I might not even put it on owners per-say. A lot of this money goes to landlords, lenders, and other higher-level extraction agents. When you get under the hood of some of these nursing homes and care facilities, what you'll often find is Vulture Capitalism. An institution that did work and was humane, but got bought out and turned into a vehicle for siphoning away other people's money.
At another level, they can be used by real estate companies looking to gentrify family homes. An elder person shows up and is roped into a reverse mortgage as a condition of residency. The nursing center might be fine enough on its face, but the costs are exorbitant in a way that's invisible to the tenant. Bank accounts are drained. Housing is seized. And then the company makes its money effectively liquidating the assets of those in their care.
Well, unfortunately, there is no project like that with Wikipedia’s critical mass. Most attempts with any attention are rather horrific. See: Grokipedia.
Idk if you even want the kind of attention Wikipedia achieved, given how it ultimately became the target of endless waves of scams and influencer operations.
That said, the Wiki format has been prolific in a way even the core website has not been. The core data for Wikipedia has been harvested and replicated across a thousand different boutique iterations. A lot of what made things like Grokipedia and Conservapedia and the rest flop is that these projects tried to administer the sites even more tightly than the original. And it's an enormous project, so that loads a phenomenal amount of work on a handful of people.
If Wikipedia dies, nothing good will replace it.
That's an absurd presumption. Just straight off the bat, you have the old Encyclopedia Britannica. You've got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors. You've got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts. You've got physical libraries. You've got digital libraries. You've got LLM compositions of libraries.
The biggest flaw most of these have is the same one any search engine after Google had. "Why would I go here if I can just go to Wikipedia instead?"
But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.
Wikipedia is valuable because its a reasonably sane default reference for billions of people
It's a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.
What you will experience is not merely a lack of oxygen but a surplus of boot on your neck.
The second time he ran, it was as much about keeping his own ass from being indicted by a swarm of state and local prosecutors, looking for some easy wins against a vulnerable high-profile target. Alvin Bragg was the tip of the iceberg, even if Merrick Garland was too cowardly to advance any kind of prosecution at the federal level.
And let's not forget the general seductive allure of becoming a national demagogue. Trump's vanity drove him in both campaigns. His skill at cultivating celebrity turned a simple vanity campaign into an unstoppable movement. And his naked appeal to fascism in a country that secretly has a hard-on for fascists delivered the kind of President that a plurality of Americans deeply desire.
Sometimes these fucks just do it for the love of the game. It wasn't until Trump's second term that he really figured out how to milk the Presidency for all it was worth. But also, he didn't have Silicon Valley riding his ass the first term, either. Can't help feel like the Anarcho-Libertarian chucklefucks running the tech sector have infused the Trump admin with a full on smash-and-grab ethos that his first term lacked.
I'd blame contraception. And by blame I mean celebrate.
But the idea that teenagers aren't fucking because Capitalism really undersells the impact of hormones. Kids fucked under feudalism. They fucked under theocracy. They fucked as serfs and slaves. They fucked as cave people. The mode of production isn't what's at issue.
Birth rates in North Korea are still below replacement level, same as South Korea. Some of the highest birthrates in the world are happening in active war zones. Some of the lowest in the safest and wealthiest.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
I don't think it's a planetary limit we're hitting. Population expansion is highest in parts of the world with some of the worst living conditions.
A lot boils down to access to contraception. Take that away and all those horny teenagers will fuck out more babies, because hormones override any kind of logical long term economic understanding.
I'll spot you "they" as the endless white nationalist nags and natalist pundits. For some reason "population collapse" never shows up as a concern for Palestinians or Cubans or Bangledeshis or Congolese. It's only ever a rich white European problem.
But this endless "I didn't start the fire" rhetoric kinda ignores how the prior generation as a whole had about as much control over their material conditions as we do now. Just being mad at The Olds neglects how many of them delivered the education and health care and technology and agriculture that brought us to the modern moment [in a good way].
