Oi, politidorks, hit me up with some nuanced articles you've been reading lately.

[Dion]

@Vilageidiotx more or less

[mdk]

@Keyguyperson fuck u buddy

@mdk it's linked to politics, it's basically explaining the chronology of monarchy -> republic with representation or monarchies with representation (to a lesser degree) where the bourgeois began forming a public sphere (where private people come together in a public body to discuss matters related to politics) and how it progressed from there. The media was a nr. 1 tool for them more or less like the French political journals and stuff.

The author then argues that there was a change in modern society where that's no longer the case, or beginning to decrease, due to media being increasingly focused on crime and entertainment and how there is no longer a platform for politics unless it generates revenue.

Now I'm unsure where the change comes in

@Buddha

You should be able to get free school points by relating (read: force-fitting) the article into a "twitter age" conversation.

A, that last argument is just recency bias, so it's bullcrap. But B, it's irrelevant anyway because media is no longer the primary means of understanding current events. Instantaneous communication has supplanted it. The zeitgeist IS the story, but it's also how we hear/share/interact with the story.

[JDolan]

Figure this is as good a place as any to ask for anyone to point me in the right direction.

Anyone got any good links for any proper analysis of the Lex CEU that Hungary passed recently, I believe it was last Tuesday? I'm trying to get a better sense of just what Orbán is trying to get up to with his giant middle finger to the Soros-funded American University in Budapest/Central European University but all I'm really getting are (mostly) small blurbs that it happened, or coverage of the fact that there were protests against it, but not really much analysis of it...as a law besides it being an attempt by Orbán to "reform" the nation's university system and establish primacy for native Hungarian institutions and all that...but a lot of it feels very superficial in the English-language coverage I can find. And then there's the fact that the only Hungarian source I could handily find (444.hu) is so liberal (or at least anti-Fidesz) that most of its coverage doesn't go much beyond "It's bad because Orbán wants it" or (as in the case of what's on the front page there now) "look at how many people turned out in protest...and look at these awesome posters".

[Dinh AaronMk]

Figure this is as good a place as any to ask for anyone to point me in the right direction.

Anyone got any good links for any proper analysis of the Lex CEU that Hungary passed recently, I believe it was last Tuesday? I'm trying to get a better sense of just what Orbán is trying to get up to with his giant middle finger to the Soros-funded American University in Budapest/Central European University but all I'm really getting are (mostly) small blurbs that it happened, or coverage of the fact that there were protests against it, but not really much analysis of it...as a law besides it being an attempt by Orbán to "reform" the nation's university system and establish primacy for native Hungarian institutions and all that...but a lot of it feels very superficial in the English-language coverage I can find. And then there's the fact that the only Hungarian source I could handily find (444.hu) is so liberal (or at least anti-Fidesz) that most of its coverage doesn't go much beyond "It's bad because Orbán wants it" or (as in the case of what's on the front page there now) "look at how many people turned out in protest...and look at these awesome posters".

@JDolan

You could if anything think of it as being yet another thing against globalism. Soros is just another globalist money-maker with hands in Hungary and this could perhaps be to the determent of Hungarian primacy. That's probably what's going on.

If Orban is trying to ride the wave of populism then he doesn't need to do much. This way of conservative populism isn't necessarily 'deep'.

[JDolan]

<Snipped quote by JDolan>

You could if anything think of it as being yet another thing against globalism. Soros is just another globalist money-maker with hands in Hungary and this could perhaps be to the determent of Hungarian primacy. That's probably what's going on.

If Orban is trying to ride the wave of populism then he doesn't need to do much. This way of conservative populism isn't necessarily 'deep'.

@Dinh AaronMk

No I get that. It's the same blurb I've been getting from just about everywhere. It's a protectionist move against foreign institutions and all that.

I get that Orbán is all in on the whole globalist conspiracy theory. That he's riding the populism and all that.

What I don't get is what the Lex CEU is supposed to actually be doing, what it's precise mechanisms of action are in order to defund, what the actual legislated rationale is beyond mere educational protectionism, nationalism, and all that.

ALso speaking of Soros, I find it a little ironic though, given that Soros himself is Hungarian...and if anything you could make a very rational argument that what he's doing is actually just as nationalistic as he give the nation an actual second internationally viable university institution besides Eötvös Loránd. I'm trying to look into the internal logic to the piece and also how it affects other institutions despite the fact it was so narrowly tailored as to basically only affect CEU...it surely has wider impacts on other institutions. In short there's a dearth of information out there about the longer-term forecasts about the impact of the forced shutdown of the CEU.

But you're right, this kind of national conservatism is pretty simple by and large: to read too much into the motivations is probably foolish.

Also, I'm not really looking to be filled in on it (I already know the broad strokes that you're touching on), so much as find further sources, articles, etc on the specifics, the details.

[Kratesis]

The source seems biased but I thought this article was interesting and they made a fair effort to provide the evidence for their claims. Still, I'd like to see it confirmed by another source.

ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2017/02/09/..

[Vilageidiotx]

The source seems biased but I thought this article was interesting and they made a fair effort to provide the evidence for their claims. Still, I'd like to see it confirmed by another source.

ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2017/02/09/..

@Kratesis

The biggest problems with this are...

A: Paying for clicks isn't a viable business model. It would be a financial loss. If this was not the case, the internet would be a financial perpetual motion machine and none of us would ever have to work again.

B: It doesn't do anything for them but allow them to boast. Fake traffic doesn't mean real traffic, so their narrative wouldn't actually be spreading at a greater rate here.

C: Alexa may be a flawed source. Tracing website traffic is a very hairy thing. I recall a forum IP tracker that always had be in the pacific ocean for some weird fucking reason, when I live some 2000 miles+ from the pacific ocean.

[Kratesis]

@Vilageidiotx I agree that the market would eventually correct for malfeasance. That said, that doesn't mean they didn't use bots to drive their clicks up and reduce bounce percentage. The NYTs is in the business of selling ads as well as subscriptions after all. You can get pretty fancy with those bots click path and if nothing else you can make it appear that you have a smaller percentage of singletons than you really do.

I'm not saying they are definitely guilty. The source is too shady for that. But it certainly falls within the realm of possibility and it wouldn't even make the top one hundred shady things a large company has done this month.

What I would like to see confirmed is the NYT is A: banned in china and B: had a huge spike of traffic from china in a short period.

[Dinh AaronMk]

A: Paying for clicks isn't a viable business model. It would be a financial loss. If this was not the case, the internet would be a financial perpetual motion machine and none of us would ever have to work again.

@Vilageidiotx

While true, one of the guys I work with at work was telling me about an app that at the least pays you to watch ads. Something like so many ads is so many cents. But if you run it long enough you can rack up a lot of money, and the Beer Money Reddit has threads for schemes to milk such services to get extra dosh for little effort.

Basically you end up running the app on multiple (probably cheap as fuck smartphones) and put them on a table and every so many minutes you come back and hit the "I'm still watching" button before walking away.