Who cares. Reddit is dead to me, and spez murdered it.
Reddit was amazing. I will always enjoy and fondly remember what it was like before Spez fucked up one of the most reputable cultures and brands in internet history. Fuck that guy… just… what a fucking shithead to destroy something so wonderful.
I just wanna look at memes, cats, and news and hang out in the comment section without being exposed to ads, is that too much to ask?I hope their IPO sucks and they get shorted i to oblivion while they bleed off users month over month, because thats whats going to happen if they keep pulling this sort of stuff.
The user base is also incredibly toxic. Anytime you post a public picture you get ridiculed for using it to host pictures. Which is the entire point of it yeah? Sure you can also treat it like social media, but without the basis of posting pictures, it wouldn’t exist.
I was convinced imgur was sold to Reddit. Although when searching for this it looks like I was wrong and they were instead sold to MediaLab, though apparently also a very shitty company.
I dunno there have been rumours that their IPO is just around the corner for years now, idk how they justify it reddit just isn’t set up for that sort of growth model. Its users (at least before all the nonsense) I’d say are on average more likely to use 3rd party apps, ad blockers and not engage with the kind of activity that normally creates revinue (thats frankly why I’m here I’m a reddit refugee from appolo). My guess is all this activity is prep for going public but I just can’t see it going well.
It’s basically when a private corporation goes public and offers shares of their company to the public for the first time, as well as listing on a major stock exchange. It’s worth noting that private corporations can issue stock to individual shareholders, those shares just aren’t traded on the open market.
This is one of the things I like about Lemmy. I can scroll through and be done in 10-20 minutes. More if I want, but otherwise, the rest of the day is mine for the taking. It’s like I’ve escaped and reclaimed my time.
Honestly, this is part of a broader trend of enshittification sweeping the Internet these days. It’s not just spez, it’s any SV bro from the current crop of technology companies. I think this is a lesson worth remembering for all of us who took the freedom and magic of the Internet for granted.
Absolutely. Cory Doctorow’s Def Con 31 talk really nailed it. I’ve listened to it like 3 times. He is the person who coined the term “enshitification” and the talk describes what it is, how it happens, and some things we can do to prevent it. The Q&A at the end is also awesome.
I’ve been back a few times for specific communities that haven’t moved over, so like once or twice a week
It’s much like when I initially went from Digg to Reddit; it was dramatic then with time it was less unless until one day I realized I hadn’t been back to Digg in forever.
I only go back when there’s an answer to a DDG search. There’s so much valuable information there, but as time goes by, that will change and the answers will become less accurate. In ten years, it’ll be a graveyard.
Who cares. Reddit is dead to me, and spez murdered it.
Reddit was amazing. I will always enjoy and fondly remember what it was like before Spez fucked up one of the most reputable cultures and brands in internet history. Fuck that guy… just… what a fucking shithead to destroy something so wonderful.
It’s going to take years, but Lemmy will kill Reddit. People like authenticity. Reddit will lose authenticity as it antagonizes its user base through its monetization efforts.
A core group of people who value that authenticity above all else migrated after Reddit betrayed its values this past summer. They will be the early adopters of this brand new community. It’s happened before on the internet. People hate bullshit. They want to connect with real people that have good intentions and are good faith contributors, free of the influence of investors trying to monetize those relationships.
Yeah every time Reddit pulls some shitty stunt, we get a new influx of angry people demanding algorithms, whining about federation being too complicated and picking fights.
It’s like the bar just closed and everybody’s going to 7-Eleven to be mad about it.
Honestly you took the words right out of my mouth. I literally could not have said it better myself. I hate that man, and his company for what they did to one of my absolute favourite pieces of the Internet. Reddit will live in on history, because I sure as hell won’t go there anymore.
Reddit will keep making horrible decision after horrible decision, completing the process of enshitification, until they slowly piss off their remaining userbase one by one until they have nothing left and go the way of Digg. It’s gonna take a long time because people hate change, but they usually hate bullshit more than that and everyone has a breaking point.
Who I blame doesn’t matter. I just stopped using it. Spez doesn’t care that I’m gone. Neither does the board. I don’t like current reddit. But I’m under no illusion that they will to clamor to keep the users that want vpns and anonymous viewing.
A large group of data providers using the site is better for them than a huge group of content sharers.
Conspiracy theory: I think the whole Pao thing was a power play to make spez more powerful and played the userbase like a fiddle by doubling down on reddit’s built in misogyny and anti-authority/corporate bent at the time.
I was active on reddit for quite a while and by contributing and visiting the site making reddit money.
I have no desire to feed their greed and what they pulled with their API pricing was nothing but greed and shortsightedness.
I’m gone from reddit for good.
then is trying to lose as little money as possible from this ordeal
Bro he could have just bought it and done nothing and he would have been better off. I don’t have the same read that you do. My read is that he had specific strategic political interests in buying it and the money/ value/ revenue shit is secondary.
or everyone could recognize that he is far more malevolent toward you than any hacker could possibly be, but yeah, they definitely have no security that worries about YOUR data
It’s not about trusting some idiot. It’s about attaching your identity to your activities online. I remember when these websites used to advise against doxing yourself.
And journalists if they report on him negatively, or oppose his Russian “peace” talk suggestions, even if it puts their career in danger where they live. Peak freedom of speech absolutism!
Ironically, it’s going to be a bunch of “libertarian” tech bros who use crypto for “privacy” who will be the first to give Musk (and by proxy every world government) their ID.
Probably most monero users dont use kyc exchanges so i dont think they will use kyc twitter let alone the first ones. This may kill twitter, but there is lots of stupid out there like those crypto and bitcoin users lol so you never know.
Hush Money case for Stormy Daniel’s, a former Playboy model, and a 3rd woman
34 felony counts - Falsifying business records in the first degree
Classified Documents Case
32 felony counts of willful retention of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act
6 felony counts of obstruction-related crimes
2 felony counts of false statements to the FBI
1 felony count attempted destruction of evidence
Attempted Coup (January 6th)
1 count conspiracy to defraud the United States "by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit to obstruct the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election"
1 count conspiracy to impede the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding
1 count conspiracy against the right to vote and to have that vote counted
1 count obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct and impede, the certification of the electoral vote
At this point it seems like nothing will ever happen to him, ever. He seems likely to remain free to commit more crimes, whine endlessly, swindle money from idiots and further harm the country.
Thank you for listing out all of Trump’s charges from the indictments.
Here is a refresher about the recent indictment and charges related to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6th insurrection.
Trump pushed the big lie that the election was stolen. Trump lost in the courts^[1] including the Supreme Court.^[2] Then he tried to pressure state officials.^[3] He tried to pressure Pence.^[4]
So what does Trump do after exhausting all nonviolent methods of overturning the election? Trump turns to his supporters and lights them up making inflammatory statements such as;
We are going to fight for the survival of the nation.
Now is not the time to retreat, its to fight harder.
We will never give in, never back down, never surrender.
We will fight like hell.
You have to get your people to fight.
Trump primed them for weeks.
State officials had started getting death threats weeks before the attempted insurrection following the general election.^[5] Trump saw first hand what violence was being created as his supporters rioted and vandalized black churches in Washington back in December.^[6]
Trump didn’t stop his incitement after the initial violence, he got more specific. He told his supporters how, when, and where. He gave them 18 days notice inviting them to the rally telling them to be there, that it will be wild.^[7] And on the day of the insurrection Trump told his supporters to march on the Capitol and fight like hell.
Following the riot Trump continued to promote the big lie that had incited the insurrection. After the mob was dispersed, Trump praised and sympathized with the mob in a video he released, claiming once again that the election had been stolen.^[8] Then he praised the insurrection in a tweet after the mob had been dispersed. He told his mob to remember Jan. 6 forever. He said that he loved the insurrectionists and that the violent mob were special people.
In a phone call, Trump tried to pressure officials in Georgia into making tens thousands of votes disappear to try and steal the 2020 election. They found no illegal votes, refused to overturn the results and began receiving death threats from Trump’s supporters.^[1]
After Trump had exhausted all legal forms of overturning the election; From having over 60 frivolous lawsuits thrown out from all levels of courts including the conservative leaning Supreme Court (Trump picked 3 justices out of 9), and after his Attorney General Barr resigned (an individual that covered/stalled investigations for Trump), Trump turned to his stalwart supporter in Vice-President Pence. A lie was pushed that Mike Pence could refuse to certify the election results as he presided over the counting of the ballots of the electoral college during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. Pence refused this illegal power grab. Having no further recourse Trump incited an insurrection during a rally Trump held at the same time the E.C. ballots were being certified. Trump’s supporters erected a gallows, stormed the capital where several people subsequently lost their lives including police officers. Politicians were incredibly lucky they escaped. For example Capitol Police Officer Goodman’s quick and heroic decision to lead an angry mob away from where congression members were hiding probably saved many lives. This mob was chanting hang Mike Pence, many of whom wore tactical gear, carried zip ties, and used flagpoles, fire extinguishers, and chemical sprays as weapons while attacking police officers that protected Congress.^[2]
So good to see you here, PoppinKREAM, after the reddit debacle. It gives me hope for the kind of informed, careful, and comprehensive analysis on Lemmy which is, after all, your calling card.
Though there’s no way to really prove it unless you know some personal things about me that I can prove. But I tried to stay somewhat anonymous other than being a Canadian anthropologist who works in athletics lol
As per @doc suggestion, I have edited a comment on reddit I made a few weeks ago to include my Lemmy handle.
I do believe it is you, hiya! I’m being perverse as a matter of policy.
I try not to get too invested in identities anyway. I look at the user if I need the context to evaluate their frame - but usually, you know when you’re reading insightful commentary.
Even if it wasn’t you, someone copying your well-sourced comments would be welcome but I’m also super happy that you could validate using your reddit source content.
Back on Reddit, most of my saved comments were from you, PoppinKREAM. Glad to see your detailed (and well sourced!) explanations are here on the lemmyverse now too.
…audio from Trump advisor, Steve Bannon, surfaced from October 31st, 2020, just a few days before the Presidential election.
Let’s listen. [Begin Videotape]
STEVE BANNON: And what Trump’s going to do is declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory, but that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner. The Democrats — more of our people vote early that count. Theirs vote in mail. And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage — that’s our strategy.
He’s gonna declare himself a winner. So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm. Also — also if Trump is — if Trump is losing by 10 or 11:00 at night, it’s going to be even crazier. Because he’s gonna sit right there and say they stole it. If Biden’s wining, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.
I want to print this 1000 times, wrap it in a plastic binder cover letter so I can use it to smack people upside the head with it every time they utter the phrase “bOtH sIdEs”!
I am afraid that Jan. 6 will be seen as a mere skirmish before their real battle against democracy. I hope that wherever Trump will be taken for court and prison will be sufficiently safeguarded from the mind-washed lunatics.
you gotta hand it to him. It is impressive to collect so many charges and still be out of jail.
Is it a quality that recommends him for president, or any position of power as menial as being the guard of a parking lot? God beware no! Get him away from any power, any money and anything where he could harm people, because he will do that for sure!
I mean if I wanted my guy to win no matter what and didn’t care about democracy I’d probably go for the dude who has a friggin cult following and sells boatloads of merch who has already attempted to change the results of multiple elections by any means possible, because if they win there’s a chance they’ll never have to worry about winning again
They’ve been trying ever since the Bush years to deny reality. Ever since WMDs they’ve been sore that reality has a liberal bias, and have been stubbornly hanging on, in the hopes that once they get past this one scandal then Republican values will win out, just you wait.
It depends which segment you mean. At the core, the party is run by idealogues, and pirates. The idealogues really believe in looney religious shit (as in, "jesus is coming!" or "demons"), or insane economic theories. The pirates don't give a fuck about ideas or religion at all - they just want to steal money from the government and through rigging the economy.
My comment applies to Republicans broadly as a whole. Regardless of their motivations, they all find reality inconvenient and when their policies failed (WMDs in Iraq War, 2008 financial meltdown), they tried to blame others rather than admit their policy was the major cause.
It’s wild that there are so many charges, and in such a short timeframe. It feels like just yesterday that we weren’t sure if he’d ever be charged with anything…
When I heard that this was the 3rd indictment, I found myself thinking, “Ok, there’s the Mar-A-Lago case, but what was the first one? Ah…”
In the future there will be entire college courses dedicated solely to the Trump era.
It’s wild that there are so many charges, and in such a short timeframe. It feels like just yesterday that we weren’t sure if he’d ever be charged with anything…
Investigating, assembling all the evidence, putting together the case is a very involved and time consuming process.
Especially if you want to get every single little detail correct in order to make the case as bulletproof as possible.
For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.
Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.
But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.
Holy shit, an actually reasonable take on Lemmy regarding subscription services. I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was reading and was waiting for the “LOL, JK! Pirate everything, they don’t deserve my money and fuck every ad and paid service ine the universe.”
ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.
I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.
That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.
For sure. Subscriptions have to have some sort of value add, and in a world where I was king they’d be illegal otherwise. Spotify: songs you don’t own are being delivered to you. Value add. Dropbox: storage you don’t own is being provided to you. Value add. BMW’s heated seat subscription: you already own the heaters, the controls, the vehicle, and are paying for the battery that energizes those heaters and the gasoline that charges the battery. No value add. That’s just rent-seeking.
I would also even say that a show/movie subscription makes sense. Except all of the services have already preenshittified themselves to the point where it’s literally more convient to just pirate everything.
So far spotify hasn’t done that so I’ll continue happily paying for spotify even though I’m a filthy pirate. Hell, spotify could double in price and I would still be perfectly happy with the service I’m getting.
its not the subscription service that’s bad its the implementation of the subscription services that suck and you 100% should pirate and adblock every piece of media you consume unless its directly profiting a small creator otherwise youre setting a precedent that 18 subscriptions should be required for me to follow a tv show.
pirating was dying down in popularity until this rise of the current shitty corporate media garbage. money is the only thing that matters on this god given earth do you really think your money is better off in a corporations mega stock with a super small portion actually being given to a creator?
and if you say more things in life matter than money then go on without money, youll be completely unable to enjoy anything. solely off the basis of youll starve because low and behold we’ve monetized eating and drinking. two fundamental requirements of survival.
welcome to earth where ur either bombed by powerful people or youre blackmailed by the cost of living (designated by powerful people) enjoy your stay (or die the world doesnt actually care they just want your money, and dying is pretty lucrative for funeral homes anyways)
The difference is that music streaming services actually offer a better experience to most people compared to movie/tv show streaming services for example.
Choose whatever music streaming service you prefer and you get pretty much the same huge selection of songs across the board. You can pick based on features and user experience. With movies and tv shows, most content is exclusive to a single platform. So you have to keep adding/removing subscriptions unless you want to pay north of $100 a month to have all of them at the same time. Every streaming app has a different interface and different features, and some might not work on all your devices. Piracy isn’t only cheaper in this case, but actually more convenient. It’s the better product, even when you leave pricing out of the equation.
Sure, some people will always resort to piracy, but there’s a direct correlation between the quality of service offered and the amount of piracy.
I can completely understand tv content piracy for convenience alone (and sure, it’s cheaper/almost free, that’s definitely a factor), but I never even thought about replacing music streaming with pirated content, because it’s just super convenient.
we have a family subscription (12€/mo.?) in our household, and i would probably not go back to pirating music anytime soon. they offer genuinely great features and from your post, they don’t seem to be the bad guy here. anyway, if it’s not shutting down in the next couple of months, i’ll keep using it. but they do neet to get some FLACs onto there soon.
if there existed something like spotify for video streaming, i probably wouldn’t even pirate movies right now.
Yeah, Spotify has supposedly been working on a lossless option, but it's been in the works for years now. Don't have a clue what the hold-up is, especially given that other services have it already. Tidal and Apple Music have it already if it's something particularly important to you.
That’s more or less the problem (one of many problems I suppose). Companies seem to think it’s a good business model to burn money collecting a user base and then turn all their free users into paying users down the line.
it’s like this to eliminate competition, any alternative has to fund marketing costs + unsustainable pricing, while Spotify will be running their ponzi scheme, effectively leveraging their market position.
I’m absolutely not defending Spotify or any other capitalist entity, but profit by no means constitutes a reason to exist. I know plenty of people who have never turned a profit and in fact accrued debt who are far more valuable than any executive at Spotify.
I just don’t give a shit if Spotify or any major labels exist. I buy records and merch from independent labels run by people that actually have a soul.
Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all.
This is bunk. If people pirated the record labels out of business we would have less music sure, but there will always be people who make music for the love of the craft, rather than just to line an executive's pocket.
I'm all for directly supporting artists (and I buy albums and merch directly from the band wherever possible), but let's not pretend like the people pulling the strings aren't also responsible for the shitty situation they're in.
Fuck the recording industry and how they treat artists. And I say that as a premium streaming service customer.
If you still have to work a full time job to live, that’s a lot less time available to create art. You sound like you’d expect artistic friends to give you a discount on their work “to get their name out there”
Agreed, I have Spotify premium for the convenience, but I have no illusions about where that money goes, which is why I go to concerts and buy vinyl records when possible.
The amount of it would still be dramatically reduced. Those people who are making music solely for the love of it already exist today and people are perfectly welcome to listen to them; nothing is stopping them at all.
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
Of course not, and I clearly called out that there would be less music if there wasn't an monetary incentive to do so. But at the same time, record industry titans falling would leave a massive vacuum that would be filled by more independent artists and labels. In the end, there would be less music overall, but there would still be some way for artists to get their cut.
Industry titans aren't music, they're merely the middlemen who craft what they think the public wants to hear and leech money from artists. Them falling would be a boon to the smaller and more niche acts who don't get the chance to explode because they don't have the weight of a major label to push them into the spotlight.
Thank you for calling this out. Also, art is not about volume. What does it matter if I can listen to 10,000 tracks that sound like bunk vs 10 tracks that touch the fabric of your being.
Also, what if you genuinely love a lot of music? We do exist.
