The term "validity" is thrown around a lot but there's no universal measure of psychometric validity. In simple terms, something is valid if it's predictive of something else that is useful (usually a behavior or another construct). There's plenty of studies that investigate the validity of love languages around things like marital satisfaction etc. More importantly, for the purposes of this study which is just based around self-reported preferences (and not psychometric properties), validity doesn't really matter. Reliability does, and there are is plenty of research around the reliability of these scales.
That's a really powerful self-discovery. Obviously some people are more introverted than others, but introversion has more to do with how we handle (over)stimulation than it does desire for social connection and acceptance. Humans are incredibly social creatures by nature. Even the most introverted people usually want connection.
I'm extremely fortunate to have a partner that valued what we had enough to stick around for a long time but, this past year, it was starting to reach a breaking point. That lead to big talks, some scary but polite, some loud and angry. A lifetimes worth of under-the-surface stuff all came out over just a few months.
What I think we figured out is that we have "compatible" (co-enabling) anxieties that keep our relationship mostly functional. That feels like a drastic over-simplification but accurate, I think. All I know is it feels like the most emotionally productive year of my life and our relationship is way better now. However, I still haven't figured out how to tone down the anxiety much :)
> What I think we figured out is that we have "compatible" (co-enabling) anxieties
Good news, you're completely normal. Every couple has their unconscious dance both in a positive and negative way.
Barring physical ailments, low vitamin D (etc), the solution for anxiety is do your healing work. Anxiety is often unresolved fear, anger, shame, guilt, etc. Everyone has anxieties, and they have to be dealt with daily.
The differences between men and women are usually not as dramatic as standup comedy and television make them out to be. The differences aren't dramatic, but they are statistically significant.
Or any other social institution for that matter: religion, newspapers, families, schools, sports, &c. Social institutions are fundamental or at the very least complicit in the legitimization of the social mechanisms of typification. That is to say, licensing the idea and practice that individual behavior can be simplified to types.
We all know the dangers of using oversimplified models in other contexts, but the same applies here and happens to be one of the largest generators of present conflict. It's a classic map-territory problem applied to people themselves and - whether the map makers know this or not - those who control the maps can sometimes also control the territory.
I seriously wonder whether there will be a cultural rebellion against the digitization of our lived experiences. It seems like everyone (even the youngest who grew up in a fully digital world) feels like we're on this path to black mirror dystopia, but there's yet to be a collective awakening/action to combat it. It wouldn't surprise me if down the road there's a cultural movement that decides "we're opting out of all this"
A bunch of episodes of Black Mirror aren't really even about the future. They're criticism of things right now (or, rather, when the episodes were made).
I took a course in university on sci-fi and the professor said that all science fiction was a reflection of the moment it was written, and had almost nothing to do with prognosticating.
“The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.”
How many video game developers rarely play video games? I bet most game devs don't count gaming amongst their defining interests.
There seems to be a majority swath of humans who get hooked on unproductive hobbies. Drugs, partying, social media, video games. I'm talking HOOKED, dreams framed by the TikTok UI, taking work off to watch a Counterstrike tournament, weeks of back-to-back hangovers.
I mean, I've been there. I too hear the lull of chemical dissociation.
What I'm wondering is, what happens as that lullaby gets louder and brighter and more attractive, in sync with people working less and less as automation forms a mechanical sheen on all economic activity?
I'll just toss this one I caught as I wrote that: You think the opioid epidemic is bad? Is it better or worse for us that our addictions can't annihilate us in an instant? How many people are in their rooms right now, alone, entangled in expensive parasocial relationships and expensive video game habits?
What if people aren't stealing and robbing shit for drugs anymore, but are doing it to donate to their favorite streamer, or buy the new Supreme hoodie or buy a PS5?
I mostly agree with this, but I think it's more subtle.
Every game developer I've ever known, which is a good number, was a hard core gamer who loved games. Most of them really reduced it as they get older - not just because as you get older you just don't have the time or energy, but because doing something for work just kind of ruins it for most people.
That last bit is very common: my wife is a professional artist and doing that as her profession has just about ruined her interest in painting and drawing despite doing it for a lifetime. I was a hobby coder my entire life until mid-way through my career. Now although I sometimes do short stints, I gotta say, it is kind of ruined for me.
