Politics Please say rock bottom is getting close

Everything Beagle · Mar 28, 2025

SharpeScooterShooter said: ↑

a transgender
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Person. Transgender person. We're people.

SlyPokerDog · Mar 29, 2025

Everything Beagle · Mar 29, 2025

So if Trump somehow ends up taking Greenland before 2028, and somehow Democrats win the presidency in 2028, does the Democratic president give back Greenland in 2029? Or will they apologize profusely to Denmark while they keep Greenland?

Phatguysrule · Mar 29, 2025

Everything Beagle said: ↑

So if Trump somehow ends up taking Greenland before 2028, and somehow Democrats win the presidency in 2028, does the Democratic president give back Greenland in 2029? Or will they apologize profusely to Denmark while they keep Greenland?
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Keeping Greenland makes no sense. We currently get all the benefits of having Greenland without having to manage Greenland. They take care of it for us, they allow us to have bases there, they have been a very close ally and we basically do whatever we want militarily in Greenland.

Same thing in Canada.

It makes no logical or logistical sense for us to try and occupy those countries. The simple knowledge that they are close allies to the US protects those countries militarily. If anybody did try to encroach on their lands we would just go run them off.

The only thing it does is makes us look bad and ruins our stature in the world. The only people this is good for are authoritarian regimes.

I like to think that we would give any country we take under Trump back and change our constitution to prevent it from happening again.

But if the current Democrats take over I don't know.

SlyPokerDog · Mar 29, 2025

With global warming, 20 years from now, Greenland will be the new Cancun.

SlyPokerDog · Mar 29, 2025

crandc · Mar 29, 2025

Look at that rainbow of animal colors! DEI and gay agenda!

Chris Craig · Mar 29, 2025

SlyPokerDog said: ↑

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Ridiculous

Phatguysrule · Mar 29, 2025

The Newspaper Flourishing Without a Paywall

There was a time in media when having a billionaire owner was an asset. For many outlets, this is still the case, particularly those publishing super-secretive group chats of powerful government officials who seem eager to trample on the rights of the press. But for others, like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, both of which have seen their benefactors bend a knee to Donald Trump and sacrifice the integrity of their newspapers in the process, ownership has become a problem. A problem that the Guardian US, the American arm of the British newspaper, has exploited.

“All around us, media organizations have begun to capitulate,” editor Betsy Reed writes in the current fundraising appeal at the bottom of each Guardian article. “The Guardian has neither a self-interested billionaire owner nor profit-seeking corporate henchmen pressuring us to appease the rich and powerful. With the new administration boasting about its desire to punish journalists, and Trump and his allies already pursuing lawsuits against newspapers whose stories they don’t like, it has never been more urgent, or more perilous, to pursue fair, accurate reporting. Can you support The Guardian today?”

The asks themselves are not new. The Guardian for the past eight years has asked readers to donate in support of its journalism, a “reader revenue” program that helps the paper exist without a paywall. But the appeals have gotten more strident — and more Trump-focused — since the Post and the L.A. Times withdrew expected endorsements for Kamala Harris last fall, and to great effect. The last week in February was the second-biggest week in U.S. reader-revenue history for The Guardian; the biggest was the week of the 2024 presidential election.

The Guardian US expects to hit $44 million in voluntary reader donations in the U.S. and Canada this year, up 33 percent over last year, with some people supporting on a recurring basis and others giving one-time contributions. A first-person account by a Canadian citizen detained by ICE, for example, netted $105,000 in pledged donations. These contributions account for more than 60 percent of the American operation’s total revenue, which last year exceeded costs by $16 million (the rest of its revenue comes from advertising and philanthropic support from foundations). The amount that people are contributing on a pledged basis doubled in October — the month that Jeff Bezos pulled the Post’s endorsement for Harris — and has stayed at that level every month since, according to internal data provided by The Guardian, which just surpassed 350,000 recurring supporters in the U.S.

“Our messaging does appeal to people to support our work as a kind of cause, and I think that works for a number of reasons,” Reed said in a recent interview in her downtown office, “but one is that there is a real crisis of access to reliable information for people who don’t want or have the means to subscribe to the New York Times. That is a real problem that we have an answer to.”

Guardian managing director Steve Sachs added that The Guardian’s global perspective — the internal catchphrase of the U.S. operation is that it covers America for the world and the world for America — is also a draw at such a volatile moment in geopolitics. “People are even more interested now than they were six months ago,” he said. The Guardian US’ audience is split 50-50 between American and global readers.

The Guardian launched its U.S. operation more than a decade ago and seemed to have a promising start, hiring high-profile columnists like Michael Wolff and Glenn Greenwald and winning a Pulitzer for reporting on widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency. But as the Obama era gave way to the Trump era, the close association of the Guardian US with surveillance-state reporting made it less relevant to American readers. Annual losses led to restructuring that hit the U.S. operation, once housed in an airy Soho loft, particularly hard.

