MudMan @ MudMan @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Me neither :)

Of course there are more than two countries in the world, so it's entirely possible to have different pricing structures anyway.

I've bought people very nice phones for under $400 multiple times. Recently.

Flagship phones are grossly overpriced. The midrange is super nice and usable these days, though. It's a side advantage of phone tech standardizing so much. And as you said, being a necessity for daily life it's probably okay to spend at least a few hundred on one you're going to use for several years.

Is this going to be another "the US has weird ideas about consumer goods" thread? Because it kinda sounds like one.

We have tractors for that.

What I'm starting to realize is that despite Americans seemingly being car-first in so many facets the entire narrative around the humongous cars seems to be to have a one-size-fits-all car that is supposed to do everything. Wanna carry manure? Pickup truck. Wanna carry kids to school? Pickup truck. Seemingly want to drag a plow? Pickup truck.

A person with what we'd call a "farm", or at least a person in a rural area who has animals and plants vegetables in a field (I also think the concept of "farm" is different) would instead have different, cheaper vehicles for all of those. A small tractor head, or a big tractor if you have a lot of land and it's worth the money, then a van, then a small car, then Jeep or a Range Rover if you need to go offroad and tow a lot.

Do Americans in rural areas just have a different pickup for each person working there instead? That seems insane.

I was honestly not thinking this conversation would reveal one of the biggest challenges to visualize the logic of a different culture I've had this week.

Like I said, for the really nasty, loose stuff people would just throw an open bed trolley in the back of a different vehicle and do it that way.

I don't know what you carry, but I'm pretty sure you can do both of those things in a van if you have to. At most you may want to put a tarp underneath first. And you can hose it later. Again, I don't think Americans are picturing what the back of a work van looks like or how it gets used. If you fully open the back and side doors at once you actually get direct access to more of the floor than you do in a pickup bed.

It's not holier than thou, I literally have never seen a pickup truck in my life outside of the times I've been in North America for work. I'm just trying to explain why.

But then I just read the words "A v8 van", so I don't think that I'm gonna bridge this particular cultural divide here.

My free account reports 19. Like I said above, I may have grandfathered in to a different amount or it may be regional or who knows.

I don't think any providers charge for SMS anymore. Or at least you get enough free ones that nobody ever hits the cap.

Because everybody uses Whatsapp instead, so it's not even worth trying to monetize the residual usage. It's like email, only automated communications use it, so you're better off only charging government agencies and companies who are the only ones using it.

Maybe I got grandfathered in? I don't know, at some point obscuring their own rules became part of the dumb playbook of all these tech corpos.

I mean, no, they'll notice. The messages would appear on a different app.

But me texting them is not the issue, people don't remove their text message app. The issue is them wanting to text me, entering my phone number on Whatsapp and having it not be there.

Never mind that a number of these interactions are using groups and other tools. So no, it's not an option. You may as well tell people you don't have a phone or you refuse to interact through anything other than wax-sealed letters. Is it possible? Yes, sure, the post will deliver those. Does it make sense? Not at all.

People underestimate to what extent Meta apps have supplanted signfiicant chunks of communications infrastructure in many places around the world. For all the crap people give to Musk's little hostage crisis on Twitter, it's peanuts compared to Meta's stranglehold. Americans in particular don't realize how hard they already won social media.

No, it's not "as easy in my case", it's impossible in my entire country.

It'd mean not having contact with friends, family, work clients, businesses and plenty of other conveniences.

I'm glad you're self-sufficient enough to not interact with humans on the basis of their messaging app, but here in the real world, if a client gives me their Whatsapp contact and I point them at Telegram I look like a weirdo who suddenly wants to have a ten minute conversation about social media instead of doing their actual job.

So I can repeat, if you like. You can't get rid of Whatsapp.

Well, some of us need our phones for work, so...

...also not an option.

Kinda need people to be able to reach me. You know, for continuing to survive and stuff.

I didn't say many.

I said everybody.

I don't think I know a single person that texts over anything but Whatsapp. Businesses will reach out that way if they have your number. The government, too, sometimes. Every single person I know defaults to it and nothing else. My parents do. All my friends do. I may be able to convince a few of those to swap, but there is no way I'm convincing all of them. Again, "swap" here includes SMS texting. I'm saying this applies to all communications over phone that aren't direct phone calls. Scratch that, actually, most of these people also default to Whatsapp for voice calls.

The one exception is that some of my foreign friends do use a different app. They use Facebook Messenger.

You can use Whatsapp and something else. You can't get rid of Whatsapp.

Well, that depends on context. Let's say it makes less sense if you built your entire userbase on the back of handing off free storage for decades only to reverse course later after you've amassed a captive userbase in the literal billions of people.

But hey, I'm not gonna relitigate enshittification now. We all know.

FWIW, my current Whatsapp backup is 4GB, 1.5 without video backup. Google Drive gives out 20 for free, but they already made the same move regarding Gmail storage, so most of that is full. I have a paid account, but it's a work account and my personal chat logs do not belong there. Not using whatsapp is not an option. Just this week my vet sent me text messages over it. They didn't ask if I use it, they just assumed it because, again, captive audience in the billions. Whatsapp is just how texting works here.

According to the Steam Survey we are at least 2% but no more than 4.5% of users.

Which, at the risk of unleashing the wrath of the fediverse, is still noticeably higher than Linux users.

So there's that.

Ah, gotcha. I was confused because whenever the point of pickups comes up people keep bringing up having to use them for work, and in my mind that's what vans are for. I've been taken to school in a van before, but that's not the point of them.

I think over here people would instead get a hatchback and a van if they had to do both things. That'd probably cost the same amount of money and be more practical. And you'd have two cars by the end of it.

Oh, and there definitely are work vans sized like minivans. That's the entire point of the Kangoo, as far as I can tell. It's basically a minivan you can choose to get with or without seats.

EDIT: Oh, hey, apparently you CAN buy a Kangoo with a closed cabin, too. I said earlier that you couldn't.

A work van is not a minivan.

Refer to the video I posted above. The first comment mentioning those things seemed a bit confusing at first, but I'm starting to think maybe Americans don't have a notion of what a work van looks like? That's... a thing I learned today.

The Trafic in particular has a separated cabin and the floor of that thing is pretty much one layer of sheet metal between the wheels. You're good on both counts.

It does smell... eh... agricultural inside one of those after a while, of course. It's kinda nostalgic for me at this point.

For the really nasty stuff people here just get a trolley to hook up to a jeep or a tractor and a bit of patience. Or, you know, sealed containers. Trust me, people do haul a lot of smelly stuff and I haven't seen anybody who owns an open bed pickup truck in my life. I know more people who moved stuff around with oxen than with pickup trucks. It works.

I guess in other climates it's different, but over here people get vans for that. Can I interest you in the concept of "what if your pickup truck had a roof and also wasn't grotesquely oversized?"

Although, I'm looking at this year's Renault Trafic and that front is actually starting to get concerning, tbh.

This is the most Fedi pendantry thing I've seen today and I encourage the chain to continue until it triggers a black hole of chained corrections over nomenclature nobody cares about or will ever follow.

This.

Of all the weird choices MS makes sometimes, this is one of the most baffling.

On a 16:10 screen it's fine on the bottom, but I use a 21:9 on my desktop setup. That's just comically broken without the option to dock it to the side.