Arotrios

In theory they can, but it's very unlikely, as it requires a 2/3rds majority in both the Assembly and the Senate. One of the things I severely dislike about California politics is that the Governor's veto power is near absolute in practice. On top of that this state has an entrenched political machine that has invested in Newsom since he ran for Mayor of San Francisco - and many in Sacramento owe their careers to him. There's no realistic chance any of these vetoes get overridden.

Newsom, we get it - you want to run for president. But don't fuck up my state to do it.

You've done ok in CA when you've kept your mouth shut and followed in Brown's footsteps, but this latest bullshit display of throwing widely popular progressive initiatives (this one passed 66 to 9) under the bus is a slap in the face to all Californians, proving yet again that you're an empty neo-liberal suit playing progressive to pander to the public.

California is not your billboard for a future presidential run. Do your damn job and stop using your veto pen to try to appeal to voters who aren't even your constituents yet.

Agreed. I'd also like to add that intelligence != wisdom != experience, and you need all three to achieve real understanding.

Find your representative by zip code here

Came here to say the same. Lieberman is a snake, and has been using his position as the 2000 VP Dem nominee to undermine progressive policy for more than two decades. I have no doubt he's been bought and paid for by the GOP, I'm guessing right around the time he started rooting for the Iraq war (he was the biggest supporter on the Dem side at the time).

Stop. My face hurts from all the palming.

If the man would rather resign than do his job, he shouldn't have his job.

Fuck censorship - posted for the kids of Charlotte County.

Right on - we're always open to travelers of the Fantastic Planet, and any other extradimensional refugees ;)

Side note - our movie series is here under the #cinemainsomnia tag, if you're just looking for full length films.

Fuck this Nazi censorship.

Agreed. I did a rewatch before I posted it to the @13thFloor and I was amazed (hadn't seen it since I was a kid). Some of the most intriguing and beautiful surrealistic animation ever, and the story is remarkably good - generating a sort of slow clinical terror in the viewer that flows and builds beneath the bright alien landscapes.

Short Stories:

I have no mouth and I must scream - Harlan Ellison - this story was the apogee of sci-fi horror in the 70s and 80s.

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - Philip K. Dick's original short story and the inspiration for Total Recall.

Weird French Shit:

Fantastic Planet - Animated french scifi about humans being kept as pets by giant blue aliens.

City of Lost Children - steampunk cybercultists

Classic Movies:

They Live - In case you're out of bubblegum

Tremors - broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't ya?

Scanners - Pop!

@MargotRobbie I'm getting PTSD from this post, and an urge to say "this". You've officially become my favorite version of Margot Robbie (although Harley Robbie is close on your heels).

@izzydata Odd behavior on the part of the admin there, especially as they were adding you as a mod to communities less than two months ago. Feels like they have a stake in Synch bringing in some revenue, and aren't happy about your criticism.

You ran a great community over there, and it's clear you're getting the shaft. If you ever are looking for a home for your content, you've got an open invitation to the @13thFloor - always looking for great scifi across all media.

Looking at the thumbnail attached to this post, I gotta wonder, is Blue Beetle going to be on the jury?

I’d watch that movie. Especially if his abuela is bringing the chaingun.

“When the committee held an initial hearing on broadband permitting streamlining, including a draft of the American Broadband Deployment Act, no state or local government was invited to testify.”

If you’d like to make your feelings known on this omission and the bill in general, here are the members of that committee - clicking on a rep will give you their contact information.

I’m not surprised. Antioch/Pittsburg is right at the line where the Bay Area starts turning into the Trump country of the Central Valley, and despite its reputation of being a bastion of liberal thought, Northern California has a really ugly undercurrent of “good ole boy” racism the further you go east and north.

Agreed again. If I wanted folks IRL to know what I post, I’d be on Facebook. Reddit’s value to posters was its anonymity. Without it, there’s no reason to use it over its centralized competitors in the social media space.

I totally hear you there and agree with you re: the business choices Spez made. Reddit lost a 20 year contributor when I walked away, and even if they rolled back all the changes, I won’t be returning.

I was more looking at applying your suggestions to a fresh publishing model, as your ideas intrigued me (having run a publishing forum in the days of the early internet). I want to have a space on the internet where content creators can keep ownership of their content and get adequately paid for publishing - I think properly run, it could become a vital hub for our cultural legacy (as Reddit was, albeit clumsily and destructively). The incoming revenue is the biggest challenge, which is why I focused on that element.

Some users will pay if you have a paywall, but only if you already have a substantial amount of content they want to access. This works for a search engine crawling pre-existing content, but not so well for a forum style site like Reddit, where most of the content creation is driven by engagement with other content. If you reduce the engagement rate (aka through a paywall), you’re actually reducing your incoming content in the long run (something we’re seeing on Reddit after the blackout).

I don’t know what the ultimate solution here is, but I really do like your payout concept with Monero. If I did build another publishing attempt, it’s something I’d try to implement if I could get the incoming revenue to support it.

Excellent points. That being said, Reddit will never pay contributors. They have never had interest in quality of the content on the platform, only it’s engagement rate - the years of publishing subs like jailbait and The_Donald speak to that. Engagement, now that they’ve got a critical mass of users and 20 years worth of content, can be maintained with bots, sockpuppet accounts, and reposts (all of which have become the course du jour for the front page and /r/all since the API revolt began)… at least until they go IPO, after which it’s not their problem anymore.

The biggest problem with online publishing is that without that critical mass of readership, it’s very difficult to become profitable enough to pay your contributors. Reddit’s never gotten to this point, even with millions of users. It’s my hope that with contributors moving off of Reddit, we’ll see new publishing models appear that utilize some of the excellent ideas you’ve outlined above. I particularly like the suggestion of using Monero as a currency to ensure anonymity.

Tying voting to currency is an interesting idea, but I think that voting should be free, as my experience running forums is that only about 10% of your viewers will care enough to vote, and maybe 10% of those choose to post actual content. Putting a paywall in front of voting will kill engagement. However, limiting the number of free votes an account gets per day, then allowing people to buy more votes with currency, and earn currency for posting content could work very well if run correctly. The trick is balancing the actual profit you make off of the contribution with the need to pay your contributors, and here it becomes a question of determining the proper margins and payouts.

The other problem is that the only real revenue source outside of the users of the site is going to be Google Adwords or a similar platform (unless you go for ancillary streams of revenue, like attaching an e-commerce store to the site). If you charge for access to the content, you’re killing your engagement. I haven’t used Adwords for awhile now, but when I did the payouts were absolutely abysmal (like less than a penny per click). They were so bad that it wasn’t even worth dedicating the visual real estate to put up the ads.

Ultimately, this is the same challenge traditional publishing has had for a long time. It’s generally unprofitable unless you have a runaway hit or ancillary streams of revenue (like syndication deals with other media types) - most of the actual content almost never makes money, which is why so much of our traditional media is paid for by advertising and subsequently controlled by corporate interests.