exocortex @ exocortex @discuss.tchncs.de

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2 yr. ago

Yeah it was not specifically only about Deutsche Bahn, but also an observation about one of the multiple problems that drives the enshittification.

One Point that Deutsche Bahn definitely did was to find out which connections are mostly used by people ( tickets for these connections thereby contribute mostly to DBs revenue) and kind of abandon the less profitable connections. That's accounting in my book.

What they did (counting passangers by rail-connections) wasn't possible before, as DB-tickets were sold not electronically and couldn't easily (cheaply / with little work-hours) be turned into data sets and analyzed.

IIRC tickets were priced much differently - they weren't fixed to specific trains but to connections (no "Zugbindung"). So There wasn't even (easily available) data to when most travellers were using the trains.

Today with all the data being generates automatically the accountains know much better what costs and what earns DB money and they prioritize based on that. Once you get into the habit of that even things that are obviously always costs (like fixing rails or bridges) will be outsourced or avoided. (like the supermarket example - it's obvious that someone has to restuff the shelves, but once you have all the data and see only red numbers you try to separate it away and not do it (so it gets turned into a subcontract with probably unrealistic conditions that some other companies are underbidding each other in order to gain the contract - even if this means that their employees will not earn a living wage from it. It's a perfect system that also pushes responsibility and blame away from the outsourcing company. they can always blame the sub contracting company for underpaying or not follow safety regulations (even if they can only fulfill the sub contract by operating this way)).

I think Loki was nice. Au least it was nice to look at. For Star Wars I recommend "Andor" which is maybe the best Star Wars ever made (of one removes the nostalgia-factor from the original trilogy). But seeing the rest on Disney+ Andor seems like an incredibly unlikely fluke. The one thing that luckily sneaked by the Disney content police. The one thing that wasn't dumbed down by endless focus-grouping and insertions of memberberry-characters and -items.

—> JFK

I'm German and have been in France quite often in recent years. It's fascinating to hear their opinions on Germany. Outside our country is still imaged as having great engineering, efficiency - that Trains run on time. It's quite puzzling to me.

I came to the conclusion that the only real innovation in the last 30 years has been accounting. largely driven by neoliberalism. So every neo liberal country has kind of become more similar. Germany is not special, but has the advantage of having a lot of old successful companies that only slowly get sold of to international conglomerates. (Like Kuka etc). We behave as shitty as the rest, but our downward trajectory started higher up.

Modern computers and software made it possible to account for basically every item in a company with little cost. Before you'd have needed so many people and hours of work to judge profitability of small things that it wouldn't have been sensible to do so. CAD-Software also enables a special kind of accounting - simulating hardware components enables engineers to judge which parts are necessary and how much thickness is really needed. This is a huge and complicated process of optimization.

Accounting made it possible to turn a mostly opaque company structure that ran inefficient (but mostly on par with the competition) and judge every employee, every item. That's why supermarkets have outsourced the job of restuffing the shelves to a different company (that has to somehow make it work with the shitty pay that get). But it's also the reason why appliances seem to hold just slightly over the warranty period. CAD-simulations made it possible for the accountants to change the products (make them shittier) so that people would need to buy new ones often.

The Deutsche Bahn is the same. Has made it possible to invest the smallest amount possible, because they realized they can just work with the deterioration infrastructure as well - most people don't have a choice and have to take the late train anyways.

It's the same with telecommunications here btw. With only few companys owning most Internet services they realized they don't have to invest a lot into fiber. People need Internet and will have to pay anyways. It's more profit to just raise prices.

Lol?

I'm German and travel regularily in France as well. Travelling in France by train is a JOY compared to Germany. Please ask around as many French living in Germany as you can find. Hear their opinions.

Yes. But travel to other countries and hear their thoughts about Germany and you'll discover this image is very much alive still. It's important to spread the word outside of Germany, too.

I missed it. Will listen. His Common People cover was so perfect. I bought the CD recently. Gotta give this one also a try.

Don't know how it is elsewhere, but in Germany there's a lot of podcasts that are donation bashed. There are some that have their "basic"-content (their main podcast for example) free and additional stuff behind a paywall.

The most famous one that does it like this in the US would be Chapo Trap House.

True. I just used it as a stand-in for other ways of making content + earning something while doing it.

If everytthing is on Patreon it might be slightly better, but not good

Maybe it is time that we start to write our favourite youtubers to start developing alternative means of distributing their videos. Patreon and so on.

