honey_im_meat_grinding

Make sure you keep in mind that Conde Nast (the parent company of Wired) has subsidiary companies running articles like "35 Best Airbnbs Near New York City, From Cozy Cabins in the Catskills to Beachy Houses in the Hamptons"[1]. They likely have indirect or direct financial ties to AirBnB.

So this article that is seemingly trying to present an argument that this regulation isn't working because a black market has emerged, while giving more space in the article to small landlords and AirBnB's CEO and their defence than to critics of AirBnB, as well as mentioning hotel prices rising but not how AirBnB has caused rental prices to rise... should give you pause about the bias this article is trying to hide.

[1] https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/best-airbnbs-near-new-york-city

The story of McDonalds in Denmark is a fun example of this if anyone wants to read. [1]

McDonalds decided not to follow the union agreement and thus set up its own pay levels and work rules instead. This was a departure, not just from what Danish companies did, but even from what other similar foreign companies did. For example, Burger King, which is identical to McDonalds in all relevant respects, decided to follow the union agreement when it came to Denmark a few years earlier.

In late 1988 and early 1989, the unions decided enough was enough and called sympathy strikes in adjacent industries in order to cripple McDonalds operations. Sixteen different sector unions participated in the sympathy strikes.

Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.

Once the sympathy strikes got going, McDonalds folded pretty quickly and decided to start following the hotel and restaurant agreement in 1989.

This is why McDonalds workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour.

[1] https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-denmark/

For the record, government debt isn't bad. What is bad, is how that debt is used. If you use it to fund productivity boosting infrastructure projects, then it pays for itself. If you use it to invest in successful companies in return for shares then it pays for itself... unlike when Tesla got a $400 million gov. loan and gave nothing in return - which meant tax payers had to take the hit when Solyndra (which got money from the same scheme) bankrupted itself into the toilet, tax payers took all the risk and got shafted both when a company failed and when one succeeded.

The Norwegian government, for example, owns 30% of the domestic stock market. One of many strategies the US government should probably be looking to if they want a healthier way to invest in companies.

Using debt to back tax cuts on the other hand, like Trump did according to this article, is an awful strategy.

Most people I see (in various forums) focus on the sexism part of this. It's bad, but I think it's worth highlighting the way Madison says they misled her and started controlling her digital side gigs outside of LTT, and just how bad working there was. Here are a few of the things she mentioned, but I recommend reading the full thread:

I had asked and been told during my interviews that I would be allowed to monetize my YouTube channel and be allowed to join Floatplane in exchange for shutting down my Patreon. ONCE I moved [from Arizona to to Vancouver] I was presented with an entirely new contract/handbook that I was not told existed.

Work from Home was a whole issue. If you took 3 minutes to answer a personal email, you could get in trouble. (happened to me) There is a system of micro-managing and a level of distrust because the amount of content they have to push out daily is so insane, no one gets a break.

I remember getting told off for taking my sick days, as in the days you're entitled to. This no days off, "grindset" culminated in the real moment I realized I had to leave.

They also forced me to have them as my representation if I wanted to take any sponsors for my Twitch or YouTube channels. Originally I had been told, just make sure you okay things by us for non-compete issues. Then that changed when I moved to take the job.

I honestly think the only way Linus can redeem himself at this point (for me personally), is if he made the company into some sort of multi-stakeholder worker cooperative where the workers have an actual chunk of democratic say over the direction of the company. This is how it's done across Europe already via works councils, e.g. in Norway 33% of the board (leadership) is represented by workers, while in other European countries it goes all the way up to 50%. It's been made very clear that the current leadership are incompetent and need to actually listen to their workers.

If anyone thinks this is a unique situation - this has happened so many times. The easiest example is the Nazis, or the "national socialists" because socialism was popular back then so they used the term despite starting with killing union workers and leftists.

Vincent Bevins talks in depth about this in his book If We Burn, where he discusses why (certain) protests fail by going through real life examples of movements that were hijacked by right wing extremists. This is not new or novel, this is going by the playbook on how to fight against movements that ask for justice, peace, more democracy, economic equality, and so forth.

It's a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It's about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.

