The man On the left is justifiably disturbed knowing what he’s about to run over. The man on the right is psychotically excited to see someone was tied to the rails that they almost ran over.
The guy on the left is sad because they missed the guy on the tracks, and the guy on the right is happy because he can see a train coming from the other direction.
I don’t really care about airlines, but AA is the only airliner that flies out of the local regional airport (only flies to a bigger airport a few hours away), and I’ve never had any issues with them.
The worst I’ve had was having to listen to a flight attendent talk about God because I was on the last row.
We usually fly AA on flights to Europe. We live near KC, so our choices are AA or United (IIRC). And we prefer AA’s time schedule. Outside of major cities there is little choice to many destinations.
Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
Even if Google provided an option to opt out of tracking there would be no reason to trust then since they have lied about not tracking people in the past.
YouTube seems to redirect any Premium profits intended to creators to the entity which made a copyright claim on a video. This would be sensible if YouTube’s copyright claim system wasn’t so vulnerable to abuse. Normal (yellow) demonetisation will pay out from Premium though. youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
Features are removed from YouTube to incentivise Premium such as playing videos while your phone screen is locked.
Similar to above, Google have been increasing the amount of ads particularly on phones where ad blockers are harder to use. I.E. pushing users to Premium not by making the service better, but by making non-Premium worse.
Point one: I’m pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you’re on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want. Is it Ideal? No. But you should’ve acted 10-15 years prior if you wanted to stop this. It’s still not ideal though.
Point two: I agree. There does need to be space for them to repent, but they aren’t actively trying to, so don’t trust them (see the next point as an example of that).
Point three That’s a shame. They really need to fix that, though with how corpos do things nowadays, not sure that’ll happen.
Point four: That’s normal, expected and a reasonable business decision. Most of these features they likely added after premium, and they’re meant as incentives. Why else would you want to but their premium, if not for the added features?
Point five: This is shitty and mostly inexcusable behaviour. It’s god awful, and they really shouldn’t do it. I do have to play devil’s advocate a little. They are fully, 100% in their right to do this. If you don’t like it, vote with your wallet (and time). If we stop using their services, they’ll stop making it worse. They are still A-holes for doing it though.
Point one: I’m pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you’re on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want.
I mean sure, they could try combining the user agents my unofficial apps provide with my carrier’s NAT IP to build a profile on me, but it would be highly inefficient and imprecise to the point where it’s almost useless for them. With a Youtube Premium account they have an identity tied to an email address, full name, and payment info that they can relate every click in their apps and websites to. If I also use their other services with the same account, I would be paying them to spy on everything I do and sell my data, so other companies can sell me crap.
If you’ve already got that much of a set-up to guarantee privacy, it’s a very good point. Most people aren’t that dedicated to privacy (I think), but it’s still a very valid point in your case
I would be very interested to know how good they are at tracking a user across brand new browser sessions. I have mine set to delete cookies, cache and history (minus a few trusted domains) on close but I’d imagine it would be easy to differentiate between me and others in my household by browser fingerprints alone. The only question then is whether those guesses are reliable enough for Google to essentially treat those sessions as 1 person, or throw it away since there are bound to be quite a lot of cases where 10s or 100s of people on the same IP have very similar browsing habits and configurations and trying to figure out who is who would be incredibly difficult (think offices where everybody could have exactly the same laptop and share similar browsing habits due to working for the same company). That’s my cope anyway. The alternative is Youtube over Tor for which would be painful.
Points 4 and 5 on my end are essentially two sides to of the same coin. I should clarify, I don’t have a problem with YouTube introducing a new feature and making that Premium-only.
I mean, fair. The two big reasons are that your views are worth much more than normal viewers to creators, so it does mean you’re helping support the content you watch. Further, the more people who pay for content the less influence advertisers have. All this said, I would assume that $5 a month to your favorite creators (Patreon, Paypal, Librepay, etc) would be worth more to them than a share of your YouTube Premium subscription fee.
That’s what I’m thinking. The day I have a job I would much rather support my favourite creators directly than pay YouTube and hope for some trickle down effect
Playing while locked doesn’t seem to work unfortunately in Firefox for iOS. You can do the trick where you start PIP and then immediately lock the phone to play in the background, but that only works if you don’t unlock your phone again.
It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:
I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.
As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.