I would feel drastically unfulfilled music-wise, if I only had around 10 songs to choose from. I listen to music way too often for that. I would absolutely start to get bored of the same songs after a bit. That’s only about one album’s worth.
For me personally, using a music subscription service just makes sense right now. I am very busy, so I don’t have time to pirate everything anymore. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t do it again if push came to shove, but I’m not at that point.
I like that I don’t have to worry about things being hidden in the files. I like that I don’t have to worry about suspicious websites. I like that almost everything that I want to listen to is right there, in the same place. I like that it comes with a music player. It might not be the absolute best sound quality out there, but I also don’t have to sort through a ton of apps to find an app that works.
I didn’t take it literally lol. I was just stating my experience in response to someone else’s comment. If I see “1000” and “10” in the parent comment, I’m probably going to use “1000” and “10”. It would feel weird if I threw in random new numbers, I guess.
To me, all of this is more of a “you do you” thing. I’m sorry if I made it seem like I was angry or upset with you. I actually think that it’s cool that both are options, honestly. Freedom of choice, and all that.
I didn’t think you were angry anything. I just wanted to say in proportion there would still be tons of music to consume. I’m similar, I will break into a new genre even when everything starts sounding stale… except, I know of the hundreds of songs I listen to there is only so much time in the day to find new music and I go back to the stuff that really hit me.
The ideas is you can literally create thousands, hundreds, millions of songs but if the people churning them out are no talent hacks you may never find 10 songs that move you. If anything you are helping my argument.
But I first need to be able to listen to a shitload of songs to identify the ones I want to hear over and over. Without streaming services, I would be heavily restricted regarding discoverability.
It’s still not a good justification for making the free version completely useless. Those limitations are just ridiculous; I miss the days where paying for a product only meant getting rid of ads and gaining some exclusive features. Maybe they should also reduce the label share instead of always making the customers pay more. I refuse to pay a subscription for non-trivial things like music; they can still make money off me with ads when I use the free version. They can increase their profits with other features like they are already doing by allowing people to buy merch from Spotify.
Those days were built on the backs of venture capital. They were never sustainable. Now you’re on the other end, and it’s either deal with more ads and more restrictions, or pay up and get rid of all of that (or use something else).
I assure you, Spotify would love nothing more than to reduce the label share - it's not as if they love giving away almost all the money they make - but they also have next to no real leverage, since the labels have all the power here.
Again, Spotify loses money with every single free user. There may exist some balance point where they can actually reach financial stability by converting a large chunk of them into paying users, and I don't think can really blame them for doing what they can to achieve that.
That doesn't mean it doesn't suck to lose features you liked, but an individual not liking something doesn't make in immoral.
I doubt major labels can live without Spotify as much as Spotify need major labels. They can push users to pay for Spotify by adding more cool features for payed users instead of removing fundamental features of the free version. Forcing people to pay is never the right solution
The labels could murder Spotify in a day if they decided to simply stop offering them licenses and went exclusive with Apple, Amazon, Tidal, or anyone else.
The labels of course do get quite a lot of money from Spotify so they don't have much of a reason to do that, but again, they really are the ones that hold the cards.
This is business. The only right solution is the one that gets them closer to financial stability. They have been developing features for the paid tier and have been exploring other revenue streams (hence the deep dive into podcasts), but ultimately, they have absolutely zero obligation to give away content for free.
Ok, forget about reducing the labels share. I think the other points i made about finding new ways to generate more profits are still valid and better than making the free version almost useless. If spotify wasn’t profiting from free users too they would shut down the free version completely
Spotify isn't profiting at all; that's the entire problem.
It's banking on the hope that offering a limited free tier will encourage some amount of users to become paid subscribers, while offsetting the cost of operating that at least a little bit by serving ads. It's unfortunate that you can't make sufficient revenue by just operating a free tier that's truly sufficient, but those numbers quite clearly do not work.
I mean, are you saying that you would be complaining less if Spotify simply killed the free tier? I rather doubt that.
You said that spotify isn’t profiting at all then explained how they profit a bit for it. I’m sure they would make more profits by finding alternative way to make money like artist subscriptions than from pushing people to subscribe by making the free version almost useless and yes I would complain less if Spotify killed the free version. I only use spotify on desktop to support artists by playing a playlist of artists I want to support on repeat with almost inaudible volume. All music I really listen to is locally either from music i bought or pirated music
I think what he means is that even though they’re offsetting the costs, they still aren’t profiting. Let’s say it costs Spotify $30 per free user per month, some of whom become premium subscribers for $10 per user per month. That means for premium users, it still costs $20 per user per month. The free users are still costing $30/month though, so they show ads to reduce that cost to $25/month, which is less of a money sink, but still not outfit
What a waste or resources. It is doing stuff like this that forces the companies to put restrictions on the users. Please stop playing music you are not listening to, for everyone’s sake.
It takes ads to bandwidth and server costs for Spotify. The ads on Spotify are worth less than before, because the ads have less reach. That means Spotify will have to play more ads to cover cost, and because the revenue per ad will go down. Maybe your little action has an insignificant effect, but if millions did what you did, it would have a drastic result.
Never mind that doing this will give your favorite artist a few more pennies at the cost of a different artist that didn’t get his numbers inflated. You aren’t doing some great good to save the planet.
I used to not mind paying for Netflix because it was better than trying to pirate things. That has changed 😅. It’s still easier to pay for spotify premium than try to pirate music. However, I would be cautious as they may try to make additional changes to the premium tier (price hikes without actual useful additional features) that would make it not worth it. Looking at the year in review that spotify does every year, and I listen to a TON of spotify between work and personal use I probably listen to 12+ hours a day so it would take a lot for me to ditch it but not impossible.
Who would have thought that good old dumping at a large scale and inadequate economic regulation would lead to companies basically “starving” themselves in a Mexican standoff?
And it’s not just Spotify it’s a major chunk of the tech companies, because no one learned anything from the dotcom crash.
These aren’t the only options. I’ve gotten into Bandcamp and it’s great because I can listen to an album multiple times before deciding if I want to buy it. Then when I do, I get a DRM-free FLAC copy to keep forever, and a much larger portion of money goes to the artist.
Sure it doesn’t have the extreme catalog of Spotify or things like social playlists. It’s very album-based (which I like personally) and takes a little more effort to choose what you listen to. But I’ve had no difficulty discovering new artists and great tunes.
Of course the company has problems too. The new buyer just laid off half the staff and says they won’t recognize the union, so we’ll see how it fares. But even if it goes under, I keep the music I bought.
Can you elaborate? I can find articles that say there have been layoffs but what does that mean for the platform and how it supports the artists? Is it basically dead and not worth using anymore? I want the large majority of my money to go to the artist not the label or platform shareholders, is there something similar to bandcamp in that regard? Don’t suggest physical media please a lot of artist either don’t make any or are extremely difficult to find and buy.
They were bought last year by epic games. Now they were sold to songtradr, probably because it wasn’t profitable enough for EPiC. As part of that more than half the people were let go.
They’ll want their money’s worth, so prices fo up, or in this case the percentage cut. My bet is also the enshitification is starting soon. For now it’s fine, the future, probably not. But that’s just my guess.
Yeah this isn’t Spotify’s fault really. It’s a cringe over prostitution of the industry with increased server cost, record studios asking more in premiums, and growing pains from increased salaries. It’s unfortunate we can’t ever just let something exist for the sake of general good without the greedy asking for their take when it becomes popular.
Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn’t have any music to enjoy at all.
That is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
This is ridiculous. Spotify has been effectively doing dumping as an economic policy, and now that they have a sizeable portion of the market share, they’re turning to enshittification to make a profit. I see nothing defensible in that. The fact that they can’t turn a profit means that they’re trying to drive out competitors with less VC money.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps, and especially not ones engaged in anti-competitive behaviour, and it’s embarrassing to defend that. I’ve never used Spotify and I never will, but the idea that they lose money on every user tempts me. I second the other guy in the comments: If it isn’t economically viable, it shouldn’t exist. It’s just wannabe monopolism otherwise
Fundamentally, no industry can survive on VC money forever, so there simply has to be some kind of crunch eventually, either by reducing the product, increasing the price, or both.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps
I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist. Spotify is not going to be able to operate at a loss forever, and while there is a discussion to be had about what level of profit is warranted, I don't think it's a particularly wild thing to say that the answer is at least non-negative profit.
If it isn’t economically viable, it shouldn’t exist.
What I genuinely don't understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn't exist if it's not economically viable, and at the same time, you'll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn't offer the free tier because it's not viable, and you'll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?
I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist
Except what made the product attractive to the consumer are the very things making it unprofitable. Minimal ads, unlimited streaming of any and all music you want. Without that might as well stick to terrestrial radio, at least that doesn’t use up your mobile data.
What I genuinely don’t understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn’t exist if it’s not economically viable, and at the same time, you’ll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn’t offer the free tier because it’s not viable, and you’ll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?
The point you dismissed as a “nice sentiment in abstract” applies here: it’s completely irrelevant to the consumer. If Spotify dies we will just go to Apple/Amazon/Youtube Music, and if they all die that’s then iTunes and MP3s get to make a comeback.
Spotify’s profitability is Spotify’s problem, no-one else’s.
Yes we’ll all go back to those services and be worse off for it. The reality is, nobody outside of this congregation of websites wants to go back to downloading mp3s. Truthfully, most people on here don’t either. I have a TB SD card that’s over half full with flacs and I still use Spotify because the features it has are more convenient than setting all of that up myself, let alone trying to pirate older music that’s relatively obscure. You ever felt what it’s like to sit on 6 different torrents for the same album for 2 weeks with no seeds?
I was a young child during the napster days, and by the time my parents had anything better than dial-up iTunes had already taken off.
Maybe I’m less into music than most people, maybe most are music enthusiasts who actually take full advantage of all the music, all the time, for a low monthly rate thing but i mostly listen to the same small handful of artists with only the occasional breakout towards newer things. If Spotify and YouTube Music were both to die all I’d have to do is spend a larger amount upfront but then I’d be back to pretty much the status quo, and without the monthly bill. So for me any sort of significant changes in price or quality of service completely negate the sole reason I bother with music streaming and that is convenience and cost.
There’s a lot to the features that Spotify provides. First, there’s the social side: collaborative playlists, “jam sessions” that let your friends add songs to the queue, Spotify wrapped, etc.; then there’s the functionality side: I can play a song on my laptop and pick up right where I left off on my phone, or even switch to my phone while it’s still playing, the recommendations are great and, increasingly, people are turning to Spotify-curated playlists rather than making their own or selecting songs individually. All of those are things you can’t replicate easily outside of Spotify, with the exception of recommendations.
And remember, music is incredibly present in people’s lives. It’s almost always in the background, people use it to study, to drive, to cook, to work, to party, to hang out with friends, to destress, and for a myriad other reasons. Not everybody’s a music enthusiast, per se, but people listen to a lotttt of music.
I’m not saying you should use Spotify, but if Spotify and its competitors just disappeared, a lot of people’s lives would be worse for it
If it isn’t economically viable, it shouldn’t exist.
If you’re claiming this as an axiom, I disagree. Public transit isn’t economically viable. Homeless shelters and soup kitchens aren’t economically viable. Increasingly in the modern world unbiased news isn’t economically viable. If you’re handicapped in some way you’re probably not economically viable. Honestly the human race isn’t really economically viable. Some things are objectively good and should exist at any price.
Now, I’m not under any delusion that Spotify is one of those things. Lol nope. But the statement on its own isn’t really a defensible one, and I think only the most strident Randian libertarians would try.
If you’re not claiming this as an axiom, and just saying that if Spotify in particular isn’t economically viable it shouldn’t exist, then I can probably get on board with that. But for my family’s mental health, I think a service like Spotify should. Or the return of a plurality of online mp3 storefronts.
I seriously do not believe that companies running major online services continuously for over a decade have not made a profit. This must be Hollywood accounting.
It's not at all a coincidence that this happened at the same time interest rates were rock bottom. Lyft has never had a profitable quarter, nor has Spotify. I think Uber has had a few, but they've also heavily struggled. Netflix does well, but no other video streaming service has been profitable. Disney+ has already started to dial back on production as a way to cut costs. Reddit has been around for a long time and isn't profitable.
Capitalism isn't actually as easy as a lot of people think it is. To make sense of this, you have to realize that in extremely low interest environment like we had, the primary business objective is not profit, but rather, growth. Especially in the tech world, you're trying to sell a story to investors that you're creating an entirely new market that you're poised to absolutely dominate, and that if they simply give you money now, rather than getting some profit in the short-term, they're going to wind up owning a lot of extremely valuable shares in the next Microsoft, or Netflix, or whatever. Debt is very cheap, and so tapping into that stream of investor money doesn't cost you much at all, and you can build some cool new thing that people like a lot. The problem comes when the chickens finally come home to roost, and the investors expect to get something for their money. That is currently happening, now that debt is much more expensive and investors are much less willing to take big risks, which means that those services that were living off of investment money now need to either establish that they can actually make the numbers work or perish.
Spotify, for instance, is sitting on nearly two billion dollars of debt. Now, they're not in the worst position, because for better or for worse, the labels need some streaming services because that's simply how people consume music today, so the labels will have to keep it alive on way or another. But it doesn't change the fact that the numbers need to add up eventually. Reviewing Spotify's sheets, they're not in a terrible position though. They lost $453 million in 2022, but they also spent $1.48 billion on research and development. They've been doing a lot of development on podcasts and ML-based recommendations, which is probably where a lot of that went, and the kinds of engineers that work at Spotify don't come very cheap at all.
Now, you'd probably say that they could simply not do that and content themselves with being a perfectly adequate music streaming service, but if they announce that they're doing that, it opens a huge opportunity for a competitor to go guns a' blazing to try to develop a bunch of flashy new features to steal customers. Additionally, the labels, and indeed musicians as well, don't want music to be cheap. They want it to be valuable and so desirable that people are willing to pay a decent amount for it. Musicians aren't exactly selfless saints either; no one really is. Plenty of artists, of all genres, could easily make their music completely free to access, play free concerts, and personally cover all associated costs with doing that. But they don't, because at the end of the day, everyone wants a slice of the pie.
So they would rather take in more debt at an unfavorable time than to maintain a profitable leading business or even to limit research investment to a sustainable level? That really makes it sound like being unprofitable is a choice rather than an inevitable reckoning with a fundamental unsustainability of the business.
Yet ultimately they make up for those excesses by squeezing the customers more.
If investors, knowing all that you do for this long, continue to approve this approach, then it seems like it’s itself a mechanism to try to extract more out of a market that could have been stable. In which case referring to it as an inevitability to be blamed on customers who aren’t really paying its worth doesn’t seem quite accurate. After all, if they were, the investors would be seeking to expand in some manner, right? Which means these businesses aren’t allowed to simply be profitable, and customers will always be on the hook for that.
But still they can’t be quite so unprofitable to be unsustainable or they would just fall apart. If hollow hype was enough to keep investors in, we wouldn’t see tech fads come and go so quickly. Seems to me that most tech companies don’t get to survive their “unprofitability” for so long.
That really makes it sound like being unprofitable is a choice rather than an inevitable reckoning with a fundamental unsustainability of the business.
Yeah, for a while it is a choice. Finding an audience, finding a customer base, finding product/market fit, all of these things take time. But after a while that choice gets taken away. If Spotify doesn’t start making money soon, its investors probably won’t stick around much longer.
Seems to me that most tech companies don’t get to survive their “unprofitability” for so long.
A massive subscriber number absolves a lot of sins. Not unprofitability, though; at least not for very long. Hence platform decay.
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Well, hypothetical speaking, if there were two completely absolutely identical jobs, but the one had a ping pong table. I might choose the one without and ask them to get a Foosball table, since I’m no good at ping pong.
Most places that have HR like this work their employees too hard for them to have time to use a ping pong table anyway, so it’s really just a hollow gesture.
Ping pong tables are loud as fuck and disrupt the whole office. If they invest in a soundproof room to put it in, sure. Otherwise it just makes you feel like a massive douche.
It’s always about autonomy, one way or another. People want to be able to control how they work and what they can get out of it. For some that does mean more money, for some it would mean less stress, for others it could means less meetings.
It’s pretty easy for management to address all of it by just giving people more power over what their work lives are like, but that could mean less control over their workforce. No “owner” wants that, to them, they own their employees’ time/work life.
Eh. Toxic work culture can drive people away regardless of the pay. Obviously some people suck it up but not everyone. Ultimately the goal is to treat employees well all around. Good pay, benefits, and work culture will keep people happy.
My last job had a pingpong table. We’d even use it occasionally. That is, until people started getting pissy when they’d see us playing pingpong. Then management started bitching that we were playing pingpong instead of working. Eventually, nobody was allowed to use the pingpong table - it just sat there, in the middle of the room, with brand new paddles and packs of balls that we weren’t allowed to use.
The money was okay - not great, but not terrible. After some management fuckery, I left for a $10000/yr raise and 100% work from home. I’ve gone up $20K since then, been promoted to senior, still have upward trajectory, and still work 100% from home. I have a desk in Memphis somewhere, but I’ve never actually seen it.
My employer really covered their bases. We have ping-pong, pool, and foosball. That guarantees that everyone has something that will keep them from quitting.
If I had been well paid and treated well I would not have ever started that job search. Further even just having one of those two thing might have kept me from looking.
At that job I hit the tipping point of both. It’s was getting shittier everyday and the pay wasn’t budging year after year. Finally mid-Covid the power flipped to the employee and jobs were much easier to get. I started looking and jumped shipped.
I have autohotkey configured to insert the current date in ISO 8601 format into my filenames on keyboard shortcut for just this reason. So organized. So pure.
Download Autohotkey, and create a new script. Paste these shortcuts into the script and restart the script:
#NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
; #Warn ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors.
SendMode Input ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir% ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.
:R*?:ddd::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime, yyyy-MM-dd
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return
:R*?:dtt::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime, yyMMddHHmm
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
Return
Now, if you type ‘ddd’ on your keyboard, the current date will be typed out, eg ‘2023-11-23’.
