Never heard of anything on the playlist before and I doubt I would have really stumbled on it normally because it’s not the style I normally seek out but so far it all slaps. How is it they’re allowed to include this stuff on their website?

I’m sure his fans could vote a few extra times for him.

Is any of that information centralised anywhere? I still have and love my old dumb TV, but I want to be prepared for when I am inevitably dragged in to the “smart” era.

Hopefully they won’t start standardizing TV’s that have to phone home periodically and if they are denied this for long enough, refuse to work until they’ve established a connection to their servers. I’m not aware of anything that does this but it’s definitely what will start happening if enough people disable network connectivity to circumvent smart features. This wouldn’t worry me too much since I’d likely want to use the device as just a display anyway and plug something useful in to the HDMI but if the whole machine is somehow tied up in these sophisticated operating systems, what if they just disable HDMI until they get their way?

Vote for Kodos!

aww you beat me to it.

What’s the original clip from?

This is disturbing. I wanted to know more so I googled it but I found nothing. Where did you hear this?

I’ve actually watched some of the Ancient Apocalypse but haven’t seen it through to the end yet so some of my criticisms could be unfair as they may be already addressed in the show itself.

They’re fairly entertaining, I kinda like it. Every episode starts with an interesting archeological site and a little bit of a rundown on the uncontroversial aspects of why it’s an interesting place. In this regard it’s quite a good travelogue show. There’s also a gradual step up from there to Hancock’s pet theory, the usual structure is a “here’s this interesting ancient place thought to be A, but what you probably didn’t know was that there’s probably a hidden or previously unknown aspect to it B and then the even wilder part is it’s all connected to this wider insane leap C”.

A is always good to learn, B is sometimes compelling such as when they think they have physical evidence of entire additional ancient structures underneath a visible one, though often very speculative and typically involve the site being older than experts believe. C is Hancock’s ridiculous theory about a very advanced civilization that died out but survivors of which went around the world spreading its greatest achievements to other societies at the time, which to line up with his timeline for when this advanced civilization fell requires most archeological discoveries to be older than currently thought. He’ll usually go in to comparative mythology as well with cool artwork that is implied to be historical but is quite clearly made for the show.

As I’ve said I like the show, but Graham Hancock does his best to make it hard to like by being such a grating self satisfied dickhead. I can see why if you’re an expert in the field it would be galling to see rampant speculation getting very popular and seriously received but I don’t think I’d have such a problem with it if Hancock didn’t go out of his way to talk about how much smarter he is than the “experts” and variously suggests that the reason they don’t like him or that they haven’t made the same amazing discovery as him is variously because they are conspiring to keep theories that don’t fit a narrative suppressed, are too lazy to do physically go and investigate places where there just certainly must be something amazing if only people would just go dig it up, or somehow, despite their clever and underhanded conspiring are just not clever enough to think of Hancock’s suggestions whilst also rejecting them out of hand.

This makes it a hard watch, he dedicates a lot of time to this, and even while doing so accuses experts of being “defensive” which is hilarious because if you’re going into this cold with an open mind to listen to what he has to say, the first thing you get is him being super defensive about why no one else believes his wacky theory, which would be a huge red flag if you were to try and assess whether he has any kind of a point or his theories have any merit until you realise that this is basically his shtick and how the show sets it’s tone. It doesn’t just want to be an “archeology” documentary, it wants to embrace Hancock’s outsider status to create in him a character for a more dramatic narrative. This is a good idea for making an exciting show but since it’s already on shaky ground be pretending to be a documentary it needed to be handled skillfully to really work in this way but instead they decided going completely over the top and bringing it up over and over again like the insecure kid in the plahground that always lies was the best way to execute it and thus squandered the dramatic potential. To give you an example, Joe Rogan is used as an interviewee to try and bolster Hancock’s credibility.

