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Google’s plan to prioritize facts ticks off climate deniers

by JosephineCandel Posted on March 10, 2015

Google’s plan to prioritize facts ticks off climate deniers

By on 10 Mar 2015commentsShare

As the internet becomes a greater part of our lives, and information travels more quickly, it’s become easier for people to stumble onto inaccurate info, and for that info to take hold and spread. Consider, for example, the anti-vaccination movement, or the “birthers.” And also, of course, climate denial.

Websites proffering misinformation and farfetched conspiracy theories on global warming are just as easy for the casual googler to pull up as, say, an article about the latest IPCC report. (Try googling “Is climate change real?” or something along those lines, then go ahead and cry.)

But that might change. Last month, Google scientists outlined new research on an algorithm to rank websites according to their trustworthiness. Lily Hay Newman explains the project in Slate:

The strategy isn’t being implemented yet, but the paper presented a method for adapting algorithms such that they would generate a “Knowledge-Based Trust” score for every page. To do this, the algorithm would pick out statements and compare them with Google’s Knowledge Vault, a database of facts. It would also attempt to assess the trustworthiness of the source—for example, a reputable news site versus a newly created WordPress blog. Another component of the strategy involves looking at “topic relevance.” The algorithm scans the name of the site and its “about” section for information on its goals.

Climate deniers are already crying “censorship.” Marc Morano — a prominent denier who’s worked for both Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe, and who now runs the denial website Climate Depot — complained to Fox News, “They’re going to basically say, truth is what a government agency says it is.” (It’s not just the government that disagrees with Morano on climate science. It’s the overwhelming majority of the world’s experts on climate science. But whatever.)

Of course, Google’s algorithm has always been something of a mystery, privileging some sites over others. The engineers who operate it are reluctant to discuss how exactly it works — though the number of times a site is linked to does play a big role. Google points out that the algorithm is constantly evolving as engineers make small tweaks. So if the search giant isn’t currently guilty of censorship, this new tweak won’t make it any more so. It’s sort of like a cable provider deciding what channels appear toward the top of the list, like major networks and C-SPAN, and which ones get relegated to the triple digits.

If climate-denying sites (and other well-linked-to nonsense) get moved from page one of search results to, say, page three, that might do some societal good. And if you don’t agree, there’s always Bing.

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Google’s plan to prioritize facts ticks off climate deniers

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GOP Donor: Elect a Republican Sheriff in Case Obama Seizes Dictatorial Power

by PollyWillshire Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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As DeKalb County, Alabama, prepares to elect its next sheriff, one local Republican has taken it on herself to ask voters a tough question: In the likely scenario that President Obama suspends the 2016 elections and seizes dictatorial power, can the local citizens count on a Democratic sheriff to oppose him?

Betty Mason, a Republican donor who is married to a longtime leader of Alabama’s Republican Party, posed the question in a letter she mailed last week to voters in DeKalb County, which covers a rural community in the northeast corner of the state.

“Obama is determined to be a dictator with the executive orders he signs,” she wrote. “He has left the US Constitution in shreds. If Obama decides to run again (against US law) or declares a National Emergency to suspend elections in 2016, what will our Democrat sheriff do? I am concerned he will go along with this lawless president.”

The county’s current sheriff is Jimmy Harris, a Democrat, who is running for reelection. Mason encouraged voters to support his challenger, Republican Rex Leath, who is the assistant police chief of Collinsville. “Leath has pledged to defend our citizens even against a lawless President,” she declared.

Mother Jones asked Leath if he shares Mason’s concerns about the president’s autocratic aspirations. “Oh, I sure do,” he says. “I would hope every American in the country would…I don’t really know what he is capable of doing at this point. If martial law is declared by the president, he can’t be removed from office.”

Here’s a copy of the letter, which was tweeted by a local resident:

Mother Jones couldn’t reach Mason, but her husband, Frank Mason, confirms that she wrote the letter. He added that the couple helped Leath organize the campaign event referred to at the bottom of the letter.

“Based on what Obama has done, I don’t know what he might do,” Frank Mason says. “I just don’t really know.”

