The economics term for this is price discrimination. Nothing to do with racial discrimination, it’s discriminating based on willingness to pay.

But usually it’s not done by raising the prices above normal it’s done by setting the regular prices higher and then offering a discount to people who aren’t willing to pay less. People tend not to get upset when it’s done that way. Student discount at the movie theater is a form of price discrimination. People accept it because they’re being nice to people that don’t have a lot of money. Seniors discount? Also being nice, I guess. But the reality is they know everyone else is willing to pay more so they charge more.

And this has already been happening online. About a decade ago I noticed what when I searched for flights from an airline then went to facebook, I’d get an ad from that airline offering a discount. Not as sophisticated as attempting to determining the exact price I was willing to pay, but it’s along the same lines.

But the problems with these schemes is that people quickly figure out the system. I just made it a habit to search for a flight, then go onto facebook to look for the discount even when I’d be willing to pay even if there was no discount. But why not trick the system into thinking I didn’t really care about booking the flight and get that discount?

Yeah that’s how I see it too. Political strategist types can’t understand that not everything is a grand strategy. They assume if they can’t understand the strategy it must be 5-D chess or whatever. But maybe there is no strategy, and they’re just being idiots?

For some reason they simply couldn’t fathom an old man giving up power for the good of the country.

It probably only takes a staff on the order of a thousand people to make things go viral on the internet.

If it’s your job to just sign up for social media accounts (fill in the the captchas, type in a name, upload a few images) you could easily create at least a hundred per day.Multiply that by a thousand and that’s one hundred thousand accounts per day.

Of course you’d have to post some comments occasionally to make it look real. But that would just be re-wording the text from other comments. Of course if someone were to do this, youtube comments would look like, well… exactly like youtube comments are like right now.

So figure a a hundred thousand accounts per week with comments to make it look legit, that’s millions of accounts per year. Yeah you’d want to space it out a bit so it wouldn’t look suspicious. And you’d need to route the traffic through a botnet so the IPs are from the same country the account claims to be from. But within a year you’d have millions of accounts that all appear legit to any automated system checking them.

So now you’ve got the accounts and you want something to go viral. Have your thousand people start logging into accounts and running the video or whatever through your botnet, click like, leave a comment, maybe even check out the ad so the social media company makes a bit of money and aren’t incentivized to look at it too closely. This probably only takes around 10 seconds per account. You could have anything you want have at least a million likes and engagement within a day. Which is probably way more than is needed for the algorithms to start recommending the content to legitimate users. And then it’s all automatic from there.

Sure a few thousand people sounds like a lot. But not for the government of a country that wants to do disinformation.

Republicans are also always on about how the government is bad (even when they’re the incumbents) and how deregulating things make everything better. Libertarians are people who drank a full jug of that particular kool-aid. Also like republicans, they tend to only care about gun rights, though they will sometimes pretend to care about other rights to make it feel like an ideological thing.

The smaller ones are called “love seats”. That makes it consensual, right?

I kept getting frustrated that Harris didn’t say they were cleaning up his mess…in retrospect, I imagine that she wanted to distinguish herself from Trump’s repeated that wasn’t me that was you strategy.

That’s exactly it. “You did it”, “no you did it!” finger pointing doesn’t accomplish anything.

Also it’s not entirely truthful. This inflation is a global phenomena. Not everything about the economy is under the President’s control. The US has fared better than most countries and the world and Biden has managed the aspects of the economy he could extremely competently. It’s damn near impossible to come out of an economic situation like this without a recession, but he pulled it off.

But people when people feel the economy is bad telling that “the economy is good actually” just makes a candidate seem out of touch. Really what’s needed is some trust-busting (which is in the works) and raising taxes on the wealthy (also in the works). But there’s still a lot of people that believe the trickle down stuff (including the undecideds that Harris needs to get), so that won’t do either.

Inflation is always problematic politically. Someone gets a raise that matches inflation, they feel like they gained something they earned. We actually term it a pay raise (when it really shouldn’t) and employers most definitely present it as something they’re generously giving the employees. So people don’t see inflation as being the reason they got a pay raise, it’s simply the reason their pay raise was taken away from them. Inflation is difficult to explain because there’s multiple reasons for it, and trying to explain concepts around the velocity of money to someone angry about inflation isn’t going to go well. People tend to just say “it’s because the government is printing money” even when interests rates have been increased which is the opposite of printing money.

So yeah the economy is a complicated subject. So… “we’re going after the corporations for price gouging and we’re gong to bring down the cost of medicine” are the things Harris is saying because one minute is not enough time to explain the real complexities of the economy to people that believe the “trickle down” nonsense.

Yeah Vietnamese people ate dogs, cats, rats,etc. But not in the US. In Vietnam, during the war. Only because the war caused food scarcity.