But during the pandemic, the Guardian US, like other news outlets, experienced a surge in reader interest, readying it for an expansion in 2022 that included hiring Reed, formerly of The Nation and the Intercept, and Sachs, who’d spent years on the business side of Time Inc. The audience has continued to grow, with Sachs noting that the site typically sees between 40 million to 50 million unique visitors a month. “We’re now at a place where our audience is actually bigger in the U.S. than The Wall Street Journal’s audience in the U.S.,” he said.

Leaders and organizations across the media industry have been trying to innovate in the way people can pay for news. Sachs says he’s been increasingly asked about the no-paywall model, with others in the industry wondering whether they should adopt the same. “If you’re creative enough, you can figure out some new things,” he tells people. “But the question is, does it scale?” If it’s “another half-million dollars, a million dollars, whatever, it’s not worth the effort,” he said. Other publications that were donations-focused, including Vox.com (which is owned by the same parent company as New York), have moved away to membership models as a result. “The reason I think that it works for us is we cover so much breaking news and it drives a lot of traffic, and we have the scale to make it work,” Reed said. “Even if we only monetize one percent, it’s still a lot.” Still, even scaled-up publications like the Guardian US have to contend with the fact that donations are very boom-and-bust.

Despite The Guardian’s strident anti-Trump fundraising pushes, its broader audience is less partisan, as is the tone of its news coverage. It’s a weird line to straddle. “The appeals that you see at the bottom of articles are really framed around issues of press freedom and our identity and our structure of ownership,” Reed said. “They are not appeals that say, ‘Trump is bad, you need to support The Guardian, we are against Trump.’” Maybe not explicitly. But they are clearly benefitting from this moment and using the new money to hire, with expectations to continue growing its staff in the U.S. this year.

The big question is: Will it last? “I mean, unfortunately, there’s no shortage of global crises going on, from what’s happening in the Middle East to Ukraine to what’s happening in this country,” Reed said. “The world is incredibly interested in the shitshow here. God, it’s like they’re rubbernecking at a car crash.”
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Source

Interesting comment from poster on Hacker News

yen223 23 hours ago | next [–]

I was hoping this article went deeper into the Guardian's somewhat unusual ownership model, because I find it interesting and would love to learn more.

The Guardian is owned by (and I think largely funded by?) a trust that was intentionally set up in a way to ensure no commercial interest could interfere with the paper. How well it achieved that goal is, of course, debatable, but it has survived nearly a century in that form.
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SlyPokerDog · Mar 30, 2025

RFK Jr. Expected To Lay Off Entire Office Of Infectious Disease And HIV/AIDS Policy

crandc · Mar 30, 2025

SlyPokerDog said: ↑

RFK Jr. Expected To Lay Off Entire Office Of Infectious Disease And HIV/AIDS Policy
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Brain worm who doesn't deserve name Kennedy, not only pretends HIV doesn't cause AIDS, he has questioned entire germ theory of disease. He not only wants to erase the 21st and 20th centuries, the 19th as well.

AmirIcon · Mar 30, 2025

crandc · Mar 31, 2025

Ron DeSantis took over New College, a small liberal arts school with a reputation for being progressive and gay friendly. He fired the board, replaced with right wing activists with no academic credentials, cancelled classes deemed too "woke" and instituted a ridiculous number of athletic scholarships for a school with no Division I NCAA teams.
They just fired a professor for being Chinese. Literally. He is seeking political asylum in the US and was teaching classes on Chinese language and culture. A law in free state of Florida bans state from hiring people from problematic countries. Including China. Freedom!
Professor said he is reminded of the conditions he fled

crandc · Mar 31, 2025

When brain worm cancelled all NIH studies related to vaccines, three Bay Area studies shut down. One, conducted by ophthalmologist, studied effectiveness of shingles vaccine for people who had shingles of the eye, which sounds really nasty. Another studied safety of vaccines for pregnant women. Third addressed overcoming vaccine hesitancy among teens.

AmirIcon · Mar 31, 2025

Everything Beagle · Mar 31, 2025

A reminder that all of this, all of this administration's opinions (including the trans panic and trans sports thing, jesus fucking christ) is consipracist horseshit. This video describes what a conspiracism really is, and the process of falling down that hole, in an entertaining way.

Atheist creationism. It's creationism for people who don't really believe in a god.

AmirIcon · Mar 31, 2025

Insane...

Phatguysrule · Mar 31, 2025

Getting close to rock bottom...

crandc · Apr 1, 2025

In order to not offend DUI hire prior to today's visit at US Naval Academy, the Academy removed all photos of Jewish women graduates.

crandc · Apr 1, 2025

My Pillow guy announced he wants to run for governor of Minnesota against Tim Walz.

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