A big part of streaming company retention policy is promising things to people who are in the process of cancelling their accounts. So… why not cancel your account every couple of months?

If someone is going to send me a gift card or offer a free month of service every time I call, I’ve got a strong economic incentive to call early and often.

Fordism is dead. Sorry. Try again next Industrial Revolution.

Why bother when you’re using a parent’s credit card? Why bother when you’re flush? $20/mo on a $20k income versus a $200k income creates very different incentives.

Won’t Purchase Full-Price Video Games, New Study Finds

The only game I’ve ever seen sold at full price on a consistent basis was Factorio. Every other publisher seems sold on putting $60-80 on the label and then floating 10-30% discounts as the sales cycle permits.

It’s the Macy’s model for sales. “You’re getting a $20 discount on a $60 game” sells more titles than “Here’s a game for $40”.

First time I’ve ever heard of a social media app behaving like this, certainly.

I just have to assume its because Republicans make such good content. How else do you explain Ben Shapiro, Andrew Tate, and Joe Rogan blowing up my YouTube Recommends section? They’re just winning in the marketplace of ideas, clearly.

Sitting here in the Texas O&G industry, staring at my giant pile of Permian Gas Field money and wondering why everyone else is complaining.

Listen, fuck Trump. But also, it’s naive to ignore all the people getting stupid rich off his bullshit economic policies.

I’m saying it is a science that deserves to actually be taken seriously

If you’re dismissing the scientific method, you’re not taking science seriously.

I don’t bring up hylomorphism when I talk about physics

Psychology isn’t a question of physics. The complex machine that is the human brain isn’t some single-action lever with a discrete well-defined input/output relationship. Neither is the human brain some binary circuit governed by logic gates and trivially deterministic sequences.

At some point, you have to approach psychology experimentally. You can’t just wave your hands and assume you know how the black box of the mind is going to work. And you can’t dismiss the accumulated experimental data because you don’t like the person who spearheaded its compilation.

Freud would give you a long diatribe about the distinction between Id, Ego, and Superego.

You can believe a thing is wrong and still do it. Ask any smoker. You can do a thing and wrestle with the psychological consequences afterwards. Ask anyone who has ever felt guilty. You can plan to behave a certain way and become derailed by impulses or anxiety. Ask anyone who has ever succumbed to fear or pain.

Self-policing is a logical response to an illogical/immoral impulse. Tossing cookies out of the cabinet and ice cream out of the fridge is the first step towards dieting. Cancelling your credit card is a technique to curb impulsive spending. How is this any different?

losing complete control to a corporation

Getting forced off of a community forum every time a business gobbles up the rights to the software is a loss of control.

Same picture.

We probably shouldn’t be using Discord

It’s a useful tool for a variety of organizational goals. Why should we have to leave? They’re the ones that suck.

We should get all of our advice from little kids.

These articles tend to lean on click-baity “One Neat Trick” headlines, while disguising the more practical hit-or-miss reality of facial recognition software. Sometimes you can outsmart the computer. Sometimes it just fouls the system and fails out. Sometimes the system works exactly as intended.

Little kids experiment around the edges of a system until they get bored or frustrated. In the aggregate, they can be very clever just through the number of permutations they try. Individually, your 12-year-old isn’t going to Hack The Internet reliably.

what’s stopping people?

Capital, distribution, and expertise mostly.

in the past ten years, human flesh searching most often targets those perceived to make anti-nationalist comments.

Is there any actual evidence of this?

instead, they do non–party-threatening punditry. i’m talking people like zhang xuefeng and yuan tengfei or tankies like guyanmuchan

Chinese social media platforms have tried to rein in online nationalists by periodically suspending their accounts.

Well-known nationalist influencers Sima Nan and Guyanmuchan have been censored without warning. So was the blogger who tried to sue Mo Yan, whose lawsuit was also rejected by the courts.

One vlogger, who shot to notoriety this year after he posted a video accusing a shopping mall of putting up decorations that resembled the Japanese flag, was similarly shut down. A scathing state media commentary denounced his video as “a malicious report that rides on the online traffic of patriotism”.

:-/

Again, that doesn’t seem to be the case. These influencers are consistently at odds with state media and censors.

The WTO was always a modern form of merchantilism, predicated on the theory that Wall Street financiers would functionally control the global stock of capital in the end.

The China Problem is, at its root, that too much capital is owned by Chinese nationals. We had similar problems with Japan and Korea in the 80s and 90s, and solved this by forcing them to devalue their currencies and take on loads of foreign debt - both private and public - while hooking themselves up to the Saudi well-head for their energy needs.

But the Seattle protesters never really got a head of steam behind them, because Americans did benefit from all these cheap imports more than they suffered. Like, its hard to talk to a guy making high-six figures in the Bay Area or at Microsoft or Apple campus that they’d have been better off working the textiles or lumber industries or making low-margin electronics.

This was a real J. Sakai “Read Settlers” moment. Very hard to convince colonial settlers to vote/organize against what was their generation’s own best interest. If anyone should have been protesting (and quite a few did but certainly not enough), it was folks in Bangladesh or Malaysia or the Philippines, since they were the ones who ended up eating most of the global industrial era shit sandwich.

Now we’re faced with Chinese economy that gets to both make a bunch of high value high demand components and domestically consume it, though. And that’s not nearly as good a deal as what the post-'08 US economy has to offer.

“Hey, you’re not doing this DDoS from a Microsoft office are you?”

“Nope! No no no. Definitely coming from Iran.”

there is. it’s just not translated as doxxing for some reason i can never understand:

An early human flesh search dated back to March 2006, when netizens on Tianya Club collaborated to identify an Internet celebrity named “Poison” (simplified Chinese: 毒药; traditional Chinese: 毒藥; pinyin: dúyào). The man was found out to be a high-level government official.

That doesn’t sound like a campaign of independent agents backed by the CCP to harass dissidents of the government. Just the opposite.

In December 2008, the People’s Court in Beijing called it an alarming phenomenon because of its implications in “cyberviolence” and violations of privacy law. Human flesh searches are banned under the law.

This is a radical departure from the American mainstream social media organizing that has often been encouraged, facilitated, and collaborated with by state and national government agencies.

these already exist…

Again, I’m sure there are folks on the internet with bad takes. I’ve yet to see an Alex Jones equivalent on the scale of “Mainstream, high profile internet show dedicated to denying the existence of school shooters as a pretext for imposing gun regulations”. When that kind of personality pops up on the Chinese internet, authorities tend to move quickly to censure and de-list their content.

And a Chinese Tucker Carlson? What would that even look like? A Reagan-Era Maoist with family ties to the PLA who maintains an enormous following of Millennial / GenA viewers built on the back of qigong enthusiasts criticizing Xi Jinping from the Left? Seriously, name some names. I’d love to learn more about this individual.

I’ve dipped my toe in the waters of Chinese media and you just don’t find these kinds of firebrand figures anywhere in the mainstream. If anything, my experience has been with very baby-brained paternalistic bullshit. Hour long shows that have people cosplaying as historical figures and a crowd of academics and talking heads all just nod along agreeing with one another. Entertainment idols and rising political stars jerking each other off to some banal socio-economic milestone or hagiographical rendition of past glories.

If American media is All Red Meat All The Time, Chinese media is unseasoned tofu. It’s a totally different atmosphere.

Young people are kinda cooked I guess.

Always have been.

Insulin has always been incredibly cheap and easy to produce. It’s crazy that “Chinese insulin” has to break into any kind of market, given that we could be producing it at home at-cost in quantities large enough to saturate the population for next to nothing.