Zephyr
20hr ago
Nah, this was back when it came out - I hated that ad so much that it sticks out in my mind.
Zephyr
1d ago
I mean, ideally I'd be able to pay the individual channels that I like watching money, based on my usage, and have YouTube take some percentage of that.
Given that my only option though is to pay $13.99 directly to YouTube, I think I'll pass.
Zephyr
1d ago
I mean, given that I go out of my way to not buy anything I see advertised to me, and I use adblock as much as possible outside of that, I'd say it's not me either way.
More seriously, I don't think it should be regulated out of existence; I was just opining that a lot of advertising is annoying as shit and if I could make it all go away with a sweep of a magic wand, I would.
So I am someone who hates ads, and I use adblock on my main browser. However, I like to watch YouTube on my TV, which means I get ads.
I despise these ads, and wish I could make them go away; however, I have a fundamental dislike of paying for people to unshittify their services. There are a few reasons why:
- I find it encourages people to keep making things shittier in exchange for more money (see Netflix adding an "ad-supported" tier). If I've already expressed that I'm willing to pay them to undo their damage, they can damage it in new and inventive ways in order to extract more money from me. Following that logic, most things with ads get gradually shittier over time as more of their revenue comes from said ads. I'm willing to see an ad on the sidebar when I read a news story; what I don't like is when they have an ad in the sidebar, an ad in the header, the content is broken up by ads, there's a giant video ad that takes over 40% of my screen, and when I go to click on something a random popup takes over my screen. Paying them to get rid of this rewards them for being garbage people. It doesn't help when I hate both parties in the transaction; some advertisements are so incredibly annoying that I want to inflict real violence against the person who made them (thinking of you, IE10).
- There are a lot of things I'll use once in a while, as opposed to every day; like, if I'm reading a wiki for a video game I'm playing, or I'm reading some news articles, that may be the only time I engage with that particular system. I'm not willing to pay $10.99 to remove that when I'm going to stop caring 3 days later (especially when it involves getting out my credit card, entering it into some shady payment system that may decide to make it impossible to cancel, etc.)
(I feel like I should include a #3 there, but oh well).
In addition, I find that advertising is very much a thing where more of it makes it shittier for everyone. Like, there are a lot of services where I'm price sensitive, but the quality of the thing is not going to matter much. Take Uber vs Lyft vs a taxi - if all 3 of them are going to cost me approximately the same, take the same amount of time to show up, then I don't really care which of the 3 I get. However, if Uber is aggressively advertising, they're going to show up first when I google "taxi (my city)", which means that Lyft and the taxi services are going to have to pay to advertise, which means all 3 of them have to raise their rates to pay for advertising.
I don't think it's realistic to ban them; however, I'd be in favour of having a national vote for the most annoying ad of the year, and the person who made it being forbidden from ever going on the internet again (/s, probably).
Edit: I think one of the reasons that I find advertising so annoying is that it is inflicted upon me in a way that a lot of other stuff just isn't. Paying to not experience something is fundamentally irritating - it feels a lot like someone decided to make my day worse, and is requiring money to stop doing so. Like, if Apple or whatever made a deal with spam callers so that the "Hang Up" button on my phone is disabled unless I listen to their whole spiel, or pay them $20, I think most people would rightly decry this as insane.
Zephyr
1d ago
Canada was looking towards China for diversifying their options
If you are at all familiar with Canada, this wouldn't come as a surprise. We've had consistent allegations that the LPC has had China intervening on behalf of them, and we've been signing a lot of treaties that empower China to access our resources.
Zephyr
2d ago
So China literally has a "department of propaganda*" (at least, according to an individual I know who lived in China for about 8 months). They'd come by every month and everyone would have to line up and take photos that presented China as a good place to live/work in. The individual in question was in a place that was specifically foreigner-focused (as in, I think they had native Chinese people running the place, but all of the people there were from foreign countries).
*Not a euphemism - they literally called themselves that in English.
Zephyr
3d ago
I agree that certain false positive rates are acceptable when enforcing the law (up to but not past the point of conviction/sentencing at least).
