• 54 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
Cake day: March 29th, 2025
  • @dwazou@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world•Apple Watch Shipments’ Continuous DeclineEnglish
    2•3 days ago

    Wonderful news. That means less electronic junk to recycle, much less pollution.

    I’m actually quiet happy to own a dumbphone and no smartwatch. Having a powerful Linux laptop is great, but I came to the conclusion humans need low-tech for their mental health. Not having tech around me helps me focus, go on nice walks, write what’s on my mind and read books. I just feel happier.

    If you aren’t careful, the things you own can end up owning you.

  • @dwazou@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world•(Faulty) Tech Utopias provide a convenient justification for ignoring the real problems of todayEnglish
    18•14 days ago

    San Francisco is the city with the most tech engineers and software developers. It’s the US city with the most tech entrepreneurs. The roads are full of robot cars. You see people walking around with tech glasses and weird devices. You could throw a rock in the street and it will probably land on some tech guy.

    It’s a complete disaster. Homeless people everywhere. Families unable to see a doctor or a dentist. Desperate men in the streets, injecting themselves with drugs. Luxury private schools where smartphones are banned and professors give tips to get into Stanford. Poor public schools for ordinary kids.

    What kind of Utopia is this? This is not utopia. It’s a nightmare.

  • @dwazou@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world•Lenovo Cuts the Windows Tax and offers Cheaper Laptops with Linux Pre-installedEnglish
    34•15 days ago

    Microsoft essentially created a private sales tax on every computer sold in the world. This is how Bill Gates became extraordinary wealthy.

    The US should have won that anti-trust case. If you want to understand how Gates saved Microsoft, read this 1998 investigation that I found in newspaper archives :

    HOW MICROSOFT SOUGHT TO GAIN ALLIES AND INFLUENCE IN WASHINGTON

    WASHINGTON – Twenty months ago, Rep. Billy Tauzin walked into the office of Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, bearing a 10-inch-by-10-inch white box and a warning.

    Tauzin, R-La., the chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the telecommunications industry, placed the box on Gates’ desk. Inside was a lemon meringue pie, a reminder of another pie that had been thrown in Gates’ face several weeks earlier by a Microsoft critic.

    The message to Gates, the richest man on earth and the leader of the digital world, was blunt: You need to make friends in Washington.

    At the time of Tauzin’s visit in early 1998, the Justice Department was contemplating filing its antitrust suit against Microsoft.

    “I told him he was being demonized,” Tauzin said in an interview. “I said he had to win the antitrust case in court, but there was also the court of public opinion.”

    Gates apparently took Tauzin’s message to heart – with a vengeance. While Microsoft and its executives contributed a relatively modest $60,000 to Republican Party committees in 1997, the company’s contributions in 1998 shot up to $470,000 as part of its overall political contribution of $1.3 million. The 1998 figure included donations to political candidates, with the bulk of the money going to Republicans.

    This year, the company’s contributions of nearly $600,000 have been more evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, according to Federal Election Commission records.

    Microsoft’s lobbying, focused on swaying Congress and creating a generally friendlier climate in Washington, has had little if any effect on the current antitrust litigation in U.S. District Court, where the company was dealt a major setback on Friday by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s initial findings that it had used monopoly power to stifle competition.

    Rather, the lobbying campaign is a long-term strategic push intended to alter the political terrain where future power struggles will be fought.

    Campaign donations were just one element of Microsoft’s multimillion-dollar effort to win allies in Washington. The company also poured millions of dollars into an aggressive public relations and political offensive, hiring an armada of well-connected lobbyists and underwriting the work of research groups, academics and consultants who have made arguments sympathetic to Microsoft’s defense in the antitrust case.

    The company’s lobbying budget nearly doubled in 1998 from the previous year, to $3.74 million, according to the company’s lobbying disclosure reports, and is on pace this year to significantly surpass that figure.

    Gates and his top lieutenants have made dozens of trips to Washington, cultivating powerful figures in both parties and hiring some of the city’s priciest lobbyists.

    Microsoft has retained Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee; Vic Fazio, a former Democratic congressman from California; Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota; Tom Downey, a former Democratic congressman from New York and a close friend of Vice President Al Gore; Mark Fabiani, former special counsel to the Clinton White House; and Kerry Knott, former chief of staff to Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, the House majority leader.

    Microsoft has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to research groups, trade groups, polling operations, public relations concerns and grass-roots organizations. It has financed op-ed pieces and full-page newspaper advertisements, and mounted a lobbying effort against an increase in the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcement budget.

    In June, Bill Gates met for lunch with the Republican leaders of the House in the small whip’s room off the House chamber. They discussed Microsoft’s public policy agenda, ranging from exports of encryption software to Internet privacy to antitrust actions, said several participants at the meeting. Knott, now a top official in Microsoft’s Washington office, attended the session.

    Eight days later, Armey introduced what he called his “e-Contract,” a list of Republican legislative initiatives that pointedly adopted Microsoft’s view of the role of government antitrust actions, like the one that now threatens to dismantle Microsoft.

    “When federal agencies use heavy-handed tactics to target specific companies,” the Republican document states in language that echoes Microsoft’s own, “the real message they send to the market place is this: You could be next.”

    Armey’s aides insist that the release of the document was just a coincidence and that Republicans had long opposed aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws. Microsoft officials also denied that they had influenced Armey’s priorities or his language. The package of Republican proposals is still before Congress.

    Another Microsoft move on Capitol Hill drew criticism for heavy-handedness.

    It is lobbying to trim the antitrust division’s budget brought a flurry of editorial condemnation. The Washington Post said Microsoft’s actions were “a comical caricature” of a company trying to bully its way through Washington."

