Thread by @gravislizard

imagine if microsoft offered professional services to anyone who could pay. i would pay $300, one time, to have someone at MS who actually knows something log into my PC and figure out why explorer can't render thumbnails

no sfc /scannow bullshit, i mean they raymond chen that shit, they get in and coredump explorer and go "okay you have a png library that paint.net installed, that's the problem"

honestly, i'd pay any company for that if they were trustworthy, but "repair windows pc" is basically a stopword. there are hundreds of millions of people who think they have complicated and interesting problems, but don't, and millions of amoral vultures preying on them

"repair windows pc" is the 21st century equivalent of scamming octogenarians over the phone

there's this howling mass of people trying to fix worthless celeron pcs that are totally fucked and just need a windows reinstall, and a bunch of people in impoverished countries telling them that if sfc /scannow doesn't work they should give them money to do nothing

the screaming, raging static makes it impossible to talk about any problem whatsoever with the most popular OS in existence, you just get overwhelmed with sfc /scannow

i think a lot about how, because we refuse to do anything about global poverty, i can't fix my computer

a man is surviving on a cup of rice a day in india, and because of that, he has a massive incentive to use the only tool he has available (eeepc covered in duct tape + public wifi) to try to steal $20 from me 8000 miles away

except there's 100,000,000 men living like that, and all of them have realized that it might be possible to survive by trying to steal my $20. so there's one hundred million people between me and getting an answer to why anything on windows is broken

this situation can't be fixed because there is such an unbelievable, overwhelming number of people with unsolved problems on both sides - baffled 70 year olds with celerons in the US, and people starving for no reason

neither party cares that i am not part of their scam (i know this won't be fixed by sfc /scannow, and i'm not going to pay the $20 for fake service) because if they did, the scam wouldn't exist at all

so all possible nuanced conversation about windows is completely drowned out by the bellowing bazaar atmosphere of the unending scam and there's no possible way i could get out a detailed question without being screamed over by fifty guys hawking fake baseball tickets

so i periodically want to get mad about this but then i remember that windows pcs are so commonplace that they have simply become a public conceptual space, and all public spaces will be occupied by panhandlers until you stop ignoring poverty and do something about it

this is the equivalent of being upset that you can't comfortably go get a sandwich because the part of town with all the good delis has a bunch of homeless people who keep yelling at you whenever you're there

their problems are way bigger than yours and you have to recognize that even though you do wish you could get a sandwich. the problem is that convenient sandwiches are a luxury of a healthy society; we don't meet the prerequisites yet.

we'll be able to fix our computers once we do something about global capitalism making every single country in the world a hellhole nightmare with either massive incentives not to get a normal job, or no jobs available

so i say "i wish i could pay someone a lot of money to fix my computer properly" but what that really means is "i wish i could use my money to elevate myself above the turmoil of the lower classes as they thrash uselessly to try to stay above the water"

some of the clueless celeron owners being preyed upon are wealthy, but most aren't, i'd say. the scam demographic is people who only have $20 to waste. i think it's easier to scam the poor than the rich because the amount you're stealing is so much less impressive

so yes, if there was a $300 service i could use, i probably would be able to get quality work, because the scammers wouldn't operate up in that range. it's hot enough that people might bother with e.g. chargebacks and make things difficult for them

but of course the $300 service doesn't exist (or if it does, it's just a dressed up $20 service) because there's *so much* scamming going on, so much malware, that they'd just be swamped by people who have the money and want impossible repairs

computers are a clusterfuck. they often can't actually be fixed without as much effort as actual surgery, but nobody is going to get paid doctor money to fix them, and if they did, it would be like a brain surgeon doing the same hopeless aneurysm repair 20 times a day