A climate of mild paranoia.

Honestly I wouldn’t mind paying for news. It has to be paid for somehow, and if we’re not paying for it, the billionaires are. At the same time, I don’t pay for news. The news subscription model is completely broken.

The idea of paying $20+ dollars per month made sense in a world where you got most of your news from your home town newspaper. And in exchange, that newspaper had the funds to do a tons of local and national reporting. But now? Most people get their news from dozens of different news sources. I’m not going to pay to subscribe to dozens of news websites, when I will only visit each one a handful of times. Each paper’s subscription prices assume that they’re going to your primary information source. But my main information sources are news aggregators.

What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.

I want to support journalism, but their prices are just completely divorced from how modern audiences actually consume news. They’re still pricing their newspapers like it’s 1990. (Made up numbers), instead of trying to get $20/month out of 1 million people, they should be trying to get $2/month out of 10 million people. But every news site just wants to charge you an arm and a leg and trap you in their own walled garden.

And this is why Brian Thompson got what was coming to him.

Yeah I recommend. The chief antagonist of the series, Morning Light Mountain, is one of the best examples of a truly “alien” alien that I’ve read in sci fi. It’s about as far from the trope that aliens are just humans with crap glued to their foreheads, or stand-ins for various real-world human cultures, as you can get.

I loved the concept of Peter F Hamilton’s Commonwealth saga. People invent wormhole technology. Interstellar colonization is done by opening wormholes directly to alien worlds. Except the tech isn’t cheap or easy. IIRC they described an interstellar generator as made of half a cubic kilometer of intricate machinery. They’re giant machines that can open portals to distant star systems.

Because of the immense expense, they need to make maximum use of these gateways. The generators operate on regular schedules, connecting to different worlds in the human sphere of colonization. And to make maximum use of the gateways…they run trains through them. You travel to a distant star system by buying a train ticket.

Scene: design board meeting room, car manufacturer

“What if instead of designing the ventilated seats to blow air, we reversed it? What if we used them as the air intake? Turns out if we consider how the ducts are plumbed, rough calculations indicate we could save $5/car!”

Yeah I have a subscription there. I recommend it.

I would say it’s not a community just based on the fact that you can’t have any kind of actual conversation in the comments section. Commenting on YouTube videos is just screaming into the void.

Most creators on YouTube make their main money from patreon/merch anyway. No reason you can’t do that on peertube.

Zero. Dated for three years, married for seven.

Blue MAGA nonsense.

I mean every single swing state? Why would it be surprising for all the swing states to swing in one direction? They don’t swing randomly, they usually swing together.

One county in NY with ZERO Kamala votes?

Precinct, not a county. A precinct dominated by an orthodox Jewish community that all vote together. The congregation decided to vote for Trump.

Something like 12% bullet ballots in blue counties only when the avg is 1%?

Trump drives out low-propensity voters, and he’s way more popular than Congressional Republicans generally.

Voting machines connected to Starlink?

Voting machines aren’t connected to the internet.

Don’t be like Republicans. You’re better than this.

Unfortunately now Google is ChatGPT. It provides its own shitty AI answers, and its search results have been corrupted by an ocean of slop.

I see it like this. Books are the work of a single individual. That one person will have broad authority to write their story however they please. So range of book quality is very large. There are great books and there are truly awful books. And in fact, the vast majority of books are total rubbish. But the dregs get forgotten and the good stuff rises to the top.

Movies are made by committee. This reduces the spread of quality. Many hands tends to move things towards the average. So you have a much lower portion of total crap, but you also don’t have as many true masterpieces. The quality of most movies tends to be pretty mid.

But because books don’t go through as much of an averaging out of quality through being created by many hands, when they go well. They go WELL. Sometimes a master author will sit down, truly be in their element, and create their greatest work. And their vision will carry through and arrive to the reader undiluted. But movies? You can be the greatest director or screen writer on the planet; you’re still not going to be able to make a movie without the help of hundreds of other people. You could write the world’s greatest movie, but your vision will inevitably be worn down quite a bit before it reaches the audiences in theaters.

Or, expressed graphically:

Oh, your hard drive has the whole movie series on it? Well I got the whole series right here!

Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.

This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren’t bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they’re stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can’t attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.

It’s just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.

These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.

Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.

Think you want to be bred now? Wait until you have SRS, if that’s your cup of tea. T_T

I like the idea of the transition happening slowly over several decades. Basically you found a company, and you’ll be able to maintain majority control over it until you reach your retirement. You can have a vision and carry it through. You just can’t create a multi generational empire that makes your children and grandchildren into newly minted aristocrats.

I mean, obsess over performative semantics if you want. I just want to see the bastards hang.

Nah. SCOTUS will never let that happen. Rendition him and his ICE goons to countries like Venezuela. He and his ICE gestapo will have caused the deaths of countless Venezuelan citizens. They’re fully within their legal rights to charge him and his agents with crimes against humanity. If Trump can rendition innocent people to third party countries, we sure as hell can extradite the guilty to face trial. Don’t even try to use the US justice system, not while SCOTUS is so openly corrupt. Just ship all these bastards off to the home countries of their victims. Let them do with them as they please.

We need to rendition Trump to Venezuela or other applicable country. They can then try him for all the deaths of their citizens he’s caused in his numerous concentration camps. SCOTUS can take its presidential immunity ruling and boof it up Kavanaugh’s ass. If we can’t try him and all his ICE goons here, then we can send them all somewhere where they can be tried. Trump is sending innocent people to random countries. No reason we can’t do the same with mass murderers.