60 really isn't a problem at all. I will drive a 1,000 miles going 60, if I can do it in a straight line, it would still save a large amount of time. The problem is absolutely that 20mph range. Not useful at all.
Part 103 vehicles can't be operated over congested areas. FAA considers anything more than sparsely populated as congested. A single church in the middle of nowhere might be sparsely populated.
I'm not even sure you can take off or land in your own neighborhood. Is a neighborhood a settlement? shrug
Also, no operations in common types of airspace: no bravo, charlie, or delta (or class e surface area). This may not be difficult seeing as they tend to exist over congested areas which must be avoided anyway.
Part 103 ultralights are vehicles, not aircraft, therefore not general aviation. Therefore, I'm not sure who will insure these operations. It may be the realm of self-insured.
Could one be forgiven for assuming on the internet that people know what "console gaming" or "the 1990s" are? I expected the worst reading this comment thread before clicking TFA but it's really very straightforward.
Well of course I know. But I never owned a games console in the 1990s, I've never played a game on a 1990s console, so I have no clue what aspect of the experience is being captured or not.
Everyone's bandwidth would be saturated if no one assumed their reader knew what they were talking about, but assumption is a form of lossy compression that allows both miscommunication and misunderstanding.
Don't assume -- especially when writing. Always explain because people outside your target audience will read what you write and they may go on to buy a million of your product, or give you a job, or something.
Considering it is basically the only over-the-counter pain med allowed during pregnancy, I think we will learn that this government doesn't understand the difference between causation and correlation.
How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore? I don't think Dems are doing a bang up job, but this is something developed and deployed, 100% working, that only helps the American people navigate a complicated tax system. The only reason to get rid of it is to hurt the American people.
Because for probably the vast majority of Republican voters, this is effectively a religion (identity politics). It doesn't matter what the Republican party chooses to do, voting Republican is a part of who people are and to do anything else is simply unbelievable.
To expand on this a little, even before this hyper-tribalism consumed politics, conservatism has always had an in-group / out-group mentality
It has been remarkably effective to find a niche wedge issue and drive it to the forefront.
Abortion, guns, big city crime, religion…the practical impact these issues have on most people’s daily lives is dwarfed by economic policy but it hits the emotional nerve centers and has a crisp message.
And that’s how you get people voting against their best interests time and time again
I sort of fear tribalism will typically win more and more in the future. There’s a large enough population in the conservative end that’s fine with tribalism. And while there’s certainly a fair share of it on the democratic side, the democratic side tends to lure in educated and anti-authoritarian folks who question things, formulate opinions outside the pack, and will have more difficult electing a cohesive candidate. Meanwhile the Conservative Party targeting religious folks already have a group of people who tend to be OK with just me following whatever it’s told to them without question or with little question.
There's a good read that was put out by OK Cupid (the dating site) 15 years ago outlining exactly this. They had a lot of personality questions that they'd use to match people, so they had a lot of this data correlated with a lot of demographics.
One of the interesting takeaways was about dating compatibility (they are a dating site after all). They found that republicans tended to pair well with other republicans, more than any other group paired with itself, and far better than democrats paired with other democrats.
I think this analysis ignores that the Republican party is winning because they expanded their coalition outside of their base of religious and upper-income voters. Trump pulled in lots of either non-voters or formerly Democrat voters. That's hurting the Dems it has made them more uniformly the party of the educated and upper-middle class and losing broader appeal The flip side is that the GOP now needs to manage a more diverse (racial, religious, cultural, income) coalition along with that. Trump is unifying to across the coalition to a large degree but its hardly assured that his successor will be able to continue that.
The GoP does not need to make things work. One of its pillars has been to ensure a hamstrung government, and take a position that government is ineffective.
Any time the other party comes to power, they are unable to make significant change or headway - and the Republicans are proven right.
The Dems are by default the party of Governance so unless they too get on board with gutting institutions, and removing safety nets, they will always be stuck with this weak hand.
The Republican strategies (all of which are publicly discussed in various news articles over the years) do not need to manage a big tent, because even when out of power, they simply need to ensure governance is ineffective.
And given their near mind control via Fox and their content economy - they can even blame the opposition for problems when they are in power.
This is why I think Liberalism is on the outs. Its whole premise is that we can rationally manage society, but there's no romance in this. The Old Left had romance, as did Fascism. Trumpism has a certain amount of it. Abundance and the traditional neoliberal platform of the Democrats simply don't. Only a very small percentage of the population can get their blood up about means-tested social programs.
A Democratic party that was serious about winning elections would turn sharply left, get new candidates, and start the long process of selling voters on things that they can feel some romance in: ending suffering, universal childcare, universal healthcare, good union jobs, a struggle to take back our country from the money interests. Imagining a future where we aren't all climate refugees in Northern Canada.
Unfortunately, the Democratic party is not serious about winning elections. They keep their fossilized leadership in place while their mental capacity deteriorates until it's simply no longer tenable to pretend that they are capable of governing. Younger candidates are considered a success if they can successfully fundraise, even it they can't actually win the elections that they're fundraising for. In every instance, party operators are out for themselves rather than trying to win and deliver material benefits to voters. Republicans at least win (barely, and usually with some extreme gerrymandering), even if they can't deliver materially.
The only alternative I can see right now is a return to the Old Left playbook: a confrontational labor movement. Maybe there are other alternatives that will emerge but I've yet to see one as promising as just organizing your workplace.
Progressives needed to show up at the polls as a bloc. Unfortunately, there is a pervasive belief that this is a symmetric game between Dems and Republicans.
This belief gives people a reason to expect that their protest is recognized, without doing significant harm to electoral outcomes.
This isn’t the ONLY problem here, theres reasons progressives feel disillusioned by the party, but the rule of power is that its must be grasped.
The Tea Party movement ate the Republican Party from the inside - they primaried politicians and used their Fox/Media economy well.
I hear you but I think there are much deeper problems. The material basis for the post-war order (high employment in high-margin industry in the developed countries, globally marketized resource extraction everywhere else) is collapsing. "Progressives" are just as lost as the rest of the broadly left coalition, but they're Liberals too, and their world is over.
I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest. But people are complicated and have many interests beyond immediate simple financial interests.
> I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest.
You can't mischaracterise a phrase and then say it's wrong. That isn't what it means.
The thing that any "voting against their best interests" critique misses is that most people are willing to vote "against their best interest" if they feel like it's the morally correct thing to do.
Like, I'm an adult who never intends to have children, but I still support robust public education. I could make some arguments about how paying taxes for schools is somehow in my best interest. But the reality is I support public education because I think it's the right thing to do, not because I think it will personally benefit me.
The thing is, conservatives and Republican voters don't lean that way because they're just too stupid to vote for Democrats. It's because they have a different moral framework. And that's something that can be hard to reconcile and address. Changing someone's political views requires changing their entire worldview, which is incredibly difficult.
I do believe that supporting public education will benefit me. (And I, too, have no children nor any intent to have any.)
Robust public education would have gone a long way toward preventing the disaster currently unfolding. The very fact that Trump is aggressively gutting every part of the government that once supported education and science is (indirect) evidence of this.
An educated populace makes better decisions, and requires me to spend less time standing out there with a sign stating the painfully obvious.
