There is little surprise that if a brain is behaving differently, that we can see differences in neurotransmitters. Like the Serotonin Hypothesis, that doesn't mean the neurotransmitters themselves are part of the physical cause and not just a consequence.
It's like trying to diagnose and treat a political crisis by observing telephone connections. We see stark changes in telephone use in a crisis. If we meddle with the telephone exchanges we might improve or harm various types of event. It's not really about the telephone calls though, we are just hacking at the messaging of an external event we are ignorant of.
A conspiracy theory induced panic might be superficially "solved" but cutting all the the phone lines. We have not identified or solved the cause though and people don't find life without telephones (dopamine) worth living so they plug them back in (quit their anti-psychotics).
It's worth bearing in mind that the West was pretty awful too with a vast quantity of appalling crimes that our rose-tinted spectacles might like to forget because the victims were "non-people". It was Imperial Britain with it's colonies, the US with it's viciously racist segregation, Leopold II of Belgium chopping of limbs in the Congo. Not cool.
It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.
Ehhh...it's not like Lenin was much better. As soon as he was in power, he pretty rapidly got to "actually we should do some purges".
The history of Russia is one of an endless parade of terrible leadership which invariably decides that a quick round of death squads will solve all the problems.
Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism if people were starving in the streets, whereas ultimately the USSR liked to pretend they fixed that while just doing it to the Ukrainians, Polish and other Baltic states.
No. Claiming this underplays how appalling Stalin was. Lenin purging Mensheviks AFAIK, meant losing party membership and maybe emigrating to continue your political project, whereas Stalin's Great Purge killed a million people. This isn't a defence of Lenin, it's just that Stalin was on a different level entirely.
> Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism
This is kind of the basis of small-government advocacy. Whatever good the current person may do with said power, it is unlikely that the next person will be so benevolent.
Forced labour camps and secret police organisations were pretty ubiquitous. The Tsars had The Okhrana, forced labour camps and political repression (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had all been exiled to Siberia). The Checka and Gulag were the Bolshevik versions of the same thing. Russia had the White Terror... and then the Red Terror. It all fucking sucks but the point remains, Stalin took things to new levels of psychopathic insanity where we start hitting 10s of millions of excess deaths.
If you don't like Gulags, then bear in mind they were created at roughly the same time the US setup forced labour camps in Haiti that led to 1000s of deaths and extra-judicial killings. Not something Americans talk about much. Should Woodrow Wilson be compared to Stalin too?
Yeah, fair point. Not to cast off the notion of personal responsibility for actions, but IMO monstrous individuals are a when, not an if, when the preconditions exist like that.
I don't know why I keep hoping mgmt will see that one day and decide not to have pretty bad things now that some later nutjob can turn into really especially bad things. It's not much of an up-side that the people who built the tools are often consumed by them.
That's basically the UK and I haven't experienced a problem with indoor air drying. I would give some basic guidelines though. It's the sort of things that you don't think you need to tell people until you see what they do...
- ideally machine washed with a significant spin to remove water. Air drying hand washed items that are sopping wet is a lot harder - might take 4x longer
- hang in a room with decent ventilation and some active air flow. Trying to air dry in the equivalent of a cupboard would be doomed
- hang fully spread out with decent space between the clothes. Drying time will be significantly extended if densely scrunched together with pieces touching. Buy multiple racks to get enough hanging space.
- don't put used wet gym clothes in a laundry bin to fester. If you aren't washing them immediately, hang them up to dry first and put them in the bin later
Hmm. My faith in the BBC's commitment to decentralisation and open standards has been damaged by the artificial month delay they added to their podcast feeds to try and drive traffic to their centralised Sounds app. I've been listening to the In Our Time podcast for 20 years and then they go and vandalise it as a growth hack. There is no way I am using multiple proprietary podcast apps so I end up listening to topical comedy a month out of date... which is just weird.
I feel like BBC Sounds is some senior manager's vanity project that they have staked their career on.
Their obsession with trying to get me to use it instead of normal RSS feeds or third party radio services like TuneIn is incredibly frustrating. They have intentionally broken the experience for smart speaker users and podcast listeners because they are incapable of enticing them over with a better experience. The obsession with control has soured my feelings towards BBC radio.
