I'm not crying! You're crying!

In Winnipeg, we have a variety of rye bread that is white, light, and fluffy. In the rest of Canada, it is sold as "Winnipeg-style Rye", but in Winnipeg it's just "Rye". It's seriously the best.

For jam, we've got a single grape plant in the backyard that produces about 15L of grape jelly every year. An insane amount for a single plant. Not 100% sure on its variety (maybe Valiant) since it was already 30 years old when we bought the house. But fucking awesome.

For peanut butter, we actually tend to use "Nature's Nuts Nut and Seed Butter" -- which is some mix of: almonds, cashews, chia seeds, hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and Brazil nuts. Made in Canada, but obviously a bunch of these things don't grow in our climate ;)

Edit: just realized this conversation is on lemm.ee which is shutting down. Sadness. Looks like a similar community will spin back up on lemmy.world

DM: yes.

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

Majestic

As a mod of a few mostly quiet communities on lemmy.ca, I'd note that there isn't actually a lot of work involved. Like, I check the ModeratorView every few days just to make sure something didn't slip through my feed, read some comments, and then return to scrolling. I have never actually had to take a real moderator action. It's actually crazy how nice everyone is, even the ones that disagree with me :)

Like check the modlog on lemmy.ca -- it's not that busy.

1988 was peak old school wiretapping. Like, physical connection to a phone line and a guy in a van. Still doable, but doesn't scale well. Remember the crazy people that would unplug their phone when they weren't calling anyone because the microphone could be on...

It wasn't until the 90s with digital communications that people started being concerned with the possibility of mass wiretapping. See the Echelon NSA conspiracy theories and such.

But we are all wiretapped now all the time and do so willingly. Hey Siri...

I digress. Calvin definitely has a van parked outside. Or at least he can imagine he does, which is close enough.

The number is probably set just high enough to force meta to respond with lawyers who have an actual payroll. $1M is nothing, but if they roll over, then every other artist will do the same. Meta will need to fight this in courts. It will cost them money to do so.

Eminem can make an album about it afterwards. And he doesn't look super greedy. And other artists might win because of him.

Wouldn't put more than like 5V DC on it, but you could use it to put power to some low power USB toys.

I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I'd get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn't fraud or a scam -- it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same -- I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same -- write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don't think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn't organic.

That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.

Notably absent: Russia, North Korea

Met him once after he gave a talk on campus. Decent dude.

He asked the lecture hall an interesting question about the explorer mindset. It was during the era of the MarsOne media-fueled vapour hype. "Would you take a one-way trip to Mars?" And then started asking why, or why not (the consensus of the room was nearly unanimously "no"). And talked about explorers ancient and modern, and how risk was no longer tolerated. Very interesting fellow.

RIP.