My understanding is that Kramer’s actor accepted the criticism of his comments and apologised (and then later made other ill-advised comments and apologised for those too…); whereas Seinfeld rejected criticism and doubled down.
So my take is that Seinfeld is an odious bigot, whereas the Kramer guy didn’t realise he was in a bubble, and hadn’t yet reaslised that the world had moved past what he was saying.
I get by alright without a smart phone. Over the years I’ve seen more and more “just scan this QR code to do such-and-such”, and I ignore them. I think you’re right that it is a lot of added friction compared to using a phone. A lot of stuff is instantly at your fingertips with your phone.
But to be honest, I really truly think that a bit of friction is a good thing. Without it, we just slide helplessly into oblivion. Or, less metaphorically speaking, the friction turns an automatic decision into a deliberate one. The friction pushes people to think about their actions and choices a little bit. And that’s generally a good thing - even if its a little bit harder.
<insert "GNU + Linux" copypasta here>
Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.
Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.
It’s a short hand way of communicating. Like saying that a good search engine tries to find the most relevant sites. Or a streaming algorithm tries to recommend videos that you’ll watch. It’s not that we are saying these things are conscious or whatever. We’re just describing what they do.
It’s not so much an aversion to algorithms as it is a version to corporate controlled algorithms (which are often targeting highly questionable metrics).
So what you’re saying is that if we just keep switching to different data sources, we could get above 50% in less than two months!
For Seinfeld, I’d be more surprised if he wasn’t a customer of Epstein.