activistPnk @ activistPnk @slrpnk.net

Posts

397

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765

Joined

2 yr. ago

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Corporations certainly would bend to consumer demand if consumers were wise enough to boycott and make demands. But the question is whether consumer wisdom would ever advance on a scale to make that happen. I think I have little hope of seeing it in my lifetime.

There are 35 million Mexican adults (38%) without a bank account. So living unbanked is at least an option, and more than ⅓ find it viable.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to hear that all banks in Mexico are digital and that not a single one offers offline service. And that not a single digital bank offers logins w/out 2FA, or 2FA by SMS (which includes feature phones), or 2FA by using a card reader. If all that is true, consider posting about it in !smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org.

This is extremely reductive and oblivious to the actual realities of banking in various countries.

I think you will be hard-pressed to find a country that does not have a single bank that can serve those w/out smartphones. If you find such a country, plz post about it in !smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org and send me the link. Then we may be able to make a case for ppl in that specific country not being boot-lickers, if at the same time being unbanked is illegal.

If you think it’s easy to be “unbanked” then I would suggest that you try it yourself first.

I have been simulating an unbanked life for years now. 5 creditors are threatening lawsuits for non-payment after refusing my cash. One took me to court and it was an easy win for me. I just appeared without a lawyer and pointed to the law.

It’s also worth noting that unbanked is more extreme that simply choosing a bank that does not require a smartphone.

It’s banking:

https://slrpnk.net/post/28294479

The army of corporate boot lickers in the mobile phone context is largely composed of people who think banking on a smartphone is wise, despite the attack surface and despite the bank being empowered to monitor their customers more closely. Banking apps are the most significant culprit for gluing people to Android.

We may never see the day when more than 5% of the population realises the importance of FOSS enough to shake free of their addiction to convenience.

Check out this EU bank: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/43348480

28.2 is too old. I forgot which version it called for.

It would be easier to understand if you had been around in the 90s. In the 90s we were accustomed to text UIs with little use of the mouse. The keyboard is faster and the mouse slows us down. Usenet was the universal forum platform of the time. We had a very rich set of apps which were very well developed because phones and GUI browsers were not competing for developer labor.

And because many people actually were offline, apps were designed for offline use. In Gnus you could fetch all headers for all the forums of interest. When offline, you could tag the topics that look interesting. The next sync would pull them down. Users automatically had their own local copy of everything.

A web browser is not half-assed, even less so compared with most apps.

A web browser is inherently shit software because it tries to be a jack of all trades which makes it a master of none. It has a huge attack service because it tries to suit many purposes. Browsers were meant to be document viewers. They were never meant to be an app execution platform. It’s rife with compatibility problems that plague them.

As I write this, I cannot see any of the comment interaction icons because the 3rd party app (Alexandria?) doesn’t play well with Ungoogled Chromium. The stock app is even worse which is why I started using Alexandria. Web browsers are a total shit show. It’s a duopoly between Google and Mozilla, and Mozilla has proven to not have the users interests in mind.

Browsers are bloated. Electron turns any app into a bloated garbage. It’s such a shit show. It’s much better to have a dedicated app for a sprecific purpose. Not a single thing trying to be many things.

Yep. Which is why I also use a personal website for the stuff I don’t want to see go away without me having any control over it.

How is your workflow setup? Do you run a piefed instance that syncs with piefed.social? Or is piefed.social your instance?

I suggest this community for a survey of the situation:

!smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org

IMO, one of the most perverse situations was the guy who was denied healthcare for not running a phone app.

On the desktop? A web browser. Why use an app?

To be clear, the web browser /is/ an app b/c it’s JavaScript. The browser is just a vessle for the stock Lemmy JavaScript app which does not work on terminals. Since the app is JavaScript it does not have decent local drive access, which means all the data is kept exclusively in the cloud. The moment an instance goes down, all the users are fucked. User’s history and comments are gone.

