I think that thanks to the behavior of corporations a lot of people have a very unhealthy association with money. Corporations engage in a grossly unethical fashion to try to coercively exploit every single penny from people, and that's generally disgusting. I think that makes 'normal' people want to go in the exact opposite direction and you end up where we are in this discussion.
But if you just look at money as what it is - a simple means of exchange, then charging money doesn't need to be some sort of parasitic or exploitative profit-maximization thing. It's simply a means for people to be able to support themselves while doing something they enjoy, without having to rely on the wholly unreliable and potentially undignified behaviors in relying on donations.
This is all further compounded by governments making it difficult for people to transfer money between themselves openly + anonymously online, let alone on a global level. Actually selling things has some pretty significant hurdles to overcome. Easing global anonymous transactions would greatly lower the pain involved in selling stuff 'ethically'. Of course there's already one tech that had the potential for this, but hasn't yet quite lived up to its potential.
I don't think it's subconscious at all. If, for instance, you contract something on fiverr for $5, you expect $5 of work. If you contract something for $1000 you expect $1000 of work. And the former's probably going to take a lot more feedback to get to where you want than the latter.
Basically, you get what you pay for. That's not always true, but it holds pretty reliably.
I was all with you right up until the class conflict stuff. Nobody's enslaving anybody. Well that's not true, we're mostly enslaving ourselves. There are endless easy opportunities in life. For instance go teach English in Saudi Arabia and you'll earn around $60k a year which doesn't sound like much until you account for the fact you pay 0% in taxes and have a cost of living well under $1k a month.
Just live frugally, dump your excess into index funds, and you'll likely be a millionaire in a decade. Yeah it's Saudi Arabia, but the price is right. And from that point one never needs to work another day in their life if they don't want, since typical returns on a million $ are more than enough to pay for cost of living in like 90% of the world.
Yet approximately 0% of people will take this advice. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of people generally prefer to seek the easiest, most popular, lowest friction choices. Options like I'm mentioning here only exist precisely because most people won't take them. But it's a sort of paradox in that there's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so.
> There are endless easy opportunities in life. For instance go teach English in Saudi Arabia and you'll earn around $60k a year which doesn't sound like much until you account for the fact you pay 0% in taxes and have a cost of living well under $1k a month.
Just be born a single male with knowledge of Saudi, English and ability to teach and then lock yourself away for 10 years in Arab world living like a second class citizen. What the fuck am I even reading? Let me guess, for women it’s “just open an OnlyFans account”? I swear to God, the shit I read on this forum when it comes to things outside of tech.
You don't need to know Arabic to teach English in Saudi Arabia. And that generalizes to the overwhelming majority of the world. And no you wouldn't be a second class citizen. Saudi Arabia has one of the highest immigrant populations in the world, far higher than e.g. the US as a percent - about 40% of the population.
0% of people will take your advice because it's half-baked and you didn't actually research the requirements (hint: simply knowing English is not enough) to get such a job. Or you purposefully omitted the requirements to make your point that it's "easy".
A word of advice: if you want to give advice, at least be realistic.
The requirements beyond being a native speaker, especially for the demographic of a forum like this, are not real show stoppers. And my advice is similar to the path I took with my own life, though not in Saudi Arabia. And it sent me on a journey that ended up way away from teaching English, but that's the nature of life.
The unspoken benefit of doing things like this is that it also exposes you to endless opportunities because the expats you meet half way around the world tend to be an exceptionally interesting batch. It's certainly a path I'd recommend to absolutely anybody who's not content with the typical treadmill of life.
Leaving the place you have lived your whole life, the place where your family and personal life is and going to another country for work for 5 to 10 years will destroy the past life they had.
After 5 10 years that person will almost become part Saudi due to living in another country. And after he comes back no one will be that close, even close family members will feel something different due to the person being away/(out of physical touch) for 10 years
You mean worldwide, by nature of being an English speaker? Probably. But people don't really care about that. They want to keep up with the Jeffersons and Saudi Arabia allows a means to do that, at least relatively. On the off chance you somehow meant something else, relocation costs including airfare/etc are included as well as a return ticket.
maybe class struggle was the wrong terminology, but the more i see of problems in the world the more i start to think its about money/power vs "all the other busywork" we get bombarded with daily.
