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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I'm not sure breaking up Facebook is a good idea since it's whole purpose is to unite people across the globe in one easy place.
How do you "break" that without it just being enormously inconvenient for its purpose?
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2019/03/08/day-778/
2/ Trump's inauguration fund took in tens of thousands of dollars from shell companies owned by foreign contributors and others with foreign ties. The three shell companies each gave $25,000 to the fund, and at least one contribution was made by a foreign national who is reportedly ineligible to make political donations under U.S. election law. One of the donations was made through a Delaware shell company on behalf of a wealthy Indian financier. Another was made by a shell company formed in Georgia on behalf of a lobbyist with ties to the Taiwanese government, and a New York-based shell company formed by an Israeli real estate developer made the third $25,000 donation. (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/08/trump-inauguration-money-shell-companies-revealed
3/ Paul Manafort was sentenced to less than four years in jail in the first of two cases against him. Manafort's 47 months in prison for bank and tax fraud was far lighter than the 19- to 24-year prison term recommended under federal sentencing guidelines. Manafort was ordered to pay a $50,000 fine and restitution of just over $24 million. Judge T. S. Ellis said he thought the sentencing recommendation was "excessive," adding that he believed Manafort "lived an otherwise blameless life." It's the longest sentence to date for a Trump associate caught up in Robert Mueller's investigation. Manafort will also be sentenced next week on separate charges that he served as an unregistered foreign agent, laundered money and tampered with a witness. (New York Times / Washington Post / Politico / CNN / NPR / ABC News / CNBC)
Trump twisted Judge T. S. Ellis's remarks made while sentencing Manafort to falsely claim "there was no collusion with Russia." Judge Ellis said that Manafort was "not before this court for anything having to do with collusion with the Russian government to influence this election," because Manafort was not charged with or convicted of any crimes of collusion. Trump said that he was "very honored" by Judge Ellis's statement and that he feels "very badly" for Manafort after receiving his lenient sentence. (New York Times / Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-i-feel-very-badly-for-paul-manafort
4/ Trump watched the Super Bowl with the woman who founded the spa where Patriots owner Robert Kraft was caught soliciting prostitution from trafficked women. Her Facebook profile reveals photos of herself standing with Trump, Eric and Trump Jr., Florida Gov. Ron De Santis, Sen. Rick Scott, Sarah Palin, and others. Cindy Yang, who sold the spa around 2013, has also visited Trump's White House and is a member of Mar-a-Lago. A day after Kraft was charged, Trump expressed shock at the news, saying Kraft "proclaimed his innocence totally, but I was very surprised to see it." (Miami Herald / Mother Jones)
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article227186429.html
The White House communications director resigned to join Trump's 2020 re-election campaign. Bill Shine, a former top executive at Fox News before he resigned amid sexual harassment scandals there in 2017, joined the White House in July 2018 and is the sixth person to fill the role. (CNN / CNBC / NBC News / New York Times / Washington Post)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/politics/bill-shine-white-house-communications/index.html
A White House source leaked documents related to Jared and Ivanka's security clearance to the House Oversight Committee. The Trump administration refused to provide documents on the process for granting security clearances after the committee requested them, so a source inside the White House leaked them to the committee. One of the documents also includes details about why Jared's security clearance was changed to "interim" in September 2017. (Axios)
Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was sent to jail for refusing to testify about Wiki Leaks, the website she shared classified documents with in 2010. (Washington Post)
Elizabeth Warren announced a regulatory plan aimed at breaking up Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook. The far-reaching proposal would split up Amazon and Whole Foods, and Google and Double Click, as well as Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and Whats App. (CNN / New York Times)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/politics/elizabeth-warren-amazon-google-facebook/index.html
The U.S. economy added 20,000 jobs — fewer than expected — last month. Unemployment fell to 3.8% from January's 4%. (NPR)
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/08/701448301/u-s-economy-loses-steam-adding-only-20-000-jobs-last-month
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining more than 50,000 people it claims are undocumented immigrants – an all-time record. ICE has detained approximately 2,000 people since Jan. 30, and is another 2,000 people shy of the 52,000-person daily detentions ICE is asking Congress to fund in its next budget. (Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-is-detaining-50000-people-a-new-all-time-high
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Read her article. Come on now. Facebook wouldn't be "broken up" per se; they'd be forced to sell Instagram and Whats App, prevented from exploiting content creators that post to Facebook (local newspapers, etc).
