> The apparent desire for paternalism unnerves me.

I find the EU imposing these conditions, under threat of force, on Apple that sells a product that people are free to buy or not buy, much more paternalistic than anything Apple does.

You have a lot more freedom in the EU to switch countries than you do to switch phone ecosystems.

There are 27 countries you can freely move between. If you work in one and move to another your pension gets rerouted when you retire.

There are only two phone ecosystems. If you buy something in the Apple ecosystem, you don't suddenly have it rerouted to Android if you move.

The EU isn't threatening force. It's a civil issue. Apple can just not sell in Europe. And even if Apple can't use force, it's a lot more authoritarian.

That is the role of governments. Europeans made the EU for this and similar purposes.

So you're not concerned with paternalism itself, you just don't like Apple, right?

I think he doesn't like the fact that a corporation is controlling people for its own profit first and their customers' welfare a distant second. Apple is not a charity or a government, it's a business. The EU is a government, its purpose is to regulate and legislate for the sake of the people it represents. It's more sane to trust the motivations of the EU, even if its actions are ill-considered at times, than a corporation whose primary, overriding objective is to make its owners wealthier. The former will generally pursue actions that benefit consumers, the latter will only coincidentally do this, if it stands to make a lot of money in the process.

Whats the difference in between a corporation that dominates the life and choices of one half of the population and a feudal lord that does the same.

The 'paternalistic Eu' is at least comprised of officials appointed through democratically elected parliamentarians.

What kind of democratic powre does the public have in the decisions that Apple takes?

What has the result of 'free market' mechanics been, other than increasingly dominate people's lives to maximize profit all the way to reducing their phone's performance just at the right time when a new version is going out to force them to upgrade?

EU isn't a government. "Europeans" do not elect members of the European parliament. Finally, I would argue that the reasons for forming what became the EU, back in late 40s and 50s last century, were completely different from what we have today.

Europeans do elect members of the European parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parl...

Indeed. My bad.

Exactly. As if consumers needed to be protected from their own choices. Nobody is forced to buy apple. There are plenty of other manufacturers. Let the fucking market sort this.

I absolutely agree with you, but here's a hypothesis worth considering: What if we're building a society that is so complicated that it just isn't feasible for individuals to make informed decisions about important matters any more?

Societies have long accepted that things like medical treatments have to be prescribed by an expert, and some societies have even decided that healthy people can be forced to have medical treatments even against their will (i.e. vaccines).

My hope is that we are just in a temporary phase, where society has learnt how to transmit information freely but not how to reliably transmit trust. If the reputations of software developers and medical practitioners could be established without corporate or government monopolies, then society might get past this local minimum and into a more stable state.

I won't argue with the hypothesis at large (even though I hope it's unfounded), but as it applies to this particular situation, you're ignoring a crucial factor: the gargantuan incentive for monopolists to convince you that their monopolies actually protect you. It's incredible how successful Apple has been in convincing their users that freedom is bad, and I'm absolutely positive it's not because Apple is genuinely concerned about society; they're concerned about their multi-billion-dollar revenue streams.

If we reach a point as a society that we decide we have too much freedom, we should absolutely never let it be regulated by corps with such a perverse incentive.

> What if we're building a society that is so complicated that it just isn't feasible for individuals to make informed decisions about important matters any more?

Then we should apply the regulator brakes immediately, as hard as possible. If the threat new technology poses to society is so great as that, then we should regulate those technologies, possibly to the point of strangulation.

Ancient Roman urban legend: An inventor came to the Emperor to show off a new material, unbreakable glass. He showed the Emperor a glass chalice and threw it to the floor. Instead of shattering it merely bent, and the inventor bent it back into shape with a hammer. The emperor was very impressed, then ordered for the inventor to be killed. Unshatterable glass was very nice, but it wasn't worth the social and economic disruption it might cause.

I am not that Roman emperor. What I support is the regulation of business practices, not technology itself. But if you (and Ted Kaczynski, for he has argued the same) are right and the threat to society comes from the technology, then we can regulate the technology as well.

It is obviously that we cannot do that because of the global competition.

Regulation of technology to reduce risk to society will just make competing part of society you have no influence on to dominate. And you lose on both fronts - technology domination, and ability to control it in the future.

Regulating Apple specifically, or the role of smartphones in society generally, imperils national security? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. The relevant business behavior and technology to squash is the technology that intersects with the lives of common people in an intimate way, not military R&D. I'm talking about regulating the way online banking and ecommerce work, not the etching of silicon or production of rocket motors. The cited threat is phones getting pwnd by scammers who drain your grandpas bank account. If that threat is indeed so severe that digital freedoms for everybody need to be curtailed, it would be better to ban online banking entirely than to put the entire population under the paternalistic control of a handful of corporations.

