Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
Like many people I'm here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I've been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed...
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
If you care about the planet, please make sure you sit down before you start reading this post about ExxonMobil.
So.
The CEO of ExxonMobil just said this in an interview: "We’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions."
Who's the most influential voice on climate change? Who's to blame for inaction on climate change?
According to the CEO of ExxonMobil, it's environmental activists.
No, really:
"Frankly, society, and the activist—the dominant voice in this discussion—has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."
Oh, and the CEO of ExxonMobil also apparently thinks consumers are to blame for climate inaction:
"Today we have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that."
Gets better.
He thinks unnamed 'people who generate emissions' should pay for it. (Rather than, say, major transnational oil companies.)
"People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price. That’s ultimately how you solve the problem."
So, remind me again. Who knew about climate change before most of the public?
"Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue... This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation."
And just who, exactly, stood in the way reducing emissions all these years?
"ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents...
"The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil."
“The simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.” — Jarrett Fuller
So Google is now preventing people from removing location data from photos taken with Pixel phones.
Remember when Google's corporate motto was "don't be evil?"
Obviously, accurate location data on photos is more useful to a data mining operation like Google.
From Google: "Important: You can only update or remove estimated locations. If the location of a photo or video was automatically added by your camera, you can't edit or remove the location."
Please welcome Flipboard U.K. to the Fediverse! 🇬🇧 You can follow the main account, @FlipboardUK, to see all the stories the team is flipping, or these Magazines for specific topics that interest you. Everything is curated by human editors and updated multiple times a day.
It's an exciting week here in #OpenSource author land. Yesterday was the fifth birthday of my first book, and today my second is available in beta/early release! 🎉
Introducing Business Success with Open Source!
Is your company using open source in any way? (yes, it is)
Does it want to do that in a way that improves the #business while also being good for the #FOSS ecosystem? (yes, it does)
#Climate disasters are now costing the United States $150 billion per year, and the economic harm is rising.
But Fed Chair Jerome Powell has declared unequivocally:
“We are not, and we will not become, a climate policymaker.”
But it’s getting increasingly difficult for central banks to ensure the economic stability they seek if they do not integrate climate instability into their policies.
David Zaslav is the guy who started cutting content and killing films to "save money" and bolster the APPEARANCE of WBD's stock price. Seems his tactics were exactly what we expected, a short term gimmick, good for a single fiscal quarter, and disastrous in the long term.
He will absolutely earn MILLIONS from this terrible performance as CEO. There need to be more significant consequences for millionaire CEOs running companies into the ground.
There are jobs and livelihoods at stake.
Elon Musk spent 44 billion dollars on buying Twitter, only to change everything which made Twitter brilliant. And now, as Twitter is on the verge of failure, Musk claims it is all the advertisers’ fault.
But is it?
Watch my deep dive into Elon’s business decisions and see how even a professional company can be killed by amateur leadership.
This is why platforms are so hostile to you curating the content you want to consume.
It's basically just a few more angles on that thing I point out semi-regularly: Consuming what you want gets in the way of serving you what they want you to consume, i.e. whatever they make the most money on.
via @gerrymcgovern
“The results show that making streets friendlier for #bikes — and sidewalks friendlier for #pedestrians — is actually good for #business. The rise of #completestreets and #roaddiets, as urban planners call them, has been a huge boon to businesses in #cities”
“survey after survey has shown that business owners overestimate how many of their customers drive to their stores, versus #walking or #biking”
Elon's "extremely hardcore" toxic work culture means people are forced to take Adderall without a prescription to meet their workload. Just ask SpaceX employees.
"Some SpaceX workers resorted to taking Adderall to keep up with the pace of work at the company's launch facility, and others found themselves falling asleep in the bathroom during long workweeks, a recent Reuters investigation found.
"Travis Carson, a former SpaceX worker at the company's facility in Brownsville, Texas, told Reuters some workers took Adderall — a stimulant designed to help people with ADHD improve their focus and concentration levels — without a prescription to keep up with the pace of work."
Pas Legorafi: Les Ecolos font de Flora Ghebali la 11è sur leur liste aux Européennes, lors du Conseil fédéral. La fille de Daniela Lumbroso, chroniqueuse sur BFM, ex-conseillère com' de Hollande et candidate LREM, prône un "capitalisme écologique" et réclame le retour du service militaire...
I don't tout myself much on here, but from 1st July 2024 I'll have some capacity to work with new clients on a regular basis (an existing client is gradually moving work in-house due to increased volume). If you know anyone who needs a PHP app maintaining on a regular basis (3-10 hours/month), please point them my way. 😀
Are lots of websites really going downhill and/or closing or does it just seem like it to me?
Like many people I'm here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I've been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed...