Tag: commented

When It’s Bad to Have Good Choices – The New Yorker

Why are well-fed people in affluent countries often unhappy and anxious?

The choices between those objects that they valued most highly were both the most positive and the most anxiety-filled. The more choices they had—the study was repeated with up to six items per choice—the more anxious they felt.

What changes as we move from the scarcity of wartime Warsaw to the abundance of the First World isn’t the nature of the anxiety, it’s just the nature and significance of the choice itself. In one case, it seems heart-wrenching; in the other, trivial. Our brains, though, don’t make those kinds of value judgments: to them, a difficult choice is a difficult choice. And difficult choices mean anxiety.

Source: When It’s Bad to Have Good Choices – The New Yorker

 

Having good choices might foster critical thinking, self-reliance, etc. But that doesn’t stop it the experience from being stressful or making you anxious, possibly even for a long time after you’ve made the decision, which IMHO was the takeaway from the article — that the more impactful and closer a choice is, the harder it is and the more anxious that makes people. Needing to pick between job offers in your home town, or far away in the big city can still make you anxious, but it is still good to have that choice. And nowhere in the article do I see support for the state/government to step in to artificially reduce choice.

How many people agonize over where to go to college, what to major in, or whether or not to get engaged/married to their current significant other, or regret such decisions years or decades later *because they changed their mind about being able to do better*? IMHO, they aren’t upset that they made an objectively bad choice (although I’m sure that happens too), but that they feel they made a relatively bad choice given that they now know all the details and specifics of their actual choice and only know the highlights of the foregone choice.

Service Drains Competitors’ Online Ad Budget — Krebs on Security

The longer one lurks in the Internet underground, the more difficult it becomes to ignore the harsh reality that for nearly every legitimate online business there is a cybercrime-oriented anti-business.

Source: Service Drains Competitors’ Online Ad Budget — Krebs on Security

 

I really like the term “anti-business” to describe businesses whose sole “product” is undermining other businesses’ business models and/or the free market or society more generally.

People Hate Bankers Because People Are Ignorant – Bloomberg View

Research shows most people are not financially literate enough to use a credit card or take out a mortgage. People should take a test before buying any financial product.

Source: People Hate Bankers Because People Are Ignorant – Bloomberg View

 

Is the root problem that banks sell/push products which only 30% of their customers understand?

I Still Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem – Terence Eden’s Blog

One of the most popular blog posts I have written is called “I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem”. In it, I rant against service providers trying to lock their customers into a monoculture.

Panasonic, it seems, are quite happy to ignore customer demand. Once they have your money, they cease to care.

Amazon could use open standards, develop apps which work on the majority of available platforms, and gather millions of customers who actually want their service.

Instead, they’ve gone with the rent-seeking approach of strong-arming their customers into paying more for a service they cannot use and do not want.

Source: I Still Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem – Terence Eden’s Blog

 

Evolving consumer expectations is an interesting point. I think that, to a point, consumers *ARE* owed something by the companies they purchase from, and that point is defined by how free consumers actually are “free to go elsewhere”. Examples:
1) buy a new car -> replacement parts and maintenance supplies for that car should be available for at least 6-10 years because basically no consumer can machine their own
2) buy an operating system -> bug fixes should occur for at least 6-18 months and security patches should occur for at least 2-3 years because basically no consumer can reprogram an operating system (and altering a closed-source OS is illegal)

Similarly, consumers are morally, if not legally, entitled to information as to how a company runs as far as that information is directly relevant to their potential purchase. For example, what if Microsoft liquidated its current inventory of X-Box Ones at half price and then, without warning, terminated all support for the console including discontinuing new game development and operation of the XBox Live online service. Sure that might be legal, but consumers *DID* have a right to know that what they were buying was only a couple months away from being a paperweight.

In America, there are generally 3-5 internet “options”: cable, DSL, cellular (limited and expensive), satellite (limited and expensive), and dial-up (impossibly slow)– there is no competition in cable providers and DSL competition is rare. There are 3 bulk television options: DirectTV, Dish Network, and cable. There are 4 wireless cellular networks: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint. There are 2 high-end smartphone operating systems: iOS and Android (3-4 if you want to count Windows Phone or FirefoxOS). We are not really free to “go elsewhere” for a lot of modern technology because patents, monopolies, oligopolies, and ecosystems are being used to control us by limiting our effective choices. This is not to say that this is harmful to the point that it should be illegal, only to say that it is understandable that consumers may have expectations of customer service and product development for their new technology purchases which are above and beyond those their parents had of a new household appliance 30 years ago.

Control may be a good way to squeeze more revenues out of consumers, but as a society we have known for over a century that corporate control is not in the best interests of consumers or of society. As consumers, we can also be the watchdogs for activity which is objectionable enough that we demand our legislatures make it illegal.

Court Upholds Willy-Nilly Gadget Searches Along U.S. Border | WIRED

A federal judge today upheld a President Barack Obama administration policy allowing U.S. officials along the U.S. border to seize and search laptops, smartphones and other electronic devices for any reason.

Source: Court Upholds Willy-Nilly Gadget Searches Along U.S. Border | WIRED

 

This is a very interesting case which brings up a lot of interesting questions:

  • When does technology sufficiently constitute our “person” such that we must be legally secure in it, in order to have a functioning democracy of citizens?
  • To what extent should citizens be required to trust the government to only enforce laws “reasonably”?
  • To what extent should government be required to trust citizens to be acting reasonably, without suspicion otherwise? Or to what extent should the government act to find reasonable suspicion?