I feel there will be a lot less people watching YouTube in the future and as a whole many youtubers will see their revenue drop significantly. Watching YouTube as a whole will become less and less bearable. I watch videos without ads on my pc, but on mobile i use the app and endure the videos (for now) as the app is just nicer to use compared to the browser.

But if I have to see ads all the time (also these unskippable 20s ads) I think I'll simply stop using YouTube all together. about 90% ofy YouTube use isn't neccessary at all. I'll just watch it, because I'm too lazy to do anything else.

I could be should read a book instead. Maybe others will do that too in the future?

i guess they report outside of twitter that there is no "report" function on Twitter itself.

Why don't we buy it?

Could this be a kickstarter?

Who in their right mind makes that decision as a producer?

Business-people obviously and sadly. I mean movies have always been a business first, but since there are now basically only 2 or three large companies left with a much larger share of the income they can much better predict the expected income. Everything becomes more efficient. Before with thousands of little studios competing each individual project was kind of hustling around in all kinds of directions. It was hit or miss at random basically. And a small studio doesn't do focus-grouping in order to increase a movies financial success - that would be much too expensive for a small project. Those things only make sense financially if your movie is fairly large OR your company already has a well oiled marketing-department that focus-groups for basically every movie automatically. But with focus-groups you obviously always aim for what most people like. It's like the lowest denominator. That's why so many things feel so boring in marvel/disney-productions. There's no too room for random happy accidents.

I still have hopes for cinema though, since the incredible rise of the A24 brand in recent years for me is a clear signal that people are fed up with this marvel/disney-monoculture-assembly-line that clogges up the cinemas. One major aspect of the disney-death-star is that Disney basically prevents other productions from materializing. They even prevent some of their own projects from materializing as their planning shows them that N large movies a year is about the most they can extract from the movie-going audience. So they will not produce more big budget blockbusters, because that would only waste money. (If that doesn't make sense think about this: the more blockbuster you release each year the less it will be watched as you reach a saturation at a certain point. As a studio you try to release big-budget movies at times at which they don't have to compete with similar movies. Disney being the biggest player - aka the "disney-death-star" that has gobbled up pixar/marvel/star-wars and the entire 20th century fox IP/franchises - is defining what is and isn't possible to be released during a year (and making a profit with reasonable likelihood)).

Similar with competitors: They know that their big budget movie will have to compete with e.g. Marvels new this-and-that that weekend (or another Disney release at another time) and will not produce a movie. Disney is clogging up the cinemas with their grey goo.

A24 simply made movies that are different and not aimed at everyone. That simple idea was e extremely radical.

posted before maybe:

• filters with a timeout (filters that disappear after a while). The filter might remain in a list of filters and can be reset again (or gets deleted after timeout). This would be a middle ground between blocking certain things completely and not at all.
• weighing of certain communities. A weight of 0 would be the same as blocking. A weight of 1 doesn't change anything. A Weight of 0.5 would multiply the upvotes of posts by 0.5 in order to change its position on the frontpage. ( I am not sure how exactly the rank is determined, but weighing certain meme-communities lower would be nicer than completely blocking them - i like a nice stupid meme from time to time. am not sure how this could work on reality, son this might not have a perfect solution though.

The Federation would provide a great tool of figuring out the best way to build trust. A reputable server will only let people join if they are in some way reputable. Servers that let scammers flourish will become defederated. If course servers have to be comparable in size. If there's one server with 90% of users it doesn't work that well.

There's a recent Rust ML framework called "burn". So maybe there's also a future for ML in Rust for you.

Some call it a glitch in the matrix. It's probably some type of caching :-D

Hm right. Ok I understand. So that wouldn't work like i thought it would. It could sort clientside, but that would have kind of "quantization errors" regarding pages. hm

Try out sync. The filters you can customize are amazing.

"conservative"

Today people who self-identify as conservative are basically all assholes with a deep hatret towards dignity, humanity, society and nature. They're proud to be assholes, they're vice-signalling.

But the actual word - "conservative" - it has lost all meaning. What are they "conserving"? They're against environmentalism. I'd like to "conserve" nature so that future generations may still live on it. Am I now conservative? They want to burn everything down even the things they claim to uphold. They yell about freedom of speech and ban books at the same time. They shit on rules and all long-standing conventions, norms and just basic human tactfulness. What things are they "conserving"? The word has lost all meaning and means just bigoted loud asshole today.