"Sacrifice your one and only precious youth for happiness" is the TL;DR here. Also, the Saudi's are very choosy about who gets to show up and teach - a girl I went to high school actually went - after she got her masters in education.
I'm not saying some people shouldn't do this, but everybody can't. I (mid 40s male living in Canada) used to be a huge proponent of living beneath your means and did in fact sock away 20% of my income into investments. But the K shaped job market, real estate market, and cost of living in general has made that far harder to do today. I had a dirt cheap apartment in downtown Toronto ~2004-2007 before I bought a place, managed to have a fun youth AND save by simply not participating in lifestyle creep (the number of young people I knew that blew money on fancy German cars and other bling as tech salaries started to grow still makes me shake my head).
But that same apartment I rented for $700/month is now $2500 and requires a letter of employment (read they only will rent to professionals) to apply for.
Netanyahu has been claiming that Iran will have a nuke within a few years, for more than 30 years, and seeking to use that as a justification to invade them. If Iran wanted to make a nuke in this time frame they would have. The only thing that changed now is that he found a big enough idiot to believe him. Though now that the US and Israel have invaded them, I do expect they will develop a nuclear weapon, because it seems to be the only way for a nation to ensure its security in modern times.
Actually having an assembled weapon is a red line and significant threat.
Having almost-a-bomb like an IKEA Billy shelf still unassembled in its box in the garage is what they wanted. The threat of being able to have a bomb. There have been several instances over the decades of the west finding and blowing up their prepared materials and facilities in order to try to make the runway longer.
By the way this is also most likely where Japan is.
Japan is also a NPT signatory and they also very likely have an almost-bomb. That is in secret they very likely have the research, the designs, the industrial capacity for the final enrichment, and almost weapons grade enriched stockpiles. They don't want to have to cross the line into the territory of actually constructing a bomb or announcing it publicly, but they want the potential and for their adversaries to know that they could do it in short order without giving them enough of a provocation to actually be called out.
No, actually having an assembled weapon is how they get the US and Israel to stop screwing over their country, which has been going on for more than 70 years now. They inched up their enrichment higher and higher each time the US or Israel attacked them as a warning. And the US and Israel kept attacking them. There is nowhere left to go but nuclear from here.
This is even more true as the former Supreme Leader of Iran had issued a religious fatwa against the development of a nuclear weapon. And then the US decided to assassinate him. His successor, his son, is much more hardline. That's either some serious 5d chess, or we just have idiots for leaders and allies alike. And we both know which it is.
Like most of all widely spoken languages, there's a lot of regional variation in English. There's even a bunch of quizzes online where you answer 20 questions about phrasings, and they can tell you where you're from with a disconcertingly high degree of accuracy.
In my experience a "retort" is sharp or witty, but certainly not angry, whereas the word "rebuttal" is itself essentially antagonistic. You might use it when referring to something or someone that you look down upon, whereas a more neutral term would simply be "response."
Just personally I tend to regard retort as short and reactive while rebuttal as a longer and more considered disagreement. A retort could be defensive and wrong or it could be sharp and insightful - it doesn't imply one or the other. A rebuttal is mostly an attempt to correct something while a retort doesn't need to be a correction (although it could).
Even something like "piss off!" could be a retort, but usually never a rebuttal :)
Just as I was reading your comment I remembered that Samuel Jackson used "retort" in his speech in the "Pulp Fiction" movie and was wondering whether he was openly antagonistic there (I mean, he killed a bunch of guys with a pistol shortly afterwards but still) or was it a witticism.
I admit I am lost on these nuances and I usually kind of use whatever idiom comes to mind, which yes, likely would net me some weird looks depending on where I am geographically.
