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Author Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O  (Read 13006678 times)

TamerVirus

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157950 on: July 28, 2021, 09:33:59 am »

The answer is always gratuitous use of POWERWASHER!
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McTraveller

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157951 on: July 28, 2021, 10:48:40 am »

Wow the big tech companies posted a combined profit of $57B last quarter. That's almost a million times the median annual income in the US (which is supposedly $66k).  The world median income is $9700, so this is six million times the world median annual income.

Even though I'm economically conservative I can see that's an astonishing amount of money - a single quarter's worth of profit could pay annual wages for literally millions of people.

What's even more astonishing is how much of that profit is due to advertising (Google claimed $18.5B quarterly profit).  Rhetorical lament: when will people stop paying extra for the brands that spend so much on advertising!?  Sadly this is probably not a meaningful amount for most individuals, which is how these companies can amass so much profit - it just doesn't cost an individual that much.  I mean even just taking the US population, which is too small for Google, that $18.5B would only be $19 a month per person, spread across all their purchases.

Would you notice your expenses dropping by less than $19 a month? Or a better question, would you change your spending habits to pick brands that would save you less than $19 a month?
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heydude6

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157952 on: July 28, 2021, 11:11:20 am »

Ad companies subsidize a lot of valuable things. Stuff like YouTube, TV tropes, other websites, and flash games back when those were still around.

Though ads do suck, it’s important to remember that without them we would lose a lot of great things. I think we’re getting the better end of the bargain honestly.
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WealthyRadish

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157953 on: July 28, 2021, 11:46:02 am »

Ad companies subsidize a lot of valuable things. Stuff like YouTube, TV tropes, other websites, and flash games back when those were still around.

Though ads do suck, it’s important to remember that without them we would lose a lot of great things. I think we’re getting the better end of the bargain honestly.

All of the things listed rely entirely on user-generated content, and if the corporations squatting on it ceased to exist people would achieve a similar result with peer-to-peer systems like tribler that (with a little work) would offer almost identical functionality without need for centralized servers.

The operating expenses generated by these companies can be viewed as an almost complete loss to society, analogous to the government just paying people to dig ditches and fill them in again (worse, even). It's highly dubious whether advertisements in general serve any positive function either, given they exist to manipulate consumption patterns and entrench the monopolistic effects of possessing brands and intellectual property.
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voliol

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157954 on: July 28, 2021, 12:50:24 pm »

Just leave food, any food, even fucking salty food, and you get thousands of ants... at least that is how it works here... darn I need more boric acid.

No food here, other than a few breadcrumbs on the table perhaps. As far as I’ve observed (this summer and previously) they seem to be attracted by the white color. They’re drones (I think, at least winged ants, tiny and reddish), so maybe they’re confusing it for another ant colony to mate in, or something?
I could’ve probably extracted the boric acid out of them though, as there were enough to smell them. Luckily they don’t get inside, but like Joshua said it’s their patio set, it can’t be used after a certain point in the evening.

Frumple

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157955 on: July 28, 2021, 02:36:21 pm »

Would you notice your expenses dropping by less than $19 a month? Or a better question, would you change your spending habits to pick brands that would save you less than $19 a month?
I actually would notice that, for what it's worth -- an extra 15-ish USD a month would better than double my general entertainment budget, which is something like twenty every other month or so (spent almost entirely on game sales; most of my entertainment preferences piggyback off the functionally necessary internet access).

I've already (mostly, anyway) dropped brand horseshit to the tune of that or better per month, though, so eh.
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Vector

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157956 on: July 28, 2021, 05:51:52 pm »

Inquiring minds might want to know that ants detest cinnamon. It burns their little feet.
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Lord Shonus

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157957 on: July 28, 2021, 06:27:07 pm »

Ad companies subsidize a lot of valuable things. Stuff like YouTube, TV tropes, other websites, and flash games back when those were still around.

Though ads do suck, it’s important to remember that without them we would lose a lot of great things. I think we’re getting the better end of the bargain honestly.

All of the things listed rely entirely on user-generated content, and if the corporations squatting on it ceased to exist people would achieve a similar result with peer-to-peer systems like tribler that (with a little work) would offer almost identical functionality without need for centralized servers.

The operating expenses generated by these companies can be viewed as an almost complete loss to society, analogous to the government just paying people to dig ditches and fill them in again (worse, even). It's highly dubious whether advertisements in general serve any positive function either, given they exist to manipulate consumption patterns and entrench the monopolistic effects of possessing brands and intellectual property.

