To my knowledge, Paypal continues to randomly and often very opaquely freeze people's funds for months at a time or longer, so if you have a link to this FTC ruling, im honestly curious to see it.

So let me get this straight. Weeks of protests which started against racism and police brutality but in many places degenerated into mass looting and burning of whole buildings (often in both cases having no connection to perpetrators of violence against minorities) gets swept under the rug as justified social anger and legitimate social protest (not to mention the medical community performing clinical contortions to keep itself on the woke side of things despite its previous criticisms of those who were irresponsible in not socially distancing in public) But this bunch of people deserve lengthy prison sentences, all the hate that can be tossed on them and every nasty thought it's possible to generate?

Talk about absurd double standards. No fan of Trump and these protestors strike me as idiotic, but if you're going to hate on them this much, it's worth analyzing why other fairly recent protests somehow deserved a free pass because of their supposed social justice credentials...

>That shows you how little value these services actually provide to most people. The remaining users wouldn't pay for year two, because to many others would have left the platform.

No, I'm extremely critical of many aspects of Facebook (and implicitly Whatsapp as an FB property, especially now) but to say they provide so little value based on how few people would possibly pay these amounts uses flawed assumptions. If people didn't pay it wouldn't be because they don't gain at least 1 or 2 dollars in value (many people almost certainly do, I certainly do with my own use), it would be because the model of offering high value for free in exchange for massive amounts of saleable user data is so lucrative that alternatives with free versions would quickly take over market share. In absolute terms, the use value of FB or Whatsapp to a user is often much more than 1 dollar per month, but compared to the ease of switching to someone who in the existing market again offers the same for free, it could quickly descend to less than 1 dollar.

Yet, here you are, a relatively anonymous individual of whose talents, accomplishments or level of education we can't be sure, happily spewing out your own completely unsubstantiated opinion, essentially indistinguishable from garbage, to a reading public on a major news aggregation site.

> Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence.

Have you ever actually read examples of newspapers and news reporting from the earlier parts of the 20th century? The dishonest, mendacious bias in favor of any media source's ideological preference was extreme to a degree that even today isn't readily visible. Certain media empires were absolutely ruled by their owners and even major papers like the New York Times were often loaded in slant towards certain ideological narratives. Just to name one example: Read about Walter Duranty. Things were even more vicious in the 19th century.... I have no idea where this notion of once fair, objective news sources comes from but it's certainly not rooted in the practical reality (referring in all of this to U.S media and politics, regarding other countries things get more ambiguous and complciated probably).

I think you and GP are talking about different time periods. Walter Cronkite is 50s to 70s, the postwar figurehead when there were like 3 TV channels. That's where the notion of a shared reality comes from. And I guess this was still pretty strong into the 90s, everyone watched gulf war I on CNN right?

Whereas Walter Duranty was a big deal in the 20s & 30s, in much more fragmented & volatile times. Although how much their fragmentation resembles ours I don't know. They had many far-out newspapers but still only a few radio shows, and perhaps a larger role for shared institutions like churches & public schools?

I'm not sure this is your position, but one extreme is to describe this "shared reality" as being imposed by force on everyone by one privileged group.

But I'd like to highlight other forces. One was technological, 3 TV channels or whatever was all they could do, and this implied that there was going to be a pretty high degree of conformity. You couldn't broadcast weird Italian movies because only a few percent were interested. The 4 big car companies who bought the ads which paid the bills really didn't want to be associated with anything partisan, they all needed to sell to everyone.

Another was historical / emotional. The nation had just emerged from this gigantic world war, and it was a spectacular victory, which gave enormous prestige to the huge centralized machines built to fight it. They built a lot of similar machines back home, big corporations with a commander-in-chief who wasn't a self-made robber barron, he was promoted up the ranks. Big unions, and big regulation.

This experience also squashed a lot of earlier differences. You say "Women? Marginalised people?" but this seems like a modern take, I think they would have said "Irish? Polish? Jewish?". These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one, I mean, a Catholic could be elected president, that was a big deal.

But all of these are gone now. So perhaps 100 years ago is a better guide than 50 years ago.

