Agreed. This kind of "journalism" is sheer garbage, whether it's supporting your viewpoint or not, and probably poses a more serious risk to the country than Covid ever will.
1,513 karma · joined March 17, 2021
The strategy is predatory: You take a product like name-brand dish soap, divide it up into smaller containers (but not small enough to be obvious!) and presto, your soap is "cheaper" per unit, when in reality, you're charging more per oz. Then you make it as convenient as possible: more locations that Starbucks, nice rounded off prices so customers don't have to do math, and so on. The bottom line is that you end up profiting by over-charging poor people who either don't realize what's happening or have no other viable options.
That said, people also find the service offered by drug dealers attractive. And yet if the number of crack dealers in your neighborhood explodes overnight, it's unlikely most people will see that as a positive development. A healthy neighborhood is not one riddled with drug pushers, and a healthy economy is not one riddled with dollar stores. There's nothing wrong with a few discount stores, in the same way there's nothing wrong with someone stopping at a fast food place every once in a while. But if you're eating every meal there, something isn't right.
Revenue: 8.09 billion USD (2020)."
Who needs reputation?
I learned this lesson over a decade ago. After being burned over and over because some shitty browser or site bug ate my post I now use One Weird Trick on every post I write:
1. Write it.
2. Select it and Ctrl+C it.
3. Post it.
If the post gets eaten, the text is safe in the clipboard, waiting for another go. This is for shorter posts. For longer ones, multi-paragraph stuff considered over hours or days, it lives in Notepad until it's ready to post. NEVER compose anything in a webpage form. They just can't be trusted.
Email was actually one of the first aspects of the "classic" Internet to fall to the gentrification of the tech monopolies, long before the web in general. In theory, it's an open ecosystem anyone can jump into. In reality, unless you have a lot of energy/time/money to get around the big providers banning you for "spam," it's not going to happen.
To be fair, I was also surprised to read that anyone was still using Hotmail, so maybe I just don't have my finger on the pulse of the hip new generation.
Going into fits of stylish hysteria because the evil billionaires are launching rockets again misses the more important point: they would be just as evil if they WEREN'T launching rockets. Space exploration isn't the issue. The issue is that workers (and small businesses) are getting ground into a pulp to grease the gears of an increasingly cruel and dysfunctional society. What the ill-gotten gains are spent on is irrelevant. The point is they were ill-gotten in the first place.
And this matters, because the vast majority of nasty people running these society-crushing companies AREN'T operating private space programs. Walmart doesn't own any rockets. Nor does McDonalds. But they're still disassembling the foundation of a free, equitable society everyone can participate in, brick by brick, with their perverse economics.
The excuse given in the article however just seems like rewarding bad behavior, and explains at least one reason why the Windows GUI is such a disaster (at this point, it's just years and years of junk accumulation as well, but even in 95 there always seemed to be at least 3 ways of doing the same thing).
"You have to understand that the it wasn't "open", they were only permitted to do several big events a year. So yeah, it was pricey, but it was an event kind of thing, not a casual go anytime deal."
Ah, that would explain it then. My first thought was "I guess there just weren't enough people interested in pinball to keep it going," but all the accounts claim attendance was maxed out. Only having it open for given "events" seems dumb, and clearly it didn't work out. Wonder what the thinking was there.
Anecdotally, I've seen a number of "retro" arcades come and go locally in my small city. It sounds neat on paper, and I enjoyed going to them a couple times, but unlike this place's (supposed) huge turnout, they were never packed. Nostalgia just wasn't strong enough to keep them going.
Then everyone lost their minds and decided webpages needed to be PROGRAMS and we've been paying the price ever since.
The Index was genuinely revolutionary, despite also being punishingly expensive. It's hard not to feel a sense of envy on seeing one in action. But this? No one will care in a year (or maybe even six months).
What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast sea of individual sites, small communities and small businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing. Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two hands to count.
Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically, and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the differences become more superficial with each release, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.
I was there in the early days of 4chan. Back then, brigading/mob justice felt the same: a force for good, a bunch of snappy underdogs thumbing their noses at jerkoffs like the Scientology crowd, or animal abusers. Who could find fault with that?
But the problem with mob justice is that it never stops there. Image board campaigns became increasingly dire and cruel: hacking, ddoss-ing, harassing people that maybe didn't deserve it as much, or at all. And eventually the idea hit the broader culture, mixed with radical left ideology, and mutated into what we now call Cancel Culture.
It's satisfying on a primal level to see institutional investors lose even a little control. But it's just that primal satisfaction that makes mob justice so dangerous. Maybe this is a blip and won't go anywhere. But if it's indicative of a trend, the implications are sinister. The Mob has just gained the ability not just to end people's careers and reputation, but to end whole companies, and potentially even destabilize the whole economy. It's great right now, because we're still in the "harass animal abusers" stage. What happens when we hit the "someone started a rumor about this company, so let's run it into the ground" stage?
Rule by tyrants is bad. Rule by the mob is even worse. Which would you rather live under: Henry the 8th, or the French Revolution?
However, it does have one edge-case use that's come up a few times. If you have a few bucks, moderate technical knowledge, and just need a way to put 20 or 30 videos online in a form that's easy to link to and navigate for the non-technical, Peertube can be a handy tool. In the past you might say "Why not Youtube?", but Youtube has become increasingly obnoxious to use for simple "throwaway" cases. What's the alternative? Tossing the files up on a shady site like Mega? Running an FTP server or hosting a torrent? Youtube used to be a no-brainer for something like this, but there are so many techno-bureaucratic gotchas now that an alternative just might be worth it. There's zero discoverability, no ad revenue, and you have to deal with hosting and security, but at least Peertube is a ready-made package that mostly "just works."
Machine Learning is also genuinely making new things possible. Two Minute papers has a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22Sojtv4gbg demonstrating a model that trains on driving footage, then adjusts video game footage to look almost indistinguishable from a real world shot (and in real time!). This is technically a video game application, but it's not hard to imagine how this could be used in a video or movie context.
The extent to which this site/software actually captures these broader trends is probably minimal, but they're definitely out there. I think we're on the edge of another huge shift, like the one where CG became more practical and down-to-earth so it could be used anywhere. A lot of the same stuff will be done, but by a couple of people rather than an army of editors.
Indeed it did. That's the fun of Fallout: it's only about 25% satire, and that's bananas.
As just one example, it argues that social media companies are not necessarily protected from being compelled to host content they disagree with simply because it would be "compelled speech," as stated in the rejection of recent Florida legislation. There are a number of existing cases where entities were compelled to do just that because they were operating a public space, even if privately owned (a shopping mall for example). Agree or disagree, this is information I wasn't aware of (and probably a lot of readers here as well), so it's interesting information to have.
Ordinary internet users hate it because it represents a serious loss of autonomy for them, and a degradation of service. It makes the internet less free than it used to be.
The wealthy and powerful (and those who love brown-nosing them) hate social media because it's STILL TOO FREE. There's way, way too much information there that threatens their vice-grip on the world, and it has to go. NOW.