So, sure, you are probably right, but probably for the wrong reasons.
As for "unproductive hobbies" the reality is that all hobbies are basically unproductive. The stained glass artists I know struggle to give away their output because there's only so much anyone around them wants, but their hobby is to produce it. Ditto the painters, woodworkers, etc. Yes, these can give you practice with useful skills, but they're still basically generating a waste product, and if you try selling it, on average, you're just trying to mitigate your losses, piece work is almost never financially sound. This is all to say that one shouldn't view hobbies as "productive" or not, you should view them as providing benefits not directly related to the activity. Hiking, running, cycling, weightlifting - these are all "unproductive" but they are useful practices. Games aren't devoid of value in this sense - hand eye coordination, rapid tactical thinking, etc. are all skills you develop and maintain with practice.
That said, I'm 100% on board with you about the parasocial relationship thing, but to note the obvious, the real elephant in that particular room is social networking in all of its guises. Video games aren't even close, and, if anything, are probably closer to the "real relationship" end of the spectrum than any other online endeavor. I know many gamer groups who have transitioned to real life on multiple dimensions, far more than "hey these are the people i interacted with on Twitter" and other purely ephemeral constructs.
I wouldn’t consider “Hiking, running, cycling, weightlifting” to be “unproductive”. It is pretty well established that regular exercise routines improve your quality of life in many physical and mental ways.
You are correct that social media and online gaming are not the same: I have heard numerous examples of online gaming friendships transforming into real life friendships, but I have never heard of people on twitter/tick-tock/etc forming real life relationships.
I believe that gaming is fine in moderation, but as soon as gaming starts to negatively impact other aspects of your life — personal health, relationships, work/study commitments — you need to cut back. I have seen numerous people squander away their education and futures to video games. I’m guilty myself of letting video games negatively impact my life and it can be hard to find the right balance.
Well John Romero got fired for slacking off on development of Quake 1 playing Doom deathmatches all the time. So I can imagine some devs love the games they make but probably not that many.
I think the backlash against Google Glass might have subsided if it had been a useful device that was widely available. (Of course, the wide release version was on watches)
As it was, wearing a Google Glass was making several statements: I have acccess to this special thing; I'm going to wear this mostly useless object in a highly visible location on my body; and if actually using it in public, I don't care that having a one-sided conversation with a computer annoys those around me (kind of like talking on a phone/bluetooth headset, but worse). Maybe the camera was the anchor for the issue, but I don't think it was the real issue; I don't recall seeing articles about people being shunned for wearing the Snapchat camera glasses.
If/when we have AR glasses that are reasonably priced and genuinely useful, I'm inclined to think they'll be broadly accepted. Yes, there will be people including some of the people reading this who will be upset about the panopticon-like invasion of privacy associated with always-on cameras everywhere. But they'll be largely ignored just as they are today with respect to video/photos being just a smartphone in the pocket away.
It's easy to forget that less than 20 years ago taking a photo, much less a video, was a pretty deliberate act involving equipment that most people didn't routinely carry with them.
Google has lame boring marketing and is just not fashionable enough at this moment, just wait until Apple iGlass ProPrivacy™ appears on the market, lines at the Apple Store will be record long and owners will wear it with pride and sense of accomplishment/superiority.
I mean, if it's the same product, more or less an Apple Watch you have to strain your eyes to see, I expect it'll have the same lack of customers, even if Apple invents it. Maybe with less backlash.
Google Glass was just too sudden a change. Another decade of eroding our collective sense of privacy and boundaries means it might be more successful now than it was back when we still had some expectation of personal privacy.
anecdotal, but I went to a concert recently and was amazed/thrilled to see maybe five or ten isolated instances of someone pulling out their phone to take a few second clip for insta or snapchat or whatever
5-ish years ago it would be common to see 25-45% of the crowd with their phones up and out recording almost the entire show
I'll gladly be part of a movement to opt out of this. I tend to be very selective about technologies I let into my life. My wife hasn't always shared my view, but the metaverse she agreed doesn't need to be part of our lives.
I hope the bifurcation is real because that will make it easier to keep the metaverse separate from the real world.
It's less niche than I would have guessed--about 5% of industry revenue and about the same as CDs (which surprised me a bit given that I still sometimes buy CDs and haven't bough vinyl for decades). Still, that's revenue not listens or anything like that so that's still pretty much a rounding error.
