and Muricans go: “wE aRE noT thERe YeT!!”
The other half are asking, “where are we going?”
The federal government is a protection racket now. You pay your money and your windows don’t get broken and your business doesn’t mysteriously catch fire. It may be illegal, but who’s going to do anything about it?
It may be illegal, but who’s going to do anything about it?
Not Americans, that’s become evident.
Tim Bitch.
Not at all. For the sake of at least one of our major technology companies, I’m happy Tim was able to bribe mango Mussolini so cheaply. For the cost of a small piece of gold and a little pride, tim cook saved his company potentially billions of dollars. Well worth it.
Of course it also violates every business ethics training I’ve had to goto, so it’s probably bribery that would usually get him thrown in jail. But again, good for him to know when being immoral is the right thing to do.
This is not like the situation with Harvard where jaundice Jesus is trying to gain control, destroy its reputation. Harvard has to resist or lose itself. Apple is just one small piece of gold to allow business as usual
You know, people might agree with you if Tim Cook’d up this scheme to save people’s livelihoods but he didn’t, and we both know that.
He is going to lay off the exact same number of people to make the number go up harder.
Tim cook bend the knee. 🤔
He screwed up. It should have been a solid gold apple.
Wouldn’t work, everyone in the administration would agree he’s the fairest goddess.
the constitution ain’t shit.
Coming from a non-US centric point of view: I generally believed in the idea that the government does everything it does for the good of an entity. Sometimes that entity is the people (legality of cannabis), sometimes it is one person (presidential pardons) and sometimes its a company (bailouts). We can argue how ‘good’ any of these actions actually are, but thats beside the point. I always knew there were backdoor deals and some companies or some people got special privileges (corruption). But that was always behind closed doors. Rarely did it leak to the public stage and when it did, news coverage and accountability followed (usually).
However you may feel about government, it generally works on the principles of law. The ideal was; If you followed the law, you had the same opportunity as anyone else doing it.
I still can’t comprehend how Trump completely flipped this around. There is no semblance of just democracy and unjust corruption anymore. Giving the president actual gold in exchange for an exemption of law while openly broadcasting it. The ideal is broken and shattered on live TV. Justice is now blind because Trump is pissing on her face and she cant look at his limp dick anymore.
It makes perfect sense when you see the billionaires as lords and Trump as king. It’s a feudal kingdom ruled by royals, not a nation with laws. That’s just how it is now.
The Return On Investment of Corruption has always been massive in the US.
If they Act more like a King than a President… Are they still just a President?
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
The rich already fear for their lives; hence the kowtowing to a mushroom-dick pedo. The point is to make them fear the people more than they do that piece of child raping corn in a diarrhea attack.
Oh, it won’t improve then either. The mega rich will stand in a mountain of the dead before they’ll give up even a fraction of their wealth, and they’ll lash out at anything that they “fear”.
What is this cringe ass larp?
What LARP. Plenty of people are all about “the great class Revolution” but few are actually winning to risk the meat grinder it would actually take. It’s also why they’re banking big time on AI and robotics. Nobody to talk back or question if ordered to gun down a street full of “enemies”
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Exactly, but we need a plan that reaches the right wing folk and a reason for people to back it , here it is.
we need a plan that reaches the right wing folk
It’s called a gun, it’s got amazing reach from far distances.
Tax wealth not work is a great way to pitch it to people as well. It doesn’t matter if your working 30,40,50,60+ hour weeks, whether you make 10,20,30,50,100,200 dollars an hour. That’s not what they are pitching to increase taxes on. They want to cut taxes on workers.
All the media is owned by wealth, and it will be spun and sold to the masses as a Bad Thing. And as we we have seen, the majority of people are idiots and lap that shit up.
I think a lot of it is that people don’t view things as finite, they for some reason think every dollar they make is a new dollar that came from nowhere and when they spend it, it goes no where. It’s easier to not look at the big picture of where the money flows, and just tunnel vision what is happening directly to themselves and hope someone else fixes things because they don’t have time/money to address anything.
Thats the hard truth
Ok - that whole thing was absurd and cringey and Tim is a billionaire and billionaires shouldn’t exist but I think Tim is far from one of the richest CEOs in the world.
I don’t think he even makes the top 20; maybe even top 50?
Yeah he’s a recent addition to the billionaire basket.
Ah, well if he’s only profited off of the exploitation of others for a decade instead of two or three, I suppose we can give him a pass! He seems great, with those billions of hard-earned (by other people) dollars! What a swell oligarch!
I didn’t say any of that. Just agreeing that he isn’t in the top of “richest CEOs in the world.”
Reading comprehension is important.
He’s just following the example set by other CEOs
I’m not saying that appeasement is always the way, but I’d rather Apple stayed off Trump’s vindictive side by giving him a little shiny toy then by giving them (for example) user data or backdoors into their platform.
Yes, in an ideal world, they’d tell the whole administration to go fuck itself, but they also don’t want to be destroyed by the government (however illegal that may be, do you really think they’d survive long enough for all the legal challenges to go through the system if Trump decided Apple had to go?)
You have zero way of knowing that there aren’t some level of backdoors. There’s zero reason to think they wouldn’t fold for the US govt like they did for the Chinese government. Lastly there is no high ground here for Apple. It’s bad enough that they go above and beyond to dodge taxes and this is them doing more of that but in a somewhat more shameful way than normal. Fuck em.
