Regarding the discussion of ger/yurt districts in cities, it's also important not to underestimate the cultural significance of the nomadic lifestyle and yurt culture.
Changing climate (desertification) and economic conditions have meant that a lot of people have given up their nomadic lifestyle and moved to cities or their outskirts (mostly Ulaanbaatar). They often are reluctant to do so, it's a big step, and they often hope it is a temporary one.
They set up their yurts not only because of housing shortages, but many are also hesitant to move into apartments or other permanent structures as it's seen as the last step in giving up this nomadic lifestyle. Often they are setting up their yurts next to permanent structures, either because they are living in the 'yard' of relatives or to expand their residences and stay connected to their culture.
I've traveled across Mongolia on a motorcycle many years ago, and one thing I never expected is how absolutely everyone living in a permanent house also has a yurt in their backyard, regardless of how good the house is. This made no sense to me as an outsider (like, do you really need a second house?) so I asked a local about this, and was given a funny look. Yurts are just hardwired into the culture, it's a status symbol, it's where you invite a guest, it's what you use when living outside, it so many things at once.
One of my best Airbnb experiences was staying in a yurt in the backyard of a Mongolian woman…in Wisconsin. It was great. They also had a huge fire pit with tons of chairs around it, and I could tell they loved having tons of people over and just hanging out.
Only insofar as both building types are recognized externally as inextricably linked to the culture, right? Sauna is deeply rooted in Finnish culture but not quite to the level or multipurpose use of ger.
Agree - ger living is not necessarily a failure of public policy, it could just be a cultural decision. Even Genghis Khan lived in a ger. Of course, for some people, it's likely to be a matter of necessity, for others, a matter of choice, but it's not prima facie bad.
> When ineffective policy results in a large chunk of the populace generationally living in yurts on the outskirts of urban areas, it’s clear that there is failure.
Prompt: "Mongolians still live in gers even in 2025... WTF?! That seems like a total policy failure. Help me understand why it's not just a dumb culture being dumb?"
Beginning of response: "The sight of traditional gers, or yurts, persisting as common dwellings in Mongolia, even within the cityscapes of 2025, is not an indication of a 'dumb culture' or a simple 'policy failure.' Rather, it is a complex tapestry woven from deep-seated cultural identity, stark economic realities, and the practicalities of a unique way of life. To understand the prevalence of the ger is to understand the soul of Mongolia itself."
It goes on like that for a few more paragraphs that are, to be honest, quite convincing.
The most annoying thing about modern life is people citing LLMs to try to win arguments about subjective questions. They are biased to agree with anything you ask them, and will do so unless it’s blatantly factually untrue.
Even if you ignore agreement, LLMs are trained on the content of the internet which is wildly biased toward the mean or lowest common denominator urban english speaking viewpoint depending on the subject.
The most annoying person in a chat group is the eternal LLM responder, that person that takes any question and feeds it to an LLM and replies back in the chat with it. We're now creating groups without these people to avoid the bullshit.
My pet theory is that LLM posters get more flak than they otherwise would because the equally terrible commenters who simply googled it, or worse, formed an opinion and googled up a cherry picked link to support it crowd feels threatened by them.
I'm not sure about Mongolia, but elsewhere I've seen wooden platforms for yurts under which water and sewage is ran, much as you would do with a crawlspace type house.
I've been in a Uzbekistan palace, I think it was Khiva. And it was, well, a palace, with courts and richly decorated rooms. But at certain fully enclosed by walls court there was a circular place where yurt have been standing. Khans were tracing their lineages back to Genghis Khan, and it was unbecoming for the khan to spend nights under the firm roof, even if it's in a middle of the city with long sedentary life style traditions. All the visiting relatives wouldn't approve.
Mongolia is also really struggling right now with a mass migration off the plains because of several very cold winters that have decimated their flocks. There just isn’t enough room for them to move into permanent buildings even if they wanted to.
It also sounds like they would already have one, and / or that it would be relatively easy to move if they want or need to. Don't they go back to their more rural homes for special events, for example?
Moving a ger can be a significant effort, especially a large one. Most urban dwellers find owning the trucks and vans that can hold these things pretty impractical if they're not moving regularly.
There's a fairly large domestic tourism industry catering to urban city-dwellers who want to go live in a nice ger for a couple weeks to feel connected to their history.
If anyone has any tips for the most cost effective way for expats to file, please share them here.
I'm doing it all by hand because I'm tired of going through the 'free' apps and entering in all my details, and when I get ready to file it end up being hundreds of dollars to file since the other forms (extra 1040 schedules, 2555, etc) are not included.