It is extremely niche because the relevant measure isn't revenue, it is "hours of music listened to". And the amount of hours spent listening to vinyl as a proportion of all music listened to is vanishingly small, smaller than it has ever been. A hipster resurgence as a novelty collectors item doesn't change that.
Ebooks never gained the completely dominant position that digital photography and music did. And even those among us who prefer ebooks for fiction consisting of flowing text still prefer printed books for a lot of more reference-oriented or "coffee table" books.
As someone who went all-in on ebooks for 10+Y, having bought a kindle immediately and used it extensively, I've gone back to books. The kindle experience just isn't as good and it took me a long time to simply accept that.
I like the Kindle especially for travel. Lighting in hotel rooms/planes often is less than ideal and it's great to not be forced to choose a book I'm going to be in the mood to read on a given trip. But, for the most part, I don't like cookbooks and other essentially reference books on Kindle/iPad. (I still buy them sometimes but mostly because I got some sort of $1/$2 deal.)
Yeah, kindle is only for travel and for when I'm living abroad in places where I just can't get access to non-mass market paperbacks and so need to order from the e-book store
Slow. So awful for going back and forth that I stopped doing it. Smaller display than I’d like. I have special hate for the touchscreen kindles, I really prefer my 1st hen kindle to the current version. Actual forward and backward buttons.
I'm going to call it now: The zeitgeist of the 2030s and 2040s will be a focus on biology to contrast with technology. So instead of trying to eliminate humans from the equation, we'll see a group of people who take parts of tech they like (such as systems thinking) and focus it on human improvement instead of external tech.
Think genetically engineered humans vs. cyborgs; there will be a focus on holistic 'working with' human impulses and neurology instead of 'what can the tech accomplish'?
This is starting to happen now, and we're working on it related to neurology and improving sleep at https://soundmind.co
Cyborg always has the feeling of a severely augmented and strange human. I'm surprised by the number of people who have no interest in Neuralink, and say they wouldn't go near it.
As we're seeing the mental health benefits of sometimes turning off our digital devices and focusing on ourselves, I think this will drive the future of us not being always connected, but being connected when we want to.
I think what you're pointing to is correct, Augmented Humanity, rather than Augmented Reality.
I know just enough about that shit to not want to go ANYWHERE near Neuralink or the 'Metaverse'.
Which is sad because I love the idea so much. Plus I remember the Web before advertising, I don't even want to think of what they'd do with NL or the Metaverse. I can see them doing things like trigging shots of adrenaline so I feel appropriately angry viewing 'Red/Blue Team Bad' video stories.
Regarding the zeitgeist change: don’t you think that expectation windows for results based on success of disrupting markets by tech have shrunk to a point where it’s not possible for a more long term and complex projects (biology being one of them) to attract enough talent? I feel like such changes are only possible based on big crises
I do, but I also think that we'll see this biology flowering from non-tech people who have some tech skill. So it won't be tech companies moving into biology space, it will be lab workers and students who know some coding realizing that 'hey, I could do this thing using my phone' and sharing with each other. I also think that as the sector grows and we see more people trained, we'll see a medical research boom the same way we saw a boom in devs in the 90s so the talent base will expand a LOT.
The expectation windows are set by investors, and I think biology has a good shot at being able to get resources/funding without having to rely too heavily on VCs or investors (think government and academic funding). Likewise, there's no Microsoft, Google, or FB waiting in the wings to buy up/bury any advancements.
I also think we're overdue for some major social changes because our current ways aren't sustainable (regardless of what you think the problems are + what 'side' you're on, I think we can almost all agree that this can't continue). The main problem I think IS that we're too short sighted currently, and we'll have to correct that, so I do think long-term projects will become easier in the early 2030s.
I think you have a point, I am betting on human-to-human occupations, especially psychology, gender roles being shrunk might bring some new ideas and shake the field up.
> I also think we're overdue for some major social changes because our current ways aren't sustainable (regardless of what you think the problems are + what 'side' you're on, I think we can almost all agree that this can't continue).
I'd love to hear more of your POV here - I tend to think things are....pretty okay? In the grand scheme of things?
In the grand scheme of things, they are. (I mean, for most of human existence we barely had any medicine and as a disabled person, I do love me some medical science).
