tossthere

> You cannot rely on people being responsible with substances and mechanisms that make them behave irresponsibly. That's the whole point of regulating addictive things.

This statement is so profoundly simple and rational and true.

My childhood was severely impacted by addiction in the family, and “It’s A Disease” is a refrain I’ve heard from every doctor and group therapist and concerned friend and public health official.

The problem with “It’s A Disease” is that when you have a drug-addicted family member, you spend years or decades being trapped in extremely emotionally complicated and potentially catastrophic situations over and over again, and often the ONLY way to break free of it is to do things, say things, and make decisions that are very deeply hurtful to both you and your own family. Things you’re not proud of, that no reasonable or kind or loving person would ever say or do to somebody merely for having a disease.

“It’s A Disease” turns the addict into an innocent victim of their own family.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the cyclic part of drug addiction was desire -> gratification -> withdrawal, with negative behaviors as a consequence of that. Seeing drug addiction as a cycle of one’s behavior toward a substance being altered by that very same substance, literally never even occurred to me. I can accept that and not blame myself or my family. Thank you.

> b) To attempt to diversify from this single source of income. Except this will never happen, nothing will ever come close to the income ads generate for them. They know this, but they have to look like they’re trying, both internally and externally.

I’ve heard a lot of people repeat this, and I don’t think I understand where it’s coming from.

Advertising is just a revenue model, it’s not something a company necessarily needs to diversify. This seems to me like saying Walmart is in a precarious position because all their revenue comes from sales.

It’s the product offering that needs diversification. Walmart can’t only sell coconuts.

The ad revenue is coming from pretty diversified sources: search, video/tv, maps, email, calendar, web browser, mobile …

The media’s ad-supported business model and the effects of branding on consumer behaviors naturally results in an extraordinarily pro-left media environment. The cost of advertising is bid up by brands that benefit from presenting a liberal image, and it drowns out all alternative views.

Just to illustrate, take greenwashing as an example. Companies market their products as being good for the environment because that drives sales, and you can find that message on every shelf in the grocery store. There are many alternative views, very convincing ones in my opinion, that choosing the bottle of water that uses a thinner plastic is still harmful to the environment, and supporting greenwashing by purchasing it actually results in net harm to the environment because it reduces adoption of better options (reusable bottles, tap water) and distracts consumers from issues that could actually have a meaningful impact on climate change (innovation in direct air capture, greener steel production or air travel, a carbon tax, etc).

But how would that message ever reach consumers? It doesn’t make them spend more, so people never hear any of this.

The result is a populace that believes they are saving the world by not asking for a straw at Starbucks.

This is happening at an ideological level. Major brands either declare no political stance, or they declare a pro-left stance. Every celebrity either declares no political opinion, or declares a pro-left political opinion. (Or declares any pro-right opinion, even vaguely or accidentally, and has their brand harmed or destroyed for it.)

I’m something like a Clinton-era liberal, I guess, but the media environment is concerning to me. I would choose Biden over Trump, but the fact that the election was this close even with every major media source being so aggressively and overtly anti-Trump and pro-Biden does concern me. I can’t ignore the fact that if the media environment was more balanced and less ad-driven, it probably would have been an easy victory for Trump. And I do think all of the above is material to the subject of election integrity and the health of our democracy.

Former Pokémon TCG enthusiast (circa 1999) here! Kids back then had the same approach, large and heavy coin, flip from a consistent height, consistent strength. Heads every time.

There were popular coins made specifically for Pokémon TCG then, and they happened to be large and thick and plastic and heavy, so the cheating was widespread.

I was one of the many kids who did this routinely. But there was one kid who took first place nearly every week, out of a field of 50+ entrants. “He must cheat the coin, AND be an amazing deck builder and card player on top of that”, I thought.

Then one week I was matched against him, winner goes to top 8.

Our decks were nearly identical, I could flip heads every time, I was a strong player. “50-50” I thought.

Turn one. Retreat Scyther, in Electabuzz, Thundershock. I flip my giant coin, and before it flattens, he picks it up and hands it back to me. “Flip it higher please.”

He must know I’m cheating. I assumed he must be cheating too though, every other kid is, and he wins this tournament every week!

Guilty, I flipped the coin fair this time, higher. Before it flattens he picks it up again, hands it back to me. “Higher please.”

I lost every coin flip that match. He won, went to the top 8, later won the tournament for the nth week in a row.

It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how he was winning every tournament. In a field full of cheaters trying to flip heads every time, all he had to do was wait for the coin to enter that terminal spinning motion every coin does right before it flattens. Well practiced at this, if he sees that it’s about to flatten heads, he quickly grabs it and hands it back to you. “Higher please.” Repeat until the coin flattens tails.

