Personally, I don’t mind when ads are reasonable for a website or service I’m getting for free. I think people should get paid for the service they are providing. The problem is it always eventually gets out of control and at that point, yeah I’m going to block your ads.
I was on a website earlier today and 80% of the screen was ads. Sorry, you’re getting added to my block list.
Just never go to a website like that again if you have the choice. Seeing a drop in visitors and ad revenue after making the decision to pepper the entire screen with ads is the only thing that will cause the webmaster to reverse that decision.
I’ve paid $10 for spotify every month for years and it’s always been a great service and the algorithm does a good job of finding me new music that I like.
But most of this stuff can be pirated or bought piecemeal without bothering with a subscription.
And that’s what we’ll do when it gets out of hand, as we all know it will.
Alternatively a Gabe Newell quote: “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.” Not exactly the same context but it also applies.
Pretty good analogy though. Steam has some ads (out of the box it literally launches an ad window at startup) but it isn’t really a pain in the ass about it. You close the window, you move on, it only happens once and there’s nothing unskippable. It doesn’t shove ads in front of my face every time I launch a game from the library (I’d immediately leave the platform if there were.)
Fact is if steam and the other major platforms were ever to devolve within striking distance of how bad youtube has become, piracy would become unhinged. So far Valve has resisted the illusory “infinite money lever” that idiots in c-suites have misunderstood ads to be.
And the ads in Steam are from its own store. So it helps with discoverability. Seeing some fucking razor blade ad before watching some firefigther documentation is just completely unrelated. Plus: I can’t buy razor blades on youtube. It’s a fucking video streaming platform. When Steam shows me new games, it’s at least something I would actually do on Steam.
Well, from the perspective of the shareholders, you’re doing everything right if you’re making more money. And sadly, not enough people push back on this sort of thing to make it not profitable.
His point around 7:20 is very important. It’s a trap of which I am definitely a victim:
" ‘Just hit accept and play. You aren’t important or powerful enough to spend brainpower on this.’
It’s not about whether or not I believe that there will be a societally important reason that I personally sue Blizzard […] It’s about this very slow erosion of rights and the lowering expectations. "
My expectations of corperations is eroded as fuck mane. I literally accept that they are taking advantage of me because ‘that’s just how it is’.
I'd be fine with ads, but Google's policy is only superficially about ads. They want surveillance and user profiling, not ads. Ads are just a way to deliver these. Over my dead body.
I have to play devil’s advocate here. Are you really fine with the current level of ads? Fine with some past/historical level less than now? What level is ok exactly?
To me the current level of youtube ads is unhinged. Even minus the privacy issues it’s not usable. And it got that way (to me, at least) as soon as skip wait timers (remember when that was all we had to deal with?) became a thing.
Now? With unskippable ads, huge wait timers, and ads injected into the middle of 8-minute videos? Nope nope nooope. Not a chance in hell would I watch unblocked or non-premium youtube.
Fair enough, let me rephrase. I'm willing to negotiate about ads, the exact boundaries yet to be discussed. My privacy and my data are absolutely off limits, especially if they're gonna pretend it's not even about these.
YouTube started nearly (or completely?) ad-free and stayed that way till all of their competition was dead, people were addicted to it and there was no alternative. Then they started turning up the ad knob - gradually to avoid people leaving for something newer, until it was so obnoxious that ad blockers became common among even nontechnical users. Now they’re gas lighting ad block users as if they are committing a crime.
YouTube wouldn’t be in a position to make these unfair demands if they didn’t use their enormous wealth to create a video hosting monopoly and subjecting their users to bait and switch. F*** Google and their pretend morality. F*** them for destroying the web experience. F*** them for destroying web access and livelihood for many by banning their accounts and neglecting all appeals. I’m sure not going to create revenue for a very abusive, unethical and evil corporation.
If content creators want to get paid, start a patreon account or something. Or join a paid subscription service like nebula. I’m open to all those. I just don’t want a disgusting leech in between.
Well yeah it’s a “good” website because it has absolutely no aspirations. Might as well have handed me a sheet of paper. I could draw a perfect picture if I set out to draw a stick figure.
I agree about Rossmann. I see so much critism of him that boils down to “he’s a manic nutbar”. And while he certainly has these qualities, I find it inspiring that he has found so much success with his autism. Doubly-so because he is constantly advocating for people to better themselves and society.
I mean, he has a great moral compass, and he’s smart. But he might be better at driving public opinion while he’s on the air. And he definitely doesn’t want to do it.
Jon Stewart was on the air prior to Bush II’s election, and throughout his reign. This didn’t prevent B II from getting re-elected, and he remained a highly popular president until his final year in office. Our lionization of entertainers is nothing short of bizarre
Bush and Trump are entirely different beasts. Bush had the Bush name to give him legitimacy initially and the Iraq war fervor to keep him going. Trump has been publicly a buffoon his entire life and the media failed to properly call him out. We needed a strong media presence to tear him down, and Stewart could have been that.
This is the same Stewart who pulls shit like this thegrayzone.com/…/jon-stewart-pentagon-ukrainian-… , all while posing as a Progressive ally for the cameras. We mistake singularly witless “comedians” like this as forces to be reckoned with at our own peril
Even ignoring the surveillance aspect of ads, which I could go on a massive rant about, Google and other ad platforms themselves doesn’t seem to care about harming people with malvertising and scam ads. Why should I care about their revenue?
