As a progressive, I agree that Big Pharma's profit motive is a major problem when it comes to public health campaigns like mass vaccination, and that those companies have not remotely answered adequately for many of their past misdeeds.
>to the point of absurdity and recoil from the general public
This is incorrect. The actions of wealthy people speak for themselves; they don't need to be demonized, they are plainly wrong on their face. That said, we're in agreement that these people don't have power without the less-wealthy people who enable them.
An aspect of this phenomenon (though not the entire explanation): Conservatives tend to oppose initiatives that are broadly beneficial - especially if they stand to help marginalized groups - if they require even a minor or suspected sacrifice on their part. In this case, inclusive of having to sublimate oneself to a public health campaign/the purported risk of side effects or autism, respectively.
I've also noticed that conservatives tend to have a pronounced reaction to the prospect of ills that have visited marginalized groups also becoming their problem. The US has a limited but sharp history of medical exploitation, particularly of minorities. Many conservatives think, "We're next, unless we resist forcefully."
You're doing that common conservative thing of correctly identifying the principle, but then taking a turn into ridiculousness when enumerating examples. We are, in fact, in this mess because of the upper middle/professional class. It's not because of green regulations or DEI. It's because that class has a vested interest in enabling the aforementioned billionaire charlatans and their flights of fancy/fear, no matter wht those might be. Literally, if we're talking about their retirement accounts. Why are the best minds of our generation working on ads and addiction machines? Why can't we, as a country, solve problems that poorer countries solved decades ago? Because so very few with a salary and mortgage can think 5-10 years ahead, outside of their plan to scale the crab bucket walls (as rugged individuals). It won't end until a critical mass are ready to say, when presented yet another boondoggle meant to impoverish their neighbors economically and spiritually, "I don't care, I won't do it, fire me," and mean it. The robots aren't ready yet; the wealthy and deleterious elements of society still need poorer cosigners. Snap the pen in half.
Terms of Service say otherwise. Until the ads came in, users absolutely had a "right" to access YouTube's services for free. I'm sorry that you misspoke.
Bernie Sanders won against Trump in h2h polls in 2016 and 2020, quite strongly. Booker was on his was to something similar. Even 2008 Obama campaigned left of Clinton (we made the correct choice as far as an electoral victory goes, then, if not necessarily policy-wise).
These are realities that the DNC won't face because it threatens their donors. SF is a bad example as a region on a neoliberal stranglehold that is only nominally leftist, but much more concerned with money. The political machine there is adept at crushing upstarts. Nancy Pelosi had a serious challenger several years ago; she refused to debate him, and bad actors with Pelosi connections torpedoed his efforts with specious harrasment campaigns.
Which is all to say that the DNC and its local arms go out of their way to actively scuttle anything that doesn't have their seal of approval. Hope in SF, Kentucky, and elsewhere is not a function of progressive electoral capability, but of establishment Democrats' willingness to play fair or dirty.
Well, there's the notion that price no longer quite reflects what's going on under the surface. Certainly, it's in the interests of an entity experiencing a run on its reserves to do everything it can to obfuscate any indication that a run is taking place, including suspicious price shifts. Perhaps it's even more suspicious that such clear movement isn't being reflected in price volatility. If there were no trouble, a small shift reflecting physical movement wouldn't be too dangerous to allow to happen. But what if it wouldn't be a small shift?
That's incorrect - or, at least, not seriously tested with a true far-left candidate with the DNC'S full backing. Dan Osborn was decidedly not that.
Bernie Sanders is, of course, the quintessential example, as he polled better against Trump than all 3 of Trump's eventual Democratic opponents. Katie Porter flipped a red district and was well known for taking corporate stooges to task; the DNC undermined her latest election, and now she's out of politics, IIRC.
Then there's the case in Kentucky, where Charles Booker had a real chance to unseat Mitch McConnell in 2020; he was exceptionally charismatic and had poll numbers that were rising terrifically fast because he was home-grown and made a point of trying to unite people through shared interest. The DNC shoveled millions into primary opponent Amy McGrath's campaign, and even locked black Kentuckians out of their sole voting center in Louisville, suppressing the vote; right-of-center McGrath won, but it's hard to overstate by how narrowly.
She was trounced in the general, and it's important to point out why: because she represented too little difference from McConnell. She was never going to peel voters off the real thing with a milquetoast knock-off. Booker growth in the polls before it was cut short was so pronounced becaus he offered a real choice to Kentuckians. But the problem, for the DNC, isn't that far-left policies aren't popular (they are, wildly, and particularly among the demos that stay home if not activated with a promise of positive change); it's that those policies are anathema to the elite within the party and party donors.
That's the actual reality. Which is sobering, because it means that the left's best chance to make real progress would be when an economic reckoning robs that elite of the funding to buy their preferred candidates.
This is a deeply interesting comment. Obviously, YouTube began and spent several years as an ad-free, subscription-free platform, so to state that no one has ever had the "right" to use YouTube without paying or watching ads is patently false. But why would someone make such statement? Are they too young to remember an ad-free YouTube? Do they have some vested interest in pushing the idea that the YT user experience has never been and never could be more consumer-friendly than it is? Has the state of political rhetoric in 2025 - the age of Applied Big Brother, where simply stating one's preferred history makes it "real" - trickled down to normal discourse?
Who knows? Anyway, I use an adblocker and Grayjay.
