Refer to my other comment in this thread, but no, this is not “manipulation” any more than any form of capitalist and liberal reaffirmations are manipulative.

Bruh, the oil industry has literally paid for multi hundred million dollar lobbying groups to push their message. And no, not every capitalist does that.

Your point is an interesting structural argument, but it doesn’t need to paper over the real world differences and history to do so.

Lmfao. Legitimate grievances?

Harper was in power for 10 fucking years and gutted Ontario’s manufacturing sector, yet do you see Ontario yelling to separate?

Albertans have long been manipulated by Canadian conservatives (i.e. oil companies) into wrongly thinking that they are uniquely picked on and punished.

They’re now also being manipulated by outside actors.

For the province of personal responsibility, Albertans really don’t seem capable of acknowledging that their insistence on only electing Progressive Conservatives for decades, even in the face of gross fiscal mismanagement, is what got them stuck in the boat they’re in. Why is it Canada’s problem that Alberta didn’t even bother to make oil and gas companies clean up their own wells?

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The majority of the Middle East, South America, and most of Asia — like 2/3’s of the worlds population — have known this for 50+ years.

Korea and Japan would disagree.

And the internet barely existed at that point, not every westerner in 2005 could have afforded to travel widely. The average western person would have gotten their general impression of the US from western media.

No, we’re not.

Sorry, did you misspell Iraq there?

Or is the article author unaware of the world’s perception of the US for the past 25 years?

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Lol, they didn’t try to kill used games on console, when they announced the Xbox One they also announced that you would be able to digitally sell and transfer your games licenses and share you digital library with friends.

Gamers didn’t hear that though, and then those plans got scrapped when they had to rework everything before launch.

It’s a free market, right? Customers choosing what they prefer and all that? And then eventually the one that provides the best price-for-service ratio comes out on top? Something like that, right?

Yeah, that’s lead to monopolies before numerous times. That does not change the fact that a monopoly is still a bad thing as as soon as there’s no competitors, the monopoly can jack up it’s prices or keep them artificially high.

Assuming there’s up front costs you have to pay to be able to compete with that monopoly (infrastructure, marketing, etc), then you’re looking at losing a lot of money trying to break into a market where everyone defaults to your competitor. And in that time, your monopolistic competitor can afford to lose even more money to bleed you out of the market and then go back to high prices.

And that’s just the financial barrier, that doesn’t count networks effects and platform lock in that can prevent customers from leaving.

Monopolies are always a bad thing, and inherently need to be heavily regulated as they structurally break capitalism. Quite frankly any industry that creates walled-garden or relies on network effects needs to be heavily regulated as well, and steam checks all three of those boxes. There’s a reason that they are THE most profitable tech company per employee, and that’s not because they’re charging fair prices.

They never tried to kill anything outside the Microsoft store. That’s just what Tim Sweeney and developers got fearful of and made a big fuss about (not saying it’s not worth making a fuss about, but they never announced they would do it). Microsoft did introduce more limited versions of windows that had sideloading disabled by default, but these were low cost versions of windows generally aimed at children and grandparents / non tech people, not at their gamer user base.

The US is a shit hole country.

Enjoy spiralling the drain together.

I spent a year at a software company that built software on top of Salesforce and was just flabbergasted by the decisions and restrictions they had.

You’d hit hard limits on things like compute and number of requests etc with no literally no way of increasing or scaling them outside of paying absurd custom contract fees to salesforce. It lead to a ton of stuff having to use external platforms to do things and all of these horrible kludgy workarounds, whereas at any other software company it would have just been a matter of your infrastructure automatically spinning up another instance during high load periods.

Then their frameworks and programming languages are just piles of garbage.

Apex is their backend language and it’s basically an extremely old and limited version of Java, but not only does it not support any of the niceties of modern Java, it also doesn’t support any actual Java packages or frameworks so stuff like Kotlin or the Spring ecosystem is out of the question. It doesn’t even come with a framework for writing unit tests. On top of that, you then have all these insane restrictions on how your code files are organized. There’s no name spacing, all your code files have to be in a single flat directory, there’s file length restrictions and character restrictions and even casing restrictions… depending on where you reference an Apex class, it could use one of three different name syntaxes (i.e. MyClass has to be referred to as myClass in some places, MyClass in others, and my-class in others).

Their frontend language was a pile of even shittier garbage, though was replaced with their own web component framework that is at least halfway similar to standard web components. But they still come with the crazy lack of name spacing and all the file naming and organization restrictions, they still don’t support TypeScript, and they come with literally no ootb methods for State Management, routing, etc.

And all of their dev infrastructure has to run on an instance of a Salesforce server so there is literally no way of developing actually locally.

A visualization of the year I spent trying to develop good software that users might like on top of salesforce: https://youtu.be/kSGEzpkgsu0?t=35s

Lmao, the CEO of Salesforce is congratulating Trump and Musk on their efficiency efforts?

Salesforce is a fucking cancerous efficiency draining leach on society.

It is hands down one of the most incompetent and greedily developed platforms in the world. Literally every Fortune 500 company using it would spend far less and get far more by building the equivalent with internal dev teams.

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Not everywhere imports beef from the Amazon.

*American Beef Prices.

The rest of the world is doing fine.

If you buy a new Tesla, it will get vandalized.

We do, but we also have more of a right to see how private money is spent that we don’t get. As is, it’s easy to make government seem wasteful when we don’t see how private money is spent.

That really does not matter. Spend some time camping with no phones and notice how differently you feel and behave. Humans did not evolve to have smartphones and social media, it triggers numerous emotional responses without actually satisfying them, by its inherent nature.

Social media. You use it up spending time on Reddit and Lemmy etc.