This kind of performative "empathy" people talk about in online forums is not true empathy. It's frequently the case that prioritizing this fake "empathy" results in bad outcomes. It saddens me when people use "empathy" to justify policy with strongly negative overall consequences. It's how you end up with, for example, the disaster zone that large chunks of San Francisco were before Lurie started cleaning up a few months ago. Or the deplorable state of our healthcare system.
You're bringing in all sorts of unrelated things here. The simple reality is that expecting a 70-year old to leave their entire life behind and move to the city just because of a relatively simple issue like this, is deeply and profoundly unemphatic. As is the general principle of not accepting that some people may want to choose a slightly different life from what you might choose for yourself. No one is asking the world here. These are small accommodations at best.
Nobody's asking them to leave their life behind! Talk about bringing in unrelated things! I'm saying we should recognize that lifestyle choices have consequences and that's OK. Not every consequence needs mitigation by third parties. Having to use a TOTP app and/or make a 20 minute trip into town to use some web services is not an unacceptable price to pay for the lifestyle choice of living in a remote area, and we shouldn't be vilifying people or branding them "devoid of empathy" for not prioritizing support for that use case over other, higher impact things they could do to improve their products.