It would be amazingly risky for Apple to hide backdoors in their products. One of their big selling points is their reputation for taking user data privacy seriously. If it ever came out that they’d helped a government by violating that, their credibility would be shot and they’d lose a noticeable percentage of customers overnight.
That’s not good business, so I don’t think they’d risk it.
One of their big selling points is their reputation for taking user data privacy seriously.
lol, that is reputation only
Remember back when the U.S. government had to go to the international hacker community to try and hack an iPhone about 10 years ago? I remember, and Pepperidge Farms remember. Maybe they’ve added backdoors since then, but there hasn’t been any evidence of that, and it wouldn’t be able to be kept quiet for very long of there were. You’re collecting down votes, but I don’t think you’re wrong.
Their reputation amounts to them telling us that privacy is a human right but forgetting that the instant the Chinese government comes between Apple and money. Also if they were truly serious about security they would be open source. Like others have said, if the government wants a backdoor, they will get it no matter what apple says publicly because profits matter more than anything.
Lol. If you don’t think Apple has backdoors in their products I have a bridge to sell you.
If you think Apple has hidden backdoors, some class action lawsuits would love to know about it. They’ve filled their pockets on much much less damning evidence.
I’d be more interested in your background and knowledge of these backdoors than some bridge
If Apple weren’t pussies, and Trump said he’d end them for not capitulating, they’d just have to release all sorts of goodies that Trump and his cronies stored in their cloud.
But alas, everyone and every company in America is a damned wuss.
I’d rather Apple stayed off Trump’s vindictive side by giving him a little shiny toy then by giving them (for example) user data or backdoors into their platform.
Who says they aren’t also giving that data?
I’ve not read anything suggesting they are. I’d imagine this would be quite a big story if anyone has any evidence of it, and the Trump regime is incapable of keeping its mouth shut.
Plus someone from Apple would leak it. Even if you genuinely believe Tim Apple is sucking trump’s dick, you can’t believe the entire company supports that.
I believe these large tech companies give all kinds of data to the government already. Probably more than any of us should be comfortable with. Would anybody notice if they expanded the data set slightly?
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I knew someone would say that.
What are my other options?
I’ve gotten away from Microsoft and Android.
I need a phone that can run modern banking apps, so I can’t run some janky Linux OS just for hyper privacy.
I also need something my parents can use, since they’re all in on Apple at the moment too. I don’t live close enough to regularly visit to do on site tech support, and honestly, not my idea of fun anyway.
For better or worse, Apple is it at the moment.
What banking apps don’t run on Android? You’re coping hard right now.
Well I don’t want stock android, do I? I can hope Apple aren’t selling my personal data. I know that Google would. I’ve de-googled my life, I’m not going back.
Keep hoping and coping then. Just drop the pretense that you aren’t doing exactly that.
You know that Apple sells it too, I havr degoogled my life too, and I can use android totally fine with a stock rom and with google services completely disables because yes you can disable it and yes it works fine without it. With apple they will force you to use their apps and shit ecosystem with android you can choose within at least.
Not for long, you won’t be able to sideload your banking app in the future with all the work being done on device attestation.
Every bank in the country has a website. Just use your browser like a regular desktop user. Not everything needs to be an app ffs.
You never have more power against an authoritarian than you do right now.
You have to resist, push back, fight etc. or you keep losing.
giving him a little shiny toy
It wasn’t a shiny toy…
The base was a literal gold bar, that just had been reshaped to hold the piece of glass.
trump will 100% throw the glass away and melt/sell the gold.
It was one step away from a bag of cash
I don’t think Trump is that hard up for cash that he’s melting little gold bars.
…
This is like say Gollum doesn’t really want his Precious…
It doesn’t matter if people like that need more, they’ll always want more.
Especially not when it’s a symbol of his power to make Apple bend
We only saw the part of the appeasement process which was meant to be public. We have no way of knowing what is included in the non-public part.
lol one has nothing to do with another.
Absolutely not, there’s no upside to capitulating to a fascist, period.
If the government wants backdoors they’ll get them and in fact probably already have them. I’d rather no one appease a fascist dictator and anyone who does or thinks it’s a good idea is a fascist by proxy.If Trump would decide Apple “has to go”, the US can stop pretending that they live in a democracy.
The US has pretty much never been a real democracy (other than in a roman sense, as in “power belongs to rich men”).
In the Roman sense, it was never a democracy, in the sense that we vote for representatives, who then in turn vote on stuff for us. Er, I mean for the corporations. So you can see why this system is so prone to abuse.
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Every Western democracy votes for representatives, direct democracy isn’t really a thing (except for partially in Switzerland). But many countries actually manages to represent the voters with their representatives, the US system definitely doesn’t.
I think you mean that many countries manage to let voters have i say along with all the other interestsgroups on the country, of which many are corporations.
This is the type of thinking that has put corporations above people. “Oh no the trillion dollar company can’t do the right thing or they could go under!”
Yeah, because appeasing fascists has traditionally gone well…
Whose to say they haven’t already?
Apple should be destroyed by the goverment, case closed.
Regardless, as mister H. has shown and mister P. too, you can never appease a authoritarian monster, they always ask for more.
lol he behaves like a mediaeval king in addition to smelling like one
He is kissing Trumps ass, so lame. Am ending with buying new apple products!
Exactly. I’ve had iPhones since they came out. Next phone won’t be an iPhone.
