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Cake day: March 12th, 2025

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  • Have you considered that maybe moral bankruptcy isn’t the most effective way to win elections, at least not if you’re presenting as the slightly-less-right-wing option? The Democratic party is broken, nobody is buying their shit any more, and that’s why someone like Trump can get elected. There is no opposition party. It’s not a problem that will get fixed by ignoring it.








  • Really, I couldn’t stay interested past Dumbledore’s death knowing there was like a hundred ways he might not actually be dead. The whole deathly hallows thing even acknowledged that, it’s good that Rowling very intentionally chose not to do a C.S.Lewis there. But the problem was the inherent brokenness of the world, which was just unsuitable for a serious story.




  • Seems to me it’s an efficiency problem.

    If you want to send an email to someone, you don’t send it to a mailing list of all your contacts. You just send it to the person to whom it concerns. But suppliers, who want potential customers to be aware of their product, are just sending their message to as many people as possible. And even targeted advertising isn’t useful because it aims to promote one product rather than helping customers to make a balanced assessment of all the choices available. Plus it’s typically unsolicited and therefore an intrusion and an unwanted waste of time and attention.

    People out there who want that product need to know what’s on offer and who offers the best quality and value for money, which would have to come from an independent source. Independent review sites are a very good alternative to advertising, and maybe they could do more to promote new products and inform customers about things which would suit their needs, which would be a cost effective way to help suppliers reach their customers. That sounds a lot like advertising but if it were truly independent and on-demand, it wouldn’t be. In theory AI might do a good job of this, but it’s so open to abuse, it’s a natural pathway to push whoever pays for promotion. If advertising were illegal, I wonder how you would police that.

    More broadly, if we rely on reviewers to help customers find what they need, how can we ensure they are independent and fair? Maybe if there were a network of independent reviewers, they could act as a check on each other, if a reviewer consistently favors one brand when the rest don’t, it could be somehow highlighted and shown up as a bias.