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The Coming Collapse | Common Dreams Views

As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.

First space, then auto—now Elon Musk quietly tinkers with education | Ars Technica

That first year, Musk’s children accounted for nearly two thirds of the student body. “It was really small,” remembers Dahn. “Especially when five [students] from the same family... go on vacation and you have three kids [left].” It is not unusual for parents to have a grassroots effort to build their own school, according to Nancy Hertzog, an educational psychology professor at University of Washington and an expert in gifted education. “But money talks in terms of how that school is directed and supported,” she says. “The worry would be, are these schools preventing kids from other populations getting in? Are there strict test scores, and can they support kids with disabilities?”

First of Three Signs of the Adpocalypse | LinkedIn

Ad fraud is larger than anyone thought. The first of three signs of the impending adpocalypse has already been revealed - video ad fraud. It was far larger than anyone thought. There will be two more signs revealed in the coming year -- mobile ad fraud is larger than anyone thought; and ad fraud in China, India and other younger programmatic countries will be so pervasive it almost cannot be believed.

Two years after buying Elite Daily, the Daily Mail says the Facebook publisher is worthless - Recode

The owner of the Daily Mail, the publisher that bought Elite Daily in January 2015, says the New York-based startup has been a bust, and has written down all of its investment in the money-losing company, citing “poor performance.” It is taking a $31 million loss in the process. […] “audience retention and revenue growth have been disappointing and losses have exceeded expectations,” leading to the write-off.

What is the future of news? Bleak, probably. - Vox

I really think that what we're seeing now with this influx of fake news is the end result of the systemic defunding of media entities for the past 10 years, if not more. We could see this happening in slow motion. We all knew that as trusted media entities began producing less investigative stories, less hard news stories, an information vacuum would emerge into which bullshit and propaganda would drop. This was inevitable.

Mo Pageviews, Mo Problems

In 2006, the New York Times boasted that its website drew an average of 12 million unique visitors a month. Today, it has 78 million. Salon, which had a mere 3 million unique visitors back then, now has 17 million. During the same time, the Guardian’s readership skyrocketed from 15.7 million to 120 million. Fat lot of good it did them.

Time Editors Are "Happier" Without Wall Between Church and State

“They are more excited about it because no longer are we asking ourselves the question are we violating church and state, whatever that was. We are now asking ourselves the question are we violating our trust with our consumers?  We’re never going to do that,” Mr. Ripp said in a video interview with Bloomberg’s Stephanie Ruhle. The interview comes less than two weeks after Time Inc. separated from Time Warner and became its own publicly traded company. Instead of worrying about upholding the divide between church and state, Time editors can worry about maintaining consumer’s trust in Time brands while simultaneously using it to work with advertisers. “They’re not stupid. They are running a business. They know that. They’ve been firing hundreds of people over the last couple of years, following a different path,” Mr. Ripp said, of his editors.

Snapshot of the collapsing innovation cycle

The life span of an innovation, in fact, has never been shorter. An African hand ax from 285,000 years ago, for instance, was essentially identical to those made some 250,000 years later. The Sumerians believed that the hoe was invented by a godlike figure named Enlil a few thousand years before Jesus, but a similar tool was being used a thousand years after his death. During the Middle Ages, amid major advances in agriculture, warfare and building technology, the failure loop closed to less than a century. During the Enlightenment and early Industrial Revolution, it was reduced to about a lifetime. By the 20th century, it could be measured in decades. Today, it is best measured in years and, for some products, even less.

Rev. Graham: ‘As I Read the News, I Can’t Help But Wonder if We're in Last Hours’ | CNS News

“As I read the news, I can’t help but wonder if we are in the last hours before our Lord Jesus Christ returns to rescue His church and God pours out His wrath on the world for the rejection of His Son,” said Rev. Graham in a post on the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) website.
the digital world has created a situation in which there is virtually unlimited supply. Therefore, any money you can make on advertising goes down. Even if BuzzFeed or anybody else does better and their traffic goes up, their per-view revenue goes down. It’s a total catastrophe. You don’t sound very optimistic. I’m not really optimistic. The point of optimism is that up until a year ago everybody was desperate about mobile ad rates. They have started to come up — and in some cases, they’ve dramatically come up. There’s no traditional publisher who has not been burned in mobile and tablet. But the ad rates are coming up.