Since you have to follow twitter anyway if your interesting in seeing what those handful of folks post it make using anything else a tough sell.
That's really not true. I haven't been on twitter more than a few times in my life, but I stay pretty well informed about what the important people tweet about. Our Newstainment industry has monetized scraping tweets off twitter and plastering them in their broadcasts and sprinkling them throughout their articles, often helpfully putting a clear screenshot of the tweet in larger font than the article, then typing the tweet out anyway just for fun so you get to read it twice.
Even formally serious journalists and publications have fallen into this trap. If they just fucking ignored the dumpsterfire that is twitter, nobody would know and nobody would care. Let the tweeters cannibalize themselves. But no, we need to pretend that twitter is important, and broadcast tweets through all mediums.
You don't need to follow twitter. It's nearly inescapable if you follow any sort of media at all. Here I am on/., and we're having a fucking discussion about the CEO of Twitter realizing that Twitter is a shitty way to communicate due to him tweeting a bunch of shit in an attempted interview. It's fucking inescapable. I did not need to go on Twitter to hear this story.
We're just going to sail out there, then tack back towards the sun with our solar sail. Not fast, but the iron isn't going to go bad. You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be./s
It's not just a realistic budget and profit expectation that's needed - what's needed is some risk. They almost all play it safe, and just iterate the same-old-same-old now with better graphics.
Trust that you've got good people, (that is, if you haven't laid them all off) and let them try something new. A lot of the tries will be flops, but if you can find that big new thing, you're going to make bank. No, it's not a sure thing. But FFS, you're just laying people off left and right anyway. Might as well take a risk to have a break-out hit in the process.
If I was in the business, I think I'd rather try something crazy innovative and get laid off when it didn't work out than grind out another clone of a decade old game only to get laid off anyway.
And if you're just trying to milk your stock incentives, you've got enough name recognition and money to risk having to take your golden parachute and go cry on your yacht for 6 months before getting hired somewhere else. Take a risk and shoot for a giant payout! I mean, if you're the C* of a major gaming company, you absolutely do not have anything to lose. At least nothing that you're going to miss.
And a wallet. Which I do find crazy. And you also use it constantly, which is not how a lot of people use their cellphones, including the GP, who I was responding to. FFS, I even wrote,...if that's your use-case. Obviously it's not yours.
It's like you were jealous that people were communicating without you and jumped in to go, "NONE OF THIS APPLIES TO ME GUYS!!!!" That's great. Do you need a gold star?
As others have pointed out, they lost money because they priced the direct flight to that airport, the same one the person was on, higher than the total flight including the second leg. If the person had purchased the ticket which corresponded to the flight they actually took, it would have cost them more.
That's the airline's problem.
They're offering the same product for two different prices, and they are upset that some people have realized that they're hiding the cheap price, and are now selecting it.
I don't know, I think having a paid flight somewhere that you'll miss counts as an emergency. You can argue that you probably shouldn't cause yourself emergencies, but that's really a personal choice, right?
I haven't ever really seen any advertisement here. Well, other than the occasional slashvertisement article that slips through. I can tell you that they regularly uncheck my "disable advertisements" box. Not that that does anything, but it reminds me how scummy the last few owners are and have been.
The connector is loose, and it can disconnect from USB if you pick it up from the desk to check something on the phone.
Why on earth aren't you using the wireless charging if that's your use-case?
That's where wireless charging really shines! I've got the little puck on my desk at work. Drop the phone onto it, glance to make sure that it lit up to indicate it's charging, and done. When I want to check something on the phone, pick it up, check, drop it back onto the charger. It is sooo much more convenient than a cable.
So designing a passively cooled reactor which would work on Mars, and shipping that massive radioactive machine there, landing it, and installing it is easier than shipping a kevlar bag and some solar panels to Venus and stopping before you hit the ground? I really don't think so.
As you noted, we're not going to be mining either place for the foreseeable future, so comparing the two is rather silly. It's all about installing made-on-earth habitations, and setting them up to be semi-self-sufficient like the ISS. If you're not going to be mining, Mars is harder.
You can find near Earth-like temperatures and pressures in the atmosphere of Venus. It has an induced magnetic field. Mars has neither, meaning you need significantly more infrastructure to handle insulation, pressure, and shielding. More materials mean more trips, more money, and less people. Venus has CO2 and N2 in its atmosphere. You could actually separate the CO2 to snag the oxygen and mix with the nitrogen in the right ratio to create breathable air. 100% of your air will need to be shipped to Mars.
