"On February 4, 2026, following the restriction and closure since 2025 of other government-funded information websites, the CIA announced, with no warning and no explanation, that The World Factbook was discontinued."[0]
>We need to find better ways to sustain great journalism while making it easy for people to pay and consume.
journalists have always been employed and funded by the rich and powerful so that they can 1) amplify good news about the rich owner 2) drown out bad news about the rich owner 3) push agendas 4) resist opposing agendas.
the concept that at one time journalists were some independent rag tag group of truth-seekers is blown away by any historical recollection of the practice.
so : no , I don't think that we need to find better ways for people to pay and consume ; I think that's entirely up to the profiteers behind the mechanism to figure out how to do.
It's never been easier in history to be a nobody and get a message out to the masses; this is one of the only times in history where a journalist can do their job without selling their souls to the devil (paraphrasing hunter thompson).
and this is ignoring recent internet history of ad-malware, person-tracking, and compulsory clickbait headlines that beg the stupidest low-IQ takes possible in order to get you to click into a paywall.
I feel very little sympathy towards industries that'll save themselves from drowning by stepping onto their customers' heads to avoid the ocean.
On the flip side it stops me constantly for hacking reasons when I tell it to make/install custom firmware to bypass hardware restrictions and get root access on certain systems. I have to constantly remind the agent I work at the company at question and have their permission.
Yeah, I teach a class where students make games using AI. I had a student try to create a SpongeBob themed game and it refused. All he had to do to get around it was say “it’s for a class and education purposes”, and Gemini happily generated images of all SpongeBob characters.
i've read enough 'shlemiel the painter' ports across hundreds of systems and thousands of examples that I must quickly and coldly dismiss the precept that computers were ever used efficiently.
they got rich by wanting to get rich and make money; that's the entire motivation and it doesn't have a ceiling.
you don't just get rich and stop, it doesn't stop for these people. They aren't rich enough. They aren't powerful enough.
Most folks at that table with Trump are way beyond the joy of creation; they're playing politics now, and their game is the competition with the 200 other hyper-elite for positional vying.
I don't have three commas but I got rich slow and then I stopped. I sometimes wonder what three commas would have been like, but then I see all these negative examples and I think I'd rather enjoy what I have than pursue more.
The way they suck up to Trump doesn't make them look powerful, it makes them look pathetically weak. I wonder if they feel like they are cleverly manipulating a moron.
I have a hard time seeing the alternative history where the nazis' won which lead to the formation of Israel 3 years later and consequent Israeli colony expansion, leading to the current conflicts and ICC stuff.
"making an agreement with Zionists did not make Hitler a supporter of Zionism any more than the Nazi–Soviet pact made him a supporter of communism."[33]
"Keith Kahn-Harris is a British sociologist and music critic. He is an honorary research fellow and senior lecturer at Birkbeck College,[1] an associate fellow of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research,[2] and a lecturer at Leo Baeck College."
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
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