https://medium.com/brain-labs/why-spotify-struggles-to-make-money-from-music-streaming-ba940fc56ebd

For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.

Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.

But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.

I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It's not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it's fun. They're doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.

No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper. And given that that is very rarely the case, we have to look at things like carbon taxes to actually price in the externalities of climate damage. But that is going to increase the prices of some goods, and that requires a level of political will that has proven very difficult to come by. "Just make corporations pay" to fix things, whether that's a carbon tax or taxes on oil company executive pay or dividends or whatever else the proposal may be is always going to mean "increase prices to compensate for climate-related externalities".

That doesn't necessarily mean that all costs of addressing climate change must directly fall on consumers; government subsidies to reduce the costs of environmentally sustainable practices can also be extremely beneficial. But ultimately, this is a problem that we've all created, and we're all going to have to be part of solving it. Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn't actually get us any closer to solving things.

Seriously. Trump is advocating turning Gaza into a parking lot.

And it's not like Democrats have exactly been shy of their general support of Israel, if you've paid any attention at all. They just also happen to acknowledge that Palestinians are people, unlike most Republicans.

Hell, he literally stole money from another Republican Congressman and his wife.

You almost have to respect it.

Let this be a reminder to anyone who hasn't liked Biden's handling of the Gaza situation that this is the alternative.

Strictly speaking, it's the governing body of Gaza, which hasn't held elections in well over a decade. The West Bank is governed by the party Fatah, which is much less militant.

There is, however, the awkward truth that the West Bank has also not held elections in a long time, precisely because Hamas would probably win them.

That would require getting elected, which would require them being broadly popular.

People left Facebook because it got overwhelmed with their parents and grandparents, not because they ever cared about privacy.

It's also a very deliberate strategy to give a little bit of space for people who've identified as Republicans in the past but refuse to follow Trump. He's saying that you don't have to identify as a Democrat, or even necessarily drop the Republican party as a whole, but rather you simply have to recognize the obvious fact that Trump represents a major departure from the Republican party of the past and refuse to go along with it.

Of course, the part that isn't being said is that the old Republican party is well and truly dead and buried, but speaking diplomatically like that is very good politics and can help him net some more moderate votes in tighter margin states.

Within Israel, the vast majority of people don't particularly care about any kind of manifest destiny style reclamation of the West Bank or Gaza, and if that were the only issue, I genuinely don't think there would be a significant problem.

What essentially everyone does care about, however, is repeatedly having rockets lobbed at them. When people feel under threat, reason starts to fall away, people begin dehumanizing the "other", and you get the massive mess we have today. The fact of the matter is that Israel will never accept any situation where its people are under threat. No matter what you think about what acts are or aren't justified or your opinion on how various parts of the history played out, none of that changes this basic reality.

Palestine is not going to be able to militarily eradicate Israel. There is precisely zero chance that Israelis allow themselves to be subjected to a second diaspora and they'll fight to the death to prevent this, and that's to say nothing of external players like the United States. Again, whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing, it is a true thing.

On the flip side, Israel is perfectly capable of essentially eradicating the Palestinians, though this would subject it to massive international condemnation that would also have huge economic impacts. You're already beginning to see whispers of this as the world increasingly sees Israel's response in Gaza as being excessively harsh. The most they could do is a slow and steady degradation of Palestinian society while encouraging them to "voluntarily" leave, which is arguably what the strategy has essentially been under Likud with settlements and the like.

So, what's required for a peaceful co-existence? Firstly, you need a mutual acknowledgement from both leaders (and also, a legitimate Palestinian leadership in the first place) that the other side exists and has a right to do so, ie, Palestinians giving up on the idea of eradicating Israel and Israelis giving up on the idea of fully annexing and ethnically cleaning Palestinian lands. This is not a trivial thing. The Israeli far-right, though they're not dominant, are growing and believe they have a divine right to the West Bank, with the Arabs being seen as little more than animals in the way. The extreme Palestinian side is that all Israelis are essentially foreign invaders and should be forcibly removed or killed. Both of these positions must be completely taken off the table.