In a way yes. If you compare ads to purchasing products or even subscriptions, ads translate into attention and optimizing for addictive engagement. The same as microtransactions in games.
If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus.
The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
It's not just advertising. It's capitalism in general. If they don't show you ads, they find other ways of monetizing you. Things that aren't in your interest. "Enshittification" per Cory Doctorow.
It's not confined to capitalism, and it's more than a bit fruitless to frame it as such. A strict command economy would still be trying to advance its own interests through identical methods. Instead of "friend post, friend post, click here to buy product, friend post", you get "friend post, friend post, the Rungra People's Pleasure Ground is proud to announce that Supreme Leader has facilitated the construction of a brand-new dolphinarium, friend post".
Yes, capitalism is bad, and command economies are also bad. However, we are talking about capitalism, because we live in it, and we are not talking about command economies, so I'm not sure why you brought them up.
The implication of the conversation is "if only no-capitalism, then this wouldn't be an issue". The fact that this exact same behavior can (and does) readily occur under a command economy - an economic system very antipodal to capitalism, if possibly not quite literally-100%-diametrically-opposed-in-all-possible-regards - casts doubt on the fact that it is directly linked to capitalism in any meaningful way.
It's also a bit strange to say "we are talking about capitalism" when this is your first post in the sub-thread.
Capitalist systems heavily influenced by Objectivist/libertarian/Mises/Chicago “regulating markets more than hyper-minimally is immoral, oh and I conveniently have also proven from first principles that regulating them makes everything worse in all cases” horse-shit are bad.
Free (as in competitive) markets are indeed great, but capitalism is not free markets. It is, in fact, antithetical to them, since what capitalism really is about is a property rights system that allows for unlimited accumulation of capital (hence the name!), which inevitably leads to its aggregation in the hands of a few monopolists who then strangle said free market.
Free markets themselves, though, are a concept far older than capitalism, and are compatible with a broad variety of economic systems, including many forms of socialism and left-wing anarchism - e.g. Proudhon, the granddaddy of modern anarchist thought, was very much anti-capitalist and pro-free-market.
The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for the platform as a place to find jobs or employees.
Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for something to watch means less time streaming?
I assume it's about papering over the gaps in their content library.
You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office. They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content libraries that you hop between month-to-month.
A short while ago, I noticed I only used Netflix to watch 2 classic comfort shows, and I started to doubt if it was worth a 2-classic-comfort-shows-as-a-service subscription. I tried looking through the catalog to see what else I was paying for and ended up cancelling my subscription.
Netflix does an amazing job in giving the impression that they have an endless library of top quality content, but in reality, it seems like it's only a handful good shows and some filler, but presented in a way that makes it look like there's way more than it actually is.
My wife and I realized we were only really using Netflix to watch Seinfeld. I got a complete set of DVDs for less money than a month of Netflix and canceled my subscription
I'm using usenet and a bunch of FOSS (*arr) and I'm never going back. This way I OWN my library, there is no chance that in November I will lose the ability to rewatch the office due to some uninteresting bullshit.
Whenever I physically can I buy DVDs or digital downloads.
I guess I just didn't understand the Netflix model - why would I want to rent something that I can just buy and have for life? Especially with the enshitification these days - it means I have to pay a massive amount of money (over 5 years say), for a shitty experience, ending up having nothing when I cancel the subscription? That's just a recurring bad deal, in my opinion.
And even if that isn't the case right at this moment, they have to be prepared for rights-holders to fuck with them and they have to be prepared to cut production costs (or for a rival to spend big on production in a way they don't think they can match).
So regardless of the state of their content library it's necessary future-proofing.
This. The absolute worst case scenario for streaming is you open the app scroll for a minute or less then close it. If you scroll for 10 minutes instead of just 1 the streaming service has much larger mindshare and youre more likely to check again tomorrow.
> More time spent looking for something to watch means less time viewing?
or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like a slot machine - where you "win" by finding a good series to watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to encounter a perfect series to watch.
Studios don't want to license content to Netflix now that they are direct competitors, so Netflix has fewer and fewer movies and shows that they didn't produce themselves. And they want to spend as little as possible on producing their own content.
That way they make as much profit from the subscriptions as they can.
2. Reducing the value of competitors.
They are competing for user time. They want you to spend as many minutes as possible on Netflix because any minute not spent their is a minute you might be spending on Hulu or Apple TV. At the end of the month when you decide that you can't afford that many streaming services and decide to cut one, you'll pick based on which one you use the most. They don't want that to be the other guy.
