> McCarthy, an Augustinian friar from the South Side who has known Pope Leo for 43 years, told the story as a reminder to parishioners that the pope “is like us,” and “a very humble guy.”
So humble that he was able to change his information over the phone by threatening directly to the president of the bank that he'd use a different bank if they didn't let him, and the president bent over backwards to meet this demand. He's just like us!
Someone might be perfectly happy being your friend, and not understanding why you never come to their parties that they advertise via the group chat on whatever platform, or insta posts or whatever.
"If they cared enough they would message me directly on my obscure to normies messaging platform!" Yeah your best friend might. The greater social circle?
I get it, I'm trying to get everyone on signal or onto federated platforms, but I'm realizing that if I wanna talk to The People, I need to go to where The People are.
There was an old YouTube video of a young guy standing around somewhere in East Asia, placards in hand, recording himself showing messages on those placards about why you should quit social media, set to Marching The Hate Machines.
It had a placard in it saying something like "You don't have 100 friends. You have like 4. And that's OK."
The more I'm getting older, the truer this has become. There is something extremely zen-like about letting the past trail away like the wake of a ship, as Watts said.
In an ideal world, those people were dear to me, and me to them, and we would all stay in touch and be one big happy family, n'importe the distance. But it takes plenty out of me just to be there for those that matter most. And for them, putting up with my quirks is burdensome but not an unscalable wall. As it is for me with their quirks in reverse.
It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable.
The golden age of the internet was when it was an enthusiast's space. It is now almost entirely a corporate space, where the remaining enthusiasts' content is scraped 100K times a day and sold without attribution by the corporates.
The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and Meta charging may create another wave of converts there. It has a lot of growth pains to endure yet, but the ability to painlessly spin up your own instance could be very attractive to young people looking for their own non-corporate spaces on the internet.
We may also see some renewal via large companies (Meta in particular) imploding, from mismanagement and disenchanted users. My experience marketing a new product is that online advertising is completely ineffective now the web is filled with slop, no matter how well targeted it is. We've recently pivoted to optimise for word-of-mouth with orders of magnitude better results. I think any adtech company without a solid alternative profit stream is in for a rough ride (and no, AI is not a solid profit stream for anyone but Nvidia).
well Apple is stated as an easy counter example. They charge money for premium hardware and software. everything else is downstream. So while they could squeeze at every possible opportunity, they are less incentivized to abuse the relationship because their core proposition is: you pay money for our premium hardware and software.
it’s imperfect but contrasts this with the modern approach of grow at all costs, light money on fire and punt entirely on how to ever make money. it usually doesn’t end well for customers.
That was a great deal when it came bundled with YouTube music. When they bizarrely tried to merge the two products so that when I was interested in watching videos, all I got was music video recommendations, it lost its lustre.
Now I would rather just pay for a couple Patreons. I heard there's some new pay to use YouTube thing out there that creators are pushing, I can't remember the name but I hopped on it and didn't see any extra content beyond what's offered on YouTube so I don't see the point.
Oh and before I got grayjay so I could have ad free casting of videos, premium was nice for when watching on the tv.
And if it's anything like Whatsapp, they'd need to keep up support for otherwise unsupported platforms like ancient Android versions, cause .01% doesn't sound like a lot until you realize your install base is in the hundreds of millions.
Old theory - I feel like that Simpsons meme, "say the words Bart," but, Marx write about this:
> The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.
The fact that companies seek profite by cutting labor costs, but in cutting labor costs can inadvertently reduce the spending power of their customers in aggregate, is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
> The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved.
PRC netizens, and who knows what percentage of them are real but presumably more than 0, will defend this when I talk with them about it. How the surveillance makes them feel safe, how they wouldn't feel safe without it.
Hm, maybe, I'd prefer the person looking over me while I slept to be someone I know, but I guess everyone knows brother Xi. Regardless, the implication seems to be that we need the requisite police state to go with it, when Taiwan and Japan both have basically total CCTV coverage as well, yet are liberal democracies. Both countries are also comparably safe to the PRC. So there certainly seems to be some middle ground. I don't know about Japan, but I've not heard of issues of private companies exploiting the CCTV for profiteering purposes, or like, cops using it to stalk people, or the government using it to engage in civic oppression (post constitutional reforms).
I think we just need sensible levels of surveillance with proper safe guards. I'm quite happy with a network of CCTV that can track down the driver who just bulldosed and killed a kid on the their bike. I'm not ok with Amazon building their own network of spying doorbell cameras to sell adverts.
I do wonder about the tradeoff between convenience and the various negative externalities.
Example: trains are better for the environment than planes. I need to get from Copenhagen to London for a wedding next month. The train schedule is roughly 20 hours long, starts at 6am, several transfers, and something in the range of 250USD. On Skyscanner there's flights from Copenhagen to London essentially every 20 minutes, it takes an hour, and it costs 50USD. No wonder the ferry to London ended! No wonder everyone chooses the flight!
If you walk around Taiwan you'll see all sorts of failures of governance. 60 year old crumbling buildings with double stacked illegal builds on top, each floor worth 1 mil USD because there's just no supply here. Pedestrian hell because it takes coordination with 6 different agencies to get a green line fake sidewalk put on the road, let alone an actual infrastructure change. Rapidly escalating in-your-face wealth concentration as most new buildings are luxury condos that are immediately purchased, held, and kept empty by the ultra wealthy while their failsons cruise around Taipei in Lamborghinis, flagrantly violating traffic laws.
PRC propaganda against us is escalating and as soon as they learn to stop calling us separatists (and drop the Han Chauvinism angle that just centers Taiwanese identity around the island itself) and instead focus on how shit in the PRC Just Gets Done mostly to the benefit of the working class, you just gotta trade the right to protest and the right to privacy, I think that'll be the end of Taiwan sovereignty. I mean, wouldn't most people take that trade? A small increase in quality of life, an escalation in security and certainty, and all it means is you have to be a little more careful about what you say online?
I think about this a lot. I think this is the root of a lot of the problems that grew in our world - the absolutely understandable tendency in people to just want to get on in their lives, and how this makes them vulnerable to exploitation by people who are very willing to put in a bit of extra effort exploiting them.
Do you also think about your use of AI in posts? It's such a tradeoff. On the one hand - no one wants to read, on the other no one wants you to submit AI content.
What evidence do you have to support your accusation? Emdash usage? You have an emdash in your post, do you use LLMs?
Go look at my blog. Any LLM use there? I care about writing, I use LLMs to write code but never let it touch my prose, hence why I'm on a no ai webring.
Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. No I am not a bot, I'm for reals.
My two cents with the EU tinted glasses. I completely agree with failures of governance that you mention. Especially the plane/train cost comparisons are infuriating. My personal view is though that the slippery slope of "security" -> "control" -> exploitation. I heard the phrase "absolute power corrupts absolutely" in history class and time and time again, authoritarian systems have exploited the masses more effectively. All it takes is one bad ruler to turn thing around and syphon more than is "acceptable". Not that the western world is looking that great right now in terms of class divide, but the laundry at least is open for everyone to see. Freedom > Security for me.
So humble that he was able to change his information over the phone by threatening directly to the president of the bank that he'd use a different bank if they didn't let him, and the president bent over backwards to meet this demand. He's just like us!
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