Yep. No one is going to McDonalds for a delicious burger, just a cheap and fast one. Now that prices are above $10 if you want a meal, and the restaurants are understaffed so even the drive through takes > 15 minutes, there’s really no reason to eat there
I think it’s important to not give certain things the benefit of the doubt. This clock stuff is just plain stupid to get bent out of shape about, but the other two are serious concerns.
This is just anecdotal, but I was a late 90’s kid that had as much screen time as I wanted growing up. I played an absurd amount of videogames, and had to be dragged outside by my siblings or I could comfortably stay indoors in front of a game or the internet for hours on end. I spent most of my early years (age 3 to age 15) in front of a screen. Yet, I did just fine in school, got a degree, and now work as a software engineer. I fell in love with my highschool sweetheart, and after waiting until I had my degree, we got married at 23, almost 10 years after we started dating. It felt like my obsessive amounts of screen time as a kid didn’t have any negative side effects to my life as a whole (outside of being a quiet and reserved person, and some could argue that that’s not a negative) and led me down a successful career path.
However, I don’t think kids these days have the luxury of doing that anymore. The content put in front of me as a kid was games made by teams that were passionate about the thing they were working on. Forums and early YouTube videos were created by some no name person with the hope of sharing something they openly cared about. Social Media didn’t exist yet and once it did, I never really got into it.
The content put in front of children these days is one of three or so things:
Obviously there are exceptions to these everywhere, but I’m talking about the things that are actively being shoved down kids’ throats. It’s not that I think that the content I consumed was better than what I see kids consuming now, but I think that the motivations behind the content can just as easily influence children as much as the content itself. I think that in a lot of ways, this kind of content is actively degrading kids’ brains, and from my experience, it’s not the screen time, it’s what’s being shown on screen that’s the issue.
Thankfully I’m tech savvy enough that I can make the internet for my children what it was for me as a kid, without all the marketing and money making schemes that pass as content these days, but a lot of people just toss a tablet in front of their kids and call it parenting.
I was going to rant about privacy as well, but this is getting way too long. Just know that I think digital privacy is really important, and think that we’ve paid the price for not considering it earlier, and there are ways we can save our kids from the same fate.
Sorry, I tend to write way too much on topics I care about, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
tl;dr - The clock thing is stupid, but please approach the constant exposure to the modern day internet and the digital privacy topics with a bit more scrutiny.
Big companies do this on purpose. They want their earnings and their expenses to match up as close as possible, because companies don’t pay any taxes on money spent on making money, only on profits. So if a giant company is in the red, the vast majority of operating expenses are tax deductible
That’s not a low end payout per view. Typically it’s a fraction of a cent (USD) per view. Typically ads pay out per 1000 views, and the average of that is $0.38. To make the math easier, we’ll call it $0.50 per 1000 views, or $0.0005 per view. On top of this, YouTube takes their 45% cut, which means you’re looking at more like $0.00025 per view. Of course, that’s the average, and for a larger channel with the right audience you’re more likely to see a CPM (cost per mille, mille being 1000 in French) of a few dollars. Let’s call it $5.00, which would come to a CPM of $0.005, or roughly $0.0025 after YouTube takes their cut. That’s still $25,000 for 10 million views, which is a ton of money, but I think people have a tendency to overinflate how much money comes from Youtube ads.
I mean, I found it in two pretty substantial dictionaries after a quick search: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sike https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=sike
Along with countless other dictionaries that cover slang and alternate spellings, but I figured you wouldn’t think that those counted.
But I will say that if being in a dictionary is a requirement for a word being part of the English language, you’re not accounting for a large portion of modern American/Internet vernacular. People who actually study language would never have this take, as languages are made up of the words people actually use, not the words that a board of folks decide to put into a list.
Language isn’t set in stone. If enough people are using one spelling, then that becomes a new spelling. A lot of spellings, words, phrases, and meanings from 100 years ago would be unrecognizable to you. People who pretend that the words they like best are the only correct ones are just being jerks for the sake of looking smart.
The answer is yes and with significant effect. I just barely skimmed this article but this doesn’t seem to be focusing on the important factor: Algorithmic content feeds.
Modern day social media (things like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, X, etc.) Are all set up with one goal in mind: make as much money as possible. This in itself isn’t a problem depending on who you ask, but let’s pick one social media as an example and see why this eventually causes political polarization.
For this demonstration, I will pick Facebook, but this could just as easily be done with any free, ad-supported website/app.
Okay, so to reach their goal of getting as much money as possible, Facebook shows ads between posts. Companies pay Facebook to show those ads to people, with the promise that they will be shown to people that fit a demographic that would be interested in the product. When the ad is viewed by enough people, Facebook will stop running the ad unless the company pays again.
Now that we know how they make money, let’s look at how they ensure they get as many people to view as many ads as possible. This mostly boils down to a few metrics.
If you spend more time on Facebook, you will see more ads. To maximize time spent on the platform, Facebook keeps track of everything you do, both on their site and off. I won’t go into specifics here, but they utilize web cookies to keep track of your browsing history and things like app permissions to keep track of your location and what you do on your phone. From this data, and potentially other data on you that they purchase from data brokers, they build a pretty good profile on what you would be interested in seeing. They show you relevant ads and relevant posts to hopefully keep you on their site.
Keeping engagement high means you are more likely to click on an ad, which pays out more than a view for an ad. To ensure you are fully engaging with content, as discussed above, Facebook keeps track of what you like to view and interact with, and puts that in front of you. However, Facebook also knows what type of content garners more interaction.
This is where the whole system leads to political polarization. There are two types of content that bring the most engagement: Controversy and content designed to make you angry. So what does Facebook do? It throws the most controversial, rage-baity article that makes your political opponents seem like absolute monsters in front of you. Often times, these posts are actually really misleading and full of both deliberate misinformation or non-malicious misinformation. These posts get people riled up, and so they are very likely to engage with the post. And because Facebook knows that you are less likely to stay on the site if it shows you something that you don’t engage with, it avoids showing you posts that show the other side of the story, so you are caught in an echo chamber of your own ideas and the misinformation of the outrage-inducing posts you have seen.
Facebook won’t show you posts that are on situations where you and your political opponents actually agree, because if it doesn’t get you worked up, you aren’t likely to engage with it. They also won’t show you posts that have a majority of engagement from your political opponents, since it’s likely not something that the data profile they have on you suggests you’d like.
News content that shows both sides agreeing is already hard to find, considering that the news sites also know that rage-inducing content gets more views and more eyes on their ads, so they primarily focus on making controversial content anyway.
Enough of this over time will make you think that everyone on the Internet agrees with you, since Facebook doesn’t show you content that those who oppose your ideas are engaging with. This type of situation will support an us-vs-them mentality, and breeds pockets of the social media with either left-leaning content or right-leaning content is all that’s being shown, which breads political polarization.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, sorry it was so long.
tl;dr: Social media exists to make their owning companies money, politically polarizing content gets them more money, thus in a way social media exists to make politically polarizing content
While I would never read Heathcliff normally, I actually do like to see these daily posts. I find it entertaining to see a comic artist who is so bad, his titular character being completely absent doesn’t change the comic in any way. It’s absurdism
Yeah, I use it to blow leaves off my walking path and into my flower/mulch beds. Prevents me from slipping and helps my plants
I think they meant that they eat cows, which are, in fact, vegans
I don’t have the space for a home gym, but I do use my money and time I save from my commute to pay for and use a gym subscription. Also easily the best shape physically and mentally I have ever been
Does this mean that my insurance company won’t consider them acts of god anymore and will actually cover them?