Neither are really that feasible, but Venus has a lot going for it. Everyone gets hung up on the surface, which is essentially like getting hung up on "living on earth" while focusing on deep ocean floor lava vents. There's a lot more to Venus than just the extreme surface. If there's life, it's going to be up there in the clouds. Mars stops and ends at essentially "top of Mt. Everest without the air and water".
How are you going to power the robots? Solar probably won't cut it for a TBM. What are you going to do for water on Mars? How, exactly, do we deal with the fact that Mars is toxic to most known life? We're not going to be able to track dust into a habitable place. We're not going to be able to drink water from Mars without really expensive filtration. Everything is going to need to be hermetically sealed, and there's going to need to be extensive decontamination of anything coming into a habitable area.
These aren't trivial problems. I'm not saying a floating habitat on Venus is easy - I'm saying that humans living on Mars is a hell of a lot harder than most everyone seems to think it is.
People have speculated building floating outposts, but is that really easier than colonizing Mars?
Probably. Lots more solar power because it's closer to the sun, and there is actually raw-material feedstock in the clouds of Venus we could harness to produce fuel and other useful things. Not to mention water vapor, which will be very handy to have. Current plans on Mars for water are for something like 4km wells into a layer of ice which there seems to be somewhat good evidence for.
A major issue is how toxic Mars is. Tons of perchlorates, and that makes the dust and ice very toxic. Venus doesn't have that issue up higher up in the atmosphere. There is a zone where pressure and temperature could actually be close enough to Earth's that we could potentially be exposed to it without much protection as long as we had oxygen to breathe. There is no place on Mars that fits that bill. And radiation is a lot less of an issue on Venus due to the thickness of the atmosphere.
Sticking the landing on a planet is hard. Planning to stop part-way into the atmosphere isn't going to be any harder. At least with the atmosphere, if you're off by a little you're a lot less likely to splat. Off by 200 feet with a lander, and you're likely going to break it and everything in it. One leg on a rock or in a hole, and the whole thing can fall over.
The atmosphere of Venus is a bit more like the ocean than the sky on earth. We know how to build zeppelins, submarines, cruise ships, and aircraft carriers. Something in between all of those doesn't seem that much more difficult than digging out tunnels on Mars to live in. At bare minimum moderately easy access to water on Venus would simplify a ton of major roadblocks for living on Mars.
In most cases adverse possession is a few feet to maybe a few tens of feet of property. In this case, it's miles. Over time, I can definitely see the actual border getting fuzzier and fuzzier, as who is really going to care if someone is a few feet across the border if they're miles from you. Human nature being what it is, over time the border is going to be "over there, but we don't go there", and it will gradually creep closer and closer to the wall.
As you note, it's a real issue due to the legalities of crossing the border onto US soil. Pop up a little shack, call in the doctor, and roll a very pregnant woman just across the border. Just clearly document that she's given birth on US soil, and boom, that kid's a citizen. Putting a wall on the border itself solves few problems. Putting one miles from the border doesn't seem to accomplish anything, and really seems to have more negatives than positives.
I'm in the same boat. I just tried to think of some ads I know I saw recently, and I honestly can't really remember. Some sort of drug ad with a lot of side effects, wife was watching a home improvement show, so I think one about paint?
I know there are a lot of vehicle ones, but I can't tell you which was honda and which was toyota. I know chevy is running a pile of "people surprised that it's a chevy" ads, but I couldn't tell you what models they were. And ford is lying about their new aluminum F-150 by calling it "military grade aluminum". That stood out enough that it made me laugh, so I remembered that. But the next vehicle I'm buying is electric, and none of those ads are for one, so that's all a giant waste of their time and money for me.
If you want to trick me into reading about your shit, the best way is to organize it, make it informational and comprehensive, and provide outside sources. Put some effort into making it scholarly and I'll potentially dive deep. Shout a slogan in big bold letters and like you, that goes right past me.
If you can't get people to donate because they love what you're doing, what you're doing isn't valuable to them or unique enough to differentiate you from others.
It's a harsh truth. And if you want to do it no matter what, great. That's a nice hobby that makes you happy. But don't complain that your viewers aren't supporting you if you're in this for a hobby.