And past it too - in a lot of cases, we won't have definitive proof, and part of that means that we will occasionally put the wrong person in jail.
Zephyr
3d ago
What you have to understand about Canada is that we are (the dumbest of) the liberal stereotypes, on average. We pride ourselves on not doing what the US does, even if it’s insanely destructive.
The US requires people to pay for healthcare? Well, we’ll forbid that (unlike European nations which usually offer both a public and private option, we only offer public - as such, we have serious brain drain to the US and wait times that exceed years).
The US is anti immigration? Well, we’ll bring in more immigrants (as an absolute number) than them, even though our population is approximately 10% of theirs.
We elected Carney on a campaign of “elbows up” against the US - despite his party basically ruining our economy over the last 10 years, we decided that rather than appease the giant superpower next to us and the source of most of our trade, we’d rather be prickly about it and make everything worse. Because we hate Trump.
Hell, go to /r/Canada on Reddit and look at any thread about immigration - you’ll see lots of people talking about how badly we need to remove people who overstay their visas, but we can’t do ICE because it’s facist.
Zephyr
5d ago
And better still that we work on removing the stupid and pointless work as much as possible.
To clarify more on what I mean; if you have a glut of people in a certain profession, then the wages for that profession will be lower (aka, it's a buyers marker). One thing that we saw here in Canada was that we had a lot of positions that were unable to be filled (at the current wage) shortly after the pandemic; this obviously leads to companies competing to get workers into them, which is good if you are a worker. I do acknowledge that increasing the size of industry will provide more jobs overall - the issue becomes when immigration is used as a "depress wages" button. I had the exceeding misfortune of doing job applications shortly after Canada got 5m+ new immigrants (as in, roughly 2.5% of our population); it was a nightmare as every position I applied for had 150+ applicants in the first 30 seconds. Eventually, the industry will be able to absorb them; but it won't be fast, and I only have these 80 odd years on earth. If the industry supports it in 5 years, I'll have lost 5 years where I could've been earning better wages (and as everyone knows, investing makes earlier money grow much more than later money).
The same logic would also argue for cutting birthrates (after all, those children will want jobs in 18 years) and even eliminating fellow natives who also compete for your job.
To be fair, in an ideal world (for me, personally) I'd be the only person providing the service that I'd do, and I'd be able to name my price. In reality, I have a lot of sympathy for not driving people out of their home because they can't get a job there. People who were born in a country don't really have the option to leave and go elsewhere - especially when they're middle class. What this ends up being is a situation where businesses hire from the immigrant pool, knowing that they are less willing to pursue labour and employment code violations (as that may get them kicked out), which saves them money. The people who lived there before can no longer do so because the businesses have done a form of gentrification to them, pricing them out of the market. And the wealth inequality grows worse and worse.
Specifically with regards to birth rates, there is an upper limit to how quickly women can produce children - and once a country has reached a place where children don't often die young, there are also resource constraints on them. I think it's unreasonable to assume that women would suddenly jump to producing 8 children per woman when our current TFR is around 1.5 or so; even if they did, this still behaves very differently than having a similar number of immigrants pumped into the system. Women can only produce 1 child every year or so (give or take); there is time to see the developing trend, and build more housing, add more jobs, etc. as the children reach maturity. By comparison, dropping the immigrants in at around 1m per year leaves no time to expand; there are physical limitations on how quickly a business can build a new factory, or new houses can be built. As we've seen up here in Canada, the government inviting the immigrants in took no care in making sure we had space for them.
Edit: Sorry, I wrote this while I was super tired, so a lot of the points blended into each other - if you want me to write it up a bit better, let me know and I'll re-do it.
Zephyr
7d ago
One great example of this being Reagan's whole speech where he basically says that immigrants of the time are in some sense more American than actual native born citizens with the argument that the immigrants (especially the ones fleeing the communist countries) understood this and held a love for the US and our economic freedoms and embrace of working hard for yourself and your family.
This is eminently reasonable; immigrants ... embrace of working hard for yourself and your family are not really what most people are upset about.
Most people are upset with immigrants who:
- Break the law (or otherwise act in an antisocial manner).
