Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base?

A business being in a position to be able to implement differential pricing (at least beyond how they divide up their fixed costs) is a sign that something is unfair. The unfairness is not how they implement differential pricing, but that they can do it at all and still have customers.

YouTube can implement differential pricing because there is a power imbalance between them and consumers - if the consumers want access to a lot of content provided by people other than YouTube through YouTube, YouTube is in a position to say ‘take it or leave it’ about their prices, and consumers do not have another reasonable choice.

The reason they have this imbalance of market power and can implement differential pricing is because there are significant barriers to entry to compete with YouTube, preventing the emergence of a field of competitors. If anyone on the Internet could easily spin up a clone of YouTube, and charge lower prices for the equivalent service, competitors would pop up and undercut YouTube on pricing.

The biggest barrier is network effects - YouTube has the most users because they have the most content. They have the most content because people only upload it to them because they have the most users. So this becomes a cycle that helps YouTube and hinders competitors.

This is a classic case where regulators should step in. Imagine if large video providers were required to federated uploaded content on ActivityPub, and anyone could set up their own YouTube competitor with all the content. The price of the cheapest YouTube clones (which would have all the same content as YouTube) would quickly drop, and no one would have a reason to use YouTube.

would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark

And in the efficient market, that’s how much the service would cost for everyone, because otherwise I could just go to a competitor of YouTube for less, and YouTube would have to lower their pricing to get customers, and so on until no one can lose their prices without losing money.

Unfortunately, efficient markets are just a neoliberal fantasy. In real life, there are network effects - YouTube has people uploading videos to it because it has the most viewers, and it has the most viewers because it has the most videos. It’s practically impossible for anyone to compete with them effectively because of this, and this is why they can put their prices in some regions up to get more profit. The proper solution is for regulators to step in and require things like data portability (e.g. requiring monopolists to publish videos they receive over open standards like ActivityPub), but regulatory capture makes that unlikely. In a just world, this would happen and their pricing would be close to the costs of running the platform.

So the people paying higher regional prices are paying money in a just world they shouldn’t have to pay, while those using VPNs to pay less are paying an amount closer to what it should be in a just world. That makes the VPN users people mitigating Google’s abuse, not abusers.

Yes, but for companies like Google, the vast majority of systems administration and SRE work is done over the Internet from wherever staff are, not by someone locally (excluding things like physical rack installation or pulling fibre, which is a minority of total effort). And generally the costs of bandwidth and installing hardware is higher in places with a smaller tech industry. For example, when Google on-sells their compute services through GCP (which are likely proportional to costs) they charge about 20% more for an n1-highcpu-2 instance in Mumbai than in Oregon, US.

that’s abuse of regional pricing

More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.

Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.

However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.

High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.

So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.

they have ran out of VC money

You know YouTube is owned by Google, not VC firms right?

Big companies sometimes keep a division / subsidiary less profitable for a time for a strategic reason, and then tighten the screws.

They generally only do this if they believe it will eventually be profitable over the long term (or support another part of the strategy so it is profitable overall). Otherwise they would have sold / shut it down earlier - the plan is always going to be to profitable.

However, while an unprofitable business always means either a plan to tighten screws, or to sell it / shut it down, tightening screws doesn’t mean it is unprofitable. They always want to be more profitable, even if they already are.

They don’t have any leverage, because the people calling the shots in Israel (and to be clear, that is the likes of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who want effectively no Arabs river to sea, and hence Netanyahu, who I think would do just about any atrocity no matter how abhorrent just to stay in power and out of jail) value the pretext to invade far more than they value the lives of the hostages.

So the hostages do not actually give Hamas any leverage over Israel - hence why Israel is not willing to agree to anything. Hamas should not have taken civilians hostage or targeted civilians in the first place, and they should release them. That is still an ongoing war crime, even if it is overshadowed by bigger ones being perpetrated by the Israeli side.

Hamas never had a chance of winning on military might.

The best chance for a good outcome for the Palestinian people is through raising awareness of the plight of the Palestinians, resulting in international pressure. The pressure against Israel arising now is because of the severity of Israel’s war crimes, while Hamas’ war crimes are one of the key talking points used to justify not taking action. Hamas could help Palestine win the information space war by taking the high road; winning a military war is futile for them.

While it is not fair to punish Palestinian civilians for the war crimes of Hamas just because the interests of Palestinian civilians are aligned to Hamas’ goals, there are many people who don’t see it that way. Palestinian statehood (or a non-apartheid one-state solution) would now get far more international support if the Palestinian militants shifted to peaceful resistance.