I was thinking about the "against their best interest" argument recently and connecting it to the democrats.org "who we serve" page made it even worse than it seemed. Rational people not on the list should avoid them?
I assume you are being obtuse or whatever but anyway -- I will attempt clarify a little more. Why did you add qualifiers like "underrepresented" in your reply?
I am not on the list. My brother is not. My son is not. Most men I know are not. That's the entire problem with making a list; you can't help but exclude.
Do democrats support me and my interests? Have I been voting against my own interests by supporting a party who excludes me from their stated in-group?
You can find many articles pointing out problems with that page, which is probably why they finally took it down.
Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
Electing Trump was a big FU to that attitude. The astonishing thing is that liberals are so cocksure of themselves that they have not yet figured out this simple truth and are still carrying on as if Trump were simply an anomaly rather than a predictable response to their own actions. The magnitude of the tone-deafness in the Democratic party is simply staggering. And I'm a Democrat, or at least I was until I realized how utterly incompetent they are.
[UPDATE] Ironically, the fact that this comment is being downvoted into oblivion actually demonstrates the very point I am making.
[UPDATE2] With regards to my saying that Democrats are incompetent, this is manifestly true at least with regards to 1) winning elections and 2) controlling Donald Trump. Maybe they are competent at other things, but that seems like a bit of a moot point to me under the present circumstances.
I disagree. When it comes to "voting against their best interests," these best interests are not determined at an individual level, but rather through what is in the best interests of that group of individuals.
It is provable that, for example, having a strong emergency response infrastructure is in the best interests of the people of the United States, and especially in the best interests of, e.g., Floridians. Natural disasters happen, and having a strong, coordinated response to assist the victims of natural disasters is in society's best interests, even if individuals (generally wrongly) think that they are self-sufficient enough to handle that situation.
So what I'm saying is that while folks that are "voting against their best interests" may on an individual level have decided that their best interests are different from the best interests of their neighborhood/region/state/country, it doesn't make them <i>right</i>.
A rural voter voting for candidates who will enact policies that will close the only hospital within 100+ miles of where they live is, by definition, voting against their own best interests, as it is in their best interests to have access to that hospital when it becomes necessary, as it could literally be a matter of life or death. Those voters opinions of what might be in their own best interests don't actually matter in terms of determining their best interests, but it matters a lot in terms of getting them to vote against their own best interests.
What Democrats are incompetent at is coming up with messaging that stands a chance of being more convincing than the blatant lies and propaganda of the modern Conservative media machine.
No. There is nothing patrician about it. Stating "it's in your own best interests that the only hospital within 100 miles of your house stays open" is not a "patrician attitude" at all.
Again, it is stating a fact. It is not in those voters best interests to vote for politicians whose stated goal is policy that will cause that hospital to close.
There is nothing derogatory or "patrician" in that. It is a cold, hard fact. Politics are politics, and facts are facts. That people choose to go with feelings and reject facts is beside the point. Their feelings do not determine their best interests.
But we also have a long history of using regulations and other inducements to get people to act in their own best interests. The current regime has just decided that it will act in the best interests of monied interests, to the detriment of a large swath of the people who voted for them.
Now, if you want a liberal, "patrician" attitude, here's one: Fuck 'em. They voted for politicians who openly told them they were going to do things that would be absolutely horrifically bad for them. Let them deal with the consequences and feel morally superior because they've "owned the libs," or whatever other BS helps them sleep at night as their poor, mostly rural communities fall apart around them. Do I think it will get them to vote for politicians who have their best interests in mind? Absolutely not, at least not at a scale necessary to change elections results.
I spend a fair amount of my time in rural America. It's not pretty, and it really doesn't matter if it's a red state or a blue state, rural America is hell bent on its own destruction. It's a shame, but apparently, it's what they want. So let 'em have it.
If you're not free to make (what someone else believes to be) the wrong decision you're not free. Dems assume that they can tell voters what's in their best interest because Dems assume that they can tell voters what those voters value and what those voters think is the best way to achieve it. That's the patrician attitude, the idea that the vast majority of the population is too stupid to make decisions for themselves with the ipso facto evidence being that they don't want the same things that the patrician does. Whether it works out in what is judged to be their "best interests" or not, that attitude is why people are abandoning liberalism and it's a very good reason to do exactly that. Is it cutting off your nose to spite your face? Probably, but after years of someone looking down that nose at me I might be tempted to cut it off as well and damn the consequences. Between that and the way Dems run on "no kids in cages" then rule on "expanded open-air detention facilities for underage migrants", they run on "student loan forgiveness" then rule on "partial forgiveness for people who were already legally qualified", they run on "healthcare for everyone" then rule on "access to insurance marketplaces for everyone with a small subsidy to help pay for insurance that's mostly useless". They run on "women have a right to choose" and when given the chance to make that a law they say it's "not a legislative priority" (Obama, 09). Even if I do concede that Democrats have "my best interest" at heart I don't trust them to actually do any of it.
I'm not sure why you seem to completely ignore what I'm saying.
Let me state again, and plainly: What a person thinks is in their best interests, and what is actually in their best interests are two completely different things.
But you did a great job of boiling down the typical Trump/Republican voter's ethos: "Is it cutting off your nose to spite your face? Probably, but after years of someone looking down that nose at me I might be tempted to cut it off as well and damn the consequences."
This is what we are dealing with in the United States at this point: Stupid people that are pissed off that they're not allowed to be stupid and through their own stupidity endanger the lives of the responsible adults in society.
"That's the patrician attitude, the idea that the vast majority of the population is too stupid to make decisions for themselves with the ipso facto evidence being that they don't want the same things that the patrician does."
Well, when an ever-growing portion of the population is proving that out, maybe the stupid people are the problem. Case in point: anti-vax attitudes, we're having measles outbreaks because stupid people refuse to vaccinate themselves and their children.
Your entire argument in this post seems to be that "Democrats did a bad job of keeping their promises, so I'm going to vote for stupidity, even if it hurts me."
At what point did I say I was a Trump supporter? I've voted Democrat every election since I was first allowed to in 08. My point was that if you think you're just going to tell voters "no, you're wrong, you're supposed to want this rather than that" then you're just gonna get your teeth kicked in by Trump a third time.
> Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
This is such a tired refrain. As a libertarian who was telling my aghast friends in 2016 that Trump was really speaking to people's frustrations and likely to win (thus you know, demonstrating that I at least understand many of those concerns, if not outright share them), this still doesn't explain it. For the most part Trump's policies do nothing to effect his (non-financier) supporters' professed interests, yet they keep lapping it up and coming back for more.
Perhaps with my libertarian biases, I could still be putting too much emphasis on the economic and liberty-based complaints rather than the contingent that wants to criminalize healthcare, put a handful of unlucky brown people in concentration camps, and other negative-sum social policies. But it still really doesn't feel that is where the broad support is coming from in the first place.
Ultimately from where I'm sitting, the responsibility for the communications breakdown mainly rests on Trump supporters for seemingly making "owning the libs" into their primary KPI. The Democratic party certainly has a similar "rabid" dynamic with regards to social justice / diversity, but that's a much narrower contingent (vocal, but still only a slice of policy) whereas for the Republicans it has broadly taken over the entire party platform.