An old Vietnamese man explained to me they didn’t kill their pets. But if their pet died, they would give it to their neighbours to eat, and their neighbours would do the same if their pet died. Because no matter how hungry they got, they wouldn’t want to eat their own dog.

Both sad and strangely heartwarming. I wonder if this is where these stories originated from.

I’ve never heard of a class action libel suit before, I don’t think it’s a thing. Seems like libel is saying specific damaging things about a specific individual. But IANAL, I just watch a lot of Legal Eagle.

Yeah I just hold shift and ctrl and start mashing function keys until I figure it out LOL.

You’re not offering any alternatives.

Or maybe we should just consider every issue individually?

Yeah so Israel is a democracy. You’re saying a democratic country is a Nazi country.

I think a common thing among Nazis is to try to de-legitimize democracies. Trump does it, Putin does it, and you’re doing it while claiming they’re the Nazis. What does that make you?

Also Hamas came into power by winning a plurality of the votes and refused to hold elections after that. Their goal is to at best ethnically cleanse and at worst commit genocide to remove people of a certain ethnicity from a region. They use extreme violence and a narrative about past injustices to maintain power. They keep people in a perpetual state of angry fervor to control them. That all doesn’t seem just a little fashy to you?

How do you know when you’re not the one being a Nazi accusing your enemies of being a Nazi? Is it just that you’re always not the Nazi and everyone that disagrees with you is a Nazi? How are you different from Trump, Musk, Putin, etc?

What you see and don’t see on social media is already decided by nation states. It’s just countries like Russia, China, and Iran do it covertly.

They can push the things they want to the top of the algorithms with a relatively small (for a nation state) amount of resources. Sure they usually don’t outright ban content (but that can happen too by spamming abuse reports) but they can effectively shadow ban people by simply promoting everything except for the things they don’t like and use bot spam to do the social media equivalent of signal jamming.

And of course (as we’ve seen with Musk) the leadership of social media companies can be influenced (by a combo of same the misinformation they use on everyone else + money) and made into assets for nation states. This allows them to have some influence over who gets officially blocked on social media.

Yes it’s not ideal to have nation states influencing speech, the current is to have foreign adversary nation states influencing speech. The choice is between having democracies having a de jure influence on social media or have authoritarian countries have a de facto influence on social media.

We now need a “verify you are a captcha” mechanism to counter this.

Yeah, right? Captchas have trained users to do whatever weird thing a webpage tells them to do, so now people will do this without thinking about it.

But your personal experience probably doesn’t give you a representative cross section of Americans.

Neither does yours. The fact is that there are Democrats pushing legislation pushing to move towards Ranked Choice Voting. It’s only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it’s all for show.

There’s also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd.

Yeah but they didn’t form a new party did they? And I don’t think the Dems want to be dependent on the GOP running another unpopular candidate in 2028. They have campaign workers that actually talk to a lot of voters so they’d know better than either of us about the cross section of Americans.

Most people don’t know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don’t really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don’t even know about it?

Yeah I’ve seen all of these videos before. Problem is, these aren’t isolated concepts. There are very specific power dynamics within a proportional representation system that aren’t the same as the power dynamics in a community representation system. He doesn’t go into those details in the rules for rulers videos, only the broad concept of democracy is mentioned. He only goes into a some math on the FPTP video but doesn’t discuss the differences power dynamics for those different systems.

Basically in a community representation system (called FPTP by people trying to make it sound arbritrary an unfair) the power flows up from the communities. In a proportional representation system the power flows down from the party leadership.

Considering the “rules for rulers” video it seems CGP Grey thinks all government has to be top down, so he doesn’t seem to have even considered the possibility of power flowing upwards from a community. This is what happens in the system he thinks is bad, so I’d say he hasn’t adequately considered everything about the subject.

We don’t actually elect rulers we elect people to represent our communities. Sure they’re usually part of a party but because we elect representatives, not parties, that representative has the option of leaving the party if it serves the interests of the community they represent. Since parties can lose seats between elections they have to listen to the the elected representatives (community leaders) to avoid losing seats. People in a community put pressure on their representative, the reps but pressure on the party leadership, power flows upwards from the people.

Proportional representation only seems better if you think as CGP does and believe we can only be ruled over and we need to find a better way to select rulers. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of representative democracy.

Yeah it is. Most computers come with windows pre-installed so most people never do this kind of thing.

And there’s also things people need to be careful of. Like wiping all out all of their cherished photos by formatting the entire drive. Considering that casual users probably shouldn’t attempt to do this. Not trying to gatekeep or anything, but there is potential for data loss for a user that doesn’t back up their data properly, which is common for casual users.

Apparently it nags you if you don’t have a 365 account. So it’s just more enshittification.