MudMan

That can't possibly be a real sign.

And if it is, it can't possibly have worked.

But you've never explained why that is. You just... kinda like it that way. Their normal takes precedence (it didn't for a bit, but I called you out on it and now it does again) only because you say so. No definition you put forward included whose normal goes first when two normals happen at once.

To be clear, normal doesn't work like that, it's not what I meant and you fully understand this. But if we play by your definition, nothing in your definition decides which normal is the more normal. I say my normal goes because I'm the speaker and my set of expectations define normalcy in my speech. You have provided no argument against this.

We won't indeed. And that's why the neoliberal fantasy where the market self-regulates is bullshit.

We won't because our set of incentives isn't infinitely fluid to the point where every negative, hostile or illegitimate action is unprofitable. And we shouldn't have to, because there already is a mechanism to account for that fact, and it's the law.

We're not meant to judge our spending money in fungible commodities and entertainment based on political stances and larger considerations about long term convenience. We're not meant to weigh whether Nintendo has a right to disable our device remotely as part of the choice to play a cute racing game.

That's not the sphere where those choices belong. We've been told it is by neoliberal capitalists who don't want a government to tell them what they can and cannot do, so they keep insisting that they can be as crappy as they want because if they do something the public won't like they will "vote with their wallet" and the market will settle in the optimal spot of profit vs service. And if it doesn't a competitor will give people what they want and they'll buy that instead.

But that's a lie. It never worked that way, and it doesn't work anywhere close to that way in a global online oligarchy. You're meant to be able to buy whatever the hell you fancy because there is supposed to be a state regulating things to be safe, fair and protected when you engage in small commercial exchanges.

Because you need Office, Microsoft doesn't get to be the Antichrist. Because Netflix has the show everybody wants to watch it doesn't get to be the worst. The idea is those companies are supposed to be held to the level of being-the-worst-Antichrist we all deem minimally acceptable. Market forces can play within that space, and no further.

So you want Netlfix to not be the worst? Get a legislator to enforce it and watch Stranger Things to your heart's content. Because whether you like Stranger Things isn't supposed to be connected in any way to how Netflix conducts its business or how abusive it can be in the process of doing so.

No, you've said many times that it being relative means the bar for normalcy that takes precedence is theirs and not mine. Which doesn't follow from your premise. And whenever I tell you that you just repeat the wonky premise.

Alright, that's harsh, you just quietly backed away some by moving from "it's normal for them so it's normal" to "it's normal for them but not to you", which is not the same thing you were saying before. I guess I'll take the small compromises in a conversation we both knew was a waste of time from the first post.

To be clear, I agree that you don't have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo's piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist... You're allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you're not bummed out enough. That's a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.

What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn't worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going "hey, maybe we need to take a look at this".

Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.

Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.

But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It's just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You're a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you're a focus group data point, not a political actor.

No, hold on, you get past the "other than get involved with politics" part very quickly there.

You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?

You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That's getting involved with politics. If that doesn't do it then the next recourse isn't to spend money for posturing, it's to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.

That's what you can do.

What you can't do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That's not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don't care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.

This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say "but what else could I do besides getting into politics" and pretend they've done something by buying some shit over some other shit.

Nah, man, that's not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don't need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.

But just to be clear, "voting with your wallet" is doing nothing. That's the choice you're making.

I'm not struggling, I'm telling you how it is based on your own parameters. You could have argued that normalcy is relative, but you didn't you got stuck on the dictionary definition and decided that the set of expectations that apply are the expectations of the group and not my expectations.

I'm saying either you have a logical reason for that set of priorities or your argument doesn't follow. There was not problem with clarity on that sentence, the ambiguity was introduced by your caveat.

To be clear, this is irrelevant and a waste of time. We established that up top. We both understand what I was saying and why your response is what it is.

The ouroboros of social media garbage being thrown at me here would be annoying even if I wasn't actively trying to filter out US news from my feeds.

I know somebody who used a marbley surface for their kitchen and every time I'm at their place I'm thrown by a part of the pattern that looks just like someone spilled chocolate milk and let it dry in place.

Admittedly that's because it's particularly large dark patch. 70s floral patterns in fuzzy materials were way too busy to identify any one thing as a stain. It all became this noisy blur. If anything it had the opposite problem of sitting down on top of the crushed barn flakes because they camouflaged perfectly on your sofa cushions.

Cats, too.

I don't understand why you think normality is defined by the object of the sentence rather than the subject.

I mean, if you take your definition of normal, surely the person speaking determines what's normal, right? That's not a good thing, because your working definition of normalcy is bad and nonsensical and only determined by your desire to antagonize somebody online on a nitpick, so you probably don't like it much yourself beyond that. But if we take it, then I get to say what's normal when I speak because normal is "the state of being usual, typical, or expected" and I'm the one having the expectations here.

The surroundings are my surroundings because it is my post.

No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn't a political action. Your political action is political action.

If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.

How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I'm sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the "voting with your wallet" thing doesn't stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.

Is this one of those things where sarcasm doesn't carry over the Internet, or...?