Nowhere did I say we shouldn’t demand more. You can be angry and wanting for change without letting those feelings overwhelm you and driving you to despair. If you are arguing that people really should be depressed and suicidal because of things in the world outside them which they cannot change alone then you are wrong. No one should be letting the news affect them so deeply as that.

This is the way things have always been. Going all the way back to the days of Bronze Age kings who post the laws in the town square and everything was punishable by death or dismemberment.

But in a lot of ways we’re a lot better off than the poor people were back then. Look at all the electric appliances, heating and cooling, transportation, fresh produce and spices from all over the world, fresh meat and bread… Even if you’re working at Starbucks and can barely afford to pay rent on your 1 bedroom apartment you still have a ton of luxuries a Bronze Age king could only dream of.

Now am I saying things are great and that we should stop complaining? No. Of course not. But we shouldn’t let our desire for change prevent us from appreciating what we have. That road leads into the dark tunnel of depression and mental health crisis.

People use all kinds of clichés to try to deliver this last message. “Touch grass” is a popular one. The problem with them is how trite and condescending they are. That’s not what I’m about. If you are suffering because of these broader issues then my wish for you is to find some joy in something simple that you have right now.

It’s easy to look at a guy like Elon Musk and just boil over with rage. Here’s the dirty secret about him (and other billionaires like him): he’s not happy. He’s addicted to winning. It’s a totally self destroying compulsion. Same goes for Jeff Bezos. You can see it in the failure of their relationships. They’re like real life Walter White.

Ahhh damn, large company. Otherwise if you found a company that goes out of business and then personally recover financially to a positive net worth you can be like Michael Dell!

Well you could eat one in South Korea instead. They love hotdogs there. They have developed some cool new takes on the corndog:

A lot I think. McDonald’s doesn’t just build restaurants anywhere. They conduct rigorous market analyses to determine where they want to buy real estate. They don’t buy unless they expect a place to be growing.

They have the benefit of all the data from their restaurants. They can compare that with publicly available data from local city councils. This is one of the reasons big companies seem to be immortal. They just have so much data, experience, and understanding of exactly how the business works at a local level.

Of course what they can’t anticipate (and few can) are global economic slowdowns and other major trends or even sudden events.

Say you want to open your own McDonald’s branch. You pass their financial vetting, get on their waiting list, go through McDonald’s boot camp, then McDonald’s corporate builds a new McDonald’s restaurant on land they own (or acquires land before doing so), then they lease the land to you, sell you all the equipment for the kitchen, the furniture for the dining area, and all the food and other supplies you need.

The prices are set according to their rules, the food is provided to you by them, the recipes are all very simple (you learn them at boot camp), all you do is hire and train the staff and operate the restaurant. You pay McDonald’s for everything, your profits are entirely based on sales, they own the land your restaurant sits on. If you decide you want out they’ll find someone else to take over.

Just as residential real estate has skyrocketed in price, so has commercial real estate (even more so). If you decide you’re out and McDonald’s corporate decides that location is no longer profitable then they sell the property with a large return on their investment.

But here’s the really annoying thing about McDonald’s: they don’t care if their sales trend towards zero. McDonald’s makes all their money on the real estate values of their restaurants, not on food sales.

Our western culture of individualism is older than capitalism. Much older. It stems from our agricultural and pastoral modes of production. Grains like wheat as well as livestock like sheep, goats, and cattle are highly amenable to work by an individual farmer or shepherd or rancher. Wheat is sown in ploughed fields that have been worked by oxen or horses.

Compare with a different grain like rice which must be transplanted into flooded fields by large groups of people or crops like potatoes or yams which must be planted and dug up individually by mass labour.

The structure of individualism or collectivism is in the roots of our cultures going back thousands of years. So rather than capitalism giving rise to individualism I think the opposite is the case.

You have not denied that Rossmann engages in rage baiting. Everything you’ve said dances around that point. You’ve tried to make this a discussion about who is paying for it. THAT DOESN’T MATTER. It’s the subject matter which is toxic. And Louis Rossmann is guilty of it. I’ve watched plenty of his videos and they’re all the same. Endless rage masturbation. It’s garbage content. The modern day equivalent of Jerry Springer.

His activism could cure cancer and end world hunger but that wouldn’t excuse him for it, because others are doing the same activism WITHOUT THE TOXICITY.

