Isn't this 'Vote with your wallet'? I know I vote with my wallet. Everything I buy is a vote for how I want the world to be, and what products I want to see flourish and prosper. I also evangelize these products to others so they get on board too, because I alone will not make much of a dent, unless I recruit others to purchase it too.
* No amount of personal spending decisions can advance systemic changes like better public transport or more careful military funding. These require governmental action.
* With our wallet, we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only choose between bad options.
* Voting with our wallet requires immunity against professional PR campaigns, time (for researching on what to buy), money (to afford options which are better according to personal views but more expensive), friends who appreciate instead of belittle our purchasing decisions, ...
In the end, I believe the story "vote with your wallet" internalizes a form of victim blaming: The consumers are blamed for their irresponsible purchasing decisions, but the responsibility really is with the companies and governments.
Of course, not spending consciously is also not a solution. But we obtain greater leverage by using our influence on society. Only few of us are editor-in-chiefs of important newspapers or important politicians, but most of us can engage in visually powerful protests which are also able to generate political wind.
> With our wallet, we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only choose between bad options.
One weird thing markets do is make unusual alternatives far more expensive than the difference in cost of manufacture between them and more-common options. The market “chooses” the $80 option because the one that costs $5 more to make but is way better retails for $200.
You also see whole markets (effectively) collude to make cheap upgrades expensive to buy. There are several very-cheap upgrades that make a refrigerator much nicer, but are only available on expensive refrigerators. Think, things like making the drawers open and close much more smoothly. There is no low-end-except-for-$30-in-upgrades option. The car market does some similar things.
This is called menu pricing and is a way to segment your market [0]. It is used to separate high and low demand consumers. If you are on the low end of demand it will tend to extract most of what you are willing to pay.
I "vote with my wallet" as a form feel-goodism. It has almost no impact, but it helps me feel satisfied with myself. This is similar to donating a small amount to a charity that works on issues I personally feel connected to, even if they're relatively low-impact. While the majority of my donations go to charities that I understand (to the best of my ability) to have the greatest impact on human flourishing.
In the same vein, I can't stop at voting with my wallet; as you say, I'm choosing between the options given to me and their artificial costs. If I care about a particular outcome, I have to give extra effort beyond my purchasing decisions. There's no amount of inconvenient train rides I can take in my city that will convince it build new train lines; I have to go around the city and tell people that trains and density are more effective for the outcomes we want.
While there are some dictatorships out there, in the democratic world the people voting with their wallets and the people in charge of government are the exact same people. Which means that any governmental change comes by what is ultimately the same mechanism.
> we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered.
Only in the short-term, though. The wallet can also communicate what one wants in the future, and that is only limited by what is fundamentally possible. Of course, often people don't actually want anything better, even if they say they do. Talk is cheap. The neat thing about the wallet is that it proves what people actually want.
There are lots of things that the government will do when individual market participants don't have market incentives. In the US, the Interstate Highway System and rural electrification are two examples. Even the Transcontinental Railroad required the government to incentivize its development through land grants and so on. Governments and markets operate by different mechanisms.
From a voter's perspective, voting with a wallet seems not too dissimilar from voting in elections. Both are necessary, but insufficient to "advance systemic changes."
Voting in an election isn't generally necessary for most people. It is rare to see a candidate show up who is incapable of doing the job.
What is necessary is to stay in regular communication with whoever you hired. If they never hear from you, they can't represent you, which questions why bother to hire an employee to represent you in the first place if you are not going to use their services?
Reading this, one concept just keeps ringing in my ears: learned helplessness[1]. As it happens you really do have a fair bit of control over your life. How you choose to live it, what you buy and what you don't, and whether you submit to the persuasion trickery that calls itself news and entertainment—that's all up to you. Your choices really do matter. I can't promise you that they'll drive the kind of macro change you might like to see, but I can assure you beyond all doubt that waiting for companies, governments, and established propagandists to do it for you certainly won't.
The argument is not so much that waiting will work, as that things more drastic than voting etc. will.
Personally I gave up trying to improve politics where I lived, and instead moved to a country with better polices. This feels kind of like cheating, or shirking my responsibilities, but it was vastly more effective at getting me the life I want.
"Vote with your wallet" should only ever mean paying a lobby and an election campaign to influence your elected politicians.
You choosing to buy from Apple instead of Samsung will sure have an impact on the world, but probably not how you think it will, not what will be marketed, and more in the line of which lobby Apple chooses to pay with your money down the line.
I ran a little experiment once with Reddit and registered with the Tor Browser. My first post was shadowbanned. After contacting the mods of the subreddit, they unbanned my post and it was visible to everyone. So I concluded Reddit is hostile towards Tor IPs. You have to go out of your way and contact mods to get posts visible, which people aren't going to do.