Votes on this comment:

1. Came from 14 different instances - many of them major. Of those instances, the instance with the most votes contributed was lemmy.world (i.e. your own instance), from which my instance has seen 14 votes for that comment.
2. Of the voters, I looked at the distribution of the person IDs assigned on my instance, which approximately represents the order they were seen by my instance (e.g. they voted on or interacted with another comment). If there was vote manipulation, I’d expect to see lots of IDs close together. However, there are not runs of IDs that are close together. To avoid this when manipulating votes, they’d need to have planned in advance, and made accounts and used them individually over time before finally deploying them to downvote you.

If there are instances that are a significant source of vote manipulation, and the local admins are unwilling to address it, there are options available to instance admins like defederation.

However - in the case of your comments, there is no meaningful evidence of vote manipulation.

True, except the difference Israel is still taking occupied land and building settlements, and excluding the people born there from them.

The government at least needs to pick one of the two options to move forward (as well as acknowledging and making reparations for those with traditional connections to the land who were affected by past injustices):

1. The two state solution: Palestine is a genuinely separate sovereign state, with a right to self determination, airspace, control of their territorial waters and so on. Israeli government representatives only enter Palestine on invitation from the government. Anyone born on Palestinian land, even on a former settlement, is a Palestinian unless they find another state to accept them and renounce their citizenship. Palestinians have equal protection of the law, and are expected to follow Palestinian laws on Palestinian land, or face the Palestinian justice system. If they renounce their citizenship, they are subject to Palestinian immigration law and might have to leave Palestine.
2. The one state solution: The entire Israeli occupied ‘river to sea’ area is one state, and everyone born there is an Israeli citizen, with equal rights under the law, power to vote, etc…

The problem is the current right-wing extremists in power in Israel do not want either solution; they want to have it both ways - when it comes to ownership and control, they want to deny the existence of a Palestinian state. But when it comes to citizenship, they want to claim everyone born on the land they occupy is not Israeli so they can deny them rights and exploit them. Their life is substantially controlled by the Israeli state, but they get no say in the leadership of the state - undermining claims it is a democracy. They don’t have equal protection under the law - Israeli authorities protect settlers taking land against people with generational connections to the land.

None of this is new in history, as you point out. Most of the Roman Empire, most of the former British Commonwealth, etc… had similar things in the past, with massacres of the native people, lands confiscated, native people been treated as having fewer rights than the colonialists, etc…

What is different is that those are all past atrocities (although fair reparations have still not been paid in many cases, at least further atrocities are generally not continuing to anything like the same extent), while Israel continues to commit the same atrocities to this very day.

Or use it as a Progressive Web App. This could be a good thing for awareness of PWAs and for them being seen as a killer feature that people won’t buy a smartphone unless they support them well. A transition away from app stores to PWAs can only be good.

If they are doing TikTok, maybe they should do Facebook, Reddit and YouTube next.

While Milei doesn’t have a lot going for himself, in this case it could also be that the companies supplying the fuel have some US component / have more to lose from not having access to American markets than they gain from supplying that airline, and it is the US government to blame.

The US blockade of Cuba is, of course, very hypocritical; there have been human rights abuses in Cuba relatively recently (e.g. the crackdown on peaceful July 11 2021 protestors), but if that is grounds for continuing sanctions of an unrelated industry for links to that country, then if there wasn’t a double standard the US should firstly be sanctioning Israel for years of brutal repression and apartheid in Israeli-occupied Palestine, and secondly be sanctioning itself for the police crackdowns on protestors calling for righting the wrongs in Palestine.

And also the videos were being used to incite people to retaliate. Immediately after the attack, a rioting mob seeking vigilante justice surrounded the church, trapping the paramedics (who were treating the assailant) and the assailant inside. The mob apparently injured dozens of police, damaged about a hundred cars, including writing off a number of police cars, and some people armed with illegal weapons climbed a ladder to try to get into the church.

I haven’t seen any source suggesting it was a pen. Several sources, such as https://www.aap.com.au/news/police-powers-bolstered-as-terror-attack-probe-widens/, describe the weapon as a “flick-knife”. Other sources say that the bishop victim was “seriously injured”, and the assailant was injured in the attack and his own finger was sliced off with the knife.

I think you are right that no one died, but wrong that the weapon was a pen - this was a serious attack with an actual knife.

Unfortunately a probe by Israel will likely result in: “We’ve investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”, no matter what. These are people who deliberately bomb and kill hundreds of civilians for one suspected militants, and who are creating a famine affecting an entire population mere kilometres from places with abundant food through their deliberate policies on aid. Killing people trying to help the people they are genociding is by design in the eyes of the far right extremists who are running Israel at the moment.

