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Notes -
Some thoughts about online political ads:
For the last couple months pretty much all of the ads I get on YouTube have been political. I figure this time of year must be a ripe harvest for Google in terms of ad revenue. Maybe it can buoy them through the recent drop in tech stocks.
Interestingly enough, every single ad I've gotten that mention abortion has been strongly pro-choice. I've strongly pro-life myself, and for most of these ads the effect is that I now know who to vote for (namely, the person they're warning me against). This is a very useful service because all the Republican candidates are keeping their stance on abortion on the down low. It often isn't even listed as an issue on their official campaign website, I have to google around until I can find some interview where they were asked about it in order to learn their stance. The Democrats are definitely making this an abortion centered campaign, and the Republicans are trying to keep their heads down. For someone like myself, who will not vote for a pro-choice candidate, it means I have to do a lot more legwork.
Also interesting is that I saw the same ad more than a dozen times (which is normal) when I suddenly realized that the names in the ad were different every time. Turns out they are cycling through every Republican running for the state legislature, slotting each name in for "If X gets elected, women will have to travel out of state to access reproductive healthcare." It occurred to me that online it can be difficult to tell what district a viewer is in, so I guess you have to have a shotgun approach.
Though for all the abortion focused ads, I did notice none of them actually say the word "abortion": it's always "reproductive rights" or "women's health." The most notable euphemism I heard also happened to be the only time I think I've seen genuine "dog whistle" in the wild: a candidate declared (along a list of other issues) that they would preserve our "constitutional privacy rights". Excellently manufactured so that anyone who cares about the abortion debate will hear "I am pro-choice" while the average voter who doesn't care about abortion doesn't hear it at all. So, ads are big on abortion but mostly wants to talk to the base.
Which is the other odd thing: ads like this are meant for pro-choice voters. It does nothing good for them for a staunch pro-lifer like me to see them. Yet I did see one openly pro-life online ad this election season, and it was on my wife's computer! My wife, who is much more moderate on the issue than I am. Even curiouser, this ad was on a probably-not-quite-legal manga scan-lation site. How and why are pro-life ads ending up on a manga website? Don't manga readers skew female? Doesn't YouTube's audience skew male? I had assumed I was only getting pro-choice ads because most people online lean left, but now I'm not so sure.
A minor observation from the political ads in my area:
Abortion gets mentioned a lot in Democrat ads about Republicans, and always with the suffix: "even in cases of rape or incest".
The words "abortion", "choice", "termination" etc. are completely absent in Democrat ads about our ballot initiative to make partial birth abortion legal. It's all doctors saying stuff like "the government shouldn't come between me and my patients". One ad I had to check to see what it was about because a doctor started talking about how things happen in surgery and sometimes you have to make hard choices etc. Nothing at all to contextualize it to abortion. If my view of the initiative came from ads, I wouldn't know it was about abortion at all. The ads are all generically medical.
The combination of "Republicans want to take your most precious right of abortion from you!" combined with "hey, vote for this vague medical reform to stop government interfering with doctors!" is pretty interesting.
"unless I want to prescribe Ivermectin or HCQ"
"Unless I want to prescribe anything" really. Or do anything. The medical field is heavily regulated on every level.
Less than you think. Doctors are supposed to be able to prescribe approved drugs for off label uses. Excluding drugs scheduled under the Controlled Substances Act of course.
Pharmacies refusing to fill prescriptions for Ivermectin and HCQ was really unprecedented.
The FDA is only supposed to have labeling power, it's not supposed to be able to micromanage treatment.
Sure, but they're "approved" drugs. Even when doctors are free to prescribe them it's still very explicitly under the state umbrella.
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Makes sense: I imagine that a majority of swing voters are neither in favour of complete bans on abortion, nor in favour of "anything goes."
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For what it's worth, all of the political ads I've gotten on YouTube in the last month have been 1) Mike Lee (my senator here in Utah) sucks, don't vote for him 2) Mike Lee is awesome, vote for him 3) Vote for Evan McMullin because Mike Lee sucks. None of the ads have mentioned abortion one way or the other, as far as I've noticed.
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I wonder if there's a different asymmetry here.
