Traveling across the developing world, I have been astonished at how many women even in countries with limited English skills follow the Kardashians (and the young men follow Andrew Tate). Yes, on one hand celebrities are silly, but on the other hand they have a global societal impact that nerds like us might not appreciate.
"Hi Res audio is snake oil designed to sell the same thing multiple times, period."
The "period" is unwarranted, because there are too important caveats. Firstly, it has been extremely common for albums to be sold with very compressed dynamic range, assuming the average consumer will be listening in noisy environments etc. However, the mastering supplied to Hi Res shops sometimes lacks that compression, so that is where you can hear the album with room to breathe.
Secondly, the SACD format allowed adding a layer for 5.1 surround sound. In classical music, this is especially important for works where the performers are spread out around the hall, not just all on stage in front of the listeners.
So, with Hi Res the higher frequencies and 24 bit depth are snake oil, but the ancillary benefits are audible to anyone with a good listening environment.
"if some ayatollah gets both religious fervor for the afterlife and thermonuclear weapons"
Among that majority of the Iranian population who now dislikes the regime, it is a common belief that the regime is really only interested in preserving its wealth and power; it is no longer sincere religious fanaticism like back in Khomeini’s day.
"They profit less if people actually learn a language and so can't be too good at their job because they'll bleed users faster than they can gain them - similar to dating apps."
This might be why some of the best language-learning content I have seen is from national broadcasters like YLE in Finland. There, once a foreigner learns the language from that material, they then become a consumer of the broadcaster’s main content.
What is sad, is that there are already whole generations who think one must learn with an app, and are completely unaware of self-teaching textbooks from traditional publishers like Routledge, Assimil, Teach Yourself, etc. These books don’t work for everyone because learning styles are different, but they do work well for some segment of learners, yet with the decline of the physical bookshop, many young people may have never seen them.
(Hardcore linguaphiles are aware of these books, and have been one of the major demographics in the ebook filesharing scene that led to LibGen and Anna’s Archive. But I’m talking about the ordinary people you constantly see on e.g. Reddit who are just moving to another country, have to learn the language, and assume that one uses an app for that.)
"There are people who don't interact as much as other people but feel content about it and aren't lonely."
Yet the difficulty about self-reported degrees of loneliness, is that it doesn’t tell you how resilient a person’s contentedness is. Put that person in a crisis situation, like a suddenly precarious financial situation or a serious illness, and they might feel that they desperately crave human contact and were masking it before.
That first sentence has been a totally standard way to open a research paper for at least twenty years now. (As I have seen from both publishing myself, and as a side gig, doing editing of myriad papers by non-native English speakers working in many other branches of the sciences.) A writer has to start somewhere, and that has always been a matter of social convention.
There’s also being funny not quite for attracting others, but for avoiding alienating people one has already attracted. As someone surely autistic somehow, I find myself making frequent jokes because I know my interlocutors don’t want to hear about the subjects I’d really like to talk about, so joking seems the least-offensive and least-effort part I can play in socializing. When I saw Mike Leigh’s 1987 short film The Short and Curlies, about a young man who reacts to every single thing with a little joke, I very much recognized myself.
Among the classes rich enough to employ servants, complaining about those same servants is a perennial thing. Even a valet or chauffeur who comes out of an elite training school and knows to stay at the margins of his or her employer’s consciousness, might still have small human quirks that irk that employer. So, machines may well prove preferable servants over humans.
There are quite a few Muslim peoples who don’t recognize the hajj to Mecca as an obligation, such as Nizari Ismailis and Alevi-Bektashis. Even in the Balkans or West Africa among Muslims who ostensibly subscribe to a more “orthodox” Islam, though they might see the hajj as a nice thing, consciousness of it as an obligation may be low.
While Europe has a long coastline, there are only a given number of ports capable of the high thoroughput needed to feed Europe’s population. Blockade those and the entrance to the Baltic and Mediterranean, and most of your work is done. Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be targeted.
"If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would"
I wouldn't for one simple reason: the canon of classic cinema that one needs to watch and rewatch in order to have a solid knowledge of the art form, consists of many hundreds of films. Multiply that by the cost of purchasing individual films, and you arrive at a total cost that even most people in highly paid countries would find unbearable, let alone less fortunate regions of the world. And while some very lucky people might have access to public libraries that can supply rips, you can't expect the rest of the planet to go without culture, so torrenting it is, just like how Anna's Archive and LibGen have opened literature still under copyright to all.
The artists who don't mind not making money from their work itself, have built a personal brand to obtain other sources of income. But the future that the OP describes, and which feels quite believable, is one where AI defeats humans even at building a monetized brand around obtained content, so there isn't anything left for humans. I am much less optimistic than you that people will demand human connection, I think they will be satisfied with a convincing enough simulacrum.
