Politicians used to have visions. Like, let's build a society where everyone can afford to get an education and no one goes without healthcare or whatever. Now it's all just a big spreadsheet exercise where money is moved around from one pot to the next and no one cares about trying to envision what society should be. And then, of course, it's the politician's whole career so they'll cling on to power for dear life no matter where that takes them politically (and maybe more important ethically).
Facebook, Amazon etc....
- Thread starter Raoul
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I literally discovered this a week or so ago and immediately ditched my profile.
I just have to laugh. Our goverment is just stupid with the law they tried to push.
Facebook and google provided a way to share and spread the news stories. If you wanted to read the whole thing, you still had to visit the page and provide them with clicks anyway. It's basically free advertising/sharing.
Yet we wanted to then have google/facebook pay the media companies for that as well. No surprise that facebook, and likely followed by google, simply go its easier to just remove the content instead of paying for it.
Facebook and google provided a way to share and spread the news stories. If you wanted to read the whole thing, you still had to visit the page and provide them with clicks anyway. It's basically free advertising/sharing.
Yet we wanted to then have google/facebook pay the media companies for that as well. No surprise that facebook, and likely followed by google, simply go its easier to just remove the content instead of paying for it.
I thought it would go that way too, but it looks like Google may be backtracking and is signing deals with the likes of News Corp for tens of millions of dollars. I think the media companies argument was that Google get revenue from each ad view too, but I personally thought it seemed like a decent two way deal on face value so am a bit surprised that Google have stumped up the cash so quickly.
I'm surprised that google would look to make any deals. I would have thought the news companies would be the ones to massively lose out, with google largely unscathed. People are still going to use google to find the news, they will just be directed to overseas media that covers australian news instead
The most bizarre thing about this is people using Facebook for news, god forbid they actually go out their way and search out reputable sources, rather than headlines being spoon fed too them.
Yes!
Just been reading about this and some of the comments are so strange.
Morrison wrote on Facebook: “Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing.
Has Facebook really got its hooks so deep into the Aussie general public that they can’t just fecking google the information they need instead? Imagine needing important information about your health or emergency services and Facebook being your first port of call. That’s simultaneously mind-blowing and profoundly depressing. WTF?!
I can’t get over the uproar in Australia, if Facebook said they were banning news sharing in Europe I’d be dancing down the high street.
Most likely because of how much influence those same media companies have. They are the only reason the stupid law were even thought of.
Murdoch, 7 and 9/fairfax are oligarchs in the Aussie media landscape.
And from their stupid screeching on twitter, facebook and their channels plus a giant propagana hit on facebook, you can see that they are pissed because Facebook outmanouvered them.
Facebook went nuclear due to their algoriths and the health pages are back but Morrison is doing this on behalf of Murdoch not for the good of the people
That's a common theme in fiction, Deus Ex series of games occur on that setting. Blade Runner touches on that too. Most cyberpunk stuff have that as part of that setting.
Got the creeps out of me when I first saw it, because it seems so inevitable. The growth in size of tech giants in the last few years seems to make that inevitable, and they've been extremely challenging of laws and rules everywhere. I think drastic politic action will be necessary to curb them. It will be a staple of left wing politics in the next few years.
Unless these tech giants get their own private army they won't be replacing nation states any time soon. China has already proven that state is much more mightier than these companies by bringing down Jack Ma to his knees in recent months.
They already have private armies: lobbyists.
And if that doesn't work, offer politicians a cushy advisor salary when they quit office.
Seems to work very well in the West.
Christ, wasn’t fully aware of this Kaplan cnut. Many want to blame Trumpism’s rise on the left, but the severity of brazen cuntishness on the right that was embedded into DC during the W administration was astonishing in its own right.
For Vic, an Amazon driver since 2019, the company's decision to install a four-lens, AI-powered camera in his van was the final indignity. This month, he quit
https://news.trust.org/item/20210319120214-n93hk
https://news.trust.org/item/20210319120214-n93hk
At first, it was Amazon’s “Mentor” app that constantly monitored his driving, phone use and location, generating a score for bosses to evaluate his performance on the road.