It seems to me that, as part of increasing homogenization of what views are acceptable to hold while still being regarded as socially left-wing, the democrats are in a potentially advantageous position that they can campaign on yay abortion without having to further break down what yay means. Meanwhile, the republicans, who's social position is increasingly everything outside the narrow but concentrated window occupied by the democrats, have to hold together a coalition with as broad a range of views as safe, legal and rare, all the way to total prohibition in all circumstances.
You'd be surprised at how narrowly targeted these can be, and to what extent relevant orgs are willing to go to enable that narrow targeting.
You're right that republicans are a big tent on abortion in comparison to democrats, but that big tent runs more or less from "first x weeks only" to "when pregnancy threatens the mother's life only", not "safe, legal, and rare"(which usually implies that liberal social policies will reduce abortion in the absence of legal restrictions).
Additionally the reddest states have mostly banned elective abortion(although there are a few exceptions, at least one of which is notably not for lack of trying), which is a major datapoint that although the republican party tolerates some amount of dissent, its consensus position is "no elective abortion". Sure, rape and incest and robust threat to mother's health exceptions is probably more moderate than shout your abortion. But it's not an order of magnitude difference, and the largest red state only allows abortion when it threatens the woman's life.
According to slightly old polling data, only 62% of Republicans think Abortion should be illegal in either most or all cases. The Republicans have a big enough tent on abortion that they need to include people who support elective abortion in some capacity. Even if that inclusion is limited to just not advertising any specific policy.
Edit: To make an international comparison, the average European policy is within the Republican big tent (though the average European probably wouldn't realise or admit to this since international English media is very anti red tribe)
Do you think it is possible to win a Republican primary in a red state while supporting elective first-trimester abortions? I don't. That is why Dobbs is a political opportunity for the Democrats (as well as, obviously, a policy opportunity for pro-life Republicans). The pro-life right used to be able to define their big tent as "anyone who thinks Roe and Casey go too far - which as you point out includes the median voter in most developed democracies. But once they have to start governing, that ceases to be fudgeable. The gap between the median Republican primary voter (who is to the right of the median Republican because of differential turnout) and the median voter is not bridgeable, and either the Republicans will need to find a way of throwing their base under the bus without being primaried, or to take the heat from supporting an unpopular policy. (Allowing state-level referenda like the one that confirmed the legality of abortion in Kansas is probably the easiest way to do this).
The evidence from the rest of the world is that abortion is important enough that the median voter will get what they want in the end. I suspect that means elective first-trimester abortions in all but the reddest of red states. Their is also a (in my view slim) possibility that gerrymandered state legislatures will be able to enforce the preferences of the median Republican primary voter while telling the median voter to pound sand, but if that happens then those states are not democracies.
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The assumption that this is a starkly gender divided issues always struck me as strange. The most extreme pro-life people I've met, and I was raised catholic with plenty of outside of mass church crowd interactions, have always been women. Now maybe women are just more hot on the subject on both sides and women skew democrat while men skew republican so there could be a gender skew just from that but there are definitely rabidly pro-life women that these ads could be trying to reach.
At least in polling, it's been pretty consistent since the 60's or 70's that the percent of men/women for/against abortion have been pretty close. In the most recent polling from Pew women are 5% more likely to be pro-choice/5% less likely to be pro-lifr, but this has fluctuated over the years/depending on the poll and has even been reversed at times.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#h-views-on-abortion-by-gender-2022
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Not when you consider that the chief rhetorical tactic of the side that has cultural hegemony is to insist that being anti-abortion is a male predilection (tied to power or some more malicious patriarchal goal).
Hear it enough and it has an impact.
It seems strange to me that people with access to good quality polling take their own medicine on the idea.
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From the discussions of long-term polling I've seen, this is right. There's not much of a split between men and women on the object level issue--women are slightly more pro-abortion than men, but only slightly--but there is a measurable intensity difference. Women are more likely to land in the "strongly [pro-/anti-] abortion" category than men.
(I think this might be a polling artifact, though. One of the major cultural arguments made is "this is a women's issue; men should sit in a corner," and it's plausible that would impact expressed-intensity to pollsters.)