As a fellow recovering Democrat I couldn't agree more. When the party shifted to neoliberalism in the 90s an incredible arrogance came with it. The attitude went from "How do we represent working people and get government to do what they want" to "We know how to govern better than the plebs, how do we get them to want what we're willing to do?" And their reaction to Trump has been to dismiss him as a flash in the pan and try to wait him out like bad weather, but they completely fail to reckon with the idea that whatever else he may be he's currently the guy batting .667 against them and in 2024 managed to maintain the support of open racists while gaining ground with every minority except women.
Trump isn't a disease, he's a symptom. He's an emergent property of a system that has been hilariously blatant about the fact that it doesn't value the people it needs to to continue functioning. Trump fits in a hole the government left in the hearts of the American people when it decided that its primary operating principle is "give the voters just enough to get them to put us in power give everything else to the donors and then buy stock in their companies". Doubly so because the lesson the Dems learned from Obama was that they can exploit identity politics to give the populace a symbolic victory and then govern in a way that directly transfers wealth from their voters to the donor class. Since 2008 the Democratic primary has been a game of "Who will you accept neoliberal market worship from?" An african american man (08, 12), a woman (16), your choice of an old white man, a mixed race woman or a gay man (20), the same mixed race woman from 20 who flat out told us when asked if there was anything she would do differently than the historically-unpopular old white man said "Not a thing that comes to mind" (24). They're the Pizza Party, the manager at work who has been given the impossible task of trying to buck up a completely demoralized staff while not being permitted to offer them anything of substance. The neoliberal wing of the Democratic party has been feasting on the seed corn since 1992 and can't figure out why the fields are empty and their serfs are angry.
Their response to Trump has been internally contradictory to a delightful degree as well. In 2015 HRC specifically instructed Dem-aligned media to elevate Trump's campaign with the theory that he would frighten people so badly that they'd vote for her without her having to offer anything substantial to voters. You'll remember the focus of the campaign was threefold: she's a woman and it would be neat to have a woman president, she's qualified, it's her turn. More of the same policies that pissed everyone off, very little in the way of material support that actually makes the average person's day to day life better, a lot of scolding people for not already being on the Dem side rather than figuring out what it would take to get them on the Dem side ("basket of deplorables") and generally treating voters as a resource that needs to be managed and then exploited for maximum value rather than as the people that you as an elected official serve.
To me, the defining feature of the modern Democratic party is their self-assurance that Trump is an idiot combined with a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that that idiot just keeps kicking their asses. If your opponent is weak but consistently puts you on your back what does that make you?
From the perspective of an independent, I’m not sure why you’re singling out Republicans here. It reads just as true if you’re to swap in the word Democrat.
If it turns out that Obama is in the Epstein files, my friends won't have to get rid of their Obama hat, or their Obama sneakers, or their Obama cologne, or their Obama watch, or their Obama bible, or take down their Obama flag, or delete their Obama NFT trading cards.
Both parties are alien and hostile to me, but for very different reasons.
This is why arguing politics with these guys is pointless. I once naively thought I could bring around one of my MAGA friends to the light side by focusing on policy but it just doesn't work. He admitted that everything Team R is doing is not really helping him but in the end it's always something like: "Look, I was born a Republican, my family is Republican, I will never vote Democrat, no matter what any of them do. We have to trust Trump to do the right thing." It's truly a religion. There is no getting to these people.
Given the complete destruction of norms and institutions over the last year, the country is already lost for at least a decade, if not several. "Winning" is now a fantasy for our kids to maybe enjoy one day. I'm not sure that spite is a particularly bad option in this scenario.
Seriously I wish we could split the country. Let the deplorables live by themselves un-vaxxed, with guns, religion and all of their other non-sense. And let us normal people live by ourselves with science and compassion.
(Unfortunately this will not happen. Because two things will have to be split: national debt and the nuclear arsenal. Heavy Sigh…)
I think that a fundamental problem with democracy is that as the state indulges its natural tendency to expand and centralize it leads to a state that is the average of an increasingly large pool of citizens' opinions on how their country should work and much like how the average number of fingers on a human hand is very different from the expected number of fingers on a human hand the average of everyone's opinions on how things should work is completely different from any one person's opinion. Thus, the thing that is ostensibly designed to ensure everyone gets at least some of what they want actually ends in no one getting anything they want, and it promotes factionalism that will eventually lead to separate power structures. It's happening right now, whether its southern sheriffs refusing to enforce gun laws or northern mayors declaring their cities to be sanctuaries from federal immigration enforcement, the development of competing power structures has us hurtling toward a constitutional crisis and maybe that's not the most terrible thing? Getting there is gonna suck but maybe there's just a natural boom/bust cycle for democracies where they swing on a pendulum between "growing and consolidating power while watering down voters' intent" and "collapsing back down to a place where voters feel like they're actually part of the society they're governed by". Maybe the antifederalists were right, and this was always supposed to be several independent countries governed by a few overarching laws that should really only ever have been concerned with trade and immigration, and accepting a common currency to further enable both of those goals.
Don't you think it cuts both ways though? I saw a video where a guy was asking (presumably liberal) NYU students about quotes relating to immigration policy. He initially said they were from (republican person T), and they stated that they thought the comments were racist. Then the interviewer said, oh wait, sorry, they were actually from (democrat person O), and the students immediately shifted their opinions and said the comments were reasonable.
I'm sure there's a little tribalism on the (D) side, too, but I don't know anyone who decorates their house, yard, and truck with Democrat merchandise and flags, wears Democrat political shirts and hats, has a shrine at home with a life-size figure of a Democrat politician, or brings up Democrat politics in social settings that are not even remotely political like a kid's birthday party. I've seen real life examples of all of these from the (R) side.
You don't want this, I promise you. I was in a Discord recently that was the liberal equivalent of MAGA and it scared the bejeezus out of me to see Dems frothing at the mouth like rabid red hatters.
You've never seen evidence of cultural/tribal signaling on the left? Never seen an "in this house" sign, somebody wearing a mask outside and alone/spread out, NPR tote bag, "Anti-Racist Baby" book on the shelf, brought up Robin Deangelo or random Trump jokes at a bbq... Fish don't know their wet.
I don't doubt they exist--I just haven't seen any, and I have seen many dozens of examples from the other side. I'm talking about an order of magnitude difference in degree of tribalism, not claiming total absence of tribalism from one side.
Tribalism coming to the Dems is taking FAR too long. People recognize that tribalism is working for the Republicans, so it’s natural that they are going to eventually imitated the winning strategy.
Seriously, I can’t believe it took this many decades for it to happen, and only after Trump made its efficacy blindingly obvious.
PS: Tribalism is not good for the overall health of a polity. Its just that people imitate whatever strategies appear to work.
My observation is that “both sides” (EDIT: of the electorate) are locked in this dynamic. In the ideal world people are able to evaluate specific ideas, but instead people judge ideas based on who it comes from.
id love to know some of the good ideas from republicans, because for the past like 50 years or so, nearly every one has been a disaster or discriminatory
Here's where I think the bulk of the US population is:
- They're in favor of giving asylum to those who really deserve it (yeah, I'm sweeping a huge amount under the rug of the word "deserve"), but they're not in favor of "open borders" or large numbers of people coming here not through the legal process.
- They're in favor of equal opportunity and helping those who are downtrodden, but not in favor of "white guilt" or hiring/admission quotas.