That said, have you tried Patreon? I keep spending more and more money there on people doing shit I enjoy seeing. Music, comics, videos, educational series, social change projects, etc. It's really easy for me to say, "Yeah, they are worth a beer a month to support." Especially when I get special treatment because of it.
That's the real hook with Patreon. Your premium was "pay us or we'll irritate you with ads". That's a protection racket. Patreon is generally set up more as a "the more you pay, the more cool access to us you get" sort of deal.
Some of the people I support there give early access to their stuff before it hits the public website, allow supporter feedback on early drafts, let supporters drive the direction of their work, get feedback on scripts and plots, and use their biggest fans as a soundingboard before unleashing their stuff on the public. That makes their big fans even bigger fans, and gets them personally invested in the work. If you can't get some folks to donate $5 a month for something like that, you really don't have fans.
The world would be a better place if this was true for more people. Unfortunately advertising works for a large percent of the population. I remember a few years back when I was interacting with a handful of teenagers, one kid starts belting out the jingle for a fast-food fish sandwich. Half of them joined in, then they decided it would be hilarious to go get fish sandwiches.
What. The. Fuck.
It blew my mind that that shit actually worked. Then it occurred to me that if it worked on them, it also works on millions of other people. Tell you you have a problem often enough and they have the cure, and after awhile you forget that you were only told you have a problem, but you still believe you need the cure. You're hungry, thirsty, not manly enough, not pretty enough, not wealthy enough, not fashionable enough.
Even if advertisement doesn't work, we're still going to get advertisement. It's enough to see other people doing it for businesses think that they probably should too, just to be competitive.
It's sales and marketing stupid. If you've never worked with sales and marketing, you wouldn't understand. Sales and marketing is a different world, with different rules. It's the people who need the expense account to take clients to fancy dinners and shows. It's the wheelers and dealers, the schmoozers and show-offs.
It's those hung-over, strung-out assholes who make these stupid decisions at a meeting they wander into 10 minutes before it's over, throw everything decided already onto the floor, vomit a pile of stupid in its place, and then walk back out because "they're late for a meeting".
If they instead asked the developers? They'd think about what one would do with a new video card, and then recommend ads for the hottest AAA games that need that sort of horsepower, and new SSDs, motherboards, ram, and processors. Because if you're the sort of person that upgrades a video card, that's the sort of shit you're going to buy next.
I still won't add advertisements into my life if they somehow actually would be relevant, but man, it would make them a little less irritating.
I've been skipping most all social media, blocking most all ads, and relying on my RSS feed for a long time now. Managing tech, information, and the broader internet is where it's at. Fixing the signal to noise ratio issues, blocking the shit, and trying to let a sliver of truth get through all your defenses.
It's not easy, but if you work at it you can get closer to something worthwhile than most.
I'm generally pretty happy with my RSS feed. It's got some decent variety, and it filters out most of the blatant propaganda and news-entertainment on all sides. It's got an international look at the US, which I find helpful. It's also got an international view, which is sorely missing in most US news. I know this is a war I'm going to fight for the rest of my life, but I'm in it for the long run.
I'm going to fight the force-feeding of propaganda to me as long as I can. Disconnecting is not the answer. You get nothing then, and that's not helpful.
I think they have and are being deliberately disinformed and propagandized via Fox News and living in social media bubbles.
This was very evident when a whole lot voted in politicians promising to end Obamacare, and turned out to be horrified when bits of it got the axe because they rather liked the Affordable Care Act and the insurance it got them.
I don't think people who vote for Republicans are dumb at all, just mislead by opportunistic billionaires.
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
I don't know another word for when you constantly get bamboozled and either don't understand that it happened or believe that it won't happen again despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The problem is that even the economical arguments against UBI tend to only compare the cost to the services it would replace, and not look at the broader economic impacts of people with steady income. People without a steady income often can't ever save, because they can't effectively budget when they don't know how much money they'll have next month. Once you have a steady income, it becomes a lot easier to plan your life around. And once you've got a workable plan, you can add saving money into that, for things to improve your life.
People who have always made decent money just don't seem to understand that if you get $500 less next month, but $500 more the month after that, it doesn't balance out. If you're at the edge of poverty, that $500 less might mean you've skipped dealing with that check engine light, and now you're looking at $2k worth of repairs. Or you had to skip paying a bill and now you're in for a $35 late fee.