I don't follow the BBC's approaches to revenue generation that closely, but is part of this due to larger overseas audiences? I'm now living outside the UK, so I expect that I'm viewed differently as a user by the Beeb, as well as by TV licence payers. If access to content isn't controlled then it's harder to maximise the revenue.
BBC Sounds feels like it's part of that efforts, but I'd be interested to know more given how much family members complain about the costs of licencing and services relative to the quality.
The real problem is that the BBC must be in a position whereby, should the government decide to link TV license and BBC access in a hard way, or (god forbid) fully privatise the service, they can flip a switch and make it so. So everything has to be behind a registration wall.
They have been under 13 years of pressure from Tory governments, run by friends of Murdoch, who don't believe in free knowledge and public broadcasting; the BBC had to be seen to go in the general direction of preparing for de-facto privatisation. This is the result.
The BBC has a history of fighting that -- when ITV Digital collapsed, the BBC was quickly out of the gates to get DTT decoders with no CAM modules as the norm.
I think they missed a trick by not getting into the open HDMI dongle market, letting companies like Amazon take the initiative. We now see the result of those non-open platforms (amazon taking 30% of income as a platform provider etc), but with government interference as it is (remember it was Labour that stopped the BBC building an international streaming service back in 2009) I can see why.
They really jumped the shark when they made you have to sign in to the BBC News app. I uninstalled it and just decided to use my browser, and guess what, I now read the BBC less, so well done. But then I know I'm not the typical person on the street, so unfortunately this probably did yield a lot of new sign ups, under duress
Inevitable in that people in charge of the BBC want to prove that people (specifically an appropriate cross-section of the British public) use the BBC to keep the funding secure
I definitely did not work at an ISP. But what I said doesn't require a static IP per house. Just GeoIP so non-UK residents are treated differently (unless they VPN).
The target is not to determine whether the client is in the UK, but whether the client is a specific license-payer or at a specific address. GeoIP doesn't help to get either of those datapoints.
I feel the same about Radio France (the radio public broadcaster here in France, equivalent to BBC Radio + BBC Sounds). They've been pushing their app more and more, and now RSS feeds correctly list the episodes, but if you try to download one from a few months ago you just get an ad to download the app. No thanks.
Does Radio France generate revenues in other French-speaking countries with the same content? It feels like the BBC is trying to maximise revenue but expectations for consumers locally and overseas are going to be very different. Blocking loopholes hurts the local users more.
French public broadcasters are ad-supported, they don't have to separate local and overseas websites/apps/revenue logic. I've seen another comment about the BBC having ads for other BBC content; I already get ads in my Radio France podcasts (just the one before the proper content), and they're dynamic, so they surely change them depending on where you listening to maximize revenue. Probably the same type of dynamic advertising I get when listening to US podcasts with inverted French-speaking ads.
The Rock feed by Radio France is among my favorites online music radios. I don't use smartphones and don't like to keep a browser running just to listen to music, so I extracted the URL and use it into whichever player I have available.
It's about as self-conscious as you can get, too. You already have an audience for the entertainment products you produce. Out of all the places where you can sneak in a "value add," this is not one of them. As if you're going to out-produce your own creators.
It's audio only entertainment. Just.. go with _that_.
I actually quite like BBC sounds but it is completely possible to circumvent it. You might need to look the URL of a show up on there but you can play any show on sounds using `mpv <URL>`
I also use that method to listen to live radio:
alias bbc1='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_one.m3u8'
alias bbc1x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_1xtra.m3u8'
alias bbc2='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_two.m3u8'
alias bbc3='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_three.m3u8'
alias bbc4='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_fourfm.m3u8'
alias bbc5='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live.m3u8'
alias bbc5x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live_sports_extra.m3u8'
alias bbc6='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_6music.m3u8'
In the early days you could get the summary of The Archers episodes for the week in advance by twiddling the URL.... At some point they got wise to it, and they might get wise to this too.
The much-missed Beeb-O-Tron[0] used to have a function to do this called the "Beebobodge"[1], given any timeslot in the week. Nowadays I use Radiofeeds[2] to get live URL stream links which I play through Transmission on Android or VLC on PC.
I have get_iplayer [0] set up to download the topical comedy as it comes out and put it into a Podcast addict virtual podcast folder. Suits my needs.
I would use Sounds, but the UI is actually really fiddly to get to where I need to go, you can "subscribe" but you can't have playlists or queues. It's just a bit rubbish all round.