If you type ‘dtt’ tgen the datetime stamp will be typed out in YYMMDDhhmm format, eg 2311231012
There are so many cool things you van do with AHK to make your work more productive. For example, rather tgan typing your email address a billion times, add the shortcut:
Lithuania is one of the Baltic States, conveniently squished between Russia & Belarus to the east and the sea to the west. Across that sea is Sweden. You’ll usually see three countries be the parts of this set. Lithuania is the southernmost of these three.
(This doesn’t consider the separator) Cyan - DD/MM/YY Magenta - MM/DD/YY Yellow - YY/MM/DD The other ones are mixes of those two colors, so e.g. the US is MM/DD/YY and YY/MM/DD (apparently).
Also just noticed I didn’t attribute this picture, I’ll edit my comment.
We are ridiculously inconsistent in Canada. I’ve seen all 3 of the most popular formats here (2023-11-22, 11/22/2023, and 22/11/2023) in similarish amounts. Government forms seem to be increasingly using RFC 3339 dates, but even they aren’t entirely onboard.
Funny thing, in ISO 8601 date isn't separated by colon. The format is "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+hh:mm". Date is separated by "-", time is separated by ":", date and time are separated by "T" (which is the bit that a lot of people miss). Time zone indicator can also be just "Z" for UTC. Many of these can be omitted if dealing with lesser precision (e.g. HH:MM is a valid timestamp, YYYY-MM is a valid datestamp if referring to just a month). (OK so apparently if you really want to split hairs, timestamps are supposed to be THH:MM etc. Now that's a thing I've never seen anyone use.) Separators can also be omitted though that's apparently not recommended if quick human legibility is of concern. There's also YYYY-Wxx for week numbers.
In many of them but not all, because it’s become convention and has been enshrined in their documentation policies. cGMP just requires that your quality management system has a policy in place that specifies how to document the date, and when exceptions are allowed (for instance, data printouts where YYYY-MM-DD is often the default).
It’s also the reason some labs require you to initial/date every page of printed data, and some only require you to initial/date the first and/or last page. I’ve seen FDA auditors be okay with both, as long as you can justify it with something like: our documentation policy defines the printout as a copy of the original data, and the original data as what’s stored on machine memory with electronic signature; versus: our documentation policy defines the original signed/dated data printout as the original data. In any case, it still has to follow 21 CFR part 11 requirements for electronic records & signatures, where the only date predicate rule example they give is 58.130(e), which itself is broad and only applies to non-clinical lab studies. It’s notable that the date format 21 CFR 11 itself uses is actually Month D, YYYY, with no zero padding on the day.
And if you don’t have IQ/OQ/PQ documentation showing how you locked down and validated the software’s ability to maintain an audit trail you can’t even use electronic records (or signatures).
YES! I wish more people knew about RFC 3339. While I’m all for ISO 1601, it’s a bit too loose in its requirements at times, and people often end up surprised that it’s just not the format they picked…
Huh, I’ve never noticed how much bloat was in ISO 8601. I think when most people refer to it, we’re specifically referring to the date (optionally with time) format that is shared with RFC 3339, namely 2023-11-22T20:00:18-05:00 (etc). And perhaps some fuzziness for what separates date and time.
“I can reuse this old function if I just monkey-patch this other class to work with it, no one will have any issues understanding what’s going on”
Edit: Thought this was the programmerhumor community. For context: A monkey-patch is when you write code that changes the behaviour of some completely different code when it is running, thus making its inner workings completely incomprehensible to the poor programmer using or reading your code.
Had a coworker who used MMDDYY with no dashes. Unless you knew it was very hard to figure out, since it could also just be a number that happened to be 6 digits, too. At least YYYY-MM-DD looks like a date generally.
I know they probably actually meant the States of the US, but…
They did say states with a lowercase s. ‘States’ = regions within a country, ‘states’ = can mean countries. Technically they aren’t defaulting to the US.
Technically no. Greenland is a country but not a state. It has a sovereign government but is not represented directly internationally. It is part of the Kingdom of Denmark which is a state but not a country. Then there is Denmark proper which is also a country but not a state.
Next step: there’s a good argument to be made that the United States is not a nation. tldr: a nation is a group of people sharing ethnicity, language, culture. The United States is a country united by an idea, not an ethnicity.
Many countries other than the US are comprised of a federation of states. And also those that aren’t are generally considered nation states or sovereign states, which are still definitively states. The United States of America do not have an exclusive right on statehood.
Plus even though it may be implied that the original replier intended the context to mean the United States of America… it is a valid response with further implication that one should check their local jurisdiction’s laws if they were so inclined to do so.
The UK, for all its problems, does typically have some of the best consumer protections in the world. I can see Amazon being forced to overturn this if there’s enough uproar (which there might not be tbf, seeing as they gave extra credit as compo).
And is that amount of money enough to replace the item that’s been taken away? Like if the DVD were widely available at the same price at the time of the digital purchase, but you got the Amazon “purchase” instead (for convenience?) then what are the odds that you can still get the DVD for that price today?
They will. My experience community building thus far is that if you can build up one anchor community to the point where people are organically sharing content and commenting, other adjacent communities will start to generate the same sorts of things with smaller subscriber bases because that anchor community is keeping people’s eyes here. Just a question of time.
Yes, when you make a post look at the line where the ‘save post’ button is at the bottom of the entry. There will be two overlapping squares. That’s the crosspost button.
I’m dying with the lack of baseball communication. The biggest Baseball and Atlanta Braves communities are pretty much dead and I really miss talking ball.
Phillies fan checking in. Agree. I have a community with a bot that posts game updates like Reddit (which is nice) but the game threads are mainly me posting once or twice and one or two other people with side off comments. No community engagement so to speak. Long way from the Reddit game threads of several thousand comments.
Feel your pain. I’m constantly thinking, what the hell do I have to do to get r/orioles to follow me over to Lemmy to grow the numbers? They are one of the only things left at Reddit that I regular look at. But 99% of the mod and user base there just doesn’t care about the the issue.
Conversely, that means that at least sports spaces are among the least bot-spammed places on Reddit. So there’s that.
The best thing you can do to help is to comment on threads. I know it feels weird to comment in an empty post, but it does tend to spur lurkers to respond.
Sports is definitely hard to have take off in these sorts of spaces, since sports are generally talked about much more amongst regular/casual users, than the more tech-savvy crowd who are willing to try these things out.
It’s the same on the biggest ActivityPub platform (Mastodon) - the really popular regular subjects such as sports and cars just don’t have a presence there.
I was lamenting the lack of an NFL community here but no way in hell I’m joining a Dallas Cowboys community regardless of how much discussion it generates. 😆
Shameless plug for !baseball (check out our sidebar for the team-specific communities). We’ve got the game bots ported over and are working on improving them and adding new features.
I agree with !matt though, the Venn diagram of sports fans and tech-savvy lemmy pioneers is pretty small. You can help by posting and commenting to attract more users. More content == more users (eventually).
I’m usually a lurker, but I decided to just go ahead and make one that I was missing. Something about personally wanting Lemmy to grow is motivating to me.
I made an XCOM community on Lemmy.world, and even though I’m the only one posting so far, it’s fun to watch the subscriber count grow. Already at 50!
Please definitely don’t be discouraged in the slightest, TPM.
Single-game forums were almost always the smallest gaming subreddits on Reddit, often times being several orders of magnitude smaller than the “gaming in general” communities.
But that special feeling of having other people passionate about that specific game you love can’t be beat. Hang in there, and you’ll definitely grow and get that engagement in time.
May I suggest doing an informal poll of some sort to boost engagement? I’m not that familiar with XCOM, but it’s a pretty big series with a lot of games, right? Maybe just a simple “which is your favorite XCOM game?” thread.
Totally agree! I just have been a registered reader on Reddit. Now, it’s the first time I’m participating - might be considerably because lemmy is trending. Nevertheless, I found communities and post I’m interested in within minutes - 👌🏼 whereas Reddit was mostly clutter.
I’d also expect another big jump when clients like Sync and Boost get their apps for Lemmy online. That will attract an enormous amount of users from reddit.
You need both though. Memes and shitposts to scroll though and chuckle, and then quality stuff to engage on. Lemmys got that, and the momentum will keep it growing.
I tried lemmy like a year or so ago, and it felt so stale. The technology is there, but the content just wasn’t. That’s clearly changed now. 😊
Would be nice if there was a way for posts to be flagged such that memes and shitposts and more serious discussions could be separated, so you could filter depending on mood.
Yep, also an easier way to explore/sign up and filter instances and their different pages. I’m new and have no idea what I’m doing regarding that. So far I’m just signing up to instances and hoping new interesting stuff appears on my page… I’m on Lemmy.world as I assume we all are, how do I view the different pages on this instance or is it all just in a singular feed?
Hit the communities button near the top of the page to subscribe and view. You don’t need to sign up to more instances unless you really want to, we can post on any federated instance. It’s weird at first but you’ll get it.
Discoverability is something that could definitely use more work. Right now I recommend the site lemmyverse.net/communities, which is searchable and shows subscriber and active user counts. It should help you find where the most populated communities for your interests are located, if they already exist over here.
Your front page has three feeds. All is just what you’d expect. Local filters to only show posts from your home instance (lemmy.world in your case). I find it’s mostly useful if you’re registered to a smaller instance and want to keep up with local concerns.
Home shows updates for all communities you are subscribed to.
I’m on sh.itjust.works, others might be on lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, feddit.uk, etc., but we can all interact with each other. That’s one of the benefits of the fediverse.
I thought I was gonna be able to quit Reddit full time. Didn’t look for a few days, then did. Still check since some niche communities aren’t over here (or active) yet so I have to go there. But I only still check every few days (I was a several time a day redditor so usage is down) and I’ll check Lemmy at least once or twice a day now.
It just definitely needed to hit a critical mass. Enough that people had enough to read, stick around, and post themselves. Which in turn created a place that new people felt had enough content.
It’s also about search engine indexing. It’s happening slowly, but I’ve noticed Lemmy posts are finally beginning to show up in Google/Bing search results. As this trend improves, more people will stumble here by accident and then join out of curiosity.
The most depressing thing I’ve seen related to this topic. A small team that worked incredibly hard were lucky enough to achieve the impossible, and now they watch without any control as it is taken from them, for no other reason than greed.
Due to unchecked neoliberal capitalism, big companies like Sony already cover so much of the developed markets, that they have no way to naturally grow more. So they are forced to squeeze more out of what they already have, as stagnation is not accepted in this hellish system.
Including lying, controlling narratives, committing outright fraud, controlling the fate of companies through “consultants”, changing the definition of Recession, killing of whistleblowers, killing of journalists who help whistleblowers, to name just a very short few.
This system blows, how many millenia does it fucking take to figure that out?
Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been-one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the purchaser of meat. That was true everywhere in the world, but it was especially true in Packingtown; there seemed to be something about the work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and ferocity-it was literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human lives did not balance a penny of profit.
Upton Sinclair
I read The Jungle a few months ago and its aged so depressingly well. Nothing has changed, it was obvious what was happening long ago, but we’ve done nothing but watch it get worse.
We haven’t done nothing. There’s Rojava and the EZLN building whole competing systems. There’s loads of people doing mutual aid or building cooperative economic structures all over the world, and those movements are gaining a lot of traction as people are waking up to how shit things are.
You don’t usually hear about all these projects, in the same way you may not notice termites hollowing out a structure until it’s far too late to save it.
I hope you have noticed that Rojava is next to Turkey, has lost much of its territory to Turkey, and can lose the rest anytime. Definitely fighting against it better than a certain UN member state too bordering Turkey (I’m being ashamed of Armenia here), but still.
EZLN may be in a better situation. Mostly because in Latin America “live and let live” seems to be not such an idealistic approach, since I’m confident there’s a lot of force which could squash them.
But only on one topic. Yes the FDA was created in large part from outrage over food condtions described in the book. But that really is only one chapter of the text, the majority of it deals with the exploration of workers in ALL sorts of industries (not just food), how preadatory home loans lead to finical ruins, how voting systems are rigged and how our policing system only produces more experienced criminals, not reform.
The last 2-3 chapters are explicitly socialist talking points that are still being said, for good reason, today. If the book was as influential as Sinclair wanted it to be, then we would’ve seen FAR FAR FAR more than the FDA.
I mean, heck, reread the passage I copied in. It’s not really about food.
So you’re intentionally exaggerating when you say “nothing has changed”. Yeah nothing has changed, except an entire Executive Branch department that didn’t exist before. It was more influential than many other books written at the time.
Of course the author wanted the book to be even more influential, that’s why authors write. No writer says “this book kinda sucks, I hope people read half of it and put it down”.
You can “uh actually” my phrasing if you really want to, but playing tone police is to miss my actual point how these are long standing and well known problem that Sinclair spoke about extensively.
If you don’t have anything meaningful to contribute to the conversation, it’s okay to just keep scrolling.
The devs that made Helldivers MUST have been aware of Sony’s mandatory PSN policy. This is just a sob story and throwing Sony under the bus at this point.
This would have been less of an issue if it remained enforced from the start. Re-enforcing it after demonstrating it clearly works without makes it look scummy and greedy. People could also easily refund if they didn’t agree. Now its too late.
For a lot of people it now looks as: now that the game is a success we want to collect everybody their data as well so we can make even more money.
Tbh, other games just require a 3rd party account without linking them explicitly. This requires an actual link which ( likely ) gives them access to a lot of your steam information which you’d rather NOT give to a corp that doesn’t seem capable at guarding people their data.
That is true, but it I’d an additional hurdle. Sony is playing it smart.
They made an announcement and had a bunch of Outrage now. If they had just enforced it people would have refunded on mass probably. Now people can still actually play.
I’m guessing steam might be less eager to refund when the actual deadline hits. I also feel like a lot of people will just cave and link/create the account.
That’s definitely what Sony is expecting. And it’s also what I’m hearing from friends. That they dont want to, but that it’s a fun game ans they’d rather keep playing with friends.
The thing is that it was enforced right at the beginning. There was a period where you couldn’t play without a PSN account, before they made it optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player numbers.
It’s an issue now because it wasn’t stated clearly enough and loudly enough that not having a PSN account was only temporary, and I think Arrowhead screwed up because they didn’t know that PSN accounts aren’t available everywhere and so were selling the game in places that couldn’t play it unknowingly.
Steam is usually pretty good about refunds and has apparently already pulled the game from the store in places where you can’t make a PSN account, so I imagine they’re planning to refund the game. This looks like the kind of thing that could be class-action lawsuit worthy.
The thing is that it was enforced right at the beginning. There was a period where you couldn’t play without a PSN account, before they made it optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player numbers.
That’s what I heard as well. I was a bit dumbfounded when I read that it suddenly became mandatory.
I think Arrowhead screwed up because they didn’t know that PSN accounts aren’t available everywhere and so were selling the game in places that couldn’t play it unknowingly.
I think this is the most plausible reasoning. It’s what I’m thinking as well, and also what seems to appear through the CM. In which case it is a screwup on their end. Though in 2024 I do get you’d expect people to be able make an account anywhere in the world for a company like Sony.
Steam is usually pretty good about refunds and has apparently already pulled the game from the store in places where you can’t make a PSN account, so I imagine they’re planning to refund the game. This looks like the kind of thing that could be class-action lawsuit worthy.
If they did that’s good on them, but not wholly their responsibility. It is a good move to prevent new purchases they’d have to refund anyway ( or until there is clarity on what will happen in those regions ). I would kind of expect the publisher to do this once they figured out this was possible though :/
You have to put in an actual support ticket. There’s examples of people who wrote something like “The publusher is forcing me to sign up to a 3rd party and I do not consent”
Re-enforcing it after demonstrating it clearly works without makes it look scummy and greedy.
Day 1 policy was that PSN linking was mandatory. Arrowhead execs knew this. Players who bought the game in non-PSN countries should have gotten a pop-up banner saying as much instead of the payment screen.
Im not even sure if the game would have taken off at all. Psn servers couldn’t handle the load which is Why it was disabled ( temporarily ) in the first place.
A lot of people, including myself, never even linked the psn because I could skip it.
In what world is that a mobster deal? The game initially released saying that PSN accounts were required, this is in every store front description. The devs clarified that was not enforced due to technical issues at release time.
Sony funded the game in the first place too. They didn’t take advantage of a moment of weakness. This is all contract stuff agreed upon long before release.
It absolutely sucks ass, but this is an incredibly basic business deal. Sony stepped in to provide server support because it’s Sony’s game, and Sony makes money off it. Now that the game is more stable, they likely went back to Arrowhead and said “Hey, it’s time you sorted out the contracted requirement for PSN accounts. You agreed to this.” and here we are.
Maybe Sony told Arrowhead that PSN accounts could be made by everyone. Maybe Arrowhead thought they could push back on the requirement after the game came out without them required. We likely will never know what went on behind closed doors.
But this isn’t shady, just absolutely monumentally fucking shitty.
Unfortunately, as long as refunds are handled reasonably well like they were with Cyberpunk 2077’s PS4 release, gamers won’t really have a leg to stand on. It’ll just be complaining that they can’t play something they wanted to play, after getting a number of hours in it for effectively free.
I didn’t think that’s necessarily true. They were contracted to make the game by Sony and when they started probably had no idea it would even be sold on PC.
Why do you care that a company as scummy as Sony is getting thrown under the bus? Outside of this fiasco Helldivers was a pretty great game. If throwing Sony under the bus gets this decision reversed literally EVERYONE wins, and honestly, as the Publisher, thats probably one of the things that comes with the title, taking the heat for shitty ass decisions that could otherwise tank a game
Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…
So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.
Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.
I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.
This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.
Or make a game that doesn’t rely on those resources. I was considering getting this game when I got a system that could handle it. I’m gonna stick to my single player indie stuff.
This is like saying to any sort of person involved in commercial agriculture “don’t buy a John Deere tractor if you don’t like their draconic business practices.”