UBI really can let people be better people, and stimulate the economy around them as they do it.
First, the study found no difference in employment between those getting money and a control group which didn't. So unlike what our neocon troll of a GP is claiming, UBI didn't impact employment in the least. Why might that have been?
They were getting about $650 USD a month. Do you honestly know ANYONE who would take a look at their current salary and go, shit, I'd rather make $7,800 a year doing nothing? That's $3.75 an hour if you need it in those terms to make sense.
That's why there was no impact on employment numbers. The people who had jobs kept them because they couldn't afford to live on UBI alone, and the people who didn't have jobs before didn't find a new job while on UBI. The deep dive into why UBI didn't help them reenter the workforce as anticipated will come out next year when they're done with the research.
The reporting so far is both preliminary as well as pretty biased. One of the things that's not coming out of this so far is the personal and societal cost savings due to that happiness and reduction in stress.
We know that stressed, unhappy people don't preform as well at work or as parents, they tend to be sicker and have more chronic illnesses, and in general are less willing to take risks. If UBI doesn't change their ability to get a job in the short-term, it might in the long-term. It might also let them take care of some medical or mental issues which will cost more to deal with in the future. It might let them be better parents and thus raise kids who are better adapted to be engaged and employed citizens. It might let the employed stay employed, either through better performance or allowing them to get through a hardship like a vehicle accident or illness.
Looking at this just through the lens of "did more take jobs" is ignoring what UBI is supposed to be doing: It's supposed to be replacing most of our social safety nets. If it turns out that it's reducing the need for recipients to access those services, and if they are less of a cost burden on society than they would be without it, then it's doing its job.
Simply focusing on jobs like the GP troll which started this thread did is a really dishonest measure of whether or not it's successful.
I know. The 30s through the 60s were a terrible time to be an American. The country suffered economically and had its morale and innovation crushed. Why would we ever want to go back to a time like that?
(If you're confused, see my other post in this thread.)
Slashdot Mirror
Since you have to follow twitter anyway if your interesting in seeing what those handful of folks post it make using anything else a tough sell.
That's really not true. I haven't been on twitter more than a few times in my life, but I stay pretty well informed about what the important people tweet about. Our Newstainment industry has monetized scraping tweets off twitter and plastering them in their broadcasts and sprinkling them throughout their articles, often helpfully putting a clear screenshot of the tweet in larger font than the article, then typing the tweet out anyway just for fun so you get to read it twice.
Even formally serious journalists and publications have fallen into this trap. If they just fucking ignored the dumpsterfire that is twitter, nobody would know and nobody would care. Let the tweeters cannibalize themselves. But no, we need to pretend that twitter is important, and broadcast tweets through all mediums.
You don't need to follow twitter. It's nearly inescapable if you follow any sort of media at all. Here I am on /., and we're having a fucking discussion about the CEO of Twitter realizing that Twitter is a shitty way to communicate due to him tweeting a bunch of shit in an attempted interview. It's fucking inescapable. I did not need to go on Twitter to hear this story.
We're just going to sail out there, then tack back towards the sun with our solar sail. Not fast, but the iron isn't going to go bad. You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be. /s
It's not just a realistic budget and profit expectation that's needed - what's needed is some risk. They almost all play it safe, and just iterate the same-old-same-old now with better graphics.
Trust that you've got good people, (that is, if you haven't laid them all off) and let them try something new. A lot of the tries will be flops, but if you can find that big new thing, you're going to make bank. No, it's not a sure thing. But FFS, you're just laying people off left and right anyway. Might as well take a risk to have a break-out hit in the process.
If I was in the business, I think I'd rather try something crazy innovative and get laid off when it didn't work out than grind out another clone of a decade old game only to get laid off anyway.
And if you're just trying to milk your stock incentives, you've got enough name recognition and money to risk having to take your golden parachute and go cry on your yacht for 6 months before getting hired somewhere else. Take a risk and shoot for a giant payout! I mean, if you're the C* of a major gaming company, you absolutely do not have anything to lose. At least nothing that you're going to miss.
And a wallet. Which I do find crazy. And you also use it constantly, which is not how a lot of people use their cellphones, including the GP, who I was responding to. FFS, I even wrote, ...if that's your use-case. Obviously it's not yours.