Change, however, doesn't come based on how good things are. It comes based on what people expect from the future, and right now we have a system that more and more people aren't trusting to be there in a few decades.
From a domestic American POV, we need to address things like retirement funding, healthcare, and political corruption as well as our lack of social cohesion. Imagine a pandemic like COVID but slightly deadlier in the late 2020s; it'd be absurd because EVERYBODY'S blown their good will at this point. Likewise, our supply chains and economy clearly don't have key risk redundancies built in. On a more sociological scale, I note that more and more people are beginning to feel like it doesn't matter what they do because the system will ALWAYS fuck them, and stripping people of agency doesn't lead to good, stable societies.
On a global scale, since the start of the Industrial Revolution we've focused on growth while disregarding externalities and we really need to stop that. Likewise, since America is going to probably go down (or at least knock itself out of the unipolar world) in the 2030s/2040s, I also imagine there will be a backlash to the American Era, including in cultural values, which will also result in big changes.
This is a fascinating question, because my first thought was 'maybe they would be' but as I thought about it more, I don't think so for two main reasons:
1.) Geopolitics. I don't imagine this biological cultural flowering to come from the First or Developed Worlds. If I had to guess, I'd say India or Africa, because they have a ton of manufacturing going on (and therefore a bunch of practical knowledge) AND governments that both a.) don't give a shit about copyright or property law outside of their borders and b.) are incentivized to make sure it stays that way.
For example, Moderna could try to bury an Indian biotech company, but how? Literally. So what if they're infringing on one of your patents in making their 'turn your eyes purple' serum? They don't care.
And for buying, yes, they could, but the regulatory differences between acting in the developed versus developing world are huge, so it would be purchasing a company solely to keep the product off the market/so it isn't approved in the developed world before their own version. Okay, so they buy the company... and all the foreigners quit and start a new one. Or they don't, but they tell their friends so their friends who didn't sign an NDA do it and then hire them for something 'unrelated'.
2.) Vertical integration or lack thereof. You know how FB is particularly insidious in the Third World? How it pushes WA, for example? Good luck developing anything tech wise without being bought out or discovered when all of your communication tools are made by the people who have an interest in burying you. The tech companies have done a very good job at integrating themselves into logistics at a base level on a global scale. Pharma, on the other hand, doesn't have this advantage. If Google or Apple ARE recording all my phone calls, they aren't giving that data to Moderna. They'd rather keep it and later try to poach the medical-data business from Moderna or fund some SaaS company.
I did not see this reply until now because I'm bad at HN, but I appreciate the effort you put into it. It's really interesting to think about, but I'm not sure I can engage much because I'm pretty out of my depth!
Does point 1) not apply to tech innovations outside the global north as well? I can definitely see your points about patent infringement being relevant to the Chinese tech ecosystem.
Vertical integration is a really interesting point. It's easy to believe that monopolies are all-powerful, but there's plenty of room in the "margins" in industries which aren't (yet) built on pervasive surveillance.
I was a management consultant ages ago and worked on large capital projects. In my experience (as the article mentions) it was a mix of:
1. Red tape & public "input"
2. Layers of contractors and subcontractors, each taking their slice
3. No real incentives for governments to be cost sensitive. Usually capital projects last well into the next administration.
4. Too many cooks in the kitchen and consultations
Yeah my first reaction to this was "Oh it's going to be the public". Because the US has strong rights and legal system basically anyone can come along and considerably screw up a project just by claiming some endangered bat is living in the path of it, or some economic harm will be done, or some community will be damaged, it's far easier to just to just stick planning notice on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
A great example of this is in the UK where the main road going east to west from london to cornwall is a single carriage way with 2 lanes going past one of the country's most historic sites (stone henge). It's a fucking disaster. So the plan is to build a massive tunnel under stone henge to help traffic and remove the blotch on this area of historic importance. It's expected to cost £1.7Bn but it's already been completely tied up in legal fights, it was proposed over 25 years ago (when it was already desparately needed). Essentially plenty of people either don't want it built at all (presumably just accepting that we'll never ever be able to have economic in england west of stonehenge) or they want a tunnel that is several times longer than the proposal sending costs and construction time soaring.
What you could do, if you were Turkey, you could just built a 12 lane motorway and shove stonehenge a few miles north. It'd be cheaper.