Not to be all "you hate capitalism and yet cell phone" but you gotta see the prior generation as the same group of disaffected working class as we have in the modern day.
Ffs, our parents were inundated with "Overpopulation" as the crisis du jour. They were lectured over having too many kids and having kids when they were too young and not being economically independent enough to care for anyone but themselves. We inherited that from them and internalized it. And now we meticulously practice contraception because we've been drilled to believe it's the responsible thing to do.
Only post-COVID have we really seen the Natalist Panic taking off. It's a complete 180⁰ and largely the product of Millennial insecurities.
Questionable leadership or not, it is a lighthouse in the information dystopia of the 2020s, which literally helps hold society together.
It pioneered a novel mechanism for collaborating on a project with minimal trust between contributors. But it was also riddled with bias and vulnerable to exploitation and as prone to cultivating disinformation as a universal source of truth.
Rather than fixating on the site as some last bastion of Web 1.0 nostalgia, we would do well to do better than Wikipedia.
Organizations like the Internet archive project have, imho, done as much or more than Wikipedia because of their commitment to accumulating primary source material. Managing that catalog and incorporating it into an encyclopedia of knowledge is much more than just stuffing a hard drive full of editor arguments and dead links from the old site.
We should probably all be downloading the website and printing off the important stuff
Sort of defeats the fundamental purpose of a collaborative online encyclopedia.
If I want a massive hard copy of collected human knowledge, I just go to the public library. I don't need to print my own.
But if I want to look something up on the fly (much less check down a bunch of citations), a thousand dead trees worth of printer paper isn't going to deliver the goods.
I think it might be more that the industrialization of agriculture made rare flavors far more commonplace.
Even real vanilla isn't all that expensive or hard to come by anymore. Virtually every grocery store has it in quantities that will suffice for anything but full on commercial needs.
So it has become a default flavor, exactly because it is both cheap to acquire and popular to consume. Not unlike chocolate (which, I might argue, is more vanilla than even mediocre quality vanilla).
I understand the rationale behind punishing an attempt at theft if that’s what actually happened
Let's assume that - deliberately and with malice of forethought - this person stole asparagus.
What is the appropriate punishment?
The drug charges are just fucked.
It's very easy to get people whipped up into a lather about drug use, so these charges just find their way onto your record regardless of what else you've been charged with.
We've done more in the last five years to curb fossil fuel consumption than at an point in human history.
From a massive pivot to renewable energy to our Green-Centric foreign policy of blowing up Nordstrem II, embargoing Venezuela, and shutting down the Straight of Hormuz, we are absolutely turning a corner on future fossil fuel consumption.
Donald Trump may go down in history as the most climate friendly leader in our generation. A hundred thousand Greenpeace activists could not have achieved in their lifetime what he's done in less than two terms as president.
critical thinking is an old paradigm that most of humanity is unwilling to interact with
Critical thinking is a mechanism for digesting large amounts of information over time, in order to make informed policy decisions.
If you don't have useful information, you don't have spare time, and you don't have any actual input into policy, it lacks value.
I see folks consistently trying to make this an individualist problem. "I figured it out because I think critical! You didn't because you're a dumb-dumb!"
But more often than not, it's two people talking past each other, working off different bodies of data (of debatable quality) that they've incompletely digested. And then all they know how to do with their conclusions is yell "You're an idiot!" at people who disagree.
How do you reach large numbers of people to form a consensus? How do you collaborate with them towards a tangible benefit?
Curiously enough, Facebook used to provide a mechanism for this purpose. And the fact that it doesn't anymore - that it is largely a trap for weak, confused, vulnerable people to scream at one another while they get scammed - speaks more to the profit engine of the service than the core competency of any of its members
I might not even put it on owners per-say. A lot of this money goes to landlords, lenders, and other higher-level extraction agents. When you get under the hood of some of these nursing homes and care facilities, what you'll often find is Vulture Capitalism. An institution that did work and was humane, but got bought out and turned into a vehicle for siphoning away other people's money.
