@otfrom I don’t think there was a golden age, but it’s also not true all ages have been the same. This is a very different age than the late 20th Century I grew up in, in some ways better (more viewpoints get a wider hearing), but in important respects much worse (less conducive to using reason — with inevitable unfortunate biases but still — to converge upon a widely shared, pretty functional, consensus understanding of reality).
@otfrom i don’t think that’s right.
selling and running classified ads was a lucrative business largely decoupled from subscription revenue or readership. you just had to be known as the (or one of the few) local hosts of classified ads.
network TV news divisions were loss-leading prestige shops. NPR, PBS too much rely on ad-like sponsorship, but the relationship between audience size and sponsorship level is tenuous.
greater degree of decoupling from audience increases possibility of quality
in the photographs, we are stuck, frozen in time, but we are young. so perhaps it’s a wash.
@admitsWrongIfProven under current institutional arrangements.
you don’t want news organizations optimizing for viewership or subscriptions.
what should they optimize for? that’s a hard question.
but definitely not viewership or subscriptions.
This community is no longer available.
when websites do something annoying and you reward them with your e-mail address or whatever, think of the incentives you are creating.
is America a retrofuture?
i think the tech pronatalists ought to shift a few shillings from their life extension institutes fund a Manhattan Project in pursuit of male pregnancy.
Omni Magazine cover from 1985 on male pregnancy.
we can bring back the semicolon! accuse LLMs of overusing them, say writing with a lot of semicolons is usually AI slop, then watch writers and editors race to deploy them to defend their honor.
@light @AnnaAnthro you get frisky you put a condom on even though there’s no evidence a pregnancy will result. ex ante it’s just a risk, a meaningful one. so you address it.
i want to start the rival "Party in the USA"
@eARCwelder for a while. but only for a transition period.
these are machines controlled by people with interests, and unless you very deeply trust the people who control the one you are working on, you must presume the answers are intended to influence you in order to serve other peoples’ interests. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5o6k7jvowuyaquloafzn3cfw/post/3ltciqcsfl22w
@benjohn perhaps there’s a kind of conservation law, people turn their bullshit into gold — for them, while our once golden epistemological commons curdles into bullshit.
least popular, least charismatic plutocrat burns cash to start a new political party without attending to the structural (especially electoral) factors that cement two party dominance in America.
it’s more than a bit pathetic that a *Gulf petrostate* like UAE sees the writing on the wall and dives headlong into EVs + solar, while the “good ol’ USA” clings nostalgically to coal, oil, and monster trucks.
see #TimSahay #KateMackenzie https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/brics-in-2025/
they call alchemy a pseudoscience, then they invent a machine that turns bullshit into gold.