You have to understand that the average American functions off of lizard brain impulses. It would be probably go like this:

Acknowledging age concerns of the electorate = show of weakness.

Running someone fresh that appeals to this American Idol-esque popularity contest = show of weakness.

Running someone Republicans don’t have their talking-points fleshed out on = show of weakness.

America operates on principles of running someone strong who says they will always be strong and that if they ever become weak while in office and they acknowledge this to be replaced, the entire party goes with them like a tug boat latched to a sinking oil tanker. Trump didn’t win because he’s smart or a decent human being. He won because he exudes baseless confidence like a broken nuclear reactor exudes gamma radiation.

Warren is a woman and economically progressive and America hates people who are either of those things, let alone both.

It’s like RBG all over again, if these people could just get it through there heads to quit while there ahead they could preserve a decent legacy, instead of tarnishing it by leading the way to a regressive order that overturns everything they’ve done.

This is one of the core problems of the Democrats: hubris. When Obama had a majority in the House and Senate, he could have easily pushed through a Supreme Court appointee to replace RBG. But she wouldn’t go. Because in her mind, there was no one qualified to fill her shoes. She was convinced that she was the GOAT and that to voluntarily step down when it was safe to do so would be an insult. This is coupled with the fact that Democrats were absolutely, completely certain that they would win every election for the presidency after Obama without trying and that the “coalition of the ascendant” would easily put Hillary into the White House, and then she could be the first female president in US history and have an easy PR win by replacing an aging female supreme court justice.

I’m willing to bet we have the the same problem here, but in one person: Biden probably thinks the Democrats could never field anyone for president better than him and that his victory is a lock without any real effort to campaign for it again.

Fun fact: the last time anything like this happened it was with Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was the 22nd president of the United States who lost his re-election bid the first time around, and then got re-elected to be the 24th president of the United States. We are officially in the second Gilded Age.

You know, for all the complaints I see of tankies, I have encountered 10x more people who incessantly complain about them.

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

And both of those things SUUUUUCK.

It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.

Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.

A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.

only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand

Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.

We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.

This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.

devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.

The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn’t made anyone’s life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.

Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.

Yep, that would be a great system. /s

Man, you’re definitely spot on with this. For me, it’s a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don’t have to pay attention to. It’s ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I’ll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I’m going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it’s sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I’ll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan’s Island or something on in the background.

However, getting an MBA isn’t going to change you from one type of person to the other.

Sure, an MBA is sort of useless. Management is largely based around personality. And you can’t really teach personality. It’s the same way for a lot of professions, like teaching, actually. In fact, I’d say the management pool should be drawn from people who were accomplished high school teachers. There’s a lot of crossover there in terms of organization, planning, and dealing with a bunch of people who all hate the work you make them do.

Dog, we’re all engineers. And the worst business leaders I’ve ever worked with directly were good engineers before they got promoted into positions of management (or started their own terrible business, as the case might be) in which they had no business being because the skill requirements for engineering are not automatically transferable to managing people. It’s called the Peter Principle, and there’s some real truth to it.

I want to see engineers run companies that make things

I see you’ve never worked with engineers.

Thompson rightly concludes that the American dream is already dead by the 70s.

Important context for that is that the novel is a famous, and relatively early, meditation on the failures of the 1960s counterculture movement and the intense, if ultimately unfocused vision for a better future for the nation that was central to it.

And it’s a great line for the gun lobby. In a lot of ways, the NRA and gun manufacturers would prefer a Biden victory because gun sales spike when Democratic presidents get elected, as gun-nuts are certain every time it happens that this is the time, for real, that they’re “coming for our guns.” In other words, people panic buy rifles because they think a federal ban is coming. But the reality is that Dems will never push through sweeping anti-gun legislation because there are so many pro-2FA democrats out there that doing so would be ludicrously difficult and monumentally unpopular.

This is the main thing that happened, I think. I met some old friends recently I hadn’t seen in a while and it’s wild how differently we engage with the internet. My main source of interaction is on a laptop, and even then a non-trivial amount of my web interaction is purely via the terminal. Of all of my friends, one of them had a PC, and they don’t use it. Their engagement with the internet is purely on mobile devices. I was dumbfounded. Like…how do you do stuff on a phone. I hate phones. They’re so much worse than a good keyboard. But I also hate the current version of the internet and they seem to love it.

And that, I think, is the core difference. It’s not that the phones took over, it’s that the keyboard died for the average user. A keyboard allows a complex degree of engagement that is difficult, if not truly impossible, to match on a device meant for short bursts of canned responses and auto-complete suggestions. It forces individually brief, but ultimately continuous pre-programmed engagement.

And that’s the entirety of the modern internet. It’s why tiktok is so popular. It’s why youtube shoves Shorts down your throat when you visit. It’s why Twitter took off. It’s also why a website like reddit, that was based initially around the kind of engagement I like, is so hard to monetize and why the attempts at dumbing it down and strangling it of anything that isn’t that same kind of superficial engagement (and by God are they trying) is so difficult for the website’s leadership: because all the other places that are more profitable than it are designed to do that from the jump, and they have to superimpose that strategy onto a content aggregator whose main attraction was a robust, nested comment system.

I keep thinking about what was, for me, the Golden Age of the internet. I know it’s different for everyone, but from around, I guess, 2009 to 2017 I was online a lot. And a lot of what the internet was and how it operated and the ideas there, especially on reddit, were so formative to who I am. And I keep feeling like I never appreciated it or really thought about how vibrant and interesting it was while it was like that. It feels like when you’re a kid and you see a wave for the first time, and it’s building and building and it seems like it’ll be building forever, getting bigger and bigger, but then suddenly it collapses under its own weight and is gone as if it were never there, and after the fact you just wish you’d appreciated it for the wonder it was in that moment. Part of it’s just getting older and the general feeling of nostalgia that comes with age, but sometimes that nostalgia is justified.

psychotic break a couple of years ago after his mom died

Went from “weird” to “sad and tragic” pretty quick. Honestly, it makes me worried about my own mental health in a big way should I face a similar kind of tragedy.