At another level, they can be used by real estate companies looking to gentrify family homes. An elder person shows up and is roped into a reverse mortgage as a condition of residency. The nursing center might be fine enough on its face, but the costs are exorbitant in a way that's invisible to the tenant. Bank accounts are drained. Housing is seized. And then the company makes its money effectively liquidating the assets of those in their care.
Idk if you even want the kind of attention Wikipedia achieved, given how it ultimately became the target of endless waves of scams and influencer operations.
That said, the Wiki format has been prolific in a way even the core website has not been. The core data for Wikipedia has been harvested and replicated across a thousand different boutique iterations. A lot of what made things like Grokipedia and Conservapedia and the rest flop is that these projects tried to administer the sites even more tightly than the original. And it's an enormous project, so that loads a phenomenal amount of work on a handful of people.
That's an absurd presumption. Just straight off the bat, you have the old Encyclopedia Britannica. You've got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors. You've got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts. You've got physical libraries. You've got digital libraries. You've got LLM compositions of libraries.
The biggest flaw most of these have is the same one any search engine after Google had. "Why would I go here if I can just go to Wikipedia instead?"
But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.
It's a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.
What you will experience is not merely a lack of oxygen but a surplus of boot on your neck.
In fairness, he didn't take office to fix a pool, either.
The first time he ran in the GOP primary, it was as a stalking horse for his good friend Hillary Clinton. He did not intend to win, just to clean up on gullible GOP donors while inflating his media brand.
The second time he ran, it was as much about keeping his own ass from being indicted by a swarm of state and local prosecutors, looking for some easy wins against a vulnerable high-profile target. Alvin Bragg was the tip of the iceberg, even if Merrick Garland was too cowardly to advance any kind of prosecution at the federal level.
And let's not forget the general seductive allure of becoming a national demagogue. Trump's vanity drove him in both campaigns. His skill at cultivating celebrity turned a simple vanity campaign into an unstoppable movement. And his naked appeal to fascism in a country that secretly has a hard-on for fascists delivered the kind of President that a plurality of Americans deeply desire.
Sometimes these fucks just do it for the love of the game. It wasn't until Trump's second term that he really figured out how to milk the Presidency for all it was worth. But also, he didn't have Silicon Valley riding his ass the first term, either. Can't help feel like the Anarcho-Libertarian chucklefucks running the tech sector have infused the Trump admin with a full on smash-and-grab ethos that his first term lacked.
I'd blame contraception. And by blame I mean celebrate.
But the idea that teenagers aren't fucking because Capitalism really undersells the impact of hormones. Kids fucked under feudalism. They fucked under theocracy. They fucked as serfs and slaves. They fucked as cave people. The mode of production isn't what's at issue.
Birth rates in North Korea are still below replacement level, same as South Korea. Some of the highest birthrates in the world are happening in active war zones. Some of the lowest in the safest and wealthiest.
I don't think it's a planetary limit we're hitting. Population expansion is highest in parts of the world with some of the worst living conditions.
A lot boils down to access to contraception. Take that away and all those horny teenagers will fuck out more babies, because hormones override any kind of logical long term economic understanding.
I'll spot you "they" as the endless white nationalist nags and natalist pundits. For some reason "population collapse" never shows up as a concern for Palestinians or Cubans or Bangledeshis or Congolese. It's only ever a rich white European problem.
But this endless "I didn't start the fire" rhetoric kinda ignores how the prior generation as a whole had about as much control over their material conditions as we do now. Just being mad at The Olds neglects how many of them delivered the education and health care and technology and agriculture that brought us to the modern moment [in a good way].
Not to be all "you hate capitalism and yet cell phone" but you gotta see the prior generation as the same group of disaffected working class as we have in the modern day.
Ffs, our parents were inundated with "Overpopulation" as the crisis du jour. They were lectured over having too many kids and having kids when they were too young and not being economically independent enough to care for anyone but themselves. We inherited that from them and internalized it. And now we meticulously practice contraception because we've been drilled to believe it's the responsible thing to do.