I ended up rube-goldberging get_iplayer outputs into a proper podcast feed and thence into Pocket Casts with the rest of my podcasts. It sort of mostly works.
Every time I hear the BBC Sounds jingle - "Music, radio, podcasts" - I think of the show W1A where they referred to the the "Department for Culture, Media and Sport" as the "Department for Culture, Media and For Some Reason Sport".
"Music, radio, and for some reason podcasts" is much more fitting.
While I agree the delay is a killer for topical news/comedy content, it's hard to argue the same for In Our Time. In Our Time is the only show I regularly listen to in podcast form.
In recent weeks they've started inserting interstitial ads for other BBC content at random points inside In Our Time.
"How can they do that, the show is an uninterrupted 45 minutes of talking" you might ask. Well, they just insert it at a random point somewhere, possibly halfway through a sentence. It's both very annoying and amateurish.
I don't know if this applies to your circumstance, but w.r.t. those m3u8 urls posted elsewhere: I have found that a lot of systems will cheerfully reference the ad-break content on some rando spammy looking domain in the middle of their otherwise sane #EXTM3U format making it cheap to just block them and the player skips over it
My suspicion is that is how uBlock Origin is able to make the YT ads magically disappear without otherwise blowing up the content stream
For IoT the one actual pain-point is that if an episode generates online discussion then I can't participate but it's mainly a complaint about the user-hostile attempt to make the podcast feed an inferior second class citizen.
It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad really.
I'm surprised they even have those feeds at all. I presumed their days were numbered when Sounds came out. It's not just them, a lot of podcasts seem to really not want you to use their plain old RSS feed, instead hiding it behind collapsable segments and similar. I guess they get more metrics (and maybe money) if you use Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever. Then of course there are the ones with outright exclusivity deals
It's a shame because RSS podcasts are naturally distributed (probably because they date from back when that was the default mode of the web). No need to bow down to someone else's content rules - if you have a domain and the ability to host some fairly small files, you can have a podcast which can be loaded into thousands of apps across all platforms with no central authority
I'd also take that as a lesson to some younger people getting into decentralization afresh and thinking it requires heavyweight federation. You don't necessarily need a complicated protocol and your servers talking to each other. Just standard client interfaces and then the client can do the aggregation with distribution as a natural property, like the web
A number of BBC podcasts set their rss url to http:// instead of https://. One can still get these feeds over https/443 (see below). But podcast apps will try to use http/80 of course.
Why does BBC do this. Or maybe it's the podcast apps that do it. Weird.
There seems to have been a political attack against BBC comedy, which honestly was doing great work at raising awareness of political mischief and helping to shine a light on government wrongdoing and corruption.
The killing off of "Mock the Week" around the same time that free BBC radio comedy was forcibly dissociated from the news cycle just seems suspicious. And we know that BBC management has been loaded with Tory faithful, it stinks.
In Our Time is an absolute tour de force. Bragg just brings such an enlightened academic curiosity to so varied a corpus of subjects. It's a delight to follow along in the wake of him and his guests.
As a mountaineer, you no doubt have a wonderfully ergonomic high volume backpack that is great for a week of shopping. Two if your diet is basic meat and veg not processed food in lots of packaging.
Same to the OP. You should own a decent feckin' shopping bag. It's basic adulting where I live. You have observed the problem yet not doing anything about which is just really weird.
>You have observed the problem yet not doing anything about which is just really weird.
They observed the problem and simply have a different solution than you. I'm sure there's a number of other factors they didn't mention that make it preferable to simply use their perfectly working car.
> I'm sure there's a number of other factors they didn't mention that make it preferable to simply use their perfectly working car.
I'm sorry but when one is willing to put that much effort to try to justify using a car to avoid a 10 mn walk, that's only because one is way too lazy and privileged...
You treat the walk as the default and car as something that needs to be justified. That's BS. I think you are too privileged to live in a safe neighborhood, in good climate, to be healthy enough to walk with load, and to own a good backpack :P
To me car is the default solution, it's simply better in every way for most people. Making one's life better doesn't need to be "justified".
It is! Just like not having surgery, not using AC/heating, or not wearing glasses, etc. All those things are unnatural and some are expensive, but luckily we are not hunter-gatherers anymore ;)
Or maybe better the cognitive load? There are various studies that show removing white lines and navigation furniture to make junctions more of a puzzle, decreases speeds and increases attention and safety.