I agree but I think it needs to be slightly more practical. Sometimes a line of business just dries up and it would damage the company to try and keep that service going. It wouldn’t make sense to force a company into bankruptcy to keep one line going that few people use anymore.
Earlier today, though, I was thinking about sunsetting guarantees. Companies can and should decommission things when it makes business sense, but the user generated content it has gathered shouldn’t just disappear, and they shouldn’t be allowed to destroy the user experience of things people have bought.
So I would propose rules like:
If a service is being decomissioned or an entry point to that service being shut down, the content available on that service must be made available as a bulk export. Personal data, such as account data, messages, etc should be made available to users individually, while publicly accessible content should be made available publicly.
If a public service is being taken down completely, source code should be made available publicly.
If the service for a device which was physically purchased by consumers is being taken down, an update must be provided to allow users to use a local or alternative backend service. The source code for the service must be released publicly.
If features are being removed from a service which backed a physically purchased device, an update must be offered which allows users to point to a local or alternative service for either all functionality or, at minimum, the removed functionality. Looking at you, Google, keep removing features…
Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.
I don’t know how to feel about this election as an ameribro.
I’m left-libertarian (upper case left, lower case libertarian) on the political compass, which is practically not represented in US politics, so I’ll take whatever I can get. Biden is, realistically, the best I can hope for this election cycle. He’s not great, there’s a lot of big policy issues I diverge with him on pretty sharply (both on left and libertarian), but the other candidates for the DNC are a hot fucking mess. As for the libertarian party, it’s actually insane. Gary Johnson got booed for saying he’d want people to have driver’s licenses to drive. That’s a no go for me. And as far as the conservatives go, they run the gamut from not an instant disaster (I guess) to the loud, proud, and complete end of the republic.
Biden has at least done some things that I kinda like, and doesn’t seem keen on destroying the republic. I’d love to get a reformer in and sweep Reaganism out on its wrinkled, swampy ass forevermore, but I don’t think that’s realistic at this point. Where I start getting worried is that the Biden campaign seems dead set on repeating some frankly terrible HRC '16 strats, which, well, we saw how well that worked for her, but the pro-Biden response is “Trust me bro, Trump is actually unelectable this time”. I’m also concerned because, let’s face it, Biden’s old enough that he could get struck down with a stroke or what have you at any minute.* Every day, the cosmic dice are getting more and more weighted against him. The democrats have done very little to make a case for a possible candidate/president Harris, where the republicans have laid a LOT of groundwork against her. If Biden bites it or gets incapacitated, Harris is going to have a huge uphill climb in front of her.
I guess where I get uneasy is that it feels like the democrats are making a lot of avoidable and predictable mistakes, and they’re just banking that it won’t blow up in their face this time because, uh, what, that was that time, this is this time? They could do better, but they’re just going to choose not to, and be shocked if shit goes sideways.
*I mean, so could Trump, but I’m not hoping that he wins.
Not OP but gonna explain a bit about it nonetheless:
Other than the US use (generally meaning anarcho-capitalist, selfishly ignorant or both), libertarian is just the opposite pole of the “how much do we let people control us” axis from authoritarian.
So basically a left-libertarian (which is a big spectrum of different political philosophies) is broadly speaking someone who doesn’t believe in inherent authority but DOES believe in rules and various degrees of enforcement to defend the powerless from the powerful.
No. Liberalism is a center-right to right wing ideology that’s inherently capitalistic and permissive towards business. If Rupert Murdoch was still in Australia, he’d be supporting the Liberal Party.
Libertarian is liberal right on that compass.
Only the ahistorical and deliberately misleading US definition.
I’m not in the US, no, but am intimately familiar with most of the terms, themes and national level events as I’ve been following and debating thoroughly for half my so far 40 years lol, so you don’t have to worry about me not getting it 🙂
Ah ok, sorry about that. I get a lot of people assuming that, so I was the one making an ass out of you and me this time 😁
As for the rest, I think I’m just going to leave it be since I’ve described the broad strokes pretty accurately already and it’s semi-late here so I’m gonna go catch some Zs if I can. Sleep tight yourself when you get that far!
They aren’t confusing the terms. It’s just that “libertarians” in the US are largely viewed as right-wing anti-authority, whereas on the global stage, they’re kindof like normal anarchist-lite. If you say, “well that’s not very specific”, then yes that’s correct.
