Nice to know I can finally cancel Prime though. The entire value proposition has now gone. Free shipping is hugely conditional (and prices are artificially jacked to cover it in the first place), and now they want to put the worst thing on the internet (ads) into the only component of Prime I still sorta kinda use sometimes. I’d rather keep the $140 a year or whatever.

Zillow, who had aBsOLuTeLy NoTHiNg tO Do WiTh ThEsE pRiCeS now has some thoughts on it huh

lol that’s fair. But also, the there’s a cyclical relationship between suburbs and grocers. If you build suburbs, the grocers arrive. Where there are grocers, people might live and form suburbs. You really only have to “drive 40 minutes to get groceries” if you’re waaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the sticks. Or, and I’m sorry to say it, what’s more likely, is you live in a dense, urban area and are very near groceries, but can’t afford a vehicle to get there directly, and so you’ve got to walk to the bus stop and wait for the bus to come around. This could definitely total 40 minutes to go get some eggs and milk. It’s a fucking tragedy.

I’m more interested in which accounts have already moved, so I can follow them.

I think you know very well I would never engage with this possibility as a means of self preservation. Good day sir!

Forgive me, sire; I hadn’t $80,000 to spend on a luxury truck.

You fuck.

Safety razor user; I change every one to two shaves. If I start on that second use and it’s too rough for the shave I’ve got in mind (mostly a problem for my neck) then I’ll toss it.

Leaving carts outside the corrals at the store. Failing to signal. Actually a lot of car or car adjacent behaviors. All of which go back to “my immediate convenience is more important than being a conscientious member of the society I live in with other people.”

‘Female’, when it’s used in a non-clinical or technical context to describe a human woman. Everyone has a slip here or there, right, so, broad stroke take incoming, but, generally speaking, I’ve never met or talked with anyone who reliably refers to women as ‘females’ who actually respects them. It’s a word you’d use to refer to a complete person only if you see them first and foremost as some kind of specimen, and it reaks to me of poor socialization, unhealthy relationship with that sex, or simply low class.

If Lemmy had awards this succinct answer would get a pile of them.

Objectivity in reporting is a nice goal when you’re trying to write objective journalism. But this dude clearly wrote an opinion piece. It literally says “you shouldn’t” in the headline. That sort of thing can’t be objective, and it would look embarrassing if it tried. Objectivity for objectivity’s sake regardless of context is not really sensible. What you’re asking for is a fact sheet, not something written by a person because that person believes a thing.

That being said, I’ll give it to you: it wasn’t an especially good op-ed piece. It would’ve been better if he elaborated some of the stuff he said. But that just means he’s got some work to do as a writer, not that his crime was ‘not being objective enough’.

No.

Anything that is, or once was affiliated with Gawker / GMG is, in its current state, a cringe-inducing, shambling husk of whatever it once was. My muscle memory still directs me to a number of those blogs and everyday I recoil at what has become of them.

Just speculating here. And building off some half-remembered On The Media pieces. But as (for any number of reasons) the faith in a social platform collapses (and often the safeguards against toxic stuff go down too, a la Twitter), people with a low tolerance for that shit are likeliest to bail and the ‘call people the N word on Xbox’ folks are likeliest to stay behind. People who could watch what Reddit did and stay behind aren’t bad, I’m not saying that, but their tolerance for unethical stuff is way higher than the tolerance of those who decided to find a new home. Self-selection, ya know.

I still type shitty things. But then I stop and rephrase in a more human way.

Sucks for me. I use iOS (I’m sorry) and that’s the original reason I got YouTube Red (back then): they make iOS users pay for background playback. Most of my YT consumption is documentary / essay / spoken word stuff so I need that feature to treat it like a podcast player, basically. Most of the rest of my YT consumption is in my living room, where ad blocking isn’t an option (and I hear even if it was, they’re catching up fighting ad blockers).