- They're in favor of giving someone a break, but not in favor of giving criminals an infinite number of breaks (whether violent criminals or just shoplifters).
When the Democrats won in 2020, they took that victory as an endorsement of everything they believed in. It wasn't. It was a declaration that we didn't believe in where Trump wanted to take us.
When the Republicans won in 2024, they took it as an endorsement of everything Trump stood for, and everything he will decide to stand for in the future. It wasn't. It was a vote against the Democrats implementing everything they wanted to over the last four years.
In fact, it's not just the Republicans who make that mistake. I keep reading "you voted for this". Well, not exactly - there are a bunch of people who voted against open borders, but did not vote for militarized thugs grabbing people off the street based on skin color. (Yes, I know, their vote enabled that. My point is that their intent was not that at all, but only to vote against an open border.)
The bulk of the population doesn't want the Democratic platform or the Republican platform. They want some kind of sanity, avoiding the extremes of both sides.
(You say that the Republicans only have extremes? Not so. They also have "stop doing what the Democrats are doing". In some cases, that's not a bad idea.)
There is not a single national-level Democratic politician who advocates for open borders. If there is, please tell us who.
The feeling of an open border is due to a confluence of our asylum laws, the Constitution, and a surge in relative desirability of the United States vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The President cannot directly change any of these factors.
The reason it feels like some of that has changed is because we have a President who is flouting our asylum laws [1] and the Constitution [2], having the net effect of making our country less relatively desirable [3]
Your observation is yours, but it isn't mine and many others.
I grew up in a Dem household but I don't vote dem because my parents did or because I'm a party member (I'm not), it's because the lesser of the two evils is almost always the blue side.
And this was before the GOP literally became a cult. Now it's not even a choice.
I concur that ultimately you have to decide which party to vote for (and I happen to vote similarly to you).
What I am asserting is that it would be better if we were able to judge ideas based on the merit of the idea rather than who it comes from. That is, in my experience, not happening and the electorate for both dem and rep are guilty of this behavior.
I absolutely agree with that. But as a vote for a candidate due to an agreeable policy position is also a vote that's likely to vote as a block for everything else, it's not entirely invalid to vote that way (historically).
But as today's GOP is the Party of Trump™, and they now vote in lockstep, it's a simple "nopes".
I abhor partisan politics -- Washington warned us against them at the beginning and he was right.
The false equivalence you reference, and that I agree exists, is about the politicians actions.
But I’m talking about the electorate who, in both cases, largely do not seem to evaluate the strength of ideas or policies, but, in many examples I can cite, judge ideas based on who it comes from.
There simply is no alternative. Normal people must be completely blackpilled like me. The Democrats have an approval rating the lowest in Decades. None of these people are "working for [us]". Everyone is captured and this country is over. I really mean this. As part of the working class, we all feel this way.
This can be fixed with sane campaign finance laws. Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled. And every Democratic-appointed Justice on the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Citizens United. I know it sounds trite, but voting for Democrats again and again, flawed as they are, for generations, is the only way we're going to get out of this mess.
> Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled.
I don't want to be rude, but I don't believe you. I also have seen the polling and the country does not believe it as a whole. Democratic voters also don't believe it either. If you personally have an income >150K you are likely completely insulated from real Americans. The perception is that the Democrats care more about Israel and their donors than the country. Only 8 percent of Democrats are supportive of Israel but almost 90% of Dem senators are (I made this number up, the rest are real).
edit: the Republicans are publicly grifting, lest you think I like the Republicans. My overarching point is that ~60% of American's don't own homes and are completely uninvested in this country. They have completely given up, or are in a state of giving up. The Republicans and Democrats are extremely vile reptilian grifters who sold out this country.
I get it, your perspective is totally fair. Part of the reason Democrats care only about donors (the Israel lobby is one of those donors) is because of the influence of money in politics, which is a direct result of Citizens United. If they don't care about their donors, they lose. The incentives are pretty straightforward.
There were great campaign finance laws on the books, but Republican-appointed judges have steadily eroded those over the years, culminating in Citizens United. We have to overrule that awful case if we are to ever have working campaign finance laws in this country again. There's only one way to overrule that case, and that's with Democrat-appointed judges. Those judges typically do not answer to donors and so don't have the same incentives you've identified.
It does seem that people are fed up enough to ignore campaign spending, however. Examples are the Wisconsin supreme court race and Mamdani vs. Cuomo.
I really don't think that the Democratic establishment as we know it has much time to live. Democratic voters are not interested in the center-right. They want to go left. Candidates that move things to the left do well without expensive campaigns.
No. The alternative is to have some courage. It's easier to destroy than it is to create. There is a responsibility bias against the Democratic party because they're the only ones that know how to govern. Everyone is responsible is some way for the outcome. Our political rivals have attacked us so hard we're starting to believe the characterization they've made of us. I don't buy into the 'Everyone is captured and this country is over' message. It's a false equivocacy and just an excuse to be super critical of our own people.
Due to first-past-the-post voting in the US, I have at most two realistic options for my vote.
For the majority of the problems I see that I believe the government should be addressing, one side says "that's not a real problem" and the other side offers a really bad solution that they also won't realistically be able to make law.
Because Obamacare was such a fuckup? Where is Trumpcare? Where is Trumphousing? Bushfinancing? Bushtransport? How about even as a promise, and not as a delivered reality?
Anytime big news like this, news report on it, but the specific news channels do not mention, at all or minimize it position it in a way of for instance.. got rid of a terrible tool that didnt work well and was inefficient etc. So instead of focusing on removing free tax service so people have to pay again, people think it's a good thing because x y z, or even if they you ask any they don't know why its a good thing, they say someone they trust says its a good thing and people they don't like says a bad thing, and that's enough.
Or they'll cover it and say how this is a win for the American public because they no longer need to use a socialist government website to file their taxes.
1. People have demonstrated they aren't really willing to pay enough for independent media, aside from one or two person shops.
2. The current media is incentivized to collect ad revenue. Currently, the best known scheme is to outrage or scare readers so they keep refreshing the page. So, in that respect, the current media is doing great business.
Populism has a zero sum view of the world. Absolute prosperity is less important than relative prosperity. In addition, for some there is a very strong expectation that they should be more prosperous than “out” groups (in the US, racial minorities).
Liberal policy in the US since Clinton has failed to deal with this, focusing instead on absolute prosperity (GDP per-capita). And progressive policy has been ineffective since they promise equality, including with minorities.
But there was already a free way you could file taxes with Turbotax, FreeTaxUSA, and H&RBlock if you had a simple return. Direct File was a government built alternative to that.
Because those other companies actively violated agreements they made with the government in the 2000 to offer those services for free. They regularly tricked people into paying and lost a class action lawsuit over it.
It's also weird that we have to file taxes at all. Other developed countries have their revenue agencies automatically calculate the taxes for you and send a return. The only reason we don't is because of Intuit and H&R Block lobbying like crazy to prevent this. It's rent seeking at it's worse
Direct File was only built in the first place because Turbo Tax and H&R Block dropped out of agreements with the IRS to keep free tax filing options free and unencumbered of upsells and dark patterns.
The number of people their "free" products actually serve dropped drastically a couple years ago. They will upsell or dark pattern you to paying for it as best and as deeply as they can.
"Anymore?" At what point has the GOP worked for "the people" at all?
