The Correspondent

Historically, gas tax and vehicle registration fees (particularly for commercial trucking) tried to account for the infrastructure cost in a somewhat variable manner. EVs complicate this approach some since electricity is used by more than EVs.

Ultimately though vehicle related deaths per mile and per person followed the opposite trend so there hasn't been a huge motivator for people to suddenly feel pressure to have safety regulations which require them to give up the vehicles they like. Climate related requirements needs (such as efficiency) seem to have an ever bigger role in reviewing what sizes make sense lately though. Rather than outright say weight is the thing that needs to be regulated I'd rather see it be directly about efficiency requirements or safety requirements and let manufacturers figure out the best balance to achieve the goals with.

Interestingly, Europe seems to have been adding mass at the same rate (higher in terms of percentage growth, actually) but they just started off smaller. https://thecorrespondent.com/310/your-car-has-a-weight-problem-and-we-need-to-regulate-it#

I think a 10 euro subscription service is a lazy business model, only one worse is everything based on ad revenue. I loved the fact that you could buy articles instead of getting another subscription.

I tried to buy an article last year, I'm not 100% sure why, but I never succeed in reading the article that I wanted to read. I just wanted to pay like 10 euro's until i needed to pay the next 10. But they were already forcing you into a monthly subscription model.

Now they are just the dutch version of apple news, seems like a terrible spot to be in.

I didn't try the audio stuff yet, that might be interesting. I enjoyed the audio stuff from Audm, but I thought it was expensive to get a subscription. Also to much competition in the podcast space.

I think https://thecorrespondent.com/ is doing a better job at changing the world. It's clearer what you get for your money, and you actually feel like your supporting journalism. Not sure if I feel the same way about Blendle.

That said, i know some people who use it, but mostly because their jobs requires them to be up to date with most newspapers.

I've stopped follwing the news cycle 4 years ago. I realized it wasn't a proper source of information. News needs to be published fast, so there is no time to do a proper source check. It it short, so there is no room for other views. It needs to be simple, easily understood, so it uses the dominant world view as a frame. News needs to get attention/clicks, so it is focussed on negative events, creating a skewed view of the world.

I only read analysis, long reads, investigative articles and news sites that do not focus on news, but on (global) developments. A good example is https://thecorrespondent.com (english version not active yet), I'm a member of the dutch version and I really enjoy reading investigative pieces about our tax system, healthcare, forgotten dutch histories and so on.

All in all I can say that when I stopped following the news cycle, the mental clutter really reduced and it made me feel better.

I wish advertising didn’t exist. Not just on the internet, but everywhere else too.

Ads encourage people to buy stuff they probably don’t need. They incentivize clickbait and tracking. And most online advertising is probably a waste of money anyways. [1]

How then, you might ask, will content and services be paid for?

Sponsorships are not a solution for the same reasons.

The Brave browser is not a solution. [2]

I think the solution is to pay for everything with donations and crowdfunding. This model incentivizes doing what’s beat for the end-user. Great examples of this include Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.

If ads were banned, many websites would die, and I would be ok with that. Only the ones that are the best for users would survive.

[1] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/

[2] https://rudism.com/the-brave-browser-is-brilliant/

I thought at that time the main reason the nation backed out of the universal income was not racism, but a statistical error:

> Even former Nixon advisor Daniel Moynihan stopped believing in basic income, following a fatal discovery upon publication of the final results of the Seattle experiment. One finding in particular grabbed everybody’s attention: The number of divorces had jumped more than 50%. Interest in this statistic quickly overshadowed all the other outcomes, such as better school performance and improvements in health.

> Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no change in the divorce rate at all.

From https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-president-nixon-and-his-basic-income-bill/173117835-c34d6145

Somewhat surprised that there is no mention of The Correspondent yet. The Dutch version has been quite successful for quite a few years now, and they're launching an international version later this year[0][1].

(Having said that, the authors of De Correspondent sometimes come across as oblivious to how their world views are shaped by living in the cultural bubble that is the Randstad[2]. There is a certain arrogance to the writing style that just makes it feel like the kind of thing that people living in Amsterdam would write, and it sometimes rubs me the wrong way. I guess that makes it the Dutch equivalent to the New Yorker.)

[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/

[1] https://decorrespondent.nl/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randstad