I don’t think they need to be pushy, just the quality of product decisions has been going down as time goes on. Monopoly a bigger issue for sure, If not for the massive decline in value to both users and advertisers, we wouldn’t mind the monopoly so much.

Google must be scraping the bottom of the barrel of crazy that’s also stupid enough to pay for ads, I think it’s common knowledge now that Google games analytics to artificially inflate the appearance of ad impact.

This is the way forward

Ah yes that’s where their development resources for all the last 5 years went: fucking up the paid experience with minor tweaks and fucking up the free experience with major tweaks.

I pay for this shit for my whole family and don’t know a service with anywhere near the same library, I’d jump ship in a heartbeat to a service with both a complete music library and a first-class podcast listening experience for web/PC users.

I’m not an Aussie and I’m not following this in particular, but from what I’ve seen that’s how bad ideas work: you don’t want to start a dialogue where the noes point out all the flaws in your ideas. In the US the extreme of this is legislation passed in a specially coordinated session at midnight with an absolute minimum of debate.

With that said, why the hell does a budgeted program belong in a constitution and not in a regular legislated budget? And why the hell does one specific group need specific recognition defined at the level of a constitution, as opposed to broad rules changed in such a way that their specific exclusion is forbidden with a catch all that also benefits other minorities?

Yeah shielding. Totally passive.

mobsters did that in their houses, people who buy them often only learn about the previous owner after realizing that one or two rooms are faraday cages - zero wifi or cellular.

Not in places where constitutions are not the ultimate authority AND written such that they form negative rights by only limiting the governments power. That’s in all those places whose immigrants to America get on TV and call America’s constitution anachronistic.

I think one key difference is that Israel has compulsory service for everyone. Like if in the 1770s the Torrey soldiers on leave held a music festival and they all got gunned down, I’m fairly certain the history books would not change substantially. It’s abhorrent, but if you were in the same situation - occupation by some analogous group to wherever you live who have overwhelming military superiority - would you give up your Identity and assimilate, or try to make them hurt? I’m absolutely NOT saying Palestinians are the good guys, I’m just saying I understand where they’re coming from.

Both sides paint the other as the enemy of democracy and freedom.

That’s just what happens when you have two authoritarian parties. They just lob Accusation-In-a-Mirror attacks at each other.

Your arguments are so informative and full of insight, you should publish to a journal.

You clearly grew up more privileged than me, and lived a more sheltered experience, if you truly don’t know that criminals work in groups.

Bored teens with no futures do exceptionally dumb shit, like attack people for fun. They pick the weakest person they see, and in NYC every year there are at least one or two stories where the attacks turn into homicides.

I mean you lack the legal option of having a means to defend yourself.

Read what? You said I’m buried in macho fantasies.

My owning guns has no bearing on domestic violence happening in a different household.

You know yourself and know you are the kind of person who might use a gun on your own family. I know myself and have no such violent tendencies. The broader statistics may be relevant to the question of whether you disarm everyone wholesale, but are irrelevant to one individual’s personal decision whether or not they will defend their own lives given existing legal constraints.

I don’t dispute that.

Only question is: what is your plan for when 3 dudes surround you and the first one who is much larger than you makes every signal that he’s about to dominate you?

I have no macho fantasies. More randos could beat me to death with their hands than the ones who cannot. You may have a bit of martial arts training and fantasies of obliterating some muggers with your hands but I have no such illusions. I’ve been the victim of crimes like this and consider myself lucky as I was utterly helpless at the time and survived. So fuck off with that “just run away or fight” nonsense you believe from watching too many movies where good guys always take damage differently from bad guys.

In every other country if three people decide it’d be funny to beat you to death, you actually have zero you can do about it.

You take your robbery and beating, stabbing or slashing, accept the Belfast smile when they decide to give you one, and hope they stop while you’re still able to survive.

He’s still going to prison for discharging a firearm apparently.

Not QUITE how Twitter works, Democrats can pay for ads and run all the psyops they want with fake accounts too.

Question is whether any Chinese or Russian intelligence teams decide targeting messages at lefties is going to contribute towards their goals as a whole.

I completely believe that they were failing.

Question is how bad will the PsyOps and interference get? Without them?

You are correct. YouTube is tricky for several reasons, and hard to prosecute because the true monopoly is discovery (because everyone uses it).

Content can be consumed anywhere, you can follow some niche creator on Patreon, but YouTube is realistically the only place you’ll discover them.

YouTube chooses to demonetize and outright ban perfectly legal and normal content that happens to disagree with their politics. On it’s face this is okay, they’re a private company after all, but the insidious thing is that entire subjects may as will not exist for you know because YouTube bans them.