I completely agree with what you say, but I hardly see it as better now. Big payment services (from traditional banks to PayPal) lock "high-risk" (meaning anyone who has ideas they don't like) customers out of their services completely independent of the justice system and state apparatus.
Firstly, the guy never said anything about European values, he could just as well have been talking about his party. That said though, the "value" being breached here is the value of having a free society where you can exist outdoors without government cameras scanning, identifying, and tracking you. I would like to think it's more a human value than anything else.
In effect he invoked "European values" the way he phrased his claim. Looking further, his party's values and European values are the same thing according to them (See: https://www.reneweuropegroup.eu/what-we-stand-for/promoting-... ), which is again a nice rhetorical trick.
More importantly, he didn't say "free of mass surveillance", which is fair but you can have facial recognition in public space while staying anonymous as in my previous example. He said "free of risk of mass surveillance", which is very different and an absolute, extreme proposition. It's like saying that cars should be banned because people should be free of the risk of car crashes, ban the police to be free of the risk of police brutality, etc... It does not make sense and is indeed a rhetorical trick to make a blanket ban appear the only acceptable option.
Sorry but I don't want to live in a country where the government scans my face and tracks my movement every time I leave my home. Nor can I even believe I even have to say this. Cars are deadly machines and regulating deadly machines is different to regulating and tracking human beings. And just because my name won't match in a criminal database and therefore I'll remain "anonymous" doesn't change that I don't want the government putting a leash around my neck, even if they promise not to strangle me with it unless they say I did something wrong.
Unlimited texting plans were rare in some parts of the world. If you need to pay 9 cents per text, WhatsApp is a godsend. I even had to pay for receiving texts or pay a premium on sending texts when being abroad (which happens much more often in Europe). My understanding is that during the same time period, unlimited texting in the USA was pretty much expected. Luckily, we now have free roaming in the EU, so we don't have to worry about extra charges when using the mobile internet, but I still have to be careful when visiting Switzerland (which, again, is just a 2h drive for me).
It's really convenient for travel, you don't need to pay international rates for SMS, just connect to free wifi and you're golden. If/When you buy a local SIM card, people can still reach how they used too, they don't need to text a new number. When you change your number for some reason, you don't need to message everyone that you have a new number etc.
Because SMS is terrible as a text standard, and people want to use a rich messanger. SMS was used when there wasn't much alternative as Nokias didn't have great app support. People already knew of better things and used ICQ, MSN Messager et al. even without being technically inclined. The limitation was the platform.
It's also why iMessage hasn't taken off. We are used to things working cross platform, the iMessage lock-in doesn't interest people as it isn't providing much convenience for its limitations.
What other replies already said, plus the UX. If they could write WhatsApp (or Telegram) using SMS and their multimedia siblings (can't even remember the name) as transport, then maybe people with unlimited SMS plans could use it. But the standard SMS app UX is so much worse than the UX of those chats. Add groups and all the other features. SMS are to get notifications from banks and credit cards :-)
I add a data point on costs and volumes. I have a 90 GB monthly data cap on my phone but I have only either 100 or 1000 free SMS per month, can't remember because I don't use them. I'm probably not sending 1000 messages per month (but it's only 33 per day), definitely more than 100. I don't want to discover that I run out of messages on the 22nd of September so I won't be using them as a hidden transport in a chat app.
Hard to say, they were all the rage and suddenly just kinda stopped being used (their only purpose now I believe is 2FA, and spam). One reason I can think of is chat history syncing between devices
Wasn't it originally because carriers used to charge per SMS message? Whereas you could send a message with very little data usage, and mostly for free when on WiFi.
where i live (western europe), the telco's overcharged for sms, making a decent conversation costs euros each. Whatsapp + wifi is free.
I heard that originally sms wasn't meant to be a consumer product, it was just so technicians could test or communicate. Then the telco's realized people like texting more than calling (people prefer async sometimes, weird because comms mainly developed from async to sync), and decided to charge a limb for it.
We have this in Germany at some stores, such as Kaufland. They're sold in a section called "Die Etwas Anderen", which means "The ones that are a little different". They're sold at a reduced price, and they're just as good quality as everything else, they just look a little funny.
As a relative stranger to Twitter, I can't help but feel a thread of Tweets is unsuitable for telling this story, surely he should just write an article about it rather than have it chopped into chunks and strung into a thread?
If there were no health effects of not sleeping besides having that "gained" time taken away at the end of life, I would absolutely do it. I'd be spending more time in my 20s and 30s and wouldn't have to deal with being in my 70s and 80s
For me it's the groupthink mentality where anything but the status quo is downvoted to oblivion.
Other than that I don't get much out of the site, because most the subs I would enjoy are so small, I can just visit once or twice a year and sort by best of the year, and stop when the quality drops. That was I never even need an account.
The groupthink mentality has gotten way out of hand.
While you might think a subreddit is a place for fans of X topic to gather, it seems to end up as a place for superfans to gather. This can be a problem since their viewpoints are extreme and niche.
Instead of merely enjoying topic X and thinking of X in generally positive thoughts, the superfans treat topic X as the BEST EVER. Any discussion of X's shortcomings is met with downvotes or negative comments.
