• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I used to have this NYT lifestyle reporter in my Facebook and they were constantly posting hyper-specific quote requests. “If you are a bartender who has seen more business from upscale clientele since Covid ended and think this is because affluent people have less empathy, I’d like to interview you for an upcoming article!”

    It’s fucking embracing how the News already knows exactly what they want to say before they even go to people, and they just want people to repeat their line like a good little drone and then go away. And most people will for the mere chance to have their face or name in the news.



  • True. Think about this though. I could probably come up with a question like this one for the professions of 90% of people here.

    “Waiters of Reddit: how do you feel about working in an industry with its own special slave wage exception, an industry where the bosses expect you to dance for cruel patrons who have control over your compensation?”

    “Medical researchers of Reddit; how do you feel about working for an industry that puts profits before people, whose CEOs are being gunned down in the streets because people die so they can make a number?”

    “Software engineers of Reddit, how do you feel about working for the evil tech bros who have sold the self esteem and mental health of a whole generation to make a buck?”

    The answer to all of these is that while they have some truth, the people who work there believe they are also doing some good with their work, and earning a living, and not just selling their soul to enrich the demon at the top of the corporation.

    You say that if we can see it from far away, they must be able to see it from close up. But I’m not sure it works that way. Maybe there’s just a lot we can’t see from far away. And maybe being close to it is TOO close to see it as we do.




  • I don’t mind him being on YT. He should just get involved with Nebula too because it’s a significant project with real momentum that’s designed to take the video format back from YT, a big algorithm driven tech company the likes of which he’s complaining about in the video. In essence, he could be practicing AND preaching, but he’s just preaching.







  • This kind of thing goes way back. I mean you’ll get a lot of content deleted on most web forums, but the one universally verboten thing, above all, priority zero, until the end of time, is: no. fucking. recruitment. to. competing. forums!

    If you ask a lot of web forum owners how their site got started, more than half of them will tell you “well there was this other forum but their server went down for 3 days and people needed a place to go.”

    Communities are portable. Reddit knows this. Every site manager knows this.





  • You mistake me completely. I’m not advertising the virtues of this system at all. I’m just pointing out that there is nothing Korean or American about declining birth rates. This is a universal phenomenon of a society’s transition from agrarianism where more hands = more wealth to an educated, skilled labor force where each child requires a significant investment.

    The US and, for example, Germany use immigration to offset this and keep their population growing. That’s simply a fact you can look up. Japan for example doesn’t want to do this and they’re dealing with the consequences of population decline. This is all over the news for years now.

    I’m not saying this is good or bad or anything. This is just the way things are.

    Your bit about Ancient Rome is a good laugh because it was hardly a developed society by today’s standards and it did indeed run on imported labor, except they called them slaves. So you are at once off base and also wrong.



  • Regulations were put in place to prevent manufacturers from opening their own stores right next to the dealers they worked with. Dealers assume some risk when they take on inventory. Apparently it’s not like a bookstore where any unsold copies just go back to the publisher. It’s still a flimsy justification though and enshrined these middlemen who then enshittified everything. Worse, in some cases manufacturers are entirely prevented from selling direct, even if they don’t work with dealerships. It’s too much.