This is strongly in tin-foil hat territory but: streaming video costs a lot more money than streaming some JSON to populate a UI. Every minute you spent browsing the catalogue over playing a video is probably a significant costs saving for Netflix.
And tragically most users prefer the auto playing previews. Theprimeagean has a YouTube video about how he tried to a/b test it before release thinking "no way that's what users would prefer" and was unfortunately wrong.
My problem with turning it of is that if you _do_ want to watch the preview it's very cumbersome. Clicking on it goes to the movie/episode. So to get to the preview you have to go to the list of Episodes, scroll down (and try not to get spoiled) to trailers then play it. So I have one profile with it on and one with it off, depending on if I'm browsing or not.
100%. Wasn’t trying to contradict your statement - just giving some additional context.
And he is a semi popular tech YouTuber that has risen to popularity in the last couple of years. I think he also streams on twitch but I’m not on that site so I can’t say. But he worked for Netflix for about 10 years.
> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain
They want to take the bargaining power from creators (and old IP owners).
They don't want the customers to search for a specific show. They want the customers to watch whatever is shown to them. This way Netflix will have tremendous power over show creators - if our algorithm doesn't favor you, it doesn't matter how good your show is or how much money you spend on marketing outside Netflix.
You've got it backwards, Netflix doesn't want people to just doom-scroll, the users want to doom-scroll.
Attention destroying apps reduce the long term focus and reward centers such that doom-scrolling through the catalog probably feels better than just watching something. Most of the folks I know who start a movie or show immediately pull out their phones anyway to scroll elsewhere.
Because my netflix subscription is cancelled specifically because the "Finding something I want to watch drains my energy" phenomenon. Gradually over the course of like a year I got more and more frustrated with being suggested things, and not having a good way to find things.
I wish Netflix and other streaming services had more information about a movie or show for me to base my decision on. I would like more text. Maybe, some reviewer snippets. The full major cast members, not just the top names. The director should be prominently displayed. Let me easily see what else that director has done, even if it's not on that streaming channel.
Apple TV is the worst, because it dumps you right into the program, and you have to back out in order to get more information.
They all just want me to trust them that I'll love it. I end up having to pull up reviews on my phone.
> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain
Because regardless of whether or not the business model depends upon it, investors have been trained that “engagement” is inherently good quality for their investments to have. Increase engagement, stonk price go up.
Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute.
I don’t buy Netflix solely because they don’t integrate with the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.
Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions. If you recall, “reality” TV shows were taking over in the 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering of quality).
Netflix was changing a lot to drain more money out of users recently, which is why income rose recently. What I'd like to see is active / recurring users instead.
It's important to look at the competition as well for this. I think we can all agree that streaming is here to stay. But how are the others faring here? In a more and more fragmented landscape, Netflix still has the fattest offering. Also the quality of the service (aka, search, languages offered, subtitles, trailers, stream quality, own productions...) is way better than say Prime or Disney+. So why shouldn't they be leading the stats? Even if you think they suck, compared to the rest of the pack they suck the least.
Mostly it's to cover up that the catalogue isn't as great anymore, isn't it? Since almost every big label took back the rights and started their own streaming service, Netflix simply doesn't have as much content (that anyone would want to see) anymore.
I quit all those platforms recently and I'm not missing the frustration of having to 'switch channels' through their incomprehensible categories and views anymore.
Think of it this way, the less time they spend actually WATCHING content, the longer they will pay their monthly service because they have this massive "watch list" that they never actually get through. They just keep paying month after month never getting through a backlog that they inspire to watch. I don't agree with it, but it makes sense to me. If you can never feel satisfied, you will pay over and over again chasing that satisfaction of watching "everything."
Many people will pay Netflix for years hardly watching content for months just because the convenience factor of not having to subscribe/unsubscribe when they know a new season of X will be out in the next year. It's wild to me, but people are lazy. So again, the more you keep them from actually watching the content and realizing they are "done", the longer they likely just keep their subscription active. Get them to add as much potential content they want to watch to a never ending backlog watch list.
I guess my thing with LinkedIn is that there's just no reason to use the feed. It's still a place to connect with people I've worked with and keep up with what they've been doing. It's incredibly useful for that. I really don't find the feed to be either a boon or a hindrance in that use case. I know it's there, I know it annoys some people, but it's just irrelevant to me.
The LinkedIn feed would actually be very useful if it only showed my contact's milestones such as job updates, their own product/service launches and events like conferences or conventions that involve them.
Of course, such a feed would take me 2 minutes per week to read through so that wouldn't be good for the business.
