ArkVark (u/ArkVark) - Readit News

ArkVark commented on Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison darknetlive.com/post/drea... · Posted by u/a5withtrrs

pmachinery · 5 years ago

The motivation for fictitious wars against bogeymen is to empower and bankroll law enforcement while diminishing the civil rights of citizens.

Like the war on terror, the decades long war on drugs has been a roaring success.

ArkVark · 5 years ago

And now we have the War on COVID.

ArkVark commented on Apple Ending "Fortnite Save the World" Updates for Mac epicgames.com/fortnite/en... · Posted by u/tosh

tekkk · 5 years ago

To be fair most digital content is still purchased out of app stores so I dont think the developers are the losers there.

Losers are the governments if they cant pay for their healthcare or care for their elderly because all the big internet co's dont pay any taxes for their profits in their countries. A digital tax would at least put pressure on them to take a smaller slice of the pie. Granted, it might be not the optimal solution for the problem.

ArkVark · 5 years ago

Europe generates a lot of content, but owns none of the platforms. Lower commissions on those stores would translate directly to higher profits and investment by those content creators, which would be taxed directly and indirectly.

ArkVark commented on The Russian vaccine for Covid-19 thelancet.com/journals/la... · Posted by u/DyslexicAtheist

nkoren · 5 years ago

That stood out to me as well. There's a real opportunity cost to not moving more deliberately: those few extra months represent several hundred thousand lives lost. Could a vaccine be worse than that? Of course if the answer is yes, then that would be horrific -- you wouldn't want to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people and then discover that you've unintentionally shipped Thalidomide 2.0. But at the same time, the probability of such risks should be balanced against the certainties of what will happen without a vaccine.

Anybody who says that this is a simple or easy calculation frankly has no idea what they're talking about.

ArkVark · 5 years ago

COVID has leapt from the realm of science and reason into fear and hysteria.

If we 'saved' 1 million elderly people from dying of COVID, and they instead died over a period of time from vaccine side effects, those effects would be impossible to quantify via a binary PCR test and so would be ignored.

Additionally if people were vaccinated, but still died, we could at least say 'oh well, we tried'.

Rushing out a vaccine and giving it to people near the end of their natural lives is a completely legitimate decision to end this hysteria and get back to normal life.

ArkVark commented on Apple Ending "Fortnite Save the World" Updates for Mac epicgames.com/fortnite/en... · Posted by u/tosh

hunta2097 · 5 years ago

Apple have to maintain a vice-like grip on their ecosystem as their approach relies on controlling the entire vertical.

As more and more pressure is placed on them by the EU, the Right-to-Repair movement, big partners, etc. something has to give but i'm not sure Apple have the mindset to comply.

ArkVark · 5 years ago

I think the inevitable move here is for the EU to enact a maximum % commission for platforms above $1b revenue, at something like 20%. Maybe for sales from that region or for developers in that region.

Unfortunately the EU is going the opposite way - increasing VAT and digital taxes, which are passed straight onto developers.

ArkVark commented on At this point, 5G is a bad joke computerworld.com/article... · Posted by u/CrankyBear

bitminer · 5 years ago

I disagree. I think the purpose of 5G is to allow carriers (formerly known as The Phone Company) to sell value-added services to other companies large and small. IoT, video-on-demand, Big Data, AI, automation, etc. The bandwidth story is the distraction.

Guess who pays?

ArkVark · 5 years ago

IoT devices are cheap and tiny and so are rarely on the latest cellular standards. Your typical IoT use case is smart metering and logistics - hardly big data users.

In most of those other use cases, the carrier serves as basically a big dumb pipe.