whofearsthenight @ whofearsthenight @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Indeed, and as I posted elsewhere these days I'm far less likely to buy into a product where it's not clear how money is being made as was the case for Youtube and the last decade. It's only been free and easily ad-blockable for this long because the Silicon Valley way is to make a product that really can't exist on it's own but survives due to the deep pockets of the company or VC until it dominates the market and then turn the screws. Tie this to the fact these are all publicly traded and there is never enough growth, and we get here.

This is why enshittification is suddenly top of mind for everyone. For the last couple of decades, we've been enjoying the fruits of this model and we're now reaching the part where everything has consolidated and the surviving companies start jacking up prices and so forth. Netflix, Uber, Amazon, Reddit, Google/Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, etc have all done this in one way or another.

But this opinion that some folks seem to have that they are for some reason entitled to gratis, ad-free video streaming is so bizarre.

Agreed, and further if a company today presented this as their model, I would be skeptical as hell and unlikely to even try the service.

That said, I'm not losing any tears for Google. I'm in the US so not subject to this price increase, and while I do pay for Premium and find a lot of value in the service, I wouldn't be able to tolerate a near doubling in price.

I think you're mostly correct, but I slightly disagree on this part:

Rules, regulations and restrictions, slowly put up more and more stops for simple small people to enter the space

I think the reality is that convenience simply trumped out. As much as we can see now that allowing the internet to coalesce into a handful of silos, or often only 1-2 silos as is the case with Youtube, years ago the major value they provided was that you could simply go there and find the content. Reddit's demise reminded me of this more than anything else. I was a daily visitor for quite an array of topics for over a decade. When they decided to fully fuck up the site and I left, I found myself having to think about which of those content sources I wanted to replace and what I'd want to replace them with, and as much as it would be cool for that all to just be "lemmy" the reality is that I now am looking at far more RSS feeds, discord servers, mastodon servers, etc.

I also think that there is a phenomenon that is a bit more insidious at play, and that's that most of these services are funded by VC or these massive companies and don't make money for years or even a decade or more until they've consolidated the market to basically just them and they can charge whatever they feel like. Youtube follows this pattern. Even after Google's acquisition, it was quite a while before YouTube became even break-even as they gobbled up the market for this type of thing. VC/Google can sink billions into infrastructure without turning a profit until the market is basically just Youtube, and then all of a sudden we get Adblock crackdowns and near doubling of Premium rates. The only place that might compete with Youtube at this point is probably Apple or Amazon mostly because they're the only companies that can say "we're going to lose hundreds of millions or billions for at least a decade."

Ultimately, I think this is going to be the major lesson from about 2000-2020. As consumers, we should be extremely mistrusting of businesses where we can't understand how they make money, because usually that just means that the way they make money is to basically monopolize the market and then really fuck us.

Who would have thought that the party that advocates for child marriage, forced birth even in cases of rape/incest, has an unhealthy infatuation with child beauty pagents, and spends an inordinate amount of time accusing everyone else of pedophilia is in fact full of pedophiles?

That's the problem, they're not roughly half of all voters, but as previously stated have outside power. As for contending with them, the only thing to do is vote dem and start changing policies. Republicans, especially with a majority control of basically anything, are a policy failure on multiple levels.

It's not that they're a particularly large portion of the country, it's that they have outsized power thanks to the electoral college and it's easier to disenfranchise dem voters. I'm not wailing about them, so much as stating fact. If 4 years of the chaos of Trump, cozying up to dictators, the million+ dead from COVID that didn't need to happen, the complete tanking of the economy and causing rampant inflation, an attempted coup/insurrection, many of his own staff saying he's not fit, Fox News turning against him (privately, but those texts all got released, thanks Dominion), a rape conviction, a fraud conviction, him spilling military secrets on tape, him stealing and attempting to hide classified docs, and now the likelihood that he's going to likely be jailed or under house arrest while trying to campaign for president, if all of that isn't enough to convince someone to not vote for Trump, what will?

The point of the comment was essentially don't bother with these people, the only answer is to vote dem in '24, and get as many people as you can to do the same. Things are stacked towards Republicans by nature of the system, you can ignore trying to change these people's minds because idk anything will at this point, but you can't sit it out or not vote dem this time around.

This is a good point.

eh, everyone should be using some form of cloud backup, with the small exception of like people with extreme privacy needs, and even then you have to get to a fraction of a fraction before the answer isn't encrypted cloud backups.

That said, Win11 basically turning into an ad platform is gross as hell.

I think with quite a lot of software, monthly subs are really the best way to do it, and I think if you look at the history of things software is cheaper than it's ever been. Aside from the obvious things that just cost monthly money to operate (cloud storage, even weather apps don't keep working without servers) the reality is that we expect software to stay up to date and keep getting better. Aside from the fact that prior to sub fees for this type of software, the "one time" purchase cost used to be several orders of magnitude higher, and you would still basically end up "subscribing." Meaning, you didn't just buy Office in '95 for $300-$500 and keep using it until even 2005. MS would change a file format or upgrade a thing or something, and suddenly your $400 Office suite needed an upgrade, so you paid another $400 in '97.

People have never liked paying for software, but I think this is the most equitable, true model of the actual cost. I like it less with the bigger companies, but especially with smaller devs, the software I rely on I'm happy to pay a monthly sub on because I know that's a much more stable model and will encourage the dev to keep the software up to date and releasing new features.

Sounds hilarious.