Leath didn’t know in advance that Mason was writing to voters—but he says she’s glad he did. “It was a very sweet letter,” Leath says. “Very well written.”

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GOP Donor: Elect a Republican Sheriff in Case Obama Seizes Dictatorial Power

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We’re massively underestimating climate costs, experts warn

by LucileHarrap Posted on June 16, 2014

We’re massively underestimating climate costs, experts warn

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Crank up global temperatures by 30-odd degrees and humans could plummet toward extinction. Yet one of the world’s most cited economic models on climate-change effects projects just a 50 percent reduction in global economic output if temperatures rise that much.

That’s an example of how substantially we’ve been underestimating the costs of climate change. So argues a new peer-reviewed paper in The Economic Journal written by Nicholas Stern, author the famed 2006 Stern report on the economics of climate change, and Simon Dietz, both of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

And, in part because we’re relying on an outdated economic model, carbon-trading programs are woefully undercharging polluters for their climate-wrecking emissions.

The new paper critiques a model developed in the early ’90s — the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy, or DICE model – and a related paper, “To slow or not to slow,” by Yale economist William Nordhaus. Both represented historic efforts to evaluate the economic costs of climate change, demonstrating that delaying climate action would increase its costs. But DICE was a basic model by modern standards, and Nordhaus himself emphasized its limitations. Yet it continues to be cited by leading researchers and groups, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the absurd effect of substantially reducing the seriousness with which global warming’s economic impacts are being viewed.

“This modeling framework has had a lasting influence on the field and indeed several elements of it still constitute the ‘industry standard’ today,” Stern and Deitz write. “While it was very much the purpose of ‘To slow or not to slow’ to cast climate-change mitigation as a dynamic, investment problem, in which abatement costs could be paid up front, so that climate change could be avoided several decades into the future, the model dynamics were unsatisfactory.”

Stern and Deitz ran the DICE numbers again, except this time they assumed stronger effects of climate change on economic growth and output, and they incorporated more modern science that warns of more severe climate impacts than had been anticipated in the early ’90s. Based on the DICE model, the carbon price should be between $40 and $50 per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions next year. But by incorporating Stern and Deitz’s more contemporary assumptions, that price could rise to more than $200 per tonne.

And if you think that’s a severe disconnect, consider this: The world’s most expensive price on carbon emissions is currently in California, where certain polluters must pay just $11 for every ton of carbon dioxide that they pump into the atmosphere, or about $12 per metric tonne. That’s 60 percent higher than the going price in Europe.

“It is extremely important to understand the severe limitations of standard economic models, such as those cited in the IPCC report,” Stern said. “I hope our paper will prompt other economists to strive for much better models.”


Source
Endogenous growth, convexity of damages and climate risk: how Nordhaus’ framework supports deep cuts in carbon emissions, London School of Economics
New economic model shows risks from climate change are bigger than previously estimated, London School of Economics

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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We’re massively underestimating climate costs, experts warn

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What Did My Government Do When I Was Taken Hostage In Iran?

by Blaine3524 Posted on June 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I filed a lawsuit against the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department. I intend to persuade the government to release records that will reveal how it dealt with the imprisonment of Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and myself in Iran from 2009 to 2011. The three of us were arrested near the Iranian border while on a hike in Iraq’s Kurdish region, which we were visiting on a short trip from Sarah’s and my home in Damascus. Sarah remained in prison for 13 months, and Josh and I for twice as long. For the two years that I was in prison, I wondered constantly what my government was doing to help us. I still want to know.

But my interest in these records is more than personal. Innocent Americans get kidnapped, imprisoned, or held hostage in other countries from time to time. When that happens, our government must take it very seriously. These situations cannot be divorced from politics; they are often extremist reactions to our foreign policy. Currently, Americans are being detained in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Cuba, and other countries.

