- 8 Posts
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Cory Doctorow thought that through: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham
And not just any Americans. They’re owned by Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund associated with the Republican party that also owns a notably Postmedia-like publication: The National Enquirer (via a360) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Asset_Management
Oh man, that inflation will get ya, back in the day it was only $20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH6kUCqIfD4
More detail / similar concepts if you’re not a video person: https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america
They published this in Popular Mechanics in 1912, we’ve been ignoring this for a long time:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year,” the article reads. “When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
Also, this Wikipedia article has a good summary on the overall arc of our understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science
It’s not the only IXP, just the largest.
It’s not really any particular problem, I just think it’s the sort of thing that’s worth being aware of at least. So I pointed it out. I did overhype the headline (should have put the building housing a key part…) but did indicate in the post that they bought the building and not control of TorIX itself and that
While that’s not necessarily an issue, I kinda figured it was at least a little bit notable but I’ve not seen it mentioned aside from an investment context.
It was also an opportunity to highlight Bell’s unnecessary sending of traffic through the US which I think should have a higher profile though I’m not a strident nationalist and might actually be sorta okay with it if it was actually legit more efficient or something but it sounds like it’s done for business reasons eg. to pressure smaller players into private peering.
I’d like to see infrastructure have a higher profile in general. I really appreciate connectivity, electricity, running water, roads, etc. and thing the investments we make there pay off. But it seems to often fall prey to being easily underfunded in favour of some attention grabbing but ultimately underwhelming pet project calculated to garner votes. Like tech debt being swept under the rug in favour of shiny features.
It’s just the building, seems fine really but like, maybe less of a non-event than the almost no attention it appears to be getting.
Or you mean the part where Bell unnecessarily routes Canadian traffic through the US just cause they can get paid more that way? Ya that doesn’t seem good to me either but has been widely known for years now and apparently we’re okay with it.
True, I do value public broadcasting and support it through my taxes so ya, CBC and TVO. I was mostly just thinking of things I had to opt into paying and brought that up in the larger context that you don’t need a state or a massive corporation to produce quality journalism. And so if our state fails to extract a bailout from American tech companies to satiate our bloated media corps I’m pretty confident we’ll be okay.
foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content,
I don’t believe they are getting particularly much revenue from journalism. I think that’s why their reaction to this is just to block the links being posted: it won’t really affect their bottom line. A blip. Even if Cali does it, people will just post memes or screenshots of headlines or w/e.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at.
Indeed, few of us spend much time reading the news. Especially actual investigative journalism and not just what amounts to entertainment content. Saw an article recently saying that Canadians level of interest in news media is even going down from what was presumably a fairly low baseline (see how easy it is to get by without links?)
I think there is a silver lining to this though: it doesn’t cost that much to make the kind of news that’s important. It’s certainly not free but you mainly need to pay a few talented and driven people enough salary to support them while they doggedly pursue the truth. You don’t need a massive printing press and a delivery fleet like in past. So news doesn’t need to be corporate. News doesn’t need to be Reddit, news can be Lemmy.
If something is happening, those of us who pay attention should be linking to it when it’s important. And should be linking to quality sources.
I live in Toronto, recently some protected lands were going to lose their protection and the circumstances around it were suspect. The most in depth journalism on the topic was this piece from a very small donor-funded org that investigates environmental issues: https://thenarwhal.ca/ford-ontario-greenbelt-cuts-developers/
Indeed, the federal government has an excellent program that supports this model (and that very publication) – it allows news orgs to be recognised as tax-deductible charities if they meet certain criteria, effectively amplifying the impact of those of us who think it’s worth paying for news to exist:
I do value journalism, and I do think more people should care and I think we should be linking to it everywhere we think we might be able to engage our fellow citizens with what’s going on around us.
I don’t especially value corporate manipulation and lobbying which is what I see from things like Postmedia, which owns way too many newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Canada
A for-profit business is seeking profit first. That necessarily distorts journalism. Especially when the business model is based on ads. I’d rather support a smaller, more focused sort of news gathering. And it’s better if more of us donate, they should beholden to a large sampling of the minority of us who think it’s important journalism happens and not to shareholders.
Currently I contribute to: Canadaland, The Local, The Narwhal, and The Tyee. I also pay for The Guardian because they don’t have a paywall.
I’d like to support the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail but they have paywalls so I’d have to log in to read them and then they’re associating my reading habits with my identity and selling it to advertisers. That business is gross. Much like what Facebook and Google do. I don’t want to support that. Plus I can’t link people to the paywalled news. And I think it’s important to be able to do that: it’s all the more important to have it there for the few people who will click through and become informed precisely because, as you said, most people won’t. And I don’t see pay-for-links helping; if the platforms eventually cave and start supporting that scheme, won’t it just encourage vapid Buzzfeed style clickbait as they try to get as much link juice as possible?
So I want to pay not for access to the news, but for the news to exist for everyone because I believe it’s important. And I think it would probably be good for society if ad-funded news died. Any other publications I should be supporting and linking to?
I did, because it tries to regulate merely linking to content, something I consider absurd. What I did not say is that it is “ridiculous to ask them to share some of the profit they make from Canadian work with Canada”. So I responded as such. I’m not terribly interested in engaging with someone who puts words in my mouth. If you’re curious for more of my thoughts on this topic, I intend to respond to the interesting comment by @StaggersAndJags@kbin.social when I have time to be more thoughtful.
It’s not, that’s why I didn’t say that.
To my understanding the bill is about payment for links.
Good. This law is ridiculous and I’m glad it won’t give the result they intended. Being able to link to things freely is a very basic part of the web, we really shouldn’t mess with that. And Facebook is a ridiculous place to get news from so it may have ancillary benefits as well in terms of maybe slightly improving public discourse and encouraging people onto other platforms with more transparency around their content weighting and data use practices.
…WTF? There are way too many Canadians with ties to Ukraine, myself included, that would be offended at the very idea of anything but utter condemnation of Russia’s inhumanly brutal invasion. How can an invasion ever be “self defense”, that’s absurd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
How can abducting children, laying siege to residential areas, rape, torture, etc. be self defense? It’s not. It’s abhorrent. Russia is worse than Trump.