• 2 Posts
  • 320 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: March 30th, 2024

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  • Not so sure about that. Like populism in politics, religion gives you simple answers and justifications for complex situations and easily comprehensible explanations for complex phenomenoms.

    In a world that is getting harder and harder to grasp, people get lost in the big picture. Things like globalization, climate change, foreign affairs, our financial system etc. are all hard to understand for a big chunk if not the entirety of the population.

    Dictators, monarchs as well as religion all provide easy guidance: Do X. Don’t do Y. You are the good guys, people who are/do/think Z are the baddies.

    No individual thinking required. No boring facts, no discussions, just faith/loyalty/patriotism that counters every argument and allows you to feel superior and put the blame on someone else.

    I think in situations of high social inequality or disruptive events (war, famine, financial crisis, pandamic), there will always be a high demand for religion and political extemism.


  • Is there a credible source for the costs of hosting? Wikipedia is listing similar ad revenues as you did but no info on the costs. YouTube has 2.7 billion users that watch in average around 11 hours of videos a month. If 2 billion USD/y would be sufficient to host all that that’d be just 0,74 USD/user*year or 0,06 USD per month. That sounds really cheap considering that you have to pay for storage, traffic, backups and redundancies (at least I never heard of significant outages or data loss on YT).

    Does anyone have a credible source on the number of employees YouTube has? If you search for that you fine vastly different number from just 2k to 189k employees.


  • TBH I’m not sure if a platform like YouTube will ever exist in a non-commercial way. Many creators that I follow reached a level of professionalism that comes with significant costs. You need expensive cameras, microphones, lights, high-end computers, drones, personnel costs for cutters and people that help with research. They have travel costs, sometimes rent for offices etc. All that just to produce the content.

    On top, there are significant costs for hosting. I mean YouTube is hosted on multiple data centers rather than a bunch of servers or even home computers. Already Lemmy, which is mostly text and pictures, is a decent financial burden to instance owners. Not to mention the time for moderation and administration. And even here, in a place full of hardcore FOSS supporters, it’s not like admins are drowned in donations.

    If YouTube ads and product placements are the only source of income for content creators, then the only alternative would be that consumers directly pay for the content and the platform. Or that such a platform would be paid by some state / taxes. Both of which don’t sound very realistic to me.


  • I have no clue if there’s indeed any proof for such a claim, but the theory that I read elsewhere is that it’s a way to obfuscate money flows.

    If a foreign nation (Russia, China, North Korea, whoever) would like to engage in the election, they can’t just donate to the campaign officially. But instead, they could buy a couple thousands of these coins in smaller transactions.

    TBH I’m rather with you. I think the majority of these coins is just bought by some MAGAs. For foreign nations there’d be probably more efficient ways to transfer money like shares etc.







  • Ey, stop putting so much pressure on these hardworking people! They already had the intend once to send out an invite for a brainstorming session to create a first draft of the concept of the plan! But then they got distracted by all these important people tasks that you folks don’t have any idea of! Be more patient and show some respect! Like Trump when he visits a cemetry.


  • I like this definition the best. If someone is making a super complex sandwich with many ingredients and passion, then I’m fine to call that cooking. Same with a cold soup, a cous-cous salad or a fancy appetizer. Many dishes in top notch cuisine are served cold. In molecular kitchen, there’s even stuff served below freezing. Still all cooking to me.

    If someone just warms up a can of Ravioli, microwaves convinience food, etc. I’d consider that rather food prep. If using the microwave is just one step of multiple in a recipe, than that’s fine again.

    For me cooking requires a minimum level of effort rather than a minimum level of heat.


  • Personally, I don’t like noticeable make-up. If it’s barely visible, it’s fine as well but in general I like ‘no make up’ the best.

    It’s also not only about looks:

    • If you wear make-up, you have to be careful with rain, touching the face, kissing etc.
    • It may take a lot of time to apply.
    • It’s expensive.
    • It’s rather bad than good for your skin.
    • It’s bad for the environment (more trash, animal testing, contimination of water etc.).

    No make-up = Win-Win-Win-[…]