CORRECTION: The 5/29 edition of Pluralistic quoted $20k Rebyota; this was the rumored pre-release price; the actual average wholesale price is $10.8k. Thanks to Benjamin Jolley for catching this error, and to Stephen Skolnick for getting to the bottom of it.
3/
The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting: Or, if you prefer, "plundering."
#5yrsago Youtubers with millions of followers are dropping out, citing stress and burnout from algorithm kremlinology polygon.com/2018/6/1/17413…
11/
#5yrsago Leaked document shows Trump officials planning to force Americans to spend $311m-$11.8b/year to keep unprofitable coal and nuclear energy plants from shutting bloomberg.com/news/articles/… wall
12/
#5yrsago Citing bad publicity and internal dissent, Google announces it won’t renew contract to supply AI for US military drones gizmodo.com/google-plans-n…
13/
#5yrsago Tax-funded charter schools textbooks deny evolution, teach human-dinosaur cohabitation, endorse slavery and indigenous genocide orlandosentinel.com/2018/06/01/pri…
14/
#5yrsago Amid wage stagnation, corporate leaders declare the end of annual raises triggered by increased profitability axios.com/2018/05/27/bro…
#5yrsago Stanford prof Niall Ferguson conspired with campus Republicans to do oppo research on students who opposed invited eugenicist speaker stanforddaily.com/2018/05/31/ema…
#5yrsago Governments all over the world buy spy products that let them track and eavesdrop on global cellphones, especially US phones washingtonpost.com/business/techn…
20/
#5yrsago Amazon bars Australians from shopping on its non-Aussie sites to put pressure on the government to rescind tax rule smh.com.au/business/compa…
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, @BeaconPressBks et al) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🙇🏼♀️". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? You can read my work elsewhere, but it is now a #TwitterCrime to tell you how. Please visit my site, pluralistic.net, for links to find me on less-unhinged places (I can only imagine that my days here are numbered).
eof/
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The best summary of Trump's trade "philosophy" comes from Trashfuture's November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that's rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Ireland is a tax haven. In the 1970s and 1980s, life in the civil-war wracked country was hard - between poverty, scarce employment and civil unrest, the country hemorrhaged its best and brightest. As the saying went, "Ireland's top export is the Irish."
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American *era* and a post-American *world*. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Look, I'm not trying to say that new technologies *never* raise gnarly new legal questions. But what I *am* saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It's ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they'd lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.
3/
I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers - chairman of IBM's board of directors - to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history.
3/