Gosh, have we in the West forgotten so much of our history already?
Much of the gold was moved out of Europe prior to and during WWI. Partly out of fears of German aggression b ut also because throughout the war, European countries bought massive amounts of materiel from America, which increased the flow of money out of European and into American coffers.
But gold itself is very heavy and thus cumbersome to transport. It doesn't make sense to run transatlantic gold shipments every time a few bars change hands. So central banks tended to keep the gold more or less in one big vault and just sort of move the bricks between one country's pile and another. So there would be, in essence, a large stack of gold in the US Federal Reserve, and that gold belonged to France, or whomever. When the war ended, European countries were devastated and needed goods from somewhere that didn't have depleted industrial capacity and whose farmlands weren't littered with UXO.
This situation more or less cemented America's position as the world's creditor, and so it simply was more convenient to keep a large portion of one's gold reserves in the country with whom you were doing a lot of business. For some countries, repatriating gold is a matter of sovereignty, and e.g. France started repatriating its gold reserves in the 1960s.
Now that Americans have decided they like being a military, economic, and cultural superpower less than they like electing a dementia-ridden child rapist, other countries have correctly realized that America's decline cannot be stopped, only slowed. After all, it's Americans themselves who are the root of the problem, and Trump is but a symptom. This instability is not going to stop when he leaves office. Better get your gold off the sinking ship, but do it slowly so as to not accelerate the sinking before you can get it all out.
Re: the gold situation after WWI, if you're interested I encourage you to read Liaquat Ahamed's excellent Lords of Finance, which won the Pulitzer, IIRC.
I couch youth sports, and same experience. It's getting better now that the kids are getting older (10-11). But when they were in 1st or 2nd grade, the home schooled kids were so far behind their teammates in social skills.
I only had one on my baseball team in the spring, while he was definitely not on the same level as the rest of the team socially, it could have just been that he is a shy kid by nature.
It really comes down to the parents, like most things. If parents are heavily engaged, then the kids turn out more well rounded, regardless of where they go to school, public, private, or home.
I can also usually tell just based on the kids if their parents will be helpful or not. If I ask for a parent to help with setting up at the beginning of practice, or if an assistant coach can't make it and I need a hand, the way a kid acts is a pretty good indicator if their parent will get out of their chair on sidelines and come help.
There are outliers, but its a pretty good rule of thumb.
Counterpoint: I was also a camp counselor in my teens and 20s, and I even taught homeschool.
They were definitely easy to pick out, but I think in a good way. They were undersocialized with children, but felt way more at ease around adults. They understood more mature humor, spoke larger ideas in better sentences, and behaved perfectly.
And sure, they were a little "weird." As everyone ought to strive to be.
>How much money have you contributed back to this seemingly indispensable project?
Perhaps it's time for you to become familiar with the terms of the Mozilla Public License, under which Libre Office is released. There is no requirement for monetary compensation.
Yeah but like, we don't know if OP is making any money off this, let alone significant money. Let's not instantly hold them to the same "please contribute or you're dragging things down" standard as a zillion dollar corporation.
You believe you know better than the authors themselves about how they ought to be treated?
They chose -- explicitly, voluntarily, knowingly -- to give the thing away for free. That's their right for their own creation. Your preferences don't supersede theirs.
You've emphasized this point more than once, but I don't think it's a good counterargument to the GP. It is equally valid to say that they have explicitly (voluntarily, knowlingly) chosen to accept donations for their work.
By profiting off their work and not supporting them you are making your own choice. It says nothing about the authors' preference.
They chose a license that is _explicitly designed_ to allow people to profit from their work without paying.
There are many other licensing terms in common use. They chose that one.
That's fine, they can do what they like with their work. There is no moral obligation to reinterpret their motives in a fashion that differs from their formally expressed preferences.
They chose to accept donations -- also fine. If you want to donate, go ahead. If you don't -- that's fine too, by definition.
>I feel like Reddit has just become such a toxic place.
The more I learned about reddit's early history, the more I realized it was always rather toxic. Alexis and Steve (and Jeremy) were totally fine with Michael Brutsch (/u/violentacrez) promoting lots of gross shit (jailbait, pics of dead kids etc.) until they caught some bad publicity and it started to affect their bottom line.
I guess everyone has their price, and money talks, but it really seemed (and still seems) like reddit is happy to host all kinds of horrific content until said content results in negative press, and then suddenly it's about "protecting users", those same users that the reddit staff clearly didn't give two shits about the week prior. They care about privacy, except when it's about targeting ads to users or selling user data to advertisers. They care about the integrity of the platform, except when Steve Huffman was editing user comments for funsies.
I used both Bazzite and Debian, and, while the games do "just work", the problem with Bazzite was that the peripherals were fiddly. Getting the Xbox controllers to work needed some fiddling every time, streaming games from the desktop was hit and miss, and a few other small things like that.
It's still amazing how well gaming on Linux works, but the only reason why I wanted a Steam machine is becasue when a few friends are over, I don't want to spend twenty minutes fiddling with controllers, it kills the mood. I want to turn it on and game immediately.