One of humanity's greatest weaknesses is cognitive dissonance. People can convince themselves of just about anything. And in some ways intelligence is a burden here. A fool will just do something with a reason of 'f you, that's why.' It's only the clever man that will even bother rationalizing the villain into the hero, and we're great at it. An interesting thought experiment is to ask people if they'd be willing to push a button that would randomly kill a person somewhere in the world for a million dollars. They'd have no direct accountability themselves and their action would be unknown to anybody else.
People will rationalize themselves into declaring this moral even though it is obviously one of the most overtly amoral actions possible. One friend I have, a rather intelligent guy otherwise, was even trying to create a utilitarian argument that he'd donate some percent of his 'earnings' to life saving charities meaning he'd be saving more life on the net. The fact that if everybody thought and behaved the same way, the entirety of humanity would cease to exist, was a consideration he didn't have a response for. Let alone the fact that he just rationalized his way into justifying near to any deed imaginable, so long as you got paid enough for it.
I don't think that was intentional, but invading countries while trying to distract them with negotiations, randomly assassinating leaders and hoping everything just turns out well, threatening to "destroy civilizations", targeting bridges and more, all while aiding and abetting Israel which is intentionally destroying pharmaceutical, educational, and other such civilian institutions is all 100% intentional.
In some ways worse than bombing the school was the effort to implicitly deny it. The school was near a military facility, and itself was a military facility in the past. US intelligence screwed up. They should have simply acknowledged what happened and why. Their response just reeked of cowardice and malice at the highest level.
I don't think most people understand how the times have changed here. CNN's prime time shows get fewer views than a mid-tier YouTuber, literally. They hit < 1mil at prime time. And their demographic is, again literally, dying off as they have a median viewer age of 67 [1], which is steadily increasing presumably due to a lack of new viewers. On the bright side for them that puts them on the 'younger' side of most cable news networks.
Cable news is basically dead, but I think most of us missed the funeral. It used to be a relatively big deal decades ago, but those times are long since passed.
> a mid-tier YouTuber, literally. They hit < 1mil at prime time.
By "mid-tier YouTuber", I suppose you mean a top 0.00001% youtuber or thereabouts? Only the top 100ish with 50m+ subscribers translate to an actual audience per video of 1m+ (outliers notwithstanding), and you're comparing a US news network against an entertainment platform with a global audience of billions. I'm going to guess that CNN is still more influential to US politics than a gaming channel in India or Indonesia, even if a few of the latter get more views. Not to say that cable news influence hasn't waned from its peak, obviously, but I don't think the comparison to "mid-tier Youtubers" really holds up at all.
I don't think your numbers are reasonable. Widespread use of fake subscription services distorts things but plenty of people get CNN level views with orders of magnitude fewer than 50 million subs. Here [1] is an account whose median view is CNN prime-time level. She has 186k subs.
Beyond that it's a power law distribution. Some guy who uploaded 1 video for a friend counts as a 'YouTuber', but obviously they do not matter in terms of overall competition. We're only talking about the channels that are regularly uploading content of some reasonable standard. And amongst that group - CNN level is very much in the mid-tier range, and I think that's being generous. There are currently about 70k channels with at least a million subs.
As for influence, I don't think news has much of any influence at all in US politics anymore. They blew it all by going hyper-partisan for the sake of views - moderate short to mid-term gains for catastrophic long-term consequences. Pretty much the standard of most US businesses now a days. In terms of confidence in institutions, television news now ranks lower than every measured institution, except Congress. [2] They scored 11%, Congress scored 10%. And that's with piggy-backing off the phrasing of simply "television news" from the poll, instead of just cable news. Broadcast news is going to score significantly higher in confidence than cable news.
I think people typically flip the causality here. People's voting isn't determined by their media habits, but rather their media habits are determined by their voting. For instance in these cable news discussions, Fox is often a huge target. But if you covertly turned Fox into the NYTimes tomorrow, you'd have 0 impact on election outcomes. All you'd end up doing is creating a vacuum that'd probably be filled by OANN or another similar network.
