Increasing prices relentlessly while squeezing both labor and consumer is exactly what monopolies do. Bust it.

The situation is particularly ironic since the whole idea behind ride share - originally - was that the taxi system creates a sort of hidebound, extractive, and overly expensive monopoly system that needs to be "disrupted" by the "move fast and break things" crowd in order to usher us into the technoutopic future where such things can't exist.

Instead it has created a monopoly breathtaking in extent compared with what came before - from local to literally global monopoly - with just the exponentially worse problems on every front one would expect from such a monstrosity.

Just kill it.

This won't be the response, though. The response will be to 10X, 100X, or even 1000X or more the amount of content (all by using AI generated content, of course) in order to try to "stay ahead of the curve". Meanwhile, the person - or small company, whatever - that is trying to generate actual human-created content has no way to keep up.

Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Wikipedia is indeed "woke" and filled with "way too much DEI garbage".

Being the ardent supporter of the U.S. Constitution that I am certain you are, it turns out that Amendment 1 guarantees the right of the people to free speech.

The right of free speech is enshrined right there along with the right to practice your religion and assemble in support of political causes. I am sure you will agree that these are among the most important of the right guaranteed by the Constitution. (Even if you, somehow, do not agree, this is certainly what the Founders and authors of the Constitution believed.)

Anything the government does to restrict that free speech is nothing short of unconstitutional.

No matter how wrong Wikipedia may be, it is not the job of a U.S. attorney to regulate that speech, nor to threaten or bully in an attempt to change or stop it.

Anyone, such as in particular Ed Martin, who does so should be immediately removed from office for malfeasance.

What he is doing is literally, and very clearly, unconstitutional.

> Was Zuckerburg's campaign contribution to Trump not big enough ?

Hmm, time for a fact check:

[Zuckerberg] and his wife donated at least $400 million to two nonprofit organizations which distributed grants to state and local governments to help them conduct the 2020 election during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The donations came at a time when election offices were trying to transition to mail voting. The money helped pay for material and services such as equipment to process mail ballots, protective equipment to curb the spread of the coronavirus, and drive-thru voting locations. . . .

“These were not campaign donations. These were grants to governments, mostly county and municipal governments that run elections across the united states.”

A review of online FEC records show that Zuckerberg did not directly donate to Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. LaBolt also confirmed that Zuckerberg did not make any direct donations.

Source: Associated Press

Another source backing up the same information:

the couple’s donations were made to two nonpartisan institutions (the Center for Election Innovation & Research and the Center for Tech and Civic Life) and the grants ultimately paid for accommodations such as Plexiglass dividers, additional poll workers and more counting machines to handle the influx of mailed-in ballots, controversy has only increased.

Source: UCLA Newsroom

Apparently Zuckerberg did not make any direct donations to either presidential candidate in 2020.

FWIW the right-wing talking point that is the origin point of christoban's claim above, never was that Zuckerberg donated to Biden or the Democrats.

Rather, it was that by donating money to local governments to help them run elections better and more safely during the aftermath of the covid outbreak, that this somehow "favored Democrats", leading to Trump's loss in 2020.

The second link above specifically takes on this claim, and finds that any changes in voting patterns favoring one party over another were miniscule at best, and definitely not enough to change the election outcome.

Two year old's baby tantrum gets blown up into a real-life thing because he happens to be a billionaire or whatever.

Honestly, this is the type of person who ought to be in jail rather allowed to run any kind of a business, let alone a large one.

At minimum, anything owned by this type of person should be ineligible for every type of government aid or cooperation, from TIF subsidies to liquor licenses.

And, let's see here:

New York’s subsidies for Madison Square Garden, run by billionaire James Dolan, have cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion since the mid 1980s and no longer make economic sense, according to a report from a city budget office.

Yeah, anyone receiving taxpayer largess at this kind of scale absolutely should not be allowed to discriminate against random people he doesn't happen to like or whatever.

As soon as he returns the $1 bill he's welcome to continue doing whatever he likes . . .

Worse than copyright felons, they are a bunch of damned LEECHERS.

Just shun them . . .

Hmm, but the only conceivable defense Meta has in this action is "Fair Use" under copyright law.

The number 1 criterion under Fair Use - and, typically, the one weighted the most by judges - is precisely Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. So, this one goes 100% to the authors.

It also strong supports bs's point, that using "content for business purpose, i.e. to make money" is one of the places where the line is drawn as to whether it is copyright infringement or not. This is, indeed, one of the lines.

Just for the curious, here are the remaining 3 factors in determining whether a use of copyrighted material can be considered "Fair Use":

  #2. Nature of the copyrighted work. If it is highly creative this weights against fair use; if rote or formulaic (ie, a telephone book) it weighs in favor. Since they copied literally everything, including many novels, poetry, and other highly creative and individual works, this factors strongly favors the authors and disfavors Fair Use.

  #3. Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole. They copied the whole damn thing for every work, and an incredibly vast amount of works as well. This factor, too, strongly weights against a finding of Fair Use.

  #4. Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Since the end result of this copying is the creation of a machine that can essentially replicate various others voices and works, this also weighs very, very strongly against a Fair Use defense.

It is hard to imagine how Meta wins this one. If they somehow do, their lawyers have definitely earned the hundreds of millions they are going to charge.

For the curious, here is the explanation of Fair Use from the U.S. Copyright Office: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.copyright.gov%2Ffair...

Oh yeah, this is right up there with Mitt Romney's brilliant observation that "Corporations are people, too!"