More seriously, these people are lost. There is little purpose in trying to convert them, anyone hanging onto Trump now is either so incredibly ignorant we should just try to stem their paint-chip eating habit, so stupid they shouldn't be allowed to order appetizers unsupervised, or basically just fantastically bad, as in "I don't care if the world burns as long as I make a tidy sum before we collectively have to close up shop."

Indeed. There are a ton of categories where repairable is just not a thing. The obvious example is most electronics. If my TV, phone, etc, breaks, I should be able to go to the manufacturers website and at bare minimum find wiring diagrams and buy parts, and more reasonably actual step by step troubleshooting to repair it. Think about how many of these types of devices are in a landfill for something like a burnt capacitor or a dead backlight or just an aged out battery.

Speaking of batteries, I should absolutely be able to walk into a CVS, buy a battery and replace it in 20 minutes or less. And so should even the least techie person I know. I don't think that I necessarily want to go back to hot-swappable batteries like it's a Nokia brick from 1997, but we absolutely should be able to easily replace a battery in basically all electronics sold.

Or as we call it in America, Tuesday. It's already here, people don't realize it. People already have acclimated to "wildfire season," for example, a thing that didn't exist until the last 5 years or so in this area, as a totally normal occurrence.

His heroes are Tucker, Elon, etc? To the fainting couch!

Thanks. I mean, I'm fine. I'm sorry that this is the reality for the simplest of things in this country.

We Americans just pay more for worse outcomes basically by any way you want to slice it.

We have a whole layer of leeches on our system that exist solely to suck us dry. They aren't there to help us, they're there only to get in the middle of us and our doctors and extract as much value as possible, even when that means using their untrained reckons or just sheer "fuck you we don't want to pay for that" to deny treatment of doctor's who's literal job it is to prescribe the treatment.

This is part of the system, and spoilers, it's still the fault of for-profit insurance. Why do doctors offices screw up? Because every insurance provider negotiates a different rate, what is covered, etc. This office is going to bill one provider $3,000 for an MRI, another provider $27, another one $2799, and another one nothing. And if you go an office over, it's going to be a whole different set of numbers. And then repeat that for basically every procedure, visit type, etc.

This is a decent part of the reason why Americans pay more than just about any other country for healthcare. We spend billions more per year on exclusively middle-men who are just there in the way of your doctor's providing you care you need.

I have insurance. I went to urgent care when I was pretty sure I had the flu or COVID or something about a year ago (just slightly before COVID was declared "over.") I paid my copay for doctors office visit, I was in there for about an hour, with roughly 40 minutes of that sitting in a room waiting for a doctor (in an empty clinic) and then had a flu test and a COVID test.

They still sent me to collections for $350 for this visit. I pay a stupid amount for insurance, which my employer subsidizes, and I still can't even get a fucking flu/COVID test apparently.

For profit health insurance in America is evil. It is easily one of the most fucked up things about this country that we just absolutely ignore.

I think, and don't quote me, there have been some changes mostly to the exhaust/tuning side of things to cut emissions. I ride a '17 Bolt r-spec, and pretty much the most common mod is to change the air intake, pipes, and a fuel controller because the stock ones are kinda wimpy for emissions concerns. That said, a cursory search seems to indicate that bikes are terrible. Of course, you have to take into account that bikes produce less emissions, however pound for pound seem to produce significantly worse emissions. FTA:

The [BMW] GS highway CO2 equivalent is a stunning 380 g/mile (17% worse than the RAM truck). They found that a 1993 Honda Shadow VX600 with only 583 ccs spews a whopping 408 g/mile. That is twice as much as a new Honda Civic.

Other studies would suggest the problem is even worse. Global MRV tested out its portable emissions equipment in 2011 comparing 12 motorcycles to 12 cars of varying years — this was featured on an episode of “Mythbusters.”. Motorcycles were almost universally terrible, with motorbikes from the 2000s producing 3,220% more NOx and 8,065% more CO2 than cars of the same era.

Not great. It seems though that based on the article, there are relatively few studies by comparison and that bikes aren't regulated near the degree that cars are. I'll also say that in the above example of a '93 Shadow, that is a carbeurated bike and in that era would have been doing basically nothing to try to curb emissions. Comparatively, a new Honda Civic is going to be fuel injected with a catalytic converter and so forth. The other point of comparison they use is the above BMW 1150 GS, which is cited from a 2008 study, so at newest a 2008 bike, which they compare to a 2020 Dodge Ram. These just aren't particularly useful comparisons because especially in the last 5-10 years, emissions standards especially for cars are ridiculously different than the era of those bikes. I would really be curious to see how something even slightly modern (like, say, my Bolt with the stock tuning/catalytic converter, etc) compares.

The Ent-D computer is at least limitedly sentient. Moriarty and especially S7E23 Emergence confirm this.

Are you refuting these stats and do you want to provide a source for that?

Also, saying that some gun violence happened so that means gun control doesn't work is nonsense. It's like "well some died in a car crash so seat belts and airbags don't work."

The facts on this one just aren't on your side. Looking at this either way - the US is a third world country when it comes to gun violence, and secondarily, countries with relatively little to no gun control have extreme rates of gun violence.

Bill Clinton banned assault weapons in 1994; mass shootings dropped by 43%.

George W. Bush and the GOP let the assault weapons ban expire in 2004; mass shootings increased by 245%.

These numbers tell the whole story.

https://elk.zone/mstdn.social/@Strandjunker/111301755969285547

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527

edit:

more simply: https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527