Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to Tom Semmens,
an important function of state broadcasters of record is their role in disasters, and radio and broadcast TV are relatively robust in the face of disaster.
This is important, as is the question of access. Considering that it took well over 8 weeks for my broadband to get connected at home, despite all the physical infrastructure being in place already, and someone in a remote location perhaps having no internet connection at all, there's still a place for this "obsolete" technology. And the radio works in my car, and is still a good way to listen to the news without killing oneself fiddling with a device. I confess to reading Twitter while driving a lot - when in traffic jams mostly - but on the motorway good old fashioned newsreading makes commuting much more bearable.
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Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to Jason Kemp,
I'm probably a minority audience but it has made broadcast TV pretty much unwatchable with its high percentage of dross and interruption style thinking.
I used to think so too, but when I moved house last year we decided not to go getting MySky again (yes, I know it's broadcast, but it's also timeshifted and you can basically skip ads) and I haven't found Freeview nearly as burdensome as I'd thought.
If I'm dying I can download something, but for the most part vegging out watching what millions of other people watch has actually felt less isolating than all the picking and choosing and obsessing about not watching ads. Hell, my attention to what isn't ads is pretty low anyway, considering that I've got the net in my pocket at all times, and I'm pretty much reading during every show anyway, looking up only for those moments that they promise 7 times in the hour and then finally deliver in the last 10 minutes. ZOMG, he's gonna tell her he's a stripper! ZOMG, the dessert collapsed! ZOMG, Trump's brainfarted in 100 million faces again! OK, back to some long article the lazywebs found me.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
They are getting pushed out of many countries, and in some cases the management are being arrested. I think it's end of days for them. Which is usually the time an Empire looks strongest and most unassailable - right before it falls.
Yes it's quiet here. I've got another job and it's keeping me busy. Since the Uber advocacy is unpaid, it fits in where it can and recently that's not been very often. Considering that mostly what we're doing is waiting for the impartial majesty of the justice system to come to a conclusion about who exactly should be turning up, I'm not in that much of a hurry. At some point we'll be in an actual court hearing, and this house of cards is going to come crashing down because at the end of the day it's still a country of laws, no matter how many lawyers you send to try to mess with that.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Last time I was in a pruning gang it was all immigrants and students. Very high liberal quotient, not a lot of salty earth. How about you? What was your last experience of an eight week stint in a pruning gang like? I'll admit that it did not enjoy the work, it was poorly paid, boring and physically demanding, not to mention involving spending a fair bit on petrol to get to it. I did not see a future in it, nor did I meet anyone who did. The general opinion of people doing that kind of work is that anyone who could be doing anything else would be mad not to. Generally they were full of admiration and envy for people who seemed likely to be on an escape trajectory, whether they were liberal or not. Liberality was pretty much an irrelevance.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Has parody turned to farce? We were joking about flying cars and Ubers last year as like the next level of ridiculous. Nek minnit, it's what they're claiming. Should we start a pool on the next technology? Add to this list:
-Uber Hover cars for competing with ferries
-Uber plus Rocket Labs = taking the international flight industry by storm delivering passengers via suborbital hops
-Uber Cryo - take a one way trip to the future by putting your body on ice
-Uber Tardis - why stop at only going forward in time?
-Uber Teleport - Transmit your body to your destination without even needing to pull out your credit car -
So Labour gets Willie because Trump. Trump trumps Cucks because Working Class. Immigrants not Working Class because Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism because Libtards.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Rich Lock,
Bannon, and four or five others of a very tight inner circle, are the ones setting the policy and driving things.
They are, and they're definitely dangerous, don't get me wrong. But they're not even near Nazi levels of organized bastardry. Of course we don't want them to get anywhere near that, but until the first credible political murder is conducted by their gang, I don't have grave fears for the collapse of the political order in the US. And of course that is a threshold that it will be incredibly hard to get away with.
Hitler was organizing shit like that in the early 20s.
This is more like a Berlusconi style despotism. Corrupt, nepotistic. But not really outright fascist. It's not a good place to be, admittedly.
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A coup? I do not believe American democracy to be that weak. For all it's faults, it has stood for hundreds of years, riding through far greater challenges than a childish playboy making a mockery of it. Comparisons with the rise of fascism in the 1930s are very premature. These people are not nearly as organized or powerful as the Nazis, nor is America anywhere near as angry as the German people were during that time, nor is ANY country actually belligerent towards them. They have not been vanquished in war and crushed under decades of sanctions. Everything that's happened to them, they did to themselves.
Of course it's concerning that the most powerful job in the world is held by a muppet. But it's not the first time it's happened. I think in many ways it is the very impossibility of a coup that has led to a president full of braggadocio. Some proportion of the population really wants the kind of change a fascist might be able to bring, but they won't get that, they'll get someone going through the motions of strongman leadership and accomplishing very little because ultimately it's not a country that will tolerate fascists.
I don't really see how we can help Americans sort this out. Nor do I even think we should. Nations are already dealing with Trump's random silliness in ways that make sense to them and that's as far as we really need to go. The Trump supporters are just going to have to learn the hard way that no one is going to build their wall for them, and their economy is far more reliant on trade and immigration than they realize, and that you can't strong arm the whole world. No way is the USA that powerful. The world will simply turn away from it.
Which ironically will probably be good for the world, but not America. But what will be good for America is the exercise of it's checks and balances, eventually. Maybe they'll even add some new ones.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Gareth Davidson,
More to the point, a $200 lock provides a lot more security and peace of mind than a $20 one. Most people usually only invest in one after having their bike stolen…
Yes, for a bike worth more than my car, I can appreciate the argument. For one worth about the same amount as your lock, like what I currently ride....
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Gareth Davidson,
I can budget $360/year for insurance, I can’t budget $3600/year for a new bike.
That would only be the budget if you were losing $3600 worth of bike every year, though. What has been your average lost bike per year loss? I bet it's less than $360!