I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans. Instead, they've been the party of fearmongering -- about women, about drugs, about immigrants, about African Americans, about gay people, and the devil, about trans people, etc.
The Dems have been the party that advanced actual helpful policies, but holy crap do they ever have a messaging problem IN ADDITION to an effectiveness issue. But at least their marching orders are actually helpful.
Nixon created the EPA, he expanded the Clean Air Act, he signed the Endangered Species Act. He did a lot of good for the environment in the early 70's.
> I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans.
You're overstating the case a bit. Nixon and Ford were not bad for most people. Nixon's motives might have been extremely self-serving on domestic issues - but he was re-elected in '72, amid the Vietnam War and many other troubles, with 60.7% of the popular vote. Take a peek at his domestic policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy He didn't need Watergate, nor any other dirtywork to easily win the election - he just couldn't keep himself from scratching his Paranoid Creepy Idiot itch.
Yes, after Ford, the GOP was taken over by a team-up of "Conquer, Loot, and Pillage" fiscal conservatives, and "Dump Jesus and Jimmy, 'Cause Our Rightful Kingdom is of This World" religious conservatives.
Flip-side, I don't see the Dems nearly so favorably. In the Carter-ish years they phased out most of their historic concern for ordinary Americans. In favor of hanging out with rich & slimy, and performative concern for ever-smaller minorities.
The history of the last ~100 years of the study of democracy by basically pro-broad-franchise-democracy academics has been a journey from:
"Well, the masses must not be stupid, as restricted-franchise and anti-democratic folks have suggested, because this seems to kinda work. Let's study voter behavior to learn more about this."
to
"Uh. OK so we checked a hundred different ways, several times each to be sure, and they're in-fact incredibly poorly informed and have awful reasoning skills and their behavior, in aggregate, isn't driven by what we might hope it is at all. But, uh... I really want there to be a good outcome here, so, um, let's make some fuzzy guesses at how some kind of Wisdom of Crowds thingy and some sort of system-equilibria-seeking effects might save us? And let's keep double-checking those studies that kept proving voters are really dumb, because maybe... maybe we got something wrong?"
to
"Yeah all that was bullshit cope on our parts, it's all wrong. It's amazing this works at all. Voters are amazingly stupid, to a degree that's so hard to believe we spent decades and decades making sure—like it's proven about as surely as is the law of universal gravitation; cannot practically be educated out of that, maybe at all, and especially not if we first have to get them to vote to make that happen; and everything's basically held together by noise and circumstance and social norms, until it isn't. Go ahead and make that whisky a double. And line up another."
Intellectuals and academics coming to these conclusions and talking down to the populace is a big part of what has fueled anti-intellectualism and paved the way for demagogues to take over. If your response to today's ugly political landscape is that people are stupid, then you're not helping.
Sorry, I was contributing the painfully-well-backed scientific perspective. If we're doing public-politics kayfabe here, too, then yes that was a faux pas. I'm not trying to campaign though, I'm trying to inform.
If one mistakes the kayfabe for genuine, an awful lot of observed behavior and outcomes remain confusing... the science is there if anyone wants it (reading lists for relevant courses are widely available, journals are not that hard to come by, or just grab Democracy for Realists and follow up with reading criticism of it and checking its sources) and at least the basic fact that very few voters think or behave remotely like anyone hoping for a well-informed, rational, and empathetic electorate might hope, is depressingly solid.
This is understood by everybody operating at a level of importance in media and politics, so a bunch of what they do (and its efficacy) will also be confusing if one disregards it. Even when they talk about how they believe in the voters, and blah blah—that's part of the kayfabe, that's a marketing message, they 100% don't believe that because not only is it definitely not true, you also lose elections (or viewership, or whatever) more often if you act like (not say—act like) it's true. It's not a lie they can afford to hold on to past the lowest levels of their professions, as they'll be concretely punished for the gap between their belief and reality and replaced by others who get it.
the book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This helped me realize that asking questions like this isn't really about contradiction, it's about revealed preference. In this case, it's about a revealed preference for social stability and personal comfort/familiarity in a system that's already been pushed over the inflection point and is now self-sustaining.
It helps to stop assuming people want what they say they want and start assuming that they want the predictable effects of their actions, then try to figure out what benefits those actions have or desires those effects may fulfill. When the group does something that's against your principles or best interests, there's an implicit question: do you value being part of the group more than you value this thing that we're transgressing against? When you look at it in this lens all sorts of behaviors start to make sense.
Also the reason to get rid of free tax filing is to exploit the American people, not just to hurt them for its own sake. Tell them they have to do something, make it as convoluted as possible, then sell a service that does it for them. It absolutely does hurt them, but that's not the driving force behind the effort.
Some people are of the opinion that ANY way to lessen the burden of taxation, especially automatic taxation, will lead to silent and continual increases of taxes.
I wonder if people actually know how much of their income is taxed away?
federal tax, state tax, local tax, property tax, sales tax, gas tax...
I wonder how much we actually get to keep, and I wonder how many people are aware of it both now and historically?
The people who need to see it needs to see it in the entertainment hour of Fox News. I don't think Fox News would be disseminating this information at that hour
It drives me absolutely mad when I see (largely liberal people) complain about how both parties are the same and just as bad.
And its like... how do you really believe that? Like yeah both parties have the same corruption but welcome to politics.
So at this point I am convinced it is willful ignorance on both sides (or ulterior motives when I see certain left leaning people STILL bring up Biden or Harris in relation to trump as if either of them matter anymore in the slightest given our current situation, at this point I don't care what Biden did or did not do). Seeing something that goes against their views of "this side is bad" and just trying to talk it away as some "abuse of government power" or something to justify why it should not have been a thing in the first place while ignoring its real benefits.
Oh they do, but the democrats are so hated but a significant percentage of the population for their recent actions, people had to make a choice, and they did.
I’ve heard it described as “I know I’m being robbed, but I was already being robbed. I know this is a poor environmental choice, but the dems acted like we’re all children, thinking we have no choice but to support them. When they try to force through new social norms like they’ve been doing, it doesn’t even feel like my country anymore.”
I have to agree, they definitely encouraged the attitude of “either you agree with this new thing or you’re a Nazi”. Well, they certainly found out.
Of course this backlash is so bad it’s going to trigger another.
Positioning this as a program from the previous admin (therefore bad).
Positioning this as a win for privatization (therefore good).
And people not willing to look at politics as something beyond a sport.
Quite frankly, I believe both parties are pretty foul, and people should be looking outside of them for policy positions that actually help people, but I suppose that makes me naive or whatever.
So you believe it was done just to hurt the American people?
No, that’s not plausible.
The article suggests Trump wanted to help tax software companies, but that overlooks the fact that Trumps previous increase to the standard deduction greatly simplified taxes for many filers. So that’s probably not it, either.
Trump is hell bent on raising taxes via tariffs, so it doesn’t seem likely that personal income taxes are a big part of whatever he’s planning.
Personally, I wish the government would start sending a bill, not putting the onus on the filer to make the calculation. That seems most sensible to me.
> How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore?
anymore?
Are you implying that the GOP would have been for a free Direct File in years prior?
They wouldn't have.
This is not a new stance. I'm not sure why anyone in the Republican party would be shocked by this news, or why it would change their opinions.