His tactic was a silver bullet in a field full of flip cheaters. Nobody ever questioned his intentions when he grabbed the coin and asked for a higher flip.

Good point. I started to notice a lot of the Spotify recommendations sounded like half of an EDM track I might like, mixed with half of something that it should’ve never been mixed with.

Spotify also seems to think I’ll like literally anything with a house kick.

It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve though so they have my sympathy!

Nobody can really explain why they love one song and hate another, and the overlap of the Venn diagram between any two people is usually very small.

I can eat any dish at a restaurant and think it’s not very good, just ok, pretty good, great, or amazing. The same for any movie, TV show, painting, drink, book, article, ... but for a song, I either like it, love it, or hate it so much that I can’t stand it.

Music recommendation algorithms have such a narrow surface area to land on, and when they miss, they go right into a volcano.

Funny, but I was hoping this might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes.

Spotify constantly queues and recommends songs to me that are so bad, I can’t even imagine how there could possibly exist any data indicating that any significant sample of listeners has ever enjoyed hearing them. Spotify has 5+ years of my listening history, and orders of magnitude more data from listeners all over the world, and yet every time I set it to recommend anything to me I just sit there pressing “skip” repeatedly until I give up.

I always blamed myself, thought I was just becoming old and curmudgeonly in my 30s. But yesterday I finally discovered the problem isn’t with me. I switched to Apple Music, and it queued up 50 songs I’d never heard, and I enjoyed almost all of them.

I can use my HomePod now, too. I’m really loving Apple Music so far, highly recommend it to anyone who thinks their Spotify account is permanently broken like mine was.

Was this intended for public consumption?

Directly responding to the film by name is such an obviously terrible idea PR-wise, I’m shocked to even be seeing this from Facebook. It must be an accident.

I’ll be honest, mostly I just think that this is a very idealistic and naive reaction.

The world is extremely complicated and full of unfortunate realities that humanity just doesn’t have any solutions for.

There are people who can recognize that, and who try to do the best they can.

Then there are people who can’t recognize that, adopt an overly simplistic model of the problem and its environment, become convinced that there’s a simple and obvious solution, and then start attributing malice and blame to anyone who refuses to go along with their terrible idea.

I also think: “If they worked here they would know better.” The people here are by and large very good and thoughtful people genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and whatever negative feelings you have about how Google uses its power, if Google were gone it would create a power vacuum in the market that would be filled by companies that were 100x worse.

That’s how I feel about the mission and the morality of it all.

I also feel genuinely concerned for the future of anyone who would deprive themselves like this, as a vague form of protest that nobody ever notices, in the hopes that it might aggregate to something meaningful someday. That seems like a very ineffective and sad approach to living your life.

My own personal views, not Google’s.

Just to be clear, none of what I wrote is legal advice and I would never recommend avoiding legal representation. My point wasn’t that you should avoid it, my point was that in America you often don’t have any choice but to retain counsel, even when you know your own counsel are just additional parties to the game of robbing you.

> But luckily, there's a fairly good alternative -- in-house counsel. If your lawyer is on your payroll, they have zero incentive to do anything extraneous.

This sounds like a good way for companies to mitigate the issue of perverse incentives, but how can individuals benefit from this?

Yep! Lawyers basically just look for legal entities with money, and exploit the justice system to take as much of it as they can without bankrupting the source. Constant flow.

They’re like a tax paid by every person or company with a significant sum of money in America. Doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong, grounds or no grounds, there will still be a team of lawyers on your side taking your money to “defend” you.

Does your lawyer’s $20,000 motion really have any chance of succeeding? Did he really have to pay that company $12,000 to convert all your files to TIFFs? Did he really spend 16 hours on that letter, or does he have 95% of it saved in a template somewhere?

At first you’re happy to have lawyers on your side. But eventually you realize even the ones defending you are in on the same game, and are just there to rob you.

Don’t ever tell anyone you have money or that your company is successful.

The first time the media reported on an event and subject where I knew more than them, I was in my late 20s (I think you have to be at least that old to know a lot about something ... could explain why younger people seem to have such blind faith in popular narratives).

I was absolutely shocked by the basic inaccuracy and skewed writing in literally every single story that was written, every single video that was recorded, everything.

I mean it was all complete and utter nonsense and bullshit. Basic facts, the names of people involved, their roles, the applicable laws, EVERYTHING was wrong EVERYWHERE.

They’ve reported on 3 more events I was deeply familiar with since then, different subjects/industries, same story. Everything is wrong everywhere.

They’re always wrong in the same way and for the same reasons: A more scandalous narrative, with more compelling villains and heroes. If a legal entity with a lot of money is involved, attribute the misinformation to another source so you won’t get sued.