mycorrhiza they/them

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  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • of Google, not Youtube

    That’s my whole point! Google can afford it. Even if YouTube showed zero ads and earned zero revenue Google could afford it.

    If I want to support a small creator, I donate. I don’t feel bad about hurting the bottom line of one of the highest-earning companies in the world.

    Even if YouTube runs at a deficit, it’s probably worthwhile for Google to control the main video hosting hub on the internet and keep competition out of the game.

    So does shipping, etc.

    Spending on shipping or manufacturing is a lot less discretionary than spending on advertising. You have broad leeway to advertise less or more, and past a certain point the main requirement is that you advertise as well as your competition. If Google shows fewer ads across the board, even half as many ads, you’re still in business.

    What is your proposed alternative?

    If you want to talk real life, they’re already raking in $60 billion a year in profit so I see no need for an alternative. If you want to talk hypotheticals, I think central back-end infrastructure like Google’s servers — and the data we put on them — should be publicly owned, with an open-source marketplace of front-end services we can use to access it. We should be able to browse YouTube with whatever site interfaces and suggestion algorithms we find most useful, not the ones most profitable to Google.

    Blackrock owns 5% of Tesla

    Blackrock’s clients own 5% of Tesla.

    Blackrock dies tomorrow if they do anything other than what their clients expect of them. The sole purpose of Blackrock is to invest rich people’s money and maximize returns for them while managing risk. They have some leeway in how they do this, but only up to a point. They’re very good at what they do but they are ultimately replaceable.




  • Ads are a way for everyone to contribute a super small amount to keep the thing you’re on, online.

    In 2022 Google grossed around $280 billion, and only around 10% of that from Youtube. Before tax they profited around $73 billion, and after tax around $60 billion. They’re doing fine selling ads.

    And we paid all of that $280 billion, even those of us with adblockers, because companies charge us more to cover their marketing costs. I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card.

    I don’t feel like watching ads to convince even more companies to pay google to advertise to me and buy my data. They’re all making enough money already, and every year they spend less of it on wages or tax for society to function. Their money goes to stock buybacks, payouts to their major shareholders, executive bonuses, and think tanks to push policies and social trends that hurt all of us.





  • Are you saying you agree with the Israeli government that Palestinians are a demographic threat?

    Do you realize this is an explicitly bigoted sentiment? “Demographic threat” does not mean “some Palestinians are extremists.” It means “Palestinians must not be allowed to become too large a portion of Israel’s demographics.” The Israeli government criticizes Palestinians and Arabs in general for having too many children. This is rhetoric of religious and racial dilution. There are ~9 million Israelis, mainly Jewish, and ~5 million Palestinians, and Israelis do not want to dilute their society with them.

    Israel has also non-consensually sterilized thousands of Ethiopian immigrant women, not informing them of the nature of the procedure.

    When people call Israel an apartheid state there’s a reason for it






  • Or because they are aware of the conditions of life imposed in Palestine?

    That 50% of the children in Gaza express no will to live? That 95% of the water is contaminated and Israel strictly controls the water supply? That thousands of civilians have been killed by the Israeli army since 2008? That Gaza functions as an open air concentration camp administrated by an openly racist apartheid state? That Israel helped fund and create Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterweight to the largely secular leftist PLO and this whole fucking situation is partially blowback from an effort to divide-and-conquer Palestine? That Hamas fucking chased the PLO out of Gaza, and now Hamas is essentially the only militant force left that can resist the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?

    Who else is there for Palestinians to root for? What the fuck are they supposed to do? Just sit in their squalid concentration camp and raise their depressed children to be unemployed adults with no future, in a crumbling city with no concrete to rebuild itself, because a rich nation on the other side of the fence deemed it so?

    And in an overseas media environment where no one even fucking talks about any of this shit, and the attack is being treated as this sudden unprovoked thing out of left field, maybe some people are going to overcorrect in the other direction out of sheer frustration?