MudMan

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...?

Cozy but hard as hell to clean. The patterns are meant to make that not particularly obvious until it gets really bad, but if dust is a health concern it gets to be a bit much.

"I asked cocaine to make me a birthday card for my nephew. It's not as polished as the one I bought in the shop, but the cocaine one was a lot cheaper"

It... may not cover every scenario.

"I refuse to watch that one Argentinian TV show that has a shot made with some cocaine". Better, but bit harsh. Maybe there's some value to it.

"Cocaine is fairly practical to tell me things I can verify at a glance, but I wouldn't trust everything it says". See, that one works worse that the real one.

It's not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.

But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.

The difference is that food isn't a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can't source sustainable Mario Kart.

No, hold on, those two things aren't remotely the same.

It makes sense to work out which kid belongs to which parent, for sure. For one thing, a whole bunch of the legal system is based on who inherits what when people die. You want some way to keep track of that. There's some weirdness about keeping track of the father rather than the mother, and some cultures keep track of both or of the mother first, which makes more sense, but that's a different conversation.

But "who's paired up with who"? Absolutely not. Why would it be more convenient to be unable to separate sexual partners from descendants? That is not a practical thing. And the stuff that's preserving, which is that women are historically treated like children without full legal autonomy and part of the stuff being managed by a paterfamilias, is fortunately no longer true.

And of course once that gets recognized enough that even a bunch of Christianity admits that not all relationships are forever and reintroduces divorce (after centuries of treating women like perpetual property of their husbands) it makes absolutely no sense to have half the population ping-pong between names over their lifetime an arbitrary number of times. It's not only logically absurd, it is actively inconvenient to both the first goal of pairing descendants but also administrative bookkeeping in general. I can only imagine the amount of public records errors induced by women changing their name a bunch of times over their lifetimes.