America’s big tech companies have achieved their level of dominance in part based on two strategies:
Using Mergers to Limit Competition. Facebook has purchased potential competitors Instagram and Whats App....
Current antitrust laws empower federal regulators to break up mergers that reduce competition. I will appoint regulators who are committed to using existing tools to unwind anti-competitive mergers, including:
Amazon: Whole Foods; Zappos
Facebook: Whats App; Instagram
Google: Waze; Nest; Double Click
Unwinding these mergers will promote healthy competition in the market — which will put pressure on big tech companies to be more responsive to user concerns, including about privacy.
...
So what would the Internet look like after all these reforms?
Here’s what won’t change: You’ll still be able to go on Google and search like you do today. You’ll still be able to go on Amazon and find 30 different coffee machines that you can get delivered to your house in two days. You’ll still be able to go on Facebook and see how your old friend from school is doing.
Here’s what will change: Small businesses would have a fair shot to sell their products on Amazon without the fear of Amazon pushing them out of business. Google couldn’t smother competitors by demoting their products on Google Search. Facebook would face real pressure from Instagram and Whats App to improve the user experience and protect our privacy. Tech entrepreneurs would have a fighting chance to compete against the tech giants.
...
We must give people more control over how their personal information is collected, shared, and sold — and do it in a way that doesn’t lock in massive competitive advantages for the companies that already have a ton of our data.
We must help America’s content creators — from local newspapers and national magazines to comedians and musicians — keep more of the value their content generates, rather than seeing it scooped up by companies like Google and Facebook.
And we must ensure that Russia — or any other foreign power — can’t use Facebook or any other form of social media to influence our elections.
Please... read articles before speculating on problems that the article addresses.
So then the independent shops in the mall start closing because the mall used that data to drive them out of business.
Warren doesn't want to eliminate platforms where we can all buy/sell etc. She wants to stop these platforms from becoming both the mall and all the shops. It's okay for Facebook to be popular, but it shouldn't be able to eliminate competition by buying all of them (Instagram, etc) so it has everyone's data and doesn't have to compete or evolve.
My first thought of comparison to Amazon though is actually supermarkets, not shopping centres. And, yeah, they sell their own stuff too (even when it's not e.g. Aldi that mostly does own-brand stuff). Amazon's no different.
Except Amazon is different, because they don't *just* undercut competitors using sales data. It's not like the local Kroger selling slightly cheaper store brand cereal next to the Cheerios and the Frosted Flakes.
Here's an article about Amazon's dominance.
Amazon also controls a massive amount of web traffic. Here's what happened when a blogger tried not to use any Amazon product or services. I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life. It Was Impossible.
Amazon is not just an online store—that’s not even the hardest thing to cut out of my life. Its global empire also includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the vast server network that provides the backbone for much of the internet, as well as Twitch.tv, the broadcasting behemoth that is the backbone of the online gaming industry, and Whole Foods, the organic backbone of the yuppie diet.
Keeping myself from walking into a Whole Foods is easy enough, but I also want to stop using any of Amazon’s digital services, from Amazon.com (and its damn app) to any other websites or apps that use AWS to host their content. To do that, I enlist the help of a technologist, Dhruv Mehrotra, who built me a custom VPN through which to route my internet requests. The VPN blocks any traffic to or from an IP address controlled by Amazon. I connect my computers and my phone to the VPN at all times, as well as all the connected devices in my home; it’s supposed to weed out every single digital thing that Amazon touches.
Ultimately, though, we found Amazon was too huge to conquer.
AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.
Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block.
Edited by wisewillow on Mar 8th 2019 at 8:05:29 AM
Others have already responded to this, but I wanted to get my two cents in anyway.