    One Justice Department official said, “Even the mob doesn’t try to whack a prosecutor during a trial.”

    https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/11/biztech/articles/07strategy.html

    The reason why Apple displaced Microsoft as the richest company in the world? Billionaire Tim Cook is using tactics that are even more predatory. If you make any purchase with an app, Apple takes a 30% cut. And if the app makers refuse, Apple murders their business by kicking them out of the App store.

    They banned the videogame Fortnite because the developers tried to resist:

    https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/apple-lied-breaks-its-promise-to-allow-fortnite-back-on-ios-under-its-rules

    https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-terminates-developer-account-fortnite-maker-epic-games-says-2024-03-06/

    These tech billionaires are economic tyrants. They want to use technology in order to enslave consumers and workers. They want customers to have no choice. They want their suppliers to be powerless. They want workers to have a limited number of huge employers. Their dream is absolute power over the market.

    Fuck economic tyrants.

    Only idiots kiss their ass.

  • @dwazou@lemm.eeOPtoCanada@lemmy.ca•Welcome to Canada, the land of free roads, cheap gas, and the world’s least fuel-efficient cars. Gas is so cheap that we drive the world's biggest cars.
    1•1 month ago

    The Eastern Townships autoroute, running southeast from Montreal, opened to traffic in 1964. The New York Times called it “Canada’s newest superhighway,” and gushed about it as “good news for skiers.”

    The article noted that the speed limit was 70 miles per hour in summer (this was a decade before Canada adopted the metric system) but only 55 mph in winter. It also wrote that, as part of a “master plan,” a final stretch of the autoroute still under construction would soon meet up with the U.S. Interstate system – bringing more Canadian tourists to New England, and more Americans to the Expo 67 World’s Fair.

    One thing The New York Times did not find remarkable? That the highway was a toll road. The drive from Montreal to Sherbrooke cost $1.50, plus 25 cents to cross the Champlain Bridge. That’s $16.75 in today’s money.

    A road paid for by drivers, not taxpayers, isn’t an unusual thing in Europe. Toll highways aren’t even uncommon in the United States, from the 423-kilometre Florida Turnpike to the 146-kilometre Sam Houston Tollway in Texas to the nearly 800-kilometre New York Thruway. New York is about to start charging cars to drive into the most crowded parts of Manhattan.

    But in Canada? There aren’t many things that Canadian parties of the right, left and centre can agree on, but “free” roads – by which I mean taxpayer-subsidized driving – is one of them.

    The Eastern Townships autoroute lost its tolls in 1985, courtesy of a Parti Québecois government. The new Champlain Bridge, completed in 2019 at a cost of $4.4-billion, is toll free, courtesy of the federal Liberals. In Ontario, highways 412 and 418 in Durham Region east of Toronto were opened a few years ago as toll roads, but the Progressive Conservative government ditched the tolls last year – a move long called for by the local New Democratic MPP.

    In British Columbia, tolls on two relatively new Vancouver-area bridges were a key issue in the 2017 election. The Liberal provincial government promised to reduce the tolls; the NDP one-upped that with a pledge to remove tolls entirely, transferring all costs from drivers to taxpayers. The NDP has been the government ever since.

    And in Toronto, former mayor John Tory once upon a time proposed tolling the Gardiner and Don Valley expressways, rather than maintaining them with property taxes. The idea was shot down by a Liberal premier.

    In theory, the left opposes policies that promote pollution and urban sprawl. In theory, the right rejects burdening taxpayers with unnecessary government spending and favours user fees. In many countries, left and right have put these principles into practice when it comes to the cost of roads and driving. In Canada, not so much.

    That’s why Canada is also an outlier on gas taxes.

    Ours are among the lowest in the developed world. Yes, really.

    A recent paper from three academics at the Université de Sherbrooke points out that not only are Canadian gas taxes low compared with peer countries, their relative weight has fallen.

    Long before carbon pricing, provinces already had gas taxes – Quebec’s dates back to 1924 – while the federal excise tax on gasoline has been around since 1975. But the 10 cents-a-litre federal tax hasn’t gone up in 28 years. Most provincial gas taxes have similarly failed to keep pace with inflation. In 1981, Quebec’s gas tax was worth 1 per cent of the provincial economy; today, it’s worth less than half that. Relative to the size of the economy, the federal excise tax has been halved since the mid-1990s.

    But don’t take some egghead professors’ word for it. The Canadian Fuels Association, representing “the companies who process crude oil into essential products like transportation fuels and get those products to market,” also says Canadian pump prices are far below other developed countries. Why? Lower taxes, mostly.

    Canada’s levies – gas taxes, sales tax and carbon pricing – are higher than those in the U.S. But CFA data from last January shows that a litre of gasoline in Britain includes an extra 98 cents of tax. Drivers in Germany and Italy paid an extra $1.12 per litre in taxes. The French paid $1.30 more.

    All of which helps explain why Canada is the world champion of gas-guzzling cars. Own the podium, Canada.

    According to the International Energy Agency, Canadians are driving the planet’s least fuel-efficient personal vehicles. In 2017, the average Canadian ride got 8.9 litres per 100 kilometres. That compares with 8.6 litres/100 km in the U.S., 7.9 litres/100 km in Australia, and less than six litres/100 km in Germany, Britain, Italy and France.

    Canadians were also driving the planet’s biggest personal vehicles in 2017 – and 61 per cent of new cars sold that year were not cars, but rather trucks, namely SUVs and pickups.

    “Consumer preference for large vehicles,” the IEA says, “has offset the impacts of technical improvements on average fuel consumption.” Engineers keep figuring out how to move more mass with less gasoline; consumers, particularly in Canada, keep offsetting those engine improvements by choosing ever-larger vehicles.

    The trend shows no signs of ending. Last year, according to Statistics Canada, 82 per cent of new Canadian light vehicles were trucks.

    See you out on the highway.