Perhaps "creation" was too strong a word. So no, it wasn't so much being imposed as it was a natural (albeit unfortunate) consequence of technology, which you point out, and post-war sentiment, which you also point out! I agree with you, I'm just saying it wasn't a good thing. When there's so few voices, there's only so much they can say.

> These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one

Shared by white people, for the most part.

I'm not sure what you mean in your penultimate paragraph. "identities and divisions eroding" is only partly true, surely. You could certainly argue the opposite is true - see the women's lib and civil rights movements for examples of people fighting back against conformity.

Note that I try not to say this consensus was either a good or a bad thing, only that it existed. It had pros & cons, and trying to weigh them up overall seems a bit of a distraction. I'm glad I don't live under it, although perhaps those who did were also glad not to live under earlier systems. But we don't get to choose when to be born, so we are not obliged to reach a yes/no vote.

Right, the experience of black people was pretty distinct, 20s-60s-now, and those are really interesting stories. And there's a fractal of smaller group stories, too. But I think the story arc from hyper-partisan 19th C news-politics to Walter Cronkite to Twitter can be understood (to a large degree) before zooming in that far. Although once you do, then indeed, the present tendency to focus on smaller groups' stories does look like part of the same Cronkite -> Twitter arc.

> But we don't get to choose when to be born, so we are not obliged to reach a yes/no vote.

I wish more people thought this way. We think we're so smart!

In off to bed, but thank you for the reply, I understand more what you meant now.

If you're an otherwise healthy individual,eating cold food or being moderately cold have no clinical relevance to internal body temperature or how often you get sick from viruses. You're passing off an old grandmother's myth as a medical observation.

1.The main reason land armies are no longer relevant to superpower conflicts is due to the nuclear peace. This is hopefully a long term situation but if the genie of normalizing nuclear weapons use comes out of the bottle, or if a method of using nukes that are "optimized" for manageable long term damage is developed, I can nearly guarantee you that large powers will again start having conflicts more often. If this happens, big armies will definitely become important again. Smart warfare, drones, guided weapons and all sorts of shiny systems for technologically sophisticated killing are fine as far as they go (especially for small localized police actions) but only large military forces and equipment ultimately allow any one major country to seriously fight another major country.

2. Also, as a quick note to the comment above yours, China is an economic and possibly to some extent resource threat to Russia, but the obvious target of simply overtaking a huge chunk of Russian territory through Siberia (which in purely conventional military terms I think China could easily pull off) wouldn't happen, because Russia despite all its modern systemic weaknesses, crumbling demographics and terrible military administration still has the single largest nuclear arsenal on Earth, which takes us back to point one above.

3. China is a strong power with a vast population that dwarfs that of the U.S and an economy that's getting very close to rivalling it in both sophistication and raw wealth production, but it's also strangely isolated in its power. The U.S on the other hand has strong affinities with much of western and central Europe, several other asian nations with large populations and also a much better relationship with the second most populous country on Earth, right next door to China. Russia would never readily take China's side in a global conflict even if it dislikes the western hegemony and all of these things combined along with others leave china in a state of extreme vulnerability if we were to start talking about a real, serious multinational conflict between it and the U.S.

China's biggest strength is the economic dependence it has created in so much of the world, especially for manufacturing, but if a war were to break out between it and the west, this would in any case become a moot point, removing the one major incentive that any other country not directly next to it would have for trying to stay on China's good side.

>As for police state tactics, I don’t think they’d be considered if people were just smart and took precautions. They’re on the table because too many people insist on refusing to do simple things.

What an absurdly twisted bit of authoritarian reasoning. The very point of a free society is that you should be able to refuse certain things without being forced into them for the act of refusing.

Is there a non-paywalled version of this anywhere, or a way of finding it. Really, it's tiresome to see constant posting of content that most others can't even read.

It may be a jurisdictional thing or a lack of ad blocking? I didn't see a paywall here in the U.S. with a generic ad blocker on my phone, FWIW.

Feel free to post a link to one concrete case of mass migration due to human climate change from temperatures or rising sea levels. Not ambiguous cases like the hurricane in your link but actual relatively demonstrable cases of direct temperature rises or sea level rises from climate change caused by humans. So far, a lot of frantic hand waving and heady speculation aside, I know of none.