2025. He’s right, Tim Cook is a coward and no better than the rest of the oligarchs who kissed the ring and played the game.
But Anil also falls into this trap of believing the myth of Jobs over who he actually was. Steve Jobs was a Silicon Valley capitalist who took parts the hippie counterculture ethos and baked it into an image that sold well to consumers. He was not some revolutionary, he just successfully used the language of revolution to sell a better product than his competitors.
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism for everything which is wrong with the world but it's the people and governments who don't care about the pollution and think that's it's fine to throw garbage on the ground or in the river instead of disposing it properly. The Soviet Union did a fair amount of damage to the environment, despite not being a capitalist country.
As long as we're using natural gas, there be a surplus of cheap ethane and we'll indirectly subsidize plastic, since making plastic out of the ethane puts that waste product to use (by creating plastic waste instead).
it wasn't that long ago that most daily use goods were sold in reusable glass bottles, jars, paper bags. Clothes, shoes, appliances, furniture was durable, lasting multiple years, sometimes even passed on between generations. Then, late stage capitalism decided to optimize the hell out of everything, told us that glass is too heavy for economic distribution of goods, paper not hygienic enough and that we need internet enabled toasters. We now end up drowning in plastics, forced to replace cars, heavy appliances every 2 years but most of all are seeking weird solutions and feel good stories to solve this, well in line with the principle of the orphan crushing machine.
I am very happy that the many glass shards and the inevitable cuts have been replaced by essentially zero plastic trash in streets/forests/seas in my country and all other civilized countries.
The problem is not Europe (outside of gypsy camps and illegal immigrant camps). It is mostly some parts of Asia (and it would likely also be some parts of Africa if they could afford as much plastic).
Google had a town hall a few years ago. The Pixel Watch (4?) had just launched and supposedly fixed a bunch of bugs like apparently you could not reliably record a run with the previous generation without that app crashing and losing the workout. Someone in the audience asked about this, and the PM who responded was wearing an Apple Watch. Apparently everyone on that team at the meeting was wearing Apple Watches or a dumb watch
>China has not known freedom for some time, but citizens of the United States have a long experience of it.
One of those American beliefs presented without evidence because it’s just so obviously true, but what the fuck does this even mean? Exactly how are Americans more free?
It's not just an American belief. USA has no MSS equivalent for starters. They don't have a Great Firewall. One can make their own independent party in the US (winning is a different story, tho). And so on.
And that's just in recent times, the PRC had it worse then.
But you are cheery picking a few things while ignoring others.
In the US, you are free to buy a gun and walk around with it. In the EU you can't But if you ask a person from the EU, they will think that this "freedom to bear arms" does more harm than good in their eyes.
So who has more freedom here? The person who walks around with the gun or the person who can walk the streets with the freedom of knowing that guns are not allowed here.
Freedom is a sliding scale not a binary thing. Should you be free to marry your first cousin or children? Some freedom absolutist will tel you that governments shouldn't be able to tell you who you can marry but we can all agree that some freedoms need to be curtailed for the good of society.
Now you can argue that China is less free when it comes to political matters and that would be fine except the problem in this case is that the author simply expressed a very broad opinion which makes it impossible to falsify.
The person who is prohibited from having guns in any space has less freedom. The freedom of knowing guns aren't allowed isn't a freedom of its own, but a constraint on actions. Constraints provide security to do certain actions, improving their viability (hence why EU people may think it does more harm than good), but they don't increase the pool of legal actions, only reduce it.
Also, EU people would be wrong to assume that their countries are gun free. Focusing only on countries with a general ban, the are still a notable category of people who are allowed to bear arms: some government officials. So the security of "no guns" is already compromised. There also some downstream structural effects on building societies on such constraint. But I'd say this is besides the point.
I'm also not commenting on whether some freedom should be curtailed or not, as that's also besides the point.
In the end, given the laws of USA, its citizens do have more freedom than PRC's, even outside of politics. I've heard, for instance, that PRC's citizens have the "freedom to easy housing", but they don't. They, at best, have an promise of easy housing supply from the CCP. Given that housing supply depends on material conditions, it's not a formal guarantee. On the other hand, expressing the wrong opinion online in mainland China may net you arrest.
Western governments are so concerned when this happens to them (at arguably a tiny scale) compared to the “interventions” they’ve supported around the world for almost one hundred years.
Rules for thee and not for me. Sure, Canada isn’t the CIA, but they’ve been right there with the US from Iran to Ukraine.
But Anil also falls into this trap of believing the myth of Jobs over who he actually was. Steve Jobs was a Silicon Valley capitalist who took parts the hippie counterculture ethos and baked it into an image that sold well to consumers. He was not some revolutionary, he just successfully used the language of revolution to sell a better product than his competitors.
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