I think this is bad and antisocial and you should shut it down. I like imessage because businesses cannot easily use it. The people who are most willing to pay for what you provide will do so because they can thereby annoy me in interfaces where other spammers cannot.
More practically beeper got blocked for this reason despite not even targeting commercial messaging.
I agree this no bueno and anyone not in my contacts gets filtered out.
Why build a startup outside of making money from spamming community (mobsters) when its only annoys almost every human who receives spam calls, voicemails and texts? I mean even the founders and or those closest to them.. Im sure they love all the spam calls, voicemails (most recently being the annoying personal loan b.s.) and texts... right?
Im sure there's money to be made with spam outfits (mobsters) and more shaddy folks but again this isn't helping the issue that bugs almost every cellphone user out there. The government now is working on trying to fix this issue further, I bet there's more money there to be made in help fixing the issue then exborate it!
Our goal behind this is to make it easier for people to conversationally interact with agents when they want to. Use cases like customer service or form-fill text backs would fit this. People are already getting SMS/RCS conversations in their iMessage inbox. We're simply making those conversations feel more human, conversational, and natural.
> I like imessage because businesses cannot easily use it. The people who are most willing to pay for what you provide will do so because they can thereby annoy me in interfaces where other spammers cannot.
I strongly disagree. If I need to chat with a business, an airline for example, why would I want to use SMS instead of iMessage? It’s the same app, but being able to easily send screenshots or photos and know they were received would be a huge improvement.
There is already an Apple business api that allows validated businesses to talk to you over iMessage. It does require you to agree not to spam though (try Home Depot on iMessage to see)
As someone who has never owned a iPhone... what is the appeal of using iMessage? What can iMessage do that SMS/RCS can not do? Apart from the fancy iPhone-to-Mac handoff features i've seen folks use ;)
CXMT is a company with heavy state backing and control that started its current trajectory years and years ago. It has infinity money and isn’t allowed to go bankrupt. CXMT is reading political signals (Beijing wants indigenous AI up and down the vertical) as much as market.
> CXMT is a company with heavy state backing and control that started its current trajectory years and years ago. It has infinity money and isn’t allowed to go bankrupt.
This also describes the U.S.A. steel industry. "Heavy state backing" and "not allowed to go bankrupt" often result in particularly terribly-performing industries. If anything, it's notable that China seems to buck that particular trend.
Not sure "only the Chinese model can solve the normies pain" is a great look.
Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach. The "bread" part of bread and circuses has shrunk dramatically, "but at least you're getting cheaper circuses" is what they've been saying.
Now you're saying only a heavily state-directed Chinese model is still willing to aggressively finance new fabs and meet demand to provide that? "Capitalism demands we don't expand capacity and don't meet demand' is kinda a tough sell after capitalism has been sold as expanding access. "Consolidation, maximal extraction, shareholder preservation, and AI" isn't going to be a winner. I get it makes business sense and wouldn't be a big deal in the past, but the rapidly changing dynamics hitting nearly every part of daily life across the entire economy feels destabilizing.
We're down to wearing dystopian sci-fi level cheap clothes, can't afford chips/sodas, candy/sweet treats have been enshitified to no longer be fulfilling, we can't afford to call an ambulance. Media is polarizing instead of mass media calming. Heck thrift stores are becoming unaffordable to the low end as the middle now resorts to them.
"You don't have the foods you are used to, decent clothing, shelter, health, or social cohesion but you have a sweet 6 year old phone and flock cameras keeping you safe". Jesus it feels... not good. Even cyberpunk dystopia understood you needed to at least jack people into something.
> Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach.
Who says this? The latter are heavily regulated and not exposed to market forces, which is why they didn’t get cheaper, unlike TVs etc.
Cato
“One of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics.”
https://www.cato.org/commentary/cheap-talk-cheap-stuff
The Adam Smith types:
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/economic-nonsense-2...
"Many consumer goods follow the same trajectory; most recently smartphones have done so. Far from being left behind, the poor are pulled along by the progress that initially caters for the rich."
The result of equivalent deregulation would be slums and shantytowns. But hey, cheap rent! I don't think this is s desirable outcome either.
Also, from the article:
> In other words: you can buy a computer thousands of times more powerful than the best consumer device from 40 years ago, for something like 0.3 percent of the price. No other good in history has experienced a decline in cost on that scale: poor people can now carry around in their pockets computers many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the richest slice of the world’s population could afford a few decades ago.
That extreme level of efficiency increase is something very specific to computers and not something translatable to other areas of the economy.
You could always replace him with a "banker" who instead loans you the means of production on credit, but nobody is going to make you a lathe for free out of the goodness of his heart, nor buggies for your grocery, nor the produce for your shelves and meat for your coolers. The banker makes you take the risk because, if it fails, he probably takes your house.
Believe it or not co-ops exist just fine and some do very well. It sounds like what you would like is a co-op and I will be quite happy for you if you start one.
Bankers are even worse than shared ownership due to moral hazard (that's where muslim and christian view of money lending comes from), but yes, as a socialist I am in favor of coops.
Not really; strontium is quite common in the crust. In the oceans it occurs in the single-digit mg/L. This isn't a meaningful datapoint.
The entire article doesn't show particularly concerning findings and the protests read more like nimbyism than environmental concern. Industrial processes have some non-zero level of impact and complaining when someone runs one that's not very polluting at all is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or it's just an attempt to outsource all the pollution to china, which is fine for many things (I'd rather they were polluted than us) but not critical minerals.