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I think a major reason democrats talk about abortion nonstop is that they have nothing else to talk about- inflation and crime and gas prices all work against them. Republicans on the other hand prefer to talk about those issues and border security.
As for ad targeting that’s certainly dumb, but I’d assumed living in Texas that the weird ad targeting I was seeing was mostly an artifact of the candidates having too much money.
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I wouldn't be surprised if youtube (and other big platforms like facebook) were refusing to host some Republican/pro-life ads, and they're forced to advertise wherever they can.
Nah, I've seen pro-Republican ads. Well, more anti-Democrat, but you can tell where the sentiment is coming from.
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It's not just them. Most of the political ads I see are on more traditional channels (like local news) and there's a notable absence of pro-life ads there, too.
That's probably because republicans aren't running them, though.
Nah, there's plenty of ads for Republicans, just no pro-life ones.
That's exactly what I just said; republicans aren't running pro-life ads.
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I have seen plenty of ads from Citizens For Sanity (basic theme is anti-immigration) here in AZ, via the YouTube Roku and mobile apps. Definitely a heavy pro-Democrat skew, though.
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All I see are DeSantis ads, given where I live. I haven’t seen a single pro-choice ad, and I look at makeup tutorials. (Actually, all I keep hearing is that he’s leading, but he’s certainly spending a ton.)
But I’m the opposite when it comes to my vote, and I think women who share my sentiments already know not to vote for any Republicans.
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I always have to ask... in this day and age, why do people volunatarily still watch ads on YouTube? While it has given you fodder for an interesting post, simply using UBlock, or Brave, or any one of the dozens of other ways to block Youtube ads is a really easy way to upgrade your quality of life to a surprising degree.
Casting to a TV doesn't work with ad blockers
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I see them on my work computer which is locked down, without an adblock.
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Ads are how the Youtubers I like to watch make their money. They're already giving me the content for free, least I can do is deal with ads.
Which is the moral gloss I put on top of the fact that I dislike fiddling with things so much that I can't be bothered to spend five minutes to figure out what adblockers are legit and set them up.
There are always going to be a certain % who watch ads, YouTube creators are making plenty of $ anyway .Not just Google ads but also sponsorships such as in-video ads
But that means you're not just wasting your time watching ads, you're forced to listen to someone fake enthusiasm about RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS in a way that dangerously blends ads and content.
Just give the poor fucks some pocket change in some way that Google or twitch can't steal half of it.
You're not forced to listen to RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS enthusiasm though: You can just skip it by forwarding the video.
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Donating or subbing to YouTuber's Patreons/etc. is probably giving them more money than they make from you having ads on, TBH.
Yeah but then I have to pay them the money. My money grubbing, skinflint heart just won't allow that.
And that will not make the ads go away anyway.
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But you're already paying with your time and at a pretty abysmal rate too. You waste a lot of time to give them a pittance
Spoken quite sensibly by someone who clearly doesn't have what it takes to be a world class miser! Take John Elwes for instance: now there was a miser! A member of Parliament and extremely wealthy, he would go to bed at sundown each day so he wouldn't waste money on candles. He wore ragged clothes everywhere, and was noted for regularly eating spoiled food rather than throwing it out. He would walk in the rain rather than take a coach, and often sat around in wet clothes rather than waste coal or wood starting a fire. Now there was a miser! Skinflints like me can only aspire to be that pointlessly frugal.
Even if I wasn't a so tight with my money, it would be quite a task to donate to every YouTuber I watch. And where does YouTube get it's cut? I feel like YouTube presents me with an excellent deal: it provides free entertainment in effectively unlimited quantities, and I watch ads. Everybody wins. Putting on an ad-blocker and then using YouTube anyway seems like an act of anti-social defection.
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I think even subbing for just a month is still more than your ad view.
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Safari on mac doesn't support ublock, afaict. Even when I'm using safari, though, I just press 'm' and look somewhere else
So Safari doesn't support uBlock, but there are still decent ad-blockers for it.
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iOS has no on-device ability to block ads. Yes, you can do it if you set up a custom VPN, but that's work and added expense.
