I think you missed the point of the parent comment.
The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now goes elsewhere (Google and Meta).
It’s left very little in terms of resources for staff.
Think about what the quality of commercial software would be like if there wasn’t enough money for QA and testers and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles at 30k and 40k.
That’s the news industry right now. Poorer quality product.
I can’t talk for the US but here in Sweden most news media have fewer journalists today. Is that not the case in your country or in what way is it a mirage?
Maybe it's different in Sweden, but when I read old American newspapers, from a hundred years ago, 90% of it is absurd slop that people would laugh out loud at today.
As a news publisher (RedBankGreen.com) I’ll tell you that pretty much nobody is in it for the money anymore, at least at the local level.
It’s passion and love of the community, despite the many struggles and drawbacks.
AI bots scrape our content and that drastically reduces the number of people who make it to our site.
That impacts our ability to bring on subscribers and especially advertisers - Google and Meta own local advertising and AI kills the relatively tiny audience we have.
I dread the day that it happens in realtime - hear sirens? Ask AI who already scraped us.
It’s not really subjective if you don’t believe it’s your place to judge the human to begin with.
If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect.
The act itself is bad.
The human performing the act was misguided.
I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided.
Eg, like a diamond covered in shit.
Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too.
So the act and the person are separate.
Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc.
But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.
If someone else in the "exact same circumstances and starting conditions" implies they're identical down to every single molecule, how is that someone else?
If they're not identical at that level, they wouldn't make the same decisions. Put two almost-perfect clones into two exact copies of the world and a week later they'll be on diverging paths.
So if the argument is not to judge anyone as a person because everyone would act the same if they had the exact same life circumstances and environment, and everything that affects their decisions fits into life circumstances and environment, what else is left that it would be unfair to judge?
1. You can't judge the person, you can judge the behavior
2. To judge the person requires the ability to quantify the unquantifiable (circumstance, sequence of events leading to the outcome, going back to the literal beginning of time).
3. To judge the person implies a superiority to that person
Sure, one can take/justify simplistic shortcuts for practical reasons. But some forget that's what they are - shortcuts that bypass the nuances/reality of the situation.
You’re correct that belief is a powerful driver of prosperity/poverty - and that believing that you’re headed for either can lead to you to different modes of decision making. I’ve experienced and witnessed both.
An unexpected windfall will amplify the psychology of the recipients. For people who have lived without, the mindset is frequently “live today like it’s your last” or “enjoy it while it lasts” and blow it or self destruct.
Some will be obviously be more mature about it though.
As a Y! employee for a couple of years - although my time was brief, I can say with confidence that had Yahoo successfully acquired Google or Facebook, both would have been destroyed in short order.
Nobody can beat Yahoo in making bad deals. Lets not forget they made Mark Cuban a billionaire with a legendary Broadcast.com acquisition at $10K per user! $5.7 billion dollars written off in less than two years.
+1 from someone who also bootstrapped a side project into a 7 figure business, and just happens to be absorbing some lessons from Poor Charlie’s Almanac on Audible recently.
ha I listened on Audible too. great audiobook for a walk after dinner. Charlie's advice really holds up. which part have you gotten the most out of so far?
CSS rounded corners often looked a bit pixelated in the early days, and I remember doing image-based corners well after border-radius was widely supported.
By the time CSS rounded corners became really smooth a lot of designers had moved on to the boxy flat look, and square corners were fashionable again.
The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now goes elsewhere (Google and Meta).
It’s left very little in terms of resources for staff.
Think about what the quality of commercial software would be like if there wasn’t enough money for QA and testers and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles at 30k and 40k.
That’s the news industry right now. Poorer quality product.
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