Although you are correct, the statement is still arguably correct.l, even if only accidentally.

As the parent entity, the national PBS has a responsibility to guide and even mandate policies and provide best practice guidelines or even offer support and assistance in burden sharing arrangements.

PBS has long now had major structural challenges due to things like internal corruption and overbearing control by the well funded chapters without commensurate responsibility.

As with many such decentralized membership organizational structures, incentives can often be very misaligned between verticals and laterals.

What happens to the whole attention economy, i.e., social media, apps, games, etc. when phones/devices become too expensive for people?

Subsidize them with phones or apps that pay them a drip of coins for their attention, maybe even a little real money.

Use camera-enabled eye tracking to say, hey, pay attention to this content, lost you there for a second, there you go, welcome back. Tap into edge LLMs to herd the user back to consuming content, since its subsidized, the budget for this goes up.

It’s a mistake to call these capitalist things. When the government subsidizes you and bails you out with money printing fraud and government spending and no one is ever held accountable, let alone suffer any real consequences; you don’t have capitalism at all, any more than “communism” was ever actually communism.

Frankly, if you look at “capitalism” it oddly looks far more like the underlying con system of control core to “communism” than not, even if it has been far more sustainable and enduring because it is based on ideological control, not physical control.

Capitalism needs governments to work. It has throughout history. Free markets aren't synonymous to Capitalism.

Maybe a theoretical free market state can exist. But it has certainly never been tried.

It's amazing how naive and gullible people are even after all the many thousands of examples of lies and gaslighting over many generations now. It seems to be a permanent characteristic of a certain subset of people, and seemingly a majority of people, at least in the west and at least in this era.

It always gives me the "he only beats me because he loves me" or "he wouldn't beat me if I knew how to behave better" vibes. It's not healthy, not sane, not rational.

One disagreement though; I don't even think they will lock people out of their devices outside of very narrow and specific instances or examples to "cut the grass" as the Israelis call it, to scare and remind people they are the slaves and the long arm of the tyranny can reach out and crush them if they don't self-censor and self-subjugate. Psychological and ideological control has very much proved itself far more effective than physical control in all circumstances. They want to be able to monitor and then use methods and technologies to control that have not really come to light in society even thought they were systematized through the Iraq war. You are now the "insurgents", are you old enough to remember those, those insurgents in their own country?

You should avoid agreeing with the narcissists that always use false equivalence, whataboutism, and goal post shifting the second you call them out.

You are allowing them to define a ridiculous standard by agreeing with them that not only is it in fact “two evils” but what qualifies as evil. They’ll tell you…always only when called out, mind you…all and any meddling (also something they will then define with the same kind of falls equivalence loop) is evils, when that is simply not true, not is any kind of effort to influence the same thing as actual meddling, not us it always evil.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point, the narcissistic personality or their little zombies in most cases will constantly shift and change things all to avoid you from being able to get a clear focus on the truth, something their explosively allergic to.

As an American child of the Empire with global perspective and very high access perspective, there is no other entity besides the cabal that controls the USA and acts flying its banner; that is more deadly, more meddling, more conniving, more evil, more supremacist, and more vile.

You are in for a ride with Denglish [1], but also “senden“ is a real word [2] — it is unclear to me from your rant if you’re trying to speak from a position of authority or are just venting for no obvious reason.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denglisch

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/senden

> It's nonsensical to use "hero". Why would you use "hero"?

Because it rhymes with Wero (or with Vero)

And "senden" is absolutely a word, duh

It always has been. Frankly, sometimes they don't even spend anything at all at lower levels, it's just a conversation, a meeting with an animatronic bureaucrat high on their own self-importance and power, in a mandatory spending jukebox of incompetence and failure. I have seen people squander millions simply because they were too incompetent to properly run an organization, plan, and budget and they needed to spend the money merely so it is not taken from them next budget cycle. I am also witness to corruption and nepotism that wildly enriches people merely because doing so is easy and does not require actual work.

The return on "lobbying" for corporations is immense, actually, it's a bit of a high cost, high return with some risks type of dynamic; but especially in the Beltway bandit den and increasingly in the silicon cartel valley they have worked out a systematic methodology for bamboozling and manipulating utterly inadequately prepared bureaucrats squandering other people's money with approaching zero consequences. No, even they not only don't face consequences, they are promoted faster the better and faster they can squander money and enrich friends and associates.

Forget the lobby, the parlor is where it's at.

How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games?

You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us.

Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you?

These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society.

Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.

> > How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games?

You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it

I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books.

But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.

You point out a critical difference, you were already experienced and “skilled” in imagining because you read a lot, a function where you are inherently going to have to imagine a lot more based on various degrees and quality of descriptions.

I think you may be underestimating the value of that skill and experience. You may not even be able to put yourself in the shoes, i.e., imagine what it may be like never having to had to imagine anything if you only ever watched the things happen on a rectangle from infancy on.

I argue that you only cross referenced the imagination skill into being a federation captain because you were already experienced and skilled in imagination.

I suspect it will be realized what devastation it has caused within our lifetimes and if we still have the capacity, we may even revert back to requiring reading and hopefully even banning screen usage by any minors.