Yeah, sure they are.

It's like 3 fat cats at the top controlling thousands or tens of thousands of people below them, and also concentrating and controlling all the money their work produces.

That is pretty much the polar opposite of actual democracy, and a lot closer to a dictatorship or oligarchy, if you were to characterize it in political terms

In a similar way, the top 5% or 0.5% or whatever of the wealthy "businessmen" holding immense and grossly disproportionate sway over the democratic process isn't "democratic because they are people."

On the contrary, it is completely antidemocratic and in fact the very definition of corruption.

And the 2029 update continues:

The 1998 floppy-disk driven system continues to operate as designed. Muni obtains needed floppy disks from the one remaining supplier on eBay, who continues to gradually sell his remaining stock - currently at $199.95 per disk. He estimates 10 years floppy disk stock remaining, by which time the price is predicted to reach $1999.95 or the equivalent, one bitcoin.

Whelp, the time has arrived to completely uninstall Chrome, then.

> but are ineligible for rehire, Mullenweg added.

A company like this is ineligible for me to apply to work at, so there is no real problem here.

Yeah, they are on my "ineligible employers list."

Mullenweg specifically is on my "ineligible bosses list" - and I didn't even have to pay him 30 grand for the privilege!

And, I'm trying to figure out any/all ways our business might be using or supporting theirs to get out of those arrangements ASAP.

That's the "ineligible to do business with" list.

Capitalist assholes too easily forget that being an asshole runs both ways. And nobody wants to do business with, or work for, or work with, an asshole.

This is an amazing technical achievement.

This is a narrative I hear over and over. The U.S. is headed for some kind of armaggedon as librals/Elon Musk force us to drive electric cars, and use astonishingly economical heat pumps, etc.

But, when you look at the actual data, a very VERY different picture emerges:

  https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.statista.com%2Fstati...

Since I can't include the graph, I will describe it. From 1975 through 2005, U.S. electrical usage moved steadily upward, year by year. It looks like the average increase was about 3% annually, and it is steady.

Then in about 2005, something completely different happened. Usage leveled out.

And it has remained almost absolutely flat and level since then.

Like it when down from 4003 terrawatt-hours in 2018 to 3856 TW-H in 2020 (hmm, wonder why). Then since 2020 it has increased back to almost exactly the 2018 level, 4048 TW-H.

That is, literally, the biggest move on the chart - we have now returned to our 2018 usage level. Which is only very slightly higher than our 2005 and 2010 usage levels.

Whoo-hoo, how will we be able to manage it.

Also, overal since 2005, electricity usage has gone up a whopping (checks calculator) 6.2%.

Wow, 6% in 17 years. That amounts to almost 0.4% average annual increase. WILL the mighty capitalist system be able to adjust to this massive sweeping year over year change!!??!!?!! Keep watching the headlines to find out!!!!1!!!!!!21!!!

Kidding aside, the big story here is that large-scale adoption of energy-saving and more economical devices and practices has allowed the economy to grow massively, and electricity use to expand significantly in areas where it was previously little used or not used at all, at the very same time the overall national electricity usage has barely budged.

I realize that isn't a "let's panic now" story of the type that generates clicks and pageviews. But that is the actual story here. And it's a pretty damn good one.

Also, I don't doubt there are particular problems and issues here and there that need to be addressed. The grid is old and creaky in certain ways. Flip side, recent advances make the grid of the future look quite different than the grid we might have built out 5 or 10 or (certainly) 15 years ago. So the grid upgrade we will end up making are almost certainly going to be a lot more efficient and productive than it would have been - and WAY cheaper. So in a ways we are probably going to be happy we didn't spend a trillion dollars (or whatever it would have been - a LOT) to rebuild the entire grid according to our now-outdated conception of what a grid should be.

Don't like my data above, here is another link that confirms the basic picture, from the U.S. Energy Information Administration: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eia.gov%2Felectricit...

Here is another look at the same basic picture - but looking at all energy, not just electricity: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aceee.org%2Fblog-pos... Upshot is that per-capita energy use in the U.S. has been almost completely flat for the last decade.

I will just mention that Bing's AI chat thing really stinks.

I've been keeping an eye on it since it started auto-appearing at the top of Bing searches, and it is just so bad.

Basically, it ineptly summarizes the first few results with no sense at all of what among them is either accurate or relevant.

If I weren't so lazy, I would figure out how to turn it off. In the meanwhile, my strategy is just to scroll past it as quickly as possible and ignore. It is bringing literal negative value to the search results. I'm amazed it hasn't made Bing's share of search results drop by 50%.

I stopped visiting Threads because every time I go there, a bunch of posts show up but they are all absolute garbage. Corporate spam.

Whereas when I go to Mastodon, I don't find a lot of (or really, any of) my friends, family, or people from my immediate area, or even metro area or state. Which is the type of thing that made social media interesting back in the day, and still pulls me into Facebook or Twitter every once in a while.

But Mastodon I do find it productive to check in to once in a while, because the people who do post there appear to be actual, real, interesting people. It tends to be more of a global community around whatever particular interest you search or subscribe to, rather than a local or regional one. But it's real people posting real things and some actually interesting posts and discussions.

Whereas Threads = pure garbage.

Just checked again - Threads had exactly 3 interesting posts followed by miles of spam/garbage. The 3 were pretty obviously cross-posted to Twitter, Insta, FB, etc. Whereas Mastodon - a bunch of interesting stuff and I could easily have wasted an hour there if I were so inclined.