Itâ(TM)s my computer! Not appleâ(TM)s.

How can this forum one day lament âoeright to repairâ laws being lax and then the next day be âoewell, if apple doesnâ(TM)t want you to run an app, the obviously thatâ(TM)s just their imperative.â

Itâ(TM)s my computer. Itâ(TM)s time to break up the App Store. Itâ(TM)s time to mandate that side loading of apps be allowed.

Itâ(TM)s my expensive pocket computer. I should be able to run whatever legal software I want to run on it to do whatever legal action I want to do.

If that activity is distasteful to appleâ(TM)s sensibilities ⦠itâ(TM)s my computer.

RMS was right.

This was actually RMSâ(TM) argument for GNU software: yes, you should have access to all your software so you can attempt to repair it if you are so inclined.

It seems like a good idea.

But I would argue it on a the grounds of safety.

For Nuclear to be at all safe we need an external auditor that is focused only on safe operations. Today we put that role into the government. You don't want the role of external auditor degraded any more than it already is.

If you put the role of operations and audit into the same entity, and the role of auditor will be degraded to "safe face" on the role of operations.

I understand that you are advocating that Meta should focus first on software and later do the hardware.

Meta / Facebook has been very ... abused? ... by Apple and Google. They keep threatening to pull their app unless Facebook does things the way those companies want it done. Facebook sees developing the hardware platform their software runs on, and being the leader in that space, as necessary to free themselves from their competitors forcing business models on them that hurt Meta / Facebook.

And anybody who as ever advocated that Apple should allow side loading of apps or alternative "stores" ... sees the same problem. Apple/Google have WAY too much control over what you are allowed to do with the very expensive mobile computer you bought and pay for the service plan on.

An individual best option may be to advocate for legaglsiatve reform.

Meta can at least attempt to build the next hardware platform on their own.

I think the "difference" looks something like this:

There are two broad kinds of chemical contaminants.

One kind are our new chemical molecules we are making. The interact with plants, animals and ourselves in ways that we simply don't know and don't understand and are just starting to understand. They are "un-natrual" in the true sense. And while they are very useful, we in the past perhaps didn't spend enough time understand their impact. And now we need to find ways to ween ourselves from them and switch to alternatives that have fewer consequences.

Then there are the other kind that come from biological processes. Most of these contaminants there are lots of bugs, bacteria, critters, etc that actually *LIKE* them. Most of our concern around these is simply concentration, we have too many of them in one spot. These can be tackled by studying the the normal biological systems that take these outputs and inputs and seeing if we can replicate them local to our point "we produced too much of this in one spot" issue. Or, even, simply packing up the too much in one spot and moving it to another spot where it can, again, be useful.

The frustration is: the modern green movement is handling both of these the same. And aggressively pushing for the "elimination" of both categories, when there are drastically different approaches that can be taken to the 2nd.

I'll give you one better.

ADM once setup a large industrial greenhouse fed on the exhaust of an ethanol plant (CO2). Not only did the plants flush under the much higher CO2, they found a "sweet spot" high level where people could be in the building, but where most bugs (and their lack of lungs) would suffocate. No pesticides required.

Yes, they took it down after a few years.

Can't help but wonder if it worked too well and went across too many established narratives.

Thatâ(TM)s a leap from âoeurban areas carry ruralâ to blaming the rural areas for the war on terror.

Night time generation tends to not be green generation (it's for sure not solar).

It's the mix of "we're going electric with our cars" combined with "we're removing the reliable base load night-time generation methods" that makes some of us sit and scratch our head.

Iâ(TM)m not defending apple.

However Iâ(TM)m also not going to be just a plain simple âoechange is bad, this is bad.â

You could still do 30 day SIMs. It just requires a web site to load them, not just a stop past a kiosk.

eSIMs have pros, and they have cons. If you want to make the world better, you take the time to understand the pros and the cons and then push for action on the specific cons.