I sympathize with artists who might lose their income if AI becomes big, as an artist it's something that worries me too, but I don't think applying copyright to data sets is a long term good thing. Think about it, if copyright applies to AI data sets all that does is one thing: kill open source AI image generation. It'll just be a small thorn in the sides of corporations that want to use AI before eventually turning them into monopolies over the largest, most useful AI data sets in the world while no one else can afford to replicate that. They'll just pay us artists peanuts if anything at all, and use large platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Artstation, and others who can change the terms of service to say any artist allows their uploaded art to be used for AI training - with an opt out hidden deep in the preferences if we're lucky. And if you want access to those data sources and licenses, you'll have to pay the platform something average people can't afford.

This isn't a great summary, but with the article headings as context it makes a bit more sense:

• YOU CAN TURN OFF AI-RECOMMENDED VIDEOS
• IT’S EASIER TO FLAG HARMFUL CONTENT
• YOU’LL KNOW WHY YOUR POST WAS TAKEN DOWN
• YOU CAN REPORT FAKE PRODUCTS
• YOUR KIDS WON’T BE TARGETED WITH DIGITAL ADS

The FBI's political surveillance was not a result of popular hysteria, such as scholars used to claim, or a rational response to communist spying and the Cold War confrontation, such as a number of historians have recently argued. Instead, it was an integrated part of the attempt by the modern federal state, rooted in the Progressive Era, to regulate and control any organized opposition to the political, economic and social order, such as organized labor, radical movements and African-American protest.

• Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, by Regin Schmidt, PhD

The FBI working against progress shouldn't really be surprising when this is what they did in their formative years. It's a big mistake to think we were stupid in the past and that we're above doing what we used to do, today, and I'm really starting to wonder if intelligence agencies actually are a net positive the more I read about them, at least they seem like they're well overdue for some radical reforming to ensure they act in the best interest of common people, rather than whatever they're doing now and historically.

This is funny when you just look at your profile's first page and see you've made comments like these:

I hate this rhetoric. It implies that this a refular occurence. It is just a man hating comment. If this is happening to you frequently, maybe you are the problem. I am tired of being assumed an asshole just because I am a man. It is sexist. Plain and simple.

So you deny "unproblematic" women regularly experiencing unsafe behavior from men who are entitled and you're also denying people's gender identity - otherwise, why would it be a waste of time for a woman's fight for her right to access women's spaces? So you're hateful towards people you perceive to be "men" while complaining about "man haters" elsewhere. Logical inconsistencies in favor of hate is a hallmark sign of right wing extremist views.

It's definitely a coordinated, global effort. This doesn't just happen in multiple states and countries all at once by chance, it really feels like some group is conspiring to make it happen. We already got this passed in the UK by a de-facto unelected leadership who whips their party into voting their way.

I have to wonder if it's linked to how many women saw success with OnlyFans and the like, so they could avoid working in horrible conditions like at an Amazon factory that pretends to have rules on how long you can do work that probably damages your body, and then just conveniently lets it slip that they ended up making you do what was supposed to be 30 minutes, for several hours. Some capital owners are already trying for child labour, so their desire to abuse workers more than usual is already established. I wouldn't be surprised if it's all connected, but I'm not sure if there's solid evidence, so this is just a fun theory I have.

Considering that YouTube is as dominant as it is today because of the well-documented network effect[1], you can consider your use of YouTube instead of a competitor in and of itself a payment because it lets them keep their monopoly on online video distribution. YouTube knows this, which is why they were so lenient in their early years - if they started off being strict, people would've left earlier and made YouTube's future as a monopoly more uncertain because of a demand for competitors.

Maybe instead of justifying their profit-seeking, we should demand more oversight and democratic say over how YouTube as a monopoly operates? Kind of like how in Germany and Slovenia, workers get 50% of the seats on the board of corporations and get to have a say in how a business operates? Alike many other European countries with varying %es of the board seats, like Norway and Sweden where it's 33%, or Finland where it's 20%. [2]

Otherwise, don't be surprised when YouTube starts going after creator profits next. Something they're using to justify going after adblock users now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_representation_on_corporate_boards_of_directors

I hope unity’s shareholders are happy with what they hoped for. This is the result of driving a company too far. Let’s makes this a guideline to follow for other companies not to make such shady decisions.

I don't think that's going to happen as long as the ownership structures surrounding shareholders remains the same. It's not the average person who invests in Unity that's doing this, it's the wealthy equity firms with significant holdings that are pushing for this unsustainable behaviour. After the 2008 crash, the EU, the US, Canada, and the UK all did studies on the economic stability of coops (1-person-1-vote democratically owned businesses) versus traditional companies and found that the coops were considerably more sustainable:

The cooperative banking sector had 20% market share of the European banking sector, but accounted for only 7 percent of all the write-downs and losses between the third quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2011.

(UK) A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.

(US) Credit unions, a type of cooperative bank, had five times lower failure rate than other banks during the financial crisis and more than doubled lending to small businesses between 2008 and 2016, from $30 billion to $60 billion, while lending to small businesses overall during the same period declined by around $100 billion.

A 2010 report by the Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export in Québec found the five-year survival rate and ten-year survival rate of cooperatives in Québec to be 62% and 44% respectively compared to 35% and 20% for conventional firms.

There's also a study using 100 years of data on French wine coops vs non-coop wine companies showing similar results: not only do coops survive longer, the survival rate gap widens over time as more and more non-coops collapse [Cooperatives versus Corporations: Survival in the French Wine Industry. Journal of Wine Economics, 13(3), 328-354. doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.1]

What possible use is that?

I've noticed "has this sub gotten more right wing recently?" posts reaching the top post of the day in the last 6 months or so. r/norge and r/unitedkingdom being examples. You can automate bots that change a subreddit's consensus on certain topics by bot-spamming threads pertaining to those topics, especially in the first hour of a thread going up. I don't know if that's happening, or if it has more to do with the Reddit protest that saw mods abdicate their positions last June and new mods being responsible for the change... but it could also be a bit of both.

Reminder that US state agencies helped Bolsonaro

In March 2020, the Intercept reported that Brazilian prosecutors had secretly collaborated with the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in a manner "that may have violated international legal treaties and Brazilian law". The Brazilian Ministry of Justice had not been informed; making this collaboration illegal. They also found that money paid by Brazilian companies in the US were funnelled back into Brazil; chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol said he would use part of this sum to set up an "independent fund to fight corruption". This attempt was then deemed unconstitutional by Brazil's Supreme Court. It was reported that Mr. Dallagnol had called Lula da Silva's arrest “a gift from the CIA”. Leslie Backschies, the head of the US FBI's international corruption unit, alluded to this incident when discussing the sensitivity of anti-corruption investigations in a 2019 interview with AP news saying “We saw presidents toppled in Brazil”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash#Leaked_conversations

By "IT" do you mean tech? Because as a software engineer, I've seen turnover rates of 1-2 years for some of my favorite people I've worked with. If they actually had bargaining power, we know via studies done on unions and turnover rates that these engineers likely wouldn't dip as quickly and take institutional knowledge and their smart brains with them. Tech is so allergic to unions that it is literally inflicting damage onto itself - managers will tell you how expensive it is to hire new people because it takes months for them to catch up to your codebase, but the higher-up leadership is completely unwilling to listen to the data on how to actually retain people. They don't care if unions increase productivity or that the elasticity between productivity and salary is >1.0 as the unionisation rate grows (per studies done in Norway), because they don't want to lose their complete control over companies to collective bargaining.

The article doesn't really expand on the Reddit point: apart from the weapon trading forum, it's about the shooter being a participant in PoliticalCompassMemes which is a right wing subreddit. After the shooting the Reddit admins made a weak threat towards the mods of PCM, prompting the mods to sticky a "stop being so racist or we'll get deleted" post with loads of examples of the type of racist dog whistles the users needed to stop using in the post itself.

I don't imagine they'll have much success against Reddit in this lawsuit, but Reddit is aware of PCM and its role and it continues to thrive to this day.

There hasn't been any scientific consensus change on whether porn is actually harmful to view for underage viewers, much less how much harm at various ages (i.e. should we lower it from 18, or raise it). Meaning, anyone who outright claims it is, is likely falling for populist rhetoric feeding off our cultural aversion to nudity and sex, not scientific truth.

It gets even worse when you consider how instrumental porn is to us queer folks who often learn more about their sexuality through the medium, esp. when you consider consumption rates of queer folks vs straight folks. Or when you consider the queer folks who use sex work to earn money because they're treated worse in other jobs simply for being queer.

Let this sink in for a second: it took us less than a decade of anti-porn laws being proposed to being implemented without scientific consensus (in the UK, Germany, the EU now, Canada is currently doing the same...). Meanwhile we dragged our feet for decades on climate change and still are. That alone should make this whole trend smell fishy, like it's being done with ulterior motives.

(the UK hasn’t got free speech as an enshrined right)

In practice, does the US?

Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also a category which is not protected as free speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions

It seems to me there are a lot of exceptions to free speech in the land of free speech. I wouldn't see any harm in adding hate speech to the list given how large it already is.

e.g. passing a nearly-identical law copying Thailand about the royal family and putting in prison anyone who calls Prince Andrew a pedophile.