This is similar to the Republican party doing something anti-abortion, and then Liberals being shocked, and saying, "You guys are really still going to vote for these people?"
If you had even a minimal US history education or you wouldn't make such claims. Nixon was to the left of Obama on many issues. That you don't know this is symptomatic of the problem today. The right has moved so far to the right that what was once considered right is now lefter than anyone on the left is willing to be. This wasn't an accident. It was planned, and began around the time of Reagan. Almost half a century later, the country is radically changed and kids today think it's always been this way. Well, it hasn't.
I think Universal Healthcare does this too. I just turned 40 and I would be WAY more interested in jumping jobs if it existed. Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
> Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
This has been so apparent to me over the last 20 years. I've seen so many people who wanted to switch jobs - perhaps a move to other parts of the country for a new job - but are very tied to employer-provided insurance. People with family members with varying health issues often feel especially 'stuck' to particular jobs because of the 'good' insurance, perhaps tied to specific regional hospitals with specific networks of doctors and specialists. I've heard this from multiple colleagues over the years and it's so disheartening. We've got so much unlocked human potential, and we get tied to specific areas because of arbitrary self-imposed constraints. Self-imposed I mean on ourselves as a whole, not individually-imposed.
War bonds, rationing and other measures long since abandoned were introduced then too. How weird would it be if everyone were still limited to 8oz of sugar per month in 2025 due to the exigencies of WW2? It's no less weird when it comes to healthcare being linked to remuneration. Heck, there are better free market approaches not adopted by the US, since its usually horny for that sort of thing, right up until it's pro-labor I guess.
Healthcare wouldn't be nearly as much of the issue it is if it weren't for healthcare administration and the cap on MDs. The private vs public debate becomes way less interesting when the cost drops 90%. Getting rid of that problem should really be everyone's focus.
They aren't even doing hardware well in some cases, their bread and butter.
Bluetooth has been broken on both editions of their Pro Max Phone (15 & 16). It cuts out and has all kinds of weird issues, but no fix has come for years now. This was why I always paid a premium for their phones, they did hardware and software well. Not anymore, their so focus has been on their processors.
Are you using any Bluetooth headsets designed for their special sync protocol? I noticed no issues with any certified headsets but any of my nice Bluetooth headsets from a few years ago that don’t leverage the newer protocol instead only standard Bluetooth have issues syncing and such.
This tends to be an Apple issue. They introduce proprietary thing and eventually unless your hardware supports said thing it will have a degraded experience in some way
Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18 that makes both 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro Max randomly disconnect Bluetooth and all sorts of weird issues. They waited over a year to finally address it in 18.3, then proceeded to break Bluetooth now where it just all together disconnects over and over.
There's just so much low hanging fruit and I don't get it. Worse, it seems to be not just limited to Apple. There's just so many infurating things that I do not understand how they exist. How are you an Apple dev and not pissed off by this stuff? As just a simple example, why is my iPhone, iPad, and Macbook constantly telling me that my airpods have connected? I'm actively listening to music on my phone and have been doing so for the last 30 minutes! Fucking hire me, because I will do the meme. Problem is, I'm not sure when I'd quit because there's so many. Will there ever be the sigh of relief?
I know you guys are lurking. There's similar low hanging bullshit annoyances on so much software, so someone that is working on one of these things, please let me know. Google Maps? Search? Calendars? Email? Browsers? iPhones? Androids? AirPods? Pixel Buds? Name your team, and I'm sure I got a complaint for you. If not, I'm sure someone can. You all are killing my productivity.
I believe a major source of Apple’s software decline to be the self-imposed yearly deadlines which started after Steve Jobs. Prior to that, new macOS releases came out whenever they were ready. Maybe they were buggy, but by the end of each cycle they were fairly solid.
Compare to now, where they announce major features (Apple Intelligence), keep them in beta for over half a year, then have even less time than that before the next WWDC where they are expected to announce new stuff.
It’s bananas and unsustainable. There’s no time to do anything properly. No wonder everything is falling apart.
I think you're right. It seems all Apple is trying to innovate by is making things thinner. No real risk taking or seeking to make game changes. No iPod, no iPhone, nothing. I mean the god damn iPad doesn't even have a good native note taking App. I can just imagine Jobs going "founders mode" on someone because you can't zoom in.
But I really have to be clear, this isn't just an Apple issue. Windows is getting worse too. Google too.
I believe a big part of this is that all these systems are becoming more closed off. They make it harder for people to play around with and "hack". Taking power away from the user. I think the truth is that things are so complicated, that if you don't let the end user make fixes, debug, and write new things, then your product can only decline. Besides, you cannot know what people are going to use the thing for. The goal is to build an environment, not a product.
AFAIK the engineers are aware of all this, they just aren’t allowed to work on things that haven’t been prioritized and blessed. Since there is no bug database that can be read outside Apple, we can‘t +1 the most annoying ones. Instead, they rely on manual (semi-automated?) deduplication of the bug reports. Bugs also need to somewhat fit into the „theme of the year“ to get prioritized.
Then I hereby submit my vote in favor of revolt. I mean hey, they think they can replace us with AI coders and want to get rid of us anyways. But if we are just yes men and don't take pride in our work, then are we that different?
This appears to represent a failure within the company. It means the employees are more loyal to managers than they are to the product. Which means your management is failing at their jobs. I suspect for similar reasons, turtles all the way up. But I'm not sure it's surprising as C Suite execs value quarterly earnings over product. But the latter is supposed to drive the former
This is true, and all downstream from ex-MS narcs and assholes taking over. They don't know or care what makes a good product, and are only skilled at looking good to other midwits.
Don’t work for Apple but some bugs just take a lot of work to identify.
I work on a well trafficked consumer product and even though I have a full latitude to fix bugs at my job, I will wait weeks for the right report to come in to make it easily reproducible. I will pull the ticket out of backlog and it will take only an hour to fix it rather than frustrating me and wasting an entire day tracing a bug only to fail at reproducing it anyway. It’s constant triage.
What I'm calling "low hanging fruit" I mean "impossible to miss if you use the product." Of course, tracing a bug is much trickier and often hard to actually predict the difficulty of solving. But it's also worth noting that the harder it is to trace a very noticeable bug often correlates with larger issues in the programming, i.e. tech debt.
Tbf a lot of things "just work" on some devices, for some people's workflows -- even if it's happening every day for you, it might not be happening on the machines the engineers are living on. This can be because of different workflows, or habits, or particular combinations of versions/configurations (e.g. iPhone sku <A> with OS version <B>, laptop with SKU <C>, carplay with software version <D>, ...).
The big benefit of Apple is that they control the full stack. So you're suggesting I what, reformat my machine? Are we really at a place where the suggestions are akin to what we'd suggest noobs do on linux 10 years ago?
Give me power to debug. Give me power to write my own solutions.
And we're talking about a notification... We're also talking about a pair of headphones that can't be connected to multiple devices at the same time for some reason. I can't see this as anything but a self-imposed problem. You could connect up to 7 devices at the same time and that would be a great way to provide the seamless experience. It is the same ecosystem, the phone and laptop can easily communicate and be aware that I have spotify open on both and that I'm writing on my laptop. But no, the problem gets harder because of the issues. I play music from my phone because if I walk away from my computer, I can keep playing music through my headphones. Where's the magic? And the only reason I have spotify open on my laptop is so that if I press the god damn play button I don't end up opening Apple Music (a product I have never intentionally used nor even passed the first time use screen), jumping from my workspace.
