If you mean 'should network TV be allowed to use behavioural psychology to manipulate people into being couch potatoes' then the answer is yes, that should be regulated against.
Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.
You dropped the second half of my sentence which pointed to a specific harm. You consequently argued against something which I didn't say. You are not arguing in good faith and this 'conversation' has clearly run its course as you are not capable of engaging the actual points someone is making.
Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.
The difference is that the media is 30 seconds not 2 hours so the feedback loop is shorter and the content pool is far far far deeper because it is user submitted so the content recommendation algorithms become so effective , and the experience so compelling, that it becomes addictive. And as a wise man once said “a difference in scale is a difference in kind”
I’m actually strongly sympathetic to this argument, but I’d love to see some actual clinical research that suggests algorithmic short form video has mental and physiological effects that (say) video games do not.
I'm genuinely curious how one can look at someone using an app like TikTok and conclude that's not addictive. It's optimised in every way to engage people in behaviours that look like outright addiction.
Anyway, sometimes 'panic' is justified. Sports betting has been a total disaster, for example.
It just doesn’t look like addiction to me. The people I know who use classically addictive substances will interrupt random activities to ask if anyone wants to drink or smoke or vape; I’ve never once had someone pull me aside at a party to come take a sip of TikTok.
Certain people/businesses deal with one-off things every day. Even for something truly one-off, if one tool is too slow it might still be the difference between being able to do it once or not at all.
Domestic tourism is massive even in countries with terrible work culture like China, so your claim is not particularly strong. Either way, hobbies and holidays are certainly not unique to NA and Europe.
I don't think your initial claim is well supported considering the size of domestic travel and entertainment sectors in most of the world (although I'll admit that the way people allocate non-work activities in many places may not lead to a relaxed life in the way, say, a Swiss person on a sabbatical has). Points 1 and 2 in this recent comment are different ones again, though and not ones I disagree with.
This article seems to hinge on a rhetorical flourish whereby the literal meaning of 'you are not your job' is substituted with a criticism of 'you are not what you do'. Well, of course it doesn't make sense and isn't true if you redefine it like that - the original aphorism is instead more literal: your identity should not be conflated with the identity of your employer. The substituted argument leads to some fascinating philosophy, but doesn't deal with the more literal fact that plenty of things you can do for value to the world are still negatives, either net negative for the world or to the individual. Conflating one's identity with an employer is the latter, since the employer and the employee almost always have different requirements for well-being (in the case of a corporation then of course the employer in that sense has no requirement for well-being at all).
So it seems normal that a bunch of politicians, in the current climate, got together and decided that the weakest form of age verification imaginable absolutely had to get passed everywhere?
I'm not saying there's definitely no coordination, but nobody had to get together to decide that 2026 was the year for 90s fashion to make a comeback. Human society is very prone to fads in all areas.
Describing Germany's loss in WW2 as 'affecting their foreign policy a little' represents a profound disconnect with reality, which is that WW2 fundamentally reshaped the entire world, cemented the US as a superpower, set up the USSR for its rise, split Germany in two (with major political effects to this day), ended European empires (UK, French), and ultimately brought about the EU. And those are just some of WW2's effects, which would have all gone completely different directions if Germany or Japan had won.
This is an elite narrative. What happened to normal people? In the real world? Germans still speak German. Germany is still very wealthy, many of the same companies are still around; including those which supported the Nazi war effort like Hugo Boss and Mercedes Benz. German chemical industry is extremely successful... Population of Germany exceeds that of France...
How did Germany's defeat actually negatively affect things for the people in the long run?
One of my ancestors (French side) had to close their business because they made the decision to keep paying for employee wages during the war while their business was forcibly put on hold by the French government... Winning the war didn't mean much to them... Mercedes people who made the German war machines were filling their pockets throughout the entire war. Didn't even negatively affect their reputation!
What happened to normal people is very different.
The people who won are those who looked out only for their own interests! It doesn't matter what side they were on.
> This is an elite narrative. What happened to normal people? In the real world?
What a rubbish point you're pushing. Millions and millions died or were exterminated. Countless fled or were forcefully displaced. The country was occupied and then split apart, the effects of the DDR can be felt to this day. The collective shame will outlast any generation alive today.
Many institutions survived, yes, as they often do. But everything else was a nightmare that echoes to this day.
Software was already far down the bloat path by the time the Core 2 Duo came out, so the upgrade didn't make all that much of a difference in feel given how much latency was caused by software performing random reads off a disk. That's why SSDs made such a huge difference.
Back in the MS-DOS days, the amount of data needed to be read off a disk while the OS booted was negligible, so a second or two on a fast 486 felt amazing compared to the incredibly slow grind of watching code execute on an 8086 or slow 80286. Software was still in the space of having to run tolerably on an 8086, so the added resources of a newer faster machine actually did improve the feel of the system.
Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.
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