"The impression I get is that you are listening so hard for racism that it's all you hear. I tried to write this a dozen times trying to explain a republican position and why the arguments the right believes about it aren't coming from a bad place (which should be simple because their not. They might not be correct, but that's not the same thing). However, every time I did, I ran into the problem of racism. Not because the position or arguments are racist, but because the left sees racism in everything to the point where there are many on the right who wonder if they are projecting."
Unfortunately, I don't think its possible to summarize Conservative (not Republican, per se) positions and values in a way that the left wont find racist, because the left has defined certain conservative values as inherently racist to begin with, a position with which the Right, obviously, wont agree. Same planet, different worlds, and all that. IMVHO, the core values of the right consist of loyalty to one's in-groups, typically one's family, one's town, one's school, one's church, one's employer, and so forth. There is nothing explicitly racist with this belief system, necessarily. But the problem with this world-view is that so many conservative voters choose to live in segregated neighborhoods, attend segregated schools, worship at segregated churches and work in segregated businesses, all disproportionally white. So while conservatives do not see themselves as racist, and the majority of them are not in an explicit sense, when one defends a segregated space, including the vested interests, opportunities and resources that are associated with them, it ends up functionally as defending the racist institutions by which prejudice and discrimination are still practiced in the US. So while what they do feels like loyalty to one's own, it ends up as excluding others unfairly.
On the left, if you do not recognize and acknowledge the discriminatory treatment practiced by the institutions you participate in, then you are part of the problem, regardless of whether you are aware of this or not. Every single aspect of American life is affected by this, pretty much without exception.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.I'm not sure that I would say conservative values are inherently racist, but that's only if we're talking about the purest form of the ideology in a vacuum. Mostly the takeaway is that a lot of the ideas (like the emphasis on absolute freedom, appeal to tradition, self-reliance, etc) don't take into account existing power structures and are against the idea of implementing measures to correct them.
This is of course, ignoring how the american right isn't really "conservative" anymore. The GOP is a reactionary party. Any principled conservatives who might be able to compromise in good faith have been driven out. As long as people like Mitch Mc Connell and Trump lead the party it's hard for it to be any different.
Edited by Draghinazzo on Mar 8th 2019 at 9:32:21 AM
x4 Having read the article, it doesn't however address my point—that sure, you could break off, say, AWS and the marketplace and have them as separate entities. But you try to break them up further and... at that point you run into the big problem: you break those parts up and you're removing the essential component that makes them useful.
Amazon's hosting being so massive and widespread is the exact thing you want for web deployment as a developer and as a user—you want availability and performance without having to micromanage everything yourself.
And a shop that sells everything at cheap prices is exactly what you want as a shopper.
Seriously, at times I have no sympathy for small stores. Last year I needed a SATA cable that day. The only place I could get one was a single computer store and it was £5 for the one cable and my choice was "stupidly long cable off their shelf" or a short one from one of their own computers (I took the short one). It was nice service, but the actual value was pretty awful since I can get a pack of 5 for the same price.
Edited by RainehDaze on Mar 8th 2019 at 1:32:59 PM
I don't think breaking up the major tech giants is a particularly well considered idea; they're quasi-monopolistic and distinctly anti-competitive, but a lot of that has to do with the nature of their market space being natural monopolies in the vein of utilities where the most efficient number of firms is ones.
Having 12 different search engines with a comparable amount of market share is as inefficient as having 12 different power companies in a particular area running their own power lines.
What is called for instead is greater regulations to discourage anti-consumer practices by such firms; ideally that should come in the form of international agreements like trade deals because we are talking about gargantuan multinationals that are rather difficult to effectively regulate at the scale of the nation.
Again. Her premise is not breaking up Google search or Amazon or Facebook in the sense of getting rid of them, it’s forcing them to separate their platform business from all their other businesses that exploit their platform/data. The article literally says that, as do the excerpts I quoted.
Edited by wisewillow on Mar 8th 2019 at 8:42:30 AM
And again, what Amazon does with its own-goods thing is more or less the natural consequence of any shop having access to manufacturers.
It only becomes noticeable because there's a lot of things that people have no particular concept of brand loyalty to.
And still Amazon manages to not be the cheapest seller on at least 3/4 of the random things I've needed to get—including but not limited to cables, paper, cutlery, and ice cube trays.
