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Its not strange. However, I do think governments mandating it is an overstep and it should be strange. Then again, I am a voluntaryist living in the US so I'm p

Its not strange. However, I do think governments mandating it is an overstep and it should be strange. Then again, I am a voluntaryist living in the US so I'm pretty biased when it comes to government mandates.

worrycue 5y ago
I feel like it’s an overstep too. I don’t feel comfortable with bureaucrats determining which technology we should use. Going to stick my neck out, and some might say this is just a slippery slope fallacy, but should governments mandate choice of programming languages? It would certainly help interoperability and longevity of code - just like with connectors. Anyway on an emotion level it just feels wrong.
- t43562 5y ago
  There's a problem - waste and people aren't solving it. So the government is trying.
  - worrycue 5y ago
    Surely there are better ways than mandating a very specific technology. It would be like building codes mandating the use of a very specific concrete mix instead of mandating that supporting members must be able to handle total expected load with a safety factor of 5 or something - I’m not a civil engineer.
    - acdha 5y ago
      This is a very popular industry standard with a well known path for updates – it seems pretty reasonable for the government to simply tell the stragglers to adopt it. Unlike the concrete in your example compatibility is a bigger concern - imagine if you needed special shoes to walk on AppleCrete - and the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern.
      - worrycue 5y ago
        > the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern Lightning has been around quite a while no? So waste wise Apple isn’t doing too bad.
        acdha 5y ago
        It's definitely not terrible — microUSB was so fragile that people replaced cables a lot more frequently. My point was simply that if you're talking about concrete, the waste is on a completely different timescale — Lightning cables are pretty durable but even a decade is ages in tech while buildings and sidewalks are expected to last an order of magnitude longer without outside damage.
selfhoster11 5y ago
The way I see it, it was the government stepping in where the invisible hand of the market did nothing (or not enough). IMO, that's part of why we pay taxes.

worrycue 5y ago

I feel like it’s an overstep too. I don’t feel comfortable with bureaucrats determining which technology we should use. Going to stick my neck out, and some might say this is just a slippery slope fallacy, but should governments mandate choice of programming languages? It would certainly help interoperability and longevity of code - just like with connectors. Anyway on an emotion level it just feels wrong.

t43562 5y ago
There's a problem - waste and people aren't solving it. So the government is trying.
- worrycue 5y ago
  Surely there are better ways than mandating a very specific technology. It would be like building codes mandating the use of a very specific concrete mix instead of mandating that supporting members must be able to handle total expected load with a safety factor of 5 or something - I’m not a civil engineer.
  - acdha 5y ago
    This is a very popular industry standard with a well known path for updates – it seems pretty reasonable for the government to simply tell the stragglers to adopt it. Unlike the concrete in your example compatibility is a bigger concern - imagine if you needed special shoes to walk on AppleCrete - and the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern.
    - worrycue 5y ago
      > the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern Lightning has been around quite a while no? So waste wise Apple isn’t doing too bad.
      - acdha 5y ago
        It's definitely not terrible — microUSB was so fragile that people replaced cables a lot more frequently. My point was simply that if you're talking about concrete, the waste is on a completely different timescale — Lightning cables are pretty durable but even a decade is ages in tech while buildings and sidewalks are expected to last an order of magnitude longer without outside damage.

selfhoster11 5y ago

The way I see it, it was the government stepping in where the invisible hand of the market did nothing (or not enough). IMO, that's part of why we pay taxes.