Android has several, including NewPipe and the fact that Firefox actually runs natively there (and as such uBlock works), but their devices are twice as expensive, get vanishingly few updates, and their top-end processors are 4 years behind what is available in an iPhone for half the price.
So you're stuck with an expensive boat-anchor or a nice device with ads; I don't begrudge the latter their choice.
I suspect that most people don't need a flagship phone, though. And if you're just using your phone to browse the Web, well, $250 gets you an Android 6a, which is about on-par with an iPhone 10 and also you can block ads.
Frequent updates, too, you're just wrong about that one.
I'm honestly not sure what "better processors" really gets you in a phone, outside of using it for phone games (which generally trend towards being light-weight in terms of computational cost anyways, I suspect, or at least being not-so-reliant on high, stable framerates/tickrates) or maybe some fancy gimmick like Apple's face-tracking (making things like the iPhone X desired by some VTubers for the genuinely amazing face-tracking it provides), but even that is probably more down to algorithms/software than raw hardware power.
You get better battery life from the same size of device and pages/apps are, all else being equal, going to render faster (especially if they're using a JS framework adapted to mobile to cut development costs). iOS has always had the edge on Android in terms of UI responsiveness, too; managed languages are a bit of a handicap right out of the gate, and Google has never really been one to emphasize UI polish (much like post-2012 Microsoft, for that matter).
Really, though, iPhones aren't necessarily the most advanced in terms of specific features- it's true that Android has some real interesting things going on with its support for foldable screens (2 apps at the same time with a screen that folds up actually is a big deal- make it 250 dollars so I don't have to worry about it inevitably breaking, and I'll probably buy one). But it works pretty damn well, and you can walk into any repair shop in the world and get parts for it.
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No, not really. iPhones tend to enjoy 6-7 years of major updates; the next runner up is 3-4 for Google (and to an extent, Samsung), and shorter than that for everyone else (almost like they're optimizing for the case where you to buy a new phone when your term is up). And since the phones themselves are significantly more powerful, they remain more useful over that time.
Also, for 200 bucks, I can get a second-gen SE, which will be supported for longer than the Pixel 6A, and it's still faster (being an iPhone 11 inside). Apart from Apple mobile CPU design is still lacking; too bad there was only one PA Semi to buy out.
Sure, you have support after the fact provided you have an unlocked bootloader, where you just don't with iOS devices, but that's still more work and far from guaranteed anyone will bother (though I suppose if you buy a Pixel it's less of a concern than it is if you buy something from, well, Samsung, since community support is better on devices that aren't actively hostile to developers getting other things to work on them). Maybe they've improved over the years, though.
OK, first of all, length of updates is not the same as frequency of updates. You've shifted the goalposts there. But, even on that front, 3-4 years is plenty sufficient length of updates for most users (who tend to get a new phone every 2 years). So yeah, the iPhone is theoretically better here, but not in a way that actually makes a difference for most people.
Similarly, your point about CPU power is irrelevant for most people. I haven't had a phone where the CPU mattered in about 10 years or so. It is a solved problem these days. Phones don't do much - you dick around on the internet, and you watch some videos, and call/text people. You don't need much of a CPU to do that. So again, you're correct that iPhones are theoretically better, but you're incorrect that it actually makes a difference to most people.
Honestly, you're entitled to your preference for an iPhone if that's your thing. I would never use one but different strokes for different folks. But your arguments in favor of that position are not very good, and your initial description of Android devices ("expensive boat-anchor") is just an insane hyperbole that has no basis in reality. Use what you want, and stop dissing perfectly good devices with poor arguments.
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Because not everyone has the ability to do those things. Sometimes you're watching on a mobile device, or a device where you aren't allowed to install extensions.
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I also have gotten a ton of abortion ads. All pro choice. I think its a youtube related thing. Or maybe JB Pritzker just has 1000x the money of the other candidates.
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Is this true? I would have thought it was more male-skewed.
Over at ACX item 38 in "Links for June" was a breakdown of reviews on Goodreads by genre and sex. The original link is broken, but here is the chart.
"Sequential art>Manga" is pretty far on the female side of the chart. It matches my experience: the only kind of comics my wife reads are manga, and she reads them daily. Unlike western comics there are a lot of manga that are aimed at a female audience: heck, based on what my wife keeps reading there seems to be an endless amount of manga that are just isekais where the protagonist is reincarnated as the villain of a visual novel! There's a lot of content for ladies in the world of manga.