Nobara Linux, which is based on Fedora. I used the "Gnome" installer rather than "official" because I still want a regular desktop experience. I've been on Linux for development since 2008 as well so I wanted an "all in one" OS this time rather than dual-boot Linux/Windows.
I'm running this on AMD CPU & GPU (because AMD historically was always better supported than Nvidia). I've not run into any issues the past weeks. Discord and the game both run smoothly. Honestly hard to believe given how rough it was in the past.
That said, I don't play a wide variety of games, I tend to stick with a single game for years. So I'm happy just running "The Finals" and haven't tried other games lol.
What kind of issues are you running into with Bazzite?
>What kind of issues are you running into with Bazzite?
It's just a mess. There are three different ways to get software, so despite being a seasoned Linux user of 20+ years I'm never really sure if I'm installing something via the happy path or not.
I wanted to install Battle.net, for example, and the best/only way I could get it to work is by following some random forum post to run battle.net as a steam app, so if I want to play StarCraft 2 I need to launch Steam, launch bnet from within steam, then finally run sc from that.
Networking is kinda flaky, too. Sometimes games (incidentally, StarCraft, but also other battlenet games like HOTS) will simply refuse to connect to the master servers.
Controllers randomly don't work, etc.
I could go on. None of these are deal breakers in and of themselves, but I'm continually reminded why The Year of the Linux Desktop isn't happening. It's just generally janky.
Journalism is an interesting case study. Their revenues went into sharp decline around the start of the century, dropping by more than 50% in some cases. Concurrently polls showed trust in journalism was plummeting, that people were tuning out because they felt that what they read wasn't reliable.
Journalism didn't solve this problem by rebuilding trust and their audience. Instead they started reforming as non-profit institutions and taking huge payments from philanthropists to push specific agendas, without alerting readers to that fact.
These grants aren't tied to readership but rather to the content of what's published, so they can produce lots of articles even if nobody reads them. Those articles are then used as "reliable sources" to control Wikipedia, and from there what search engines and LLMs say.
If students start checking out at scale (already happening), or if governments cut funding (already happening in the USA), their most likely move is to just replace the revenue with money from the Gates Foundation et al, and keep going just as they are. Their primary role will switch from education or research to the propagation of approved narratives.
News reporting and journalism has always mostly been a for-profit enterprise. And no matter what business model one might choose (ads, subs, charity, etc) there will be perverse incentives working in conflict with pure truth seeking and newsworthiness. Audience capture, pleasing advertisers, the politics/interests of the owners, etc.
I'm sure non-profit sponsorship has it's own issues, but I don't think those issues are particularly new or unique or transformative.
The demand side is arguably the more intractable issue with journalism, since loads of people don't select for truth or importance in their news - or at least not very carefully. The institutions that seem to hold up the best are the ones with the broadest audiences.
On the issue of public trust in journalism, I don't think it's actually a function of the quality or trustworthiness of journalism. I think it has more to do with the rise of radical right-wing propaganda infotainment, a core pillar of which was (and is) delegitimizing mainstream media (and academic) institutions. The mistrust was created and cultivated. Consequently, there's not much they can do to regain trust, except to work harder at discrediting the radical right-wing propaganda that has been flooding all the zones for the past several decades.
I think ads were better because everyone was aware of the conflict of interest issues and took steps to manage it. They admitted it could be an issue and would have internal firewalls where ad sales weren't allowed to talk to the journalists, things like that. Advertisers accepted it because their goal wasn't to manipulate news reporting.
The problem with the "philanthropic" funding is not only is there no firewall, but it's explicitly pay-to-play agenda pushing. So that culture of keeping revenue and news separated has vanished without the public being made aware of it.
The right wing are saying things like, journalism is fake because they're just pushing a left wing agenda for money. That's the claim that delegitimizes journalism. But it turns out that the rightists are correct and that's exactly what journalists are doing, so it's hardly their fault that mistrust was created and cultivated. You should mistrust people who mislead you about their agenda, and if you go to the AP website today and look at some random article paid for by these grants there's no mention of where the funding comes from. Actually you get a popup begging for donations, saying that because the AP is a non-profit it's extra trustworthy.
If they want to regain trust, a good start would be by refusing to accept money for stories, relabelling all the stories where they did that, and then pay for journalism purely out of subscription revenues or ads brokered through exchanges (i.e. where the advertiser doesn't have any contact with the publishers).
There certainly are problems, but the biggest is that reality puts two other factors ahead of publishing the truth:
1) People don't like having their beliefs challenged. This will slant all news organizations towards the biases of their readers. We see this at all levels. The shorter and more personalized the feedback loop the faster it happens. This makes the news with things like ChatGPT, the feedback is very quick and personalized so it's very easy for people to tumble down the rabbit hole. Same thing, slower, with social media recommendation engines. And online hate communities--they lead people to extremes. But it also happens with traditional media, just much more diffuse. Everybody moves away from the center.
