I...have to agree about siding against the web...An optimistic part of me sees this as a move that pushes in the same direction that the "web" has already been going in for a long time - preventing users from getting the right information in an honest and efficient manner, preserving their attention budget, and choice. Until now, it was through increasing the noise to push monetary incentives, and now it's by cutting the noise to push monetary incentives. Why optimistic: up till now, there was no single enemy, and it was hard to fight a (somewhat) disjointed system; now, Google is positioning itself to push things further to the worse, with them (and small number of other companies) being the clear target.
My hope is that this will help overflow the proverbial glass for an increasing amount of people and we'll start pushing back towards the "old" web before Google and ad networks have transformed it, or find new modalities of interacting more freely with each other, and the content.
It's not going to be a small or easy fight, though...to a large extent, it's a fight against the current state of capitalism itself, and winning back our attention, critical thinking and choice.
And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?
Why do you think that is? Hint: taxing people buying food, which is getting worse and worse, while the top 0.01% gets more and more rich and keeps making it worse, is maybe not the solution people should embrace that you think it is...
An easier path would be to stop subsidizing the core of what is making junk foods to begin with. For that matter, at least in the US, having individual states require limitations of importing pre-processed goods could help too.
I've thought that it might be an idea for more states to require at least half of all beef and chicken to be imported into the state in at least half-carcass form. This would incentivize local farming, and local processing, reducing the more centralized processing and the environmental impacts could be further reduced in a lot of ways. That's just for meat.
Forcing insurance company accounting to average to single-payer modals and limit coverage combinations to no more than 3 choices across the nation could help with another part. Refactoring all federally funded insurance (medicare/medicaid/va/federal-employees) into a non-profit insurance corp that does likewise and any private company can also buy policies from would help to. Finally, establish "part time" work as no more than 10 hours a week averaged per 4 week window. Then require all employers to provide medical insurance for all workers that meets what the npo insurance provides.
The recent changes to USDA food guidelines are a step in the right direction, mostly... but there's still room to improve. Education in and of itself should improve dramatically. For that matter, actually having schools "make" most of their food instead of relying on premade/packaged goods would be a massive step in a right direction. Have every student participate in meal preparation at least a few hours a week as part of school work would help a lot.
I'd like to see some incentivization for more companies returning to a dividends model that includes employee profit sharing as part of said formula. I think this would do a LOT to shore up the middle class again.
Sorry, just went off on a total tangent... hitting reply anyway, but don't take anything too serious/deep... these thoughts are kind of always lingering in the back of my mind... I've just never been in a position to actually act on any of them politically.
Thanks for a thoughtful and longer-form reply. All of these ideas absolutely make sense - and their challenges and compromises could be worked on, of course.
But, even starting to think about each of them, I can't escape the frame of the current socio-economic structure, where short-term profits currently trump all, and influence of the aforementioned "0.01%" (or whatever we call it) is direct, heavy and effective, and all of that brought us here to a large extent in the first place.
In such a reality of ours, these kinds of initiatives don't go far - and even if surfaced in the media, there is a significant portion of population who would be very strongly against them, due to how opinions have been shaped and polarised over past decades.
It does seem almost impossible from current perspective.
Cool, you can fix the wealth inequality. But you also need to fix the excessive consumption of beef, fuel, and every other CO2-emitting good, whether consumed by you or by the "top 0.001%". You can't use "wealth inequality" as an excuse to delay action on climate change. Those goods' consumption needs to go down.
Fuel is trickier and requires investments and a transition period, but a beef tax would be trivial, and there are infinite substitute goods available.
I switched from M1 MBP to Asus Zenbook S16 with Ryzen HX370. A bit better performance, better screen, design, comparable battery, ok keyboard... I switched mostly because I was missing my previous Linux setup. But that was only possible several years afterwards, and if you try to compare it to the M5 Pro...
WordPress is the most popular CMS, and, at any moment in time, especially lately, there are a lot of people looking for a "WP alternative". I agree that it's not actually compatible, but it seems they tried to make it similar just enough to be able to use the word without 100% lying and attract people that way.
Nobody is looking for wp alternatives, if they were they would have moved long ago, as there are tens of similar CMS's that were supposed to be much "better" on paper yet never took of like octobercms,gravcms,ghost,netlify,wagtails,etc
For "no reason" - hah, this must be the most blatant ignoring of reality I've seen in this thread, and that's a very high bar to cross.
To be clear, I have nothing to do with neither Israel nor Iran, and am sympathetic to people of both separately - but pretending like Gaza - and what Israel has been doing for all this time there - doesn't exist is something else.
I guess we collectively forgot how idf used to kill Palestinians using autonomous mounted guns, illegally take over houses of Palestinians, rape people while raiding looting thier house(pardoned by court later on) and kill civilians without oversight.
Please explain why the hundreds of people at the concert deserved to be killed.
Please explain why Hamas needed to parade the body of the young Germany woman they murdered like a hunting trophy?
How do these actions help achieve Hamas goals? Unless their goals are really just killing as many Israelis as possible. Hamas is basically a less ambitious ISIS
They used the same reasoning idf used to
* kill Palestinians using autonomous mounted guns,
* illegally take over houses of Palestinians, rape people while raiding looting thier house(pardoned by court later on)
* kill civilians without oversight.
I always make sure to consider there are 2 sides to the story and details and nuance make all the difference in how the actual situation unfolded - but it's really, really, difficult to imagine a scenario in which something like this would be understandable.
My hope is that this will help overflow the proverbial glass for an increasing amount of people and we'll start pushing back towards the "old" web before Google and ad networks have transformed it, or find new modalities of interacting more freely with each other, and the content.
It's not going to be a small or easy fight, though...to a large extent, it's a fight against the current state of capitalism itself, and winning back our attention, critical thinking and choice.