What does our government do when civilians are held hostage? Sarah’s, Josh’s, and my family, like others in similar situations, were regularly assured by our leaders—all the way up to the Secretary of State and the President—that they were doing everything they could, but our families were rarely told what that meant. Why is this information so secret, even after the fact? It is important to know how the government deals with such crises. Is there a process by which the government decides whether or not to negotiate with another country or political group? How does it decide which citizens to negotiate for and which not to? Are the reassurances the government gives to grieving families genuine, or intended to appease them? Do branches of government cooperate with each other, or work in isolation?

Some will say disclosing such things only helps our enemies. This is a common defense of government secrecy. The CIA seems to be taking this approach with my request by invoking “national security” in its denial. This logic can be applied to almost anything related to foreign policy. If Congress had not publicly discussed the ins and outs of going to war with Syria, for example, it might by some stretch of the imagination have given our military an edge. But without having to defend their positions to the public, members of Congress might have come to a different conclusion and decided to go to war. Obstructing public discussion on how the government reacts to crises impedes democracy.

We are fortunate in this country to have the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows citizens to access unclassified government records. The Act originated in 1955 during the Cold War, when there was a steep rise in government secrecy. It was strengthened after the Watergate scandal. But transparency has since eroded, to the point that federal agencies often don’t abide by the terms of the FOIA without legal coercion. It’s been almost a year since I first filed FOIA requests with the FBI and State Department for records about our case. I filed with the CIA six months ago. The law gives government agencies up to 30 business days to determine whether they will release records. So far, however, no records have turned up. I am not surprised by this. Without a lawsuit, I would not expect to receive anything for years, if at all.

Years can pass before the government gets around to releasing records in response to FOIA requests. Last year, for example, the State Department notified me that it was ready to release around 700 documents in response to a FOIA request I had filed four years prior. The request regarded an Iraqi sheikh who was receiving what amounted to bribes in the form of inflated construction contracts from the US military, a scheme I wrote about for Mother Jones in 2009. Despite the fact that the war is now over, and the records will be much less significant than they might have been at the time, I told State I would indeed like to see them. I am still waiting.

It has unfortunately become commonplace for government agencies to do everything they can to muddle the transparency mandated by the FOIA, to the point where only people trained to get around stonewalling have any chance of succeeding. Take my request to the FBI for records about our case. The Bureau responded to my initial request with its standard denial letter: “Based on the information you provided, we conducted a search of the Central Records System. We were unable to identify main file records.” It’s a standard response—I’ve received it before—but I was surprised to see it this time. The FBI visited my mom’s home, spoke to my family repeatedly and they have no records?

In fact, the FBI letter is intentionally misleading. What they are saying is that they have failed to find a very particular type of records. As my attorney, Jeff Light, put it, the FBI “has main files on persons, event, publications, etc. that are of investigative interest to the Bureau. Imagine a file cabinet containing a series of folders. Each folder is titled with the name of a person, event, etc. When they are searching main files, they are searching the label on each folder. They are not searching any of the documents inside the folder.” In response, Light and I specifically named a long list of databases and records systems for the FBI to search. Nothing has turned up yet.

It is unfortunate that litigation has become a standard part of the FOIA process. It’s also unfortunate that the government is not transparent with people entangled in political crises about what it is doing to help them. While I was in prison, my mother walked out of meetings with politicians, frustrated with their inaction. After Sarah came home, she also asked the government to tell her what it was doing, and got nothing. We asked again after I was released. I wish I didn’t need to go to court to get an answer.

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What Did My Government Do When I Was Taken Hostage In Iran?

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Chart of the Day: The Super-Rich Spend a Ton of Money on Politics These Days

by MelodeeLum Posted on May 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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What do you do when you have so much money you don’t know what to do with it anymore? Well, you can buy a bigger yacht, or gold-plated bathroom fixtures, or throw lots of fabulous parties. Or you can take up an expensive hobby. Collecting old masters, say, or sponsoring NASCAR drivers.

