It’s likely that Google has tested how many ads it can place in search results before users lose patience and turn elsewhere.
On paper, the approach makes sense: push profitability as far as possible. But in practice, it can leave customers feeling squeezed and resentful, much like the increasingly nickel‑and‑dimed atmosphere visitors now complain about in Las Vegas, and the proliferation of tip screens.
Yeah, and imagine how much more time could the medieval peasants have spent working if only they had electricity, machines and computers at their disposal.
I think the origin of the trope is that the peasants sat around doing nothing during winter, when there was nothing to plant or harvest.
It's probably true that there was less work in the winter (although you still had all your maintenance tasks, e.g. repairs and preparing firewood), but this was compensated by much more intense labor in the spring and summer.
Overall, though, it makes no sense to say medieval peasants worked less than people do now, it's likely very comparable, and the variations would depend on the quality of your soil/irrigation and how much you were going to get taxed.
> Ultimately, we found that the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year is still largely accepted as a valid estimate by academic economic historians, at least in England for a period starting around 1350 and lasting between a few decades and more than a century, depending on the methodology used to study the data.
As below;
Totally agree - their lives were no doubt hard and busy with back breaking work - my 'yes' was a 'yes it is a trope' - not a 'yes they barely worked
It is really great that Snopes was around in medieval times and can confirm or deny! /S
The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
The majority of people today don't work as hard as the farmers of today. It is completely implausible that they work harder than the farmers of the middle ages, who almost certainly had to work harder than modern farmers (thanks to no mechanization).
That’s not really a fair comparison when vastly more of the population worked as farmers. The article has a good bit of evidence though that the amount of food needed to feed laborers didn’t lower meaningfully during the period cited as having short work hours, while the economic record that statistic is based on is very spotty. They probably worked way more hours.
The article makes valid points. However, many of its recommendations are not practical for the 60% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. Even merely contributing to a 401(k) or HSA can be difficult for these families.
Small recommendation: The diagrams on [https://wuu73.org/aicp] are helpful, but clicking them does not display the full‑resolution images; they appear blurry. This occurs in both Firefox and Chrome. In the GitHub repository, the same images appear sharp at full resolution, so the issue may be caused by the JavaScript rendering library.
I’d sign up for a service that calls a pharmacy on my behalf to refill prescriptions. In certain situations, pharmacies will not list prescriptions on their websites, even though they have the prescriptions on file, which forces the customer to call by phone — a frustrating process.
I do feel bad for pharmacists, their job is challenging in so many ways.
Didn't Google already demo that with Google Duplex? It's not available here so I can't test it, but I think that's exactly the kind of thing duplex was designed to do.
Although, from a risk avoidance point of view, I'd understand if Google wanted to stay as far away from having AI deal with medication as possible. Who knows what it'll do when it starts concocting new information while ordering medicine.
I would pay for YouTube premium if you can afford it. The cost is pretty reasonable and 55% of the subscription goes to content creators. It's not a huge amount but probably similar to what a creator would make if ads were shown.
I subscribed until they price hiked it like 45% in one go a couple of months ago in my country. Now the price for it is equal to, or in some cases even more expensive than the services that actually produce their own high quality movies/tv shows.
But it is not possible to use it without creating a Google account. I should not need to sign in to watch videos, especially when that makes all efforts at avoiding tracking null.
I get why you might not want to create a Google account, but how is it even possible to operate without one? I'm genuinely astonished by people who are able to get by in 2024 without having ever created an account on Google.
I have google accounts that I created a decade ago but I can't remember the last time I logged on one, except to log on gmail and clean the box in private browsing.
I basically only keep them because I used my real name and don't want anyone to steal an account/personnal info I might have created with that gmail address and impersonate me.
I don't really see what is difficult in operating without a google account.
I think the point about _having_ a Google account is one thing, but then there's the fact of having to be logged in. I use many of the Google services, but I don't have the need to be logged in while using YouTube for 99% of the time (if not 100%).
What do you need one for, if you're not in the Google ecosystem?
Just about the only thing I can think of is Google Docs. But if you need that for work, chances are you're using your work account for that, not your personal one.
the more it becomes "genuinely astonishing" that people can use the internet without $ProprietaryThing, the more important it is to resist using $ProprietaryThing wherever possible and at all costs. they have been pulling out all the stops for 10+ years to make it seem like you're required to have a google/icloud account to participate in society. it's slimy and endangers the neutrality of the internet.
On paper, the approach makes sense: push profitability as far as possible. But in practice, it can leave customers feeling squeezed and resentful, much like the increasingly nickel‑and‑dimed atmosphere visitors now complain about in Las Vegas, and the proliferation of tip screens.