One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It’s not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that’s not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.

But if you’re trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper’s own decision making over the past few decades.

Right … except for all of the poor Boomers out there … let’s just forget about them. Let’s forget about all the Boomers who tried very hard to stop the wealth shift to the rich. They don’t count; they don’t exist.

You decided to blame the old people instead of … checks notes … the rich people. That was a bizarre choice. Meh.

I would qualify your first point. Parkinson’s Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they’re working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors’ supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.

Yes, and you should understand the corruption quite well seeing it firsthand over there, right? (Sad to say.)

I’m not worried about the hypocrisy here. I couldn’t give a f*** about Trump being hypocritical. But I care an awful lot that he’s threatening to do something terrible to someone he considers a political opponent.

The average consumer doesn’t care about that aspect though.

They do, of course. There’s plenty of rice of other kinds.

There are other comments that already give practical ways to accomplish what you say is impossible.

That’s true but it doesn’t solve the problem now.

If Musk actually does go to Russia, then I think any of his American investments will be up for grabs. That would be quite entertaining.

Yes, very publicly, but remember that they lie about everything anyway. So it’s not like the world is a better place because two pieces of s*** are insulting each other in front of the world. They could fight today and work together next week if they think it’ll get them more power and money, because that’s all they live for.

I think what you mean to say is that we should be pressuring public officials to try to bust up Google’s monopoly on many things. And we are doing that, and it is showing some progress. But there is much more work to be done.

YouTube took down the video because of its own policies, not because of copyright law. So we should be blaming YouTube.

I think it’s easy to see exactly why if you consider how YouTube treats small content creators. If I post a video and companies claim copyright on it, the video gets demonetized and I might lose my account. I can respond and contest the claim and maybe I can win but I still lost money in the meantime, and perhaps more significantly, the companies that made their copyright claims will never face a consequence for attempting to burn my channel. In other words, if I get things wrong a few times I’ll lose my channel and my income source, but if they get things wrong a million times, they face zero consequence.

And you might be inclined to blame the media companies. But again, this is YouTube doing what YouTube wants to do of its own volition, and not something that’s required by law. If YouTube valued small-scale content creators and end users, it would create different policies.