Or politics. Seth Masket points today to a fascinating study from a team of researchers who have been investigating political polarization and political contributions. As you can see in the chart on the right, the super-rich used to account for about 10 percent of all political contributions. Then, starting around 1990, that started to rise steadily, reaching 30 percent by 2010. Then came Citizens United, and the sluice gates really opened. Within two years, the share of contributions from the super-rich had skyrocketed to 40 percent.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle. Based on other data in the study, Masket concludes that the super-rich are less polarized than the electorate as a whole:

The 30 wealthiest donors in the country are actually pretty moderate, at least judging from this measure. Apart from some extremists like George Soros and the Koch brothers, most exist between the party medians.

This presents an interesting conundrum. We know Congress has grown more polarized over the past three decades. And we know that the very wealthy are donating more and more each year. But the very wealthy aren’t necessarily that polarized. If they were buying the government they wanted, they’d be getting a more moderate one than we currently have.

This deserves more study. I’m not so sure that wealthy donors are quite as moderate as Masket thinks, since they often have strong views on one or two hobbyhorses that might get drowned out in broad measures of ideological extremism. The Waltons hate unions and Sheldon Adelson is passionate about Israel, but they might be fairly liberal about, say, gay marriage or Social Security reform. But does that make them moderate? If they spend all their money on the stuff they care about and none on the other issues, then no. They’re single-issue extremists.

This is pretty common among the anti-tax business crowd, for example. They might not care much about the hot buttons that animate the tea partiers, but they’re perfectly willing to support them as long as they oppose higher taxes on businesses and the rich. In practice, this makes them pretty extreme even if their overall political views are fairly centrist. If you’re willing to get in bed with extremists, then you’re effectively an extremist regardless of whether you publicly share their views on everything.

In any case, this is hard to get a handle on and requires more detailed research than we have at hand. Still, Masket’s observation is an interesting one and deserves a closer look. Are America’s rich really getting their money’s worth? Or has politics simply become an expensive hobby that they’re not very good at?

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Chart of the Day: The Super-Rich Spend a Ton of Money on Politics These Days

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No. 1 pesticide killing honeybees

by HarrisM45g Posted on May 12, 2014

green4us

From Seed to Skillet – Susan Heeger & Jimmy Williams

Jimmy Williams learned all about vegetable gardening at the knee of his grandmother, a South Carolina native from a traditional Gullah community whose members were descendents of Caribbean slaves. He pays homage to his family history in this inspiring step-by-step guide to designing and planting a backyard vegetable garden and growing one’s own food. Wi

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White Dwarf Issue 15: 10 May 2014 – White Dwarf

Things get apocalyptic for Warhammer 40,000 with the arrival of War Zone: Valedor – and the rules team write us a brand-new Dark Eldar datasheet you’ll only find in White Dwarf! Sprues and Glue, meanwhile, looks at the fine art of spraying your miniatures… and we have a sneak peek at the new Warhammer 40,000. About this Series: White Dwarf is Games Wo

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White Dwarf Issue 14: 3 May 2014 – White Dwarf

The Wild Riders charge forth! The Wood Elves get reinforcements this issue, and we put them to the test in the Battle of Fell Glade, a battle report against the vile Beastmen. We’re also proud to present a brand-new minigame for the new Treeman miniature called ‘The Defence of Athel Loren’. About this Series: White Dwarf is Games Workshop

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Codex: Space Marines (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

The Space Marines are the chosen warriors of the Emperor, and the greatest fighting force of the Imperium. Each Space Marine is a genetically enhanced super soldier, easily a match for a dozen lesser men, armed with some of the deadliest weapons in the galaxy and encased in formidable power armour. This codex explores the formations and Chapters of the Space

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes,

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Codex: Astra Militarum (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

The Astra Militarum are the mighty Hammer of the Emperor, an army so vast that it has never been fully recorded by the scribes of the Administratum. Drawn from a million worlds, its men and women are the thin line between Humanity and the void. On hundreds of thousands of warzones across the galaxy the armies of the Astra Militarum hold back the advance of a

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The Home Organizing Workbook – Meryl Starr

Failing the Mary Poppins’ snap-the-fingers approach to cleaning, here’s the next best thing: an utterly practical handbook that offers lasting results for anyone looking to banish clutter from every room in the house. Home organizer par excellence Meryl Starr offers up her hardworking organizing solutions in The Home Organizing Workbook, a straight

