda would likely be more than 40%.
Today, this would be harder to figure. Because anyone can use a VPN and pose as a person in any country, any country’s intelligence people could be carrying out misinformation/disinformation campaigns at any time. How much of the left or right content on FB that mom is reading is from genuine actors vs intelligence actors? How many calls for violent action on the left and right are just FBI entrapment or Russian attempts to destabilize the USA?
When all of this was being built, this angle never occurred to me. It should have, but it didn’t. I naively thought, as so many did, that the ability of people to connect across national boundaries, across racial and gender lines, and across socio-economic divides would lead to a better, safer, and happier world. Sadly, I was completely mistaken. The internet became worse than life AFK on those fronts, people joined echo chambers, and radicalism increased.
It's what Americans call non free to air television. You're probably being downvoted because it's intrensic there and they assume you must know about it.
It is indeed intrinsic here in America. Pretty much all houses that have been occupied in the last 50 years have at least one coax cable coming out of a wall jack or a corner of the floor. MoCA adapters allow for a nice home networking backbone in a house like that.
Nearly same thing but instead of smacking the screen you'd actually press the physical button on remote control and run in circles with channel's list to find anything remotely interesting.
The trick is you hold the controller in your limp hands, with your fingertip resting on one of the channel buttons. Usually the plus. So when you want to swipe you just extend your index finger just a fraction of an inch. And the screen changes. They dialed in the interface over years, and have gotten it to a process with almost no work involved.
The future of electrification is at risk because the market chose to bet on TSLA. Many companies backpedaled on EV and the POTUS is making a major push towards oil (including invading Venezuela). The future looks grim.
All the traditional car companies in the west failed.
I think short term focus is far too rewarded in Western companies. In fact that's pretty much the only oversight given to the CEOs. The next quarterly report is all that matters. Even if you wanted to do the right thing and focus on long term goals office politics will ensure that a single down quarter where you focused on long term investments will be punished by those looking to move up. Pump the numbers each and every quarter and don't bother about long term visions since those aren't important for your career, bonuses and golden parachute. The big shareholders too aren't worried about the long term either since shareholders are fluid. Pump this quarter and they can move their investments to the next company before the rot sets in.
The companies that do extremely well in the West are those with singular stable long term leadership where the leaders have authority (or simply majority ownership) to take risks. Berkshire Hathaway, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, Musks companies, Apple (under Jobs when he was around), etc.
This is partly why Tesla stock price is ridiculous. The competition is the traditional car companies which are extremely poorly run while Tesla is seen as a company run by a singular individual with more authority to take on longer term projects than just the next quarters goal. I think the market isn't correctly taking into account the possible mental illness from Musk but none the less there is merit to the idea that a company with singular stable leadership will be more successful than those which have quarterly focus.
This can be seen in many many examples. I actually don't think SpaceX is particularly well run either but their competition are companies where the only thing that matters for their leadership is the next quarterly report. So it's a case of a poorly run company vs an extremely terribly run company (eg. Boeing). No wonder SpaceX is doing well when their competition is fucking Boeing. Likewise with Amazon vs Walmart, Apple under jobs vs Apple not under Jobs, etc.
China commonly avoids this trap with stakeholder rather than shareholder based governance. This is less than perfect but it's still a league better than the race to the next quarter that Western shareholder governed companies have been doing. Details from an academic point of view: https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2025/06/18/what-chinas-e...
In other words the Western incentives for leadership is pretty broken (except when the leadership has the stability to avoid worrying about these short term incentives). I have the opinion that it's likely to lead to the fall of the West in the long term. We can see China repeatedly winning in various fields, electric cars being a clear example. We can also see in the West whenever we have shareholder based governance the companies have poor long term outcomes.
> short term focus is far too rewarded in Western companies
Zero auto companies outside China, America and Europe have successfully pivoted to EVs. And even within China, it's basically Geely and Changan. All the others are new entrants.
> China commonly avoids this trap with stakeholder rather than shareholder based governance
GM's unions own a significant fraction of its shares. This is a stakeholder system. What you may be referring to is state ownership, not stakeholder-based governance.
