Hacker News: snapplebobapple

New comment by snapplebobapple in "We Need VAT and UBI"

snapplebobapple — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:01:56 +0000

Why do so many people make the same analytical error? It's really simple what is going on: information and power asymmetries are used to accumulate more wealth and therefore power. This happens through a whole bunch of mechanisms usually referred to as market power abuse in economics all centered around getting control of a pain point that makes it less likely people will leave for a competitor and then pushing prices down (think chain restaurants saturating a region and only offering minimum wage, think the app economy getting you on the app and watching your every move to price your labor as low as possible, think larger companies spending money on lobyists to push new regulations to decrease competition and kill start ups)

The government is implicit in a lot of this when it should be doing stuff like breaking up big companies to curtail it. UBI and VAT would just exacerbate the actual problem because it would grow the government and the government would eventually just get captured again (or stay captured) and be put to work ensuring the wealth keeps flowing to a select few.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Roku LT Operating System open source distribution"

snapplebobapple — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:32:48 +0000

No, my response is protect yourself from the reality of the market via mitigation because you and i cant affect change because the incentive is to get worse for the corporation and minimum efficient scale is too high to have enough competitors to change the benefit math

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Roku LT Operating System open source distribution"

snapplebobapple — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:00:04 +0000

then put something like the OREI 8k HDMI 5 in 1 switch in front. Costs less than 60 dollars, you can control it with whatever universal remote you want or the remote it comes with. If I needed that I would just map it on my flirc skip remote and continue operating my whole setup from that one remote very easily with the tv only ever getting on/off and maybe volume signals. The nice thing about this solution is it lets you run everything at hdmi 2.1, which is often impossible on even newer tvs because only one or two of the ports are hdmi 2.1 on many tvs.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada"

snapplebobapple — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:50:06 +0000

No, it's just a bad piece of legislation that follow the pattern the EU almost always follows: Take a good idea, and then figure out the most invasive, costly and imprudent way to implement it, drastically raising everyone's costs. It makes business less likely to happen in the EU, lowers growth and protects incumbent oligopolies because they can afford to throw lawyers at it, while upcoming competitors can not, especially the organic kind fixing real problems (and the kind I would argue is the most valuable to a country vs the weird PE driven ones).

Of course you would take the GDPR burden. The direct cost isn't to you and the way it extremely negatively affects you isn't directly obvious immediately, it happens slowly over time with much larger effect than you realize. The mechanism is less quality company growth, more large company stagnation, lower pay over your life time and higher taxes because the tax base doesn't grow as much as people choose to develop the next big thing elsewhere and don't create as many competing companies in the other economic areas.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Surface Laptop Ultra"

snapplebobapple — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:34:56 +0000

It was me being obtuse because it made me laugh, lol. I was pretending they misspelled "wanker" as "maker" in the press release because wanker is a british slang term that is much more accurate than maker in this context. It was also a little of me bending my understanding of the rules here to post it because it made me laugh to do so, although I probably should have kept it to myself to save everyone else's time who will read it and feel it wasted their time.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada"

snapplebobapple — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:49:35 +0000

Gdpr is a nice thought that is a practical disaster. The regulatory burden is insane.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada"

snapplebobapple — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:48:02 +0000

It would be better off as a bunch of sovereign states

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Roku LT Operating System open source distribution"

snapplebobapple — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:52:37 +0000

Then you did it wrong. The tv should be turned on and set to display one port, say hdmi1 then never touched again until its time to shut it off. Volume should be handled through hdmi-cec from the tvs perspective it should get an on or off signal and maybe some volume signals and it should display hdmi and that is the entorety of its existence.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Surface Laptop Ultra"

snapplebobapple — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:06:07 +0000

I appreciate that. Noone needs to waste their potty reading time wondering why someone so maliciously and prolifically misspelled "wanker" in multiple different forms throughout a whole article like what happens when you read this article...

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Roku LT Operating System open source distribution"

snapplebobapple — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:00:55 +0000

the only good smart tv is one with no network connection. As long as the manufacturer has any control of the compute on your device they will always be pressured to abuse it to grow revenue. You need to budget 200 to 600 additional dollars for a linux box and use that

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Canada in Technical Recession"

snapplebobapple — Sat, 30 May 2026 06:34:14 +0000

Elect a carney, get a circus...

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S."

snapplebobapple — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:50:05 +0000

Post secondary should be setup as a loan for the subsidized portion withloan forgiveness prorated over a decade. If you leave the tax net it converts to payments like any other loan. Everywhere should be doing this, its just good policy. The carrot is way more of a problem because this place needs to be less junk on nearly every measureable dimension. the examples are too numerous to list but housing needs to be a lot more affordable and there is probably a hundred things to fix to make that one thing function betteras one example.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

snapplebobapple — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:32:44 +0000

Thats the ubfortunate side effect of cafe standards. They have had to make what people want bigger each year to keep it exempted

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

snapplebobapple — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:16:27 +0000

Why do you think any of that is relevant? Of course they will lose. There are enough of them to be a significant minority because of how terrible our federal government is and how big a joke our legal system is. This is entirely about trying to control which voting cycle they lose on. The left wants it on the next provincial election ballot because its poison for the incumbent conservatives. The conservatives want it anywhere other than on the next provincial election ballot so it can die before it poisons their election chances. thats all that this is. It helps that smith is right and the judge quashing the referendum is a yet another travesty.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

snapplebobapple — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:06:05 +0000

Thats the other way to say what i just said. Its not as good a way to say it for this specific issue because it doesn't hilight the differences that matter to this particular discussion

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Google Declaring War on the Web"

snapplebobapple — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:37:53 +0000

yah, I was on there in the literal 90's and drifted away in the late 2000's. It's still in my rss reader but I never look at it anymore. Other places have a better smattering of news I care about and I never see tech or other things I am interested there first. It probably was going down hill at rob Malda was prepping to leave and then left but I noticed it in the quality of the output and drifted away more than anything. Did it turn into a virtue signalling cess pool along with reddit and the large portions of the web after I left?

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

snapplebobapple — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:33:26 +0000

Because the only certainty is there is no ideal sort of setup, just a set of probably decent options for the current conditions, which are highly changeable. The only thing that is certain from a benefit maximization perspective is there are a lot of companies much larger than minimum efficient scale that we should probably antitrust out of existence to increase competition

New comment by snapplebobapple in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

snapplebobapple — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:28:49 +0000

So you guys can figure this out but you can't figure out that a wealth tax today is just a destruction of future income tax? You trade the government wasting the money tomorrow for the government wasting the money today and if you think the investment growth will be higher than the government discount rate (which is pretty much gauranteed), then you are paying a potentially large premium to waste it today.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

snapplebobapple — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:49:00 +0000

Point of order: that is blatantly untrue. Anti illegal immigrant has everything to do with ensuring the people in the country are known and allowed. It is completely uncoupled from legal immigration. To say an easy solution is increasing legal immigration is just saying lets leave all the security holes wide open and just make it so only the real bad guys use them because others have an easier time going legal.

New comment by snapplebobapple in "Google Declaring War on the Web"

snapplebobapple — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:03:21 +0000

man... hacker news is making me sad here. The blatantly obvious stuff that leans left gets upvoted +5 and the blatantly obvious comment made by me directly before this one that leans right is -1. This place used to care more about the correct answer.