I guess you could say that, in the sense that the government (if any. See below)would be much more of a helper and a support for regular people who aren’t rich and powerful than a ruler and an enforcer working for those that are.
What about roads and utilities?
Paid for and maintained by the people in general, specifics vary wildly across the hundreds of millions of left-libertarians worldwide. Personally, I believe that financing and administrating such thing is quintessential supportive government stuff. An anarchist would disagree with me, opposing all government or at least all except very local government.
What really turns me off of libertarian is the belief that people have to pay for their own roads and fireman. The rich will only survive then, kind of like how our healthcare is right now.
Yeah, right-libertarianism is basically “survival of the already most privileged” dressed up (with varying degrees of success) in misleading rhetoric about self-determination…
if you’re saying that the government is ran more like a co-op, then I get it.
Ideally, all organisations would be co-ops and the government would be an administrative non-profit co-op of sorts run by and for those of the people with the most aptitude and uncorrupt interest in doing such work.
That’s just my personal take, though, there’s hundreds if not thousands of left-libertarian ideologies and I don’t agree with all of the specifics of any one of them…
Not OP, but I think we’d be friends. I want left (no pun intended) alone to live my own life, but I don’t think people should be left to die because of the machine we’re in. I believe your rights extend to the point they interact with mine and vice versa. You’re rights can’t prevent mine and vice versa.
Well, typically other libertarians like to pretend we don’t exist and invoke the magic phrase “you’re not a real libertarian”, whereas left libertarians prefer to pretend that there’s more than one of us. The tl;Dr is that it’s more of anti-authoritarian take than a pro-free-market take that you’d get from right lib.
On the matter of economics, I believe that free markets work and work well where they exist, which is certainly not everywhere they’re imagined to. In other words, I’m not willing to imagine that markets with baked-in coercion (like healthcare) are free. Free markets require choice and, ultimately, the ability to say no without coming to harm. If I can buy a widget from Bob, a widget from Sally, or not buy a widget and suffer no cost or harm, that’s a free market. I also generally don’t believe in rugged individualism; poverty is, itself, a coercive force in economics. This sort of view is partly how I wholeheartedly endorse mass transit and good urbanism as a libertarian, because being functionally coerced into car ownership isn’t economic freedom.
I also believe that the government does have a right to interfere with gross negligence. That is, if you’re drunk driving, if you’re having a bonfire and there’s a high wildfire risk, or you’re doing something that any reasonable person would understand is an imminent danger to the safety of others around you, the government has an absolute right to make you stop. Most right libertarians think that the government should only interfere with direct violence and that everything else can be settled in court; so basically, if you’re a drunk driver, make sure you kill whoever you hit so they can’t sue you. I also think that this applies to companies and organizations, not just people.
Those are, probably, pretty uncontroversial takes, and you might be thinking “so where’s the libertarianism?”. Well, I also think that the government has massively overstepped its bounds, especially in the last forty years or so since Reaganism. Ready? Here we go. The war on drugs and the war on terror has seen the government giving itself ridiculous powers that need to be culled immediately. The NSA mass surveillance program (which was ‘killed’ by the SCOTUS and resurrected by Obama and the Republicans under the cynically-named USA FREEDOM ACT later that same day) should be erased in totality. The government should not be collecting any data from any tech company on anybody without consent, a warrant, or the data being anonymized (if it’s, for example, for research purposes). The patriot act should be repealed yesterday, and gitmo should be closed because holding anyone without trial is wrong, full stop. No-knock raids should not happen, period, and we desperately need police reform. The entire country is a free speech zone, and protests should not be met with brutal crackdowns. I also think that what happens between consenting adults or what a consenting adult does to themselves is nobody else’s business, as long as it’s without coercion. That’s maybe 5% of the rant I could go on, but I don’t want to write a book, and I don’t think you want to read one.
Also:
-What happens between consenting adults is nobody else’s business, least of all the church or the government. I’m pro sex work and pro LGBT rights.
-I’m pro-abortion rights.
-The government needs to leave the native Americans the fuck alone. 2023 and we’re still fucking with them. The government needs to leave everyone alone, but they particularly need to fuck off on native Americans. That said, I think we should still financially support their recovery as a people and culture from what we’ve done to them, but they should get to decide the shape that takes, not us.
