I don't expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.
I'm just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that's self-evident bullshit.
If anybody's acting"entitled" in that scenario, it's the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.
I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.
I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I've turned around, for the past thirty years now, I've seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.
Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.
When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I'll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.
Then every single person who takes any action would make a difference in the world and change the situation, which obviousy isn’t true.
How did you not get my point?
We'll try it this way:
Thirty people live in a town.
Ten of them, with a leader, want some policy implemented
Twenty of them oppose the policy.
The ten with a leader organize and push for the policy
The twenty who oppose it stand around with their thumbs up their asses, each of them telling themselves that they can't accomplish anything by themselves.
The policy gets implemented
Or
The ten with a leader organize and push for a policy.
The twenty who oppose it each, individually, pull their thumbs out of their asses and stand up and say they oppose it.
Each of those individuals, making their individual choices, finds themselves surrounded by nineteen other individuals who made the same individual choice.
They easily outnumber the ten who want the policy and the policy fails.
That's exactly how and why individuals going ahead and making their individual choices instead of failing to do it because "I can't make a difference by myself" can make a difference.
All they have to do is stop waiting around for somebody to lead them, pull their thumbs out of their asses, and just go ahead and do it on their own, each one as an individual.
the other workers at the factories don’t change their opinion.
And some number of those workers have the exact same opinion that you do - they're opposed, but they don't think they can make a difference.
And if all of you stopped waiting around for some charismatic leader to tell you what to do and just went ahead and made the choice you prefer, you would make a difference.
Very little evil is actually a direct result of evil people doing evil things. The vast majority of it comes to be through ordinary people doing banal things - things that, like building weapons, are questionable at best, but that they excuse because it's "out of my control."
The thing is that it's not out of their control. Yes - if one individual makes the decision to not take part, that's not going to have much of an effect, but if every person who feels the same way makes that same choice, that absolutely WILL have an effect.
And there's only one way to make it so that every person who feels the same way makes that choice, and that's for each one of them, individually, to look past that "it's out of my control" bullshit excuse and go ahead and do it.
Everything on any significant scale is out of individual control. Individuals just possess a very limited amount of control over affairs on a national, much less global, scale. But that's really entirely beside the point. The point is how you choose to exercise the small amount of control you have. Will you use it for good, or for evil?
I don't think it's worse, but that's only because, as far as responses from trolls and bad faith actors go, I'd rather get screeds from lunatic extremists than pseudo-leftist establishment dogma boiled down to little pieces of emotive rhetoric that are just mindlessly regurgitated over and over by bots and humans-who-might-as-well-be-bots.
I love the fediverse and especially the threadiverse. I'm okay with Lemmy specifically, but I prefer Kbin, and am looking forward to some entirely different option.
It's not as notable as it was in May or June, before the main Reddit exodus, but it still feels sort of like the early days of the internet here. People have to kind of go out of their way to be here, and the system's a bit wonky and obtuse, so there's a pleasant lack of lazy idiots. And I can actually interact with people who actually have things to say, rather than just wading through regurgitated memes and botspam.
As with so many such things, it's only a mystery if you start with the presumption that official narratives are true.
If you start with the presumption that official narratives are not true, then the supposed mystery immediately vanishes and everything just falls neatly into place.
Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
I already generally do.
What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
I honestly don't much care, but that's because western civilization is circling the drain, warped and undermined at every turn by wealthy and powerful psychopaths, and it's just not worth it to care, since there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop them
Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
Some sort of revenue stream is potentially necessary, but that's the extent of it. Advertising is just one revenue stream, and even if we limit the choices to that, there are still many different ways it could be implemented.
The specific forms of advertising to which we're subjected on the internet are very much not necessary. And they don't exist as they do because the costs of serving content require that much revenue - they exist as they do to pay for corporate bloat - ludicrously expensive real estate and facilities and grotesquely inflated salaries for mostly useless executive shitheads.
Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
Again, that's what I already do, so it would just add more sites to those I won't visit.
Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
At this point, the two are almost always one and the same. Internet technology is primarily harnessed to the goal of maximizing income for the well-positioned few, and all other considerations are secondary.
Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
This is cynically amusing on Lemmy.
Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?
Of course they should, but they won't, because they're psychopaths. They'll never give up any of their grotesque and destructive privilege, even if that means that they ultimately destroy the host on which they're parasites.
It didn't catch on to the point that it got as big as Reddit, but anyone who expected that is a fool. It caught on to the point that it's viable - it's not going anywhere. And as time goes on, it's going to continue to grow. And that's sufficient, and really IMO to its advantage. Lemmy has a different feel from Reddit, and I like it better. And the new users it attracts over time are going to be people who appreciate it. And if the bulk of the meme-regurgitating karma whores stay on Reddit, all the better for Lemmy.
I find that the most dependable way to make sense of Trump's statements is to start with the presumption that, contrary to the physical evidence, he's actually about 10 years old.
Like with this one - just imagine him as a fat, spoiled little 10 year old, out on the school playground at recess, dejectedly kicking at rocks and whining.
Of course there are psychopaths out there and they truly are a different breed, but that is not a significant factor at a nation state, ethnic, or theological level.
I don't think that's true.
The thing is that, all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths have an inherent advantage in competitions for position in hierarchical systems, since people with empathy and morality will have choices they will be unwilling to make in pursuit of power, wealth and status, while psychopaths will not be so constrained - they will be willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to succeed, guided only by their desire, with no concern for any moral or ethical questions or for the well-being of others.
That means that psychopaths are over-represented among the wealthy and powerful.
And in fact, one need not look far at all to find wealthy, powerful and influential people who are rather obviously psychopaths, including but by no means limited to Netanyahu, Putin and Trump.
That's what initially set me on this line of thought - the observation that Trump and Putin, and later Netanyahu, are bludgeoningly obviously profoundly mentally ill, and mentally ill in very similar ways - all defined by their complete disregard for the suffering and deaths of those against whom they very obviously very deliberately direct the hatred, violence and murderous tendencies of their followers. They very obviously sow hatred and violence - feeding it and directing it in ways designed solely to further their own ambitions - their own lusts for power and wealth. So by any reasonable standard, they are each and all very obviously profoundly mentally ill, and specifically psychopathic - completely devoid of moral constraint or concern for others.
And they're not even notably anomalous - they're exceptional really only by the relative degree of their psychopathy and the notable positions they've attained, but the basic dynamic of willingly bringing harm and death to others in pursuit of their own ambitions is a thing one can see over and over in hierarchical systems - governments, corporations, religions... It's arguably even more the rule than the exception, with those who are highly ranked in such organizations who display actual empathy and moral constraint being very much the exception.
I grow more convinced every day that I've somehow been stranded among a bizarre race of insane savages.
That's really the only feasible explanation I can come up with. There's no way that a race of even reasonably intelligent and rational beings could fail to recognize that Netanyahu, for example, is profoundly and dangerously mentally ill - a clear psychopath - and shouldn't even be allowed out in public unaccompanied, much less granted power over others. So it can only be the case that human beings by and large - at least the not inconsiderable portion of them that support Netanyahu (or Trump or Putin or any of the other vividly insane people in power) - are both stupid and insane.
And somehow, I, with a working brain and an actual set of functioning moral principles, have ended up trapped among them.
Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @kbin.social Posts 26Comments 275Joined 2 yr. ago
What "entitlement?"
I don't expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.
I'm just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that's self-evident bullshit.
If anybody's acting"entitled" in that scenario, it's the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.