Wow, my comment was removed for just a mild hint that Chinese communism isn’t free from corruption?

The Tragedy of the Commons was popularized by a man who was anti-immigrant and pro-eugenics, and it’s not good science. The good science on it was done by Elinor Ostrom who won a Nobel-ish prize for fieldwork showing that various societies around the world had solved the issues of the governance of commons.

The thing is, Ostrom didn’t disprove it as a concept. She just proved that with the right norms and rules in place it doesn’t inevitably lead to collapse. IMO it’s not about capitalism or communism, it’s about population. A small number of people who all know each-other can negotiate an arrangement that everyone can agree to. But, once you have thousands or millions of people, and each user of the commons knows almost none of the other users, it’s different. At that point you need a government to set rules, and law enforcement to enforce those rules. That, of course, fails when the commons is something like the world’s atmosphere and there’s no worldwide government that can set and enforce rules.

Removed by mod

And only then?

Maybe tens of thousands of years ago, but 2000ish years ago 60ish was old age. The main reason life expectancy has gone up isn’t that old people didn’t make it to 50, it’s that young people didn’t make it to 2. If a couple has 5 kids, 3 of them die as toddlers and the other two make it to 70 the average life expectancy is about 30, but that doesn’t mean living past 30 is unusual.

Also, tens of thousands of years ago there was an ice age, but for the last 10k years light-skinned Europeans still had normal summers and worked in the fields.

I don’t either, but my nose isn’t hairy and it would burn to a crisp outdoors.

On the other hand, what bullshit is it that my stupid human body can’t survive being outdoors without medicinal cream. My ancestors would be ashamed.

Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.

If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.

Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.

The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.

The whole thing is pretty ridiculous. You don’t get to consent to being born. You don’t get to consent to having who you have as parents. And, legally they get to make every important decision about your life for 18 years.

Even if you have parents who actually loved you and showed it, who aren’t abusive, who did the best they could, you’re still stuck in a relationship you didn’t get a chance to consent to. Even “good” parents often mess up their kids by trying to live their lives through those kids. Like, parents who are failed athletes trying to push their kids into sports. Or, parents who miss having little kids around trying to guilt their kids into providing them grandkids.

And then there’s the whole expectation of taking care of the parents when they get old and sick. Yes, I get it, they changed their kids’ diapers when they were young. The kids are just returning the favour. But, those kids never had a choice. The parents (for the most part) chose to have kids, and chose to do that work. The kids never agreed to the terms and conditions that said they had to help out their parents when their bodies started failing.

Suicide is selfish, but ultimately, it is your life. It’s unfair that other people get an opportunity to tie all kinds of strings to you before your brain has even developed enough to understand the concepts of life and death.

Then again, we’re just animals. We only exist because a machine which exists to propagate its genes turned out to be effective at propagating its genes. Nature is brutal, and even if we don’t always admit it, we’re still part of nature. There’s nothing fair about it. It just is.

Wait, you’re saying that The Hellbound Heart isn’t the original? Next thing you’ll be trying to convince me that Pope Greg is innocent of plagiarism, because he actually didn’t steal from Se7en.

I bet you also think the original “A Christmas Carol” was the one with the muppets.

That’s only 6 companies.

If you were standing on the Liberty National Golf Club in New Jersey about 2km from the Statue of Liberty (height 93m), from the bottom to the top it would be about 2.5 degrees.

If you were looking at the Eiffel Tower at 6000 km away from NJ, and the earth were flat, the Eiffel Tower (height 312m), from the bottom to the top it would be about 0.003 degrees from bottom to top. If you could line it up so that you could see the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower at the same time, the Eiffel Tower would appear to come up to the first 10 cm of the Statue of Liberty’s base. That’s actually a little bigger than I would have expected, but still tiny.

I wonder if, even with binoculars, someone could even resolve something that small. Ignoring everything like ocean waves interfering, vegetation getting in the way and atmospheric interference, my guess is that it would be just too small to be seen from that far away without some ultra-powerful telescope.

Is reading comprehension really that bad? The argument is that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons. The justification for attacking them is that they need to be stopped before they cross the line.

I’m not saying I agree with this line of reasoning, but the clear idea is that Iran doesn’t currently have nuclear weapons.

Keep Goodhart’s law in mind:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

No, it’s because the opposition is the establishment, and violence is a tool the establishment uses to… well, stay established.

Okay but who’s the one defining a protest as violent?

The same people who write the history books. History is written by the winners, and when they write those books the protests that led to them winning are written up as being non-violent. It’s like “terrorists” vs. “freedom fighters”. If they succeed, they get to write the history books and they’re freedom fighters. If they lose, the other side writes the history books and they’re terrorists.

It’s like it just gives up after about 8 results. “These 8 results don’t contain what you want? I give up. Here, just watch one of these videos instead.”

Screw you, just show me the rest of the results, I swear it’s in the top 30 results.

You search for “blah”, Google gives you a bunch of bad results, and serves up 5 ads. Nothing matches what you want, so you search again “blah but not foo” and you get another 5 ads. If search were good you’d only see 5 ads, but because it sucks you get 10 ads.

If Google had real competitors, bad search results might mean people would give up and use a competitor’s search, but because they have a search monopoly, they can enshittify their results and show even more ads without losing users.

I imagine that they could find that leeching is illegal if you upload anything to any other torrent clients. I think Meta was claiming they were literally in the clear because they were being assholes and configuring their clients not to share at all.

But yeah, keep your ratio above 1, or you’re a jerk.