Google Ads should get their algo audited, be held to offering a fair pricing for advertisers, let content creators have their sponsors, and give paying users what they pay for: no ads. YouTube already has a channel subscription and reward system that they skim off the top, and if Nebula can offer quality content for less than half the price of Premium while giving creators a larger chunk, I don't see how YouTube can justify its current pricing structure.
At every step they get someone to pay for less than what they promise: advertisers pay for more than their effective reach, consumers get more ads than what they pay to remove, content creators get paid a fraction of less than what they generate.
I'm not in the US, and tend to treat the far-right scene about the same as flerfers and antivaxxers: block and avoid... wouldn't be surprised if most people did the same.
Apparently, this has been steadily brewing over time, the ideology can be traced back to... pretty much Plato's "Republic", 2400 years ago, advocating for "wise Kings" as ideal rulers of city-states. Everything from there on, is a rehash on the same old theme.
Technocracy is a more modern take, starting before Von Braun and his Project Mars with an Elon ruler, followed by VISA and Dee Hock's attempt at establishing a digital currency, from there to PayPal and Elon Musk's failure to make it into one, a short lived digital gold attempt, Bitcoin and its "mining", all the crypto sphere with DAOs and NFTs, with Musk's attempts to make Project Mars a reality in between, adding to the mix works like Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Hubbard's works and legacy, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and similar.
Democrats used to see that line of thinking as a cautionary tale, Cypherpunk movements being at an intersection, while Neoliberal Capitalists seem to have shook hands with the far-right to work on expanding and implementing it as if it was a manual.
Next US Congress elections are scheduled for November 3, 2026. Fat chance he's going to risk losing the GOP majority... if there even is a Congress by that time.
In 2024, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with Canada of about $55 billion. That same year, it ran a deficit with Vietnam of about $123 billion, more than twice as much, and with Thailand of about $46 billion
Definition of trade deficit: someone accepted more of your made-up money (AKA, credit-backed fiat) in exchange for actual goods and services.
...and your leaders make you believe that's somehow bad for you 🙄
I've been seeing recommendations on "how to protest"... teaching peaceful protest, which is basically a parade. Nice for Gandhi and an upper-caste takeover from colonizers, not so nice for defending the rights of the bulk of society.
Yes, protest... and actually take back democratic institutions, before it's too late.
I've gone down this rabbit hole the other day... there's a YouTube video from 2 months ago about this, that sounded like conspiranoia... until it started happening.
Keep in mind that Musk's wet dream is to have indentured slaves in a closed Mars colony, where failure to comply would be punished by getting thrown out into a 0.6% density atmosphere... or alternatively, into a "red zone" outside of city-states (aka "freedom cities"), if not "turned into biodiesel".
H1Bs, OSHA violations... they're the somewhat-PC version of that.
Should, but won't. The genie is out of the bag, there's not putting it back... and it was a flimsy bag to begin with.
Reminds me of "The Bicentennial Man", when people decided to turn against humanoid robots. It won't happen, some people are already spending a fortune on humanoid silicone dolls, humanoid robot slaves is a much more likely future, with all it entails.
Even worse: if modulation were to be forced by law to make AIs sound robotic... scammers —who are already breaking the law— would have a field day by using non-modulated voices.
The current maximum speed per single-mode single-core fiber (aka, the typical FTTH ones), is on the order of 400,000,000Mbps, or 400,000Mbps per channel. Not much leapfrogging there.
Peaceful protesting is a red herring, intended for people to blow off steam, then go sit back at home and congratulate each other on TikTok... while a highly organized and focused group is dismantling the whole State around them.
Keep protesting, and soon you won't have the right to protest anymore.
Google Ads should get their algo audited, be held to offering a fair pricing for advertisers, let content creators have their sponsors, and give paying users what they pay for: no ads. YouTube already has a channel subscription and reward system that they skim off the top, and if Nebula can offer quality content for less than half the price of Premium while giving creators a larger chunk, I don't see how YouTube can justify its current pricing structure.