Ben Thompson is a content creator. Even if Ben’s content does not directly benefit from ads, it is the fact that other content creator’s content having ads is what makes Ben’s content premium in comparison.
I would say that, on this topic (ads on internet content), Ben Thompson may not be as objective a perspective as he has on other topics.
People aren’t collectively paying him between $3 million a year and five million (estimated 40k+ subscribers paying a minimum of $120 a year) just because he doesn’t have ads.
One reason I like CBS’s Elementary’s depiction of Sherlock (maybe more so than BBC’s Sherlock) is because how Elementary treats Sherlock’s mental health and addiction recovery as central to the character. As great as Sherlock is at solving cases, he still struggles greatly to handle his own mental health and addiction recovery, which makes him more grounded to earth.
I think Elementarys Sherlock is closer to the book version. In the BBC version he is totally aloof of social connections and norms, but in the books it is pretty clear, that Sherlock is able to tranverse London society - he had many case with high society people before Watson was part of his life - he just dislikes it.
I've not read much of Holmes, so I can't really speak to the original character, but I would point out that the "he can socialize, he just doesn't like to" bit is somewhat part of BBC's Sherlock too - look at the relationship he developed with the woman to get at Magnussen. It's an aspect of him they never really explored much beyond that though - you're definitely right in that he seems more incapable of it than anything else.
I tried watching an episode of the bbc version and found it very off-putting, it was written almost as a caricature of holmes. elementary was definitely a lot closer in spirit.
The American series (House and Elementary) has the advantage of more seasons and episodes, which I think is sometimes required to showcase the challenges of drug addiction and mental health.
The fact that these characters having to come back to face the same problem over and over again episode after episode is more true to the nature of the mental health problem itself.
BBC Sherlock has too little episodes to bring audience along a prolonged struggle with mental health.
It's definitely one of those pieces of media that is extremely frustrating because of how close it came to being an all-time great adaptation. Moffat needed somebody in the writers room with him to tell him 'no' sometimes.
When Doyle wrote most of the Holmes stories cocaine was a popular and novel new drug, it wasn't until later that it's risks became widely known. In one of his later stories, "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter", Doyle portrays it as an addiction that Watson weaned him of, but is still concerned that his friend may fall back into.
"For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug-mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead but sleeping, and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes’ ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes. Therefore I blessed this Mr. Overton, whoever he might be, since he had come with his enigmatic message to break that dangerous calm which brought more peril to my friend than all the storms of his tempestuous life."
A few things; one, even if it's not strictly speaking true that cocaine use always leads to addiction every single time, we know now better than in Victorian era England how often it does, and Doyle not having been a cocaine user may have lost some of the elements of how cocaine is addictive and what it looks like. I hate to say that there is some moral duty to show a protagonist using cocaine as having a problem with its use that needs to be overcome, but I do think it'd be strange too to keep what was effectively this SMBC comic (https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=191) as Holmes' use of coke.
Secondly, the stories that mention coke use are all written from the perspective of Holmes' best friend, who we'd expect to be biased towards writing about his friend in a positive light. I don't think this is accidental. Watson quotes him effectively saying "I just do coke because life is so mundane and boring, and not stimulating enough for me" which is nearly the exact same justification and thought process used by like, every addict and if not a word-for-word quote, then at least very similar for Chris Moltisanti's justification of his own addiction to Tony Soprano.
It may not be an exact rendering of what was in the books but it is extremely natural modification to make, where otherwise we'd have flat Marty Stu character who is talking in ways that seem very consistent with at least problematic use and yet who's not addicted. "Our own times" have dealt with at least 100 years of coke addiction, 50 years of crack so maybe we're just not naive enough to believe that a guy who's saying "my friend just takes it when he's bored, but he's bored all the time because his mind is too sharp for this dull world" isn't a problematic user or addict.
> Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty.
This is one part that is rarely properly implemented. We have our bug bash days too, but I noticed after the fact that maybe 1/3 of the bugs we solved is on a feature we are thinking of deprecating soon due to low usage.
A regulation being good or bad is not a fixed thing. A regulation that was good when created could change to bad due to circumstances or new innovation introduced.
Maybe something innovators can learn to do better is to involve regulators earlier in the design process of this innovation process, so that regulation does not become the bottleneck for introducing the innovation to the market.
The tricky thing about involving regulators earlier is that it sometimes can be seen as aggressive or unethical lobbying.
I believe the main ‘change’ of this $100,000 fee is the composition of labor.
A doctor applies for H1B too and various other non-tech job applies for H1B too. Startups and hospitals have a much higher chance to not willing to pay for the fee and we will just end up with less ‘doctors’ in the 85,000 H1B visa approvals.
I saw a comment in another thread that the AMA recognizes the problem of a deficit in new MD's. According to the comment, congress provides funding for MD residents, and that is the real bottleneck.
Don’t forget that the real utility of these H1B is for citizens of countries that exceed their EB quotas, which are primarily India and China just on the basis of their demographics. Without more serious reform of the immigration system I see this as a positive step towards raising the bar on those extra quotas.
