My problem with this thought is that a civil war = government forces vs cilivilan militias.

I imagine it more a weakened government (but still with a functioning military) supported by civilian militias backing the government, versus various large and small insurgencies possibly with foreign backing.

Why would they? They’re wealthy enough to weather nearly anything. They do lack total power though, which is why you see Silicon Valley flirting with Yarvin.

Incorrect, you keep complaining and decide to put up with the powers that be.

Enjoy living on $14/h for the rest of your life.

Yeah, just like it’s polite to maim someone when you could have killed them.

Thiel is probably safe. Haven’t heard much about young boys on the island. Of course, he could always be “gay” in the same way he was a “libertarian”.

The (gay) British ambassador to the US is in the Birthday Book with a weird creepy poem that seems to suggest he was being set up for casual sex by Epstien so I wouldn't rule that out.

> I know it's en vogue to bash new media dealers and clutch our collective pearls. But if traditional media could get these engagement numbers, I can't imagine they wouldn't.

At least legacy media wasn’t directly promoting and rewarding antisocial behavior and crimes.

My joke here would be to say "oh yeah! they seemed to encourage participation in voting!" But HN is not a place for humor, or my imitation of humor.

But to your point... yes... gate-keepers can keep out the riffraff. (And I'm not trying to be snarky with that last statement.) Taste-makers can steer the listening public towards some competent art. As a society we tend to swing back and forth between freedom and conformity. We're in a pretty "free" feeling era and the word "conformity" is almost a pejorative. Monoculture is dangerous, but sure, so is letting the moral equivalent of the Manson Family loose on your child's phone. (not implying TikTok is the modern Manson equivalent, just hypothesizing the existence of a really bad player in the digital realm.)

Is there a middle ground? Would we recognize it when we see it?

Do societal leaders and taste makers have a duty or right to discourage the use of media platforms? I always got the impression the reason TikTok was singled out was 'cause it's from China (and Singapore as well somehow.) I would love it if the people who are singling out TikTok for playing fast and loose with our dopamine regulatory system explained how western companies (Facebook, YouTube, Hacker News) aren't.

Feel free to stop reading at this point, if you haven't already. I'm well beyond replying (and mostly agreeing) to (with) your comment. Now I'm just rambling.

I have this memory of a picture of soviet workers sitting in an auditorium listening to classical music. It was around the 40s or 50s so I'm sure it was Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich or Rachmaninoff or Khachaturian. And they had completely blank looks on their faces like "okay. my boss says I have to be here, so I'm here." Me? I can't get enough of these guys and would definitely have a smile on my face if I got to get off work early to listen to them.

But... as taste-makers and culture gate-keepers, would we prefer to force people to consume "high culture" when all they want is TikTok? I mean, I would much rather read Louise Glück than watch Housewives of Some Random Town. (Sorry Glück folks, I'm just not a fan.) But if someone doesn't care for Henry Miller (any one of his books I could read over and over again), I would much rather they not be coerced into reading them. I love W. H. Auden and my spouse loves Bukowski. It's okay to enjoy what you enjoy.

I dunno. I think the article mentioned above seems a little gate-keepery. And I get it that we're worried about how people are being manipulated by media controlled by a foreign political power, but if we're gonna ban TikTok, maybe we should spend at least as much thought about what we're going to replace it with.

The employers already had all kinds of bizarre tricks to keep tipped workers down.

My girlfriend works for a local chain restaurant. Some of the things she tells me about seem like they shouldn’t be legal (forcing everyone’s cash tips to be pooled with non tipped teenagers they don’t want to pay, for example. Pretty sure the company has had previous class actions against them. This was just a small local chain in a middle/upper middle class suburb.

I saw a post on Nextdoor the other day where another restaurant closed, laying off the workers without paying them for hours worked. The general consensus about how to get the money you worked for: you don’t. The state has no labor board and there was little option for recourse.

We’ve been trying to “educate” people on nutrition for a long time, but this country is still fat as hell.

The future needs serfs, not readers.

Perhaps, but the past also needed more serfs than readers. I don't think that is good, but maybe it is too idealistic to think you can create a nation of 330m critical thinkers. Not because it isn't possible, but because not everyone wants to approach life that way.

The past needed more serfs than readers until the Industrial Revolution, but once we got those going, all that machinery required skilled people to operate.

Did making things without machinery require fewer skilled people?

Depends on what you're making. Pre-industrial society was mostly concerned with growing food to feed itself. Things like say blacksmithing or advanced weaving certainly did require skilled professionals, but they were proportionally a tiny minority of a society consisting mostly of farmers.