While natural strontium (which is mostly the isotope strontium-88) is stable, the synthetic strontium-90 is radioactive and is one of the most dangerous components of nuclear fallout, as strontium is absorbed by the body in a similar manner to calcium. Natural stable strontium is not hazardous to health at low levels.
Every element up to and including bismuth, excluding technetium and promethium, have stable primordial isotopes (i.e., have been on Earth since it was made), and in addition, thorium, uranium, and maybe plutonium (Pu-244 is on the very edge, so it's not clear if any primordial nuclei of it remain) also have primordial isotopes. Every element with bismuth or higher atomic number has no stable isotopes, and the elements from astatine through neptunium naturally occur largely via decay sequences of uranium or natural nuclear reactions in uranium ore.
Nuclear fission reactions tend to result in the daughter nuclei being considerably smaller than the mother nucleus--like a 70/30 or 60/40 split, which means that the fission products of uranium are firmly in the range of elements that have stable isotopes. (Although due to larger elements being richer in neutrons, most fission products have too many neutrons, hence undergo radioactive decay themselves).
Since it's an MVNO they can probably get away with this, no? They are not allocated any of the fixed, monopoly-prone resources like spectrum that make such rules necessary. The satanists can I suppose go start an MVNO that allows nothing but lbgt and pornography if they wish.
Ideally a Christian cell phone network would do both. It would also provide only healthy foods in the office and encourage fitness (gluttony and sloth are sinful), prohibit working on Sundays, and encourage policies to steward our world. It would control off-hours demands for those who are married and have children, and therefore have family obligations to which they must see, and might hold mixers for its singles to encourage family formation. It would expect humility and servant-leadership from its executives and patience from its managers.
I would prefer to do business with such a network but one does not exist. Apparently, people do not believe there's much market demand for any but the first of these.
This is similar to the church itself, which tends increasingly towards alignment with one faction or another. In turn, it becomes blind to the sins of its own and focused wholly on the sins of its schmittian enemy. The conservative church will tell you of the sins of homosexuality but not obesity nor wrath; the liberal will tell you that insufficient love is sinful while ignoring transsexuality. I find neither particularly Christian.
Perhaps the Benedictines could run an MVNO. I am no catholic but they'd probably do a much better job.
Jesus didn't have a whole lot to say about homosexuality or transsexuality. I really have to question your both-sides narrative here.
Why would a properly Christian cell phone network block homosexual content? Even if we take it as given that Christianity forbids homosexuality, that's a prohibition on behavior, not observation. There's nothing in there which says you're not allowed to read about gay people, any more than you're not allowed to read about Hindus.
He had plenty to say about sleeping with anyone outside of marriage between man and woman, notably in Matthew chapter 19. While direct mention is relegated to Paul, Christ operated by whitelisting, so complaining that something isn't blacklisted is categorically wrong. Transsexuality wasn't a thing in that world but is plainly a rejection of His creation.
It presumably blocks it for the same reason it should block traffic concerning first-person shooter games, or content adjacent to self-harm and violence; the latter two were mentioned in the article as additional targets. It is not good to put certain things in one's brain. I along with others don't believe in reading certain things, watching certain things, and listening to certain music for the same reasons. I view it as best as intellectual junk food and at worst as corrosive; we should seek things that glorify Him and content pertaining to violence, homosexuality, and self-harm plainly don't.
The beginning of Matthew 19 seems to be about divorce, not where you put your wiener in general.
Matthew 19 is interesting to bring up, though. The end is all about how rich people don’t get into heaven. Would you say that this service should block depictions of wealth? It can be very tempting, after all.
In Matthew 19, Christ explicitly affirms the definition of marriage given in Genesis. As I said, this is an affirmative definition, i.e. it says what it is. Implicit is what it isn't, that is, anything else. He is answering by affirming marriage as a thing grounded in creation, in the nature of man and woman cleaving to one another in a lifelong covenant.
I think things like "flexing" influencers who idolize material wealth are pretty toxic and blocking them would be good, yes.
I wasn't particularly aware of President Trump until he went for political power. I barely knew of him. I recall having seen him exactly once, in some documentary on the History Channel. He's mentally categorized to me as "politician" more than "rich guy", which is the wrong type of corruption for this case. I had much more exposure growing up to the "flexer" types as the archetypal idolizer of wealth.
You should engage with what I'm saying, rather than nitpicking, or say nothing.
As a prominent figure who has corrupted tens of millions of Christians, I'd hope he'd be more in mind in this sort of discussion.
This isn't just a random aside. My point is that you're focusing on the wrong things. For what I'd see as proper Christians, homosexuality and influencers just aren't very important. Homosexuality has zero temptation for the vast majority, and influencers are just jesters for the modern age. If the goal is to stop Christians from straying, there are much more important things to look at.
I think fewer Christians than you believe take their cues on right living from that man. Maybe I'm biased as a zoomer but I see the influence of "flexers" and tate and fuentes-style ingrates as vastly more harmful, because they function as perverse role models for young men in particular. You may think they are just jesters; that is not so. I wish that were true but it's like saying that "instagram beauty" doesn't affect young women's self-image. It shouldn't, but it does.
I don't see homosexuality as a particularly important issue, as I'm not a member of a denomination that believes it constitutes a Godly relationship. I am, for example, less concerned with it than I am with widespread gluttony and resultant obesity. However that doesn't mean that it's not of any concern, and Christian ethics don't easily accommodate a utilitarian-style ranking of units-harm-done. It was, however, the topic of this particular company and the article about it.
More practically beeper got blocked for this reason despite not even targeting commercial messaging.
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