Secondly, Israel will not engage unless it is confident that its security will not be threatened, which will in practice mean that Palestinian authorities must be de-militarized beyond what's necessary for basic local law enforcement. Again, this might seem unfair, and hell, it probably is. But the fact of the matter remains that Israel is the side holding the guns here, so you either play by their rules and try to find some positive outcome, or you flip the table and enjoy the complete loss, but with some moral satisfaction. Similarly, there would probably need to be some kind of border controls for imports that Israeli authorities can inspect for covert weapons shipments, since it's a known thing that Iran does regularly try to bring weapons into Gaza. Ideally, this would be some kind of bi-national force with Palestinian cooperation.

If you reach these points, then you still have other very big questions to deal with, like precise borders, land swaps, the question of Jerusalem, how to connect Gaza and the West Bank, any right of return for displaced Palestinians both recently and during the Nakba, and plenty of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting about. But ultimately, if you have a Palestinian and Israeli leadership that are actually interested in peace and accept the existence of the other, and both agree to cooperate on matters of security and prioritizing that peace above and past grievances, no matter how legitimate, that gives you a real foundation you can build from.

I wouldn't get my hopes up though.

We just want to live god-fearing lives and raise good families.

And the main difference between us is that I don't really care if you do that, while your friends will label my future family with two dads as a gross perversion that calls for state intervention in order to prevent the terrible abuse of a child having two loving parents that happen to both be men, as if it's not abusive to raise a child under the terror of thinking that they're always being watched and will be tortured for all eternity if they wind up being attracted to the same gender. But ultimately, that's your life and I'll leave you to it. I'd just ask for the same courtesy.

Sure, criticize away, and you absolutely should. It's just important to not get so carried away that you wind up contributing to an outcome that you openly know to be objectively worse at the ballot box.

I mean, did they steal it? Or did people largely willingly give it away? People willingly left the older decentralized platforms in favor of centralized corporate platforms because, for one reason or another, they felt it was a better use of their time. The old-school forums weren't killed; people stopped using them and left for Reddit and Facebook and Instagram etc.

If we want to reverse this, we need to understand why this happened, what those service provided that lured people, and how we can build better alternatives, and I think there's more to this than just "corporation bad".

Edit: Downvote if you like, but I'd much prefer an actual response, because I think there is an interesting conversation to be had about this.

You have to realize that this is not a terribly convincing statement, right?

The international organization is called the International Committee of the Red Cross. National Red Cross and Red Crescent groups are simply local subsidiaries, essentially.

Please don't try to make clever gotchas if you don't even understand what you're talking about, and for anyone who upvoted this, please don't upvote something just because it seems vaguely clever and snarky.

Hamas isn't a rational actor fighting for a free Palestine; their one and only goal - literally written into their charter - is to eradicate every Jew from the land by force.

Every Jew they kill is a victory for them; there's nothing more to it.

The funny thing is how people on both sides could read your comment and agree with it, but for opposite reasons.

This perspective of "Either you agree with me or you're complicit in a conspiracy against me" is incredibly childish and immature.

Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.

These aren't mutually exclusive. It can both be true, and Russia could have intentionally boosted the story on social media in order to cause greater general distress.

If we'd always been accounting for all the actual costs of cars, including externalities, most people would have never been able to afford them, we'd recognize them as the very costly luxeries they actually are, and not have completely dismantled our ability to live without them in every city except NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and San Francisco.

I always love it when people reduce debates around whether the public existence of LGBT people is actually pedophilia or whether Black people being routinely murdered by police is an actual problem to being nothing more than a mere distraction against the Real Fight against the evil elite lizard people.

