even when you do have a choice, how often do you actually read what you’re agreeing to?

You don’t bother precisely because it’s an enormous amount of work for no discernable benefit.

What are you doing to do? Not rent a car or fly on a plane? Not own any electronics or motorized vehicles? Not rent an apartment? Not use software?

We have the option to try to vote with our wallets

Do we? What good is money if we can’t spend it?

price in the US of $0.1235/kWh, that’s $11.63

Way cheaper than I’d have guessed.

737 at max takeoff weight is 175k lbs. So that’s around $80 to get airborne. Seems like a steal when you’re charging easily triple that for one seat.

people agree to it

Hardly an agreement if it’s predicated on access to a service, particularly if the service is a utility, a monopoly, or a cartel.

If every vendor uses uniform language as a means of mitigating their own collective liability, the agreement is functionally coerced.

As a general rule, arbitration is a great tool for multiple parties to resolve a dispute without going all the way to trial.

The issue isn’t with arbitration on it’s face, but forced arbitration as dictated by a single party.

How do you think they’re clearing the native residents off the land?

Using N-force, which is the little can of Nox under my seat

$5 of electricity to lift an airplane 10,000 feet definitely seems low.

If you want to be really smug, you could say a gas powered plane requires $0 of fuel to glide for 30 minutes

I pick 30 minutes at Mach 7

How long do you want to spend at Mach 7 relative to stopping and starting? Because that could be a lot of G-force.

Transgender Anti-War Communists, no less.

The only thing scarier is a Muslim Mayor.

Like…we can’t just write off everyone else’s misery and suffering because you personally found a way to avoid it.

The degree of privilege required to even entertain making a living as a YouTube starlet is astronomical.

And, again, free video hosting and distribution! That’s why 99% of people put videos in YouTube. You can host something and pass it around without needing a self-hosted solution to manage it.

That’s the business model. It’s not Netflix

I write, edit, record, and publish everything I create, all by myself.

Patreon, Nebula, even Audible will give you a better cut of the proceeds.

Devaluing smaller creators is going to mean more AI slop

Video slop is even less commercially viable than the audio, pictures, and literature.

Sora got yanked off the market inside a few months due to how badly it burned tokens for video nobody wanted to look at.

YT is also requiring a lot of people to work for free.

It’s really not. No more than a casino is requiring you to roll dice and flip cards.

People can just… not host their shit on the site. Or not be in the influencer/content creator business entirely.

People are being baited into doing this work. People are being scammed and lied to about their prospects. But nobody is actually making you do this shit, much less do it for free.

Imagine if a mechanic’s boss told her they wouldn’t pay her until she changed the oil in 800 cars for free.

She’d be crazy not to pick up and work somewhere else. Or hang her own shingle.

But that’s the hitch with YouTube. It’s not just not-paying-you. It’s also hosting your media for free. What you’re really trading on isn’t revenue from YouTube, it’s free hosting services. And then you need to monetize the content yourself, if you want to generate an income.

Case in point - Ms Rachel isn’t getting rich off her (wildly popular) YouTube channel nearly so much as her toy line and her celebrity appearance fees. Similarly, guys like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones do commercial line reads right in the middle of their shows, fully independent of what YouTube injects. Adam Friedland and Justin Rozniak do paywalled episodes through Patreon. Mr. Beast sells shitty snack food.

Everyone who has made a living on YouTube has ultimately collected the bulk of that money from outside YouTube.

Consistently one of the worst paying social media services and not exactly in a generous market.

today 50TB is expensive

I don’t believe you can go back more than five years and find per-TB rates under the current rate. Ten years is straight out. Twenty years is laughable.

Meanwhile, PBS has an annual operating budget of around $340M. They can afford to manage their own data, at the scale of tens of terrabytes. And I guarantee you that whatever they’re paying Iron Mountain to host the data is multiples the cost of self-hosting.

Refurbished

If you’re a multi-billion dollar broadcast parent company doing long term storage for a 70-year archive catalog, you can spring for new. Maybe even go Big Fancy and get some RAID drives and tape backups, for extra redundancy.

50T isn’t even that much data anymore. You’re talking about maybe $2k in hard drives.

Nazis were a product of their material conditions. They emerged from the Holocaust of WW1 and gave birth to the Holocaust of WW2.

Terror of the outside, the foreigner, and the radical didn’t begin with Nazism. And it sure as hell didn’t end with them.

So what is to be done? Just wagging your finger at folks 80 years in the grave isn’t cutting it.

Especially when the term has become so polluted and distorted with ideological baggage that it ends up being used like this.

A TV with 100 channels of content and 1 billion channels of static.

Bosses are dumb. Use that to score extra vacation. Don’t rock the fucking boat.