The specific con of eSIMs is: there probably needs to be a standardized âoeprotocolâ / data format to deliver them via that we force all phone providers to recognize. Then any carrier could build a âoeweb kioskâ for getting either pre-paid or post-paid sims.

The only thing you loose is anonymity. But if you are buying an iPhone, youâ(TM)re probably not buying it to be a burner.

Working with IoT cellular devices and eSIMs. It's not quite the 1980's. There is no scary or magic about e-sims. They are just SIMs. It's a chip that does all the things a SIM does (runs Java, yes ... a very stripped down Java), but has a very large reprogrammable area that stores all the data that is normally stored on a SIM card, specifically the secrets used to prove you are you to the network. When you enroll a device with an eSIM there is an API that you download the contents that would normally be stored into the SIM card and then ask the eSIM to memorize it for you.

eSIMs can actually be rather nice, in that they have the space to store many SIM "profiles." So if you are in Europe and have 2-3 SIMs for different carriers, your phone can remember all of them and then you just select which one of them you want active right now.

However, with Apple's walled garden things get a little concerning. You have to be able to offer an API/web service that allows the device (iPhone) to download the content of the eSIM. And, best I can tell, apple hasn't published an open protocol that they will accept for doing that yet (would love to be proved wrong here). This means that if you want to be a carrier that works with an iPhone, there are even more hoops to jump through to be "allowed" to download eSIMs into an iPhone.

Without a standard and well published API on how to offer the contents of an eSIM to an iPhone this does a real smell test of locking out smaller carriers, etc that don't have the IT staffs on hand to do the integration efforts that apple will demand to allow the iPhone to download a SIM from the operator's SIM API.

Apple cleans that up ... and a lot of the concern goes away.

It also eliminates the whole idea of burner SIMs. Can't just go plunk down $50 of cash for a SIM card that works for 30 days. Now you need an account on a web site and enter a credit card number, etc etc to get your 30 day SIM.

In the IoT space, I'm excited about eSIMs. Our devices work on farm equipment. It's a harsh environment with wide temperature swings and lots of vibration. And SIM cards are frequently not constructed in a way that is exceptionally durable. Any component I can solder down to the board increases the durability of my device considerably.

But it's not all just benefits. If I want to "just try" another carrier, I have a lot more integration work I have to do to "just try."

Ok ⦠ok â¦. Iâ(TM)m right leaning but here the truth: this has nothing to do with unions. There have been WSJ articles about this.

During the pandemic, the government forced lots of places to close and told everybody to stay home.

Amazon got an exemption from this.

Lots of people stuck at home buy the things they would normally go to a store to buy from Amazon.

Amazon struggles under the load of massive new demand, tries to expand rapidly.

Big parts of the country have decided âoeCovid is a thing weâ(TM)re just going to live with,â and are returning to their old habits. Including their buying habits.

Amazon is now MASSIVELY overbuilt. And ⦠itâ(TM)s going to be a problem for them.

Citizen's united is such a misunderstood ruling.

The government blew the argument. They were winning until one justice asked something like "So, if I want to publish a book about a politician a month before election that would reveal bad information about that politician, would the government be allowed to block the publication of that book?"

And the answer from the government was: Why yes, of course.

And ... poof. It's gone. And for good reason (on that reason).

Then all the rest is just ... political maneuvering to point fingers.

My parents, who live on a farm, in very rural Iowa, with fiber to the home, will be shocked to hear they don't have broadband.

It's not quite that.

But, yes ... it's a demographic flip. The next generations are smaller. This means that the "replacement workforce" isn't as large as the workforce it's replacing.

There's a lot of demonizing the "infinite growth" model. But we do NOT know how to handle a shrinking population.

We're used to jobs always becoming more and more specialized, with people who become more and more focused on being very good a few things. What do we do when we just don't have the people to allow for the luxury of becoming that specialized? What specialties can we drop as a society? How do we even go about figuring that out?