Stonehenge isn’t that big. I don’t know what the surrounding area is like, but isn’t it an option to build the road around it? With compulsory purchases of properties along the way, if necessary.
I confess to not having closely followed the issue, but every time I see it mentioned, my brain twitches. Is the choice between A) large construction project that overlaps with a site of immense historical and cultural significance, and B) spend the money for a couple extra miles of freeway, seems to be a very obvious one. The only reason I can see for B is a sort of aggressive anti-humanism.
These are all things, but they're things in other countries, too. France has strong unions and subcontractors and bureaucrats and all of that. And yet it costs less there.
On a recent episode of the Ezra Klein show, Jerusalem Demsas argued that part of the problem is that the bureaucrats in the US are too constrained in their powers, so e.g. when weighing an infrastructure project against wildlife protection laws, it's not a bureaucratic organisation making a final decision on how to proceed with minimal impact, but it's private organised interest groups litigating without any limits on re-litigation, and a ruling that does not necessarily weigh the public interest of having projects proceeding towards completion.
I think it's a mistake to think of european unions and american unions as "the same thing". Relationships with unions in the US seem much more adversarial than there, on average.
As you say, there are politics, labor relations, etc. in europe too - I wonder if they are just better at cooperating on this sort of project for some reason?
US unions are that way as a consequence of racism. No, really. There was a US union that wasn’t doing its duty to represent African-American members. So it goes all the way to the USSC and the gist is that unions have to represent every member or be decertified.
In contrast, in a country like Germany, the union and management can agree that Hans is a fuckup and it’s in everyone’s best interest that he finds a new job.
> Relationships with unions in the US seem much more adversarial than there, on average.
Depends. You have "red" unions, which tend to be more aggressive, have revolutionary ideologies, and see bosses as enemies to perpetually keep at bay.
Then "yellow" unions tend to be more centrist, conciliatory and, arguably, somewhat toothless.
Which kind of union is more present varies from sector to sector.
But in any case, if you've ever seen a CGT propaganda poster, you'll never be under any impression that these guys are feeling "cooperative" with management / the government.
What? This could only be so naively said by someone who has never lived in a heavily prop labor socialist country like France. Les grèves are terribly adversarial and a near constant aspect of labor negotiations.
The only way they could be considered better, in the way you imply, is that the unions are considered something to negotiate with instead of something to destroy.
Defeat, not destroy. Unions aren't destroyed in the US today and they're not sought out to be destroyed, no large government agencies or corporation is hunting them. In the Jimmy Hoffa days certainly there were some powerful people inside and outside of government that wanted the Teamsters destroyed.
The corporations aim to defeat them in the sense of keeping them voted down / out of the operations. John Deere for example recently came back with a rather lame offer for wage increases, the union went on strike, Deere capitulated and gave them a more fair wage hike, the union accepted; Deere didn't attempt to destroy the union.
Kellogs and their union haven't been able to agree to terms. Kellogs didn't attempt to destroy the union, they didn't send assassins or thugs to kill or rough up the union leadership. They replaced the union members with temporary labor and resumed limited operations. And that's entirely fair, the union can strike and refuse to work, the company can replace them.
Amazon didn't destroy the union in Alabama, that battle will continue; Amazon - at least temporarily - defeated them.
Germany is more cooperative yes. But their "workers council" concept is very strict. We've had several times we couldn't implement a global change in the multinational I work for because some workers council in a 10-man office in some German village didn't agree.
In Holland we used to have good union representation that really worked together with government and employers. The "polder model" it was called. However since we've had many neoliberal governments this concept has been hollowed out and the unions are now run as companies by the same kind of people so they no longer really represent the workers. They're just corporate puppets now. It's gone completely the other way from France or Germany. When it did work it was pretty good though. There was a decent balance between workers rights and efficiency and there was no need for many strikes.
French bureaucracy has the expertise in house to do high level planning rather than having a subcontractor do it. They're also a lot more insulated than US bureaucracies from the vagaries of political turnover. And they're more often dealing with laws written ahead of time rather than things that can't be decided without a court decision.
My broad impression is that in the EU and the US, a given project is a "meal" that all the interests involved will take a cut out of.
But in the EU or elsewhere, the "cut" the interests will take is just financial, the project will be designed for cost-efficiency by competent architects and engineers and it's just that the different interests will be paid off with money to make things happen.