/images/16670089049219537.webp
I suppose I was thinking of the Japanese readership polls, which tend to skew pretty heavily male. The population at cons and such also tend to skew male too, I thought; and I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a significant male readership even of that specific villainess reincarnation genre.
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AO3 is a female dominated site. Whenever I search for anything by hits or kudos on any of the big fandoms like Harry Potter, I have to filter out all the gay romance. If you look at the top stories on FFN for HP, it's all male: plot-based stories and power fantasies with little romance. On AO3 there's all this shipping for females, mostly homosexual or angsty stuff.
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Goodreads is definitely skewed female: given that, the Manga reviews are significantly more skewed female. Definitely not a perfect measure, but I think its illustrating something real.
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Furthermore, looking at the genres for manga on MAL "Romance" is by far the biggest and "boys love" (readership is not gay men..) alone is bigger than "action".
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Is hamefura still the best? It's the only one I've watched an anime of, read some scanned translations of the light novels.
I quite enjoyed 'So I'm a Spider, So What?', kind of an isekai antidote as the wish-fulfillment is turned down to -11.
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I couldn't possibly comment on "best" as there are far too many and it's not really my genre. My wife did ask me to watch Hamefura with her, and it was fun. Some of the manga she's shown me are better, but it's hard to compare a manga and anime since they have different constraints.
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The other ones are most likely all ripoffs of Hamefura.
Not quite since Hamefura didn't come first. Like modern isekai in general, most "villainess" stories originate from the endlessly-derivative world of Japanese webnovels. HameFura ran as a webnovel on Narou 2014-2015, then a light-novel series from 2015 to present, then a manga adaption starting in 2017, then an anime. I think that's fairly early on but I know there were still several prominent villainess webnovels that came earlier, and presumably even more that never attained prominence and/or were abandoned incomplete by their authors.
I think a good comparison is to fanfiction in the English-speaking world, except that instead of people doing fanfiction of a specific work they do their own version of a stock premise. This is why isekai often has some sort of distinctive twist on the idea right at the beginning (the original idea the author had to differentiate it from the other isekais a click away on Narou), weird pacing because it was being written and uploaded a chapter at a time, etc.
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Manga covers a lot of subcategories, the biggest of which are audience-typed--shonen (boy), shojo (girl), seinen (man), and josei (woman). Shonen is the biggest of the four, but while it's target audience is young adolescent boys, the actual reader base is broader, including both older and female readers.
They all also have different American vs. Japanese readers. Shonen is most widely known in the US because of popular anime adaptations. But the sales and readership of underlying Mangas skew very differently.
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Really? I've been seeing tasteless crap like this. Nothing says pro-choice quite like "As men, it is our duty to protect women."
I'm in a mostly red state, but one that is more strongly pro-choice than you would expect for a Republican state. That must be coloring the ad decisions: it's a red state, so be tasteful about the abortion thing! That must be the thinking.
Surely the whole point is that the messaging which appeals to a normie Republican with moderate pro-choice views is very different from the messaging which appealed to Sandra Day O'Connor in a legal brief, or which NARAL uses to pull in the donations from blue-haired feminists. The surprising thing is that the Democrats seem to be getting it right this time, after a long history of getting this sort of thing badly wrong.
Get Big Government out of my wife and daughters!
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I enjoyed getting a bunch of Democratic candidate ads while watching the Darrell Brooks trial, I guess they/the algorithm didn't realize that most viewers were there to watch Brooks' groundz and box fort antics.
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maybe the election is close where you live? I never see political ads. candidates can geotarget ads really well
I don't think so. The race I see most often is currently polling D+11
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The election here will be on November 8th, so it's pretty close. They can definitely geotarget the ads well enough that all the one's I've seen are relevant to my state, but they can't seem to figure out what district I'm in so I get a lot of ads for state legislators that I won't even have the opportunity to vote for.
I'm 99% sure he meant close in winning margin not close chronologically.
yes
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That makes significantly more sense! Thank you.
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