• 6 Posts
  • 90 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • If I’m reading an article on espn.com for free, there has to be some value exchange. I either need to pay to read the article or I need to be willing to be included in future advertising to people who have read that article. We haven’t come up with a better model to support free content on the Internet than advertising.

    I would be willing to pay 5p to read that article if there was an automatic and easy mechanism to deliver that transaction to espn.com.  I want their journalists to get paid and I want the content to keep existing. But I’m also not such a dedicated fan of that site that I’m ready to subscribe monthly. The last thing we need is an Internet full of subscription paywalls.

    So in the meantime, if the fact that I read an article on espn.com about rugby scores puts me in an audience of people who like rugby and this complicated web of advertising is going to show me rugby ads and ESPN is going to make money from that and that is going to keep the articles free … sure, whatever they gotta do I guess. I’m not sharing anything personal or private with espn.com so if they want to pass that along to 1600 other places so I can keep reading for free… whatevs.  It’s not the model I would’ve chosen but I don’t have a better plan to keep ESPN in business. 


  • I really hate how this goal keeps being stated. When did it become the unchallenged truth that everyone needs to buy an EV? The goal was supposed to be transportation without carbon emissions. That could be solved in so many ways, from maglev trains to wind-powered ships to pedal- or foot-powered commuting. It should be solved with smart infrastructure and transportation strategy, not just more consumption. 

    There are even multiple ways to power a personal vehicle that don’t have carbon emissions, and some of the most interesting ones are still emerging - hydrogen, ammonia - yet we are forging ahead like battery electric vehicles are the silver bullet to all of our problems. We are not going to fix our world of reckless consumption with more consumption… but we are going to make the shareholders of a few automotive companies very rich. Was that our goal?







  • Great article. The most concerning is that Boeing has become yet another enshittified company, chasing profit too hard over all else, and they are going to kill people with their decisions.

    “The fact that the mistake was made at all, however, suggests an organization that is decreasingly inclined, or able, to make the kinds of costly, counterintuitive, and difficult-to-justify choices on which it built its exemplary history of reliability. These choices always pertain to marginal, almost negligible, concerns — simply because reliability at high altitudes is all about the margins — so their consequences manifest slowly. But their effects are cumulative and inexorable. “