Not really. The revolutionary class is fairly bourgeois. You basically need time, money, power and education to revolt. An oppressed underclass is already under the heel and just gets crushed when it steps mildly out line. Historically the most likely group to revolt has existing status/power/wealth and is in fear of losing it due to some type political/demographic change. You find professionals like lawyers leading revolutionary movements, not farm hands.
Students are classic bourgeoisie - often from well off families and tend to be pretty comfortable and not preoccupied by their next meal. Most student uprisings are derided for being so privileged but such is always the way. They say the 1968 French student movement was diffused because they left Paris to spend national holidays at their parent's holiday homes :)
They are also indicative of two other key predictive factors: elite over production and a demographic youth bulge.
Their lack of success is perhaps the power issue. If they waited a few years to become army officers, administrators, judiciary and such they could be much more successful than doing another sit-in!
The two notable rebellions in the US were by land / slave owners. Students are limited to basically SDS / The Weather Underground that didn't go very far.
Sounds like you could do with learning something new!
My 30+ years experience doesn't matter for shit when I say... want to fix an annoyance in an open source tool using an unfamiliar language. I'm back to "how do you deserialise json" level query. Offical docs are typically either useless auto-generated placeholders or over-detailed rabbit warren not to mention there are usually five ways to do anything and I need to know the blessed approach not just any approach. I want a few lines of sample code and some confidence that it's the approapriate method and not 10 years out of date. It's what a QA site should excel at and exceed ChatRoulleteGPT answers given social proof from real people.
> Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work
Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness. Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such. Once directors get the "make whatever you want" power it's not always a happy outcome. Same thing with authors - they get famous with a tightly edited 300 pages and use that to release a 1200 page barely edited brick.
Sometimes the balance of the two really works - the money man is the only representation of the audience and can cut out that nonsensical 45 minute dream sequence. I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
There are of course good businessperson led movies and bad businessperson led movies. The same is true for creative led movies. Maybe the "explore the liminal space of boredom" movie is bad, but that description certainly sounds more interesting than a bad version of Transformers 7 or whatever.
Creative led projects are at least personal and that gives them a unique quality even if the project is an overall failure.
>I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
Editors would generally be considered creatives and not businesspeople. There is also no such thing as "an objective source of improvement" when it comes to art.
> Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such.
If there is a project that literally and perfectly matches your description, it is "Paint Drying", a 2016 protest film against censorship and classification mandates in the UK [1].
I generally am not a big fan of the CGI-dominated action film catering to international audiences. But I'm mostly not a huge fan of art house fare either.
> Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness.
This is what happens when the money men also think of themselves or their buddies as creatives. Extremely high production values on extremely stupid movies.
It’s normal to have creative flops too, but generally the landscape looks much better and healthier than now. And some of those dreamscape flops are likely low to mid budget or self funded projects.
"Gimmick" implies that shitposting is deployed merely as a means to quick success, but dril's style of "shitposting" predates the term and is just what self-expression looked like on the old Internet.
I think in this case "gimmick" was used in the pro-wrestling sense, it basically means "persona".
>In professional wrestling, a gimmick generally refers to a wrestler's in-ring persona, character, behaviour, attire and/or other distinguishing traits while performing which are usually artificially created in order to draw fan interest.
But wrestling itself, or the act of performing a character, is not a gimmick under any definition of the term.
If you want to adopt this definition from wrestling, which is a domain specific definition to be sure, then tell us what is the gimmick of dril the character?
I think you are guilty of very lazy analysis and you don't know what you're talking about.
> Gimmick" implies that shitposting is deployed merely as a means to quick success,
Can you explain this use of 'Gimmick'? I'm only familiar with the other/older/mainstream use of the term of essentially something 'extra' done to attract attention. Can you explain what you mean by 'quick success' w.r.t. 'gimmick'?
It's like trying to diagnose and treat a political crisis by observing telephone connections. We see stark changes in telephone use in a crisis. If we meddle with the telephone exchanges we might improve or harm various types of event. It's not really about the telephone calls though, we are just hacking at the messaging of an external event we are ignorant of.
A conspiracy theory induced panic might be superficially "solved" but cutting all the the phone lines. We have not identified or solved the cause though and people don't find life without telephones (dopamine) worth living so they plug them back in (quit their anti-psychotics).