It's like you were jealous that people were communicating without you and jumped in to go, "NONE OF THIS APPLIES TO ME GUYS!!!!" That's great. Do you need a gold star?
As others have pointed out, they lost money because they priced the direct flight to that airport, the same one the person was on, higher than the total flight including the second leg. If the person had purchased the ticket which corresponded to the flight they actually took, it would have cost them more.
That's the airline's problem.
They're offering the same product for two different prices, and they are upset that some people have realized that they're hiding the cheap price, and are now selecting it.
I don't know, I think having a paid flight somewhere that you'll miss counts as an emergency. You can argue that you probably shouldn't cause yourself emergencies, but that's really a personal choice, right?
I'm not really surprised that when you're using your phone in an entirely different way than the GP that you wouldn't find wireless charging useful.
I haven't ever really seen any advertisement here. Well, other than the occasional slashvertisement article that slips through. I can tell you that they regularly uncheck my "disable advertisements" box. Not that that does anything, but it reminds me how scummy the last few owners are and have been.
The connector is loose, and it can disconnect from USB if you pick it up from the desk to check something on the phone.
Why on earth aren't you using the wireless charging if that's your use-case?
That's where wireless charging really shines! I've got the little puck on my desk at work. Drop the phone onto it, glance to make sure that it lit up to indicate it's charging, and done. When I want to check something on the phone, pick it up, check, drop it back onto the charger. It is sooo much more convenient than a cable.
So designing a passively cooled reactor which would work on Mars, and shipping that massive radioactive machine there, landing it, and installing it is easier than shipping a kevlar bag and some solar panels to Venus and stopping before you hit the ground? I really don't think so.
As you noted, we're not going to be mining either place for the foreseeable future, so comparing the two is rather silly. It's all about installing made-on-earth habitations, and setting them up to be semi-self-sufficient like the ISS. If you're not going to be mining, Mars is harder.
You can find near Earth-like temperatures and pressures in the atmosphere of Venus. It has an induced magnetic field. Mars has neither, meaning you need significantly more infrastructure to handle insulation, pressure, and shielding. More materials mean more trips, more money, and less people. Venus has CO2 and N2 in its atmosphere. You could actually separate the CO2 to snag the oxygen and mix with the nitrogen in the right ratio to create breathable air. 100% of your air will need to be shipped to Mars.
Neither are really that feasible, but Venus has a lot going for it. Everyone gets hung up on the surface, which is essentially like getting hung up on "living on earth" while focusing on deep ocean floor lava vents. There's a lot more to Venus than just the extreme surface. If there's life, it's going to be up there in the clouds. Mars stops and ends at essentially "top of Mt. Everest without the air and water".
How are you going to power the robots? Solar probably won't cut it for a TBM. What are you going to do for water on Mars? How, exactly, do we deal with the fact that Mars is toxic to most known life? We're not going to be able to track dust into a habitable place. We're not going to be able to drink water from Mars without really expensive filtration. Everything is going to need to be hermetically sealed, and there's going to need to be extensive decontamination of anything coming into a habitable area.
These aren't trivial problems. I'm not saying a floating habitat on Venus is easy - I'm saying that humans living on Mars is a hell of a lot harder than most everyone seems to think it is.
Mars is really best left to the robots.
People have speculated building floating outposts, but is that really easier than colonizing Mars?
Probably. Lots more solar power because it's closer to the sun, and there is actually raw-material feedstock in the clouds of Venus we could harness to produce fuel and other useful things. Not to mention water vapor, which will be very handy to have. Current plans on Mars for water are for something like 4km wells into a layer of ice which there seems to be somewhat good evidence for.
A major issue is how toxic Mars is. Tons of perchlorates, and that makes the dust and ice very toxic. Venus doesn't have that issue up higher up in the atmosphere. There is a zone where pressure and temperature could actually be close enough to Earth's that we could potentially be exposed to it without much protection as long as we had oxygen to breathe. There is no place on Mars that fits that bill. And radiation is a lot less of an issue on Venus due to the thickness of the atmosphere.
Sticking the landing on a planet is hard. Planning to stop part-way into the atmosphere isn't going to be any harder. At least with the atmosphere, if you're off by a little you're a lot less likely to splat. Off by 200 feet with a lander, and you're likely going to break it and everything in it. One leg on a rock or in a hole, and the whole thing can fall over.