Like… there’s not really many other choices if you want to make a game that can do simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.
I mean, unless you want them making something that has massive difficulty coming to console… like maybe Lethal Company is the only recent example I can think of that’s a small non-major publisher-backed title that has networked 4-player multiplayer… and even then i’m not sure what sort of challenges that dev had when trying to implement any sort of netcode for gameplay.
Funny. I’m in thew ag sector and I would not recommend anyone buy a NEW John Deere tractor. Not unless you have the skill to flash the tractor firmware.
My peak multiplayer era was from then Arena shooters were kill. I don’t touch Live Service games because of what we’re seeing now. This game was going to be my first real try at one once I got a system that could play it as a lot of people were commending how it avoided the pitfalls of other Live Service games.
Just give me a game with a map editor and the ability to self host servers. The community itself will take care of the rest.
simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.
Quake 3 Arena came out in 1999 and has versions for AmigaOS 4, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, iOS. There’s even fewer differences between PC and console hardware now a days.
Have you tried Splitgate? They came out with a Forge-like map editor last year, and the gameplay is basically Halo mixed with Portal. It’s pretty fun and totally F2P. The only things you can buy are cosmetics.
This is the situation we’re in, even if you don’t like it. Yes, communities can take care of a lot. Yet for so many people the creation process and love of a product is why they create, not the money. I cannot blame the devs for wanting their game to reach as many people as possible. Nor can I blame Sony for wanting to make money, without that desire we wouldn’t have as many opportunities to play amazing titles as we do, though we can absolutely blame the way that money is made.
So perhaps you may have gone a different route. Maybe it would have worked, maybe not. Maybe many of us only recognize John Deere, and maybe people in the industry know of alternatives. Point is, I am hesitant to blame devs for nearly anything nowadays. Because this isn’t 1999, these titles aren’t for the PS1, Dreamcast, or even PS2 or original Xbox. It’s 2024 my dude and they had to make a choice: Get the resources, finagle some barely working alternative, or get help. I think many of us would have done the same.
Go shit on the big companies who are almost always the problem. Everyone else, man… they’re just making the shit they want because many of them love the process. We’re lucky we see so many projects reach the light of day, especially when for every successfully finished one I’d bet there are a 100 which are scrapped part way through.
What’s the difference to the end user? I’m supporting indie devs by buying their retro shooters. Asking for server software and map editors don’t hurt the the devs. It hurts the stock investors that demand the line goes up.
What I don’t buy are Live Service games. This game was going to be my first in a while after being burned the few times I’ve tried before, but Sony thought they could fuck around.
The idea that there’s a high amount of technician problems that need to be overcome to achieve crossplay though is nonsense. Just pick an engine with proven netcode and go from there. The biggest issue would be whatever red tape the console manufactures put up.
I mean netcode for pc-to-pc games at least isn’t really rocket science. I’m not as familiar with the crossplay aspect, but I’d hazard a guess that it is only difficult because console manufacturers have locked multiplayer networking behind their own subscription services. I can understand why they went the route they did, but maybe crossplay is overvalued if the cost is stuff like this.
Community hosted servers worked pretty damn well for a very long time, and aren’t reliant upon large amounts of infrastructure to continue being playable. In fact, I can still go play almost every game from that era that was good enough to maintain a player base without issue. Deep Rock Galactic seems to do alright without matchmaking, for a more modern game.
How do you propose bootstrapping a dedicated community? Genuinely asking, is the plan for there to be a dev-hosted service for a while until the community either develops or fails to develop, then to hand it off?
The developers can host a few servers, sure, that’s an option. If that’s the method they take, they also release what’s known as a dedicated server utility, that allows anyone to launch a dedicated server on their machine, or to rent out a server in a hosting center. You can find this model in games such as Counter-Strike, Quake, Unreal, and some of the Battlefields.
This allows for the community to self police, and people will naturally end up in a community that fits their preferences, and rude or toxic players will quickly find themselves banned from the majority of servers and be forced to change their behavior or play a different game. Players can modify server settings, or make entirely new game types that the developers may not have thought about or wouldn’t have the resources to create, and people can create tools that allow servers to easily moderate their servers, and elect moderators and admins from within the community for when they’re not online. This also allows for developers to negate the need to be able to host millions of players, and when the game dies, if it does, all they have to host is a Master Server list.
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Another option, especially for games with small groups of people is to allow the game to be hosted live by one of the players in the squad or group. This is called peer-to-peer servers. In this case, and can either be done by “hosting” the game server and waiting for or inviting players, or by having the game monitor latency and automatically migrate to the best host based on connection and distance. Deep Rock uses the first of these two options, whoever starts the game becomes the host, and stays that until they close the server or quit the game. In this instance, devs host no servers except the master server list, allowing even the smallest of devs to be able to handle millions of people playing their game simultaneously without any real increase in their server costs.
Typically, for smaller squad based games, like Deep Rock, this is the better option, while for larger player per match games like battlefield, the former is the better option. In both instances, players choose from a list of available servers in a menu and load in from there. You can check out Deep Rock Galactic or the Diablo 2 Remaster to see what a server list looks like.
? Open server browser and whatever matchmaking system. Matchmaking doesn’t require the game be Live Service. Despite recent actions by Epic, running a Master Server for listing available games doesn’t actually cost that much. If you’re asking about Stat Tracking, I couldn’t care about that if you paid me. I’m sure you could track that reliably on a server by server basis. Maybe have different communities that trust each other have a Stat Network.
What does it matter if the game “launches successfully” if it doesn’t sustain itself? They knew theyd likely lose their players but they were hoping theyd be special - this game is not successful in the end.
Your entire argument boils down to: they wouldn’t have been able to cheat us into thinking this was a good game without sony. If theyre going to take my money and kill the game anyway, it would have been better to not make it at all. That’s what thousands of indie devs have to contend with every day.
I think his argument comes down to, don’t hate the playa, hate the game. Far better for them to have made the game, as it clearly is a good game. The publisher coming in and shitting all over everything is what makes the situation bad. Hopefully, this can serve as more inspiration for indie devs (who do make most of my fav games) and maybe lead to more studios not accepting Sony as a publisher. I can’t fault Arrowhead for wanting to make what they love, but I can hope Sony burns to the ground never to rise again.
Unless there’s evidence that AH got a special deal, there’s no chance they didn’t know this was an eventual requirement.
I’ve been an engineer in the AA/AAA games industry for almost 2 decades, my job often involves assessing the technical feasibility of games that big publishers like Sony want to invest in/ acquire.
Someone somewhere at AW agreed to shove PSN sign-in requirements in the deal, hoping it would blow over like many games before. (e.g rocket league / epic account debacle). Now the devs are sorry it’s not working out and say “their hands are tied”, but they must have known this was coming. There are way too many legal ramifications for this to be a random power-move by Sony.
Edit: sony apparently lifted the requirement today
I’m gonna be honest. It didn’t matter to them at the time. Look at it. They made their game and we all played it and loved it. For that time they were on cloud nine. They definitely got what they wanted, for a moment anyway. I can’t say I wouldn’t end up in the same situation if I was ever more than a shit dev.
Edit: but to add, I’d put huge banners in game saying it was a requirement at login. As far as I know I was never bothered in game for it. And if I was it was too easy to click and ignore.
I agree with you that they most likely needed the money to do what they wanted to do at that scale.
But I think my point still stands. Because it is a deal with the devil in the most literal sense that is possible. You get to your goal faster, easier or at all but in the end you have to ask yourself if the price you paid for that was worth it when the devil comes collecting. That is the moral of the fictional Storys, isn’t it?
But to add to this. I think we, as consumers, aren’t completely innocent either. Buying only the best looking, 1000 hours, other buzzword games. This undeniably sends a message to indie devs which can lead to people making self harming decisions.
One could argue that we got groomed to want that. And I do. All those blockbuster-games that were made under gruesome conditions are unsustainable. But we didn’t knew that. We thought that they were the new normal.
But now we know better. This is just normal if you walk over corpses to get to your goal. And if we want developers that value our time and mental health, then we should value developers time and mental health in return.
Which means showing them that we will buy games that are not those 10 million dollar productions. And that we will measure the quality of the game compared to the resources that went into that particular game and not compared to a game that had an unholy amount of resources to burn through.
In the end we need to find a way to cut out all the rich people who came into the gaming industry as it broke into mainstream, who are throwing their weight/money around and bully everybody into submission.
And that needs strength of character. It means not buying the new shiny thing that we have seen an add for the hundredth time today, no matter how much we want that. It means not taking that deal which will make that problem go away quicker.
If gaming has taught us anything, it is how to prevail against overwhelming forces. That it takes compassion, companionship, a bit of anger and sacrifices.
If we haven’t learned that, why the fuck are we even playing.
If you don’t go public with your company, some other company will go public, and buy your company or your customers from under you with the money they got from Wall Street. There are some companies that can try and resist, but the field tilts against them.
When you own something and someone comes to offer you money to buy it, you have this thing called “No” you can say, and then they don’t buy it. It’s a pretty neat hack. I learned it from Gaben.
Epic is trying to IPO and has all kinds of investors. It tried to undermine Valve by buying out its partners by just spraying money at them for exclusives - you know, “disrupt” the industry. Steam prevails because they are real good at what they do, and they had a head start, but it takes a Gaben to not sell out, a good team and a lot of luck to manage that. Steam is playing against a tilted field is what I’m saying, and is one of the few players who successfully are managing it. They are the exception.
The point is that you can say no to selling it, but for that to work you need to:
Actually own a deciding majority of the thing
Have a good enough product to resist your business partners (eg. game developers) being paid with investor money to switch over to you, sapping value from your product.
The point is that if Steam wasn’t so much over the competition, Epic could have taken market share over with the exclusive deal shenanigans, or publishers could have started up their own marketplaces. The biggest reason for that is that Steam was early to the party and could get to a good product before others tried to enter the market.
If Steam didn’t have that, people would have switched over to Epic and publisher stores, and we’d be bitching over Steam not having any good games on it because of backroom deals.
Yes, when you own the thing you can say no to selling it. Why is this point so hard to understand? Even if you don’t have a monopoly or even if your product sucks you get to say no.
It’s not, they’re making a separate but contiguous point about how the market naturally incentivizes shittier tactics from it’s participants, and how Steam, Valve, and Gaben are exceptions to the rule.
The point I’m making is that let’s say Gaben did not have the headstart or the loyal player base. What is Steam or Valve? Its customer base or market share? Those are for sale, they can be bought with “free” services, exclusive deals with publishers, or other fuckery. Its team and employees? How would you pay them without revenue if someone else is price dumping the market?
Yes, Gaben could keep the logo with the bald guy with the valve on his head, but that’s pretty much it. Everything else he has to fight for, invest in, keep alive. And the opponent, Wall Street, has literally unlimited money.
What I’m saying is that it’s not as simple as “just don’t sell out”. And I’m speaking from experience, not as the sellout guy, but as the employee where the company was sold out from over me a few times already.
i think you are right in your assessment but I would argue that consistency also is a crucial factor.
It may be harder because of the things you say but in the end the people who invest money (into everything but the games themselves) are just in to make money.
They will try to squeeze as much money out of the customers without losing them. Or at least without losing Profit. Losing customers and still making more money is a valid strategy it seems.
People will notice that. Some earlier then others but it will get noticed and then they leave. To the next thing.
You are right with the headstart etc. so as a Dev you should accept your limitations and instead focus on the things that you can control (to an extent) and that is planing the budget in a way that you can be consistent.
And when people are looking for the next thing, you will be there better then before. Then you got customers and an image that seperates you from the rest.
There are a lot of console exclusives that I like. I think an argument can be made that companies like Sony and Microsoft can add funding and support to make games better, sacrificing profits for console value.
With Xbox failing for another console, putting out half-baked products, and buying IPs instead of creating new ones, I’m worried that Sony will just start maximizing profits.
Sony brought out a console that was almost impossible to buy and has no games. Now they try to inflate their numbers by forcing people to make psn accounts. Fuck them. Not that i ever planned to buy a playstation, but i make sure to stay away from everything sony related
I play FFXIV and Warframe. I don’t have a PSN account and crossplay is fully functioning with both Playstation and Xbox users. Heck, Warframe is even available on Switch and crossplay works just fine with those users without any account linking.
Yes, but presumably you have accounts with those games? If not, you can play with people on those platforms but you can’t play with specific people on those platforms (e.g. a friend on the platform – which is the bigger deal in my mind with crossplay).
Like, the PSN account is the equivalent of a Bungie, Paradox, or Crytek account, something that allows the game developer to maintain a cross platform friends list? No?
I suppose they could use a room code invite system for crossplay but that’s way less convenient.
I never got into Hell Divers because it legit would not run on my system so I’m not super up on all the details but that’s been my impression of why they might want it.
Either way… With all the negative feedback I’m surprised they’re not screaming from the rooftops “we’ll do something else!” I understand Sony is tying their hands as well though.
The most depressing thing I’ve seen related to this topic. A small team that worked incredibly hard were lucky enough to achieve the impossible, and now they watch without any control as it is taken from them, for no other reason than greed.
You were right though. And it’s only because we were all so furious about what they were doing and raised such a fuss about it that they decided to renege on that.
Compared to other countries, yes. And that’s not even comparing it to the US, which would be like kicking someone lying on the ground.
Try riding a train in rural France, outside the 5 TGV lines, for instance, and you’ll pray for Deutsche Bahn. Ever been to the UK?
But we could have much better PT if Germany weren’t the world’s greatest car exporter by far and the ministry of traffic deep in the pockets of automobile makers, that’s true as well.
Been in Colorado for the past week or so. You guys are a lot further ahead than Illinois is. Lots more bike paths and lanes, better traffic control that doesn’t result in stop and go movement, overall a lot more green space in your shopping centers and in human spaces, also lots more walking areas.
Don’t beat up your state too much, it’s fantastic compared to mine. :'c
I’m from So. IL originally and been to CO 4 times. Colorado is so much better in my opinion. People biking and jogging everywhere, everyone I met was really nice, like went out of their way to help my friends and I nice. Obviously that’s not everyone there, but it was the experience I had. Overall, it’s probably my favorite of the states I’ve been to and hope to go back, maybe permanently, someday.
I’d love to be a gatekeeper saying “we’re already full, turn back around”, but I’m a CA transplant myself. Personally, I’m looking to leave myself: too cold most of the year, and it’s getting really $$$. YMMV
So, as a not very smart man. Wouldn’t underground roads be better? I feel with it being underground it’d be easier to manage pollution and install some things to fight it.
Underground roads are crazy expensive. You need something to hold up the earth and anything else above it. There’s issues with water leaking in. Piping will have to go around it. If it breaks down somehow it will take longer to repair. It’s only really an option if the detour would be a lot longer or within urban areas for the extra space it frees up.
Or if you know, having greener spaces and roads underground are actually better for climate change. I’m not sure if this would help in that matter or not, but I think it’s a possibility. Not everything is about our made up concept of money.
What’s better for climate change is less cars on the road, not underground roads. If we are going to be digging these expensive tunnels in every city they should be for subway systems. That would be a substantially better use of the funds and would be a good step towards reducing the emissions of a city. This is all assuming that we stop subsidizing car ownership so heavily of course.
The entire process of building and repairing roads is pretty carbon intensive due to the amount of concrete involved.
I doubt it would affect pollution significantly. It’s not like both ends of the tunnel aren’t open to the air. It would definitely locally displace it so it’s not distributed across the above ground length of the road, but the same amount more or less (minus whatever adheres to walls) is still coming out of either end.
Underground tunnels also have the danger of fires rapidly spiraling out of control and in the past have killed dozens of people, and that was before electric cars became common. I would not want to be in a tunnel when a Tesla’s battery explodes.
I’m not saying this has no advantages, but for the trouble and cost it seems like a train would be better.
Nothing underground generates oxygen, but moving the roads from above to underground gives more “it’s free real estate” to grow grass and trees, like in the second photo, which generates oxygen and stores carbon. It’s not the best thing like suppressing the cars all together, but it’s better than the first picture.
Yeah, I completely forgot about the whole fire thing.
When yku say it like that. It makes more sense. It’s a shame we don’t have super efficient ways to convert exhaust gasses into healthier gasses. But yeah, if it’s just a short tunnel, the entrance and exits would just not funnel it right. I wonder if really long tunnels would be better. Maybe being able to use the entrances with a system to input clean air and force the exhaust through vents.
And I wonder if those fire suppression systems that starve the fires of oxygen could be something that could be useful? But that’d require automated doors to seal the tunnel, and then if someone is trapped on there, the fire is the last of their issue. Unless there were refugee points that also seal, but then you’ve gotta make sure everyone’s in them. I wonder if some form of scanner could be used to allow humans in. But then there’s that thing where a fire has been starved, but then gets a sudden burst of oxygen and it becomes explosive. I forgot what it’s called. I’m sure someone actually smart could brainstorm it better.
It’s so backwards. Making this stretch of coastline walkable means more people show up, and if businesses realize this potential then they can capitalize. Makes sooo much sense
Fun fact this is actually the Rhine river that runs sort of ⅔ of the way through Düsseldorf, similar to the Thames in London or the Seine in Paris.
The other bank is much more residential and a little high end so it’s not really a gathering place for the population, whereas the bank shown in the picture is 2 blocks from a tram line that runs parallel to the river and runs into the heart of the CBD making it an extremely approachable body of water and pedestrian strip.
On the weekends, the city holds public events to draw people to gather on this bank like food fares, carnivals, concerts. It’s always packed on the weekends and generates a shit ton of foot traffic for all the pubs and restaurants in adjacent streets.
I had no idea all this was covered in highways just a few decades ago, making the city more walkable was an amazing choice. If you’ve never been to Düsseldorf before or don’t know anything about it, it is definitely one of the highlights of Germany once you’ve had your fill of all the war sites. Extremely liveable city without feeling overcrowded, and just a stones throw from the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.
I feel it’s more likely they don’t understand proper usage of quotation marks like that. They probably think they give emphasis; I see it all the time.