That seems more of a problem with flawed democracy or autocracies, than to do with free speech. Any awful thing could become law under a flawed democracy/autocracy. The UK has plenty of undemocratic elements and they're abused to pass horrible laws right now, and we need to fix those elements - the laws are just the end result.

With this context, it gets more interesting:

On 6 December 2022, the Parliament of Indonesia passed the country’s new criminal code (NCC), outlawing sex and cohabitation outside of marriage. Under the new law, extramarital sex carries a jail sentence of one year, while cohabitation of unmarried couples carries a jail term of six months. In a statement given to Reuters, a spokesperson for the Indonesian justice ministry justified the law on the grounds that it aimed to “protect the institution of marriage and Indonesian values.”

Well, it doesn't seem to have worked – at least not in the short term. So now they can't have sex and they're not marrying either, worst of both worlds. Maybe they also wouldn't have a prison overcrowding problem if they stopped jailing people for things like these.

Back in the good old days of the Stone Age we used to work 4-6 hours per day, based on the anthropological evidence we have (as Historia Civilis points out[1]). That seems to be the amount of work humans naturally slot into when left alone. Instead we work 8+ hours per day per 5 day work week. In European countries like the Netherlands, and the Nordics, for example, that's slightly below 7 hours per day (on average, assuming a 5 day work week), so they're getting close to the range we used to work. But a 4 day work week still seems like an almost utopian idea to achieve politically, despite all the insane productivity gains we've made over the last 100 years thanks to automation that makes even a four day work week seem laughable - we should probably be thinking of a three day work week at this point.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo

Universal welfare is objectively economically superior to bureaucratic means tested welfare. Calling it "abuse" is just how they get away with turning you into bigger wage slaves with less bargaining power

The findings of the report include: moving from universalism to selectivity increases social and economic inequality and diminishes rather than enhances the status of the poor; selectivity requires processes and procedures that separate benefit recipients from the rest of society, increasing stigmatisation and reducing take-up; universalism is incredibly efficient – the selective element of pension entitlement is more than 50 times more inefficient than the universal element measured in terms of fraud and error alone and without even taking into account the cost of administration; universalism creates positive economic stability by mitigating the swings in the business cycle and creating much more economic independence among the population; on virtually every possible measure of social and economic success, all league tables are topped by societies with strong universal welfare states; universalism creates a higher and more progressive tax base which also improves economic stability, reduces price bubbles and creates more efficient flatter income distributions; and universal benefits promote gender equality and do not suffer from the inherent bias built into a system designed within a framework of assuming a male breadwinner model of welfare.

They're in talks about it, hopefully we'll see action soon. There was also an article in NRK (BBC equivalent state news) about Tesla (non factory) workers in Norway having bad working conditions and mulling unionisation, but the leadership there is anti-union so they have to do it in secret.

https://www.nrk.no/norge/tesla-ansatte-organiserer-seg-i-hemmelighet-1.16641657 (you'll have to use a translation service if you can't read Norwegian)

Ask yourself this: has Bitcoin had - or is it trending towards - a net positive impact on our world? In other words, is it worth investing in long term? If it isn't you should treat it as a short term investment and get out as soon as you've made a profit - and you've literally 4x'd your investment. The fact that we're talking about the price in c/News is already a bad bubble sign and reminiscent of all the other times we've had crypto bubbles.

My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there's too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we'd need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it's doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).

Kind of, the central government did this in response to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan:

In December 2023, Gove used his powers to "call in" Khan's rejection of the project, overturning the Mayor's rejection and turning the final decision to DLUHC ministers.

But the project did withdraw anyway:

However, in January 2024, MSG wrote to the Planning Inspectorate officially withdrawing its plans for the project.

I suspect it has more to do with London being left by advertisers right now. A few years back the tube had all the advert slots filled, always. Today, the advert slots are usually half filled and it's been like that for years. I expected it to change after COVID lockdowns ended, but it has persisted all the way until now.

So not only will you be able to get it, the people who get it to you can’t be big corporate shitheels.

