I don't get it. What's your issue with Spotify that you imagine Amazon, of all companies, is better at?

Spotify pays poorly per play, but per play is a rotten metric.

Payout works the same (all subscription fees are pooled, then paid out according to total plays) so music services are "punished" according to the payout-pet-play metric for connecting people to the music they will listen heavily to.

The best services on on this metric, will be services which most subscribers don't even use - maybe because they don't even know they have it because they got it bundled with their cable TV etc. Obviously this is not sustainable or desirable.

I have sympathy for artists, and little for Spotify. But it's also artists who are primarily responsible for the authoritarian copyright mess we have today, from Sonny and Cher to Jean-Michel Jarre to Metallica. Not sure I like the revolutionaries more than the old regime. Especially when they push garbage metrics like payout per play, and their most usual solution boils down to "you should pay me, not all those others you listen to" or "you should listen to less music besides me".

That's right! Trump and his administration are certainly seeking control over media with more hamfisted, overtly threatening means.

But do you remember project jigsaw?

Back in the glory days, the government didn't have to threaten Google. They leapt at the opportunity to please them. They pretty much came to them asking, "where do you want your people installed?". In neoliberal philosopher Tim Snyder's terms, they certainly obeyed in advance. The aggressive punishment of people with even mild takes like "you should take the vaccine but we shouldn't force people to take vaccines" was probably not even government's idea, but the idea of small people eager to show which side they were on.

Are we better off now that the velvet glove is off? Not by much, honestly. But there's no way ahead where you don't come to terms with how damn bad the Biden-era responsible centrist consensus was.

No, communism isn't mentioned there either.

I don't see a mention of communism in the post you're replying to.

And where do the lines go?

Answer: Wherever we make them. It's us who make the rules, not nature. Nature doesn't care about the difference between you and a rock, because nature doesn't care, period.

So the question isn't what's the "correct definition", whether it's of man, woman, mutant freak, whatever. Definitions aren't right or wrong, they're just useful or not, to the people who use them.

> you will never breastfeed an infant with your body

It's a bit disturbing, but that one is a "maybe". Or maybe a "hopefully not". Men have the biological machinery to make breastmilk, just not in very large amounts.

That's not even the real story here. What's the real story is that someone got tasked with making stylized thumbnails, made a really good job of it, then some middle manager got a bit jealous and decided that guns in a James Bond thumbnail was not Guideline Compliant, and put their mark on it by scissoring it out. Who do you think you are, coming here and making art on the job? Corporate dysfunction 101. News for nerds, unless you've all grown into jealous middle managers yourself.

And this was pointed out immediately, but media seems to have decided WE'RE GOING WITH THE FOREIGN DESTABILIZATION PLOT AND THAT'S FINAL!

TBF though, there is plenty of, let's say patriotic palaeoarchaeology in China. I'm immediately suspicious of archaeology from China which suggests something is much older than thought and what do you know, it started in China.

And by far the most of us who died before having kids throughout history, died from disease, not from being killed by our neighbors. Even with the industrialized murder of the 20th century, we don't hold a candle to the plague bacteria or the malaria parasite.

Anyone who's played with genetic programming or computer games with genetic breeding elements (CK2, anyone?) knows that if most people die from A, selection for B is going to be painfully slow.

Diarrhea is not as sexy as war and harems, though, for selling a narrative about our past.

got the upper hand cognitively

We don't know that. "We" (that is, those of our ancestors who weren't neanderthals) got the upper hand in the sense of having more living descendants, but we don't know if the advantage was cognitive or something else. The replacement was slow, across many generations, and was also not complete (as evidenced by our 0-2% neanderthal ancestry, depending on geography).

Look at the intense hate for Facebook.

Facebook sucks, but not inherently more so than Google, Bloomberg, Bezos, Microsoft, Apple, etc.

What happened is that they were judged to be politically unreliable, blamed for Trump's first win (after being credited, with praise, for Obama's second win). They're still scrambling to regain establishment trust, deeply complicated by Trump being in charge.

You don't have to wonder what's in some abstract fascist playbooks, you can just go read them. Everything is accessible in these days.

From what I've seen, they contain a hell of a lot of "they're exploiting our kindness", "They're exploiting our democracy", "they're exploiting our devotion to fairness" etc. "They're exploiting our free speech" seems like it fits right in.

Bear in mind that this woman, while she is undoubtedly right about everything about Facebook's issues, almost certainly joined Facebook at the urging of, and as an asset of, NZSIS. Her background reeks worse than a CNN news analyst's.

Even on the freak occurrence that someone with that background decided to join Facebook for pure idealistic reasons wholly unrelated to their FPINT past (which she would have you believe), I can guarantee you that if I think she's a spook, Facebook thought so too. She was allowed into the powerful position she got because Facebook wanted a cozy relationship to another five eyes bigwig.

So yes, listen to what she says about Facebook, but don't assume the power imbalance is in Facebook's favor!