No, but it takes a person to control a company. A Person to direct the goals of a company. So I guess Tim Apple is somewhat involved if there is innovation or not.
In the last link it literally says: “These comparatively low wages can make it very difficult to recruit managers from investor-owned firm”
These concepts only work in relatively small companies. And first off all, this company might be ranked relatively high in Spain, but it still is just Spain.
Further, to my understanding, the group could be actually described as multiple smaller companies housed under a big one. So that explains that party.
I’m just fascinated with how brains like yours work. Assuming any of this is in good faith, that is.
It’s like you just refuse to accept new information that may change how you view things. You’re so resistant to admitting (to yourself, it seems) that you might be wrong, that your brain has “mechanisms” for making sure you never even have to consider the possibility.
Every single point anyone makes, you are able to come up with some “counter” that, in your mind, confirms that you’ve always been right (it doesn’t), and everyone who’s arguing with you is just trying to trick you into admitting you were wrong, or that you learned something.
It can never just be, “hey I didn’t know that about my country, that’s interesting. Maybe I should reconsider…” Because, you know, Germany has been the most financially successful EU nation basically since he inception of the Union, so your counter that worker stake in companies doesn’t work is not based in reality. They’re fucking thriving. You (allegedly) live there, my guy. Learn about why your own country is so successful.
The lengths you will go to avoid learning something new or admitting you might have been wrong about something… Like it’s protecting itself from new information. It’s fascinating.
I’m just fascinated with how brains like yours work. Assuming any of this is in good faith, that is.
I am a connoisseur of discussion. A man who enjoys discourse. But indeed what I stated are my firm beliefs. And those beliefs have not yet failed me.
It’s like you just refuse to accept new information that may change how you view things.
It always depends on the information. Some information just has less weight to it.
You’re so resistant to admitting (to yourself, it seems) that you might be wrong, that your brain has “mechanisms” for making sure you never even have to consider the possibility.
Now I feel like I’ve been put on the spot. This might apply on some of my standpoints. But none so far in our discussion here.
Every single point anyone makes, you are able to come up with some “counter” that, in your mind, confirms that you’ve always been right (it doesn’t),
Oh, just because the Information I have given, does not convince you or support your standpoint, doesn’t make it invalid. I’d like to pull up the Infinite Monkey Theorem at this point. A few false informations can also lead to the correct outcome. But now I have lost the thread.
and everyone who’s arguing with you is just trying to trick you into admitting you were wrong, or that you learned something.
And are you not trying to prove me wrong? Is it not, that you claim my standpoints to be somewhat flawed, and yours must be the ultimate ratio?
It can never just be, “hey I didn’t know that about my country, that’s interesting. Maybe I should reconsider…”
I do reconsider when it’s to my benefit. But as said before, my standpoints have yet to fail me.
Because, you know, Germany has been the most financially successful EU nation basically since he inception of the Union, so your counter that worker stake in companies doesn’t work is not based in reality. They’re fucking thriving.
Average wealth per person in Germany is lower than in Italy or Greece. some german article to back up my claims Germany are not thriving. The German government is thriving.
You (allegedly) live there, my guy. Learn about why your own country is so successful.
Because it has the highest and second highest taxes in many sectors. And the government uses this money to influence other countries to their benefit. My people are not thriving. I wished for a concept similar to Switzerland. Still high taxes, but the money stays in the country without attempts to control European politics.
The lengths you will go to avoid learning something new or admitting you might have been wrong about something… Like it’s protecting itself from new information. It’s fascinating.
From my standpoint of course, this is the opposite standpoint.
while I do completely agree with Apple depressing lack of any innovation recently, until modern foldable phones become commonplace, there is only so much you can do with a brick of glass.
That’s kind of a dumb way to make the point. Innovation isn’t necessarily apparent in a photo with no context or information. A bronze sword and a steel sword still both look like swords, but there a huge technological difference between them.
Your implied point was that there wasn’t any innovation, but there was, by your own admission above.
Don’t shift the goalposts by latching onto an analogy I made. The fact is that the technology has progressed quite quickly over the timespan represented in those pictures, and that fact underscores what’s wrong with the post you were responding to - it wasn’t a handful of rich folk that did it, it was the work of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. You had a much better point to make than the one you did.
Honestly, you seem like you’re having trouble being calm. I’m sorry if I played any part in making you feel that way, I didn’t mean to upset you or hurt your feelings. It’s ok if we don’t agree.
Man I am kinda sorry, that I invade your worldview.
But rich people don’t have all their money stored in a vault like Dagobert Duck. It’s all stocks.
And boy, if one of the companies make losses, then their money goes downhill. It’s volatile.
And due to immense concurrence in innovation in the tech sector, every investor has a huge interest in innovation.
And with many investment, the start of a company is ensured.
The current capitalism is the system that works best.
Especially the US capitalism is one hell of a driver in innovation. I live in Germany and many companies wouldn’t be possible here. Even though we have capitalism, it’s much softer than its US counterpart.
The downside of course is poverty for cheaper labour.
And that’s brutal, but it’s the reality we live in.
Though I wouldn’t want to live in the US without healthcare, on the counter side I wouldn’t want to start a company here in Europe.
UserDoesNotExist, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this website is now dumber for having read it. I award you one downvote, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Lol people like you that believe humanity will always overcome make me laugh. Talk to any environmental scientist and they will tell you we’re fucked. There’s no secret technology coming to save us.
Yea… I know what some environmental scientists are claiming.
But the earth has seen higher levels of carbon already. It has seen higher temperatures and lower temperatures. And we humans inhabit many climate zones already.
And yes, technology can save us. We have the means to control weather with highly reflective particles. Scientists are currently attempting to make fusion work (even though they are probably using a far too small magnetic field. They should have built it 10x larger in France).
And furthermore environmental scientists do not claim that we are fucked. They only claim that change is coming and that this change comes with a bunch of problems.
But the earth has seen higher levels of carbon already. It has seen higher temperatures and lower temperatures. And we humans inhabit many climate zones already.
This is like the “They can just sell their house and move” thing Ben Shapiro said about what people who live on climate change affected coasts will do. Who will they sell their house to, Ben??
Humans can inhabit many climate zones, but several of them will become uninhabitable. The ones that contain the most people. And those people have to go somewhere. And all of the food that used to be produced in that place is gone. All of the ecosystems in those areas die, etc. etc.
This is the “war and famine” part of climate change that people don’t often talk about. Most of the death and chaos isn’t going to be from people literally immediately burning up to death, it’s from the secondary effects of killing entire ecosystems and forcing billions of people to leave their homes or die. And the migrant crises that come with all of that. If you thought Syria was bad…
And you’re right, the earth has seen higher levels of carbon. The earth itself will probably be OK.
But the earth has seen higher levels of carbon already. It has seen higher temperatures and lower temperatures. And we humans inhabit many climate zones already.
This is like the “They can just sell their house and move” thing Ben Shapiro said about what people who live on climate change affected coasts will do. Who will they sell their house to, Ben??
My family fled several times in the past. During WW2 they fled from Ukraine to Poland, and when the Russians came, then they fled back to Germany. And then years later from east Germany to west Germany. Leaving everything behind each time. Every time was a goddamn reset. So what. It’s all about survival. Rebuilding has always been possible.
Humans can inhabit many climate zones, but several of them will become uninhabitable. The ones that contain the most people. And those people have to go somewhere. And all of the food that used to be produced in that place is gone. All of the ecosystems in those areas die, etc. etc.
So the problem is and always has been overpopulation. Another screw we should have adjusted in the past but refused to do so.
This is the “war and famine” part of climate change that people don’t often talk about. Most of the death and chaos isn’t going to be from people literally immediately burning up to death, it’s from the secondary effects of rising temperatures, drought, killing entire ecosystems, and forcing billions of people to leave their homes or die. And the migrant crises that come with all of that. If you thought Syria was bad…
I know about this part. And it is the only part that concerns me.
And you’re right, the earth has seen higher levels of carbon. The earth itself will probably be OK.
As humans, it has always been our responsibility to adapt. Not the other way around. Every being on this world influences the world itself. We cannot live without influencing our surroundings.
You successfully stole a few minutes of my life. Time I could have spent on studying and working further to my ultimate goal: becoming the next German dictator.
(••) ( ••)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)
Keep going, maybe I’ll actually read the next one.
First I need some unrealistic opinions to react to.
(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ Some more of your beliefs will do just fine.
The ‘future’ is not inevitable. There have been countless collapses in history. Our technology doesn’t make us immune. The people of the major Bronze Age powers probably thought the same.
Also we do not have the means for weather engineering. If you’re talking about SRM, we have no idea what its consequences will be or how to do it effectively. It’s all theoretical. No aircraft we currently have can do this stuff. Sure, we could design it and build one, but then you need global governance to actually implement it properly. Not to mention the risk of ‘termination shock’ and countless others.
This kind of futurist accelerationist thinking hasn’t turned out well in the past: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism?wprov=sfla1It always ends up feeding into Fascism. I wonder why.
Firstly, that isn’t ‘already done’. It’s a PR statement from the Chinese government about plans. The stuff they have already done, like reducing hail etc., is nowhere near the same level to what is needed to stop climate change.
Secondly,
Radical solutions such as seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles could theoretically help reduce temperatures, but could also have major unforeseen consequences, and many experts fear what could happen were a country to experiment with such techniques.
This is from your source ^
So is this:
In a paper last year, researchers at National Taiwan University said that the “lack of proper coordination of weather modification activity (could) lead to charges of ‘rain stealing’ between neighboring regions,” both within China and with other countries. They also pointed to the lack of a “system of checks and balances to facilitate the implementation of potentially controversial projects.”
Think of the geopolitical mess this kind of thing would create. If it works that is.
Sure, I like the idea of space megaprojects. I doubt sunsails in orbit would be profitable though. How would you monetise it? Put massive ads on them? Charge everyone a subscription fee?
Now, governments could probably do something like that, and I wouldn’t be against it if safety and unintended consequences were taken into account somehow.
Also, I thought you believed space exploration tech was useless.
I agree there are many solutions. I don’t think markets and capital are going to make them happen.
We can probably buy time with tech solutions. Long-term solutions will have to involve major fundamental sociopolitical change.
Sure, I like the idea of space megaprojects. I doubt sunsails in orbit would be profitable though. How would you monetise it? Put massive ads on them? Charge everyone a subscription fee?
Well, a fee could theoretically be possible. Farmers with plants that need shadow could pay for shielding. In the end the end consumer pays the price.
Now, governments could probably do something like that, and I wouldn’t be against it if safety and unintended consequences were taken into account somehow.
👍
Also, I thought you believed space exploration tech was useless.
Let me rephrase it: it’s boring. Nada used old ass Russian rockets for years. So there is not much innovation there anyway.
I agree there are many solutions. I don’t think markets and capital are going to make them happen.
I think that depends on demand. Some airlines already offer climate compensation packages. An additional payment to compensate your emissions. Such money could also be invested into sun shield projects.
We can probably buy time with tech solutions. Long-term solutions will have to involve major fundamental sociopolitical change.
I agree on the tech solutions. Let’s see them being implemented before chopping on the foundation of our economics.
I’m actually in favour of replacing most jet airliners with rail and maybe electric airships. Most short-haul flights can be replaced by rail; it’s much more pleasant than flying anyway. Jets can be reserved for long-distance journeys. Being able to hop on a blimp would be cool, even if it’s slower. We can make them much better and safer with today’s tech.
I don’t like the ‘green offset’ thing because it makes it look like we’re ‘doing something’ when it’s actually not doing much at all. If you want to be a utilitarian, it would be much more effective to just donate to an effective charity every time you fly.
My dude, your argument boils down to “this is the way we’ve always done it so this is the way it must be”.
Have you considered the possibility that if innovation were to slow, and companies DIDN’T insist on quarter-after-quarter growth, the world might just continue to turn? That while the richest individuals may be slightly less rich, the vast majority of people would continue their lives with no negative consequences?
My dude, your argument boils down to “this is the way we’ve always done it so this is the way it must be”.
But we haven’t done this always. As humans we have tried different attempts. Socialism, communism, monarchy, feudalism, democracy, capitalism, social capitalism, anarchism,…
And here we are now. After all those experiments.
Have you considered the possibility that if innovation were to slow, and companies DIDN’T insist on quarter-after-quarter growth, the world might just continue to turn?
But we humans are not made to chill. We need to advance as fast as possible. My parents and their generation did so. We now have AI becoming increasingly popular. And sooner or later I will hopefully have children. So I have to do my part, that the lives my kin will be better than mine. Better medical tech, better education, better transport, better tech,… Of course the world would continue to turn.
That while the richest individuals may be slightly less rich, the vast majority of people would continue their lives with no negative consequences?
I don’t understand why you always believe that if the rich were less rich, that anything would change. It would not.
Have you considered that this too might be an ‘experiment’?
Defenders of monarchy and the divine right of kings used to argue the exact same thing - that we tried democracy before and it failed in the Roman Republic and Ancient Greece - so clearly feudal monarchy is the best, right?
Yet here we are, experimenting again.
Why is this joke of a system the ideal? It doesn’t produce innovation - most of the stuff that led to the internet and modern computing came out of DARPA and various govt funded universities. All of our space advancements were from state-run NASA and the Soviet space programme. The wealthy CEO types only start ‘innovating’ after taxpayers fund most of the R&D. Same with medical advancements, material science, physics - almost every single positive innovation has come from state-run, taxpayer-funded, or non-profit institutions.
Maybe try reading a little bit more about all this innovation you seem so fond of:
Have you considered that this too might be an ‘experiment’?
Yes. It very well might be. But todays world is so strongly interwoven. Tons of conflicts are constantly challenging the system. And it has yet to break. The final test will be the sudden termination of economic growth. This will be the point, where it will be shows how resilient capitalism rly is.
Defenders of monarchy and the divine right of kings used to argue the exact same thing - that we tried democracy before and it failed in the Roman Republic and Ancient Greece - so clearly feudal monarchy is the best, right?
Tell me which system to try next. But pls don’t suggest to repeat another one again.
Yet here we are, experimenting again.
And that’s a good thing.
Why is this joke of a system the ideal? It doesn’t produce innovation - most of the stuff that led to the internet and modern computing came out of DARPA and various govt funded universities.
That was maybe the start. But big companies managed to elevate the importance to another level. The complexity of everything was reinforced and elevated drastically, driven by private companies. Just take a look at AI at this point. AI is innovation, mainly driven by private companies.
All of our space advancements were from state-run NASA and the Soviet space programme.
Because most of it was useless. What kind of innovation did. space exploration bring to humans?
The wealthy CEO types only start ‘innovating’ after taxpayers fund most of the R&D.
As I already stated, this is not the case. Especially pharma, medical and IT is heavily driven by big corporations. Basic research on the other hand, there you are right. As it usually does not feature real world appliances, means that it’s mostly founded by tax payers and the government.
Same with medical advancements,
Especially medical innovation is heavily driven from the private sector. Pharmaceuticals as well. There is not much involvement of any government or tax payer.
material science, physics - almost every single positive innovation has come from state-run, taxpayer-funded, or non-profit institutions.
But as I said, mostly for the basic research. Without much interest in application.
None of those links are about Chemistry or Physics. The demos link is Economics, The Entrepreneurial State. The youtube link is about the history of the internet. Maybe try learning something that isn’t STEM. Might broaden your way of thinking.
I’ll respond to the rest of your comment later, although I’m not sure I want to anymore since you clearly have no interest in taking into account new information.
Also how the fuck can you be interested in technology and say something like this:
Because most of it was useless. What kind of innovation did. space exploration bring to humans?
If you know anything about any science you should know how stupid of a point this is
None of those links are about Chemistry or Physics. The demos link is Economics, The Entrepreneurial State. The youtube link is about the history of the internet. Maybe try learning something that isn’t STEM. Might broaden your way of thinking.
Sure it would. But it probably wouldn’t change my standpoint.
I’ll respond to the rest of your comment later, although I’m not sure I want to anymore since you clearly have no interest in taking into account new information.
Yes, unfortunately I am extremely stubborn. Sorry.
Also how the fuck can you be interested in technology and say something like this:
Because most of it was useless. What kind of innovation did. space exploration bring to humans?
Because rockets are boring. Bubble and stuff is just extraordinary craftsmanship and black matter will take some time. And I overall hate relativity theory. I am hoping for gravitons. Wave functions rock.
If you know anything about any science you should know how stupid of a point this is
Not stupid. Some sciences simply are idiotic. Do you have any idea how much I hate biologists. Entitled brats. Some of them have an extreme superiority complex. And don’t get my talking about physicists. Buch of weirdos. You should see physicists interact with biologists. It like two different species encountering each other. But communication attempts are futile.
Yes, unfortunately I am extremely stubborn. Sorry.
Fair, you do you mate
Because rockets are boring. Bubble and stuff is just extraordinary craftsmanship and black matter will take some time. And I overall hate relativity theory. I am hoping for gravitons. Wave functions rock.
Well, have fun with that, I will stop arguing.
Not stupid. Some sciences simply are idiotic. Do you have any idea how much I hate biologists. Entitled brats. Some of them have an extreme superiority complex. And don’t get my talking about physicists. Buch of weirdos. You should see physicists interact with biologists. It like two different species encountering each other. But communication attempts are futile.
llmaooo you should do science-themed standup
I only know three biologists and they are lovely people. Never seen them interact with physicists though so you may be right.
And sooner or later I will hopefully have children.
And when the average summer day is 60c and crops fail every single year, and Nestle has taken half our drinking water, and the smoke in the air from wildfires is giving everyone asthma, and deadly storms happen year round, and the coasts erode, and wars break out for the remaining water/etc, what will you tell them? Will you tell them to look at the brilliant ‘innovator’ CEO’s who intentionally shut down electric cars? The CEO’s who found out climate change was happening sixty years ago and intentionally hid it to keep themselves rich, what do you tell your kids about that?
What innovation is worth your children dying early?