Reddit is (somewhat) pro-anonymity and doesn't even require an e-mail when signing up and they encourage you not to use your legal name, with username suggestions like SpongebobSquarepants45, but I see why they don't like Tor. Had no problems with VPNs, although VPNs are not really anonymous and we have to blindly trust them.
Interesting project. One thing I noticed: when I clicked the button, a fullscreen window got spawned, without any prompt asking me if I should enter fullscreen (Latest Firefox). On a sidenote: this could be used for browser-in-the-browser attacks[0] where someone could present a mock browser UI with a fake URL.
Other than that, it's a great project. Anything to just sit without distractions gives us an unfair advantage over the majority of the world's population who are addicted to phones.
Browsers allow entering fullscreen as long as it's in response to user input, such as clicking a button. When entering fullscreen, browsers emit a prompt about exiting fullscreen, partly to make sure people know how to exit and partly to make sure entering fullscreen doesn't go unnoticed. So, it'd be hard to pull off such an attack.
That's what you'd think, but people rarely pay that much attention. The fullscreen prompt only shows up for a few seconds.
For example, recently a family member clicked on a fake YouTube link from an ad in Google's search results. Clicked the search bar and it immediately turned their whole screen into a "call apple support" popup.
They called me up because they thought it was a virus, but really it was just a fullscreen webpage, and being not very technologically inclined, they didn't even try Esc, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+Q, etc.
That's why I've installed adblock on every relative/friend's browser. Also disabled browser's notifications.
Then one day one of them blindly followed instructions to remove it so they can access an online newspaper. The only time they could actually follow instructions, it was actually malicious.
How many people actually read prompts? People literally share 2FA codes with scammers over the phone even though the SMS itself tells them not to share it with anyone, including their own support workers.
This post turned out to be wildly off-topic to the actual topic, but it's relevant for this subthread of the conversation and I've written so many words already that so I might as well post it:
I believe that fullscreen notification got implemented exactly because of people not noticing their browser went into fullscreen mode.
I agree with some other poster, that it's unreasonable to assume that a majority of people would actually read the message. Luckily, though, that's not actually necessary. It's enough for them to notice that there was something fading away. Something unexpected happened.
Now it gets interesting: Regardless of people actively reading "Press [Esc]", as long as it was within their vision, their brain would still process it anyway.
This means that, in the state of confusion caused by the fading text, they'd be wondering "what just happened?" and their brain would execute the command "press [Esc]" regardless of the text being actively read or not.
The state of confusion causes the input to go right through, getting it executed, causing the user to press Escape.
That's a really fucking neat confusion technique!
PS: I'm not good at linking to topics so people gain better understanding, but I'll just read through some until I find good ones.
> when I clicked the button, a fullscreen window got spawned, without any prompt asking me
This behavior is a pet peeve of mine. I almost never want anything to be fullscreen, and it's extremely irritating when applications or, especially, if a website makes the browser do it.
> One logical possibility would be written records of some sort, using a substrate that hasn't survived—prone to waterlogging or insects, modern paper would certainly not survive across tens of kiloyears
Sometimes impermanence is a feature, not a bug. I was always told by my elders: 'The Internet is forever'. Once you put things on it, it's hard for them to be removed. A permanent record of sorts. But over the years I've found many sites just evaporate with entire Library of Alexandria events occurring daily on the web. Yes, we have Archive.org which has mirror copies, but it doesn't catch everything.
And bit rot is useful too. After I die, I don't really want my precious data lingering around. Let it rot.
Avoid hype. Tooling might change, but stick to what works. But on the flip side if such tooling 10x's your productivity, it might be worth swapping out old methods. I call these 'game changer' tools. But they are rare enough that I can stay relevant with my current stack.
This won't really work super well for massive downscaling. If you have a vector image designed with enough detail to look good at large resolution, the smaller version will not look great and not be easy to see (apart from being also massively inefficient).
Potential timeouts for clients/workstations trying to reach microsoft.com.
Which entry is picked for use is generally random depending on the client.
Most systems will retry using another entry though on issues connecting through. That said, if you are on a network that is 192.168 based, trying to get to Microsoft.com may just send you to your local router!
Good luck with that. I was immediately prompted for my phone number upon registering. And I know there's ways to source an anonymous phone number, I just couldn't be bothered. They shouldn't ask for it in the first place.
Isn't this 'Vote with your wallet'? I know I vote with my wallet. Everything I buy is a vote for how I want the world to be, and what products I want to see flourish and prosper. I also evangelize these products to others so they get on board too, because I alone will not make much of a dent, unless I recruit others to purchase it too.