Update: It looks like quite a few stories are paraphrases (AI rewrites?) of CNN stories, so the site might just be an attempt at SEO, rather than psyops.

CNN seems to be contorting themselves to not say anything too negative about Israel’s far-right government, hence the bias coming through on other sites based on it.

The history of that site is very interesting, leading me to suspect some kind of psyops operation.

The domain name was registered on 2021-06-13, but until at least 2024-01-01 it was a rather basic Indonesian language news site, with no English content - https://web.archive.org/web/20231228131909/https://www.infoterkiniviral.com/.

The domain name was updated on 2024-03-22. Their sitemap has content going back to 2024-03-09. Old URLs that existed back in January now return 404 not found.

There seems to be no attribution (e.g. who owns the site). It is using Hostinger for DNS, with PrivacyProtect used for WHOIS privacy, and is hosted on GCP.

That said, I haven’t found evidence that the less controversial stories (which psyops likely add to lend credibility to any propaganda by blending it in with real news) are word-for-word copied from anywhere. This could mean they have invested in writing them by hand, or maybe they are AI generated as a paraphrase from another news source.

I’d bet there might be a whole series of them if they are taking this approach, but they seem to have tried to make them hard to link them together.

the most voted for parties

Simple ‘first past the post’ systems like they have in the US are flawed. The biggest problem is that clones (candidates or parties with similar positions) split the vote. For example, suppose 10% of the population wants Evil Dictator, but the other other 90% each want one of 18 different candidates as their first preference, evenly divided on first preferences (so 5% on first preferences), but rank any of the other 17 higher than Evil Dictator. So Evil Dictator has 10% of first preferences, but is the last preference for 90% of the population. The other candidates have 5% each.

First Past the Post would elect Evil Dictator in this circumstance. Better electoral systems (e.g. the Schulze method) would elect one of the other candidates.

This applies still if you elect a plurality of people - e.g. there could be two Evil Dictators, who 90% of the public oppose, but who have the highest vote because there are fewer of them to split the vote. Better systems like the better STV variants ensure proportionality (it avoids a landslide where the same voters determine all the representatives in a winner takes all approach). A larger parliament means more representation of the perspective of smaller minorities - so they are at least heard.

A “score” based voting system, if it is just a ranking of parties, could work like this. But if you are suggesting adding up the votes (so, for example, a 5 is worth 5x as much as a 1), the problem is tactical voting. People will, in practice, vote to make their vote count them most.

Let’s say, for example, there are three candidates, Racist Evil Dictator, Racist, and Progressive. Let’s say we know for granted almost everyone is going to score Racist Evil Dictator as 1. If a progressive was voting honestly, they might vote Progressive as a 5, and apart from the racism Racist might have been doing well, so they’d get a 3. The racist supporters, however, if they were being honest, would give Racist a 5 and Progressives a 3. Let’s say there are 1000 progressive voters, and 600 racist voters. If voting honestly, the scores would be Progressive = 5 * 1000 + 3 * 600 = 6800, Racist = 5 * 600 + 3 * 1000 = 6000, Racist Dictator = 1 * 1600 = 1600. Now the problem is, you can’t really get people to vote honestly. So let’s say Racist riles up their followers to instead vote Progressive as a 1 to, even if they don’t really think that. Now the scores are Progressive = 5 * 1000 + 1 * 600 = 5600, Racist = 5 * 600 + 3 * 1000 = 6000. Racist wins.

In practice, when a system allows people to vote tactically and have an advantage, it becomes a race to the bottom. That’s how you end up with dynamics like the two-party system. A good voting system works by removing incentives to vote tactically - if you put your true preferences down, you will not be disadvantaged in your influence on the election, even if other people attempt to vote tactically. That means that genuine third parties have a chance if the people like them, even in the absence of coordination.

I don’t think it is fair to say that there was ever 100% agreement over what some of those terms meant.

Like or hate it, language means what the people think it means, and as GP suggests, choosing terms that disambiguate differences is a far better approach that allows people to find common ground rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to a policy because they associate with one ambiguous label and are told that the policy is associated with another.

Adding more dimensions to the policy spectrum help. One dimension (left/right) covering all manner of social and economic policy leads to confusing outcomes.

A two dimensional view - economic left-right on one axis, and libertarian/authoritarian - is one view that is popular now, so giving four quadrants, left lib, right lib, left auth, right auth - and that is already a lot more granular. With any quadrant view of course, the dispute is always going to be where the centre is… it is something of an Overton window, where extremists try to push in one direction to shift the Overton window and make positions that were firmly in one quadrant seem like the centre.