-I’m firmly against borders. If it was up to me, I’d Thanos snap that shit. No more borders. I know that’s an extreme position, and I’d be willing to compromise for an EU-style open borders arrangement.
I’m more anti-authority and further left than your average US liberal. You’re not wrong, though. I once melted a Republican colleague’s brain by explaining that libertarian is different than liberal.
The way I see it in America is any real left political representation was destroyed during the cold war and the liberals co-oped the language of the left while cleansing it of it’s economic ramifications. When you think of how many activists and organizers in the 60s were openly socialists vs today it tells a lot. MLK Jr. and Rosa Parks for instance are these liberal heroes but their significance as socialists is completely whitewashed, they’re “courageous individuals” now who “inspire,” not radicals who had a wholly different vision of American society.
Phil Ochs summarized a liberal as “ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.”
nice program, how do you think it’s best to achieve it? Politics isn’t just about goals it’s about methods.
And don’t forget other classic libertarian stumbling block, environmental pollution. Even if libertarians admit it’s an issue I still haven’t seen any ways of solving a truly global issue which has no immediate measurable harm (and not fixing it is heavily incentivized by the free market)
That’s a tricky one. The problem is that power is, more often than not, a one way street. Once organizations or people have it, they tend to not want to give it up. It takes a LOT of effort over long periods of time to walk that power back, and particularly when the money’s against it. The US is already practically a fascist (and I mean this in a textbook, unsensational sense) economy what with how tightly the public-private partnerships run, so you’re fighting a three way battle between getting the government, the investors, and the corporate leadership to all agree all at the same time to decrease their power. The corporates and investors have been getting some really sweetheart deals put of this arrangement, and they’re not going to want to walk away from easy money guaranteed by market coercion.
I think the path of least resistance here is going to be widespread local action, at the level of the state or below. It’s not unprecedented, this is more or less how marijuana legalization went mainstream. If we waited for the policy to change at the federal level, well… [Gestures wildly at the house of representatives] maybe your grandkids will live to see some moderate change. But the states and especially local government have a frankly shocking amount of power, and they beat the feds in legal battles a surprising amount of times when their laws come into conflict, though this is largely dependent on the views of the circuit of appeals court that presides over your area. The fifth circuit are a bunch of authoritarian whack jobs that once heard of the constitution but think it sounds like a pinko hippie, for example. But we’ll never get there if we don’t try, and effecting change at the local level is both possible and realistic. For my part, I’m working on creating the first YIMBY group in central California, and I want to work with others to pressure central valley urbans to have better urbanism, cheaper housing, more public transit, and all around be more livable and affordable.
My views align much more closely with Anarcho-Communism than US conservatism. I’m not an Anarcho-Communist because all evidence I’ve seen thus far suggests that truly functional Anarcho-Communism (which has existed historically) is dependent on small enough communities that there are few to no truly anonymous interactions and/or a strong social cage of norms that ends up being morality police with extra steps.
I wish you the best of luck with your strategic voting, hopefully the lesser of two evils has some amount of representation for you.
I don’t really understand the US’ electoral system, but you guys seem really boned by the whole two party system. Like no wonder everyone is so grumpy and unsatisfied all the time when you guys seem to just have two big parties that span such wide gamuts of views and policies.
Basically, yes. Speaking as someone who’s voted third party before, there’s no hope of changing the system by voting third party at the federal level. Game theory on first-past-the-post elections and the absolutely insane amount of money in our elections practically ensures it. The best way to effect change there is to go to some form of transferrable vote or ranked choice vote at the state and local level. There are already some states whose electoral college splits its votes in this way, and the two main parties (and their big donors) hate it because it erodes their ability to take a state’s vote for granted and weakens their duopoly.
One of my favorite search ads that appeared in the mid 2000s happened when I was bored. I searched “grandpa” without any context just to see what would come up, because I really was that bored. One of the ads that appeared was one of those where they just shove your search in the title verbatim so someone not paying attention might think it was what they wanted.
It said something like “Looking for grandpa? Find great deals here!” I don’t remember exactly what the second part said, but the “Looking for grandpa?” part made me bust out laughing. I then started searching other random stuff to try and get something equally stupid, but it didn’t capture me quite the same way. Either way, my boredom was alleviated.
@Jamie@JammaJammaPJ This happened to me once when I was doing research on George Washington. I remember the ad saying “Search George Washington Death online at Target”
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