The atmosphere of Venus is a bit more like the ocean than the sky on earth. We know how to build zeppelins, submarines, cruise ships, and aircraft carriers. Something in between all of those doesn't seem that much more difficult than digging out tunnels on Mars to live in. At bare minimum moderately easy access to water on Venus would simplify a ton of major roadblocks for living on Mars.
In most cases adverse possession is a few feet to maybe a few tens of feet of property. In this case, it's miles. Over time, I can definitely see the actual border getting fuzzier and fuzzier, as who is really going to care if someone is a few feet across the border if they're miles from you. Human nature being what it is, over time the border is going to be "over there, but we don't go there", and it will gradually creep closer and closer to the wall.
As you note, it's a real issue due to the legalities of crossing the border onto US soil. Pop up a little shack, call in the doctor, and roll a very pregnant woman just across the border. Just clearly document that she's given birth on US soil, and boom, that kid's a citizen. Putting a wall on the border itself solves few problems. Putting one miles from the border doesn't seem to accomplish anything, and really seems to have more negatives than positives.
I'm in the same boat. I just tried to think of some ads I know I saw recently, and I honestly can't really remember. Some sort of drug ad with a lot of side effects, wife was watching a home improvement show, so I think one about paint?
I know there are a lot of vehicle ones, but I can't tell you which was honda and which was toyota. I know chevy is running a pile of "people surprised that it's a chevy" ads, but I couldn't tell you what models they were. And ford is lying about their new aluminum F-150 by calling it "military grade aluminum". That stood out enough that it made me laugh, so I remembered that. But the next vehicle I'm buying is electric, and none of those ads are for one, so that's all a giant waste of their time and money for me.
If you want to trick me into reading about your shit, the best way is to organize it, make it informational and comprehensive, and provide outside sources. Put some effort into making it scholarly and I'll potentially dive deep. Shout a slogan in big bold letters and like you, that goes right past me.
If you can't get people to donate because they love what you're doing, what you're doing isn't valuable to them or unique enough to differentiate you from others.
It's a harsh truth. And if you want to do it no matter what, great. That's a nice hobby that makes you happy. But don't complain that your viewers aren't supporting you if you're in this for a hobby.
That said, have you tried Patreon? I keep spending more and more money there on people doing shit I enjoy seeing. Music, comics, videos, educational series, social change projects, etc. It's really easy for me to say, "Yeah, they are worth a beer a month to support." Especially when I get special treatment because of it.
That's the real hook with Patreon. Your premium was "pay us or we'll irritate you with ads". That's a protection racket. Patreon is generally set up more as a "the more you pay, the more cool access to us you get" sort of deal.
Some of the people I support there give early access to their stuff before it hits the public website, allow supporter feedback on early drafts, let supporters drive the direction of their work, get feedback on scripts and plots, and use their biggest fans as a soundingboard before unleashing their stuff on the public. That makes their big fans even bigger fans, and gets them personally invested in the work. If you can't get some folks to donate $5 a month for something like that, you really don't have fans.
Well to be fair, you wouldn't want one without the other.
The world would be a better place if this was true for more people. Unfortunately advertising works for a large percent of the population. I remember a few years back when I was interacting with a handful of teenagers, one kid starts belting out the jingle for a fast-food fish sandwich. Half of them joined in, then they decided it would be hilarious to go get fish sandwiches.
What. The. Fuck.
It blew my mind that that shit actually worked. Then it occurred to me that if it worked on them, it also works on millions of other people. Tell you you have a problem often enough and they have the cure, and after awhile you forget that you were only told you have a problem, but you still believe you need the cure. You're hungry, thirsty, not manly enough, not pretty enough, not wealthy enough, not fashionable enough.
Even if advertisement doesn't work, we're still going to get advertisement. It's enough to see other people doing it for businesses think that they probably should too, just to be competitive.
It's sales and marketing stupid. If you've never worked with sales and marketing, you wouldn't understand. Sales and marketing is a different world, with different rules. It's the people who need the expense account to take clients to fancy dinners and shows. It's the wheelers and dealers, the schmoozers and show-offs.
It's those hung-over, strung-out assholes who make these stupid decisions at a meeting they wander into 10 minutes before it's over, throw everything decided already onto the floor, vomit a pile of stupid in its place, and then walk back out because "they're late for a meeting".