However, there are other dimensions as well that could make sense to evaluate policy (and political viewpoints) on even within these axes. One is short-term / long-term: at one extreme, does the position discount the future for the benefit of people right now, and at the other extreme, focusing far into the future with minimal concerns for people now. Another could be nationalist / globalist - does the position embody ‘think global, act local’, or does it aim to serve the local population to the detriment of global populations?

That is already a four-dimensional scheme (there could be more), and I believe that while real-world political parties often correlate some of those axes and extremes on one are often found together with extremes on another, they are actually near-orthogonal and it would be theoretically possible to be at each of the 16 possible points near the edges of that scheme.

That said, even though they are almost orthogonal, an extreme on one might prevent an extreme on another axis in some cases. For example, I’d consider myself fairly economically left, fairly socially libertarian, fairly far towards favouring the long term over the short term, and fairly far towards globalist (think global, act local) thinking. But some would say that an extreme left position requires no private ownership of the means of production. In the modern world, a computer is a means of production. I would not support a world in which there is no private ownership of computers, because that counters my the social libertarian position. So, I draw the line at wanting public ownership of natural monopolies and large-scale production - I would still want to live in a pluralistic society where people can try to create new means of production (providing it doesn’t interfere with others or the future, e.g. through pollution, safety risks, not paying a living wage, etc…), rather than one where someone like Trofim Lysenko has the ear of the leader and no one can disagree no matter how stupid their beliefs are. But I’d want to see the ability for the state to take over those new means of production in the public interest eventually if they pan out and become large scale (and for research to happen in parallel by the state).

I think putting one’s viewpoint on multiple dimensions makes it far clearer what someone believes, and where there is common ground, compared to picking labels with contested meaning and attacking the other labels.

I think it is a positive sign - although obviously hypocritical when they are providing lethal aid to the Israeli government while it’s controlled by genocidal extremist parties like Likud and Mafdal-RZ, who are using it to create the very situation for Palestinian civilians in the first place.

The bombing of civilian homes and infrastructure, combined with shootings and so on has already killed or wounded about 2% of the population in only 5 months. However, a famine could kill far faster than that; to avoid that, the IDF would only need to not interfere with the distribution of aid, allowing NGOs to provide it. Instead, they have interfered with the entry of aid at the Egyptian-Palestinian border, bombed places where aid is being distributed, and shot at civilians seeking aid on the street with machine guns.

So anything that makes that 2% of casualties not grow to 80%, for example, and frustrates the plans of Israel’s far right to depopulate Gaza of Arabs is a good start, but not really enough.

A blood clot doesn’t mean there is no foul play. There are plenty of poisons that cause clotting: https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT000113 - including some that are snake venom components.

It could also be a consequence of prolonged confinement without much movement. It could also be an eventual consequence of the 2020 poisoning (there is no evidence that Novichok specifically or mild poisoning with other acetylcholinesterase inhibitors causes clots; however, severe poisoning causes respiratory paralysis which causes hypoxia, and that can cause platelet and vascular dysfunction/damage that increases the risk of thrombosis. Not many people ever have been poisoned with Novichok and survived, so the exact sequelae are uncertain).

Now, there is a question of whether the FSB would want to do a subtle execution or an ambiguous one. They did attempt an obvious one in 2020, given it involved an agent which is clearly associated with the Russian government (although perhaps if he hadn’t made it overseas, that would have never come out). Since then, perhaps Putin and the FSB have less incentive to be brazen. If they didn’t want to send a message, they could have just kept Navalny alive. But maybe ambiguous was a compromise they wanted - it keeps would-be dissidents fearful, but provides the cover of plausible deniability for those who would criticise the killing of a political opponent.

Taking less from the environment would be better, not taking more - especially if the global population peaks and the population shrinks.

The idea of perpetual growth of finite resource extraction that many governments and corporations try to tell us is good is getting tired. How about we settle for a good enough standard of living, and work on making it more equally distributed and on recycling to reduce / eventually eliminate the extraction of non-renewable resources?

As terrible as Putin’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine is, I think the decarbonisation and transition to renewable energy as a response to it is a very positive thing. The transition to higher percentages of renewables was always going to be painful, but it is one of those things where putting it off because it is perceived to be too hard only makes it harder in the future. Ideally, we should have gone much harder much earlier - we are already locked in for a lot of warming and habitat and arable land lost, but a push now is better than going even longer without solving the problem.