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Warhammer: Wood Elves (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

For millennia, the Wood Elves have dwelt beneath the leaves of Athel Loren, defending their greenwood home from the perils of the world. When the King in the Woods sounds his horn, longbows are strung and spears are sharpened as the hosts of Athel Loren assemble beneath ancestral banners. In the depths of the forests, enchantresses sing songs of awakening, r

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Cesar’s Way – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

“I rehabilitate dogs. I train people.” —Cesar Millan There are at least 68 million dogs in America, and their owners lavish billions of dollars on them every year. So why do so many pampered pets have problems? In this definitive and accessible guide, Cesar Millan—star of National Geographic Channel’s hit show Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan —reveals what do

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All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition – Mel Bartholomew

Rapidly increasing in popularity, square foot gardening is the most practical, foolproof way to grow a home garden. That explains why author and gardening innovator Mel Bartholomew has sold more than two million books describing how to become a successful DIY square foot gardener. Now, with the publication of All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition , t

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No. 1 pesticide killing honeybees

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The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet – Mark Hyman, M.D.

by Myrna Posted on February 25, 2014

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The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet

Activate Your Body’s Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast

Mark Hyman, M.D.

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: February 25, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


Dr. Hyman's revolutionary weight-loss program, based on the #1 New York Times bestseller The Blood Sugar Solution , supercharged for immediate results! The key to losing weight and keeping it off is maintaining low insulin levels. Based on Dr. Hyman's groundbreaking Blood Sugar Solution program, THE BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION 10-DAY DETOX DIET presents strategies for reducing insulin levels and producing fast and sustained weight loss. Dr. Hyman explains how to: activate your natural ability to burn fat–especially belly fat; reduce inflammation; reprogram your metabolism; shut off your fat-storing genes; de-bug your digestive system; create effortless appetite control; and soothe the stress to shed the pounds. With practical tools designed to achieve optimum wellness, including meal plans, recipes, and shopping lists, as well as step-by-step, easy-to-follow advice on green living, supplements, medication, exercise, and more, THE BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION 10-DAY DETOX DIET is the fastest way to lose weight, prevent disease, and feel your best.

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The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet – Mark Hyman, M.D.

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Quick, change the channel! Al Jazeera is talking about the environment again

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on February 10, 2014

Quick, change the channel! Al Jazeera is talking about the environment again

By

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Mainstream American news networks don’t care about climate change. When they’re not ignoring humanity’s greatest crisis, they’re inviting pundits onto their programs to spread climate misinformation.

But here comes a Qatari government-owned broadcaster to the rescue. Al Jazeera America launched in August 2013 after purchasing Al Gore’s Current TV, and now it has a team of 800 employees with headquarters in New York. Right away it dove into climate coverage, and six months later it’s still going strong on the environmental beat.

The Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media reports:

Al Jazeera America is betting on a serious approach to news. It’s a peculiar species in the cable news landscape. Nonpartisan reporting and a fair dose of old-school shoe-leather journalism comprise the majority of the new network’s 14-hour a day news programming.

Donald Trump’s rants about a climate conspiracy have received no mention at all on Al Jazeera America. Nor has the network featured countless “think tank” pundits raving about their belief that wintry weather in one year and one place or another refutes global warming. … Instead, Al Jazeera America offers original reporting on the environment from a growing team of correspondents on the ground.

One environment newscast, for instance, detailed how green energy demand in Europe is threatening Louisiana forests. In another show, the network reported on demonstrators who set fire to a highway and defied a court injunction protesting against a Texas-based company’s fracking efforts.

And, after the recent West Virginia chemical spill into thousands of residents’ drinking water supplies, the network reported from an array of angles.

Maybe TV doesn’t have to be a vast wasteland — if it reports on the vast wasteland our planet is becoming.