You just named them yourself. FUTO. His company.

Without views he has nothing. It doesn’t matter who is paying him, he’s not getting paid if he doesn’t get views. The algorithm brings him views when he gives the algorithm what it wants. What does it want? Engagement. And the path he has taken to generating engagement is outrage, toxicity, and negativity.

He says “my finances don’t depend on YouTube” then why is he still publishing on YouTube? Shut it down! Oh wait, he can’t, because then he’ll stop getting paid by his sponsors.

YouTube has consistently reduced the amount it pays creators per ad view over time. Yet creators are making more videos than ever. Why? Because they make money through 3rd party sponsors. YouTube is a platform. The value it provides to creators is the audience it brings to them through network effects and through the algorithm.

I’ve already addressed Rossmann’s political activism in a previous comment. I appreciate all the work he’s done on it. But he’s by no means the only person fighting for right to repair. There are tons of others doing so as well, such as iFixit, the EFF, and loads of organizations representing farmers all over North America.

My criticism of Rossmann is specifically with the style of content he puts out. Negativity-based reaction videos are his bread and butter. That’s how he makes money. This puts an asterisk on all of the good things he does, just as MKB’s occasional soft takes put an asterisk on the work he does.

This kind of toxic negativity is heavily favoured by the YouTube algorithm and it leads people into mental health spirals. That’s my point. Louis Rossmann makes money by damaging the mental health of vulnerable people in his audience. None of his beneficial activism makes up for this. You can look at other right to repair activists and see that they are working towards their goals without this odious behaviour.

There are thousands of youtubers just like Rossmann. They sit there in front of the camera and react to other videos or news. People watch because they get a thrill out of seeing someone get angry and “pwn” the bad guys. There’s no creativity in it. It’s just emotional dumping. It’s totally toxic.

Louis used to be all about creativity. He used to make repair videos and teach people useful skills. He stopped doing those when he realized the algorithm would give him a bigger audience for these negative takes.

Call him a victim if you like. Algorithmic capture I’ve heard it called. Many many youtubers have gone down that road.

As for MKB. I like his videos because he’s a very good speaker, he puts a lot of thought and creativity into the whole production, and he is actually honest about the drawbacks in products he reviews. Is he perfect though? Clearly not. I would prefer if he didn’t interview Apple mouthpieces to let them deliver well-practiced marketing directly to his audience.

Sometimes I also think MKB gets a bit too starstruck because he can’t quite believe where he is and what he gets to do for a living. If you go back through his videos and sort by increasing date you can see his very first videos. It’s rather stark how far he’s come.

Both guys are in the business of self-promotion. One is based on positivity, the other negativity.

You want to fill your life with negativity? Go ahead. I’ll pass.

I’m a big fan of right to repair and I appreciate all Louis Rossmann has done for the movement. Having said that, I wouldn’t say he’s strictly a pro-consumer guy. He’s a professional gadfly.

I dunno what it is, and I’m not saying the person you’re replying to is doing this, but tons of people seem to throw shade at MKB. Like they think he’s being sneaky or is in any way untrustworthy. All I’ve ever seen the guy do is be honest with his opinions. Yes, he is generally a very tech-positive guy. But he’s not afraid to explain in detail why he thinks a product sucks.

The tech isn’t the difficult part, it’s the enrichment process itself. It involves vast numbers of gas centrifuges spinning uranium hexafluoride 24/7 for a very long time.

Almost nothing in evolution happened sequentially. We almost certainly didn’t start creating music before our brains were equipped for it. Instead these things would’ve evolved in tandem. Each one driving the other, in a virtuous cycle.

I think this is getting it backwards. Here I’ll go (warning, evopsych style speculation follows):

Our brains are great pattern recognizers because it makes us better at learning music (and other structured forms such as poetry). Music is older than all the civilizations on earth. We learn music because it’s an incredibly powerful aid to memorization. Memorization and oral recitation is the oldest form of cultural transmission we have.

Culture is the secret of our success as a species. It’s the original problem solver that gave us so many tools and techniques to survive on every continent on the planet (except Antarctica of course). Culture is the reason we learned to prepare so many foods which would have been poisonous otherwise (such as cassava).

It’s not really any more interesting. We’re never going to see an epidemic of women killing each other. There’s no all-female gangs out there that I know of. The most common female-on-female violence is high school bullying.