I really appreciate iFixit and how they help bring the discussion of repairability to the forefront.

There’s not a straightforward answer to this because it’s far too context dependent, and even a CEO at a small company won’t have absolute control over the culture of that company; I’ve seen company culture turn from amazing to toxic after losing only a couple key employees (good managers are gold dust).

To draw a comparison: staff pizza parties are so widely scoffed at not because people hate pizza, but because, when set against a backdrop of employees not actually being respected or valued, it makes them feel worse. Good will can’t be bought, whether by pizza, extra days off, or field trips. Some of those things can help, but much more important is the cumulative culture that’s built at the company.

Most decisions like discretionarily giving someone time off to look after family are going to be made at a level lower than CEO. Sometimes great policy ideas arise from a great manager using their discretion to make a sensible call, and then going “maybe we could put [idea] in place for future”.

The anti-benefits rhetoric is fucking dystopian. When I highlight the harms of making vulnerable people jump through hoops to get basic support, people often respond that it’s a necessary evil to prevent “scroungers and cheats” claiming benefits.

The minuscule number of people committing fraud is a large part of why I oppose this, but I would feel the same if there were 100x more fraudulent claims than there is now. Fundamentally, there are always going to be people who slip through the gaps, and the only choice we have is whether we’d rather that involve: disabled people and other vulnerable groups not accessing support they need; or people getting away with fraud and getting money they aren’t entitled to. For me, the choice is obvious, because I think by sacrificing vulnerable people’s wellbeing to prevent fraud is absurd when the entire point of the system is to help those vulnerable people. It undermines the whole concept — though I imagine that for many politicians, undermining it is the point

An interesting component here is that it’s possible that the video creator is responsible for this silly level of ads, but it’s impossible to know. Creators can select points in the video where ads will happen, which they can use to preserve the video’s flow as much as possible. In theory, you can even select to not monetise your video at all, which is a useful tool if the topic is something particularly dense or sensitive. In practice, I’ve seen plenty of creators apologizing when an inappropriate ad plays at a sensitive part of the video, despite them having tried to disable ads on the video. It must suck to have so little power over one’s own work.

In your case, I suspect this was a creator choosing to maximally monetise their video, given the regularity and number of ads. However, it’s possible that this is a 100% “Fuck Google” situation, given how opaque they are. I find it frustrating that when we have poor experiences like yours, we don’t even have a clear target to get angry at. It leads to accountability so diffuse that it’s like homeopathy. Getting angry doesn’t necessarily help change things (at least individually), but it can be incredibly cathartic even then

It often does, yeah. Not always though. I got one of the adblock warnings last night, and it refused to play the video. I fixed it by heading into ublock settings and manually updating. It always makes me laugh how rapidly the ad-blocker arms war progresses