2) News organizations care very much about being able to get images and video of events. This means they are readily manipulated by restricting access to those who report the locally-approved version of the "facts". We used to understand that "news" from Russia was the state-sponsored version, we don't pay attention to the fact that "news" from areas with Islamist control are just about as bad.
And news is always slanted towards the side of controversy. No controversy, people aren't going to care.
However, this does not remotely mean that the right wing news is better. The reality is that it's even worse. All the same forces are at work and then there's an ideological bias on top of that. With news having become a la carte I doubt there's any way to remain in business as an honest news source anymore.
Point (1) is why news institutions that cover a wide range of interests and have a broad audience have tended to fare better. Depending too much on a particular niche audience leads to audience capture.
WSJ and Fox News have the same owners but WSJ still has one of the best and most credible newsrooms in the business (their opinion section is another matter).
Meanwhile Fox News is a lie factory that only tells it's large (but niche) audience what it wants to hear. And now they have rival networks eating away at the pie by being more sensational and even more shamelessly obsequies. They're stuck in a radicalization doom loop.
If the theory is that advertising makes conflicts of interest more transparent, I don't think I agree. Advertisers can be stakeholders across diverse ranges of concerns - conflicts of interest are often indirect. They can influence what doesn't get written, as much as what does. The real bad actors can even just disguise ads as content. We still need to have some basic trust that institutions are respecting firewalls that - by and large - they have to self police
> The problem with the "philanthropic" funding is not only is there no firewall, but it's explicitly pay-to-play agenda pushing
> if you go to the AP website today and look at some random article paid for by these grants
Why do you say there is no firewall? Is that really true? The AP has their guidelines here and I don't see it as substantially different than what a publication might do for advertisers and other stakeholders who may be tempted to exert editorial control:
If you have specific instances where these arrangements have clearly compromised their journalism, that would be good to see.
In the meantime, I think we can do two things at the same time here: resist overdosing on maximal cynicism, but also be clear eyed about the ways money can tempt institutions to throw integrity out the window.
> The right wing are saying things like, journalism is fake because they're just pushing a left wing agenda for money.
> But it turns out that the rightists are correct and that's exactly what journalists are doing, so it's hardly their fault that mistrust was created and cultivated.
Generally speaking, no they are not correct, and most of them are just outright cynically lying, while engaging in the very behaviors of which they accuse others.
> The Associated Press said Tuesday that it is assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues, in the news organization’s largest single expansion paid for through philanthropic grants.
> The grant is for more than $8 million over three years, and about 20 of the climate journalists will be new hires. The AP has appointed Peter Prengaman as its climate and environment news director to lead the team.
> For many years, Journalists and philanthropists were more wary of each other. News organizations were concerned about maintaining independence and, until the past two decades, financially secure enough not to need help. Philanthropists didn’t see the need, or how journalists could help them achieve their goals.
> Nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica and Texas Tribune led the way in changing minds. The Salt Lake Tribune, which in 2019 became a nonprofit to attract more donors, and The Seattle Times are other pioneers.
> “As far as we’re concerned, it has been really seamless,” said Monica Drake, assistant managing editor at the Times. “It has allowed us to focus on things we want to cover and to do it independently.”
> Both sides had things to learn. For Carovillano, it was getting used to the idea that funders weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve. “This is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” he said.
> “I feel like our language has gone from people talking about local news dying to there being a renaissance of local news,” she said. “If you can provide good, high-quality journalism, people are willing to pay for that, people are willing to support it. I think there’s a lot of room for optimism. The trick is, can we move quickly enough?”
The article leads with climate grants but is really about the phenomenon in general, which covers many topics.
The quoted journalists are duplicitous, trying to reassure themselves. The text says that what they're doing used to be taboo because rich guys had "goals to achieve", but now it's considered "pioneering" and "mutually beneficial". Their justification is they didn't have any money and felt sad, but now they've got lots of money and are happy. They say the transition has been "seamless", i.e. readers aren't aware of it. And hilariously, at the end Carivillano claims there's room for optimism because people are willing to pay for high quality news - except "people" aren't paying, that's the reason they need to take money from a handful of donors.
It's obvious this compromises their journalism, especially in the stories they don't publish. These news orgs have basically been bought by the donors, large chunks of their staff only exist because of these grants. Thinking it doesn't compromise their news would be like saying Facebook simply buying all the news teams that cover the internet wouldn't have any effect.
This is a puff piece. They are always a bit icky, but they're common and I don't think you'll find any outlet of renown that doesn't succumb to these from time to time.
In this case, it reads like their way of stroking their benefactors egos a bit, but without promising them anything real in return.
FTA: "AP often needs to educate funders upon first approach, explaining the company’s worldwide reach and mission to report independently. AP accepts money to cover certain areas but without strings attached; the funders have no influence on the stories that are done, Carovillano said."
You left out a pretty important force: political forces lying about the trustworthiness of journalism in a blatant effort to gain political power. Traditional journalism didn't have any ready defenses against that.
>I made a promise to myself that if no real action is taken, I will seriously consider changing careers.
Personally I think you should name and shame the author as well as the publications and the names of the peer "reviewers" who clearly did sweet-fuck-all.
