Kaveren

> Citizen's United infamously set that in stone.

The alternative is that you can't make documentaries about a candidate's bad climate change policy and monetize it as you would a non-contentious issue.

> That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.

Neither does the individual "economic elite", defined as anyone in the top 10%.

People can complain about the two party system all they want, but ranked choice voting was just rejected in Massachusetts, the most liberal state there is (and I'd be correct to assume that Democrats have more reason to desire this than Republicans).

Gerrymandering is bad and needs to be disposed of. We aren't an oligarchy because there's some gerrymandering.

Money in politics is vastly overrated, and there isn't even that much money in the field to begin with. Bernie Sanders didn't lose his 2020 primary because of money, Trump didn't win his 2016 primary because of money.

> Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect.

People say a lot of things. People mostly agree with universal background checks for guns. It isn't the Evil Rich People preventing this from happening, and the NRA isn't particularly rich itself even though it's a popular bogeyman.

People talk a lot about climate change until it's time to shape policy on it. Someone answering a poll question doesn't matter, what people vote for matters.

Your argument comes from a fantasy where most people actually agree with you, but the lobbyists just prevent things from changing. In reality, many people are very poorly informed. People don't understand just how powerful political mobilization and voting is. I agree that they think voting won't do anything, but they'd be wrong about that.

that's because many people don't vote or take part in political advocacy. it doesn't make society in "oligarchy". our democracy actually works really well, even with gerrymandering and some voter disenfranchisement. if all those people actually voted frequently, the policy outcomes would be a lot different.

compare this to actual oligarchies where opposition parties actually can't accomplish anything because they're denied access to elections, or there's legitimate election fraud, or serious voter intimidation, et cetera.

and policy outcomes being determines by random people is actually awful, the average person has absolutely no understanding of basic economics. it's not even desirable.

The better alternative is just to learn thoroughly and apply knowledge as much as you can. You can explore without guesswork.

> That attitude is actually how I program—with scripted languages I write code and see what happens, if it didn’t work I write it again.

This is an incredibly harmful attitude towards learning, but it feels nice because it's a lot less effort than actually trying to read or listen to something to learn. It's just laziness.

Learning C++ this way is how someone would end up with a buffer overflow every 30 lines of code they write. It's the reason some self-taught developers can't give you the fuzziest definition of the difference between O(n) and O(n^2).

The closest approximation of this is how kids learn to speak, but this is incredibly inefficient, and they receive many years of formal education anyway.

something being popular and eliminating other options is not inherently bad. there is nothing wrong with one company acquiring a monopoly through superior service. you can attack amazon's behavior as anticompetitive, but that's not what you're doing here.

exact opposite, they've made a 180 on advertising. there used to be external offsite ads shown on the website, which were removed. there used to be a developer API to show video ads for revenue within games, which was removed. they've cut down heavily on event promotions from companies (think movies that appeal to kids)

they have an extremely high revenue business model off actual customers, so they don't really need to do advertising, there's plenty of other ways to get more profitable.

for example, they're at the scale where they might be able to do what Dropbox did by running more of their own infrastructure to save big.

because most companies do not recognize roblox as a platform, they recognize it as a game. nobody realizes that the development of games on it is on a similar level to web development, it's like explaining social media to congressmen.

it's not them getting special treatment purposefully. it's been on the iOS app store since 2012.

apple's policy here is a bad one. if it were fully remove, true web browser diversity could come to iOS, and roblox could finally do JIT compilation of Lua, among so many other possibilities.

there isn't a tweet you can send that will start a war unless the administration sending it is willing to confirm that is indeed a move they're making. you think diplomats are idiots.

that tweet threat isn't even an immediate threat.

sorry you just don't understand how the world works. nobody is ever starting a war over twitter, not least because people understand that accounts can be hacked. and the president's twitter account tweeting about a war would mean the president gets a call within 2 minutes. it would never happen.

north korea would absolutely never initiate a war over a tweet, they're fully rational.

also nice link to an article about a tweet that the president actually wanted to send, as opposed to a hacker tweeting, which would be denied by the white house within 15 minutes.

you spend too much time online if you think you can start any war over twitter

> you may be unaware of better alternatives because of anticompetitive behaviour by Google

google provides all of the best services in each of its major consumer categories unless you value privacy, except when there's a major competitor. there's no hidden gem better than youtube that would scale as well.

i guess we should all follow anarchoprimitivism in that case. we need to find "eternal ever lasting bliss and happiness".