Jeff ShengWhy is it that I trust Tim Cook far more than #Zuck or #Musk? This crossed my mind today as the other two #billionaires have been whining about #Apple the past few days (boo hoo! Apple won’t let me snoop on my users!). Certainly Apple has its own share of issues but I feel far less slimy using my iPhone than when I open up #Facebook or #Twitter (which I am hardly doing nowadays). #Tech #MuskVsCook #ZuckVsApple
David Christianson@jeffsheng 100% agree. Cook and Apple seem actually concerned about the users of their products rather than the loads of cash they're making in spite of / because of this concern.
Dave Lane 
🇳🇿@jeffsheng None of those corporations is good. They're all poisoned by the very model they're built upon. https://davelane.nz/megacorps
@lightweight yeah, not a huge fan of the massive consolidation of companies, and sadly, there have been few corporations I actually think are ever good. The bar is literally “Are you not extremely terrible?” 😂
@jeffsheng my preferred approach is to depend on none of them. I'm managed to more or less achieve that, except for Google Maps when travelling (to augment OpenStreetMaps.org for finding businesses and making pubtrans arrangements).
@lightweight sadly, work requires computers and a phone that I can do work on, so I defaulted to apple over other options. But if given the choice, I’d gladly unplug and move to a remote island somewhere :)
@jeffsheng I've been fortunate enough to find sustainable employment in a way that allows me to live my values. I've quit jobs that, for example, would've forced me to use MS Windows. I've never owned an Apple product.
@lightweight Academia (a job that I love where I can do my best with my values) just doesn’t give me those options.. pick which work computer? Apple or one with Microsoft :/
@jeffsheng I'm working to make academia better. Unfortunately, from a tech perspective, it's been totally intellectually and morally corrupted. Here's the start of our efforts: https://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/5763/5600 (tl;dr it's entirely open, corporate-free, and about 1/1000th the cost of those corporate 'solutions').
@lightweight it’s more of the security software they make us have… tons of things that prevent me from switching off IOS. I should have said it’s not an academic issue, but my employer is the University of Michigan that requires our computers to be set up on a certain way
@jeffsheng Yeah, I've seen institutional tech handcuffs before. There's a bizarre tech corporate-supported orthodoxy that's infected organisations, and under-skilled decision makers at every step of the way. It's why I left big organisations and started my own thing 24 years ago where I could be subject 'only to my own incompetence'. Worked out quite well.
@lightweight it’s also academic handcuffs too.. the whole tenure system :/
@jeffsheng yup. The approach I've invested in is one that rejects the current status quo and is building a parallel system that meets the same needs but uses entirely different methods. Here's a description of my motivations: https://tech.oeru.org/democratising-higher-education-oers-foss
Democratising Higher Education with OERs & FOSS | OERu Technology Blog
Rather than write a slide-based presentation for the Open Education miniconf at Linux.Conf.AU 2019, I thought I'd try an approach that seemed to work quite well recently: write my presentation as a blog post and make it available for posterity, before and after. You can find this post quickly by going to oer.nz/lca if you want to look at it on your own device.
@lightweight very cool!! Thanks for sharing!
@jeffsheng and, to be clear, I work in academia, too.
Arindam BasuThat’s fantastic to hear. I never really liked using the Windows OS, (even when I knew nothing about #FOSS back in 1990s); over the years, I tried to install different #Linux flavours (mostly as a hobbyist pulling CDs from the magazines), and on several occasions ‘bricked’ cheap old computers, particularly fried the monitors. But once I started ‘fixing’ things and learned the nitty gritty, #Linux is the way to go. I suppose you can still use #Apple devices and use #FOSS #Hackintosh?
Uncle Cid (They/Them/We/Us)@jeffsheng One way to judge this is "do they use the same toilet paper as they make their employees use?" In Apple's case the answer is no. The men's bathroom near Tim is the only one in the entire building with fancy toilet paper. People walk for nearly a mile to use it.
@UncleCid then in that case, my university is also a problem judging by the single ply in the closest stall to my office and what I assume the University President gets!
@jeffsheng yes, this is a universal metric that the media tends to gloss over. No worries, we're down here doing the real work 😂
Sumocat 🐈⬛@jeffsheng Cook is just the CEO of Apple. He answers to the board and the shareholders (disclosure: that includes me). Zuck holds majority voting rights over Meta. Musk has sole authority over Twitter (and his other companies except Tesla). One leader shares power. The others hoard it. I don’t need another reason to trust Cook over the others, but he also didn’t order layoffs before the holidays.
@Sumocat yes, the shareholders thing makes a huge difference. There’s an accountability that is set up which isn’t there in the other cases. Good point!
mav 
@jeffsheng I mean, All billionaires are bad, but not all billionaires are *equally* bad.
Andrew@mav @jeffsheng Tim being an engineer and not a finance guy probably has something to do with it (and fwiw he's not a billionaire)
@cinebox @jeffsheng Forbes says he is, though not on the same level as the other people in that sentence.
And his background is definitely a possibility, though Zuckerberg is an engineer too.
@jeffsheng @cinebox seems like it could be a thing, though a lot of Cook's wealth is also tied up in Apple stock. My curiosity is if the decisions someone like that makes are different because they founded the company vs. were selected by it. (I know Musk didn't found Tesla but he's effectively as untouchable as a founder and pretends really hard so we might as well indulge him 😁)