If they instead asked the developers? They'd think about what one would do with a new video card, and then recommend ads for the hottest AAA games that need that sort of horsepower, and new SSDs, motherboards, ram, and processors. Because if you're the sort of person that upgrades a video card, that's the sort of shit you're going to buy next.
I still won't add advertisements into my life if they somehow actually would be relevant, but man, it would make them a little less irritating.
I've been skipping most all social media, blocking most all ads, and relying on my RSS feed for a long time now. Managing tech, information, and the broader internet is where it's at. Fixing the signal to noise ratio issues, blocking the shit, and trying to let a sliver of truth get through all your defenses.
It's not easy, but if you work at it you can get closer to something worthwhile than most.
I'm generally pretty happy with my RSS feed. It's got some decent variety, and it filters out most of the blatant propaganda and news-entertainment on all sides. It's got an international look at the US, which I find helpful. It's also got an international view, which is sorely missing in most US news. I know this is a war I'm going to fight for the rest of my life, but I'm in it for the long run.
I'm going to fight the force-feeding of propaganda to me as long as I can. Disconnecting is not the answer. You get nothing then, and that's not helpful.
I think they have and are being deliberately disinformed and propagandized via Fox News and living in social media bubbles.
This was very evident when a whole lot voted in politicians promising to end Obamacare, and turned out to be horrified when bits of it got the axe because they rather liked the Affordable Care Act and the insurance it got them.
I don't think people who vote for Republicans are dumb at all, just mislead by opportunistic billionaires.
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
I don't know another word for when you constantly get bamboozled and either don't understand that it happened or believe that it won't happen again despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The problem is that even the economical arguments against UBI tend to only compare the cost to the services it would replace, and not look at the broader economic impacts of people with steady income. People without a steady income often can't ever save, because they can't effectively budget when they don't know how much money they'll have next month. Once you have a steady income, it becomes a lot easier to plan your life around. And once you've got a workable plan, you can add saving money into that, for things to improve your life.
People who have always made decent money just don't seem to understand that if you get $500 less next month, but $500 more the month after that, it doesn't balance out. If you're at the edge of poverty, that $500 less might mean you've skipped dealing with that check engine light, and now you're looking at $2k worth of repairs. Or you had to skip paying a bill and now you're in for a $35 late fee.
UBI really can let people be better people, and stimulate the economy around them as they do it.
And you'd be as dumb as the GP.
First, the study found no difference in employment between those getting money and a control group which didn't. So unlike what our neocon troll of a GP is claiming, UBI didn't impact employment in the least. Why might that have been?
They were getting about $650 USD a month. Do you honestly know ANYONE who would take a look at their current salary and go, shit, I'd rather make $7,800 a year doing nothing? That's $3.75 an hour if you need it in those terms to make sense.
That's why there was no impact on employment numbers. The people who had jobs kept them because they couldn't afford to live on UBI alone, and the people who didn't have jobs before didn't find a new job while on UBI. The deep dive into why UBI didn't help them reenter the workforce as anticipated will come out next year when they're done with the research.
The reporting so far is both preliminary as well as pretty biased. One of the things that's not coming out of this so far is the personal and societal cost savings due to that happiness and reduction in stress.
We know that stressed, unhappy people don't preform as well at work or as parents, they tend to be sicker and have more chronic illnesses, and in general are less willing to take risks. If UBI doesn't change their ability to get a job in the short-term, it might in the long-term. It might also let them take care of some medical or mental issues which will cost more to deal with in the future. It might let them be better parents and thus raise kids who are better adapted to be engaged and employed citizens. It might let the employed stay employed, either through better performance or allowing them to get through a hardship like a vehicle accident or illness.
Looking at this just through the lens of "did more take jobs" is ignoring what UBI is supposed to be doing: It's supposed to be replacing most of our social safety nets. If it turns out that it's reducing the need for recipients to access those services, and if they are less of a cost burden on society than they would be without it, then it's doing its job.
Simply focusing on jobs like the GP troll which started this thread did is a really dishonest measure of whether or not it's successful.
Same thing with professional athletes. Usually out of money something like 5 years after they retire.
I know. The 30s through the 60s were a terrible time to be an American. The country suffered economically and had its morale and innovation crushed. Why would we ever want to go back to a time like that?
(If you're confused, see my other post in this thread.)