Cannabis Social Clubs have existed in Europe for a while under a legal gray area, e.g. in Spain. I imagine that's why Germany went with a non-profit cooperative model instead of the US' (recent) for-profit corporate approach. Although Canada's approach of a state monopoly is similar to what Norway does with alcohol, which is another way to socialize the profits of drugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_Social_Club

Meanwhile Meta takes great pains to remove any glimpse of an erogenous zone like the most deranged Christian fundamentalist

Allow me to gas Finland up a bit more. They're higher than Germany in terms of innovation (triadic patents per capita), they have semi-democratically owned grocery stores with 90% of the country being a member/co-owner, they have 60% union density and a Ghent system (like Sweden, unlike Norway), their housing prices were among the few in Europe falling - after the government started their Housing First initiative and built social housing for the poor, their education system being so good (despite being relaxed unlike e.g. Singapore) and state-funded instead of private... life is pretty good in Finland.

And if they can cater to that fetish totally fine, why aren’t my fetishes allowed??

As already stated, it isn't necessarily a fetish, but you bring up a good point - why YouTube is enforcing some puritanical Christo-fundamentalist ethical standard is kind of ridiculous. As a European, where we have a less puritanical view of sex I'd like to be given the choice. It's not complicated to keep sexual content behind a tickbox choice like on Twitter or Reddit, especially not when, you know, Google Play is their only real gatekeeper here and guess who owns them? They also already use credit cards and the like for "age verification", so any excuse they have is vanishing more and more.

The paper itself has lengthy discussion on the flaws of the research it's examining.

The studies reviewed examined the possible impact of SPPA on users or their partners using cross-sectional designs, with one study also using longitudinal research methods. Of course, retrospective cross-sectional designs cannot be used to draw causal conclusions 51 about any associations between SPPA and potential outcomes because they are measured simultaneously; it might be difficult to ascertain whether individuals perceived their pornography use to be problematic before or after they experi- enced negative outcomes. Moreover, the longitudinal study used a two-wave design and a much smaller subset (n ¼ 106) of the original sample (N ¼ 1,215), which substantially limits causality- related analyses, so findings are likely to be tentative at best.

Nine of the 10 studies reported evidence that SPPA had a detrimental impact on individuals or their partners. However, some important methodologic issues must be considered. First, SPPA and its impact were often assessed using a single-item measurement, which research suggests is an adequate measure- ment of complex constructs. 4,52 If an individual’s experience is multidimensional (ie, physiologic, behavioral, and cognitive), then it might be challenging for the individual to convey this using a single item, and assumptions can be made that omit potentially important information. Second, some studies used under-defined concepts and definitions; for example, Levin et al 19 used a single-item measurement to assess impaired functioning resulting from SPPA but did not provide a definition of functioning, so it is uncertain whether the researchers were measuring the same construct for all participants

Third, three studies18,20,21 suggested that individuals’ values and morals associated with their pornography use might have contributed to their perceived pornography addiction, and Prause et al20 further suggested that conflict with their held values might have led to their distress. Therefore, SPPA might actually result from a conflict in values rather than pornography use per se.

Research that examined the impact of SPPA on the partners of self-perceived pornography addicts found that they experienced several negative effects such as feelings of betrayal, shame, and isolation. These effects were attributed to the behavior of the self- perceived pornography addict. However, research investigating the effects of pornography use has shown that women who attribute their partners’ pornography use to an inadequacy about themselves experience a greater level of distress.53 None of the studies reviewed considered the characteristics of the partners of self-perceived pornography addicts, yet negative outcomes can be affected by factors such as thinking styles and attitudes (eg, how we perceive information), which can lead to these feelings of inadequacy.

There also were concerns regarding the measurements used to make conclusions about the impact of SPPA. Many relied on adapted and non-validated measurements that were not neces- sarily theoretically driven and were derived from a non-clinical sample; thus, the findings are difficult to generalize. For example, Twohig et al21 used a median cutoff (58%) from a non- clinical sample to determine an arbitrary level of problematic cognitive and behavioral outcomes of SPPA.

I could keep going, but I think that's enough for this post - read the "Correlates and Possible Outcomes of SPPA" and "Limitations" sections of the paper you linked.

$9 x 12 = $108 increase per year. Also, you chose that sentence probably because it was the lower one despite the first paragraph being:

Short-term rentals via apps such as Airbnb contribute to housing shortages and rent increases, according to research published last week by Felix Mindl and Dr. Oliver Arentz, researchers at University of Cologne in Germany. They attributed 14.2% of overall rent increases to short-term rentals or 320 euros ($385) per year for new tenants.

This is a benefit to the worker. They’re leaving because they got a better paying gig or less work/fewer hours for the same amount of money.

