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Silence trimming is something you need to be careful of. If you listen to any comedy podcasts or storytelling, silence (pauses) have meaning and value. If you just listen to news or talk podcasts, its pretty nice to have. I have it turned on or off for selected podcasts, and it tells me it's trimmed over 1 full day of silence from my listening.

Do you not see the chicken-or-egg situation here? They're more unhealthy because of bad healthcare. That (bad) healthcare is more expensive because they're more unhealthy.

Moreover, much of the reason the healthcare is so expensive is because of insurance overhead, for-profit middlemen (including hospitals, private equity owning doctors offices, etc), massive prescription medication markups because people can't go without medication, and other inefficiencies in the system. Even with an unhealthy population, it doesn't need to be nearly as expensive as it is.

They're lucky their content is high quality because god damn the pre-roll and inline ads are always absolute fucking garbage. I know the show host doesn't control what ads the network uses, but they've literlly had USA military recruiting ads on their show, which is peak irony.

I've set my podcast player to skip the first X seconds to get past the pre-roll, and my finger is trained to skip-forward through the ads, but some automated system would make life a lot easier (and listening to Behind the Bastards more enjoyable).

Not just a rapist, a child rapist.

That's the United States of America.

Oh that's interesting. That makes sense. Like I said I'm using the Kindle 4 from 2011 and it has a slightly different form factor and no way to use a magnetic case.

Huh. Yeah that must be a thing with newer models. Mine doesn't have any magnets, and its not in a shape a case would even make sense. I do press a button to dismiss the "screensaver" (the thing that keeps you from accidentaly turning pages with side buttons when not in use), but I don't see an ad on that screensaver. It's pencils laying on a book, and has been for about a decade now.

"One of, if not the most, powerful international issue lobby is that of the pro-Israel crowd.". More background is available here.

Some of the top recipients 2021-2022:

The top recipient of pro-Israel funds in the 2018 midterms was Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) with $546,507. Menendez is the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) received the second-most with $349,437.

When looking at the overall numbers for all Pro-Israel bribe money to congress, there are 16 members of congress who have received over $1M USD. Here are the top 10:

Dynamic ad length wouldn't be an issue for chapter markers, or "tone delimited" podcasts (the first two categories). It would only be a problem for the third category, which is already the more difficult of the three.

There seem to be three categories for how podcasts deal with ad spots.

Some podcasts mark their ads inline by using Chapter Markers. For example, ATP marks its ads by putting them in a new chapter with a name like "Ad: X". In theory, you could have a player that skips any chapter who's name begins with "Ad: ", though I don't know of any existing apps that do that. Unfortunately, the number of podcasts using chapter markers seems to be a small portion of the podcasts I listen to, so this wouldn't be very useful.

Another method that could work on some podcasts that don't use chapter markers is identifying a delineating tone. Using ATP as an example again, every ad spot starts with the same jingle, and ends with the same jingle. In theory, an app could skip the delineated sections. Mind you, this would require work from the user to set up (or it could be crowdsourced): you would have to tell the app what specific sound snippet delineates the ad read. Luckily, many podcasts seem to be structured in this way, with a clear audio cue to delineate ad spots.

Then, you have really free-form podcasts where the hosts may just say, in everyday speech, something like "time for ads", and the ads will insert. Sometimes it's always the same phrase (e.g., the use of the phrase "the money zone" on MBMBAM), but that's not always the case (e.g., there is seemingly no consistent verbiage in the Aunty Donna Podcast). This category is the most difficult to deal with.

In summary, I don't know of any existing apps that enable skipping ads for any of these three categories. Of the three categories, one is very easy to implement, one less easy, and one quite difficult. All potential solutions would require a shared/crowd-sourced database of which category each podcast falls into, at the least.

Correct.