Listen, it's cool that these are the kinds of issues that obviously don't affect you or the people around you. But not everyone actually agrees that literally every issue ever can be reduced to being a sideshow of a greater class-based conflict. Do you not see how deeply patronizing it is to be told that the debates about your core identity are meaningless distractions that we need to stop talking about? I can see it being easy to believe that if your core identity isn't routinely made to be a political issue that can be debated, but not all of us are so lucky.

ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.

I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.

That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.

The suggestion that if Israel simply lifted the blockade and stopped all security operations in the West Ban there would be complete peace is ridiculously idealistic and naive.

You are not going to convince a nation that just saw hundreds of citizens brutally murdered and kidnapped that the only thing they have to do is fully open the borders and smile, and then the people who just murdered them will come out and be their friends.

You're loosely describing most of human history.

"Let's take these plant babies and grind them into a pulp, drown it, let it be eaten by a bunch of tiny monsters until they fart enough gas, and then burn it" also sounds kinda weird. Welcome to the universe; shit's a little whack.

I dunno, the internet has told me that Israel is just as bad. I definitely remember when the IDF took a bunch of civilian women and children as hostages and then announced that it was going to livestream their murder.

Oh wait.

Congrats, you've just passed every conservative's wet dream, by not only making it harder to pass any new laws because you're constantly going to be busy renewing the old ones, but also making it so that all you have to do in order to kill a policy you don't like is to wait and do nothing.

Imagine if Republicans could kill Social Security by simply waiting and fillibustering in the Senate, and go on to blame Democrats because they technically have a majority.

To quote the speech that you evidently did not watch or read:

Like so many others, I’m heartbroken by the tragic loss of Palestinian life
We mourn every innocent life lost. We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity.
Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and innocent Palestinian families are suffering greatly because of them.
Yesterday, in discussions with the leaders of Israel and Egypt, I secured an agreement for the first shipment of humanitarian assistance from the United Nations to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. If Hamas does not divert or steal this shipment, these shipments, we’re going to provide an opening for sustained delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians.
As I said in Israel, as hard as it is, we cannot give up on peace. We cannot give up on a two-state solution.
Israel and Palestinians equally deserve to live in safety, dignity and peace.
In recent years, too much hate has given too much oxygen, fueling racism, a rise in antisemitism, Islamic-phobia, right here in America.
And I know many of you in the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community and so many others are outraged and hardened saying to yourselves, “Here we go again with Islamophobia and the distrust we saw after 9/11.”
We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia.
And to all you hurting, those of you who are hurting, I want you to know I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.
And here in America, let us not forget who we are. We reject all forms, all forms of hate, whether against Muslims, Jews, or anyone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html

Deflation tends to trigger massive layoffs since revenue drops and investment becomes a worse option than saving.

Everyone always hopes that economic downturns will affect everyone but them specifically, but it really doesn't work that way.

This is mis-attributed.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thucydides#Misattributed

But with rent that’s more than doubled...

We really need politicians to start paying more attention to the housing crisis. Housing costs have been such a massive squeeze on literally everyone, and it's an incredibly stupidly self-inflicted wound because for the last 50 years we collectively decided that housing should be a primary investment asset for all Americans instead of a place to live, and fundamentally, you cannot have housing both be a good investment and have it be cheap.

Literally just build more housing. Public housing, subsidized housing, private market rate, yuppie condos, literally anything.

https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced-home-construction-for-20-years/

In the last 20 years, we build around a million single-family homes. In that same time period, the population increased by 3 million. There is no universe in which this happens and housing doesn't become significantly more expensive.

A lot of local urbanist groups have been pushing for this for a long time. Parking minimums were largely made up by pulling numbers out of hats in the 50s and have essentially no basis in empirical fact. Countless small businesses all across the countries exist in buildings that could not legally be built today because of parking minimums. I remember a story from a small Arkansas town about some local entrepreneurs that wanted to open a cafe in a vacant downtown building, but couldn't because they'd need to buy the adjacent building and bulldoze it to make a parking lot in order to meet parking minimums.

