I watched all the stuff the GPP mentioned when I was young, and I actually watch a lot of PBS now; but not nearly as much and less and less all the time. Why because i am replacing it with youtube'ers who genuinely are better.

As great as Roy Underhill's or Norm Abrams' shows ever were, I learned more applicable wood working from Acorn to Arabella and Sampson Boat Co, or at least understood them finally. Same things with cooking, ATK is still amazing, and Julia and Pépin shaped me in the kitchen; but there is plenty out there now that is every bit as good and its not hard to find.

I loved PBS in the late 80s thru the late 90s, but the era is over.

blah blah

is an incredible value for the money, said everyone defending every government dollar every time..

Certainly in the era before ubiquitous highspeed internet access and pick your self-publishing video platform, those things were great.

They are obsolete now. There is a time when even where you have found something that worked, the need is gone and it is time to stop doing it.

Patreon should have just immediately pulled their app from Apple's store. They're a website. There's no obvious benefit to doing things in an app versus a website.

That said, nothing inherently prevents Apple from maliciously making it harder for Patreon's website to work on iOS. Apple controls the only web browser engine that is allowed to run on the platform.

Actually, it is. Cars don't generally allow third-party apps at all. They're an embedded system. Therefore, those are entirely moot.

Gaming systems are largely limited to games, and to a limited extent, media consumption (e.g. Netflix), which makes them a much more specialized system than an iPhone.

And gaming systems don't need to be a single tool that serves all of a user's needs in the way that a cell phone does. Cell phones are something you carry with you all day, and generally require a monthly cell service contract. So there are significant ongoing costs and hassles associated with having more than one. But most people play games primarily at home, which means it is relatively painless (apart from the initial purchase cost) to have multiple consoles; if a game isn't available on one, they can play it on another. Thus, game console app sales compete across platforms in a way that cellular phone app sales largely do not.

So while not entirely moot, gaming platforms are still a very different animal from a consumer perspective.

Apple is the only high-volume general-purpose computing platform I can think of that does not freely allow side-loading and third-party app stores. So in many critical ways, Apple stands alone on this one. And that's doubly true if you limit it to mobile platforms.

That said, I do agree that game platforms should not be allowed to be locked down, either. It is just far less important from an antitrust perspective because of fundamental differences in how the devices are used.

U.S. courts could not give two s**ts about worldwide market share. Apple has more than 58% of U.S. market share for cellular phones.

Apple's servers aren't involved at all for in-app purchase payments through third party payment processors. And no sane person would consider such sandboxing to be reasonable for a server that just provides downloads of app binaries, because the server is not doing anything more than loading bytes from disk and sending them out over HTTPS. So that would get smacked down by the courts in a quarter of a second.

Competent lawyers do not play games like that, because they know that doing so is the surest way to incur treble damages for willful violation of court orders.

They, in fact, have 58% of the U.S. cellular phone market, which is more than enough control over the market to regulate them under antitrust law.

This. When Steve first introduced the App Store, he said they weren't trying to make a profit off of it. That was quickly proven to be a lie, because the economies of scale brought the costs way down, but the fees never decreased.

And the fact of the matter is that the decision to make apps go through the app review process is a decision made by Apple primarily for their benefit, not for the user's benefit. No other general-purpose platform (as opposed to game-only platforms like primitive cell phones and game consoles and iPod) ever did anything like that prior to Apple doing it, and it was never a security disaster.

Because the user has no choice about whether to buy apps from Apple or from a third-party, it isn't reasonable for Apple to charge fees on the review process. Doing so is effectively rent seeking, interposing themselves in commerce while adding zero value to that commerce compared with other alternatives. Doing so distorts the free market for in-app payment processors by basically making that market not exist. And so on.

And Apple already charges a fee for the review process. Every developer has to pay a $99 a year to distribute apps through the store. That's paying for app reviews and a couple of DTS incidents. If that isn't adequate to cover the costs, then Apple needs to make that reflect the actual cost of app review.

And IMO, Apple should be forced to open up the platform to third-party app stores globally, allowing companies to choose whether to pay that fee or distribute their app through a third-party store instead. Building a platform should not give you carte blanche authority to say what apps run on that platform, because Apple does not own the hardware once a consumer buys it. It looks like a sale, so it is a sale. And at that point, the law recognizes customers' rights to do pretty much whatever they want to with the hardware, up to and including wiping it and running Android if they can figure out how.

There's no clear security justification for not requiring Apple to provide a switch on iOS similar to the one on macOS that lets you install apps signed by Apple and distributed outside the store, nor for providing a switch that lets you install and run unsigned apps with the same security mechanism that macOS provided prior to code signing. It worked well enough to keep users safe for decades, and the code is already there. All they have to do is turn it on, provide a little bit of UI integration, and maybe unify the keychain implementation if they haven't already done so by now.

