This is a textbook strawman argument. The foundational premise of this argument is that the only reason someone could have for opposing a tool like this is because of a desire to exclude others from accessing specific works that they believe hold a specific degree of cultural capital, and, as such, anyone who makes an argument against this technology must, therefore, automatically hold this position.

Which is not the case. One argument against this technology is that it at best mangles and at worst destroys the underlying meaning and significance of a work of literature. Your argument seems to consider the form of language of a work of literature as window dressing to it - something with far less meaning or significance than its summarizable content. But for many works of literature, it’s not. Some things are written to be difficult. Some things are written to be accessible purely to adults with a complex grasp of the language. Some thing are meant to challenge a reader. That’s why every year in school you’re assigned slightly harder books - because learning is a process of continually being challenged. And this is a tool that actively seeks to negate that. If you’re learning English and you want to read a famously difficult English novel, why reduce its complexity to the point where you’re not even reading the actual novel instead of just reading a version translated into your native language? Or get two copies, one in English and one in your native language, side by side and compare the language in each? A good translation by a skilled translator can preserve most, if not all, of the artistic value of the original, as opposed to this, where a huge chunk of the underlying artistic value of the work itself has been drained from it like blood from a slaughtered animal.

As such, the issue is not “wanting to keep the work out of the hands of ESL learners or children.” It’s about not wanting the underlying work diminished.

I would also argue that this is a tool ripe for exploitation in the worst ways possible, as “simplification” is a stone’s throw from censorship. Some group doesn’t like the inclusion of LGBT characters in a famous book? Use this AI tool to programmatically erase any mention of them. Some group doesn’t like that a book is critical of capitalism? Suddenly, large parts read like a parable straight from the mouth of Supply-Side Jesus. I know, let’s cut out all mention of race in Huckleberry Finn. Now it’s just a fun story about a kid and his…“friend”…traveling down the Mississippi! And if you were reading a novel in this way for the first time, you probably wouldn’t have any idea that this wasn’t what the author themselves had written and that you were reading a warped, ideologically twisted homunculus of the original.

“The highs were high and the lows were low. Specifically for the two cities and the people in them that this novel is about.”

You have to understand that the average American functions off of lizard brain impulses. It would be probably go like this:

Acknowledging age concerns of the electorate = show of weakness.

Running someone fresh that appeals to this American Idol-esque popularity contest = show of weakness.

Running someone Republicans don’t have their talking-points fleshed out on = show of weakness.

America operates on principles of running someone strong who says they will always be strong and that if they ever become weak while in office and they acknowledge this to be replaced, the entire party goes with them like a tug boat latched to a sinking oil tanker. Trump didn’t win because he’s smart or a decent human being. He won because he exudes baseless confidence like a broken nuclear reactor exudes gamma radiation.

Warren is a woman and economically progressive and America hates people who are either of those things, let alone both.

It’s like RBG all over again, if these people could just get it through there heads to quit while there ahead they could preserve a decent legacy, instead of tarnishing it by leading the way to a regressive order that overturns everything they’ve done.

This is one of the core problems of the Democrats: hubris. When Obama had a majority in the House and Senate, he could have easily pushed through a Supreme Court appointee to replace RBG. But she wouldn’t go. Because in her mind, there was no one qualified to fill her shoes. She was convinced that she was the GOAT and that to voluntarily step down when it was safe to do so would be an insult. This is coupled with the fact that Democrats were absolutely, completely certain that they would win every election for the presidency after Obama without trying and that the “coalition of the ascendant” would easily put Hillary into the White House, and then she could be the first female president in US history and have an easy PR win by replacing an aging female supreme court justice.

I’m willing to bet we have the the same problem here, but in one person: Biden probably thinks the Democrats could never field anyone for president better than him and that his victory is a lock without any real effort to campaign for it again.

Fun fact: the last time anything like this happened it was with Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was the 22nd president of the United States who lost his re-election bid the first time around, and then got re-elected to be the 24th president of the United States. We are officially in the second Gilded Age.

As a note, the Israelites would in later generations go on to kill a shitload of people. It’s one of those things where it seems like the Bible only really considers it murder if God doesn’t sanction it. It’s honestly one of the many sticking points that makes Abrahamic religions a hard sell for modern individuals. That said, if you look at it from a historical perspective, it really comes across more like a religious version of the Code of Hammurabi. It’s less “don’t kill” as a philosophical or religious position and more about sanctions against killing in a practical legal sense. A functioning society has laws that formally govern behavior and the Israelites were essentially an ecclesiarchy, with Moses being both head of state and high priest. The same laws that governed social life were always going to intersect with laws that governed spiritual life.

You know, for all the complaints I see of tankies, I have encountered 10x more people who incessantly complain about them.

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

And both of those things SUUUUUCK.

It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.

Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.

A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.

only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand

Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.

We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.

This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.

devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.

The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn’t made anyone’s life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.

Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.

Yep, that would be a great system. /s

Man, you’re definitely spot on with this. For me, it’s a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don’t have to pay attention to. It’s ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I’ll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I’m going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it’s sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I’ll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan’s Island or something on in the background.