Again I haven’t watched all the episodes, so perhaps he’s building to something but to me the most glaring flaw in his theory, one not helped by the “everyone but me is such a dumbass for not noticing this stuff when the evidence is right in front of you” style is that he presents lots of different cases where he thinks an archeological site is built using advanced techniques or for advanced purposes that don’t line up with the prevailing understanding of the civilization that built it and therefore they must have had contact with people from his theoretical super civilization. Okay, but how is it that these societies have left traces of their existence all over the place including clues to their cobtact with this mystery society, but the benevolent super society itself didn’t directly leave a trace? I think he’s leading up to saying something about the ice age somehow destroying the evidence but that all seems a bit convenient. In any case it could be true but with the crucial evidence form such an extraordinary hypothesis apparently not present, it’s shaky ground from which to proclaim everyone else has no idea.

I had forgotten about this so evidently it has stopped, that said I have only ever used ublock origin and it was happening to me, with that on Firefox so I don’t know about this theory that it’s just that one particular adblocker.

I find it hard to let go of the idea that Google was doing this, but then again I suppose the fact that it isn’t now would suggest they weren’t behind it in the first place since the supposed motive for it was to push people to Chrome and if you just stopped doing this after like a month tops then it wouldn’t be a particularly effective strategy.

Well that would also seem OK too. It’s major news and while I don’t known where you saw it, it’s likely for an intended audience that’s been following events thus far so it’s not exactly misleading since it can be reliably predicted that people reading it, like yourself will understand what was won.

I have to say this pledge seems pretty stupid on the face of it. It’s origins come from a very anti democratic place and the logic of it makes no sense since if you were planning to forcibly overthrow the government through a secret plan that involved running in the primaries you’d hardly let the cat out of the bag by skipping it, you’d just make the pledge and then do it.

This guy skipping it is for sure an ominous sign but he already wanted everyone to know this and the ootional and pointless pledge is providing a convenient means for a political stunt which is ironic since a stupid political stunt is what it sounds like it always was to begin with when people were forced to start making it for similar theatre.

Not saying it’s not a concern though, it’s a worrying marker of the changes of the political landscape where deliberately signalling a desire for insurrection is a smart and shrewd political move that’s actually beneficial to a canditate when people point it out is a very dangerous place to be in.

Exactly. The article is pay walled so I couldn’t get too specific since I don’t known it’s scope but my suggestion here is that it’s not complete naïveté not to have automatically assumed the war in Ukraine would lead to both actual inflationary pressure as well as cover for just plain old price gouging because that price gouging behavior on its own doesn’t make good business sense even hard nosed and cynically motivated, it requires both greed and concentrated ownership in cartels. Presumably we should see this greedflation happening unevenly in particular sectors where cartels or cartel like conditions have flourished.

I guess one way it’s surprising is that, it takes a degree of coordination for this to happen. I mean you have some major international event that can trigger international economic consequences like some degree of inflation and then some genius thinks that since the public have been forced to swallow price rises across the board because of this, what if we just raise our prices some more and it will be assumed it’s for the same unavoidable cause. Okay, I get the scam, great. But, whether consumers believe the pretense or not and have sympathy or not, wouldn’t stop them going elsewhere if someone else didn’t come up with the same clever scheme or hasn’t launched it yet, and still has higher, but not extra high prices. Or maybe they do all see a great caper and jack up the prices at the same time, eventually, for the same greedy reasons, those businesses would want to take the other’s lunch if they could and would see the benefit of being at least just a little bit cheaper which is supposed to create a cycle that is the way capitalism supposedly works.

This doesn’t happen when you see monopolies or near monopolies. Supermarkets in Australia are in particular being talked about for price gouging and there’s an associated near duopoly between 2 dominant chains. In that context it’s definitely not very surprising. I’d bet that this particularly recent example of price spikes without adequate explanation are associated particularly with sectors where there is very little competition. The article was pay walled so I can’t tell if they’re referring specifically to prices for groceries or economy wide problems.

Was it meant to make money? I mean, I think it’s just basically like old fashioned campaigning materials and propaganda, it’s just taking on the new interactive dimensions of social media and the perpetual campaigning of modern politics that Trump particularly is known for. Really it’s “profit” would be measured in outcomes rather than dollars, just as ad campaigns track numbers.

Hahaha this is so fucking weird. I can’t say I’d care much exactly but just… What!?

I love how the dumb one’s looks like she’s an upside down balloon that’s been sealed closed with a knot rather than having hair.