Users who want the current model would just not go into Settings and change the setting. Apple can have three or four dire warnings about how doing this reduces the security of the phone before allowing users to do so, ensuring that only users who understand what they are doing throw the switch.

And there's no clear justification at all for Apple demanding that third-party app stores pay money for sales of apps that Apple doesn't actually review. That is *pure* rent seeking. Apple isn't providing *any* value in those transactions, but is still charging money ("core technology fee"). No way should that be allowed. Users already pay for the operating system as part of the cost of buying the device. Those fees are pure double dipping, and that's really not okay to charge two parties for the same purchase.

The more Apple clings to control over the platform, the more fines they are going to get, both in the U.S. and the European Union. One company exercising near-monopolistic control over a large chunk of the cellular phone market is inherently problematic, and using that monopoly to control an unrelated market (apps) by deliberately preventing consumers from being able to install alternative app stores that avoid those fees is IMO a flagrant violation of antitrust law. I'm glad the courts have affirmed that.

From a technical standpoint your are correct. From a practical standpoint there is something we all are not seeing.

The industry has customers that place a lot of value on relative anonymity. There isn't anything inherently illegal, immoral, or wrong with 'dark money' either it really isn't anyone's business what anyone else invests their personal wealth in. (beyond basic tax law enforcement etc, which yes privacy does complicate)

The industry also must certainly be aware they make quite a lot of money off players who are in fact sanctioned, using their platforms in complex laundering schemes and the like.

I don't see anyone who is running and IB, brokerage, or exchange wanting to just make all that go away. Maybe I am to cynical but if the people in those positions were really the types to say "hey we are willing to make less money, for the greater good" well there are at lot of things like know your customer standards and the like they'd have beefed up voluntarily already.

So I am left with there is a plan here we have not seen yet, like charging premiums for coin blending services or other various proxy ownership games like invite only trading of in house assets off chain.

One thing I am certain of nobody is trying to give the SEC radical transparency out of the goodness of the big hearts

I'm talking specifically about the meat substitutes that try to taste like meat. There are ways to have a healthy vegan diet, but a lot of the plant-based burgers and fake meat tend to be loaded up with large amounts of sodium salt. So switching to those because you think they are healthier may actually be way worse than not doing so.

The dumbest part of the entire thing is - a college campus is one place where it should be like super easy to find some folks to wager with. Maybe like I dunno talk to some of the guys in your hall, activity lounge, wherever.

Setup some squares - everyone can photo the board with their phones so there isn't any funny business. You could even like socialize and watch some of the sporting events, maybe find girls like sports to watch as well get a couple bags of chips and some sodas and actually have a good time?

Oh the best part some of these people you call 'friends' win and maybe you win next time. There is no house taking a cut...

i don't think a little friendly gambling with people know is to likely to get anyone into addiction or encourage people to take risks they can't really afford but commercial gambling be it on sports, prediction markets, or stocks is down right predatory. The pattern-day-trading rule exists for good reason - its to prevent Etrade from turning into Draft Kings, and it has worked. We probably need something like it for Sports/Prediction market betting. If you can't find 25k worth of assets to park in an account, then you should be limited to handful of bets/plays a week. That way people don't get hooked, and hopefully you don't get people playing with money they can't afford to lose as often because, by virtue of the fact if you can keep it on account for x days you don't urgently need it.

This isn't actually true. For screens with low resolution, because of the way scaling works, serifs can degrade legibility, but because of the way human brains and eyes do superresolution with micro-eye movements to compensate for poor visual acuity, serifs should not degrade readability even if your vision is blurry.

More to the point, I have to scale up sans-serif fonts a lot more than serif fonts to work well with my eyesight. So I'm saying this from personal experience.

You actually have it entirely backwards. Serifs require a higher resolution to render, or else thin lines can disappear entirely. That's why some people incorrectly think that sans-serif fonts are more readable on screen; their screens simply aren't good enough to render serifs properly. (Pedantically, this means that sans-serif fonts are more readable on crappy screens.)

But if you have a screen with a high enough resolution to render them properly, fonts with serifs significantly increase reading comprehension and speed of reading for large blocks of normal-sized text. (citation, original book) And while it is possible to reduce the difficulty of reading sans-serif fonts through careful design, IMO, there's no good reason to believe that a version of Calibri with serifs would not still be more readable.

To be fair, some serif fonts sometimes need 600 DPI to prevent lines from disappearing entirely because of poor font scaling software.

But the flip side is that assuming the serifs don't disappear because of scaling deficiencies, they are way more readable at small font sizes, particularly for people whose vision is not perfect. It is dramatically more legible to me than Calibri.

Collect a rent from OpenAI everytime some little girl asks mommy to print some Disney Princes invitations to her imaginary tea party.