A typical bike-riding leftist urbanite who also happens to be a hockey-crazy Western Canadian.
It’s not that people are incapable of picking up on nuance, it’s got more to do with it being reeaaally hard to convey tone through text. Like it would be hard to fully grasp all the finer points of a psychological movie if instead of watching the movie, all you had was a text version of the dialogue.
Personally I’m a fan of using an ‘/s’ marker, but inside of a spoiler tag.
To interject with a somewhat pedantic point, nothing is truly apolitical. But there is something to be said about sensing the proper time and place to start a political argument.
Except the marketing in this case is actually more accurate. Using ‘kilo-’ to refer to 1024 of something is a straight up misnomer. The Ancient hackers really cursed us with an ambiguous convention for counting bytes.
Cory Doctorow’s blog pluralistic.net is required reading as far as I’m concerned.
You should also look into Escape Pod if you like sci-fi (just a hunch).
City Planner Plays is quite literally the Bob Ross of city building games. He uses his actual professional knowledge of city planning to build really creative and compelling stuff, and he makes it seem easy enough that you want to try doing it yourself. He has commissioned a library of chill lofi beats that he plays in the background of all his videos, which adds to the vibe immensely. And on top of that, he seems like a sincerely pleasant guy, just having fun doing a thing he enjoys doing. It’s an absolute gem of a channel.
Mobile-first is supposed to be a specific way of implementing responsive design, but I think a lot of people say “job done” after the first step and never get around to the whole responsive thing. I think it’s easier to use a mobile layout on desktop than it is to use a desktop layout on mobile, so in that way I think mobile-first is a good principle to follow. But I agree, making a desktop layout that looks good is ignored far too much these days.
The one thing that really grinds my gears above everything else is how on some news sites, there’s an autoplaying video at the top of the article that follows you when you try to scroll past it. An autoplaying video is bad enough, but that’s just infuriating.
I find news sites tend to make the most aggressively bad UX decisions, most of them are a nightmare to visit even with an adblocker installed.
And 100% of the time the thing you end up clicking is an ad. It’s definitely intentional.
This guy Systèmes
Asking out of genuine naivety, why do you do that?
I love listening to solo piano or ambient music while reading. Any other type of music is too much for my brain to handle.
It’s an adjustment I had to make when everyone started working from home in 2020, and I find it works well on transit too. Might just be that I’ve trained my brain to go into focus mode when I hear that type of music.
Ads are a bigger business than you might expect. Get enough eyeballs in one place and brands will be tripping over themselves to give you money just to mention their name. Take the superbowl for example. It’s usually the most viewed event every year in the US, so naturally there is a tradition of advertisers pulling out all the stops and making high-budget bombastic commercials for that specific occasion. You can imagine how attractive it is for brands to want to put their ads on big social media sites, where psychological tricks are used to capture as much attention as possible at all times, instead of just once per year.
Then there’s the user data angle. The big sites all have millions of users who constantly give away personal information without even being prompted, and that makes it really easy for the companies who run them to analyze what makes each user tick and serve ads to the people who are most likely to click on them. This elevates the rate brands are willing to pay even further.
Those two things, along with a suite of anti-competitive practices, are enough to get sites to the point of being mostly profitable. Venture capital and hype-based market speculation get them the rest of the way.
Does anyone remember the spongebob edits people used to upload in the early days of youtube? Idk if they’re still around but I remember watching the pizza delivery one about 10 times in a row and just dying laughing.
I wonder if any of those videos are still funny, a lot has changed since 2009
Best I got is being in a glider that we had to ditch in a corn field. Hopfully I never have to witness anything worse than that.
I love Jon Stewart but I think he’s a little off base with this take. Are we supposed to not call out the overtly fascist stuff the government is doing? Will that get more people to listen the next time we have to call out an overtly fascistic act or will we have to hold our tongue then, as well? How many grannies need to be eaten and impersonated by wolves before we’re allowed to move past the “ooh what sharp teeth you have” crap?
With fascism especially, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. The people going through life like everything is fine are implicitly supporting the fascism. I’m not going to stop yelling about how a pack of wolves has taken over the government, just because some people think the word is overused.
The more it hurts the more it shows you really care, right?
I do not understand where they are making a profit
I think you’re overestimating how much money it costs to produce this stuff. Economies of scale and certain other practices in this specific industry allow retailers to sell stuff at a significant markup even when it seems like they’re giving customers a heavy discount.
But even with relatively large markup percentages, the low price point means retailers have to move incredible volumes in order to make enough money to stay open. So they end up using aggressive marketing tactics to get people to come in the door and start impulsively buying stuff.
My intuition is that those shirts are simply from last season and didn’t sell well enough or they’ve gone out of fashion. The store is using it as an opportunity to put a big 80% off sign out front and whip potential customers into a frenzy. Could also be a scheme to recover costs from online returns. But I really doubt there is anything wrong or even different about those shirts.
Source: worked in clothing retail for a several years
OP be careful, you’ve inadvertently spoken the sacred incantation and summoned the dreaded political content right into this very thread!
In case you’re actually, seriously asking and not just trolling, having privilege and success under capitalism does not disqualify a person from being a leftist. You can’t really criticize a person for participating in a system where if you don’t participate, you starve.
He’s using his influence to organize the working class and advocate for collective action, which is the one tool workers have in the fight against their own exploitation. Even if you don’t like him personally or don’t think he’s part of the working class, he is a very strong ally and has undeniably strengthened the movement.
Cory Doctorow had something relevant to this in one of his blog posts a while ago, but I can’t recall if he was quoting someone else. The gist of it was about how corporations already exist as the uncaring, unfeeling, immortal tyrants that everyone is afraid AI will eventually become, and humans (including CEOs) are insignificant gut flora who survive by helping their hosts consume the world’s resources. I’ll add a link later if I have time/remember.
To answer the question, it’s the second one and we are currently living in that dystopia.