mg5150

We used to have an entertainment industry. Now we just have Disney, Time-Warner, Comcast NBC/Universal, Sony, etc. There's nothing wrong with this that can't be fixed by coming down on these corporations the way we used to come down on monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T.

I'd say both. He took prevailing conservative groupthink of the Lee Atwater school and weaponized it to become one of the OG alt-reich trolls[1], to quote somebody who apparently plays too many JRPGs.

> The man was a fucking demagogue. He made his fortune peddling cryptofascist propaganda while calling himself a “conservative”. He helped set the stage for the resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism, white supremacy, and neo-Nazism in the United States. He was the OG alt-reich troll, and his grave should have a pay toilet in place of a headstone.

[1]: https://demifiend.org/articles/good-riddance-rush-limbaugh.h...

IMO, anybody who takes Charles Murray seriously needs to be hit upside the head with a hardcover of Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which exposed race-and-IQ studies for the racist bullshit they are in the 1970s, years before the publication of The Bell Curve.

There's a reason one of the first words every toddler learns to say is "no". It's the word that allows people to assert themselves and thus become fully human.

IMO, DMDs are the real professionals. They're passionate about getting paid, and they don't buy into HN's bullshit.

Have you considered getting together with some like-minded individuals and DDOSing Twitter into the ground? I doubt anything of value would be lost.

There's a movie you should see. It's called Network[1] and it was made in 1976. It deals with prime time TV news and how it is used to exploit people.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/

> Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

If Medium took away custom domains once, what's to stop them from doing it again? Why do bloggers keep falling for Medium's bullshit?

They can, unless the kids have the guts to refuse to log their reading and their parents have the sense and decency to back up their kids.

News is entertainment and always has been. Since many people find sport entertaining, it makes sense to include sport in the daily news.

I'm not an Angular developer. I'm a generalist who uses Angular when necessary. Likewise for every other framework or language you can think of. I don't really give a damn what language/framework I'm using as long as I get paid, except for VB6. You couldn't pay me enough to touch that again.

So if for some reason I wanted to find info on The Cure's 1982 album Pornography, the cops would get notified? What if I wanted to see if Anthrax had a new album coming out?

Why do techies keep agreeing to work on bullshit like this?

I don't think there's any need to worry about whether Covid-19 involves premeditation; it's easy to suggest that many countries' leaders exhibited a depraved indifference to human life that itself makes the resulting deaths through their inaction or incompetent action murder. Or, if you're not willing to admit that our leaders don't give a damn about us, why not "social negligent homicide"?

IMO, cookie consent should not be a website's reponsibility. It should be built into the user agent, which should block all cookies/analytics by default and prompt for consent when first visiting a site. Of course, this would most likely break adtech so it won't happen.

My day job keeps pressuring me to use video, and I keep fighting the temptation to replace my photo with a "SEELE 01 SOUND ONLY" graphic from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

My coworkers might want to see me on video, but I'm used to having an iron curtain between work and the rest of my life and I'm not comfortable with letting work intrude that far into my home. As nice as it is to be able to work from home I see no reason why I should give my coworkers a view of my basement.

Besides, I have a face made for radio and a voice made for print. I'm doing my team a favor by keeping my cam off.

> I don't see how Clubhouse can survive as is with the invite only system when their competitors can easily copy them to bankruptcy.

Maybe if Clubhouse went all-in on being a virtual gated community where you had to pay for access and the subscription fee was high enough to not only cover expenses but provide a sense of exclusivity. If all of the hoi-polloi are using Facebook's version of Clubhouse, there might be value in the original Clubhouse if using it means not having to be around working-class schmucks like me.

Nobody's invited me, which suits me just fine since I don't have an iPhone and liked the internet better when it was all text.

I think this[1] is a good compromise between excessively brutalist websites like the one you mentioned or Zain Amro's site[2] and blogs pretending to be SPAs built with stuff like Bootstrap or Gatsby. Yes, I think React as a static site generator is overkill. But I'm old, and I don't see why a personal website should "appeal to society at large". Society at large isn't paying for domain registration or hosting, and they certainly aren't maintaining the site.

[1] https://bestmotherfucking.website/

[2] https://zainamro.com/

I've never trusted Facebook, and the only reason I still have an account is that my family insists on using it. They acknowledge that I'm right to be wary of Facebook, but they're familiar with it and my sixty-something parents aren't going to switch because they have more pressing concerns and (in their opinion) nothing to hide.

All I can do, since they won't use alternatives like email, SMS, or Signal, is give them as little data as possible. I don't post to the timeline. I use 20 year old photo as my profile pic. I don't provide any biographical info. I don't "like" anything or send friend requests. And I don't post anything on messenger that I wouldn't be willing to write on a postcard.

Facebook won't be close to trustworthy until it is forced to buy out Mark Zuckerberg and sell off Instagram, WhatsApp, Occulus, etc. Remember, this was Zuckerberg at 19, according to transcripts leaked to Business Insider:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

He might have gotten less contemptuous of users with age, but Facebook's actions do not suggest this is the case.

As an aside, the only thing that would get me to trust ANY social media platform would be if it served as a front-end for users' websites. When you sign up, you should be able to provide your website's RSS/Atom/JSON feed, and your posts should come out of the feed. When somebody follows you, they're just following your feed. When you delete your account, your data remains your own because all the platform was doing was pulling from your feed.

I know the Solid project is supposed to address this, but I think it's a solution in search of a problem.