Even if the money had been available. you can't just spawn millions of teachers out of nothing. there aren't that many people who can and want to do the job.

for me, some ads also utterly ruin the brand of the ad host.

For example: here in France we have this one company whose business model is "get a 18.xx€ refund on your order (20€/mo subscription)". its rather obvious how this kind of system makes money.

i had some elderly family members get scammed this way, and I absolutely refuse to ever return to any webside that displays this "offer from our partner". after checkout ofc.

so i get my train tickets on trainline, and amazon gets what businesses fnac and darty should have gotten. manomano must've lost a couple thousand euros of purchases from me already, hope it was worth it to them.

I guess thats one important upside of age verification systems I didn't think of. They encourage creativity and a healthy disregard for stupid rules.

what would be the point of the government fining itself though?

Now that I'm thinking of it, it would create the need for an extra gaggle of bureaucrats to oversee the process,so I suppose someone might see a point to it ...

You may think you're funny or something, but boy do I have news for you.

There absolutely are fines for French administrations. And, knowing the French tax system, they've probably found a way to levy VAT and some other taxes on top of those fines.

good. now do the software enshittification part, which is the real driver of device obsolescence. being able to replace the battery is nice, but if the new battery lasts half as long because the software needs twice as much resources to perform the same tasks - you're not really fixing anything.

You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.

Very few people do that. I don't. Because a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway, and, more importantly, b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.

Every time a small device like a cell phone or watch or camera or etc gets opened and worked on, they never come back the same. Waterproof seals get broken, parts get misaligned, heat doesn't sink properly, etc. You can extend the life of these devices with repairs sometimes, but they tend to limp along.

> You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.

Still way more expensive than swapping a battery pack, and this mean leaving your phone to a stranger for a few hours or maybe a day if the shop is really busy. Anything that add friction to changing battery will help sell new phone.

I do it.

> a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway

You don't, this is nothing but an excuse for

> b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.

Nah, sorry, enshittification is not "just an excuse". My current 2020 phone(xperia 5-ii - I wanted that sd slot&jack) is noticeably slower than when I got it, even though the battery is holding up decently(it basically needs to last a day, and it usually does). Software shops seem to get focused on testing their stuff on "modern" devices. It looks like, once your device starts to slip out of that "testing pool", things get increasingly buggy until it eventually makes general use enough of a pain to require replacement.

I think last couple years' improvements to battery tech made software take over batteries as the bigger contributor to device obsolescence.

So this change, while welcome, is a bit late.

I have 4+ years old S22 Ultra and there is absolutely nothing slowed down. I didn't install any crap semi-random apps just for the lolz, its basically static set of features with maybe 2 new apps per year added as it keeps doing more and more like ebanking or work auth. It doesn't even have Snapdragon processor, just their own Exynos and its simply fine.

It keeps getting all updates and will keep for few more years.

Camera results massively improved cca 2 years ago with some update so that they are cca on same level as current ones. Plus I still has 10x physical zoom which trumps all current models, iphone pro max including since we still can't bypass physical limits of optics.

Really, 0 reasons to update and battery capacity is the only upcoming issue - still fine now but I feel the decrease a bit. If I could swap it easily myself without paying some phone shop to do it, that's a massive advantage.

There's flash degradation that's unfortunately a factor, too. If not for that and thermal problems (which I learned were common in this model), I'd probably be still using my S22.

(OTOH, I upgraded to a foldable, and don't want to ever use a regular candybar phone ever again.)

its a question of degree. going to the barracks when you get called up by mail vs getting grabbed off the street, punched in the face and shoved into a bus headed for the training center.

But if you don't do #1, then #2 will happen involuntarily, right? So conscription ultimately = physically forced.

They will probably go to prison instead, like some of my friends did. Giving military training to people who definitely don't want it can be a bad idea for many reasons.

Unmotivated draftees are mostly used as a workforce. Especially in modern warfare, soldiers without significant training are worse than useless, as the wrong action at the wrong time can compromise the stealth and mission of their unit.

Make someone a slave and give them a loaded gun, what could go wrong?

>Human responsibility is not the same as human decision making.

this is going to end up being interpreted as "well, the president signed off on the operation. see - there's a human in the loop!" - is it?

That's precisely how I read it. They're weasel words delivered by the master weasel himself.

I think its also important that while people may callously say "just nuke'em", if you were to hand them a red button and tell them to go ahead and do it - most wouldn't. But that latter part doesn't end up in the training data.

>China...where you cannot criticize the CCP?

I'd be more worried about the data being stolen and resold even faster than elsewhere tbh. staying out of the way of the ccp as a random guy on the other end of the world should be doable.