Users shouldn't need these defensive patterns when you have the capacity for such integration.
I'm not suggesting that, I'm just explaining why these bugs happen despite all the testing that goes into it, on top of everyone at Apple living on Apple devices by default. I don't really have a solution, I work in the browser, not the part of the OS that handles HID &c. What I do wouldn't work for you: I do just reformat my device quite often, but that's because I work with new hardware / custom OS builds & thus often get in a borked state that would never show up on a customer's device -- and it's only possible because I have access to internal development tools and all that.
Is the particular problem what you were saying about headphones not connecting to multiple devices at once? If so, I admit that's a different kind of issue -- rather than the lack of functionality slipping through testing, it was probably just never included as part of the PoR in the first place. I.e. at some point the designers, or the engineers, or whomever, decided that it wasn't worth building. Despite the level of integration that is indeed possible, you still have to make tradeoffs -- security, performance, timelines, etc.
It's funny that this thread comes up now. I just lost a ton of work in Logic Pro, years of recordings on one particular track, because of what seems to be an interface issue. I thought that it was crystal clear that I was deleting something in the window that was in the foreground with a highlight around it. It turns out that it's something in the background that got deleted because of reasons. There's no file rollback in iCloud.
These kind of things are really frustrating when it seems like they should be caught with human usability tests. It's easy to throw blame around, and I think Apple does a lot of good work, it just seems like for value of the company they could slow down the pace of iPhone and macOS releases and make them more substantive.
> Don’t work for Apple but some bugs just take a lot of work to identify.
On the other hand, I have reported to them security issues which would take literally one line to fix and literal typos and errors/omissions in the documentation which are all still present after years.
I personally probably won't be very helpful for whatever it is -- I work with the compiler team, so nothing visible -- but I'm happy to +1 your issue during the next feature review cycle or &c
Please tell someone I'm tired of my wallpaper reverting to the default animated one when I disconnect my external monitor with the lid closed. Further data point: I use the solid color background feature.
Firefox. I'm pretty disappointed that I can't have a real Firefox on my phone. This is my first iPhone and I forgot what it was like to be assaulted by ads lol
But you got me, I don't have any complaints about the compiler. I haven't been writing much C these days so you're safe ;) Tbh I think the thing I'm most frustrated about is that it becomes harder for me to fix things myself. Taking power away from the user is not a security feature.
I have a more important feature request. Fix the god damn iPhone keyboard settings. Auto capitalization should capitalize a stand alone i, but we can all recognize an iPhone user because of this. And I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use swipe but also not randomly have it modify the previous word I typed (autocorrect is off). Pressing back space then deletes two words. Not once has this feature been helpful, it's a hindrance that happens at least once an hour. And if I move my cursor back to a misspelled word, click the accepted correction, please don't split the word at my cursor, just correct the whole word...
I know I might be "holding it wrong" but man has this been unintuitive.
It's really incredible that I have such a better experience pairing my new airpods to an old machine running ubuntu than a recent macbook. When using my macbook, the airpods just randomly disconnect and start glitching with static noise and I have to pair them again. On linux, there is no random disconnect and the sound clarity feels way better.
I'm predominately a linux user. My main machine is and I have quite a few. I'm not quite sure why you're down voted, because it is mostly as usable these days as anything else. Arguably it is more easier. Though I find the rough points are more due to hostility from Microsoft. But hey, at least on Linux I can find a way to do whatever I want, and that's how computers should be.
I switched to Linux as my main environment because both Windows and MacOSX were getting ridiculously cluttery. So many notifications that were unblockable, demanded my immediate attention, and distracted me from what I was actually doing. Be it some weird blocking popups of shitty background services or constant repetitive notifications that should not be notifications when they were the expected behavior.
In the last years this aspect has gotten much worse in my opinion. I know Linux has its rough edges, but once configured for your own workflow, it will keep working the same way without any distractions. And the LTS variants of distributions are almost maintenance free these days, if that's your concern.
I see operating systems usage as an investment and commitment. And I'd rather commit to an open source distro where I can in the worst case fix my own problems with it rather than betting on a platform that eventually has to be enshittified with ads because no amount of money will be enough for its investors.
People complain mostly about Windows 11 right now, but guess what will happen once MacOS reaches market dominance? Microsoft is just a couple years ahead in the shareholder cycle, and they were at their peek arguably the best software providers before the enshittification process started.
Bluetooth in general is (and has been) broken forever.
Look at the comments on Google rewriting their Android Bluetooth stack for the fourth time.
> I know the guy that heads up the team that did this work -- he and I spent 2+ years fighting Broadcom's old, god-awful bluetooth code. Our whole team used to play what-if games about replacing the thing while massive code dumps came in from vendors, making the task ever larger.
> I had to write a service on the RPI and the only way to reliably connect was to restart bluetooth before every attempt.
Apple has finally gotten fed up enough to roll their own Bluetooth/WiFi hardware implementation, which is a huge undertaking.
It is said to start shipping this spring.
> Apple is switching over to a new Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip that it designed in-house starting in 2025, reports Bloomberg. The combined Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip will replace components from Broadcom
> "Apple has finally gotten fed up enough to roll their own Bluetooth/WiFi hardware implementation, which is a huge undertaking."
This has more to do with do with Apple wishing to pay less for WiFi/Bluetooth chips than wanting to fix bugs. They've gradually been replacing more and more silicon with their own designs for years, and tomorrow we'll likely see the next step: the debut of Apple's 5G radio chip.
Personally I have no issues at all with Bluetooth on my iPhone 13. It seems rock solid to me and never disconnects unexpectedly. (I do have some long-standing, annoying but relatively minor, issues with Bluetooth audio on macOS though).
The 2025 iPhone SE is said to be the first shipping device for both the new Bluetooth/WiFi chip and the 5G modem.
Cost is certainly a factor, but it doesn't take a lot of searching to find people designing and building devices saying that the existing third party hardware and firmware implementations for Bluetooth are problematic.
I don't think the Android/Pixel guys were daydreaming about ditching Broadcom for no reason.
I seem to remember discussions the Google Glass people posted here about their own issues with keeping a stable Bluetooth connection with the available third party Bluetooth chipsets.
I need a place to rant about my recent apple frustrations. :)
I recently got a new laptop - I can airdrop to it once or twice before the notification to accept the airdrop stops showing up until reboot. Just that flow is broken, other notifications continue to work.
I got an apple watch for my kid as an "upgrade" - software is a complete mess, connectivity issues abound, it's less reliable than the gizmo watch it replaced.
The iPad just got a calculator last year.
I am randomly not allowed to delete some photos from my phone. I have no idea what this is about.
I switched to an iPhone for the first time in 2022 with the 14 Pro. I got it on the release day and immediately there was a glaring visual bug when running a timer on their “Dynamic Island” (a huge flop). Ever since then I’ve encountered so many bugs that I can’t believe that this is the famed Apple. It’s the buggiest phone I’ve ever owned. Even now there is a bug on timers when the screen freezes and I can’t scroll through the timers, or start a new one. Constant bugs on their default apps that are SIMPLISTIC (or should be). How is there a bug on timers when it’s existed for 15 years? It also deleted all my of my locally saved notes when I bought a Mac and signed into iCloud. Completely unacceptable.
