As I just noted on another response, mostly it was that I came up with a delicious turn of phrase and couldn’t not post it. And yes, while broadly I think that Google deserves every bit of shit that’s thrown their way and more - that they could vanish from the face of the Earth tomorrow and the internet could only benefit - this particular incident really isn’t a good example.

I have to admit that I was so pleased with that turn of phrase when it came to me that I went ahead and posted it in spite of the fact that this specific incident doesn’t appear to be a good example.

It’s really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from “Do no evil” to “Don’t even bother pretending not to.”

I propose that the thing that’s already looming on the horizon not be called an AI “bubble,” but an AI “pimple,” not least because it’s going to be so satisfying when it pops.

It’s safe to assume that one could graph the atrocities committed by the Israeli military, duplicate it, shift it a day or two down the timeline, and one would get the graph of news articles censored by the Israeli military.

Axiomatically, no, since it isn’t even AI in any meaningful sense of the term, so it fails to live up to its hype right out the gate.

Undoubtedly.

And that in no way contradicts, or even really addresses, my point, which is not about overall expenses, but about the distribution of them - the portion that goes to employee wages vs. the portion that goes to executive compensation packages.

They thought by raising wages, owners would cut into their own bottom lines.

I don’t think anyone actually thought that.

They’re simply making the point that the problem is not the wages paid to the employees, as you imply, but the obscene salaries paid to executives and franchisees.

That the American execurives and franchisees are not going to take the necessary steps to correct that problem pretty much goes without saying, but that doesn’t in any way change the fact that that is the problem

TikTok doesn’t engage in speech at all. TikTok is s platform on which people engage in speech. Those people include Americans.

So TikTok being legally considered a person or not, having rights or not and so on is irrelevant, since TikTok’s nominal rights aren’t being violated in the first place. The rights of the Anerican people are the ones that would be violated - they are the ones whose freedom of speech would be restricted.

IANAL but I presume that’s the argument they’re using - that when they say that it’s a violation of the first amendment, what they mean is not that it violates their supposed freedom of speech, but that it violates our inalienable freedom of speech (as it in fact, and obviously, does).

So… aren’t these wannabe twitter competitors going about the whole thing bass-ackwards?

I saw a broadly similar article the other day about some sort of shakeup in the Mastodon board of directors.

It’s as if they think the way do do an internet startup is to first appoint a board of directors and hire a raft of executives, then… um… you know… um… do some business… kinda… stuff…

Work toward an eventual full withdrawal from NATO and an overt and full political and military alliance with Russia.

I’m not joking.

Cadbury Mini Eggs.

And any decent quality or better saltwater taffy.

They never really did.

It was all, always, just about themselves. They claimed to love the country because they just saw it as a rightful extension of themselves, and they claimed to love democracy because they just saw it as the process by which they got what they wanted.

Now that they’re faced with the fact that the country necessarily also accommodates other people and that democracy means that other people can get what they want, they have no reason left to pretend that they ever really valued either one.

So they’re instead diving headfirst into xenophobic fascism, in the hope that they can recreate a world in which the country exists only for them and the government serves only their interests.

I guarantee that the ADA works for whoever is the biggest source of revenue, and thus the biggest funder of executive salaries.

That’s just how it is in a system of hierarchical organizations. The executive positions inevitably come to be held by people who have come to hold those positions because they were the most willing and able to do absolutely whatever it takes to fight and claw and scheme and backstab their way into them. And those people not only aren’t inclined to serve any interest other than their own - they necessarily aren’t even equipped to. If they had any actual integrity, decency or empathy, they wouldn’t have been able to do everything they did to win the competition for the position they now hold, and it would’ve gone to some other scheming, manipulating, self-serving psychopath.

And thus, we end up with something like this. Inevitably.

Nicely clarified.

Yes - the way I said it leaves the possibility that they have to pay at minimum their profit, and no - that should not be the case. They should have to pay at minimum their total revenue.

This shouldn’t be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they’re fined less than they made off of it, it’s not even really a fine. It’s just the government taking a cut of the action.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about exactly that in the USSR in Gulag Archipelago.

He said that in the entire time he was in the gulags, he never met one single person who hadn’t been legitimately tried and convicted of an actual crime. And the key was exactly what you describe - the Soviet laws were so extensive and byzantine that whenever any official wanted to disappear somebody, all they had to do was investigate them enough to figure out what laws they’d inevitably broken, then try them for that.

That’s how authorotarian scumbags implement a police state while maintaining a superficial appearance of justice and the rule of law.

And it’s guaranteed that American authoritarian scumbags know that.

The US economy will be much worse than it is already, the country will be at war and the government will be cracking down on civil unrest.

Wrong about what? I don’t even get what the point is supposed to be.

Are you saying that people transition from Linux to Windows? That seems obviously backwards.

Are you saying that Linux is female and Windows is male? That’s not even coherent.

What am I supposed to be trying to prove wrong?

No, it’s not the same.

You’re only describing what would happen at the instance level, and skipping over the fact that the whole thing hinges on your identity on each and every instance actually being one and only one identity that would reside in one particular place. It would actually exist on, and be federated from, one particular server somewhere.

What that means, and the part you’re leaving out, is that whoever controlled that server would control your access to the fediverse as a whole - not just on one particular instance, which is the reality with instance-specific identities, but on all instances of all services.

The only way to avoid putting control over your access to the fediverse as a whole in the hands of one company would be to maintain your server on your own hardware, and as the article itself notes, most people can’t or won’t do that. So most people will end up with their identity on all instances of all services under the control of one specific company. Which is very much NOT the case now.

Now, if someone wants to somehow use their control over my fediverse access for some self-serving purpose - either maliciously or simply as a goad with which to extract profit from me - they’re necessarily limited to one identity on one instance of one service because that’s as high as it goes. They might, for instance, hijack or disable or demand a subscription fee for access to my .world identity, which resides on .world’s server. All that would mean to me though is that that one particular identity on that one particular instance would be compromised. I could still access the fediverse, and even access .world, just by coming in through my kbin identity or my lemm.ee identity or my .ml identity or whatever, since all of those are out of their control.

With this scheme, if someone wants to use their control over my fediverse access for some self-serving purpose, they have one specific place to do it - at the one specific server on which my identity is hosted and from which my identity is federated. With one move, they could hijack or disable or restrict extort payment for my access to ALL instances of ALL services, all at once.

Again, that is very much NOT the case today.