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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
e8u
mitigatedchaos

@e8u

Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.

This entire situation happened because people were unwilling to pay for content.  Your plan for this is… to not pay for content.

e8u

This seems akin to the, “why do you make me hurt you” defense.

If Eve attempts to derive revenue from manipulating Alice into spending her money unwisely, thereby deriving less benefit from it than she could otherwise, it is bad for Eve to succeed, and it is good for Eve to fail and starve in the street.

Advertisers deserve to be given long prison sentences. I don’t want to do that, because it would violate their freedom of speech. However, they do deserve it.

“Content” that cannot survive without advertising doesn’t deserve to exist.

mitigatedchaos

Remember that time when Google took over the government and forced everyone to connect to websites that had advertising at gunpoint?

Well you probably don’t because we’re not in that timeline.  As for myself, I still haven’t forgiven GDN, but fortunately it doesn’t exist yet, and it may never exist.

Look I’m not gonna wring you out for using an ad blocker just because you don’t like ads, but don’t style yourself as a morally superior revolutionary over it.  You aren’t.  This “content that’s supported by ads doesn’t deserve to exist” thing is ridiculous posturing, and on some level you know it. 

Internet advertisements are a form of microtransaction payment that exists due to coordination problems, partially because the value of one read of a webpage is both low and unknown before reading it.  A proper alternative system would be a form of widely-accepted digital currency that made it cheap and easy to send very small amounts of money, perhaps backed by the State if you’re into that sort of thing.

Suggesting that paying money, which is a direct and very expensive signal about not wanting advertisements, is unacceptable, is basically the exact opposite of solving the problem.

Source: argumate economics the invisible fist
e8u
argumate

selfreplicatingquinian said: $10/month for no ads and the ability to play videos in the background or with the screen off turned out to be totally worth it for me. You can even just subscribe to Google Music and get the YouTube sub free

hmm there’s the instinctive revulsion at paying for what used to be free, but honestly this makes so much economic sense; if you want to be catered to you need to be the customer, not the product.

arguably I should pay for youtube or stop using youtube, much as I stopped using Netflix when I judged the payment wasn’t worth it.

shieldfoss

I’d love to pay youtube

Of course, youtube would love for me not to, on account of I’m in a country not on their list yet.

So I keep using ublock origins.

e8u

Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.

argumate

Incentives though! What if the monthly fee disables other Google ads and also disables their tracking service; how much do they even make per user per month? Maybe this would be more profitable for them, then they could tell the advertisers to go to hell and not need to worry about the ever imminent collapse of the online advertising market.

e8u

Danegeld.

mitigatedchaos

Not a good analogy.  The Danes aren’t offering an actual service.  YouTube, however, is an actual service on offer and costs money to run, like various other websites.

Source: argumate
argumate
argumate

diogenesvonneumann said: Alawites are about 10% of the Syrian population, fighting a war to maintain their dominance over the majority Sunnis is pretty close to imperialism. And Russia supporting Assad in that war to maintain access to their naval base definitely is. On the other hand the other aspiring rulers of Syria are probably even worse.

If a sufficiently nasty war broke out in the Middle East that resulted in forced ethnic relocation similar to what happened in Europe at the end of WWII and the Yugoslav Wars resulting in relatively monolithic ethnostates, would that make the situation more fucked up or less fucked up or just a different variety of fucked up.

(Because as people keep pointing out, Europe has been suspiciously peaceful since right-wing nationalists achieved their dream of neatly reshuffling all the people and borders to line up, barring some over enthusiasm where they mistakenly thought the German border might extend a thousand miles into Russia).

mitigatedchaos

While I genuinely like the idea of allowing different ethnic groups to have their own laws (providing Exit is still an option, etc, etc) to a degree and nation-states are a way to do that, I suspect that the sectarian religious divisions might cause them to constantly bristle at each other.

It might not be enough.  But then again, maybe that war would bring about an Islamic Reformation.

politics

I hope the corrupt officials of the Earth Sphere Federation throw every Globalist in jail for meaningless political crimes.  Because that’s where this ends. But they’ll throw me in instead.  If there is one world government, there can be no place for me.  

An Earth Federation will not allow cultural enclaves that might challenge its power, that exclude people it politically favors.  It won’t allow that kind of gated community, much less a full-blown city-state.  And there will be nowhere to go except Space.

grumpy uncharitable mitigated future
funereal-disease
funereal-disease

Claiming you don’t need or want a safe space of any kind because “life isn’t safe” is the most obnoxious kind of bravery debate.

Life as an entity/overarching concept isn’t safe, sure, but we’re not talking about safety from random happenstance; we’re talking about things we can control. You could get hit by a car tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you should take a bath with your toaster. Similarly, the fact that some people out there in the world might be callous and cruel is no reason not to avoid callousness and cruelty when you have the option. On the contrary: it’s a reason to insist on more exacting standards when you have the chance to do so.

mitigatedchaos

Part of the opposition to safe spaces is driven by two things:

1. Attempts to turn entire institutions into “safe spaces” are undertaken by SJ advocates, even when making a space safe for one group means making it unsafe for another group, and this can be used as a means of political control.

2. The opposition knows darn well that they aren’t allowed to have their own spaces, therefore they want to deny every other group their ability to make an exclusive space.  Part of the reason for this is that SJ tends to make excuses for why their own policies should not apply to themselves.

Combine these together, and “the world isn’t a safe space” becomes a suitable rhetorical weapon - after all, they aren’t allowed a space so they have nothing to lose by it.

gender politics identity politics
the-grey-tribe
flowingblades

The average hackathon environment makes for a hard place for coding females–let alone noncoding ones–to feel comfortable but is deeply necessary, Ali says: “Having that diversity is actually a huge asset.”

Each of the women were adamant about not letting biases become an excuse for them. And none is apologetic for not having prior coding knowledge. They do, however, ask for a level playing field–in all positions technical or not. “Noncoding women’s voices and ideas matter,” Ahmad says. “It doesn’t matter if they [women] don’t know how to code, because that’s a teachable skill, but passion isn’t. Hustle isn’t.”

“There’s not enough tech diversity because programming companies won’t hire women who can’t code.”

the-grey-tribe

This is a pattern that crops up again and again. From a certain angle, it’s obvious why it happens: It alienates competent men and women. And it gives professional diversity consultants a foot in the door.

Full-time culture warriors can be the “idea guy“, but not the coder/engineer/manager. So this move gives activist a way to weasel their way in without having to invest time into skills and without being accountable when the implementation sucks.

The other part of the strategy, drawing a line between sub-groups and declaring one more female or more feminist, gives you an easy rallying flag, a motte, a bailey, and a group to blame.

Source: glimmersight
aellagirl

man-hate

aellagirl

I was scrolling through Tumblr and saw a vintage photo of a pretty woman saying ‘I hate men. if one of them touch me I will bite his hand off.“

I assumed this was posted by someone who thought it was funny or relatable. There are lots of images and messages on Tumblr like this - light hostility towards men, from attractive women.

I didn’t even notice my anticipation that this was done by someone approving, for an approving audience - until I imagined reversing the genders. If there was an image of a handsome man demonstrating light hostility towards women, I would anticipate that it is done by a radical or tiny group, for a largely disapproving audience. I would be much more shocked.

I don’t like the general social acceptance of hostility towards men, is my point. It’s hypocritical, because that same social acceptance vanishes if the hostility is towards women.

mitigatedchaos

Men are in the process of noticing this, which is why male gender movements (distinct from the movement that is actively opposed to notice this) are popping up.

gender politics
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