I caved for D2R, but still irked at how it’s “online only”. D2 was just one of my fav games and they surprisingly hired it out to someone who did a great job. D4 though, didn’t even entertain the idea.
We homeschool in Canada and have done so long before the pandemic. Technically, what we do is distance education, as my kid has teachers, a proper curriculum, assignments, etc. She’s absolutely thrived with this, where rural public schools were a nightmare of bullying and neglect.
But here there are rules and real requirements. Based on Oliver’s video, homeschooling in the US is an utter shitshow. The anti-intellectualism in the US is incredibly bad.
Homeschooling and distance learning are two different things here. We also have distance learning as you described (though not many places since COVID restrictions were lifted). Homeschooling is a shit show like you said.
I think it would be fairer to say that homeschooling in the US offers a wider distribution about the mean, with comprehensive, school-board curriculums on the one hand and whatever backward, ahistorical, pseudoscientific garbage the parents want to fill their kids’ heads with on the other. It really depends on the state and the family.
Here in California, we do the same as you for our daughter’s schooling and it works great for us.
There are also many homeschool types in California that are exactly what the article is about. I had an unfortunate experience with a group of students at my performance arts center. I agree with you in that there are good elements of homeschooling co-opted to be used in bad faith (and permitted by a failure of our government), and similarly good elements of public school that are co-opted by the failings of our government.
Like you said, it depends on the state and the family, but the state is inevitably going to have some slip through the cracks. Add in a certain anti-type group of people and homeschooling is suddenly pushed as the solution to their interpretation of “whatever backward ahistorical pseudoscientific garbage is being pushed”. The amount of homeschooled students who have anti-vax parents are way too high and it’s truly a plight that doesn’t seem to have active prevention, even in states where it’s supposed to be better like in California.
Even worse is the (thankfully small) group of parents who “unschool”. Where they give no attempts to actually educate their children and just let the child learn what they want and when they want
What kind of minerals are needed? Can you find earth that feels like clay but won’t fire nicely? Or do the required minerals also give those plastic properties you can see in earth?
Some are kaolinite, montmorillonite, and illite and they do indeed help with the plasticity. I am not sure if you can create clay from pure materials without specialized machines.
I am not an expert in this field but its one of the rare things that I remember from school, mostly because it was very relevant when helping my dad build a chicken coop.
Basically you need clay soil, which as far as i am aware is just a natural occurring soil layer containing those nutrients. Depending on the local area that soil may already feel like clay and might be usuable as is. But its probably better to refine this into proper clay at home.
If you want to make your own clay I recommend simply asking around where to find clay soil. Almost every terrain anywhere exists out of multiple layers of different soil and chance is high that some people can tell you exactly what your local composition is. The same nutrients that make clay are also very good to grow food, people have been studying these compositions for ages to decide where to start farming and building.
For me all that mattered was if dig a hole to put a pillar for the coop, i first had to dig trough normal dirt. Then had to struggle my way trough the “high quality clay soil which the local farm area is famous for”. To get to the much easier to penetrate sandlayer (still mostly dirt but the opposite of plasticity)
I think you’re overthinking this. The presence of water is required to make clay minerals, and water has covered just about the entire surface of the planet. I’m also pretty sure the people making clay over 10,000 years ago didn’t do a fine analysis of the raw dirt they refined their clay from. This video also showed 3 ways to refine clay, depending on the clay content. And given that the profile of soil generally includes some amount of clay (loam consists of less than 40%, deserts are often over 90% sand and still have clay) pretty much any natural soil that grows plants probably has some amount of clay.
So yes, you need specific minerals to make clay, they just happen to be almost everywhere plants, and thus people, are found. And no, this won’t give you pure clay minerals, but if the clay isn’t white, that’s already the case.
Your probably correct what the water is concerned, as I mentioned i am not a proper expert. But think in prehistoric times it was more a matter of “that spot near the river has some cool sticky dirt you can make things with” The clay soil below my parents chicken coop seemed pretty much usable as it came from the ground.
I think clay rich soil is common enough to not need to bother with low clay soil and sand but that could be a skewed perspective from my local area. If there really is no other way its useful to know that technically any dirt will contain something to extract.
Oh, absolutely. I imagine there are places with very little clay content, requiring the third technique the video showed to be used in ancient times, not unlike the extreme measures the Japanese had to use to to refine iron compared to many other places.
This might be the most awfully absurd thing that could ever happen.
“We got perfectly capable humans doing that job pretending to be AIs so that we can sell more incapable AIs services, AND prevent the AI bubble from bursting. Gotta make some big $$$ out of this shit, 2008 style baby”
One of the most level-headed takes I’ve seen about the war.
Usually I hear either massively pro Israeli government things, the conflation of Hamas/Palestinians, or outright support for Palestine to be a free country, rarely with any nuance.
Nuance is massively important when discussing almost every issue. It’s a shame to hear so few nuanced voices once war sparks. Not the first time either.
Yup I think I’m going to have to share this a lot, especially with a lot of people here in the States that only know that Hamas sucks (which it does) but don’t know the conditions in Gaza or what Israel has done to exacerbate this situation. It’s the best take I’ve heard on the situation so far. That organization of parents of dead kids from both sides was the first thing to give me hope about this conflict in awhile.
The comment the last guy said was especially poignant. “Were going to have to either share this land, or share the graveyard underneath it.”
yt.artemislena.eu
Top