I've been looking at the BMW Neue Klasse electric vehicles. They seem to exceed almost all other western competitors when it comes to the metrics I care about (mainly charging speed). I do think it's the most promising European brand when it comes to EVs.
Europe doesn’t need new entrants. They got legacy automakers that are no worse at making EVs than Chinese and American startups.
The problem is: they can’t make them cheap enough to compete with China in developing countries. I’m not sure if they even want to do that at this point, the margins there are so low. It’s easier to just rebadge a Chinese car as your own (Renault and GM already do that in SA).
> Europe doesn’t need new entrants. They got legacy automakers that are no worse at making EVs than Chinese and American startups
Innovator's dilemma. It's not a coincidence that the two largest EV makers in the world are battery natives [1], and that they outproduce Nos. 3 (Geely), 4 (GM) and 5 (VW) combined.
VW, Mercedes, BMW, Peugeot, Polestar all make great EVs and they absolutely dominate the European market. They built manufacturing capacity in EU first for the domestic market, but are not competitive on the US market because of Trumps tariffs. China produces very cheap, they‘re still competitive even with tariffs. European car companies either have to build EV manufacturing capacity in the US first, or hope for the next administration.
> VW, Mercedes, BMW, Peugeot, Polestar all make great EVs and they absolutely dominate the European market.
Maybe, but which part of the market? China imports are popular because they're good value at a much lower price point, even after tariffs.
Many EU makers have been late to, or totally absent from, the market for a car for the masses. I've always bought Asian cars and probably always will because they're just better value.
All the established brands (except for maybe Nissan and some parts of GM) wanted their cake and eat it, too. They wanted electrification while still holding onto high margins. So they made almost their EVs all sit in the luxury segment.
And in North America they failed to bring dealers to heal.
The "theft" they are really worried about is the loss of oil industry profits.
That's who is sock-puppeting all these misanthropes.
US capitalism was fine with a few wealthy people driving around some novelty luxury cars with EV motors in them. China turned it into an actual mass market product.
Only investor's share prices at risk, there's no risk to the future of electrification.
Look at solar, an industry that has continual bankruptcies, yet is eating the world. New players grow, die, and get replaced all the time, in a continual churn of new technology.
That Tesla would die a death was not inevitable, merely a choice due to recent years of extremely poor leadership and terrible mismanagment. Even now, Tesla may pull out of the slump and recover! It's doubtful it will ever justify its share price, but it's likely that if it ever gets fairly priced as a company, it could be sold to a US auto major that is regretting it's failure to produce EVs for the international market, and wants to try to catch up. Maybe. That time might have passed too...
I think it's worse than that: we're now suffering being a "supported but deprioritised platform" for a cross platform GUI.
AppKit was developed for the Mac from the ground up. All effort that went into it was to make the Mac as good as possible. Experience from that went into making UIKit, which was made to be as good as possible for iPhone. Focus on iPhone made the Mac suffer somewhat from a lack of resources, but AppKit was still a rock solid foundation.
Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better. And it is succeeding there, to some degree (though not without its own issues; especially now with iOS 26). Mac support, however, is clearly an afterthought. Yet it's now the foundation of everything in macOS.
It's not too dissimilar from what it would look like if Apple had decided to rewrite large swathes of the system in GTK when the GTK developers only really care about how well GTK works in a GNOME desktop.
> Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better.
i think there is also another issue at play; i think with swiftui being "data based" for lack of a better term, you can easily end up with ui that matches underlying data models but doesn't match the users model/expectation... you can see this really clearly with the settings app vs the old preferences; its pretty obvious (imo) they are looping over underlying data and just spitting out endless lists and dialogs etc instead of mapping it to a presentation in a user-first way...
I still don't understand who actually use iOS/iPadOS apps heavily.
Everyone I know just try to do stuff with them and at some point go find a computer to actually get shit done, frustrated with how backward everything is on those platforms.
Now they want to make the Mac the same. What the fuck.
I completely agree. I saw the writing on the wall the moment they started boosting swiftUI as a UI library of the future where it was only half done and not even compatible with existing frameworks.
Clojure REPL experience is pretty primitive though, you don’t have a step debugger or something like the conditions system, being a hosted language you only get stacktraces from the VM.
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