I hate the Web 2.0 “enshitification” of platforms, and I hate advertisements, and I’m willing to pay for a good, useful service. But this is a mixed bag. It’s still ‘enshitified’ because most of what it serves me is algorithmic and nothing to do with the hundreds of channels I’ve subscribed to over the 13 years I’ve had this particular account. It’s still chock full of ads because videos do sponsor blocks these days.

And the worst of it is they’ve got you by the balls and there’s really nothing stopping them from being Netflix and just continuing to raise and raise the price. I was an OG Netflix Instant Streaming for Xbox 360 user…years later when they finally booted me off my own family plan, we were paying like…$23 a month? For what had at that point become the worst video service? What stops YouTube from bumping up to $19.99/mo a couple years from now? It’s the only game in town.

OH and they’re also selling all your metrics. That’s the other thing. If I’m paying (through the nose) for a service, it shouldn’t be double-fucking me by selling predictive measures of who I am and what I care about to filthy fucking “advertisers” (for-profit behavior manipulators).

YouTube (like every last piece of Web 2.0) was fun while it lasted. But it is now barely better than worthless.

Spotify has higher bitrate files than YT Music.

It’s good for reviewing and giving high marks for searchability, but right now I’m having a better time with the beta version due to the absolutely insane rate of progress the dev makes every day.

That ‘motivation’ bit is so important. Former educator, currently still working in education, and I’m always wary of anything that makes a sweeping statement about ‘the kids’ not being ‘all right’. But there are important, substantial contributors to undesirable outcomes that need to be acknowledged. Poverty being one, as well as the cycle of poverty and abuse which is deeply tied to white flight and de-industrialization (which we might collectively assign to the death of the American dream if we aren’t too concerned with being precious about the the notion of patriotism).

Saying ‘iPads’ or ‘TikTok’ is the culprit doesn’t help anyone. But iPads and TikTok are contributing factors because they both exacerbate the feeling that being entertained is enough to scrape one’s way through life at the bottom of the barrel of expectations…as well as over-informing young people (and adults) that there is positively nothing left to look forward to. Industry is collapsing, housing and transportation are unaffordable, everything you once expected to purchase (and let’s not get lost talking about purchasing as a metric for determining whether one is living a good life) has now moved to an ever-bleeding subscription model; inflation is compounded by corporate greed (and maybe we should talk about how the business incentive of endless growth contributes to every other problem) and corporate greed (something no one but the executives and their shareholders can influence, let alone control) is raping all the natural splendor, wealth and even health and stability of the very ground we walk on and air we breathe.

Why the fuck wouldn’t some young person whose future job prospects (which were shit to begin with) are being devoured by AI, just turn toward the boundless font of readily accessible entertainment rather than going uphill toward seemingly fruitless self improvement? Why would they bother to rise to the level of literacy that allows them to appreciate a 19th century classic translated from the original Russian, or to parse the dense theming of some modern masterpiece? What’s the reward, to someone whose entire life to this point has been flavored with instant gratification? To them it’s all just ‘content’, and there’s plenty of content more accessible than literature. Art may mean nothing for many reasons, not least of which is it can be falsified to a level of acceptability (AI songs by dead artists, for example).

It’s a Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Brave New World living nightmare. But what is the alternative? What systems or entities or organizations are coming to save the day? There are none. This moment is a gruesome forbidden experiment: it is a post-Reaganite, neoliberal race to the cultural bottom, and the youngest generation are the lab rats.

Speaking as someone who never really plugged into Twitter much in the first place: the notion that tweets have any sort of real value and that putting caps on consuming them is a meaningful control measure is the funniest fucking thing. Like no doubt he I actually trying to ruin it, that’s happening. But this is clearly supposed to elicit some kind of reaction, and I just can’t imagine feeling like, “oh, no, this only 600?” 600 of what? Brainfarts? Serious ideas that, if they were written by serious people would be in a long form medium? It’s like saying “you can go to the grocery store but you can only buy 60 chew toys for your dog per day”. Like, okay, I wasn’t going to do that anyway and I think it’s funny that you thought I was going to, or that I’d care about this new limitation.