Saturday: _I_ canceled

I looked out at the driveway, which was … gross.

And I thought about the route to martial arts, and the sidewalks there. I _could_ get up and drive over there and wear my icebugs and I would probably be fine. But it was cold. And the instructor was very understanding. So I canceled. I’ve made it clear to T. and to R. that if they want T. to go to martial arts on a cold winter morning when the driveway has not been cleared and it is still well below freezing, it is not going to be me bringing him. Once upon a time, T. had more activities, and it was an even-ish split in terms of who brought him where, however, he has a lot fewer, and it’s either the sitter or me, so I’m basically insisting on redividing this particular pie.

No martial arts, no Vic’s, we all slept in; it was nice.

We’ve had squatty potties on two of the three toilets in the house for a long time, and I suspect that no one has used them in years. I asked around, and then I cleaned them and put them in the garage for donation. One less thing to get dirty and need cleaning in the bathrooms.

I had A. do one of her two projects for 15 minutes and will shortly ask her to do the other. Might as well have someone make some progress on something.

Dutch Dating, Apple Store commission and Ars Commenters

So, I was reluctant to get out of my nice warm bed this morning, and got through that transition in part by reading some Ars:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/apple-shocks-ios-developers-with-27-commission-on-third-party-payments/

TL;DR: There was a Dutch court case involving a dating site in the Netherlands (so, jurisdiction), and the Apple Store requiring devs to use their payment system. The Dutch court case said Apple has to allow links out and alternate payment systems. This was broadly misunderstood to suggest that the Apple Tax of 30% on all payments made through the Apple Store could be avoided. In fact, the charge is now 27%, reflecting a 3% reduction for the payment processing component, and the 27% represents all the rest of it (depending on your perspective, this could represent different things but presumably, at a minimum, customer acquisition). And presumably, that 27% drops to something else in year 2, as the regular 30% does. Who knows; I don’t much care altho there is some twist the knife potential there.

There’s a thread within the comments that should be removed.

Of the remaining (vast majority) of the comments, there’s a range. There are people saying, duh, everyone saw this coming / in fact the judge said that Apple could do this. There are people saying, hey, if you baldly fail to comply with regulations, well, you’re gonna get busted! Those two threads probably can’t both be true at the same time? There are people who are very There Is No Choice If There Were This Wouldn’t Happen. There are people who are, well, you can go buy Android. People make that choice all the time. Again, those two probably can’t both be true at the same time?

There are some interesting components to the discussion. Several people are arguing pretty transparently for an increase in regulation of how much profit a company can make. I was a little surprised to see more than one person arguing for this. Laissez-faire would appear to be receding. Lots of Amazon antipathy. Lots of This Doesn’t Happen On PCs If It Did that really makes me think hard about all those white boxes that you could not buy without paying the Windows licensing fee for, even if you were only ever going to run some flavor of Unix or whatever on it. Also, the so very many things that you can buy through a browser on the phone and apple gets no cut of any of that.

Meanwhile, in a private conversation, a friend who works for a news organization has all kinds of interesting things to say about how the pressure to eliminate third party cookies is making it very hard to even sustain logins across organizations with many brands for periods exceeding a week. I get it, but also, *shrug*? It definitely sounds like a lot of the things that Ars commenters and others have complained about for many years now is finally being addressed, but in a way that actually worsens other things they have been complaining about.