In the US, the spread-out state and administrative structure results in a situation where each interest gets it's cut through its ability to make some small change or demand some particular process. A lot of this involves a lot of adversarial relations, some of them intended to stop corruption but which actually result inefficiency and corruption (complex bidding processes legal repercussions for failure to adhere to bid etc. etc.).
California spending $3 billion planning ("planning") a high speed rail system is good example. A lot of that involved buying land whose value had inflated.
I have seen some public transportation work up close in the USA -- "me first" and competition between different teams ate up quite a bit of the (expensive) time.. lots of very competent, skilled people and also quite cynical and profit-seeking management. The actions of management were sometimes directly contradictory to recommendations by hard-working staff. Worse, management that tried to get things done quickly were pushed out by others who were better at looking good (or something else I dont know about).
The old expression "we have the worst system in the world, except for all the others" .. comes to mind
edit- I would like to point to NORESCO in particular as a sponge-like entity with a long history of failed, expensive projects and a long pipeline of new funding, based on what I saw with my own eyes.
The old expression "we have the worst system in the world, except for all the others" .. comes to mind
That's what (I think) Winston Churchill said about democracy (might be true there). But here, I think you can just say "we have the worst system". Period. The US has a variety of sectors (public works, health care, etc) which aren't just bad but fated to get worse and worse through both through the particular way US ruling interests deal with each other. Each solution introduces more pork interests since each solution follows the haphazard paradigm.
For example; I think Yimby ("yes in my back yard") proposals have aimed to facilitate development in at transit hubs, a worthy seeming cause. But since there's no California state transit plan, this approach has to define "transit hub" haphazardly - "there's currently a bus stop there". This allows those aiming to sink a development to do so by removing the bus stop. Or oppositely, allows someone to facilitate a development by adding an otherwise unneeded bus stop. I'm not sure if this approach was implemented but just proposal illustrates the inherent problem of trying to solve transfic/housing/development problems by tossing random legislation at them.
> That's what (I think) Winston Churchill said about democracy (might be true there).
As E.M. Forster put it (from memory, so I'm sure less well-worded than the original):
"So, two cheers for democracy—there's no occasion for three, two is quite enough."
> But here, I think you can just "we have the worst system". Period.
Yeah, our system's about as bad as it could possibly be and have held together this long, true. And our country's too disunited to ever fix that without breaking apart to do it.
I think in-sourcing management expertise to the public agencies would save a lot of money. Management consultants are expensive and their incentives are in conflict with public projects.
In my experience with construction projects, legal costs and liabilities take the cake. Once something is in court, there is zero telling how long and how much money it takes to resolve.
This is interesting from a foreign perspective. I still follow urban planning in Helsinki, Finland. Major public projects always face opposition and go to court, but it's not a big deal.
Because zoning plans and similar project plans are decisions made by public officials, all complaints about them go to the administrative court system. Administrative courts don't care about the substance of the argument. (That's for elected representatives.) They only determine if the officials followed all appropriate regulations and decisiomaking processes. Going to administrative court is cheap enough and fast enough that the costs and delays are usually included in the project plan.
Sometime the court overturns the decision, delaying or canceling the project. Sometimes their justifications are stupid and sometimes there are unintended consequences. Regardless, the system more or less works most of the time.
That seems like a political culture issue rather than something inherent to governments. If you really care about doing good in the world (isn't that the whole point of politics?) then you have a huge incentive to save on costs as any money saved can be put to good use elsewhere.
I respectfully disagree. A lot of the capital projects mentioned in this article (like NYC subway station) are municipal or state projects, which don't have the ability to print money like the feds.
There's a lot that's not going right for Europe, but it's interesting to see that two things in the US have really stunted the middle class: student loans and monetization of real estate as a store of wealth. Essentially the financialization of everything is making people poorer.
Buzzfeed really feels like an "ends justify the means" kind of business. Cheap, tabloid news funding "real" journalism. There's merit to the idea, but under the financial pressure of a public corp, my money is that what little actual journalism they do will slowly die off.
> Cheap, tabloid news funding "real" journalism. There's merit to the idea
I respect your opinion but I couldn't disagree more strongly. To me, an outlet publishing trash irrevocably taints anything else they're putting out, however hard-hitting and "real" it may be.
