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Apple News+ subscription growth blows away major media sites
  • NPR is not free; it's paid for by taxes, which means that every U.S. citizen is in fact paying for news whether they like it or not. And "not for profit" is not the same as "no cost to the consumer." In addition, most of the outlets for NPR are local public radio stations that are - you guessed it - funded by taxes (as well as fund drives).

  • Nearly 3 in 5 incorrectly believe US is in economic recession
  • It doesn't help that wage growth has largely been in the "unskilled" sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.

    But in aggregate, "everyone" is being paid more and "inflation" is down. So at a macro level everyone "should" be happy with how things are going. But human beings don't live at the macro level.

  • Nearly 3 in 5 incorrectly believe US is in economic recession
  • Economists don't call something a recession until rich people start feeling the squeeze. The definition of a recession, while vague, is really designed around that fact. So even if they're not doing it on purpose, their analytical blinders prevent them from recognizing other conditions that are at least as meaningful to many more people.

  • US threatens ICC, warning 'If they [prosecute] Israel, we're next!'
  • Yes but also no. The U.S. isn't a party to the ICC. It's not under ICC jurisdiction regardless of the ASMPA. The function of the ASMPA is mostly to serve as political theater.

    The U.S. should be a party to the ICC, but it's not and it likely never will be.

  • US threatens ICC, warning 'If they [prosecute] Israel, we're next!'
  • Except the U.S. is not a party to the ICC and therefore not subject to its jurisdiction. It should be, but it's not. This is bullshit fear-mongering over something that literally cannot happen, in order to distract people from the thing that will and should be happening.

  • What Everyone's Getting Wrong About The "Star Wars Hotel"
  • The whole point of Jenny Nicholson's epic video was that it did NOT, in fact, offer a "unique, interactive 48-hour movie-like adventure."

    That Screen Rant article was almost certainly planted by Disney PR. No actual employee who had to deal with all that bullshit would write something so sycophantic.

  • Congress Just Made It Basically Impossible to Track Taylor Swift’s Private Jet
  • I would bet that every single person commenting here thinks of him- or herself as being deeply invested in privacy, ranting against things like ad tracking, etc. But as soon as someone (or some ones) you don't like, or have no affinity with, wants to have the same privacy afforded to every single person who drives a car, all bets are off.

    Or are you suggesting that people (including the police!) should be allowed to have real time, constant information about where you drive to every day?

    Just because it's a plane, and just because it's a rich person, doesn't make it any less of a privacy violation.

  • New Discord TOS binds you to forced arbitration - Opt-Out Now
  • Very scummy, but neither illegal nor bait and switch. For the vast majority of people Discord is free; there’s no lock-in or purchase, which is the necessary element for something to be bait and switch. You can walk away at any time without losing anything of value (as defined by the market and by law).

  • A New York Times reporter was asked why they consistently frame things as bad for Biden but never bad for Trump.
  • Before we get out the flaming pitchforks, let us not forget that pretty much no one reads or cares about the New York Times. Their readership (print and web) is minuscule compared to entities like CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, MSNBC (and Fox, OANN, Breitbart, Joe Rogan...).

    Sure, it sucks that the NYT is sucking Trump cock, but in the end, that won't move the needle.

  • The New York Times should not be considered a reliable source of journalism.
  • I don't read the Times anymore. I get my news elsewhere. That said, there are a few things to consider here, when it comes to the relative shittiness of the NYT vs other major papers. We have this notion, unfounded, that the NYT "used to be" better, or more progressive, or what have you. Certainly compared to the other two "papers of record" for the country (Washington Post and Wall Street Journal), it's a raging pinko rag. But the fact remains that it was founded as a conservative-leaning paper, continued to be a conservative-leaning paper in the 20th century and, surprise surprise, remains a conservative-leaning paper. The lean is more Tower of Pisa than Man Vomiting on Sidewalk, but it's still conservative.

    Many of its bad takes (and there are many) are squarely in line with mainstream views. At worst, its views lag behind the country by a few years. And like all major news corporations, it is incentivized to maximize its visibility (and therefore revenue). Given the options of 1) publishing something incendiary that will put the paper in the public eye and help in creating more news to print or 2) doing additional work with the anticipated result of the truth not being nearly as interesting and therefore not nearly as attention-grabbing, they're going to do the less work option.

    Next, the NYT is a victim of the news cycle just as much as the TV networks, if not more so. While the website updates fairly regularly throughout the day, the paper comes out once every 24 hours, and must be prepped hours in advance. This means that breaking news suffers from two issues: 1) it has to be investigated at a speed faster than the TV networks because they paradoxically don't have the luxury of time and 2) they can't afford to be tentative when they don't know something. CNN and Fox especially can get away with saying "we'll report back when we know more" because that "back" is maybe 30 minutes from now. "Developing stories" exist on news networks. They do not exist for print papers. If you publish, you have to claim to be definitive, or people will stop reading. ("Why should I read the NYT when they just keep saying they don't know shit?")

    Finally, and we should take some solace from this, it should be noted that the NYT, despite being one of the "papers of record" for the country, is basically screaming into the void. Almost no one reads it. Damned if they do, damned if they don't, they're not conservative enough for the people who can throw money at a news organization when there are free alternatives available, and they're not progressive enough for the rest of us to care. The number of eyeballs scanning the NYT is vanishingly small compared to the eyeballs staring at Fox News - or even CNN, for that matter. Basically, the NYT just doesn't matter anymore. They can say whatever the fuck they want. They're not influencing anyone who isn't already on the same (sorry) page.

    I certainly wouldn't fault anyone for giving up on the NYT because of its journalistic errors. I certainly have. But we should neither be surprised nor shocked. This behavior is baked into the cake, and it has been since 1851, and got even worse after 1980 when CNN first went on the air. They didn't suddenly get stupid, and they never betrayed us. We have simply never been their intended audience.

  • Problem player kills new campaign by being a creep
  • I'd probably be the person in my group being very skeptical of the gift economy idea. Functional gift economies are exceptionally complex. The ones that aren't very quickly switch to representational value exchange (aka money), because they can, because that's exponentially easier. A realistic gift economy wouldn't just be "doing favors." It involves a whole web of social conditions, obligations and organizations that, frankly, would take the most galaxy brained DM to implement effectively.

  • Deleted
    The geniuses that ensure American kids face gun violence. At their fucking schools.
  • If I'm not mistaken, a "militia" was understood to be an ad hoc, non-standing armed group, supplied by the resources of its members. The amendment was added so that if a militia were ever needed (again), it could be formed, because the pool of potential militia members had their own firearms. Laws limiting citizen access to firearms would hobble any new militia.

    Given that armies at the time were only recently becoming "standing" (permanent) armies, and the U.S. didn't really have one, their best option for making war was militias. They were acutely aware that the revolution began that way, and only later developed an actual (organized, separately supplied, long-term) army.

    But very quickly, the U.S. developed permanent armed forces and never had to rely on militias again. At that point the 2nd amendment really should have been obsolete.

  • Deleted
    The geniuses that ensure American kids face gun violence. At their fucking schools.
  • It doesn't help that the sentence makes no sense. The second clause requires that the first be the subject of the sentence, but then the third clause starts with a new subject, and lastly there's that weird "German" comma after "Arms."

    There's more than one way to interpret the meaning, but strictly speaking the only syntactically accurate rendering comes out roughly as:

    [The right to] a well regulated Militia shall not be infringed, as it's necessary to the security of a free State (security meaning the right of the people to keep and bear arms).

    ...which is also meaningless.

    It's a stupid amendment for lots of reasons, but the big one is that it's just shitty English.

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