The Right is egalitarian. Which means they pay lip service to the idea of a fair and equal system while behaving in a manner that looks suspiciously like Patriarchal white supremacy.
So they'll say, "Totes not a racist. Racism isn't a thing anymore. Look it up." Then shut down polling stations in black neighborhoods. And then they'll turn around and go, "Shutting down those polling stations had nothing to do with the color of their skin. God, why is everything about race with you people?"
They learned a long time ago that you can be as racist and misogynistic as you want as long as you don't say the words. And try to spin the words around on other people when those people say them.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.It depends on whether you want to focus on the core values of ordinary people who tend to vote Republican, or on the elected leadership, a significant portion of whom are hypocrites who are not engaging the issues in good faith. But every Republican voter is not Mitch Mc Connell. Not even the ones that vote for him (most of whom are doing so out of party loyalty).
Now, people of color will say that they don't care what the intentions of conservative voters are, because as long as they vote for people who are creating an unsafe world, they will continue to condemn them. But now you run up against the unfair dilemma of having to choose between principles vs. pragmatism. Because in a democracy the majority rules, this means that people of color cant get the policies and laws they need with only their own votes. And white people are not going to vote against their own interests, regardless of principle or justice. I don't think that human beings roll that way, and I believe that the historical record backs me up. And yet progress has happened, so there must be a way to reach enough of them to create a plurality in favor of civil rights. And that way has always been "a rising tide lifts all boats." White people only vote for justice when it creates a better world for themselves, as well as for people of color. It has to be persuasively presented as an attempt to promote a common set of interests, a public good, and not as a sacrifice that one group has to make toward another. I think that basically explains the attitude of the white moderate toward social justice. And I don't think that can change. So the question becomes, in light of that, what now? Do you stand on principle and demand justice, however unrealistic that might be? Or do you make your compromises and settle for what you can get? And the answer to that has always been: you do both. MLK and Malcolm X, the IRA and Sinn Fien, Non-violent resistance and the threat of riots, they go hand in hand. The threat of one creates leverage for the other.
So go ahead and confront Republican voters with their racism. And go out of your way to communicate with them in a reasonable and respectful tone, because a two-pronged approach has usually been the most successful one.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.To people not as well-versed in these issues, it seems pretty silly - downright oxymoronic - that it is racist to be "colorblind."
However, it's rooted in the same ideas that sees the right-wing champion "equality of opportunity" over the much-reviled "equality of outcome," without acknowledging the inequalities that exist long before anyone ever reaches the starting line.
In conjunction, when people are processed through societal institutions and come out unequal - whether it's the education system or the criminal justice system - it is spun as solely the personal failings of the individual, rather than any wider, deeper structural issues that require race/gender/class-consciousness.
Or find more effective ways to combat racism than giving every Racist Joe you come across a sermon on why racism is bad and hoping it sticks with him.
And again, we're back to having the onus placed on us to bridge the gap between political lines, being told to engage demagogues, trolls, and other shit-stirrers as if they're behaving like actual adults.
Edited by PhysicalStamina on Mar 8th 2019 at 10:59:39 AM
i'm tired, my friendRelated to this, I've noticed that when you point out that Trump/Republicans in general are much less likely to be gender and racially diverse, they'll go "well, you're going to say we're racist anyway, so what's the point in even trying?"
It's deflecting blame without really trying to change or even hide the behavior. Because for a lot of people, the above is an actually reasonably sounding argument.

Amazon is like a shopping mall, only it can track every single item sold by every store in it, then it sets up its own stand with all those items and sells inside its own mall without charging itself rent.
So then the independent shops in the mall start closing because the mall used that data to drive them out of business.
Warren doesn't want to eliminate platforms where we can all buy/sell etc. She wants to stop these platforms from becoming both the mall and all the shops. It's okay for Facebook to be popular, but it shouldn't be able to eliminate competition by buying all of them (Instagram, etc) so it has everyone's data and doesn't have to compete or evolve.
Edited by wisewillow on Mar 8th 2019 at 7:14:57 AM