Now that my vehicle is approaching 20 years old, I’m so so so happy it has more interior comfort upgrades rather than mechanical ones like 4wd or a turbo.
Heh, some landowner near me owned a piece of contaminated property. Technically worthless but was getting some lease money for a shop on the property. I think their game plan was for the city to grow and it being valuable to excavate one day for a condo or other building. Soil remediation is a lot cheaper when you dig anyway.
Transit agency tried to expropriate for a train station at market value: ie $0.
> My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs.
The fun part about the “upper” Great Lakes is that some ships were built on it that can go through the Soo Locks, but not the Welland Canal. So they’re just stuck there moving ore (and I guess oats).
Through effective search, Google enabled mass deportalization. The best link would win. Your crappy but good blog about how to fix an issue could become top in the results.
Now YouTube favours entertainer-mechanic making subscribeable but generic videos instead of… the one specific to your vehicle by some gruff but knowledgeable mechanic.
Like, c’mon buddy, the bolt only comes off like that in the studio after 3 practice runs.
Dunno about the storage side, but fly by night operators seem to be constantly available to stream every movie and tv show and somehow afford the bandwidth, transcoding and all other costs while being shunned from the general ad industry…
Goog’s monetization requirements make no sense: requiring regular posting of new videos costs them money. You have people posting crap just to keep their monetization active.
More subscribers to a channel doesn’t save Google money at all.
Requiring X hours of views encourages posting longer videos, which costs them more to store and process.
Also worth pointing out that they’ve demonetized people after meeting the old monetization requirements and then not meeting their new requirements. No grandfathering.
I shed a tear (and subscribe) when I encounter an incredibly useful video but they have “only” a few hundred subs.
> they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless
Dunno if they’ve caught on, but just send what you need to send in a .png
Probably goes through a not-hotdog test, but that’s about it.
> I think for most people you're right, they just want to upload their videos, and maybe make a couple of bucks on the side.
Sadly, those won’t make a couple bucks anymore. You can’t get a cut of the revenue until you have 1000 subscribers.
The couple bucks a month from my 1 video that was more useful than professional was nice until the moved that goalpost.
In case you were wondering why every bloody publisher, big or small, asks you to subscribe, even if, well, why would you subscribe to a channel that helped you fix your phone one day but their next video couldn’t be more unrelated?
Meanwhile in my “blogging” days, that first couple cents/bucks a month from Adsense convinced me to spend more time on it & make $20/month, then $200. Was $2000/month for a while. Now they expect you to work for free to prove yourself?