You'll have to dig deep into nth order effects to justify such regulation imperiling national defense, essentially tea leaf reading.

And on top of this increase in complexity, is a decrease in legal consequences for bad actors taking advantage of this complexity. That is what is going on currently due to how the Internet crosses international borders which makes policing much more difficult for society.

It is a difficult conundrum as freedom is definitely something I value, but I think freedom may not be the best solution in a world without legal consequences for those abusing that freedom to take advantage of others.

Freedom with no guidelines to prevent use of that freedom to abuse others is not real freedom

We're not building that society. We're living in that society.

I don't understand how people didn't realize this over the last couple of years.

We are not qualified to have opinions on a lot of things we do have opinions on.

Many years ago I had a roommate who was an actual Marxist (this was in Berkeley CA) and who had a kind of a job or volunteer position with a local radical politician trying to influence local politics. They would do things like go to city council meetings and march around the room singing songs. Dumb shit like that.

One day I'm reading in my room and the lights flicker and I hear a yalp from the living room. I go out to investigate and I can smell the magic smoke (not weed, electrical) and the roomie is standing there with a screwdriver and a spooked look on her face.

It transpires that she wanted to move a certain bookshelf to a certain spot and have it flush against the wall, but it was blocked by a little external electrical outlet. It was an old house, you see, (old for the West Coast that is) and when it was electrified they didn't both to run the wires through the walls. Instead they ran little conduits along the baseboards and mounted external socket blocks so we could plug in lamps, etc. One of these external electric sockets boxes was in the way of the bookshelf.

You can see where this is going?

She got a screwdriver and tried to remove the electric socket box without turning off the circuit. The flickering lights were when she shorted the circuit with the screwdriver and made the magic smoke come out.

Fortunately she wasn't hurt, just startled.

Now this person was in her fifties! How the hell to you get to be fifty years old and not know how electricity works!? And yet she felt confident that she knew how cities and countries should be run.

I think there are at least two points here:

1.) We have already made the world more complicated than the average person can understand. Computers are like pouring fuel on that fire, but it's been burning for a while now.

2.) People can be really stupid and ignorant and yet feel like they know what's going on and what to do about it.

I think the obvious though perhaps unpleasant conclusion is that we should look to radical simplification in all areas, and treat complexity as something that should be budgeted, treated as an expense and necessary evil.

> Now this person was in her fifties! How the hell to you get to be fifty years old and not know how electricity works!?

Shtty American education system? Which so gimps anything that is non-profitable and makes anything that is worth studying so expensive that people live without access to knowledge?

The US is the only country where it is needed to put 'dont microwave your cat' on Microwaves and other dumb sht.

So no.

The 'dumb sh't is not that actual Marxist is doing. Trying to change that situation in which education costs an arm and a leg and people have to struggle.

The dumb sht is people like you talking as if her being a Marxist was a bad thing all the way at the start of your 'arguments', giving an example from something which should be a damning condemnation of your system and the mentality that you espouse. Because those are what keep you still mired in knee-deep sh*t - reaching all the way to a point where you have an entire population segment that believes the earth is flat and plans on taking your country 200 years back.

But hey. Suit yourself. Its natural selection.

I seem to have touched a nerve there. Sorry about that.

I'm not going to defend the US education system, it's been BS ever since I was forced to attend as a child and it hasn't gotten better from what I hear.

This person wasn't dumb because she wanted to make things better. The actual strategies employed were dumb, just ego-aggrandizement, and ineffective.

In re: Marx and Marxists I don't actually know much about it, but I also don't think much of economics in general.

I pointed out her political affiliation not to pick on Marxists per se but to illustrate that this person had strident beliefs about social/economic/political organization despite not understanding that one must turn off the circuit breaker before re-wiring the house.

Have a good day friend.

> What if we're building a society that is so complicated that it just isn't feasible for individuals to make informed decisions about important matters any more?

That doesn't happen.

WordPress have an open development ecosystem through themes and plugins. It runs up to 50% of all web sites on the planet right now, including many gigantic ones. (various CNN, Reuters services included).

That did not lead to such an environment as you speak. Instead, there materialized many independent theme and plugin developer outfits, rising into prominence just for providing good software and having good reputation. And they have been half of the reason why WordPress now constitutes 50% of all web sites.

Open Source has been similar in general too - various high-reputation outfits dominate each field without curbing choice.

> What if we're building a society that is so complicated that it just isn't feasible for individuals to make informed decisions about important matters any more?

RIP Democracy.

> But in the specific case of iphones, the argument is made that giving rational level-headed adults the freedom to associate with the software they wish would imperil children and the elderly

By whom? You are the first person I heard this from.