- Absorb resources (see Somali daycares, but also like, food-bank Indians)
- Act in favour of their country of origin instead of their country of choice.
- Undercut local labour so that everyone (except big businesses) is poorer.
If you eliminate (or even harshly cut back on) the number of immigrants, legal or otherwise, exploiting the above, I bet you'd see a lot more positivity towards them.
Zephyr
7d ago
Big scandal in NYC recently after a state hospital cut someone loose and they immediately went and stabbed someone in a Macys.
In the US, this is a scandal; in Canada, this is Tuesday.
Zephyr
8d ago
Okay, so I think I understand where our disagreement is coming from (thank you for the clarification on your position); I have been operating under the belief that the officers were attempting to arrest Good, and the action of being in front of the vehicle was as part of the arrest. If I understand your position correctly, you believe that the officer being in front of the vehicle was somewhere in the range of "being extremely negligent" to "deliberately there in order to justify shooting Good if she attempted to flee." As such, (I believe that) you believe that the officer should not be permitted to use the vehicle accelerating into him in his defense, as it was due to his own actions that it happened. Is that correct? (If it's not, please correct me; I'm trying to phrase this in a maximally "I am trying to understand" way, not in a "I am putting words in your mouth way", but I understand that may not come across via text).
Zephyr
8d ago
Either let them shoot you for fleeing, or don't. Don't say "they can't shoot you for fleeing" and then let them game fleeing into looking like a threat so they can shoot you for that.
The issue is that (as someone who does not want to be arrested) I can game-theory them into letting me flee under your rules. That means they literally can't do their job, as anyone who does not want to be arrested can force the issue by engineering a situation in which the officers can must choose between:
- Let them flee; or
- Get into a physical alteration with them
You have stated that #2 is not permissible - so it collapses back into #1, of every criminal must be allowed to flee.
Zephyr
8d ago
I feel like this is untenable, and would simply lead to no one at all being arrested. If officers are forbidden from physically stop me from fleeing, why wouldn't I just flee? Under your rules, they cannot put themselves in a situation where they could be in danger regardless of what decisions I made.
Zephyr
8d ago
The decision to speed off was not set up by the officer, but the inability to distinguish between two types of speeding off (fleeing and attacking the officer) was set up by the officer.
Does it matter at all that she actually struck the officer?
Imagine a hypothetical where I am on foot, and under arrest. The cops surround me (to arrest me). Would you say that in this situation that the inability to distinguish between "me fleeing" and "me having to attack an officer to flee" was set up by the officer, and as such, they do not have any reason to be afraid when I attack an officer to escape?
Zephyr
8d ago
I feel like there needs to be a name for the steelman that like, obviously isn't true and is a fig leaf for the money grubbing that the company wanted to do anyways. Like, does anyone actually believe that advertising is "connecting people to goods and services that will better their life"? Or that price discrimination isn't immediately used to capture all the excess value of a transaction*?
* So in theory, every transaction has two winners; both people only made the trade if they believe that the trade is worth more for them than what they're giving away (tautologically - would anyone voluntarily make a trade that they thought was all downside?) The issue with price discrimination is that instead of both parties capturing some excess value from the trade, one party captures almost all the excess value, while the other captures epsilon (as in, just enough to make the trade worthwhile, but no more).
Zephyr
8d ago
So I understand, you are saying that Good's decision to speed off when an officer is in front of her was set up by the officer in the same way as if he'd handcuffed a knife to his hand?
Zephyr
8d ago
Why? Under that logic, any arrest can negate fear for their life. An arrest is placing themselves into a situation with people who have not been following the law, who may decide to react violently to losing their freedom. If we followed your statement, then any arrestee has carte blanche to behave as violently as they want, as the arresting officer placed themselves into danger, so is not permitted to defend themselves.
I also think that your rules would make Good forfeit her right to behave in panic, if we followed them through. She chose to put herself in a situation that was deliberately antagonizing ICE, which (by your logic) means that it should negate or at least seriously make harder whether [Good] can claim fear for [her] life.