Yes, because there's no union there to bargain for better pay, bonuses, more time off work, and so forth. Tech is a new industry where workers have more bargaining power on an individual level because expertise is so sought after. Now imagine combining that with unions and we'd probably all be doing 4 day work weeks already, like unions are currently bargaining for in various countries. We'd likely also have more time for tech debt, as unions increase certain types of innovation.

Like, if unions can do this for McDonalds workers after a sympathy strike in Nordic countries:

Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.

Why would we assume tech workers in a very profitable industry wouldn't be able to get away with even more?

You mean like when the UK police force were deemed institutionally racist[1]? Or that other time it was found to be institutionally racist[2]? Yeah we have some shit to deal with here in the UK.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/22/institutional-racism-britain-stephen-lawrence-inquiry-20-years
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/21/metropolitan-police-institutionally-racist-misogynistic-homophobic-louise-casey-report

It really makes the argument that CEOs and managers couldn't be elected really weak. They'd probably be far more competent if they were chosen by workers once a year or so.

You don't have to support Epic's ultimate goal of increasing their profit, to understand that the monopoly power this lawsuit is fighting is even worse. Apple and Google should not be able to gatekeep what kind of apps we get to use - any argument in favour of them basically boils down to "they let us avoid malicious apps" but you can have democratic orgs decide that instead of oligarchical cartels. And I don't necessarily mean the government, although government regulation would be a welcome move, I mean even more democratic:

In Finland, some of the largest grocery chains (think Walmart) are collectively, democratically owned - in other words, they operate in the same boring, stable, functional, and efficient manner as other grocery shops without being undemocratic(!). The average Finnish person has say in what products are being stocked, can be elected managers of stores, and the coop gives members 5% of their spending back (i.e. revenue sharing), among other things. [1] For reference, in the UK, we get a measly 1% back from grocery shop purchases, or from Amex with their cashback.

Sure, Epic won't give us this democratic org, but they do help us challenge the gatekeepers that are way more invested in working against giving us anything like this.

[1] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/11/inside-the-walmart-of-finland/

To be fair, it already exists - PeerTube is a thing. The real reason people stay on YouTube is the network effect[1] - everyone else is there, so why would you leave? They're not coming with you, they're not giving you money on the new platform, they can just stay on YouTube and keep life simple by not worrying about a bunch of choices. Epic has spent billions losing money trying to compete with the network effect that Steam benefits off, so it's clear how much money and risk it takes... only for nothing to really change. It's not something that we can expect creators to drive without collective effort, and that kind of is happening with Nebula (which is part owned by the creators who join it) - we can only hope they keep that momentum going so they begin to form a real threat to YouTube's dominance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

What's your source there? I ask because I was curious and found the exact opposite (but I've not done any in-depth dive into this topic):

The scientists found no evidence that frequent ejaculations mark an increased risk of prostate cancer. In fact, the reverse was true: High ejaculation frequency was linked to a decreased risk. Compared to men who reported 4–7 ejaculations per month across their lifetimes, men who ejaculated 21 or more times a month enjoyed a 31% lower risk of prostate cancer. And the results held up to rigorous statistical evaluation even after other lifestyle factors and the frequency of PSA testing were taken into account.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequency_and_prostate_cancer

Let's make that 3 x 12 hour week into a 3 x 8 hour week - that's what the article is suggesting we should think more about. Because 36 hours is basically a full work week condensed into three days - a 4 day work week refers to 4 days of 8 hours of work (32 hours per week), and the article wants to go further than that by pointing to the productivity gains we've made. Here are the top countries by least hours worked per week:

• Netherlands - 30.4

• Denmark - 33.4

• Norway - 33.8

• Germany - 34.5

• Finland - 35

• Austria - 35.1

• Belgium - 35.2

• Iceland - 35.5

• Ireland - 35.6

• Switzerland - 35.7

And remember, averages are skewed meaning that most people could be working less than the average. These countries are able to stay comfortably afloat despite their shorter workweeks.

When we're talking about productivity there are so many cool things we can do: unions increase productivity, 4 day work weeks increases productivity, public/free healthcare increases productivity, fast public transportation increases productivity... all these low hanging fruits that can increase our labor output per hour - they're not radical scientific advancements, they're boring things we can do right now if we put in the resources to achieve them.

Looking at their Github, I mostly see Apache 2.0, which is a bad sign. But this whole thing seems like an advert for their product anyway, so it's likely a nothingburger and won't make a dent in the current Mastodon software's dominance.