“If we went over a bump, the phone would rattle, the Mentor app would log that I used the phone while driving, and boom, I’d get docked,” he said.
Then, Amazon started asking him to post “selfies” before each shift on Amazon Flex, another app he had to install.
“I had already logged in with my keycard at the beginning of the shift, and now they want a photo? It was too much," he said.
The final indignity, he said, was Amazon's decision to install a four-lens, AI-powered camera in delivery vehicles that would record and analyse his face and body the entire shift.
Up until this month, he had largely been able to request vans without the cameras installed.
But there were a few times he did drive a van equipped with the cameras. At the end of his shift his supervisor showed him all the images that had been captured.
Each time the camera's AI detected an anomaly in Vic's behavior - a yawn, a glance at his phone - it started recording, and saving the footage.
On March 2, he got a notification in his Amazon Flex App that he would now have to sign a consent form to allow Amazon to film him at work, as cameras were going in all vans.
He had until March 23 to sign up.
When Vic read the documents, he was disturbed to read that Amazon reserved the right to “share the information....with Third-party service providers” and “Amazon group affiliates”.
Fecking hell they really are becoming MomCorp.
Apparently this politician is supposedly one of the "good ones":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez
Amazon workers go on strike in Italy over labor conditions
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/amazon-workers-go-on-strike-in-italy-over-labor-conditions-.html
Forza Italia!
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/amazon-workers-go-on-strike-in-italy-over-labor-conditions-.html
Forza Italia!
wow she's going to break-up big tech so badly they can't even tweet
Peak current year. Some Amazon staffer trading Twitter barbs with both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren's social media managers.
Hopefully seeing Amazon put out multiple talking points that sound straight from Fox News will help liberals see that big corporations are not 'progressive' - no matter how many carefully curated PR statements they put out in support of BLM or how many rainbow themed logos they can churn out.
So "@amazonnews" is just a propaganda account for Amazon Totally normal stuff. I saw this from them the other day
They also have those Twitter accounts from Amazon "workers" who respond to any negative tweets saying how good it is to work there and how much they like it.
Totally normal stuff. I saw this from them the other dayThey also have those Twitter accounts from Amazon "workers" who respond to any negative tweets saying how good it is to work there and how much they like it.
So "@amazonnews" is just a propaganda account for Amazon
They also have those Twitter accounts from Amazon "workers" who respond to any negative tweets saying how good it is to work there and how much they like it.
That's fecking incredible. So it's an official Amazon account?
They're even more evil than I thought.
I'm actually surprised Amazon is OK with this. You'd think a corporation as big as Amazon would be more secretive about their views on politics but here they are openly critizing Sanders, are they not?
These things are mini-nation states with state run propaganda media. They are too big to fail.
That's why you never allow companies to get this big and dominant. Boeing for instance, are said to comprise about 1% of US GDP. There has to be some way to diversify these products and services where we don't end up in 'to big to fail' scenarios.
What's the economic science on this? How does one split up a "too big to fail" company without the splintered companies colluding to fix prices and maintain high barriers of entry?
In other words, how do we ensure there's actual competition after splitting up a monopolist?
We do have the history of not allowing companies to get that big, but those times are past politically &, just like with the MIC, their tentacles are everywhere, far too pervasive in our lives to remove without trauma.
We have history in this country of doing just that, albeit multiple decades ago. Just can’t see any real appetite to do so politically now.
That's for the market to decide. The only occasion when the state gets involved is when competition that previously existed is being eliminated by companies who are getting too powerful to be split up.
Tech needs to broken up. Amazon more than most.
But what if the splintered companies dominate the market and form a cartel? Not like consumers can suddenly choose another company if new companies are hampered by high barriers of entry.
There are anti-trust laws in the US to prevent that from happening.
Why tech? I know it the right wing mantra at the moment but I've never seen them give a valid reason.
How would you propose splitting up Amazon?