Tucker Carlson is another great example. There was a segment of people who were loudly rejoicing after he was fired from Fox. But it predictably had a less than zero effect on his visibility, as he now gets vastly more viewers than he did on Fox by running his segments independently. People weren't watching Tucker because of Fox, they were watching Fox because of Tucker. And, in turn, the people watching Tucker aren't just adopting his views - but rather tend to watch him because they have comparable worldviews themselves. If his worldview suddenly turned into that of Rachel Maddow overnight, all that'd happen is his viewership would also trend to zero.
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Just think about yourself. Do you honestly think you're going to go start supporting the current administration if you just freebased a few thousand hours of Fox, OANN, or whatever else? Our fundamental views are shaped very slowly and more from things like life experience than headlines, which is a big part of the reason that age is such a large factor in typical ideology.
It goes both ways; there's a feedback. People start watching a channel because they're predisposed to agree with it, but when the channel constantly reinforces their biases, it foes from a slight predisposition to a strong opinion to an absolute certainty.
Fox News doesn't just give a conservative opinion on events, but constantly asserts that every other information source is wrong. Not just wrong, in fact, but a deliberate attempt to con them.
You're correct that eliminating Fox News would not, in itself, end that process. They've had decades to reinforce their views. It may well be inescapable at this point.
But OANN isn't as slick as Fox News. It doesn't attract people with a predisposition; it's more likely to turn them off. If Fox News were to disappear, and OANN expand to fill its space, it might eventually reduce the number of people drawn into that self-reinforcing mechanism.
Don't forget Ellison/Skydance also control TikTok, where according to Pew 38% of adult Americans get their news.
The internet has killed institutions of journalism that have a reputation to protect. Billionaires did the rest of the job (RIP Washington Post). Pretty bad outcome. We are left random YouTubers, people with a Substack or podcast, etc. No fact-checking standards / departments. Will Propublica and PBS Newshour/Frontline be around in 10 years. Federal funding cuts already killed Weekend Newshour.
If you can change the narrative the whatever percentage of CNN's prime time viewers are getting, then that's even fewer receiving opposing programming. That's 100% of the goal whatever number of viewer percentages are affected. Or is it 1200% fewer opposition viewers??? ::face-palm::
That's like saying there's no hard line between e.g. white and gray, or even white and black if we take it to an extreme. And that is accurate, if you slowly shift between the two then people will claim a transition at slightly different points, but it's entirely meaningless because it's (getting back to the blue/green example) not like anybody is going to insist 'no that's blue!' or 'no that's green!' It's obvious that it's intentionally ambiguous and so any pick at such a point is going to be largely arbitrary with little attachment held by anybody.
Actually people will definitely insist on "no that's blue" or "no that's green." My husband and I have frequent disagreements about a specific shade of blue/green. I think it's blue. He thinks it's green.
A few paragraphs isn't writing, it's a snippet. The shorter something is, the better AI will be at mimicking it, because underlying flaws are less likely to be made apparent.
Music is another great example of this. I enjoy techno/trance type stuff, but YouTube is becoming borderline unusable for this genre due to AI slop. You'd think AI would do a good job of producing tracks here since this genre is certainly somewhat formulaic. And about 2 minutes into a lengthy track I'd probably do relatively mediocrely at determining whether it was human or AI, but by about 10 minutes into a track it's often painfully obvious. I run this experiment regularly as I find myself having to skip the AI slop which YouTube seems obsessed with recommending anyhow.
Ironically AI is probably providing a boon to human DJs here, because actively seeking them out it is one of the only ways to escape YouTube's sloparithm.
But if you just look at money as what it is - a simple means of exchange, then charging money doesn't need to be some sort of parasitic or exploitative profit-maximization thing. It's simply a means for people to be able to support themselves while doing something they enjoy, without having to rely on the wholly unreliable and potentially undignified behaviors in relying on donations.
This is all further compounded by governments making it difficult for people to transfer money between themselves openly + anonymously online, let alone on a global level. Actually selling things has some pretty significant hurdles to overcome. Easing global anonymous transactions would greatly lower the pain involved in selling stuff 'ethically'. Of course there's already one tech that had the potential for this, but hasn't yet quite lived up to its potential.
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