forestrywat

Did I say all, anywhere in my post? What in my post suggests that the left or the right is a monoculture?

For sure. Doesn't mean checking media bias fact check or whatever isn't worth a moment.

Who founded it, who funds it, what is the broad consensus on the coverage they typically run, what do I see in their coverage when I look through it, what have they retracted, what have they not retracted, what advertisers do they permit. Probably some other criteria, to be honest. Maybe "does the editor here seem to have a conscience".

So advertising entitles you to sales?

The case is laid out pretty clearly in the article. Spend some time thinking about it.

Is quillette a reputable source itself?

You can defend yourself without genocide. You can imprison people without raping them. It turns out there's more options between give up and scorched earth.

I suspect that's true, but the proportion of people is wildly different. Every leftist I know is anti genocide, and sees Gaza and the West Bank as unconscionable. Some may then take that to antisemitism (rather than simply opposing Zionism). On the right, though? I expect you see a lot more antisemitism leading to "what positions can I express to cloak my blatant antisemitism..."

I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take."

You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.

If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.

Unconscious values are still values.

It's eminently solvable. Make the practice illegal. Or break up big companies. Or you progressively tax on revenue, so it becomes increasingly inefficient to a mega corporation. Or require companies above a certain size become increasingly worker owned.

Amazon doesn't need to be so big and in so many industries. My pharmacy doesn't also need to be a movie studio. My cloud provider doesn't also need to be a self publishing business. It distorts too many things.

We recently had a post highly upvoted here that collected bus tickets from an earlier era. It showed the unique moment in time where such fares were highly detailed, unique pieces of art. Ultimately destined to be single use and largely extremely pedestrian.

We've also seen a website that collects old paper restaurant placemats from across the ages. Literally disposable, zero value items that were made to be discarded by the thousands.

And yet, when someone has an interesting idea that ties them together, makes us recollect or think about our past in some novel way, these useless uncommon things suddenly become quite interesting.

A book on sermons, o its own, from the 1920s is maybe not that interesting. A book of sermons selected from each decade? A collection that compares regional books of sermons? A compare and contrast of the 2020s and 1920s? I can imagine many interesting thesis where a book like that becomes interesting because of the context of other books that are juxtaposed to it.

A book on Detroit motorways and bus schedules from the 30s isn't interesting or valuable on its own. But when you contextualize it, suddenly it might be a way to understand our history, our path through development and redevelopment. Connecting our present moment to the past.

I worked in a bookshop. I know all about this. I've seen pallets of books with covers torn off so they can be reported destroyed.

Here's a bookseller describing some of the books, which he believes are going to middlemen who are playing a sort of arbitrage with the AI companies by buying obscure titles, reselling them, and tossing away anything that doesn't sell. https://charliebecker.substack.com/p/is-an-ai-company-buying...

Most reporting says they are being destroyed. Page flipping is slow compared to cutting the spine and scanning the pages.

Not really. It's not to my taste, but I've found their journalism to generally be lefty but focused on important events.

Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.

The difference is huge between 404 and Fox. Fox is out here trying to tell people there's a trans agenda, and that Biden was a lunatic leftist. They are just making up stories and publishing them because they know their audience engages. 404 definitely make editorial choices about which stories to pursue but I've largely found them to be grounded in real depictions of stuff that is happening.

Liberal isn't leftish. Liberal is your Clinton/Biden types, who are center right on the global political stage. (And only in the weird broken US political scene are they considered left wing).

Post delivery. You can send a letter anywhere in the us for less than a dollar.

Broadband. Look at municipal broadband in Chattanooga. EPB is cheap and offers high quality service.

Health care. Typically socialized systems are cheaper. Medicare pays one tenth the administrative costs private health insurance does.

Insurance. National flood insurance for instance simply isn't offered privately because private insurers charge so much.

Loans, in particular student loans. Private loans are so expensive relative to government ones.

Transit. I use the bus and the train when I'm not biking. It costs me $3 to take a 60 minute train to the airport. It costs me $120 to take a 45 minute Uber. Trains are capable of managing stadium traffic, commute traffic, I can put my bike on board. They are clean and safe.

You sure it wasn't database coherency or some other issue on the tech side? Comments are basically never ever deleted here. Even the most vile racist or ableist or homophobic comments just get flagged to death and left up.

Your comment wasn't deleted. Are you sure you don't have it minimized? (The minus sign next to it.)

Governments regularly do things cheaper than private industry. And regularly do things more expensively.

Turns out, governments can be efficient and run things well. You just have to tune the incentive structure correctly.

(Aside, I don't care about cheaply as an axis nearly much as I care about "for the benefit of many". I'd take expensive programs that help everyone, every time.)

That's just "Twitter brain" at this point, right? Hard to imagine anyone leftish still being there.

Was direct file exorbitant expensive? Or lackluster? What about all the 18F work?

On the flip side, plenty of private companies are expensive and corrupt.

I think it's possible both can be good and both can be bad.

Sounds like a good topic for research!

US had a marginal tax rate that went up to 90%. The nordics have strong progressive taxation. Wealth taxes too, like the ISF in France or the taxes in Switzerland or Spain. Wage compression, especially by increasing minimum wage alongside stronger social programs and support have shown to reduce inequality.

If the two points you've posted are true, point me to some replicated studies that say so.

I know it sucks to wait. But it's irresponsible to open up everyone to surgery for an unproven technique.

Gotta get our Christmas treats or else.

You aren't helping your case. You type like someone who puts pictures up on their wall with red string between them.

I don't think a conspiracy is necessary here. Three factors are at play:

1) It needs research. That takes a long time. 2) If its successful and good, the effects need to be studied in patients for years to understand the long term impact 3) Capitalism is going to try and optimize for profit, not for welfare. Which is the point you are making, except... it's not conspiratorial. Capital absolutely is out in the open about this.

Oh you'll get no support for me about Biden. Shutting down rail strikes and declaring Covid over very clearly put him in the "protect the owners, not the people" camp.

There are people being arrested for being in Signal chats where non violent protests are being discussed. People being arrested for carrying water bottles. ICE is shooting people who are not even in the way, just making noise across the street. Rubio called the DSA a terrorist organization.

And second, I don't think I said "at the same level as China". It can be the case that both countries are authoritarian and punishing dissidents. And still be the case that China is worse.