And it served us well for millennia. In a lot of ways, it made us who we are.

I understand that logic, but “being the product” must not really be that bad for them. They might complain, but if it was truly distasteful, they’d do something about it.

And being exploited for profit and explicitly knowing it is about the saddest thing I can think of for my fellow humans. It’s no wonder the billionaires just take and take, because people let them.

One may as well have said the same things about cigarettes up through the 1960s. Sometimes we do things against our best interests. Sometimes it’s really, really bad for us. Sometimes it’s painful and deadly.

Humans aren’t rational creatures.

Will it only be seen as an alternative once a critical mass of users move there?

I mean, yeah? That’s how social media works.

This was a plot point in the recent Flash movie.

“You are not the customer, you are the product” is true so often, but in many cases (like this one) it doesn’t really apply.

First off, “not the customer but the product” is an inherently antagonistic relationship. Your goals are opposed to Facebook’s, for instance, because you want to spend less time on the platform and you want to interact with friends and not brands, but Facebook wants the opposite of both. But with HSA administration, your goals and your employer’s goals are aligned: you both want someone who will quickly and painlessly manage your account without being a pain.

Second, “not the customer but the product” implies an undisclosed, extractive payment occurring behind the scenes. TikTok is harvesting a great deal of data from you and selling it to other companies. You are the product in that your data has value. But with HSA administration, the product is just the management of your HSA money; there’s no under-the-table dealing going on here (or there shouldn’t be); they’re getting paid by your company for their services.

Third, “not the customer but the product” relationships are entirely one-way; you have no way to impact the providing company beyond just not using their services. They do not, will not, and at some level can never care about your experience beyond making it as minimally useful to you to keep you on the platform. But that HSA provider desperately needs your company’s business, so if enough of your coworkers raise a stink and get your company to complain, they will make a change.

In actuality, “not the customer but the product” ignores the unfortunate reality of most HR/payroll service companies in this case: they’re just the lowest bidder, contracted at the bottom dollar to provide the cheapest services possible, because your employers don’t have to use their services and don’t care about your experience.

At the very least, the USPS is getting money out of them. More than the 2¢, even.

Meh. A whole bunch of cringe posts from twenty years ago will show how much I’ve grown since I was 19. Some more recent arguments I got tired of will rear their ugly heads. But I generally try to be the same person online as offline, and that person isn’t particularly controversial, at least around the circles I run in.

But there would be a lot of people who would be in bodily danger.

$5 million is less than 0.2% of the Disney company’s annual income. They probably spend more than that on copy paper.

That $34 a month for an individual, on the other hand, could be the cost of a prescription, or a phone bill, or something like that. It’s a more significant amount of money than it seems, especially since authors aren’t typically rolling in money.

It’s the characters that are most interesting to me. The Hardy Boys fell into public domain last year, Nancy Drew follows in a couple of years. Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, obviously. Popeye. Sherlock Holmes.

These characters are still relevant in the public consciousness, and now they can appear in other works, be remixed, etc.

Unfortunately I think this would have the opposite effect. Individuals would have to weigh the benefits of renewing their copyright vs. buying groceries, while companies could, as you note, write off the fees as chump change.

So (for instance), next year, John Green would have to try to decide whether he should pay to renew the copyright on his massive 2012 hit The Fault in Our Stars, while Disney wouldn’t think twice about renewing the copyright on box office flop Tomorrowland in a couple years, just on the off-chance that it might someday be popular.

Instead, I think copyright should be an initial 14-year term with the option to renew twice at no charge; but the catch would be, only individuals and groups could hold and renew copyright. Copyright could not be owned by, assigned to, sold to, or administrated by any corporate entity, only by an individual and their heirs. Work-for-hire would come with an automatic blanket license assignment for the duration of the first copyright term, but following that? Better keep Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft happy if you want to make any Toy Story sequels, Disney. And if you don’t, they can take the characters to DreamWorks after 14 years.

It gets sticky with movies themselves, since you essentially have a group of hundreds or even thousands of people to coordinate the license terms for, but I’m sure some sort of voting system or trust could be put in place. Yes, it could be manipulated, but hardly more than it already is.

The bottom line is, authors and creators (and their families) should be able to make money off of their creation for a reasonable amount of time, but also adult creators should be able to make adaptations of media that they enjoyed as children. Balancing those two things isn’t as hard as companies have convinced Congress it is.

Jack Welch’s whole business philosophy.

Before him, it was more or less understood that business owners had a responsibility to do what was best for their customers, their employees, their communities, and their company’s long-term sustainability; the companies that didn’t (or didn’t at least make it look like they were) were looked down upon.

Welch was the first one to popularize the notion that short-term shareholder value was the CEO’s highest priority. He normalized companies’ c-suites being cutthroat, craven capitalists.

To be sure, not everything that’s wrong with the world today can be laid at his feet. But late-stage capitalism can.

It’s going to happen (probably this year or next), but it’s going to be mostly Chrome OS and Steam OS.

Complex stuff (talks, projects, brainstorming, etc): The notes get taken on paper. Some things stay there, because the act of writing them down is enough. Some things then move to my “second brain;” for personal stuff, that’s currently on Notion (I’m contemplating migrating it to Obsidian or something similar). For work stuff, that’s a Slack thread, or (if it’s really important) Confluence.

Todos go into Google Tasks. I used to use Todoist, but I got frustrated by how inflexible the notification system was.

Shopping lists (and a few other similar lists that need to be shared) go into Google Keep.

Absolutely. And Vice and Gawker, and to some extent even The Onion. Some survived, some did not. Dropout in particular is one of the few semi-success stories of it. It was called the “pivot to video,” and it’s almost a joke in online content communities now; especially since everyone on these platforms was saying, “we don’t want this!” even as Facebook was saying, “everyone wants this!”

This is absolutely going to crash and burn for Meta. When companies look at the metrics for their posts on these platforms, they’re going to see massive amounts of engagement, none of which converts into sales; and they’re going to stop buying ads on those platforms thinking that their market isn’t there.

Another example of AI being deployed in a place where AI is not useful; though in this case it’s actually harmful to the goal of the company deploying it.

Oh, interesting! I stand corrected.

Off the shelf consumer electronics were not the problem.

“Ugh, it’ll probably be fine, and it’ll get my dad off my back.”

“So make it rain and then we’ll talk about physics.”

I always have more fun trying to answer the increasingly-non-sequitur "why"s (in increasing complexity) than they have asking them.

“Why is the sky blue?”

“Because the air is blue!”

“Why?”

“Because air molecules are so small that they get in the way of the blue light and bounce it around.”

“Why?”

“Because the other colors are big enough to get through.”

“Why?”

“Because the things we see as ‘colors’ are just different wavelengths of light.”

“Why?”

“Because it was evolutionarily advantageous for us to be able to distinguish between different objects by the wavelengths of light that they reflect.”

“Why?”

“Partially because things that reflect some wavelengths are dangerous to eat, and others are healthy to eat, and we wouldn’t know the difference based on the luminosity alone.”

“Why?”

“Presumably because ripening and decomposing food doesn’t undergo a visible physical change until long after it’s already unsafe, but it changes color very quickly.”

“Why?”

“Hmm. I think because the chemical processes that cause color changes and the chemical processes that accompany the growth of microorganisms tend to happen together.”

They always tap out from boredom long before I do, and it’s fun trying to figure out the super esoteric stuff. Besides, the "why"s are so unspecific that you can answer it for any part of the question.