Cyberpunk has always been, "What if what happens to those people happened to us?" "Us" being the relatively affluent and stable first world, "those people" being the put-upon urban poor and working class (which I usually summarize as "black Americans" for American readers - to shake them out of their myopia regarding the social and racial politics of the genre - but, as you point out, should include people in Asia and elsewhere).
Its power has never been in its predictive ability, because so much of what defines cyberpunk is already happening. Instead, the consideration of, "That horrible thing can happen to me, too," opens the intellectual doorway (or third eye) to questions of self, cognizance, experience. The computers are just a light show, or a lens.
Preserving wealth is actually an uphill battle. It likes to leak; the wealthy need the help of systems and institutions to keep their largesse intact. If you want it to diffuse throughout society, stop guarding it, stop bailing them out, and tax them like you mean it.
So many policy decisions are about who to throw under the bus; flip the incidence from "mostly people without wealth" to "mostly people with wealth".
Semi-counterpoint: the actually smart, high-achieving young people adapt to the status quo. The ones one rung lower, who the prevailing system cast aside for some deficit or other, begin their own independent revolutions (often at the margin of society, and achieving little).
The rubes who blindly join someone else's revolution are neither the smartest nor the most high-achieving; they're just... useful.
It's incorrect to divorce this dynamic from its history, which is largely one of America's right wing/nativists using "states' rights" as a cover to infringe on the rights of marginalized people, which are supposed to be inalieanable from the federal government's point of view. You have to mention the applications of that ideology, which include secession, Jim Crow laws, and anti-abortion laws, among others.
It seems as good a time as any to point out that the environment in which people like this are making decisions is the one in which equal opportunity/affirmative action/DEI become tenable, if not necessary.
For those of you whinging about how unfair scope-broadening to force decision makers to at least consider marginalized people for opportunities is, the problem is not these initiatives, it's these people, who make it impossible to determine if someone is being rejected for merit or for some other reason.
In general, we have to get away from the idea that the highest score along a narrow measure is the be-all-end-all of merit, anyway. Set a reasonable floor of competence, and then either run a lottery or begin looking at other qualities.
It would also be damning of recruitment patterns across American institutions. Getting ahold of prestigious or lucrative opportunities often requires pressing unfair advantages that other applicants don't even know exist, by design. My personal anecdote: my SAT score was higher than yours (statistically-speaking, this statement is correct 9 times out of 10, maybe slightly less considering the audience); my alma mater's ranking is lower than yours. I was not privy to he means required to capitalize on my performance. No one bats an eye at this; if the guidance of the adults in my life and my own ambition didn't drive me to a better school, that's tough luck. Never mind that the incidence of this sort of situation has a likewise racially-biased bent.
Perhaps if these sorts of tactics, or even just circumstances, weren't so prevalent, then they wouldn't seem like such a good idea to purposely replicate.
No one is gullible enough to believe that, if the alleged is true, it would be the first time that unscrupulous methods were used to advantage a particular group in recruitment for jobs or education, right? Or that, when it has happened, it has been primarily used to advantage black applicants?
I'll do you one better: in this specific situation, the antisocial buck stops at the friend group who doesn't all chip in and buy their Android friend a "keep in touch" iPhone.
But the point remains that a cynical UX/technical/business decision that does not need to be so is rending real relationships between actual people. If Tim Cook had the power to render anyone who didn't pay him $400+ mute to their friends and family through some sort of black magic, we'd call him a comic book supervillain.
Without reading your link: this is a problem across new and existing builds, so it can't be an issue wih permitting. Housing cost growth has outpaced wage growth for decades. We are reaching an inflection point of unaffordability (unequally distributed geographically, of course). The problem is that market rates must support a number of (often unnecessary or inflated) concerns, including but not limited to permitting and litigation. Profit for a rotating cast of securitized mortgage holders is another major one. Insolvent municipalities that can't see property taxes fall is another.
Every company in the space realizes that it's the next computer pillar, after desktop PCs and smartphones. Even more so: these devices see everything their users see (and more), hear everything they hear (and more), and can provide significant insight into their mental and emotional states. The prospect of controlling the platform all of this takes place on? No one - especially incumbents that know their history - wants to get left behind. Everyone knows Apple's modus operandi: wait for others to experiment, then define the standard and run away with the market. So, Facebook bought Oculus (and slow-walked its R&D), Google shelved Project Tango, and everyone resolved to wait for Apple to make their move. Apple knew this, and kept pushing back their own reveal. The arrival and demise of upstart Magic Leap (and smaller failures from Vuzix and Snap, among others) confirmed to everyone that there was no point in trying anything until Apple had shown their hand.
So, we've been in a stalemate for more than 10 years. The AVP finally had to come out - antsy investors - and turned out to be the overengineered product of Apple trying to outmaneuver everyone else's outmaneuver, with the entire field understanding that whoever wins this owns the next 20 years.
However, it's a bit of a Chinese finger trap. Consumers and users want actual value out of this technology, and developers want to provide fantastically innovative uses, and both are at odds with the platform owners' lust for unilateral control. The platform that wins will be more like a PC than a Silicon Graphics workstation (which is what Apple et al seem hellbent on forcing down people's throats). Get something with basic functionality that just works out of the box, and that is open and ready for experimentation, into as many hands as possible. It will bulldoze the field. (This is why the Quest line has gotten so close. Shame about the owner.)