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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • We have to learn to better frame the issues. When Japan was ascendant, everyone projected them to overtake the US in economic power and we got all afraid and passed a bunch of protectionist rules about car imports. Think pieces get written about how their economic model was better than the US and the US is a crumbling empire.

    But it turned out it was a huge real estate bubble combined with/caused by the demographic benefit coming from a boom generation going into their prime labor years and once that generation started aging out there was a real estate slump and a balance sheet recession that lasted a decade, and they never recovered to the levels everyone was projecting 10 years prior.

    Now literally the exact same thing is happening with China and everyone is all shocked. Guess what, it’s going to happen again.

    It’s not to say the US will never fall to 2nd place in the global order, but it’s not going to be from some country growing at 10%/year forever, that doesn’t actually ever happen.



  • Real answer, Elon made it more friendly to the far right (the racists and Nazis) and unbanned a bunch of them who had previously been banned for being too racist and Nazi. Then he introduced a subscription service where you pay to have Twitter spread your content.

    So that started a doom loop: The far right bought the additional views, people who didn’t appreciate the extra racism and Nazi views on their timeline left Twitter, but the view boost was paid for so it kept pushing those views to the fewer people who remained, then THAT volume of hate pushed more people away, etc.

    It probably got to the point that they couldn’t keep paid views high enough with just people who care about politics and they had to just push at all costs, eventually to you.



  • I think it’s clear he’s a fan of Apple and Tesla but he does make negative statements about them, the Cyber truck was not a positive review and he always criticized the fit and finish of Teslas. And he critiques Apple’s idiosyncracies like the proprietary charger and lack of calculator app on the iPad.

    I guess my point is that he’s not a journalist he’s a reviewer, we are tuning in for his judgement, his opinion. If he personally likes the products from a certain company, that’s not a bias that impacts his capacity to do his job well.

    Like movie reviewer giving Pixar a bunch of 10/10 reviews, and then criticizing Cars 2 as a mediocre cash grab. Maybe they are biased for Pixar, or maybe Pixar just puts out a lot of good movies. As long as you’re calling out the bad moves, that’s what we want from a reviewer.

    The fair concern is when he gets exclusive access like this, I don’t necessarily care about the puff piece interview but you hope it doesn’t influence his future reviews.



  • If you’re saying “you should not restrict ALL culture to rich people” then, we’re not. There is plenty of culture available for free on YouTube, or on broadcast TV channels, or FreeVee. And paying for one paid subscription doesn’t make you rich, $10/mo or whatever is an accessible price for a subset of digital media to a non-rich person. And those libraries are sufficiently large that you would not run out of material to watch even if you only had one service.

    If you’re saying “everyone should be provided literally all digital content for free at all times” that is a pretty extreme position which does sort of break the economics of any content being produced. Digital content would have to be plastered in way more ads or be government subsidized or something to have the money to make more of it. That’s not a political position I’d be on board with.

    If you just want the current system but with you being allowed to download the stuff you want to see on services you don’t pay for…again, there’s an argument for that, but let’s not pretend it’s some high minded one. It’s selfish. You probably have the money to pay for HBO Max for one month to watch the new Game of Thrones and the Barbie movie but you don’t want to pay money and it’s really easy not to.