If Elon Musk wants to cut $2t from the US federal budget, there's a pretty straightforward way to get there - just eliminate all the beltway bandits who overcharge Uncle Sucker for everything from pharma to roads to (of course) rockets, and make the rich pay their taxes.
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The core regulatory proposition of the tech industry is "it's not a crime if we do it with an app." It's not an unlicensed taxi if we do it with an app. It's not an illegal hotel room if we do it with an app.
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"Boss politics" are a feature of corrupt societies. When a society is dominated by self-dealing, corrupt institutions, strongman leaders can seize control by appealing to the public's fury and desperation.
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Turns out Donald Trump isn't the only world leader with a tech billionaire "first buddy" who gets to serve as an unaccountable, self-interested de facto business regulator. UK PM Kier Starmer has just handed the keys to the British economy over to Jeff Bezos.
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Oh, not literally. But here's what's happened: the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority, an organisation charged with investigating and punishing tech monopolists (like Amazon) has just been turned over to Doug Gurr, the guy who used to run Amazon UK.
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Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.
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It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services.
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