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Perhaps I'm missing something but I'm fairly sure that if I was a billionaire and I was motivated to figure out a way to donate to Renee Good's family, I would be able to figure something out without the help of GoFundMe.


Depends on how big the chilling effect is, no? For example, if a school librarian notices that a colleague in another district loses their job or worse, gets personal threats because of a specific book, they might well remove a book from shelves before it's challenged.

That is not a rebuttal to your point -- I don't have a guess on whether or not the chilling effect is significant. I'm just noting there are follow-on effects to be considered.


My point is we all need to moderate our reactions to things based on actual scale, across the political spectrum rare events are being amplified to make people think they're prevalent disasters and it distorts too many peoples' reality.

There are much worse, much bigger problems and we need to constantly be reminding people of how big issues actually are. Book bannings are concerning but what is the size of the actual impact? I see this issue more of as an embarrassment for a handful of schools and boards who are bowing to moralizing fools, people are acting like they're afraid of an escalation to Fahrenheit 451 when we really should be mocking the book banners for their foolishness instead of being afraid of them.

This is far from the only issue suffering from a lack of sense of scale.


It goes far beyond that. The Iowa legislature has already moved to make changes to how libraries work in Iowa as a result of all of the attention these issues are getting here. They're essentially trying to condense the power to the state level instead of at the municipal level, where it belongs. It's a power grab that'll have repercussions that may very well cause the smallest of libraries here to cease existing.

And it all started with people complaining about books in the library.


I don't disagree with the underlying point, I just don't agree that the effects of this particular issue are all that minimal. Mockery only gets you so far when the moralizing fools are, say, serving as Speaker of the House.

Probably also worth asking if this problem is really independent, or if it's a facet of larger, more clearly damaging trends.


To be completely fair, Russia did decide to make an exception in this case, although it took a couple of months (during which Bushby was detained) to get there.

I am a little bit torn in this case. From our vantage point it's obvious that Bushby wasn't running an elaborate long scam to get into Russia. In the moment... I don't know, former UK special forces guy? Long history of espionage between UK and Russia? Two months seems too long; it's also not as easy as your case of a teenager in the sewer.


I saw that. Six months (if I recall) is kind of a long time…


Oh, they absolutely are. As Leavitt promised at her first briefing, it’s been opened to: "independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators."


Yes, all of them right-wing chuds.


The repository is part of https://github.com/historicalsource, which has code for a bunch of Infocom games, although at a quick glance most of them aren't open sourced. Still, very cool resource.


I've been guessing that the problems existed prior to the Marriot deal; why would they give up their front door to a competitor otherwise? But I agree that it's got to be a wildly crazy story.


There's a nuance here: a lot of times, it's people hearing "male privilege is a problem" and immediately being told that this means "you personally are at fault!" So it's very understandable that people believe that they're being told "everything is their fault because they have male privilege" when they're not.


"We've observed and documented instances where judicial decisions seem to override the will of shareholders and boards of directors"

Annnnnd so? We should expect that will happen; a judge's job is not to follow the lead of the parties before the court, it's to adjudicate the law.


The Netherlands has also cut back on intelligence sharing with the US: https://intelnews.org/2025/10/20/01-3416/


The Netherlands has Caribbean islands off the coast of Venezuela. If the US blows up a bunch of fishermen by accident it would be awkward. You can actually sue the Dutch government for this kind of thing and win.


Vimeo is the really interesting case for me, because they are the white label hosting providers for a large number of niche streaming services -- Criterion Channel comes to mind, for example. Evernote failing is sad but lower on indirect effects. Vimeo going down would leave a noticeable hole in the streaming world.


Vimeo won’t “go down” anytime soon. It might get worse/more expensive, but it’s not in imminent danger. And it’s also not the only white-label provider around, either.


Bending Spoons also bought Brightcove so they actually own two of the white label streaming providers.

Would not be surprised to see the two merged into a single service.


For customer facing streaming sites they also don't seem to be the clear default choice. I think dropout.tv is one of the few "secondary streaming services" to still be with Vimeo (and with the strong overlap in their networks I'm sure they got a good deal), while many other ones like Nebula evaluated them but went with other providers.

It looks like the majority of their business is in employee training portals for megacorps.


The Nebula apps are pretty bad. Vimeo white label has issues but the app experience is much better than whomever Nebula are using.

One reason Vimeo is a good deal is that they charge for video transcoding by the minute, not by the file size. So you can upload full ProRes 4K movies and it doesn't cost the earth.


I dug in a bit and did a little research. Criterion and Dropout, as mentioned, use Vimeo. So does Arrow's streaming service (cult films, mostly). From there on in it gets even more fringe: Taskmaster (the British game show) has a streaming service built on Vimeo, the Z-movie titans Troma and Full Moon Features use Vimeo, and so on. So not insanely crucial but I still think it's a better world in which those services can keep doing what they do.


Yes, there are alternatives. Nonetheless, the niche streamers I'm thinking of would find it a moderate burden to move to a different provider and they're operating on slim margins as is.


Is this why Criterion streaming quality is so poor? It’s completely unacceptable for a service that is supposed to pride itself on loving movies and preserving them. Sometimes the scene will be dark and I will descend into some sort of weird 8 bit pixel world.


Yes, yes it is. And there was some sort of bug that pushed the top quality down to 720p last month.


Is there any streaming option with non dogshit quality?


For streaming movies and TV at reasonable prices? No, but you can DIY with Plex and get Blu-ray quality


Dont do Plex! Closed source that leaks what you upload to Plex. And they're owned by big media - so only time they start suing users for files they know they have.

Instead, check out FLOSS server Jellyfin!


That’s alarming. Do you have any sources where I can learn more about this?


What does "uploading" have to do with using Plex? As far as I was aware, My media is sitting less than a meter from me right now. Does Plex upload my content to a server without asking or something?


Plex has a lot of dubious partnerships with companies like Lionsgate and Kliener Perkins but is not owned by Big Media


With Netflix, there are never visible artifacts, play/pause always works within a second. I am sure I'm not always getting HD but I wouldn't call it dogshit. All the other streaming services though, random hiccups are common, and the UI is slow enough that it's not just play/pause, it often takes 30 seconds just to resume what I was previously watching if I closed the browser tab.


> With Netflix, there are never visible artifacts

Uwotm8. Any sufficiently dark scene will have artifacts out the wazoo.

Not to mention other stuff like subtitles mentioning the wrong spoken language (ie. the character is speaking French, but the subtitle say they're speaking English), the UI unloads after some time, and the only action you can take is to start the video (you can't go back), the button for info when hovering over a card doesn't work half time time, video controls disappear at the end of an episode while transitioning to the next (the 'next episode' button is present and animating, but you can't pause the video at the credits in that moment), etc... In short, the UI is shit and so is the video quality.


Many — but you have fork over a significant chunk of change to view them.


Vimeo isn't dogshit. In fact it's one of the only quality ones I've found which also support HDR / Dolby Vision.


Criterion is an extra layer below dogshit. Kanopy, which is free with your library card, blows it out of the water.


> free with your library card

Maybe with yours. My local library's offerings are abysmal.


Dropout as well I think.


Yep. Vimeo is the tech infrastructure from the original collegehumor, and Dropout still uses it.


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