arquebus_x

NPR is not free; it's paid for by taxes, which means that every U.S. citizen is in fact paying for news whether they like it or not. And "not for profit" is not the same as "no cost to the consumer." In addition, most of the outlets for NPR are local public radio stations that are - you guessed it - funded by taxes (as well as fund drives).

That phrase doesn't mean what you think it means.

Yes but also no. The U.S. isn't a party to the ICC. It's not under ICC jurisdiction regardless of the ASMPA. The function of the ASMPA is mostly to serve as political theater.

The U.S. should be a party to the ICC, but it's not and it likely never will be.

Except the U.S. is not a party to the ICC and therefore not subject to its jurisdiction. It should be, but it's not. This is bullshit fear-mongering over something that literally cannot happen, in order to distract people from the thing that will and should be happening.

I was going to get this game. Now I'm not.

I love what Wikipedia says, succinctly:

"The Time Cube website did not have a home page as such…In one paragraph, he claimed that his own wisdom 'so antiquates known knowledge' that a psychiatrist examining his behavior diagnosed him with schizophrenia."

Very scummy, but neither illegal nor bait and switch. For the vast majority of people Discord is free; there’s no lock-in or purchase, which is the necessary element for something to be bait and switch. You can walk away at any time without losing anything of value (as defined by the market and by law).

Which basically just turns every NPC into a piñata. No thanks.

I don't read the Times anymore. I get my news elsewhere. That said, there are a few things to consider here, when it comes to the relative shittiness of the NYT vs other major papers. We have this notion, unfounded, that the NYT "used to be" better, or more progressive, or what have you. Certainly compared to the other two "papers of record" for the country (Washington Post and Wall Street Journal), it's a raging pinko rag. But the fact remains that it was founded as a conservative-leaning paper, continued to be a conservative-leaning paper in the 20th century and, surprise surprise, remains a conservative-leaning paper. The lean is more Tower of Pisa than Man Vomiting on Sidewalk, but it's still conservative.

Many of its bad takes (and there are many) are squarely in line with mainstream views. At worst, its views lag behind the country by a few years. And like all major news corporations, it is incentivized to maximize its visibility (and therefore revenue). Given the options of 1) publishing something incendiary that will put the paper in the public eye and help in creating more news to print or 2) doing additional work with the anticipated result of the truth not being nearly as interesting and therefore not nearly as attention-grabbing, they're going to do the less work option.

Next, the NYT is a victim of the news cycle just as much as the TV networks, if not more so. While the website updates fairly regularly throughout the day, the paper comes out once every 24 hours, and must be prepped hours in advance. This means that breaking news suffers from two issues: 1) it has to be investigated at a speed faster than the TV networks because they paradoxically don't have the luxury of time and 2) they can't afford to be tentative when they don't know something. CNN and Fox especially can get away with saying "we'll report back when we know more" because that "back" is maybe 30 minutes from now. "Developing stories" exist on news networks. They do not exist for print papers. If you publish, you have to claim to be definitive, or people will stop reading. ("Why should I read the NYT when they just keep saying they don't know shit?")

Finally, and we should take some solace from this, it should be noted that the NYT, despite being one of the "papers of record" for the country, is basically screaming into the void. Almost no one reads it. Damned if they do, damned if they don't, they're not conservative enough for the people who can throw money at a news organization when there are free alternatives available, and they're not progressive enough for the rest of us to care. The number of eyeballs scanning the NYT is vanishingly small compared to the eyeballs staring at Fox News - or even CNN, for that matter. Basically, the NYT just doesn't matter anymore. They can say whatever the fuck they want. They're not influencing anyone who isn't already on the same (sorry) page.

I certainly wouldn't fault anyone for giving up on the NYT because of its journalistic errors. I certainly have. But we should neither be surprised nor shocked. This behavior is baked into the cake, and it has been since 1851, and got even worse after 1980 when CNN first went on the air. They didn't suddenly get stupid, and they never betrayed us. We have simply never been their intended audience.

This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.

I'd probably be the person in my group being very skeptical of the gift economy idea. Functional gift economies are exceptionally complex. The ones that aren't very quickly switch to representational value exchange (aka money), because they can, because that's exponentially easier. A realistic gift economy wouldn't just be "doing favors." It involves a whole web of social conditions, obligations and organizations that, frankly, would take the most galaxy brained DM to implement effectively.