When it comes to mobile advertising, Google & Facebook won, & Apple was never even really a player. If it’s unclear to you, I wasn’t complimenting Apple for this endeavor either. Mobile ads suck, & nothing they did with iAd did anything to meaningfully improve them.

That said, I don’t think YouTube owes it to Premium subscribers to add a sponsor block. That’s part of the video’s content as it was provided to YouTube, and YouTube never advertised YouTube Premium as something which will block in-video sponsor reads. This is part of how YouTubers make a living & a Premium sub doesn’t replace the money they receive for those the way it does for YouTube’s own ads.

I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war.

> We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.

Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense.

> What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.

The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394

I just don’t want to copy & paste the same answer in multiple places.

Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not.

As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.

The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”.

> America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.

America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”.

I wanted to address this though:

> The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.

The reality of the post-WW2 world is that those who were most responsible for bringing big messy & complex wars to the world were no longer able to litter their own little subcontinent hanging off the western edge of Asia with as much ordinance as they could manufacture. It was too expensive & they were either too occupied or too preoccupied with the rather expensive operation of trying to maintain their hold on their colonial enterprises. We could afford to pretend that all of our wars were “defensive” because our goal was to make sure they couldn’t pull that shit again & there was only one or two relevant powers at a time we were in direct competition with that was otherwise keeping us busy. Telling the UK & France to fuck off during the Suez Crisis was approximately a phone call.

But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.

Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.

On page 52 (57 of the PDF), there’s a letter dated December 18th 1978 (Carter administration, not Reagan) from the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing adopting 8.5”x11”, effective January 1st 1980 so departments & agencies could use up their 8.5”x10.5” stock.

I also found this article from Time from January 15th 1979 that this was actually slightly cheaper despite using more paper: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0%2C33009%2...

The government adopted 8.5”x10.5” to save money back in 1921 vs what was already the industry standard of 8.5”x11”, but this ended up backfiring and a General Services Administration report in 1972 recommended switching to 8.5”x11” would reduce by 5% the amount of times a secretary would need a second page. The Joint Committee of Printing estimated this change would save several million dollars.

> On hearing the news, one straight-faced bureaucrat in the Government Printing Office said of his colleagues' reaction to the news: "Some people think that this issue has been inadequately studied."

Apparently the American Forest & Paper Association is under the impression that it was the Reagan administration’s proclamation:

> Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120220192919/http://www.afandp...

Hakuna matata.

> I meant that the act that you described (comparing religion with a virus) is in itself using the name-calling-aspect-of "virus".

The comparison is more than a mere slur. It’s also a useful metaphor when discussing how religions & ideologies spread through a society, or “go viral”.

> The descriptive property of virus that you then mention (as in being "viral", packets of information in cell etc) equally applies to liberty, democracy and other things that (at least I) consider good.

Correct. I would still not call the viral framing charitable, but it is equally useful here, and I’ve used it for these & adjacent concepts before.

You admitted you don't know me, yet you still managed to jump to this conclusion. Good job, mate.

You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing.

The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.