These also apply to residential buildings as well. If someone is wanting to build a medium sized apartment building in an older pre-war walkable area near a train station, but modern parking minimums require buying 3x the land in order to build a parking lot, that building isn't going to happen, meaning that new housing units aren't being built and thus there'll be more price pressure on existing housing.

Not to mention, denser housing allows for fewer cars and more transit, which in an absolute boon for the environment. There's a reason why suburbs emit way way more CO2 per capita that downtown areas.

There's been a big boom in interest in urbanism in recent years and increasing awareness of just how the US got so car dependent. Toss in a quick trip to Europe at some point, add in people explicitly saying "the reason you liked these old cities so much was because of transit and lack of cars", and it's an idea that spreads itself.

I don't get why anyone would use the free tier - not being able to choose songs would actually drive me insane, let alone the ads - but $11 monthly for essentially all the music anyone could ever want, plus solid playlists and recommendations, is a perfectly good value for me. Admittedly, I listen to music all the time and it's a pretty big part of my life, so it's an easy sell.

I guess the free tier is still an improvement over radio, but regardless, producing and distributing music has costs, and I'm more than happy to pay for it. Given that Spotify isn't even profitable, having lost about a billion dollars last year, I'm not sure how long this situation will last, but for the time being, I really don't mind it.

The money spent on Ukraine has been essentially pennies relative to any significant domestic program.

If you instead redistributed all the $113 billion spent since the invasion began in 2022, you could give each American a grand total of $340. A nice chunk of change, to be sure, but spread out over the course of the war, this is literally $15 a month.

Personally, I'm okay having $340 less over the course of nearly two years if the alternative is tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians and Russia successfully re-asserting that violent conquest will not be resisted. Moldova would almost certainly be invaded next as well, since they're not in NATO. $15 a month is a pretty damn cheap price to pay to protect a democracy and save countless lives (not to mention, the torture and rape the Russian army has been committing as well)

Those are horrific as well, but it's simply not true that the IDF roams around Palestinian villages murdering every Palestinian they find, and you know that.

For starters, if they did, there wouldn't be very many left.

This childish need to see one side as unequivocally good and the other bad must be discarded or people find themselves cheering for citizens to murdered while waiting for the bus, and if you've gotten to that point, something has gone deeply wrong.

When you have a bunch of online edgelords constantly denying atrocities, this is what's necessary, and I definitely applaud the journalists for having the stomach to watch this kind of stuff so that I don't have to.

And before someone brings it up, I know it's frustrating that truth is hard to reliably determine in war, but if your position really hinges on whether the neck of a murdered baby is intact or not, the plot has been thoroughly and utterly lost. And there are photos of burnt and bloodied dead children out there if you really care to look.

Biden could be spontaneously replaced with Mao Zedong and that still wouldn't suddenly make a Congress with a Republican House start passing laws.

So Verizon gave you a phone for no upfront cost, and they're shitty for making you pay for it if you decide to dash away early?

Fascinating threshold for shitty behavior you have.

Their explicit aim is the complete destruction of Israel. It is incredibly easy to believe. To quote the Hamas charter:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.

[Peace] initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement... Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the infidels as arbitrators in the lands of Islam... There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him."

Hamas is explicitly opposed to peace, and it's sole aim is to murder or expel every Jew from the land. Any supporting these attacks needs to asked if this the aim they really want to support.

This doesn't address the core issue, that the math simply doesn't work in several places. Even ignoring profit, at the very least, you have to balance your payouts with your premium revenue, and if your payouts are so high that premiums must be higher than what people can afford, then you're toast.

Or you invoke government subsidies, in which case it's essentially a tax to subsidize people's poor decision making. At the end of the day, living in an area extremely prone to fires or flooding has real costs, and either somebody pays them, whether that be the individual, an insurance pool, or the government, or you simply stop incurring the cost by moving somewhere else (there's a strong argument for some amount of government assistance here)