The mail app is so bad that even their anti-competitive design policies can’t salvage it (reading an email on one device will show the email as unread until the app is opened). It’s just embarrassing for the so-called “premium” company.
Even if Apple does everything right, there will be problems.
One major problem with Bluetooth is that the spec is so complex that it is unlikely that any device you try to interoperate with implements the relevant parts correctly.
To compound that, most implementations in use came from half arsed SDKs that silicon vendors rushed out the door 5 or 10 years ago, and the devices have no update capability so they are never getting fixed.
I have that problem with SE and sometimes use apple wired headphones with my SE and lately there’s a cycle of use phone with headphones, put down phone, do something else, come back and unlock phone and somehow it does not think there are headphones connected, I can’t push them in any more either when this happens.
Those of us old enough to remeber Mac OS classic, know Apple hasn't always been top quality, regardless of the quality expectations of their price points.
Bluetooth has sucked since it was introduced. I've never had a Bluetooth anything that worked well and reliably.
We need a total rethink on close-range wireless communication for accessory devices. Preferably something patented with an expensive license so fly-by-night chinese hardware shops can't dump their garbage on the market using that protocol.
That kind of generalizing isn't helpful and isn't true, either. I am sorry you didn't have a "Bluetooth anything" that worked reliably. I did. In fact, everything that I own that uses Bluetooth works very well.
There are two important things about Bluetooth.
1. There are actually two kinds of Bluetooth. The "traditional" mostly connection-oriented Bluetooth and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). They share very little with each other, except for the marketing name. BLE works way better in practice. Many people still remember their old headsets that used Bluetooth and that took ages to connect to their phones and associate those with the "Bluetooth experience".
2. Bluetooth is complex. Many manufacturers get it wrong. But the problem is not with Bluetooth. You could invent a different set of protocols, and if they were to do everything that Bluetooth does, they would get very complex as well, and we would have the same problem, except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol.
> Many manufacturers get it wrong. But the problem is not with Bluetooth.
To the end user, this is kind of a distinction without a difference. The end user doesn't care whether it's Bluetooth, The Standard that's bad or Bluetooth, the Implementation. He just knows that when he has to use Bluetooth, he's probably going to have problems.
I've worked with BLE implementation developers and I've heard the stack described as a "Layer cake of sorrow." There are major problems with it, and by "It" I mean the entire bag containing the specification, all the various implementations, and the hardware ecosystem. All of these things combined define Bluetooth in people's minds.
But saying that Bluetooth is fine, it's just that every implementation is broken is a bit ridiculous. Sure, there's some value in distinguishing between irreconcilable issues with the standard and implementation bugs, but if those bugs are ubiquitous, the protocol as a whole is broken.
But if the spec as a whole is bad, all layers of the spec are bad, the implementations are all bad, and the user experience is bad, then in what way can Bluetooth be described as anything but bad?
> if the spec as a whole is bad, all layers of the spec are bad,
This discussion is intriguing. I wonder how many people commenting on "the spec" have actually read any part of "the spec" in question (I have).
And since we're posting anecdata: I can't think of a single problem I've had with a Bluetooth device in recent years, and I use a lot of Bluetooth devices. So this kind of generalizing doesn't help.
As a counterpoint, every embedded device that uses Wi-Fi promises a world of pain. The bizarre pairing procedures, connecting to temporary access points, entering passwords — it's all a combination of pain, timeouts, problems, and resets. But that doesn't lead me to state that "wifi is bad, the spec as a whole is bad, all layers of the spec are bad, the implementations are all bad".
Sometimes it is the hardware, sometime it is the software.
Two xiaomi phone models with different BT issues: One couldn't connect to two chipolos, the other loses wifi stability when connected to A2DP (ping raises, connection stutters and as the BT devices get closer, connection is lost randomly) Samsung phone: no issues [detected so far]
Then I have some Sennheiser headphones that I can get stuck and need to be physically turned on / off when it loses connection due to distance and there are other phones nearby (I roam around the house without the phone. I know that's partially on me)
I remember the time there was for windows a "BlueSoleil" BT stack besides the "Broadcomm" stack. Blue soleil was more stable, supported more profiles (pan, a2dp, etc) on more devices.
And, all those BT security issues over time? It makes me feel BT protocol cockroaches always come back.
Apple has no excuse since they control both hardware and software. They are dropping the ball.
> Apple has no excuse since they control both hardware and software.
They don't control the Bluetooth hardware though - that's still Broadcom AFAIK (at least in this 2021 Macbook M1 Pro and my 2023 M3 Max.) They might be writing the driver (I don't know if they are or if they're just interfacing with a Broadcom shim) but that doesn't necessarily help if the hardware is shonky balls.
The moral is: If everyone hates Bluetooth, the problem aren't the haters.
Personally, my experience with Bluetooth has been mixed. It certainly works, but audio quality is bad for headphones, latency is bad for mice and keyboards, sometimes the connection requires an intervention from the Norse pantheon, and so on.
Mac and bluetooth… surely a mixed experience. Most issues seem to boil down to my devices connecting to my Macbook while it is “ASLEEP” (aka lid closed). Somehow the Macbook is very eager to take over/overpower any other device (phone, other computer) to claim my BT headphones. This can be fixed in the terminal or with the Bluesnooze app [0]
That's going a little too far. If you're using bluetooth headphones, and you enable a microphone anywhere, you'll stop receiving sound from everything else on your computer.
All Bluetooth technology is licensed, no? Then it's still the fault of Bluetooth if not only is their protocol so difficult for many or most manufacturers to get right, and their qualification process doesn't enforce correctness.
But yeah I mean Bluetooth sucks, everyone has had the experience of trying to connect to a device repeatedly that keeps trying to autoconnect to some other random device that was used before. My usual interaction with Bluetooth is to always enter pairing mode and just be done with it, but hardly feels futuristic to manually hold down a button press every time you want to use a device.
> except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol
Isn't the usual way this problem is solved that the big players (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) come together and create a consortium for a new technology? So you get widespread support in all new devices and within 5-10 years most people are using it over the old one. If a better protocol is possible I don't think this would be the bottleneck.
Aren't like all of the Bluetooths alternative wireless protocols to themselves?
It's not like you can use a Bluetooth classic device to connect to Bluetooth low energy.
Then there's also like Zigbee and etc; I don't think the world is hurting for wireless protocols. Everybody has their own new standard that'll be able to replace the rest lol.
> Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18 that makes both 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro Max randomly disconnect Bluetooth and all sorts of weird issues.
My iPhone 16 Pro Max Bluetooth has been rock solid with everything I've used it with. Your comment is a good reminder that (1) it's impossible for vendors to test with all possible devices, and (2) at Apple scale there will never not be some customers who experience problems. I recommend reporting it if you haven't — I had glitchy audio with an earlier phone and an older Honda Odyssey's Bluetooth connection, and a few months after my report a subsequent OS update fixed it. (Correlation, not causation, I understand.)
Also note their hardware isn’t 100% good. They tested an old iPhone 16 I had and the NFC sensor out of all thing was broken (I had massive issues with wallet not adding cards). It’s worth going into an Apple Store to have them diagnose it.