I don’t believe that those scenarios are that plausible.
Here is south Germany, the climate change has led to mediterran plants growing here. The plant life for the climate already exist. And they are spreading (olives don’t make it through the winter yet).
Change is happening, but adapting to it is possible. And solutions for adaptation do not have to be invented, because they already exist.
I don’t believe that those scenarios are that plausible.
lol i think they said the same thing about the Titanic sinking. also the submarine guy said the same thing about it imploding.
Hmm 🤔
also all evidence that’s not conservative propaganda points to us hitting the worst possible outcomes when it comes to climate change. Read the IPCC reports and the worst case scenarios listed within. That’s what’s going to happen over the next ~40 years
I have been reading about the worst case scenario. But even then the oceans would heat up, Oxygen saturation would diminish, big fish would die, algae would thrive on higher CO2 levels and buffer climate change at some point. Humanity and most animals on land should be capable to survive to this buffer point.
You know, as a member of the SSBN force, occasionally during thermonuclear launch exercises I take a moment to regret the death of humanity and the biosphere. People like you, on the other hand, are what steels my resolve to flip the switch with gusto. I hope you know that I’ll be thinking of you, should I receive the order to commence procedures to launch.
Shipmate, I am a Navigation Electronic Technician First Class Petty Officer, fully qualified in both submarines and in my rating. I have been on five strategic alert deterrent patrols over the last three years. I’ve been through fires, flooding, and steam line ruptures. When we set condition 1SQ for Strategic Launch during WSRT, I was the one at the consoles conducting the procedures to do so. I’ve been a helmsman, planesman, Strategic Navigation Technician, and Quartermaster of the Watch.
Of course I wouldn’t have internet while submerged or at sea. Have you ever heard of in-port periods?
Fragile personality or not, I’m the sailor at the switch. What have you done with your life, shipmate?
I still think you are lying. Or you are incredibly stupid. Because your identity and your job should be kept secret. My grandparents were military engineers in the Soviet Union. Do you think anyone knew that? Of course not, because they were instructed to not talk about it. As should you, in case you are the real deal. I myself have followed the path of my father, currently studying to become a chemist in Munich. One ore year to go.
Shipmate, if you look in my post history I literally did an AMA about my profession about a month ago, and a Machinists Mate Chief even jumped in to contribute. I haven’t disclosed any ships movement, naval nuclear propulsion information or even controlled unclassified information. I keep my personal electronic devices physically far, far away from any work device, and we never cross the streams, as the saying goes.
It’s still something that I wouldn’t tell people on the internet.
Especially if you have family. The Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis,… you just elevated the chances that they know about you. And now they also know that you are the sharing kind. A little bit bragging.
Don’t make yourself a target. Not the smartest thing to do.
Sister’s in the marine corps and so is her husband. They can take care of themselves.
I’ll take your advice into consideration. Still, you have again reminded me why I don’t feel the burden of my duty too much. The existence of such organizations only hardens my resolve to flip the switch when the time comes.
Sister’s in the marine corps and so is her husband. They can take care of themselves.
Against Russian agents with Nowitschock or North Koreans using poison as well? I doubt that.
I’ll take your advice into consideration. Still, you have again reminded me why I don’t feel the burden of my duty too much. The existence of such organizations only hardens my resolve to flip the switch when the time comes.
You are a troll. Cannot take you and your persona serious anymore. There is not a single soldier this irrational on this world.
A troll? Interesting. I’ll let my chief and division know. I’d invite you to visit NSB Kings Bay sometime, but you’d get denied at the front gate, let alone the marines at Checkpoint Charlie and the waterfront gate. And I’m a sailor, not a soldier. Soldiers are Army only.
You are stating the most patriotic and naive shit here. I get the impression that you are impersonating US military personnel to paint them in a bad light.
And now this useless statement that I should visit some Kings Bay, but I’d probably not be let in - I do not understand what you are trying to tell me here? Here in Germany you wouldn’t get into some classes at university. Let alone the building. It’s usual practice that in some organisations, entry is restricted.
And for the record, best of luck in your studies. I hold no personal animosity, and a great deal of professional respect, for my counterparts in other militaries. We all have a job to do. If that means one of us has to shoot torpedoes at the other, we’ll cross that bridge when the time comes. I do think, however, that you should never underestimate the willingness of the US to go to great lengths to do what it thinks is necessary.
And for the record, best of luck in your studies. I hold no personal animosity, and a great deal of professional respect, for my counterparts in other militaries.
I do not hold any grudge towards you as well.
We all have a job to do. If that means one of us has to shoot torpedoes at the other, we’ll cross that bridge when the time comes. I do think, however, that you should never underestimate the willingness of the US to go to great lengths to do what it thinks is necessary.
Wars are fought in many levels. And the Ukraine war has already been lost. A financial Desaster to the west. No military power will change that.
Current surveys indicate republicans to be in power next year. And in Europe we also see a shifting in opinion in Schweden, France and Germany towards parties that roan further right and are against weapon deliveries into Ukraine. Quite contrary, they are pro Russia in many ways.
And I don’t judge. But if this development further continues, then all the money wasted on military support is gone. And Russia wins. In a world filled with intercontinental missiles, a war is won politically and economically.
So no matter how wiling and ready the US is, military power cannot rival with economical and political strategies.
Financial? Perhaps. Demographically, however, I believe Russia and Europe have entered a terminal demographic decline, only accelerated in Russia’s case by the war. America, on the other hand, has not lost any soldiers or any significant resources and has increased the industrial capacity of the military-industrial complex. Strategically, from a cold, hard, pragmatic point of view, that counts as a win for my superiors, in the long term. Financial ups and downs are temporary and manageable. Demographic collapses are not.
Financial? Perhaps. Demographically, however, I believe Russia and Europe have entered a terminal demographic decline, only accelerated in Russia’s case by the war.
Due to immense migration, demographic change is a thing of the past now. France, Germany and other western European countries no longer face this problem. On the other side it comes with new problems, as failed integration has become a huge problem.
And considering Russia, the country has one big ass infantry. And in the Ukraine war, Russia has yet to call for total mobilisation. And the west, even with the help of the US did not yet manage to deliver enough ammunition and weaponry to push back the Russian forces. For me that’s an indicator that Russia is more capable of actual war than the West.
Especially the US had many military missions in the past decades and most of them failed. Afghanistan is just one of the many failed attempts of military control. The US military has shown not to be capable to win wars, but only maintain them.
America, on the other hand, has not lost any soldiers or any significant resources and has increased the industrial capacity of the military-industrial complex.
Well and so did the Russians. The west has more specialised and modern weapons, it these have now proven to be too complicate to be produced in sufficient masses. Russia using old tech with easier produced weaponry has shown to be much more resilient than expected. Making use of the oldschool Propeller for bombs instead of high tech laser measured ignition timers, has proven to be just as effective. The US military has been scammed in many ways by weapon manufacturers into buying over complicated tech for simple applications.
Strategically, from a cold, hard, pragmatic point of view, that counts as a win for my superiors, in the long term.
If your superiors were involved in the last decades military operations of the US, then their word shouldn’t be taken too serious. Afghanistan is just the latest failure of along series of failures. And currently it seems, like the US will fail in Ukraine as well, even before sending troops.
Financial ups and downs are temporary and manageable.
Financial ups and downs can cripple a country’s economy so immensely, that they change a country’s direction for years later.
There is no military without tax payers. And in a broken economy, there are not many willing tax payers.
Demographic collapses are not.
It can be corrected with migration, even though migration poses its own new problems.
In Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, we crippled ourselves trying to protect civilians and establish a local government while fighting an “insurgency”. With Russia, per instruction, we will emphatically not be doing so. A war with Russia will be a concerted effort to fundamentally destroy and erase the current power structure and completely demilitarize the country, as we did in WWII. With thermonuclear weapons, if necessary. The unclassified nuclear doctrine is available for your perusal online.
In Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, we crippled ourselves trying to protect civilians and establish a local government while fighting an “insurgency”.
What the hell are you talking about? Protecting civilians? Is this some joke? The US never much cared for protecting civilians.  Let’s think about Vietnam and the massacring of thousands. Or let’s remember some “accidental” strikes against “terrorists” that turned out to be civilians.
With Russia, per instruction, we will emphatically not be doing so. A war with Russia will be a concerted effort to fundamentally destroy and erase the current power structure and completely demilitarize the country, as we did in WWII. With thermonuclear weapons, if necessary. The unclassified nuclear doctrine is available for your perusal online.
Yea. Extremely plausible that the US manages to destroy the Russian power structures. Structures that have rivalled the US structures and military for decades in many foreign conflicts. You cannot rly act in a stalemate situation. And that is rly what that is. Just look how Russia can play war in Ukraine and the US and other western countries are only willing the send weapons. This just screams of powerlessness. And it indeed makes sense with the past failures of the US Military. And all that restraint, when Russia is conquering the Worlds Granary. If they succeed, then all of Africa will be under their control. Especially with climate change and less African soil being fertile.
Africa is so gaddamn important, that the Chinese already attempt in multiple African states to take control.
If China and Russia take control over Africa, than they take control over Resources that the US depends on.
And even the idea to demilitarise Russia is ponderous. Maybe if worked with Germany after WW2, because many Germans understand English and German is rather similar to English. So taking influence on the Germans was not too hard. Russian on the other hand is a goddamn nightmare for Roman languages. And the country is so damn big, that influence and control is a matter of unfeasibility.
You’ll never have the clearance to do so, but if you ever happen to on the off chance, look up Global Campaign Plan, and on your free time, you can review the unclassified National Security Strategy. Specifically, the updated revisions.
On the unclassified side, take a look at the analysis of Peter Zeihan sometime on global demographic and resource trends.
Don’t let the troll get to you… I’ve had someone on here a week or so ago tell me I was lying about my expertise. It’s almost like they’re all taking lessons from the same people.
Thanks. And yeah, they’re probably just trying the tried and true War Thunder and Discord method. Or they’re not taking lessons from the same people, they are the same people. Who knows?
Do you not understand the system at live in is actively dooming us all? Why are you so vehemently defending it? Especially when you can acknowledge that other systems can exist?
Why would you think that companies going bankrupt is somehow worse than people being increasingly unable to live.
Do you not understand the system at live in is actively dooming us all?
I don’t think that it is dooming us. I cannot imagine a system that would lead to more freedom, better education or innovation.
Why are you so vehemently defending it? Especially when you can acknowledge that other systems can exist?
Even though I acknowledge that other systems have been tried in the past, I also believe that all of them, except capitalism with a few social tweaks, have failed.
Why would you think that companies going bankrupt is somehow worse than people being increasingly unable to live.
Because tons of lives are also depending on the company to keep on running. Making some people’s lives worse will probably not fix the problems of others. Instead the people that are in need of betterment must get a tailored solution. Tailored towards them without the need to completely overhaul a working system.
Check the planet. It is literally burning right now and we are all going to either die, or have our lives massively changed by this climate catastrophe.
Technically most of the planet is Oxygen in the highest reductive state. Bound in ores of oxidases metals.
Second highest occurrence is silicon, also in an oxidated state as Silicon oxides. Then comes Iron and Magnesium.
None of them will burn.
What you are talking about burning is not the planet, but the biosphere. And 99.9% of the biosphere contains far too much water to actually burn.
So no. The planet does not burn. Only tiniest parts of its biosphere sometimes catch fire. And the smoke actually blocks sunlight and acts as a natural measurement against climate change.
I cannot imagine a system that would lead to more freedom, better education or innovation.
LOL.
Even though I acknowledge that other systems have been tried in the past, I also believe that all of them, except capitalism with a few social tweaks, have failed.
Capitalism fails every ~8 years requiring the use of vast amounts of public funds to keep afloat. I’d also say if fails daily if you look at all the needless suffering occuring in the world today, especially in the most “free market” countries and the countries these exploit. We have “socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else,” as Jon Stewart would say.
I personally know people that endured the UDSSR. And those stories are not pleasant.
And seeing the anti capitalistic movement being accepting of radical ideas and the idea of using violence and the belief that the vote of the masses (who are in favour of Capitalism) is unimportant, just makes me believe that anti capitalistic movements all strive for what we saw in the UDSSR and today in China.
I only accept political ideas that have been viable for years in other countries without the occurrence of dictatorship. If you are a US citizen, then the wishful view to Western Europe is the only one I’d accept as reasonable.
And as a Western European myself, I can say that even though we currently face massive problems with immigration, life here is still more enjoyable than in the rest do the world.
Most leftists in the U.S. are democratic socialists, social democrats, are some flavor of anarchists; not authoritarian socialists… Most do not think violence is necessary, except for protection against the increasingly fascist right-wing. Many believe it’s possible to move closer to a socialist-like society by building mutual-aid networks and communities, and promoting candidates for government positions that align with their values; not through a violent revolution.
And yes, I would prefer systems closer to Scandinavian countries, which the right-wing here calls socialism. Ideally, I would like to see some kind of real socialism where the workers own the means of production (factories, stores, farms, etc) and controls it through democratic processes, not the investor-shareholders or the government. I think the term is anarcho-syndicalism, but I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.
Did you read any of those links? 10% of world GDP. That’s not relatively little. That’s insane.
I have only overflown the Oxford paper. Caught my attention with the affect of increasing taxing the rich. Interesting take, but purely theoretical with no reasonable adaption possibility. The rich would just leave the country and some other country would profit from their taxes.
And stocks doesn’t automatically mean good. How much of that is speculative bubbles and hype-driven overvalued stocks?
If you believe to know which ones are overvalued, then you should try to go buy short positions in them. Maybe you become rich then?
Jokes aside. The stock market is relatively precise, it also projects potential into the future. Due to that many stocks to combat climate change have risen in popularity and a lot of money has been brought to said companies by purely capitalistic driven motives.
Rich people are people and most people don’t just up and leave behind places they’ve built their lives in unless under extreme pressure. A few billionaires might relocate to the Bahamas but they’re not going to be able to take their mansions and penthouses with them - and they lose out on the markets, infrastructure, and other benefits of their home countries. That’s a major incentive to just pay the taxes.
If you believe to know which ones are overvalued, then you should try to go buy short positions in them. Maybe you become rich then?
Who says I haven’t done that already?
The stock market is relatively precise, it also projects potential into the future.
The stock market is not precise. I have data and papers discussing this - but there’s no need for them. I’ll instead leave you with a simple question: if the stock market is so precise, why is there a major crash every decade?
Due to that many stocks to combat climate change have risen in popularity and a lot of money has been brought to said companies by purely capitalistic driven motives.
Sure, purely capitalistic motives, which is why a lot of these are impractical venture capital BS and outright scams. It is currently more profitable to greenwash than it is to actually solve the problem.
Rich people are people and most people don’t just up and leave behind places they’ve built their lives in unless under extreme pressure. A few billionaires might relocate to the Bahamas but they’re not going to be able to take their mansions and penthouses with them - and they lose out on the markets, infrastructure, and other benefits of their home countries. That’s a major incentive to just pay the taxes.
As I said, it depends on the country and the relative situation to other countries.
If you believe to know which ones are overvalued, then you should try to go buy short positions in them. Maybe you become rich then?
Who says I haven’t done that already?
I do. Because you are still here. Arguing on the internet, a cesspool of morons, you and I included.
The stock market is relatively precise, it also projects potential into the future.
The stock market is not precise. I have data and papers discussing this - but there’s no need for them. I’ll instead leave you with a simple question: if the stock market is so precise, why is there a major crash every decade?
Because events, such as Corona and the ausraube war temporarily lower the estimated gains. Losses are expected. So the value weds to be corrected according to those losses.
Due to that many stocks to combat climate change have risen in popularity and a lot of money has been brought to said companies by purely capitalistic driven motives.
Sure, purely capitalistic motives, which is why a lot of these are impractical venture capital BS and outright scams. It is currently more profitable to greenwash than it is to actually solve the problem.
Companies such as Linde plc are no scam. They existed far longer than the climate drama. Their value just increased because demand in their products increased as well. Greenwashing is only done in media. Company winnings and numbers don’t lie. (Except if they do. Fuck wirecard)
It’s interesting, but I have to point out that some of the evidence they use is stuff like manufacturers relocating to China, which happens regardless of tax rates.
The stuff about energy costs is also nothing to do with taxes but rather Germany’s energy policy missteps.
Also the author randomly referring to “Genderforschern” und “Gleichstellungsbeauftragten” at the end damages the credibility of the article a lot - seems very culture-war motivated.
I agree that the way in which the taxes are implemented and how the bureaucracy works has a major impact though. But this doesn’t mean taxing the rich is imppssible, just needs to be done right, like all policy.
I do. Because you are still here. Arguing on the internet, a cesspool of morons, you and I included.
Rich people waste time arguing with morons on the internet all the time! Have you seen Musk’s Twitter feed lately?
In fact the only reason I am doing this is because I have time to kill; and that’s only possible thanks to the fact that I am wealthy enough to take days off work pretty much whenever I want, without fearing starvation. Unlike ~90% of people globally who live paycheck to paycheck.
The idea that rich people are always busy being productive is simply wrong. I know enough of them personally to know that most of their ‘working’ hours aren’t very strenuous to say the least.
Because events, such as Corona and the ausraube war temporarily lower the estimated gains. Losses are expected. So the value weds to be corrected according to those losses.
Have you heard of the 2008 crash? Dot com bubble? SVB, FTX and other crypto crap, etc? Markets crash regularly regardless of Corona or wars.
Also the fact that markets fail to consider wars and pandemics, whereas experts were warning about these for years before they happened, is further evidence that we can do better than relying on markets for everything.
There must be some way to develop a system of knowledge aggregation, decisionmaking, and resource allocation that isn’t prone to ignoring very obvious risks.
Greenwashing is only done in media. Company winnings and numbers don’t lie. (Except if they do. Fuck wirecard)
The stuff about energy costs is also nothing to do with taxes but rather Germany’s energy policy missteps.
Nah. To my knowledge we have the second highest tax on energy worldwide. Has always been this way. It’s a tax thing.