I think Netflix faces the problem that measuring the causality between a user watching specific content and choosing to stay subscribed is super hard. Therefore, they focus on a metric that is easy to measure, namely time spent in the app. This is likely not the metric they should be optimizing for, but since they _can_ measure it, it becomes the target anyway.
Netflix's primary goal used to be to attract new subscribers. Now it's a more about maintaining subscribers and finding new ways to monetize the existing subscriber base. That's why you're seeing things like "sharing" subscriptions, and advertising, and premium plans.
> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain
Entertainment is a zero-sum market. More time spent doom scrolling means less time spent on another service, which probably reduces their churn (also, ads)
i think people's view of netflix's business model is heavliy biased by what they want netflix to be.
i get it, i hate what they've become too. i'd like to believe there's a world where paying for content is a better model than selling ads. but the reality is that every time netflix makes a decision that the internet gets angry about, their balance sheet looks better.
The thing about the situation is, now that when Tik-tok-ification has grown big enough, it (no-choice interfaces, "enshitification", etc) becomes the only paradigm UI designers, managers and investors understand. Moreover, it's interface that essentially completely controls the user - all the choices they have are essentially fake and control always appeals to managers and control may not immediately make money but it can make money long term so it can be justified.
You can see how Sonos enshitified their interface and even with a user rebellion wouldn't back down, just as an example.
You should watch some pilot videos online, specifically large commercial aviation videos.
Pilots have a TON of checklists and procedures. If they're up in the air approaching cruising altitude and need to turn around (even in an emergency), it's a lot of work.
They need to assess the situation, inform ATC that they are returning, copy down heading information from ATC (they generally do not just 'start turning'), start working through checklists, start dumping fuel (planes are often too heavy to land well early on in a flight), get the approach and landing procedures for the airport they are returning to, keep talking to ATC and switch from regional/approach frequencies, all while adjusting settings and doing calculations. In an emergency, they also need to report on how many people are on board, fuel levels, what their plan is, etc... all while, you know, flying the plane and being extra alert for other traffic (both in sight, on instruments, and the other radio calls) since they are deviating from what's expected.
Plus, they often have no idea what's going on, they have only heard "there is a fire onboard, we think we have it under control" from the crew.
If you're caught using steroids before the race, you're banned from running in the race (and may be fined, and may face criminal charges). If you want to appeal that's fine, but you can't run in the race today.
She was caught improperly funneling EU funds to her own party (members), which would give her party an unfair advantage in any current political race.
Sorry, are you claiming that the independent judiciary who convicted her of embezzling funds considers her their "political opponent"? And that the sentence they handed down which is laid out by the French legal system is tantamount to "crushing dissidents"?
Yes - to me the OP means solving issues ahead of time.... create the vaccine 1x or treat the virus causing the issue millions of times.
I have spent enough of this year injured due to my own adventure sport aggressive mis steps. I was MUCH less productive during this period than before or now due to injury.
Had I not needed to deal with that, is the most productive self and that has a exponential effect society.
Yes but let's also be clear that some forms of speech censorship are widely and broadly supported in public, 'town square' or broadcast media situations. Things like child porn, personal threats, calling for or organizing violence, hate speech, etc. Laws and social acceptance of this kind of censorship, of course, differ in different regions.
Hacker news may 'moderate' illegal content on this website, but they don't have a choice in the matter, US or State authorities will shut them down if they do not, so it's technically censorship. Your view on whether this is good or bad will depend on many factors, one of which may be how you view the legal structure of your government, which is substantially different in France, the US, or Dubai (where Telegram is located).
As is mentioned in the article, Telegram is not simple a 'secure messaging app'. They are also serving a role similar to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok. They host publicly accessible channels or public group chats with thousands of members, which are all (apparently) unencrypted and accessible to the Telegram company. It may be reasonable (both legally and socially) to expect that a company which has knowledge of public, illegal speech to take steps to remove that content from their platform.
And Durov, by choosing to be a media company and not E2E encrypt all of his user's private communications, has walked right into a situation where he needs to abide by local laws moderating/censoring illegal content, everywhere.
Changing climate (desertification) and economic conditions have meant that a lot of people have given up their nomadic lifestyle and moved to cities or their outskirts (mostly Ulaanbaatar). They often are reluctant to do so, it's a big step, and they often hope it is a temporary one.
They set up their yurts not only because of housing shortages, but many are also hesitant to move into apartments or other permanent structures as it's seen as the last step in giving up this nomadic lifestyle. Often they are setting up their yurts next to permanent structures, either because they are living in the 'yard' of relatives or to expand their residences and stay connected to their culture.
You can see examples of this in the first images.