ikeepfalling3
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User ID: 1818
ikeepfalling3
2yr ago
What explains Israel's economic and technological mediocrity?
Compare the ages of the countries you're thinking of when you're thinking of Israel. The very fact that it exists was already a massive coup. And consider the world's opinion of the Mossad - of course, this is how legends are made, but they didn't even have to make a decades-long PR campaign about how awesome 007 is.
ikeepfalling3
2yr ago
Let's say you drop an IQ 200 person into a small village in the Dark Ages. How much value would you get from their IQ
What indeed would happen to a Yankee in King Arthur's court?
ikeepfalling3
2yr ago
The primary value proposition of the Internet, because this is how it was built, is in its ubiquitous semi-automated bisexual luxury virtual anarcho-libertarianism
s/is/was
From a technology perspective, the reason people keep trying to recreate arpanet is because normies are awful. The internet in its first iteration was excellent and full of excellent people - look at how all the still used and resilient protocols (HTTP, SMTP, and ffs there was a time when everyone's credentials were stored in a plaintext /etc/passwd) were designed for nonabusive actors. And then, as Ilforte would say, "it got worse". We can have gay space luxury communism or whatever, at least fiscally. But the problem is, just like actual communism, the system has to deal with real people - the 'net had a technical barrier, and we enjoyed the fruits of its creators' labor. And then it got worse.
ikeepfalling3
2yr ago
350k/yr?! Christ, no wonder we have a glut of shitty writers! Why on earth would anyone pay that much for their thoughts?
Twain, Asimov, etc didn't command such a price. Are these people the defining voices of culture? No. Unequivocally no. So what, de Boer writes a half-decent thinkpiece twice a year - and what difference does it make? Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars should require at least a little impact. The same amount for preaching to the choir (which it seems like he's doing, given that I only find his sticks through the Motte, under the "omg look at this semi-outgroup fellow using our talking points" section) seems quite excessive.
ikeepfalling3
2yr ago
Nothing new under the sun! After the printing press, there was a multi-century effort to re-centralize, and here we are! But before Rupert Murdoch (or perhaps contemporaniously), there were a fair share of (financially oriented, but hey, bullshit walks) writers that had newsletters one could subscribe to. I mostly get this from Arthur Hayley novels, but I feel like his success is at least in part due to capturing the zeitgeist of the time.
ikeepfalling3
2yr ago
If only there were some way in which one could pay a monthly fee to read the NYT. Perhaps, if the price is right, one might even get it at the doorstep...
ikeepfalling3
2yr ago
To me, the top of your post seems like you're just describing the equilibrium we've achieved, and it's not the worst one - advertisers pay to have their ads displayed alongside creators' content. Of course, perverse incentives take their toll, but the moment you start crafting content to advertise to advertisers, you're playing against the house. Sure, it might work for a quarter or two, but that's you trading on your good name, and you'll be eaten by the next generation of creators that don't need to beg for ad money - until they do the same as you, and get eaten by gen3.
Well, yes, people are worth whatever the market will bear. But the prices talked about are a little absurd, aren't they? The fact that you can make this much money from putting pen to paper means that there a demand that is unmet, clearly - I'm just questioning the quality of the product. And (myself obviously excepted), we've seen better writing even here. How much is great writing worth? I'll grant that it's worth a living, perhaps, depending on market conditions, but why should wannabe authors not be subject to the same economic pressures as the rest of the world?
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