This was already the case, well before digital music streaming: go look at music albums from the 90s and before that, and they’re overwhelmingly 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest filler.

Only a few of the greatest artists would mainly escape this trend and often only in a few of their albums, and there are plenty of one-hit-wonders who only ever produced one successful album with only one popular track in it and the rest pretty much filler.

It’s not by chance that even in the music disc days, there was the LP (i.e. an album) and the Single that only had a couple of the best tracks.

Surelly as the descendants of the Vikings it’s not completelly senseless to think they might be fine with boarding ships on the high seas to take their stuff and with a little plundering of ill-defended costal villages!???

Having moved fully to Linux some months ago, I look at this kind of thing both with with a feeling of smug satisfaction and with cold chills of somebody who only now starts to fully realise just how massive, heavy and fast the incoming train they just dodged is.

Yeah, but they’re great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-“moderate” political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won’t do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would’ve been it if, it wasn’t that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Here’s an alternate theory:

Back then both parties tended to use the “slimy posh salesman” kind of deceit (half lies, misleading statements, promises left unfulfilled with twisted excuses given for it) and what happened was that Republicans, almost against their will (Trump was an outsider) stumbled upon the “strongman saying what people want to hear using straight talking language” technique of deceit.

It was a massive success because people had been fed the same kind of posh-saleman deceit (with pretty much all the media having gone along with it and turning into de facto propaganda outlets) for decades, found the new sort of discourse refreshing and comparatively trustworthy (even though it was still bullshit, just delivered differently, because it did not sound at all like the usual bullshit it seemed trustworthier to many and all the media that had chosen sides and gone along unquestionigly with the old style of deceit wasn’t trusted anymore so all their denouncing of the “other side’s lies” was ignored)

Whilst the Republicans did adjust to that unexpected success quickly, the Democrats did not and just kept using with their usual deceit techniques spread via the media-outlets to which lots of the electorate had built a resistance to, and acting to favour the usual people when in government.

So here we are today with a lying populist getting power for a second time in the American Two-Party system.

Even that is incredibly “murica” - he’s white and a rich guy from a rich family hence he’s not getting the same treatment for overstaying his visa a non-rich non-white African.

Racism and profound wealth discrimination are as American as it gets.

Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:

• I think the “neutral” majority shift more to one side or the other depending on who dominates society and the main sources of culture and information in it.

So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.

The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.

Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.

I think you’re confusing rich people with common people.

Those making money in the “homeland” from colonization weren’t the peasants.

I live in a country - Portugal - which when I was born was still a Fascist dictatorship and still had colonies in Africa and back then the vast majority of the population in the country was incredibly poor (to the point of the country getting food help from The Netherlands) but 7 families were incredibly rich (and the white landowners in the “colonies” exploiting the locals and the land they had stolen from them too were rich).

Somehow I don’t think my mother (who walked to school barefoot in Winter as a child) was getting any of that “stolen wealth”.

Blaming the entire nation and everybody in it for colonization done by the country during times of autocracy is just how the wealthy who inherited wealth their ancestors amassed by exploiting people in faraway lands ditch the blame into the sons and daughters of the people who back then were poor and powerless.

Compensate the actual people who suffered (or their close descendands if still alive), not the parasites in power in lands which happenned to have been occupied, and do it with the money of those who gained from their suffering (or the inherited money from close descendants), not the usual Identity Politics bullshit of diluting the blame of a few by blaming whole nations and ethnicities to de facto benefit people who were not victims or descendents of victims but instead just happen to share nationality or ethnicity with the victims, all the while avoiding like crazy talking about the wealthy who were the ones amassing most if not all of the upsides of the pillaging.

Greenhouse gas emissions from Agriculture has been well known for quite a while, though not as long as Fossil Fuels.

From this very article you can see it’s the United Arab Emirates pushing hard for the Agriculture-angle on their COP - it’s almost as if they have a vested in interest in moving the focus away from Fossil Fuels.

One has to wonder just how many years’ worth of cow farts add up to the same greenhouse effect (over the long term, as methane is a stronger greenhouse gas but has a far lower half-life in the athmosphere than CO2) as more than 100k people flying over to COP28 (kudos to the genuine Environmentalists, who went by boat) or just a couple of hours of private-jet flight emissions.

Then there are all the moralists who are trying to use Climate Change as an angle to push their morals on others when it comes to using animals as food: the very same people who are usually (in my personal experience) unwilling to forego having a car or two and driving rather than cycling (from my observation, their “environmentalism” stops at chosing an electric car, which still polutes - micro-particles from tires, electricity generation emissions, manufacturing and end-of-life emissions - a lot more that my own personal choice of more than a decade of selling my car and walking and cycling instead) will blow out of all proportion the propagandist messaging put out by fossil-fuel fatcats and elites protecting their priviledge, distorting the reality and proportion of what is a genuine concern, because it helps force their own morals on others.

Changes in Agricultural practies - including reduction of meat consumptiom at the consumer level - are indeed things that need to be looked at, all of which is hard to do seriously and in a proper and proportionate way due to the subversion around the subject from an unholly alliance of people with a self-interest in pushing this angle: moralists, elites who want to keep their priviledges and fossil-fuel fatcats keep poluting the subject and destroying any chance at a serious, well-ballanced and proportionate approach at reballancing Agricultural emissions, because none of those actors have a genuine environmentalist objective.