Zephyr
9d ago
Come on, this is a false equivalence. Try parking a truck into the parking lot of your local police department, then walk in while carrying a shotgun. Carefully observe which of these actions will cause more concern. Try to convince them that the real danger is your truck.
Now, try driving the truck through the front of the building and see what the reaction is.
The SUV here is dangerous when it is being pointed at a human being; hell, if she'd had a rifle in her passenger seat when she did this, I'd still argue that the SUV is the greater threat.
Now, if she either intended to run him over or did not give a fuck about killing him, I will concede that he was entitled to self-defense in an unlikely attempt to stop her.
If he had a reasonable belief that she either intended to run him over or did not give a fuck about killing him, I will concede that he was entitled to self-defense in an unlikely attempt to stop her. Self-defense standards do not require someone to be a mind reader, nor do they require that the other person has an intent to kill. It is permissible to shoot someone who is high out of their mind, but pointing a gun at a crowd, even if he is unable to comprehend how dangerous the gun is at the moment. It is also reasonable to shoot someone who yells out in anger "I'm going to fucking kill you!" and reaches towards what appears to be a concealed weapon (even if they aren't actually armed, and were simply going to whip out their dick or some such nonsense).
For the injuries she actually inflicted on him, a headshot was clearly an overreaction, I think most people will agree that letting people grazed by cars shoot the driver is generally a bad idea.
Just for fun, go stand in front of a parked SUV - and take a look at what you could see of the "driver". You'll notice that it is basically only the head, especially on a smaller driver (like, say, a woman).
Part of what bothers me about the Good case particularly is that there's nothing stopping a delayed legal punishment.
The part where she hit the officer with her SUV.
Edit: To clarify, it is reasonable for ICE to arrest her for being an obstacle to them carrying out their primary mission in the area. (And I'm not being cute with "being an obstacle" - she was literally using her vehicle as an obstacle). As part of that arrest, it is reasonable for them to demand that she get out of her vehicle. Her choice was to attempt to flee the situation, which still wasn't the reason she got shot. She got shot because part of her fleeing meant that she drove into an ICE agent, who now has reasonable cause to fear that she attempted to end his life.
Zephyr
9d ago
Also, citizens should not have to cower in their homes if there's an immigration enforcement officer in their neighborhood.
They don't have to do that.
Said citizens should also not have to fear using their right to free speech to express their opinions to federal officers, whom we are supporting with our tax dollars.
They're allowed to do that too.
What they aren't allowed to do is obstruct ICE officers, then flee arrest in such a way that the ICE officer has reason to fear for their life (by, say, accelerating an SUV into them).
Zephyr
9d ago
The thing is, if people had been reacting on this basis I think they'd actually have had a point; they didn't.
They reacted solely as "Poilievre is conservative, Trump is conservative, obviously Poilievre is going to immediately capitulate and sell Canada to Trump!!!" (Nevermind that Poilievre almost immediately denounced the tariffs, and numerous conservatives stated that "Canada is not for sale").
Zephyr
9d ago
I can think of a few examples of how better resource optimization can make things less good.
- There used to be a lot more friction around moving people around; someone who is a top 0.01% engineer might not have ended up with Google or NVIDIA or whatever due to not being as keenly aware of their level of skills. As such, you tended to get more talented people in more diverse spaces (as opposed to concentrating them all into 1 or 2 big companies). By the inverse token, people tend to be a lot more interchangeable in jobs themselves, as anyone better will have gone to a better paying position, so you are necessarily stuck with a bunch of people who are approximately the same level.
- I'd argue that there is less room for disruptors too; for example, card and tabletop games (like, say, Magic the Gathering), or even early PC games (like, say, Starcraft) did not have as much penetration as to what the "best" choices were at any time. A very popular thing amongst CCGs currently is the presence of the "netdeck" - as in, someone who buys the exact deck that the pros buy, then plays exactly that. In ye olden days, it was much more likely to find someone who had simply been playing games in a different circuit than the pros were, and had completely different tactics and builds.
Overall, very good post.
Definitely "many" as opposed to "all". Of the channels I watch, only 3 of them have it enabled (out of about 15).
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