Source
Can ‘Unbiased, Fact-Based, In-Depth’ Environmental News Compete?, The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Quick, change the channel! Al Jazeera is talking about the environment again

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Gas company: No need to frack outside London; regular old drilling will do

by mirorita02 Posted on January 27, 2014

Gas company: No need to frack outside London; regular old drilling will do

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Sheila

The results of exploratory gas drilling near London are in, and they would seem to be wonderful news. It appears that Mother Nature broke up the rock before the frackers could get their chemical-tainted hands on it. But locals fear it’s just a ruse.

The exploratory well, drilled by energy company Cuadrilla in the village of Balcombe, 35 miles south of London, is one of Europe’s first forays into fracking. That’s where residents clashed with police during protests over the summer.

“Based on our analysis of the samples we obtained from the exploration well, we can confirm that the target rock underneath Lower Stumble is naturally fractured,” Cuadrilla told village residents in a recent letter. “The presence of these natural fractures and the nature of the rock means that we do not intend to hydraulically fracture the exploration well at Lower Stumble now or in the future.”

The bad news, though, is that now the company is investigating whether it could just drill using more conventional approaches.

Oh, and there’s that whole thing with frackers habitually lying and obfuscating the facts. And that’s what some residents worry that Cuadrilla is doing right now.

“Cuadrilla and the government will do anything they can to remove the ‘fracking’ word from any future exploration,” village resident Juliette Harris told the West Sussex County Times. “With a 30-year lease signed with the Balcombe Estate, fracking is clearly their intention. Whatever they wish to call their activities, Cuadrilla have no social license to be in our community. The protest is alive and kicking.”


Source
No Fracking in Balcombe Society (No FiBS) states ‘villagers do not believe Cuadrilla’s no fracking claim’, West Sussex County Times
Balcombe protests: Cuadrilla vows not to frack site, BBC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Gas company: No need to frack outside London; regular old drilling will do

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Movies, Movies Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Watch

by BrandiNic Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Netflix has developed an awesomely sophisticated stockpile of data about what kind of movies people want to watch. This sounds like a huge advantage for them—and it is—but Felix Salmon argues that it’s also a sign of weakness. Netflix has to mine this information because its streaming service has such a paltry collection of titles:

If you give Netflix a list of all the movies you want to watch, the proportion available for streaming is going to be so embarrassingly low that the company decided not to even give you that option any more….So Netflix has been forced to attempt a distant second-best: scouring its own limited library for the films it thinks you’ll like, rather than simply looking for the specific movies which it knows (because you told it) that you definitely want to watch. This, from a consumer perspective, is not an improvement.

I figure there are two basic kinds of customers here. The first has specific movies she wants to watch, and tries to find them. The second just wants to watch something decent, and will browse around looking for something that fits the bill. I gave up on Netflix streaming years ago because I’m the first kind of person, and I almost always came up blank when I searched for something specific. Netflix, as Salmon says, has pretty much gone all-in on the second type:

The original Netflix prediction algorithm — the one which guessed how much you’d like a movie based on your ratings of other movies — was an amazing piece of computer technology, precisely because it managed to find things you didn’t know that you’d love. More than once I would order a movie based on a high predicted rating, and despite the fact that I would never normally think to watch it — and every time it turned out to be great. The next generation of Netflix personalization, by contrast, ratchets the sophistication down a few dozen notches: at this point, it’s just saying “well, you watched one of these Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life, here’s a bunch more”.

Netflix, then, no longer wants to show me the things I want to watch, and it doesn’t even particularly want to show me the stuff I didn’t know I’d love. Instead, it just wants to feed me more and more and more of the same, drawing mainly from a library of second-tier movies and TV shows.

Yep. What I wonder is what happens when Netflix eventually drops the disc-by-mail service that gave it its start. That’s inevitable, isn’t it? And when it happens, it will mean there’s really no place left to find a large selection of older movies to watch. The old brick-and-mortar stores will be gone, driven out of business by Netflix, and thanks to licensing wars, no streaming service will be available with a broad selection. People like me will actually be worse off than we were a decade ago.

Eventually that will change. I hope. But in the meantime, it’s slim pickings.

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Movies, Movies Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Watch

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