When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.
Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western", which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that includes all highly developed nations.
No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair game depending on context.
Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social issue discussions.
Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out of government efficacy discussions.
It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.
You see this slight of hand up and down and left and right across every possible topic of discussion in communities composed of american demographics that generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.
I think the key thing (which we used to understand but seem to have forgotten) is that restrictions (including censorship) should be based on conduct, not opinion. Someone spamming commercial links, crap flooding, posting child pornography, even constant off-topic posting etc can justifiably be censored on a platform based on their conduct. But as soon as you advocate for censoring someone purely based on an opinion then you're making it dramatically easier for someone who shares your opinion to be censored later on. Although if we're being intellectually honest, even if there hadn't been any banning of wrongthink in the past, this kind of thing might still have happened anyway given the current administration and their allies. But it's definitely made it easier.
I remember when Alex Jones (or someone of that ilk) was being "de-platformed" by Google, Facebook, etc. Not only were people cheering for it, they were denying that being banned from YouTube (for example) was censorship since "there are other video hosting platforms" (yeah, there are but also not really) and "it's only censorship when it's the government who legally restrict you from speech".
(And Alex Jones is a detestable piece of shit just in case you think I'm a fan. But to paraphrase an old saying, freedom of expression is only a principle if it applies to people you utterly despise).
I just got a seven day suspension from Reddit for reminding a commenter that freedom of speech in the US only protects you from "consequences" from the government. Reddit's claim? That I was "encouraging violence". The root post was about that woman who got fired from Cinnabon after a video of her calling customers the n-word went viral and then the alt-right donated nearly $100,000 to her.
The ban message also claimed the suspension was done without automation.
The legal definition of monopoly in some jurisdictions means anyone with a large enough of a market share able to influence pricing, etc in a market. A market share as low as 25% can be called a monopoly. Does HBO+Netflix have a 25% share of the streaming market? I've no idea, but possibly.
But none of the streaming services are competing because they don't offer the same products, by design. Nobody is switching from Apple TV to Netflix because they don't share any shows - they buy both.
So? I also go to two different restaurants to buy different food, or two different websites to buy two different things, or fly two different airlines to go to two different places, etc.
Not the same, those directly compete. We all know IP doesn't work like this.
If you say you want Mexican food and I say Restaurant X is closed but we can go to Y, that's probably fine.
If you say you want to watch ratatouille and I say no, but we can watch ratatouing, which is 2 bucks at the DVD graveyard bin at Walmart, you'll say no.
> Does HBO+Netflix have a 25% share of the streaming market? I've no idea, but possibly.
No, not even close. According to Nielsen from this year, Netflix has only 7.5% of total TV hours and "Warner Bros + Discovery" clocks in at 1.5% ("HBO" as an independent entity is not tracked), for a total of 9%. A whopping 16% to go before crossing that 25% threshold.
Those percentages are of total TV hours, which isn't quite what I was talking about. Still though if you include YouTube (I personally wouldn't as I don't think they're providing a directly comparable product) they're still below 25% which is interesting.
I'm sure there will be negative side effects but the main outcome of these drugs is that you eat less. Many of us have trained ourselves to eat at a frequency and volume way beyond what is really required to keep our body functioning. This leads to weight gain in most people and thus is the focus but even independent of weight there are effects of continuously eating poor quality foods which are unlikely to be good. So I'm not surprised that there are all these miraculous sounding positive side effects to drugs which prevent most people from putting their metabolic system under near constant load.
When the side effects are better understood I suspect for the average person, eating less would be a net benefit to their overall health - _even if they don't lose any weight_.
If you made a Venn diagram for the non-genetic risk factors for heart disease and Alzheimer's, they'd basically be a circle.
Being worried about dementia but ignoring things like heart disease, diabetes, poor sleep, getting enough exercise, eating a health-promoting diet, etc. is like worrying about paying for retirement but refusing to save and invest.
Because Google provides (or used to provide) a fast consistent interface for a lot of basic queries. Sure, if I'm researching etymology in depth then I'll go to a specialist site, but 90%+ of the time I'm just double checking the definition of a word or something like that.
In general, internet browsing is biased towards sites that you're familiar with and can be reasonably sure aren't going to do something annoying (it used to be popup adverts and auto playing music, now days it's popups about newsletters / memberships or aggressive notifications about cookies / privacy notices.). This is particularly true if you ever spent time browsing in an open plan office or similar public place. There's also a cognitive load of interacting with a new interface which isn't something you want to deal with if you're midflow and want to check a word.
This is not to say that those sites you mentioned are guilty of bad practices, but the point is I'm not a regular enough user of them to have them on my mental "generally trust" list.
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