You have to stop thinking about "the news" as a business. I have an article that will help:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos signed the $250 million Washington Post deal with no due diligence

The objective isn't to earn money selling advertising, needing viewership/readership to accomplish that. The objective is to dictate what people think about...everything. It's mind control, not business. It has a financial payoff, but it's not as direct as subscriber numbers or advertising revenue.

Shipping is free on any order over $25. Put some low-dollar stuff you want but don't need right away in your cart or on your wishlist, and add one of those items to your cart when you need to get it over $25.

The only reason to have prime is if you are always in a hurry to receive things, and if you instead only pay for that when you need it, you may be better off without prime.

I've learned to plan ahead, and I've become comfortable with ebay and other sources, and not only do I not have to pay for prime, I usually find a better price than Amazon. Particularly on small things and on grocery items, Amazon prices are kinda crap.

The downside of canceling prime is that Bezos is a vindictive SOB. They will hold your orders for up to eight days before shipping. Sometimes they do that, sometimes they ship almost as fast as prime. You just don't know how long an Amazon order will take without prime, so learn to plan ahead. Order stuff before you absolutely need it. If you're in a hurry, get it elsewhere, or pay for shipping.

I've followed The_Donald since early 2016 as a hostile observer and it is clear to me that they don't know what any of these words mean. Not in the political sense.

Almost the entire Democratic party is centrist. Google "new democrats". Bill Clinton set them on this path. The party has become both neoliberal (free-market capitalist) and neoconservative (American exceptionalism, interventionist foreign policy).

They are very much NOT leftist, NOT liberal, NOT progressive. Those words have all become meaningless, because people are still using them to describe the Democrats, when they are very much none of those things any more.

Nobody creates a boring fake news story. Lots of real news is uninteresting. There's your difference. When it is believed, fake news travels faster because it is more interesting.

The guy who exposed the Russian troll farm in 2015 thinks the hysteria is overblown. If you report on that you get your live streaming ability cut.

https://youtu.be/m6IeEldlcFE

They've been demonetizing and rendering less-findable videos that don't satisfy mainstream sensibilities for at least a year. This has affected political content on both the left and right.

Still unrecognized in the media that you are allowed to see is that a new axis has opened in the political landscape: establishment vs anti-establishment. The six corporations (soon to be five) that control all the media are on the establishment side, of course, and they are having a tantrum over supporters of both Trump and Sanders (as well as all third parties).

Not being able to get them at Best Buy means the market for them will shrink, which will make them more expensive, shrinking the market farther, and possibly convince labels to stop making them.

It's the Walmart effect. The purchase decisions of other people do affect you.

Shipping is maddening without prime. They don't just ship a slower carrier. They hold it for up to a week before shipping. And some things you find are prime-only, so you can't order them at all. I got used to ordering things from ebay, and I learned to like walmart and some other sellers' direct website.

This is the opposite of my experience. Until recently, every modern US generation had it better than their parents, and knew it. It's only been this century that the realization has sunk in that the standard of living is no longer going up, when things like healthcare, job opportunities, housing costs and debt are considered. We have cheap toys and internet. Everything else is starting to suck.

The observation described in the article is quite old. That is, while people raking in the bucks during the internet boom were young, their elders were still happier. While those same people were young, their elders were happier. While *those* people were young, their elders were happier.

You, provided you have basic needs covered in your old age, which is far from guaranteed, will be happier than your grandkids.

You describe a real problem, but the point of the article still stands.

Do they have COBOL experience before you hire them?

Bana Alabed is a seven-year-old Syrian Girl. She's also a pawn in the propaganda war. CNN manufactured a story of a seven-year-old Syrian girl asking America to liberate Syria from its tyrant president. Problem is, she doesn't understand English, so her CNN interview is implausible.

https://www.youtube.com/result...

And by "whine" I mean "have been squelched and are complaining."

This policy covers topics such as war and Syria. You can't report on war or Syria, as in "the war in Syria", and expect to be monetized. If you have "war" or "syria" in the title, it'll be automatically unmonetized.

You can't report on anything the nanny state has determined might be in opposition to mainstream news. Use the word "lawsuit" or the name "seth rich" and you're probably going to be unmonetized, even if your video parrots the mainstream propaganda, as in, "the DNC lawsuit is bunk", or "the seth rich story is conspiracy nonsense". Got naughty keywords? No ads for you.

And you sure as hell can't describe the dnc lawsuit or the seth rich story, fairly or not, and expect ad revenue.

Want to talk about propaganda? Call it something else.

Hillary Clinton? Be nice to her or her paid trolls (Correct the Record, now ShareBlue) will report you.

Something you want to describe as "rigged"? Don't do that.

Think you want to report on news and use words like murder or conspiracy or conflict? Yeah, nanny state don't like those words anymore.

Say something unapproved today? They're going to go through all your videos now and unmonetize the ones they don't like.

This might be google appeasing advertisers, as they say it is, or it might be google exerting political influence, like they do in search listings, or it might just be google realizing that political commentators will continue to produce content for their platform even if they don't pay them anything. Whatever it is, it's definitely not just a smack down on conservatives. Progressives are complaining, too.

The following anonymous coward putinbot posts are mine. I don't normally bother signing in to slashdot because it isn't worth the trouble:

WaPo, CIA conflict of interest rag
Guccifer 2.0 is a fraud
TL;DR

I'm a Democrat, not a Republican or a Trump fan or a putin bot. I resist propaganda because propaganda is more dangerous than Trump. I resist propaganda because it is a symptom of a system that is so stacked against ordinary citizens that it may be too late to ever wrest control of our government back from the oligarchs, deep state and military industrial complex.

But since you mention bots, I'll mention paid trolls (not claiming you are one): Correct the Record, ShareBlue. Paid trolls working for Hillary, according to sources I think you'll agree aren't Putin-friendly:

How a super PAC plans to coordinate directly with Hillary Clinton’s campaign
David Brock's Army of "Nerd Virgins" Has Hillary's Back
Clinton SuperPac Admits to Paying Internet Trolls
The making of a Hillary Clinton echo chamber

The DNC leak taught the DNC and the Obama administration a lesson. They tried to ignore it, but a couple higher-ups actually apologized for their participation, ruining any chance they might have to later deny the content of the emails was authentic.

So now they are getting out in front of the next leak. They are discrediting it by planting the story that the Russians did it, and the Russians might alter or fabricate documents.

We don't know what it will be, but we know it was those damned commies.

Go back to your entertainment, citizen. Nothing to see here.