Only post-COVID have we really seen the Natalist Panic taking off. It's a complete 180⁰ and largely the product of Millennial insecurities.
It pioneered a novel mechanism for collaborating on a project with minimal trust between contributors. But it was also riddled with bias and vulnerable to exploitation and as prone to cultivating disinformation as a universal source of truth.
Rather than fixating on the site as some last bastion of Web 1.0 nostalgia, we would do well to do better than Wikipedia.
Organizations like the Internet archive project have, imho, done as much or more than Wikipedia because of their commitment to accumulating primary source material. Managing that catalog and incorporating it into an encyclopedia of knowledge is much more than just stuffing a hard drive full of editor arguments and dead links from the old site.
Sort of defeats the fundamental purpose of a collaborative online encyclopedia.
If I want a massive hard copy of collected human knowledge, I just go to the public library. I don't need to print my own.
But if I want to look something up on the fly (much less check down a bunch of citations), a thousand dead trees worth of printer paper isn't going to deliver the goods.
Assuming nothing historically significant happens after that download, sure.
I've got an ancient encyclopedia from the 1950s that my dad owned. Let me tell you how useful that's been over the years.
I think it might be more that the industrialization of agriculture made rare flavors far more commonplace.
Even real vanilla isn't all that expensive or hard to come by anymore. Virtually every grocery store has it in quantities that will suffice for anything but full on commercial needs.
So it has become a default flavor, exactly because it is both cheap to acquire and popular to consume. Not unlike chocolate (which, I might argue, is more vanilla than even mediocre quality vanilla).
Let's assume that - deliberately and with malice of forethought - this person stole asparagus.
What is the appropriate punishment?
It's very easy to get people whipped up into a lather about drug use, so these charges just find their way onto your record regardless of what else you've been charged with.
AI ass response
Absolutely insane this came to anything more than "please pay us for the ham and asparagus" from a check out clerk.
The need to arbitrarily ruin people's lives over any perceived infraction, because of some mythological view of law enforcement...
"I don't think I'll super size it after all", I saw as I drive past the MegaCity One GigaChad data center.
We've done more in the last five years to curb fossil fuel consumption than at an point in human history.
From a massive pivot to renewable energy to our Green-Centric foreign policy of blowing up Nordstrem II, embargoing Venezuela, and shutting down the Straight of Hormuz, we are absolutely turning a corner on future fossil fuel consumption.
Donald Trump may go down in history as the most climate friendly leader in our generation. A hundred thousand Greenpeace activists could not have achieved in their lifetime what he's done in less than two terms as president.
In a sane system, he wouldn't have so much to lose.
But he's sitting on a functional monopoly bolted onto a surveillance state with infinite money. So he can keep fucking up forever.
He wrote a creepy stalker website that became the foundation for a massive network of college educated socialites to communicate.
And then he sold their conversations to marketing firms and intelligence services.
Critical thinking is a mechanism for digesting large amounts of information over time, in order to make informed policy decisions.
If you don't have useful information, you don't have spare time, and you don't have any actual input into policy, it lacks value.
I see folks consistently trying to make this an individualist problem. "I figured it out because I think critical! You didn't because you're a dumb-dumb!"
But more often than not, it's two people talking past each other, working off different bodies of data (of debatable quality) that they've incompletely digested. And then all they know how to do with their conclusions is yell "You're an idiot!" at people who disagree.
How do you reach large numbers of people to form a consensus? How do you collaborate with them towards a tangible benefit?
Curiously enough, Facebook used to provide a mechanism for this purpose. And the fact that it doesn't anymore - that it is largely a trap for weak, confused, vulnerable people to scream at one another while they get scammed - speaks more to the profit engine of the service than the core competency of any of its members
Zuck can only be interrupted into making an even bigger mistake, so no need to hold back.
It's actually three different guys. The Holy Spirit isn't pictured.