September 22, 2012

One More Round on the YouTube Bleg

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I’m going to test everyone’s patience by taking one last shot at seeing if anyone can solve my YouTube problem. To recap: several weeks ago YouTube videos stopped playing on my computer. I’ve uninstalled Flash completely and reinstalled it. I’ve tried going back to a previous version of Flash. I’ve dumped my cache. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled my browser. Nothing has worked. Some YouTube videos play, while others simply display a blank black rectangle. I haven’t been able to figure out any pattern that accounts for which ones play and which ones don’t.

The obvious suspect is some kind of interaction between Flash and my Opera browser — and this is an especially good suspect since YouTube continues to work fine on Firefox. However, I don’t really have a clue what the problem here could be, so instead I want to ask about something else. It turns out that if I manually change the URL of a YouTube video, replacing “watch” with “v,” the URL is then redirected and the video plays in full screen mode. This works 100% of the time. So here’s my question: does anyone have any idea what’s happening here? What’s the significance of “v” in a YouTube URL?

UPDATE: I’m still not sure about the “v” thing, but I seem to have obtained a fix for my problem. Thanks to commenter Rajeev Raizada for the pointer!

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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