Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
They are -- so I hope Europeans will remember this when they have more trouble finding the size and color they need. If you can't throw anything away you do have to underproduce to avoid being stuck with crap that no one wants, is illegal to throw away, and can't even be recycled (because that would be 'destroying' the clothes, wouldn't it?)
So you have to underproduce always, and maybe not even make things that aren't a safe bet to sell out.
You can just donate them. If no one will take them, you are in fact allowed to destroy the products when it's "the option with the least negative environmental impacts".
Where even are all the people wandering around naked for lack of clothes? There's so much donated clothing already out there. And the homeless here mainly 'need clothes' because they have no way to wash their clothes. It'd be less wasteful to get them access to laundry facilities. And the developing world always gets the "PATRIOTS - Super Bowl LX Champions" gear and a ton of other cast-offs - I doubt they need more.
To me this whole regulation sounds like a bunch of virtue-signaling politicians wanted to pat themselves on the back.
If I had that kind of hustle, I'd be finding out who exports the losing teams T-shirts and reimport them. I'm sure some Pats fans would pay $50 a shirt to live in an alternative reality.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
Probably, but part of the point of outsourcing the recycling was that you wouldn't have to set up infrastructure, process and people for that. If they weren't crooked, you could even have customers ship the products directly to the recycler. To drill it first, then you are paying for shipping twice, on an item that is already worthless to you.
Some things take very little time and effort to manifest into the world today that used to take a great deal. So one of the big changes is around whether some things are worth doing at all.
Note: I'm not taking any particular side of the "Juniors are F**d" vs "no they're not" argument.
This just doesn't make any sense. Juniors + AI just does not equal seniors, except for prototyping greenfield projects. Who knows about 2 months from now, it moves fast and stuff, but not right now.
I suspect the gap is that you don't know enough about IBM's business model.
When something doesn't make sense, a very common cause is a lack of context: many things can be extremely sensible for a business to do; things which appear insane from an outsider's point of view.
Almost unbelievable that they allow this - except of course they do, because scamware makes a ton of money via in-app purchase, and Apple gets 30%, so of course they do. I'm sure people will come out of the woodwork now to white knight for Apple and spin this somehow. But anything that offends their business model can be removed in minutes, while software that by its title violates the App Store rules is just here indefinitely.
The App Store has done a great job of training users to think that anything downloaded from it is somehow safe. In reality, Apple’s static code analysis and human review processes are flawed and people need to exercise way more caution than they do.
The claim that malware "makes a ton of money" for Apple definitely needs a citation. I certainly don't believe it.
Obviously, Apple understands that the reputational damage from malware is more costly than any cut they might get from the miniscule sales of it. Apple might be evil (for some definition of "evil"), but they're not dumb.
Occam's Razor and Halon's Razor are aligned here. Apple would prefer this app not exist, but somehow it slipped through the review.
Tenuous relevance, but a different stock market game written in BASIC on the Apple II (well, I only had access to the Franklin Ace clone) was my initial motivation at age 10 or so to try programming. It was a pretty thrilling amount of power to a 10-year-old to be able to rename all the companies after my friends or whatever jokes I wanted, and next to alter the rules to get more money. It’s a good thing BASIC was everywhere in the 80s — so many books and computer manuals had enough information that it was easy to find a source to learn the (no pun intended) basics.
More in number, or as a percentage of people who use computers?
I’d believe the first one, but not the second. Even if you didn’t count the many people who only use completely closed systems like iOS, Chromebook, or the ordering kiosk at McDonalds in the denominator.
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
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