Also the author randomly referring to “Genderforschern” und “Gleichstellungsbeauftragten” at the end damages the credibility of the article a lot - seems very culture-war motivated.
The article is written by a left leaning press. So if you allow yourself to suggest non-neutrality, then they should be in favour of your argument.
I agree that the way in which the taxes are implemented and how the bureaucracy works has a major impact though. But this doesn’t mean taxing the rich is imppssible, just needs to be done right, like all policy.
The rich have yachts and housing all around the world. No tax policy can stop them from running and getting citizenship from a country that take skews taxes.
I do. Because you are still here. Arguing on the internet, a cesspool of morons, you and I included.
Rich people waste time arguing with morons on the internet all the time! Have you seen Musk’s Twitter feed lately?
That dude is actively trying to shape the opinion of people for his own interest. I am confident that this is work to him. He already did this with crypto or with the Tesla stock price. It’s marketing and marketing is work as well. All the political left are already supporting the idea of electric vehicles. Now it’s time for the conservatives. And musk is luring them towards his company.
In fact the only reason I am doing this is because I have time to kill; and that’s only possible thanks to the fact that I am wealthy enough to take days off work pretty much whenever I want, without fearing starvation. Unlike ~90% of people globally who live paycheck to paycheck.
So I guess you are not building something yourself? You just work a well paying job? I can’t rly believe that.
The idea that rich people are always busy being productive is simply wrong. I know enough of them personally to know that most of their ‘working’ hours aren’t very strenuous to say the least.
It what kin of rich are you talking about? Is it the super rich, that people claim need to pay higher tax rates? Or is it the “rich” pharmacist or doctor living next door?
Because events, such as Corona and the ausraube war temporarily lower the estimated gains. Losses are expected. So the value weds to be corrected according to those losses.
Have you heard of the 2008 crash? Dot com bubble? SVB, FTX and other crypto crap, etc? Markets crash regularly regardless of Corona or wars.
Yes I heard about them. But these bubbles exploding because of miso reduction into the future. Prediction that was more plausible in earlier stages. And the stock market is in fact trying to project the future. One cannot invest into the past.
Also the fact that markets fail to consider wars and pandemics, whereas experts were warning about these for years before they happened, is further evidence that we can do better than relying on markets for everything.
Nah, the markets acted according to warnings. Especially he Ukraine war. The values dropped, when Russia collected its soldiers at the border, and when US experts warned of the impending attack, publicly, the value dropped even further.
There must be some way to develop a system of knowledge aggregation, decisionmaking, and resource allocation that isn’t prone to ignoring very obvious risks.
An ideal system does not exist. The one we have is fairly reactive.
Greenwashing is only done in media. Company winnings and numbers don’t lie. (Except if they do. Fuck wirecard)
Nah. To my knowledge we have the second highest tax on energy worldwide. Has always been this way. It’s a tax thing.
Idk about the tax rates but Germany also decided to become dependent on Russian gas, which is a major factor tax or no tax.
The article is written by a left leaning press. So if you allow yourself to suggest non-neutrality, then they should be in favour of your argument.
I’m not ‘left-leaning’, that term is too broad to mean anything at this point.
I looked up the author and all his books are titled something along the lines of ‘In Defence of Capitalism’ so idk man
That dude is actively trying to shape the opinion of people for his own interest. I am confident that this is work to him. He already did this with crypto or with the Tesla stock price. It’s marketing and marketing is work as well. All the political left are already supporting the idea of electric vehicles. Now it’s time for the conservatives. And musk is luring them towards his company.
If you want to believe his shitposting and constant man-child meltdowns are part of a galaxy-brained plan to convince conservatives to buy electric cars, have fun with that. In reality, he’s just a self-obsessed guy seeking more and more attention and that’s plainly obvious.
So I guess you are not building something yourself? You just work a well paying job? I can’t rly believe that.
You’ve never heard of self-employed contractors? If you have a valuable enough skill, people pay quite well for specific projects. Once the project (or your part in it) is done, you can just chill with your money, or accept a new one. It’s pretty straightforward. Won’t earn me billions but is good enough to have a chill life.
An ideal system does not exist. The one we have is fairly reactive.
Who said anything about an ideal system? I want a better one. Mainly one that doesn’t burn down the planet I live on. We need to be working on developing new systems, but that won’t happpen if we keep chanting ‘Capitalism good, Communism bad’.
there is no system resilient against fraud Yet.
Resilience is not a binary. We could make a system that’s relatively more resilient against fraud and/or short-term thinking.
I’m sure it’s within the capacity of humanity to improve upon Capitalism. The only question is: will we do it in time to survive the 21st Century?
I mean, I think they’re definitely still in the minority. It seems like there’s a larger proportion of them here than on reddit. I see more of their opinions here. Maybe that’s just how the algo works here regarding upvotes & downvotes and how comments are displayed.
It’s worst on lemmy.world I’ve noticed. Beehaw was right to defederate. Y’all need to tell them in the kindest possible words to go die over and over again until they don’t come back or you’ll end up like voat.
I don’t know how I feel about it. On one hand, it makes for less of an echo chamber. On the other hand, their thoughts are fucking stupid and it hurts my brain to see them.
Yeah. I hardcore disagree with conservatives as a libertarian socialist myself, but I always want to hear what people who disagree with me (and people who agree with me) are saying, and engage in civil conversation with people who actually believe what they say.
The problem for me comes when shills (people who don’t believe what they say but get paid to say it) come into the conversation, or when people use outright disingenuous arguments (usually strawmans).
If they actually believe it, I would like to argue the factual point, which is very easy to do. If they don’t believe what they are saying, then yes, I have a problem with it.
There is plenty of evidence pointing to the fact that climate change is real and that it is caused by humans. If they choose to not listen to evidence and hard facts, then they lost the debate. If they say that big money funded those studies, simply point them to the Big Oil-funded studies claiming that climate change is false, and the fact that they originally found that it was true, and then tried to bury it.
You very well may be correct, but I always like to assume people are good and are arguing in good faith until proven otherwise.
If I can “steelman” (opposite of strawman) their position, and argue against it easilly, I see no reason not to do so, and that also makes for a better argument for other people viewing the comment thread who may believe the false notion that climate change is either fake or not caused by humans.
To me, trying to argue that climate change is fake or not caused by humans is the same as trying to argue that the Earth is flat. Very easy to debunk.
Happy to have them here. I almost never agree with them, but not only is it good to have your opinion challenged (though often wearying to have to repeat yourself), it’s good for THEM to have their opinion challenged too. Maybe only 1/100 will change their opinion after being challenged and seeing that their opinion is very much in the minority, but that’s 1/100 more than if we were all chatting away in a safe space with no opposing views.
(and to be clear, no I don’t think shit like nazis, devout racists etc is an ‘opposing view’ that deserves any debate)
Let me correct you: the innovations that are changing the planet.
Because we cannot destroy the planet. We do not have the means to destroy the planet or it’s ecosphere. No chemical agent could do it. No Carbon could.
The only think, that we might argue on is if innovation and its consequences on the climate will eventually harm humans unproportionally compared to the benefits of said innovation.
Here in the west we are in a rather privileged situation, as climate change will not affect us too much. Extreme weather events will eventually soften up, once the jet stream reestablishes its circular movement closer to the pole.
But adapting to extreme weather events shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe start building European style housing.
Now addressing other climate zones, we shall not forget that humans even exist in deserts. We are very adaptable. The means and solutions to such a life already exist. So adapting is not a matter of innovation, but education.
Saudi Arabia has proven this years in advance now. And we should remember last, that this is the extremest of possibilities.
I take offence in being called a troll. It’s insulting. You can’t just call someone a troll with a different opinion and claim that this invalidates my argument.
This is simply wrong. Basic research comes from universities and institutes.
But most research, Including research with application potential, comes from the privat sector. This includes the Pharma industry, the medical industry, the chemical industry, semi conductor industry and informatics.
It is mainly driven by big companies. In constant need to outperform their competition, or not to fall behind in research and innovation.
Saudi Arabia has ‘proven’ whatever it has proven through insane levels of draconian state intervention in everything, a lot of oil rents, and using imported slave labour.
I don’t think you have been reading a single one of the articles. The first one already is a not so fitting response to m claim that European style houses are ore resilient against extreme weather events.
The first one is about how wet bulb temperatures and extreme heat work. The second one is about Europe. Whether or not they are ‘more’ resilient doesn’t matter.
Also I don’t think you know what Europe is. Scandinavian, Central European and British houses are mostly made to keep heat in during cold winters. They’re not good for heatwaves.
Mediterranean style housing is definitely better for heat. But that doesn’t stop Italy, Spain, and France from having deadly heatwaves.
The first one is about how wet bulb temperatures and extreme heat work. The second one is about Europe. Whether or not they are ‘more’ resilient doesn’t matter.
Yes it does matter. European housing is well insulated. And definitely sturdier than US housing.
Also I don’t think you know what Europe is.
Yea, my bad. As a German I obviously have no idea what Europe is.
Scandinavian, Central European and British houses are mostly made to keep heat in during cold winters. They’re not good for heatwaves.
This is wrong. Insulation goes both ways. In summer it helps keeping the cooler night temperatures inside.
Mediterranean style housing is definitely better for heat. But that doesn’t stop Italy, Spain, and France from having deadly heatwaves.
Mediterranean housing is not especially good against heat. Wrong assumption. Swedes, Germans and the French are doing a much better job than the mediterranes.
Won’t dispute that European housing is sturdier. And yes insulation works both ways - however, you need good ventilation. And shading etc. AFAIK insulation optimised for heat retention is different to that optimised for keeping cool.
If you have a study or something that compares Mediterranean vs other European house designs, please send it to me and I’ll change my mind if I’m wrong.
As a German you should know that heatwaves have killed thousands of people in Germany as well.
Swedes, Germans, and French are also wealthier and have less extreme heat to deal with than Italy, Spain or Greece. You can’t attribute that to house design. Again, if you have a study comparing these, send it to me and prove me wrong.
My comparison on housing insulation is purely based on my experience. Italien housing is not much insulated. Insulation is usually driven by the need to reduce cost when heating in winter. That’s a problem Italiens face not so much. Therefor in comparison to Northern Europe, Italien housing is far less insulated. And because insulation goes both ways, I came to the conclusion that Northern European housing is better suited for warm summers.
But anecdotal evidence isn’t very convincing. I’ve had the opposite experience; found being in Greek and Spanish houses during a heatwave way more tolerable than UK ones, even without AC. Idk about Germany but some older Czech houses feel like ovens when it gets too hot. Lovely for winter though.
This is a good example of the worst kind of pseudo intellectual bs that tricks the uninformed. It’s confidently wrong in so many different areas that I don’t even know where to start.
The demand side of the economy is the consumer population. The consumers decide what they do and do not want to purchase, therefore driving demand.
“Infinite need” implies that infinite supply could exist, or that infinite growth is sustainable, both of which are not true. Infinite need also doesn’t exist.
I will argue that people (for example) needing clean water increases the demand for clean water. This is why companies like Nestle are profiteering off of selling bottled water, and why the CEO said that water should not be a human right.
Wait. But someone has to bottle the water, right? Or is nestle supposed to do it for free?
Furthermore they have to compete with tap water. So the value of bottled water can only be the water itself + bottle + energy used to fill bottle + interest because their “service” is not for free. There is a justified interest to make a profit from one’s efforts.
Also in some places (Flint, MI comes to mind), tap water in undrinkable due to neglect, since fixing it costs more money than ignoring the health of the population. Source: apnews.com/…/health-michigan-rick-snyder-flint-de…
I give you that. Just a few were directly involved in innovation.
But the rich do quite successfully create the framework conditions for innovation and development. Mostly driven by profit, but a world based purely on goodwill fails at the first doubter, the first who does not want to participate. So capitalism is what we got. And so far it has proven to be more resilient than other systems.
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">That didn't happen.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And if it was, that's not a big deal.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And if it is, that's not my fault.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And if it was, I didn't mean it.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And if I did, you deserved it.
</span>
(no not all conservatives/climate change deniers are narcissists but the overlap is interesting)
There’s a lot of money pushing this idea. I live in a certain US state where an organization has been paying to have billboards up that push this idea for years now.
The most terrible thing is that it’s a half truth. While yes plants grow better with increased CO2, the downsides are so destructive it is not at all beneficial.
Even if they’re right — which we all know they are not — it wouldn’t matter. Climate change is going to devastate human life if we do nothing. If, somehow, the source of the warming wasn’t human-caused, we’d still need to find a way to counteract it. It’s not our fault doesn’t prevent it from being our problem.
“Ok, then let’s prepare for the inevitable, strengthen infrastructure, prepare for mass migrations, improve our crops to sustain bigger variances in weather, evacuate people from flood danger zones, ensure our supply chain doesn’t collapse, fund poor countries so they can survive better, etc. You know, prepare for the crisis”
I had a guy tell me once that maybe climate change is just the Earth getting closer to the sun, and we should send an astronaut up to the Hubble telescope so they can look through it and measure the distance to the sun…
I’ve known this guy for over a decade, and it’s not that he’s stupid, he’s just completely ignorant about climate change and doesn’t put in any effort to learn about science.
It’s not happening. It’s happening but it’s all cyclical. It’s not cyclical this time but it’s not our fault. It’s our fault but global warming is good ackshually. Global warming is bad but there’s nothing we can do about it. We could do something about it but it’s too expensive/late. Maybe it’s not too expensive but THE CHINESE!
If you’re based in the UK, then all you can do is smile at the shit we have to deal with government-wise. If you don’t laugh, you’ll go mad, kinda thing.
That ‘Four Stage Strategy’ is horribly, horribly apt even today.
I’ve found a clever way to counter those folks is to say, “you might be right, and as humans it’s our moral obligation to seize control and protect the natural order of things for as long as we are able to slow the coming of hell on earth. Just like our right to shoot guns. Yee haw.”
What I hear some acquaintances say is like "who cares, I'll go to the beach, turn the AC on, what's the big deal" .
As if the floods we had in Italy this year, or the wild fires, or the storms, or the draughts, or the Alps without snow, the glaciers disappeared, the sea turned green, the invasion of jellyfish weren't connected.
Some people, most people, are just too fucking stupid.
To be fair, I think both sides blow it out of proportion and that can stifle discussion. It won’t be the “end of the world” where everyone will die, but we will have the “end of the world” as we know it.
I think one of the main points that need to be stressed to the kind of people in your example would be droughts.
Droughts will continue to get worse and will affect everyone. With a bad enough drought, we won’t be able to feed entire cities. And that’s when things really start to fall apart.
Yeah, people expect the earth to suddenly start cracking and spitting out hot lava or something.
No, it's gonna be a slow, steady march towards the end, just as it always has been. Slow enough that we feel like we can put it off for another day.
Slow enough that one day we will look up from our phones, see the oceans of fire and shrug. Too late now, just switch on the AC and go back to scrolling.
Brooooo this victory is an absolute game-changer for us die-hard Xbox fans, and it’s downright exhilarating! Sony’s constant blunders pale in comparison to the countless triumphs of team Xbox, and this might just be the knockout blow that finally converts those Lamestationers to our side. Brace yourselves for an epic shift as the unrivaled supremacy of our console dazzles and dominates, pulling every gamer into its unstoppable vortex of pure excitement and adrenaline-fueled gaming bliss!👊👊
I can’t tell if you’re being downvoted by dorks who don’t realise you’re joking or by dorks who DO realise you’re joking and feel attacked. Either way, sad, silly down voters.
It’s weird how collective action works so well but they only choose to do it for this linking requirement. You could get the rootkits gone as well, gamers.
Most people don’t know what they’re installing or don’t care about their privacy, which is why there’s not enough people rising up against kernel level AC’s. Also, not being able to play until you create an account is much more upsetting to most people, than just clicking ‘update’ in League of Legends.
There’s a tooltip next to the update button that says something like ‘Our Anticheat Vanguard is out now!’ or smth like that. The rest is exactly the same as any other update
The Sony BMG CD copy protection rootkit scandal was a scandal focused on the implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs distributed by Sony BMG in 2005. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and “phone home” with reports on the user’s private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software’s existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.
Yea the rally against block chain tech is stupid as fuck. It consumes nothing in the grand scale…do people not realize a lot of large enterprises have ~200k nodes give or take? Bigger companies can have in the million range. 200k machines is a joke.
Edit: I can see a lot of people just hate block chain tech without understanding anything tech wise lol
The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.
It really feels like SOMEWHERE there was a legitimate use for this for very mission-critical stuff that might need to be immutable once published and kept for posterity…
…but then it just became yet another speculative asset to make magic money that fueled stupid monkey jpegs.
The pursuit of profit benefits mankind only by the occasional anomalous accident.
100%. Capitalism is great until it reaches a peak where people who provide no value except in the wealth they’ve amassed are the ones who gain the most from it. You can succeed simply by being born with wealth and having no other value because other people who do have value will need you.
The point in OP is that “blockchain” was not a new thing. The Merkle Tree was patented in 1979, meaning that it has been free for decades. Most programmers might never have a use for it but they still encounter it every time they use git (which is older than bitcoin).
So, if you’re not aware of this, that’s because it is very technical and nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
You do understand what a DB is right? Like there’s millions of them…hell right now typing out this comment has one marking it. And then you’re downloading it to read it… that’s a transaction. Except there are millions of people reading comments constantly on all social media platforms.
My comment here has more bits in it than a single transaction.
With the electricity used to validate a single crypto transaction you could do thousands or even millions of DB queries.
Yes, everything uses electricity. That’s like saying that it’s fine if you kill one cow per day to eat its ear and throw the rest because hundreds of them are killed every day in farms.
Wasting so much electricity in such a non efficient manner so a decentralization cult member can have his wet dream of using non-government money makes no sense.
