I think you have misunderstood the reason people want social media. They want the audience (or the perception of an audience), and everything else is secondary.
Most services have now light premium-tiers, where they do show ads. And then there are the rats like Amazon, who just add them to the normal tiers, and offer an additional service to not show ads.
YT has a Premium Lite paid tier (at least in the U.S.) that does show ads on music and in certain other areas of the app, such as shorts, searching, browsing, etc.
Do you feel good about YouTube spending money on hosting and video producers spending time/money on content that you're paying nothing for? How is that sustainable?
Frankly? That's Google's (well, Alphabet's, I guess) problem.
They're a multibillion-dollar international monopoly with absolutely staggering amounts of money and power, actively engaging in a wide variety of activities directly aimed at making the lives of every normal person on the planet worse so that they can have more power, more control, and more money. Me blocking ads on YouTube not only costs them effectively nothing, it's also the act of a flea against a polar bear.
If Alphabet showed any signs of actually wanting to create a sustainable alternative to the surveillance economy, I might have some sympathy for them. But not only do they not do this, they are the ones who created it in the first place.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that I'm boycotting "the ad-free model".
I'm boycotting them. After all, every cent that goes their way supports surveillance advertising (among other unsavory things).
I have other subscriptions that support ad-free creators.
If they choose to misconstrue my refusal to support them with either money or ad views, that's also their problem. (Also, that's patently never going to happen, because my signal vanishes instantly into the noise.)
I suspect Hegseth and other officials will be replaced when Trump internalizes how unpopular this war is and needs a scapegoat to facilitate a pivot. He's already blaming other people in his administration for anything that's going wrong.
Even if his officials are ideologically stable and consistent, he himself isn't.
I don't think he cares? He's going to cash out after this and his donors will make sure he is paid handsomely for this. He can't run again and Israel just took 10% of Lebanon and is poised to be the great regional power. They're already talking about Turkey and Pakistan as the new threats... They will just keep moving the goalposts until it stops working. I have no clue where this ends, but Iran could end up buying a nuclear weapon from Pakistan if this keeps heating up.
That is kind of his style. And then we have "anti-war" voices like future president Tucker Carlson who refuses to say Trump's name when criticizing US foreign policy. It just gives him room to say "it wasn't my fault, aren't I great?"
>Perhaps you joke, but does Tucker really have a chance at the Presidency?
People had the same attitude about Trump. Tucker has millions of followers and regularly gets more viewers than CNN. He is also one of the only talking heads that isn't on Israel's propaganda payroll. I think he'd actually go far in the primaries if he ran. Whoever wins next will be whoever is the least cozy with Israel. Democrats still polling at all-time lows despite this. I think whoever distances themselves from Israel the most (democrat or republican) is going to be the winner. People see how AIPAC and donors like the Adelsons control our country and force us into wars that don't benefit us. There will absolutely be blow back from this.
While I agree with you that Americans (on both sides) are increasingly getting frustrated with American politicians' near-blind devotion to Israel, it will not translate to public eschewing of Israel in American politics. Elections are still won by money-power, and AIPAC supplies a lot of that.
I don't think so, he's too much of a nerd. He uses too much reasoning in his communication (I am not saying good or bad reasoning) which is not what people want, especially not today. Even someone like Bernie Sanders was successful because he struck a cord, his message was clear and didn't need too much explanation. Tucker is mostly trying to be the smartest person in the room, an intellectual. Too many voters are turned off by this. FWIW I expected Trump to win in 2016 based on similar things.
No they're not. They're going to continue making enormous amounts of money from corporate IT lock-in, Azure, and AI.
Windows' biggest competitor is iOS, and many people have stopped using Windows entirely and just rely on their phones. Microsoft has had record profits since that started happening.
Funny you mention iOS - my MegaCorp-issued iPhone has Microsoft entune for device management and Active Directory membership, Microsoft Authenticator for single sign-on, and really high quality versions of Microsoft office apps - Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel. Microsoft is all-in when comes to iOS.
Over Peak I had to update a shared Excel file on SharePoint each night - because as we all know, Excel is the finest multi-user database in existence. I had no problems doing that from my iPhone.
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