Typing this out made me realize a distinction I failed to bring up. People do like to learn, but people HATE to UN-learn ideas. The person in your example wanted to learn something new, but did not want to unlearn the iphone walled garden.

This is an excellent point. You’re right, we do agree, sorry my comment came off aggressive.

Flashbacks to hours writing macros, mods, and scripts so that you could spend less time doing the things you paid a company to let you do for “fun”

I’ve just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous. (Edit: leaving this comment unchanged for the sake of clarity, but apologies for the aggression)

Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.

Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.

There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn’t easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don’t do that nearly as much, even though they could.

Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They’ve just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There’s just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.

Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they’re being deceived into thinking they’re learning at all.

Just interesting because even non tech people want this when you sell it to them properly. They don’t actually want a walled garden ecosystem that is “simple”.

Nobody actually wants a walled garden, they just get entrapped in them (“it’s just where my friends/music/content creators are”)

They then become convinced that they want it, and its reinforced by the walled gardeners (looking at you, iMessage videos and bubbles)

I know a person who built their own PC (Windows, but still) from scratch for the first time as an adult. Had the money and the opportunity to buy a prebuilt rig in two clicks, but instead researched the market, ordered parts and tools, exchanged a part that didn’t fit the case, learned how to assemble it all by hand, and exclaimed that it was a great experience and would do it all over again.

And yet at every opportunity still buys an iphone despite the cost because it’s “simple” and they “don’t want to learn” something new. That’s not the actual reason - that’s just stockholm syndrome.

Man, lotta vague libertarian energy here, but to answer your question:

Why nickel and dime everyone that is probably never going to even see the fountain instead of letting the people that want/need pay for it?

In general, the answer to this usually boils down to one of two answers:

1. choosing instead to directly nickel and dime people at the point of service comes with overhead and is wildly inefficient. You want to add an internet connection to every public water fountain? Or at the very least wire them with electricity to power some kind of vending machine system? Or perhaps have a person standing there to charge people? Someone will have to pay extra for any additional steps in what could otherwise just be, well, a simple faucet.

2. More often than not, the people that need things the most are not the people who can pay for them. These people still need to survive, because letting the poor suffer and die will still cost you and everyone else money.

And study after study shows that when we all pay a little to help people in general, we can all save a lot in, say, street sanitization, law enforcement, healthcare services, etc. Things that you have to provide especially if people can’t afford it.

Not enough attention is given to the literal arms race we find ourselves in. Most big tech buzz is all “yay innovation!” Or “oh no, jobs!”

Don’t get me wrong, the impact AI will have on pretty much every industry shouldn’t be underestimated, and people are and will lose their jobs.

But information is power. Sun Tzu knew this a long time ago. The AI arms race won’t just change job markets - it will change global markets, public opinion, warfare, everything.

The ability to mass produce seemingly reliable information in moments - and the consequent inability to trust or source information in a world flooded by it…

I can’t find the words to express how dangerous it is. The long-term consequences are going to be on par with - and terribly codependent with - the consequences of the industrial revolution.

True! It’s just another of the many ways that evil is counterproductive to its own interests.

Helping groups of humans that bigots don’t like would literally result in less humans that bigots don’t like in the world.

But they can’t help the wrong humans! Oh no! They have to hurt those humans! And so they leave those humans in the socioeconomic conditions that maintain exponential population growth indefinitely

In a broad sense this is inaccurate - war has been around as long as humans, and yet we were on an exponential population growth curve until the demographic transitions started.

Over the last century we as a species have significantly reduced child mortality, improved education, infrastructure, overall quality of life, and established reproductive health initiatives that supply condoms and sex education!

These advancements cause the local mortality rate to plummet. Then the following generation gets to reproductive age but has much less offspring, and the reproductive rate falls farther than the mortality rate did.

This is called the “demographic transition” and has occurred across dramatically different cultures, environments, and economies.

This is not universal or inevitable across the globe but the impact is so significant that global population as a whole is currently heading towards a plateau!

Therefore condoms, reproductive healthcare, and distributed economic growth are more effective at reducing population growth than bombs and bullets.

Developing a nation is literally more cost-efficient than destroying it. For the species. Not for the people selling the bombs.

Yes.

Profess: 1) To affirm openly; declare or claim. 2) To make a pretense of; pretend.

If one makes a pretense of holding beliefs, feelings, or values that one does not hold, one is a hypocrite.

Whether anyone else understands the pretenses of the hypocrite or not does not change the definitions of the words.

Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess

Having no values or beliefs and being self-consistent with ulterior personal values does not change the definition of the word.

If one professes beliefs, feelings, or values that one does not possess, one is a hypocrite.

Headline from fox news: “Oliver North: Israel will have to put people on the ground and it will be bloody”

Reality is truly stranger than fiction. If any writer continued to use a character like him for so long in such obvious ways without suffering any consequences, readers’ suspension of disbelief would be shattered.

He was there for Iran-Contra. He is still here for Israel-Hamas. The exact same playbook. Place political gain over national interest. Put lives needlessly in danger and extend suffering for an easy win.

Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.

Holding a position when politically convenient and reversing your stance on that position due to political convenience is hypocrisy. It may be typical and expected, but it’s still hypocrisy.

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