DBs are not the same as a blockchain. A DB doesn’t have to hash all previous data before it every time the DB is written to. You can read and write to a specific spot in a DB without ever knowing anything else about the DB. With blockchain, inserts have to be successive and they have to reference every previous insert to validate that the entry series is unbroken. On top of that, for things like Bitcoin, every other client also has to validate it since the ledger is shared.
There’s a reason blockchain is significant. Otherwise, why didn’t stuff like Bitcoin exist prior to it? Databases, in some for or another, have existed for decades. Blockchains are immutable, that’s why. The order of entries matters and validation is a requirement.
DBs still update their tables every time someone writes to it. And there are millions of DBs being written to every second. It’s absolutely comparable.
We’re not comparing millions of DBs to a single blockchain. We’re comparing 1 DB to 1 blockchain instance. If you had millions of blockchains, you would use exponentially more energy for the same data vs. a normal database. Updating tables is not the same thing as hashing and validating every prior entry in the table.
There doesn’t need to be. My argument is not bullshit, you just don’t understand the differences between blockchain and a standard database and are pretending you do which makes the argument impossible for you to understand.
Lol no I do, you clearly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. The amount of DBs we have alone, that’s not counting any other compute servers or even WS dwarfs all the block chain out there. This article is a nothing burger and is complete bullshit. Even the study they referenced doesn’t know the exact amount…as it points out .6 to 2.2% is their estimated use…but this shit article went with the higher numbers because it’s great for people like you who hate any tech that you clearly don’t understand.
Yeah, people tend hate what they don’t understand. Especially when most people think think every blockchain performs exactly like bitcoin (which is proof of work). Bitcoin is slow and power hungry and would never actually be usable by the masses for everyday transactions. But it was the first and will likely be a “digital gold” for a long time
But it’s not the only one and in time everyone will be using blockchain technology. It’s so much more convenient and useful than most realize. The Solana blockchain has secured a big partnership with Visa that can be read up on if anyone is interested.
You don’t even understand blockchain so I’m not sure what your edit is all about. You’re comparing blockchain to a database in your replies as if they’re comparable.
When it comes to power…it absolutely is comparable…but most of you have no clue how much compute we use daily in terms of power. Acting like the block chain sucks down anywhere near the amount of power we use on even in the corporate world is hilarious…you know a lot of colos have their own sub stations right?
The only person here who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is you. If you took a standard DB (MySQL or Postgres, for example) and took that same information and stored it on a blockchain instead, you’d use far more energy on the blockchain and the issue would only get exponentially worse as the chain got bigger. Normal DBs don’t need to hash new entries or validate them against previous entries that are also hashed.
Are you dense, man? No one said that. They’re saying that one blockchain would take several hundred DBs to equal its energy use. You’re wrong and doubling down for some reason and it’s just making you look silly.
I said that genius…go check my posts…the fuck you arguing about? I literally said that the amount of DBs we have make the miniscule amount of large block chains out there look like nothing. Then you show up and say one DB isn’t comparable to one large fucking blockchain…no shit.
Please propose a law or regulation structure for significantly reducing or eliminating advertisements. I’m serious. I fucking hate ads. I just don’t have a reasonable or effective way to get rid of them.
Edit: Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
In São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of the world, the municipality forbade by law all billboards and building disfiguring ‘decorations’ some 10 years ago. Since then, the city became much more bearable, aesthetically. Nothing special happened, everybody was happy, except a few bankrupt ads agencies. Maybe, you must be able to imagine that change is possible. However, there is this ideology, Americans seem to be so fond off, that seems to make such things very difficult.
New Jersey also banned billboards. That one is pretty easy and I vote that we should adopt that policy everywhere. It’s much harder to control digital adspace, since you can do things like astroturf campaigns and product placement. Great point though! I like that law.
Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
Yes, those two are the most important and shouldn’t even be that hard to push. There are many laws that were pushed “to protect the children”, we might as well finally make some that actually do protect them.
Make sending unrequested data like ads and trackers to web clients a crime akin to gaining unrestricted access to computers. No need for a new law, just a new interpretation on an older one.
Most jurisdictions prohibit unauthorized access to computer systems. What if we just say, “running Javascript code that implements functionality not specifically requested by the user is unauthorized tampering”.
Perhaps, but you also never hear them complain about it anywhere near as loudly as people complaining about blockchains.
Yes, they’ll grumble about ads being annoying or YouTube blocking people who block ads, but the amount of power that gets wasted on this never even crosses anyone’s mind, meaning on some level, there exists agreement that advertisement are a necessary and responsible use of electricity while blockchains are not.
That’s because ad serving doesn’t set a lower bound on the electricity price. The value of crypto and the value of electricity are linked.
For the sake of simplicity I’ll just say Bitcoin.
If the price of Bitcoin stays constant (big if), and the rate of Bitcoin per watt does too, then everyone would start mining until the demand for power is so high that the price increases until it’s as high as the Bitcoin per watt.
Sure, they are unrealistic assumptions, but it’s easier to see this way that the value of Bitcoin is (almost) the same as electricity. If it were lower, noone would mine it, if higher, people would buy electricity with bitcoin for a profit until the 2 equalize.
Electricity will never be much cheaper than Bitcoin, market forces will make sure of that, causing a huge environmental impact. Ads, however, only use as much electricity as they need to operate, their amount is not decided based on how much electricity they waste.
Honestly, it never fails to surprise me when on a presumable anticapitalist forum such as this one, someone makes a passionate argument in favor of some of the most ghastly corporate practices known to man, but sure, let’s put that premise to the test, shall we?
Shall we call it a draw? Keep in mind that online advertising is a fast growing industry (and likely to continue to grow in the future), whereas Bitcoin’s power use isn’t likely to grow too much, as the above article explains. Also keep in mind that this is JUST online advertising, and completely ignores print, TV, and those digital billboards that are spreading everywhere from Times Square to your local grocery store. Think about neon store signs, illuminated billboards, etc.
Also, that’s just the cost of delivering ads to people (i.e. it doesn’t even include the cost of producing them). Think about how many people work in advertising – all the offices they occupy, the computers, cameras, and whatever other equipment they use, business flights, what have you – and I’m pretty sure the carbon footprint of the entire industry far outstrips that of crypto.
I see you completely ignored my comment. The problem is not the amount of electricity used in itself, which the estimate of 6GWh-130TWh is as precise as shooting a dart at the moon.
Crypto uses energy for the sake of using energy. The value of crypto is based on the amount of energy used to create it. It’s not valuable to society. That’s what people is upset about. Crypto provides even less value to society than ads do.
Even you said it, ads spend energy because they employ people, those people generate value.
That’s like saying we should stop heating homes because it consumes more energy than crypto mining. Hose heating improves the quality of life of people. Crypto does not.
Well I was like 25 when I took care of him for two weeks and a pretty hard partier so silence wasn’t really my thing at the time. I’m in my 40s with 4 kids so I’ll I love silence now. I’ll even stare at walls.
Well, we weren’t very keen on talking in the family when I grew up. I can’t remember if we sometimes talked while TV was muted because of ads, but when we didn’t talk it didn’t feel awkward. If anything, it felt awkward to ever talk to each other. Not the healthiest upbringing in my mind ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Exactly! Blockchain and PoW are terrible but id really like to know how much time and electricity is consumed to serve ads, cool servers, train and educate people to effectively become ad engineers.
Same with porn. But I’m building a shake-power generator for fleshlites so it should balance out the power it pulls. Saving the earth one jack-off at a time.
Charging a hybrid car battery only takes 253.4 jerks. Pretty soon we will be expanding our charging service to parking lots across America and Canada! Most of them already have people willing to do it for you already …they were doing it there anyway… Win/win.
Powerjerk ™, we make perverts work for you!
Just roll up and say “Hey Jagoff, I need to get to x!” And you’ll promptly be taken care of.*
*Do not give them drugs to speed up the process. We are serious about our drug-free workplace.
Energy isn’t free. More power captured from jerking will increase food consumed, meaning more energy used in farming. You’ll have to brand this as either a carbon capture fapture system or as a weight loss program
Humans are incredibly inefficient power generators. I can buy 1kWh of electricity from the grid for about 18 cents (generation…transmission is extra).
I don’t think I can buy 870kCal of food for 18 cents. Certainly not a healthy source. And that’s even assuming 100% efficiency. Any high school physics student will tell you that won’t happen.
Yes but what about this whataboutism? And honestly I am fairly certain it ain’t as much as Bitcoin. People usually focus on 1 thing to get it done because moving to the next. I bet you try to do that at work too.
No way ads consume less power than bitcoin. Just the lights for ads probably consume more than bitcoin, not even talking about creating ads, which I assume consumes a double digit percentage of the global work force.
I did a back of the envelope a few comments up. How it looks to me, just sending internet ads around the world consumes 20 times as much as all crypto mining combined.
You assume wrong. In the UK, about 0.3-0.5% of people work in marketing or advertising, and that’s one of the most extremely financialised service economies in the whole world. No way is the number anywhere near even that high in countries where people actually work for a living.
Apparently, 48% of consumer web traffic is ads.. That is dystopian in itself, that means around half the content floating around the internet is stuff the client does not request but is pushed to them.
That would put the ad industry at 4500 TWh per year. However, this is back of the envelope.
That means the ad industry costs us around 20 times the cost of crypto in terms of power. Feel free to check me because I don’t know shit about most of these things.
That said, this does not account for the entire ad industry, just the cost of sending internet ads around the world. Ads are made, ads are displayed in various media other than websites, and most importantly, ads have the sole purpose of driving further consumption, which all contributes to the societal costs of the ad industry.
This title is under a few layers of irony, there are similar pictures floating around of green spaces converted to highways in the US with the same title, OP is suggesting the European version actually is progress
I remember as a kid hearing this vague ideological warfare around it. The Boston Science Museum had a big exhibit on it, as a kid I learned nothing about it. Then it was lamented for being wasteful spending - and only now do I hear about how it was meant to give us back urban areas.
That’s surprising to me. I remember at the time, NBC Nightly News and PBS Newshour (my family’s news diet in the 90s) did stories about it, and they both definitely mentioned reclaiming city space as one of the benefits.
I think the Big Dig, while it ended up costing several times what it was supposed to, will go down in history as one of the best highway projects of its era. It also proved infrastructure naysayers wrong. A lot of people insist that any highway projects always just induce demand, resulting in even more congestion, but the Big Dig did nothing of the sort. To this day, 30 years on, Boston traffic is still not as bad as it was pre-Big Dig.
A lot of people insist that any highway projects always just induce demand, resulting in even more congestion, but the Big Dig did nothing of the sort. To this day, 30 years on, Boston traffic is still not as bad as it was pre-Big Dig.
Induced traffic does not mean that traffic on a specific place inevitably goes back to what it was before a new highway. It means that total traffic, including old and new infrastructure, always goes up if the total road capacity goes up.
Do you think the total car traffic in the Boston area today is greater than it would have been had the Big Dig not been built? If yes, the ‘infrastructure naysayers’ were correct.
Of course, this means new highways can be locally beneficial, for example when they are used to divert car traffic from a city center. But they still deepen the overall car dependency. Investing in rail-bound transportation while imposing heavy fees on car traffic into the city would likely be a better use of resources.
Do you think the total car traffic in the Boston area today is greater than it would have been had the Big Dig not been built? If yes, the ‘infrastructure naysayers’ were correct.
It’s probably gone down, actually, at least in per capita terms. Boston’s population is a lot bigger than it used to be, so that has to be taken into account.
Keep in mind, the Big Dig actually reduced the total number of highway ramps, which is part of why it increased traffic flow. And by reclaiming neighborhoods from elevated highways, it reconnected areas. You can easily walk places that were not possible before.
But they still deepen the overall car dependency. Investing in rail-bound transportation while imposing heavy fees on car traffic into the city would likely be a better use of resources.
Boston is far from car dependent; it’s probably one of the worst cities in America for drivers, and best for cyclists and pedestrians.
It’s probably gone down, actually, at least in per capita terms. Boston’s population is a lot bigger than it used to be, so that has to be taken into account.
The comparison is between today and ‘today but without the highway’, not between today and before the highway was built. If the population increase is greater with the highway there, that’s still part of the induced demand.
Boston is far from car dependent; it’s probably one of the worst cities in America for drivers, and best for cyclists and pedestrians.
A city being “bad for drivers” is not a great indicator of it not being car dependant. Cities in the Netherlands are probably the most walkable and bikable on the planet, and also great to drive in because there are hardly any cars.
How about comparing the before, where rush hours totaled like six hours a day of bumper to bumper, stop and go, just sitting there polluting, wasting so much time, money, health. Today, while rush hours is still too long, traffic continues to move, no stop and go, much less time sitting there, raging. Today, on the surface in Boston, there is likely much less traffic, benefitting everyone
Because the point of the comparison is to determine if the infrastructure investment was cost effective. What would traffic look like today if the money had instead been used to build public transport, bike lanes, and walkable streets? If the alternative investment had improved traffic even more, building the highway was the wrong thing to do.
– just look at those pictures someone linked, and they don’t actually do it justice. Before, you might have to cross under a six lane elevated highway with surface streets. Now getting from one part of the city to another is a literal walk in the park. Reconnecting parts of the city to be walkable was one of the main goals, and it achieved
– part of the mitigation was required transit improvements. Of course, some of that was delayed by politics, but I believe it did happen.
The comparison is between today and ‘today but without the highway’, not between today and before the highway was built. If the population increase is greater with the highway there, that’s still part of the induced demand.
I wouldn’t suggest that highways never induce demand, but the idea that people are driving more in Boston because of the Big Dig seems doubtful to me.
A city being “bad for drivers” is not a great indicator of it not being car dependant. Cities in the Netherlands are probably the most walkable and bikable on the planet, and also great to drive in because there are hardly any cars.
The Netherland has pretty robust car infrastructure too.
And I agree; a city can be bikable, walkable, and drivable all at once. That should be the goal.
Plus, it’s not like the climate will just snap back into place when the boomers are finally too old for their skeleton talons to cling to power. That shit is going to take generations of sacrifice to roll back, if it doesn’t topple civilization first.
The whole ethos of the majority of baby boomers seems to have been to raze the forest they got to enjoy behind them (as opposed to planting trees whose shade they’d never sit in like most generations aspire to), and they seem to be having remarkable success in that.
The wealthy are savvy but with the boomers gone they lose a lot of their support. Of course they will try to maintain the status quo, but the people will be affected by the material conditions and see the truth. The only thing we have to fear is hate, but MTG, Boebart and Desantis were all elected by Boomers. Young people don’t vote for those idiots. I’m more concerned about Andrew Tate.
This isn’t new though, many boomers were the hippies at one point, they had the photocopier, fairness doctrine TV & Radio and liberal attitudes for sex, gender, and civil rights.
But the same tactics were used to stop and convert many of them, plus around half of them were the same sort of assholes that give them a bad name now.
It's not about a magic cure that'll fix everything over night.
It's about repairing decades of harm done by a generational mindset that valued wealth acquisition and material possession above every other facet of society. We won't fix that trauma in one, two, or three generations but it will get better and better with time and distance to boomerism.
The values of wealth accumulation and materialism are not at all limited to or even expressed mostly strongly by the Baby Boomer generation.
The line of thinking that capitalism dies with boomers or that Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, or whatever comes next will not fully embrace capitalism and will move towards socialism or some other non-competitive society seems pretty naive.
Humans are a competitive species. Most people want to win. I doubt this mindset dies with boomers.
Humans are a co-operative species, same goes for our ape and monkey cousins.
It is this instinctual nature of working together that enabled us to take down bigger prey, settle new lands, and become the dominant species on the planet.
I don’t disagree. That said, would suggest that externally we are cooperative, but internally we are competitive. Even in ape families, there exists a hierarchy generally ruled by the biggest, strongest male.
Which brings us back to the point at hand. Will humans come together to solve climate change? Or will humans continue to try to win at all costs?
I can see either as a possibility. But I don’t see boomers dying as a catalyst.
The rich are very concerned about the fact that all statistical evidence pointing to younger generations being starkly more socially minded than boomers. Don’t forget that Millennials have lived through a major economic crisis. Just like the Great Depression, that generally makes people realize that Capitalism is bullshit.
The wealthy are funding massive propaganda campaigns as a result. They are unfortunately making some in roads with young men. But overall I don’t think it will be enough.
Don’t forget that Millennials have lived through a major economic crisis.
Yes, yes we have.
I’ll be very interested to see how the younger generations age. Anecdotally, I’ve witnessed numerous people go from progressive socialists, to centrist capitalists as they age. Not saying that will continue, only saying this as I’ve seen similar studies that show younger people are more progressive than older folks every 5 years for the past 3 decades. It’s not a terribly new concept, and I’m hopeful that it remains true.
I agree! A change of the mindset is generational change at best. In many cases flawed ideologies and poor educational standards are just beeing continued. Yet I want to be one of the naive and think that there will be a new way of thinking and noticeable political change. For the better or the worse…, who knows?!
I dunno, I feel like if I lived through the Black Death and I was there when—at the end of the suffering, surrounded by death—the last plague rat died, I’d take it as a win…
It will solve the problem of their voting habits. They have lead us down this insane path because they are a narcissistic generation. Things won’t be perfect, but we might, just might, start turning things around. If we still can.
The next most conservative generation is Gen X. All few dozen of us. Expect those with power to retain it with massive use of wealth to constrain the rules of democracy, rather than numbers of voters.
Because that’s how it works, right? When your house is flooded because of a burst pipe, when you replace the pipe then your house is magically unflooded right? I mean of course no reasonable person thinks that, but that seems to be the understanding you’re suggesting. Meanwhile you’re trying to say that if we do repair the pipe and the house is still flooded, rightly acknowledging that the pipe is 100% the cause of the flood is somehow… wrong?
The facts are that boomers fucked the world up, heavily, and did everything they could to hold onto power and rob the next generation (at least) of their deserved place in the driver’s seat of society, and cleaning up the messes and lessons left over by the boomers will take generations to clean up. The fact that boomer built long-term systemic problem without simple solutions does not mean that the boomers are not entirely at fault or that we aren’t entirely better off without them.
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