Running Youtube on a peer-to-peer basis would be a nightmare. Either whoever had the video uploaded would have to have their PC on at all times (as well as having a very hefty internet connection), or else you'd have to hope the video you're trying to watch had somebody available to upload each segment in order at all times. Guy who has the 53:21-53:26 segment of the cooking video you're trying to watch is offline? Guess you'll never find out what the brownies look like.

A centralized server is the only way streaming video can work. And once you start doing that, you start incurring costs. Significant costs. Gradually pay for that, and it quickly becomes obvious that the most effecient way to serve the content is to have it all hosted on one giant server farm. You've just invented the current Google system from first principles.

Let us say you give up on streaming. Just download the videos you want to watch via torrent.

Now, this immediately kills a large part of the appeal of Youtube - the ability to just pop on and start watching something, or to find the content you're after without delay. But there's a bigger issue. I can easily find and start watching a video from 2006 on YT and start watching it. How likely do you think it is that people are going to reliably seed torrents for 15+ years?

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WealthyRadish

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157958 on: July 28, 2021, 09:37:00 pm »

I think you're overestimating some of the problems here, but I agree at a basic level that it's hard to compete with the guarantees youtube currently offers for video life and availability compared to a completely free alternative.

Spoiler: long discussion (click to show/hide)
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Lord Shonus

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157959 on: July 28, 2021, 10:01:26 pm »

The pirate streams you're referring to are usually quite low quality, dubiously reliable, or both. It does work, after a fashion, for a rebroadcast of a single channel or a handful of channels. I can't see it being expanded much more even without legal barriers.
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George_Chickens

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157960 on: July 28, 2021, 11:58:52 pm »

I don't think 100% p2p is an adequate way to run a video service entirely, which very much needs a degree of centralization due to run smoothly. It's not possible for every single member of a federation to hold one another's videos without storage going well into the terabytes for everyone involved, and there's no recourse if a server goes down and its seeds dry up other than hoping people backed up the content.

However, federation, web-torrent and IPFS have been shown to be great equalizers, in that they give dramatically smaller and cheaper hosts the ability to serve content to a large group of people without regressing to dial up speeds. Peertube and LBRY are quite interesting and cool, and very smooth. My friends have taken to hosting their own instances. But this isn't really true p2p as much as it is multiple centralized servers working in tandem.

The main instances of these tools reminds me a lot of old Flash game sites, where games got mirrored on so many websites that one being lost for good when a server went down was very rare. I think this may have some real potential for people with already existing fanbases willing to move.
« Last Edit: July 29, 2021, 12:04:45 am by George_Chickens »
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heydude6

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157961 on: July 29, 2021, 01:49:59 am »

You guys are forgetting one thing though, a lot of creators do this stuff because it makes them money. They’re gonna want to monetize their content. Unless they start charging users directly (which opens the gates to piracy), they’ll have to run ads.

It’s not enough to bring hosting costs down to zero. They have to be negative. It has to be possible to make a profit. Since the whole point of this exercise was to host this content without relying on ads, I would consider this thought experiment a failure.

If you want to allow ads again, then I would say that a single big corporation will do a better job negotiating with advertisers than a bunch of individual content creators.
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Lets use the ancient naval art of training war parrots. No one will realize they have been boarded by space war parrots until it is to late!
You can fake being able to run on water. You can't fake looking cool when you break your foot on a door and hit your head on the floor.

martinuzz

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157962 on: July 29, 2021, 05:04:18 am »

In the Iranian province of Khuzestan, extreme drought combined with excessive irrigation of farmland have caused the water in people's homes to be nothing more than a brown trickle, or nothing at all.

Thirsty Iranians have become so desperate for water that they took to the streets in protest, shouting "we are thirsty".

In response, the Iranian government is shooting at the protestors with live ammo. According to Amnesty International, at least 8 people were killed.

WTF. I knew Iran was a terrible place, but really, shooting people because they plea for their firstmost essential life needs?
« Last Edit: July 29, 2021, 05:07:34 am by martinuzz »
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LordBaal

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157963 on: July 29, 2021, 06:05:45 am »

That is... standard government operation? Here that has happened here for water, cocking gas, electricity and gasoline/diesel.

No surprise we are their best friends this side of the Atlantic and are buying gasoline to them.
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #157964 on: July 29, 2021, 07:20:19 am »

That is... standard government operation? Here that has happened here for water, cocking cooking gas, electricity and gasoline/diesel.

No surprise we are their best friends this side of the Atlantic and are buying gasoline to them.
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