A lot of the people I recall interacting with on Usenet in the mid 1990s were very much grown up, graduated, far away from “mom”, and employed as developers or uni staff somewhere. However, they still enjoyed hacking, either out of pure fun or FOSS idealism, and without monetary reward very much in mind. I think that the OP is on to something when he says that the economic environment changed, and this led to nerd things being seen through a much more mercenary lens.
Even the major “news for nerds” site in the early years of the new millennium, Slashdot, where there was awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
Some of the most bullying behavior I have seen online is by nerds, sometimes nerds old enough to have come out of the 1990s internet. It’s not only that non-nerd bullies, too, got access to the internet, it is that modern society (both outside social factors, as well as internet-related developments like the rise of microblogging that doesn’t encourage nuance and rewards partisan performativity) can lead nerds to act harmfully.
I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well before 2015/2016.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
I can see commuting being regarded as a total time waste requiring employer compensation in the US, where most people commuting are driving. But in countries where commuting is done via public transportation, the time spent commuting can be productively used for personal improvement in the form of reading.
There is no “European PhD system” in terms of funding, or the duties expected of a PhD student other than the production of the dissertation. Different countries around the world do it differently, and that is true even within Europe.
> It really is an option to publish something and not care about knowing exactly who read it, and what they're doing with it.
In a world with UBI (or in a world where creators are aristocracy who don’t have to worry about money) I would agree. In a world of precarity, obviously many people are going to desire to limit reuse of their creations unless they get rewarded for it somehow.
Academia can be criticized as unsustainable as the OP does because the number of graduate students exceeds the number of secure employment positions available after one defends one’s dissertation or does a postdoc. However, the American model of PhD students being impoverished while studying isn’t the only one. In several European countries, the norm is for PhD students to be university employees under contract that receive a pretty standard middle-class salary. In various other countries, decent middle-class funding may have to come from outside the university, but it’s a semi-automatic process for anyone whose research plan was solid enough to get accepted as a PhD student in the first place.
Better to say that they colonized non-African or non-American indigenous people who could not be conveniently attached to vehement Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery or Catholic-conquistador narratives, because the Khanty, Buryats, Yakut, etc. have an appearance that is hardly what most people using race-based terminology would associate with “white people”.
How early on is that? What I remember of furry culture from the early-mid 1990s internet was pretty straight, at least to judge from all the announcements of heterosexual marriages, all the porn going around, and prominent internet-furry voices. I was a bit surprised when furry culture saw a resurgence in wider internet culture during the Tumblr era and now was strongly linked to non-cishet themes.
Toys I remember from the 1980s had already outsourced production to Taiwan. I assume that things soon moved to China, but it is astonishing to think that Chinese labor could have made already cheap Asian production so much cheaper. So, I assume that the drop in production costs is driven by some kind of industrial process improvements?
Depends where at the end of the 1800s. Belle Époque France saw adultery on the part of men almost normalized among the middle and upper classes, and everyone made use of prostitutes.
> Funny this is cancel-worthy sometimes, and in other times it's treated as a quaint personality trait.
You can see this same tension in Fela Kuti fandom and scholarship, where people almost have to choose between lionizing him as a anti-colonialist or anti-dictatorship hero and downplaying negative sides so that his sociopolitical impact feels more powerful, or deploring his treatment of women as something that tarnished his whole career.
> Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this.
Not sure about that, honestly. As reading of longform text has declined with the rise of the smartphone and other distractions, and the literary-fiction publishing market is converging internationally, a significant amount of people who still read fiction represent demographics that like to view art through a contemporary political lens, often specifically North American-centric notions of race, gender, and power even if the reader hails from somewhere else.
Avoiding the official bike trails in Europe has advantages. For example, when you plot your own routes away from the touristic ones, local people might be more willing to chat or offer you a place to stay for the night because they have never met a foreign bicycle traveler before. Also, bikepacking is big these days, so a lot of cyclists want routes that don't have good asphalt surfaces.
Obviously. But HN is American-dominated, and the Copyright Clause in the Constitution and the original length of 14 years, are what most people are likely to think of when it is mentioned that copyright used to be a short monopoly to spur the arts and sciences. In modern scholarship, where progress is continual and scholars hail from countries that have differing degrees of access to paid resources, any monopoly for any length of time is harmful.
What does “waymarked routes” mean, exactly? And same question for the OP.
Doing OSM editing from Mapillary imagery in various US states, I find that the roads that have roadside signage as “official bike routes”, predate modern safe(r) bike infrastructure. These are often highways that frankly look like death traps: no shoulder, high speed limits. Especially when so many North American long-haul cyclists now are riding “bikepacking” setups, it may be preferable for a router to prioritize quiet agricultural tracks and other unpaved terrain over the supposedly official bike route.