This. H1B should still have to align with America's immigration goals of allowing people form all over the world in, not just certain countries. It was hard to get the entrenched systemic bias for western europeans opened up and it seems like H1B is now captured in the same way by a few ethnic groups.
Its a fair point, but this $100,000 fee should not have been the flashpoint causing half the United States to care about this issue, and it being the flashpoint has got us arguing for the wrong thing. Immigrant doctors should have their own visa classification. There's no reason they should be competing in the H1-B lottery with Big Tech, especially now that its so expensive.
That isn't on the table right now. Its possible that it could be, as sometimes you need to have a problem before people will feel incentivized to solve it. On the other hand: We've had a serious medical care provider shortage since, like, the early 2000s; over 20 years of Bush (R), Obama (D), Trump (R), and Biden (D) to have solved this obvious problem; and no one has. Chesterton's Fence sometimes exists for a reason.
I want to clarify that I am not trying to argue but genuinely curious what is the ‘right solve’ here.
If we create an exception for doctors, what about ‘medical lab technicians’, ‘wastewater treatment professionals’ or ‘air traffic controller’? All these jobs faces shortage in US right now. If we leave it up to the executive branch at the time to determine exceptions, we will just end up in a situation in exceptions going to the industry with the ‘best’ lobbyist.
I am not in a position to decide a policy like this, but I have a wild idea. Why not lower the application fee for H1B (or make it free) or even make it super easy to apply. Right now, the companies that are willing to abuse the H1B system will do so because they know the higher the application fee, the less competition they have to get those 85,000 slots. If every doctor, speech therapist, medical lab technologist is applying for H1B, it would totally crowd out the H1B abusers and it might no longer be worth it for them to try to game the system. Just musing on ideas, not that I can implement any of these.
To clarify one small point: You have to be a US Citizen to be an Air Traffic Controller. But, I understand your broader point.
Before raising the fee to $100,000 this week, the "official" fees one would pay to apply for an H1-B were, effectively, $0. Employers would pay a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on their size. There might be some "unofficial" fees like lawyer and advisor fees to help with the process, but in essence: your "wild idea" was the status quo for 35 years.
At the end of the day, relying on temporary immigration programs to backstop critical job shortages isn't sustainable on the long-term. Its not fair to citizens, and its oftentimes not fair to the temporary immigrant either. The more efficient and feasible solution to these shortages is to incentivize citizens to enter these roles.
I was told the total cost was about 10k or so including filing fees and lawyers, and so on, and O1 closer to 50k or so. Seems like most of big tech will just try for O1 instead now... I've heard some wild stories over the years of how people "manufactured" eligibility, and/or the kinds of arguments their lawyers made.
> The more efficient and feasible solution to these shortages is to incentivize citizens to enter these roles.
If one would purely go by the rules of the free market, the solution would indeed not be immigration, but either automating these jobs away, rationalizing them so you need fewer employees to handle the same workload or raise the compensations and non-payroll benefits to attract more (prospective) talent.
The problem is, it's one thing if you do that for air traffic controllers. Flights are too cheap anyway, making them a bit more expensive to pay for more ATC will also reduce demand which in turn would also have positive benefits on the environment (CO2) and airport residents (noise).
But for stuff like garbage disposal handlers, wastewater facility staff and other jobs on the high-ick, low-pay side of things? These are actually and literally vital for society to survive, but if prices were raised to reflect the fact that you need to pay people pretty huge sums of money to do these jobs? Barely anyone would remain to pay for these services.
In the end, immigration has been used by Western societies as a stopgap to avoid the inevitable conclusion that the wide masses by far do not earn enough money, and now that immigration is drying up - in the case of the US, from the political climate, in the case of Europe including the UK, many people from Eastern Europe going back to their home country during Covid and discovering life there has actually vastly improved over the last decades - the cracks are growing so large they can neither be hidden nor overlooked any more.
By grouping everyone so that people can make the argument 'you can't cut this, we need doctors and we'll lose doctors' and paralyzing any action while the majority of slots go to positions where we don't need to import workers/aren't doctors.
I am curious if you think that the payment processing companies refusing to serve legal yet undesirable businesses to be in a similar situation as this Palantir situation here?
I wonder what forms our perception of what activity should be able to earn money from and what should not. I know that me being a professional nap taker should not be able to earn money from it, but when does one activity turn into ‘should be able to earn money from’?
> When EC2 launched, it wasn't really clear what people would do with it, but it was very cool and it was clear that it could be a big deal in some form, sooner or later.
Hindsight is 20/20, but how do you spot for “it was very cool” and “could be a big deal”?
I often hear these used as justification to build something, but the projects often go nowhere..
I have seen two sides of these artificial constraints people at their work impose. I am still not sure if these artificial constraints are good or bad.
On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy.
On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group.
I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees.
Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.
I would say that, on this topic (ads on internet content), Ben Thompson may not be as objective a perspective as he has on other topics.