There are a couple desktop apps that liberate us from JavaScript and the GUI:

• NeonModemOverdrive -- so buggy it cannot be regarded as functional
• Lem -- an emacs client for Lemmy. This may have hope but I cannot try it yet because it demands a very recent version of emacs.

The selection is a bit poor with at least one of them being ½ baked. This would not be the case if there were not this frenzy of smartphone addicts.

We are losing our human right to self-determination and autonomy

Because some banks require phones? Find another bank.

No, banks are just the catalyst. It’s because apps are being forced on us regardless of banks.

The banks are the cause of masses of people deciding it’s a good idea “chase the shiny” and continously buy new phones, w/data plans and GSM. With so many Google boot-licking people running recent phones, countless corps and agencies have decided it’s okay to marginalise the few who do not.

still today in a bad state

That’s not a boycott. That’s the normal market working as designed. If you love the coffee but refuse to patronise them, then you are boycotting.

Seems like it could be a non-stop game of whack-a-mole. Even if you ban accounts they can just create more. If you do a good job of the baby sitting, they can use even more accounts to mask patterns. I don’t see how an admin can prevail.

Disabling down votes would prevent the practice of down voting to suppress. But probably the most effective is to disable voting entirely.

Down votes have a suppressive effect. Views and engagement drop when the votes are <1. The initial votes are important because they influence the votes that follow. My Tyranny of voting thread gives some detail.

My phone is AOS 5. It auto-detects captive portals and auto launches the browser. From there, just like there are countless ways to fuck up a webpage, there are countless ways to fuckup a captive portal webpage.

Web developers are profoundly incompetent on a widespread scale. I think a lot of it is done by kids who just want to play with the latest HTML frills and latest JavaScript constructs. These are not well-trained professionals who understand the problem of rapidly changing “standards”. They are not taught about backwards and forwards compatibility, and that the latest language frills should be avoided (or guarded by conditionals based on user agent strings). These same undisciplined hackers are apparently writing captive portals.

It’s really a double-edged sword. Superficially, it seems like a great idea to guarantee everyone access to banks. But then that guarantee is used against people who reject banks in favor of independence. It’s really a terrible trade because lawmakers can then impose forced banking on people using availability of a basic account as an excuse. Europeans have quietly lost their boycott privileges, without discussion. Banks have no incentive to offer good service because consumers are forced to need them. This enables banks to become increasingly enshitified and do shit like shutdown their website and force you to lick Google’s boots to obtain their shitty closed source app that only runs on new phones. You would be hard-pressed to find a European bank that does not invest through US banks, who invest in:

• fossil fuels
• private prisons
• the air travel industry

The oil companies who the banks support pour money into right-wing campaigns in the US, ultimately empowering people like Trump. It’s really a shit show and they are forcing people to contribute to it.

Indeed, but it could be sarcasm. We don’t know if Visstix is actually signing off as a retail worker, or satirically impersonating the sentiment of a selfish asshole of a retail worker.

Retail workers are of course happy to marginalise cash payers for their own selfish convenience of not having to count out change. OTOH, a retail worker who is well equipped with a machine that handles the cash would obviously have less cause for pushing a selfish stance.

I’m just wondering about how much stock to put into the claim that kids have cards. It’s likely more accurately stated as “some kids have cards”. Which kids do and which kids do not? Can someone make a convincing argument that every kid who does not have a bank card also has no use for crossing a canal?

I suppose it’s theoretically feasible that not a single Dutch kid is being taught to value privacy. It’s quite sad because if a mass majority of Dutch kids are being conditioned to flippantly disregard privacy, independence, autonomy, self determination, and dignity, the country is sure to continue in the direction of a police surveillance state with reduced human rights. Marginalised people will increase in frequency with decreasing protection.

Yeah, it’s what the EU calls a “basic” bank account. That is supposed to mitigate the discrimination. But then some member states limit how those basic accounts can be used which effectively restores the discrimination. E.g. some member states say you cannot deposit cash on a basic account. So if you are starting with cash, you’re still stuffed.

I was born in the US to a family who’s been here for generations. … I understand English.

You are free to make the claim but the mere claim doesn’t do much for you when you’ve demonstrated the contrary.

I have three years in debate.

I’m not easily convinced that someone w/3 yrs in formal debate would improperly identify an ad homenem, build a strawman and then try to double down on it when called out.

You do not get to tell someone else what their position is. That’s their job (exclusively so). It’s broken logic and it’s inherently indefensible. At best, you can try to excuse your error as an honest mistake by explaining what exactly triggered your misunderstanding (you did not quote). So you’ve failed on that too. The blind vague claim of inconsistency is useless here. It’s a futile attempt because even if you can find an inconsistency, it’s still a strawman in the end.

Exceptionally, someone w/3 yrs in formal debate might falsely restate my stance if attempting intellectual dishonesty -- a deliberate use of broken logic on the gamble that others won’t spot the strawman.

You’ve been explicitly told in plain English (and re-told) that Lemmy is not enshitified. If you still cannot absorb that at this point, plz fuck off. You seem to have little hope of grasping how the Lemmy bugs support the thesis that enshitification alters perceptions of bugs.

I have spent years developing data interface tools for customers and working with user feedback.

And? This seems like an incomplete argument. Do users accept software that disregards user instructions? Do users accept software that misleads or misinforms them about execution success, such as message delivery? Do you regard s/w that disregards user instructions or s/w that misinforms users as having a defect?

Saying I must not understand because I don’t understand English is a prime example of an Ad Hominem. You commented on me instead of what I’m saying.

Speculation about not having English as a 1st language is NOT an ad hominem. People are not inferior for having a non-English mother tongue and it’s despicable that you would take this position. It displays a superiority complex.

My statement “To be clear, Lemmy is not enshitified” was included in my original post to mitigate the potential for those who legitimately lack the ability to pick up on nuances of the points. Your failure to grasp how the Lemmy bugs relate to the thesis suggest a comprehension impairment, most particularly after it has been explained and re-explained to you.

I also understand fully that the rest of your post reads like you disagree with your own statement.

You might try making this “understanding” coherent and comprehensible with supporting direct quotes.

Your post effectively reads like this:

① The effects of enshitification are becoming apparent. ② Here’s issues I have with Lemmy. ③ I think all bad software these days is the result of enshitification ④ and thus the term should apply to modern software issues. ⑤ This means Lemmy is enshitified by transitive property. ⑥ Enshitification is modifying what we accept as the norm.

(enumerations added)

Thanks for writing that. It exposes your comprehension malfunction.

① correct
② correct (Lemmy has issues but you don’t understand how the Lemmy issues relate to the thesis)
③ brain malfunction - I neither said nor implied that bullshit. I /would/ say that some s/w and a more significant portion of service is enshitified (but “result” is also the wrong word).
④ brain malfunction and crux of your failure to understand the role of Lemmy defects in the hypothesis, which have no relationship to enshitification. The perceptions of people exposed to rampant enshitification as they judge bugs is what you have missed.
⑤ brain malfunction, sequitur from brain malfunction ④
⑥ correct enough - but important to realise that having bugs is normal. My hypothesis more accurately stated: Enshitification is modifying what we consider a defect.

In fact, I’d argue that if you haven’t paid a cent for the software someone wrote, or the service you’re using - which is almost certainly your case with Lemmy - and you haven’t contributed to the project, you kind of lose your right to complain this loudly about it. Don’t you think?

Testing and reporting bugs is contributing. Full stop. Absolutely asinine to frame bug reporting as a privilege exclusive to those who spend money on a project. It’s to advocate for bug suppression and reduced quality. Bug reporting is an important part of the QA process and it’s foolish to limit that in any way.

The underlying deficeit here is the mentality that a bug report is somehow someone demanding a personal service. A bug report & potential fix is not for the reporter. It’s for the community. Bug reports are community reports, for and by the community. If you fix a reported bug, the person who originally reported it often worked around the problem and moved on by the time the fix is released. The fix is for future users.