Oh fuck no. The very first line is basically a HIPAA violation. It gets worse from there. We require less disclosure from Supreme Court Justices and Presidential nominees.
This is a trainwreck waiting to happen - even if Facebook itself doesn't abuse this level of power, you know that bad actors within the organization will. And once the information is collected, you know that tyrannical governments all over the world will be falling over themselves to get access to the data. This is a stalker's wetdream, an Orwellian orgasm of truly grotesque proportions.
Keep the Fediverse from Zucking. Just say no to Threads.
Canceled my sub a year ago (which had lasted since the Blockbuster days) when I heard about the changes and never looked back. Their horrible treatment of talent and their refusal to provide proper residuals is one of the main dynamics driving the SAG AFTRA strike. Imagine being a major actor in a show millions are actively watching, and your monthly check from it is $27.
Side note, Netflix has 3.5 billion in free cash on hand. Once the strike was announced, they scaled back their content investment and are now claiming 5 billion in cash reserves.
These fuckers can absolutely afford to pay their talent a living wage. Until they do, they aren't getting a dime from me.
@Bendersmember Content generation has slowed and from what I can tell, comment participation is way down. Right now, after going through and subscribing to a number of magazines, my kbin feed is more useful and active than reddit ever was, although the audience is clearly smaller (but seriously growing since last week). The quality of the content is better, and it's much easier to filter out the shitposting.
The clearest place to see content drought this is in /r/all - the top posts are all 3 - 15 hours old. Before the blackout, it would refresh in a matter of minutes, not hours.
Definitely better than Andrew Tate from what I've seen. While he's clearly a very savvy clout chaser, and he's overtaken Pewdie Pie as the most popular YouTuber, he has made a serious effort towards philanthropic acts. The fact that he's using these acts as a marketing tool to further increase his influence is clearly intentional, but he's doing real good with his clout. He's also shown considerable evolution throughout his career, including:
In an April 2022 interview with The Daily Beast, Donaldson announced that he was no longer an evangelical Christian and identified himself as an agnostic. He also stated that he had long disagreed with his church's position on homosexuality. He states that during the time he grew up in "the heart of the Bible Belt", he had religion "beat into [his] head every day", and was taught that "gay people are the reason God's going to come and burn this Earth". Although he considered anti-LGBT rhetoric to be normal growing up, he has disavowed it since then, stating: "I realized, 'Oh, this isn't normal. This is just a weird place I grew up in.' So, that type of thing, I [wish I could] go back in time and be like, 'Hey, stop'."
Donaldson considers himself strictly apolitical, saying that "I don't want to alienate Republicans and Democrats. ... I like having it where everyone can support [my] charity. My goal is to feed hundreds of millions of people ... it would be very silly of me to alienate basically half of America."
...and...
In April 2023, Chris Tyson came out publicly as gender non-conforming and revealed their struggles with gender dysphoria. In response to claims that they would become a "nightmare" and distraction for the channel, Donaldson defended Tyson and said, "Chris isn't my 'nightmare' he's my fucken [sic] friend and things are fine. All this transphobia is starting to piss me off."
This isn't to say he's perfect, but he's a helluva lot better than some other personalities your kids could be listening too.
Hmm... sounds a bit too idealistic to be true, especially given how Facebook has acted in the past. I appreciate his hope for the future, but I think he severely underestimates the lengths to which FB will go to monetize and control users on their platforms.
Here's the scenario I don't like. Threads scrapes my OC on a federated server, then reposts it to their users with advertisements. Now, not only has FB taken my OC without getting my permission or even informing me, they're now garnering profit from it. If this were a print publication, this would plainly be copyright theft. And if I want to remove my content that's now hosted on Threads without my permission, there's no possible way for me to do so - I can delete the post and hope their federated server does the same, but given how hard they make it to delete a FB account, I'm not terribly optimistic.
It's no wonder #threads isn't launching in Europe - there's no way in hell this kind of thing is even remotely GDPR compliant.
So Texas won't provide potable water to the inmates through the tap system:
“I would never drink the water at the tap,” said Don Aldaco, a recently paroled man who spent 24 years in various TDCJ facilities. “I would always get a piece of a sheet and I would tie it on the actual spigot, like a filter. I would have to change it like every other day because of all the rust and all the crud coming out.
Other current inmates commented on the smell of tap water in specific facilities resembling sewage. A TDCJ spokeswoman called the claim false.
“I actually begged him not to [drink the tap water],” said Amy Aguilar, whose loved one is at TDCJ’s Ferguson Unit. Her significant other — whose name she asked TPR to not use — has described the water as “rancid” smelling. And she said she was concerned about the quality.
“Do you smell the sewer?” Aguilar said she asked him, “And he goes, 'you kind of just smell it all. It's just this big ole rich mix of rancid smell.' ”
Water quality in prisons nationwide have been characterized as very low, due to the age of the facilities and the often remote locations.
...forcing the inmates to buy water to survive, and then, compounding their negligence, lies about the price increases in the middle of a heat wave:
TDCJ initially told TPR it had nothing to do with the price change. It added that the negotiation falls completely on the comptroller, and it did what it could to blunt the impact. The prices approved in April went up in late June.
“Due to the increase, TDCJ held the price at a lower cost for a few months as it went through our internal processes and to delay the impact felt by the inmates for as long as we could,” said Amanda Hernandez, director of communications for TDCJ. A comptroller spokesman said the description was false, and that the price rise was done in concert with the state prison system — and released emails that appear to back up the statement.
“We approve the increase for the remainder of the contract,” wrote Tanya Hudnell, director of contracts and procurement for TDCJ, in an April 11 email to the comptroller's office, who requested their sign off.
The prices may seem negligible to the working world — as a single bottle goes from $.20 to $.30.
“For people who are receiving absolutely zero pay for their work, any increase in cost is extremely significant for them,” Deitch said.
...resulting in those with no savings or outside help having to drink sewage tainted water in order to survive.
This would be a violation of the Geneva convention if they were enemy soldiers, and this is an absurd cruelty. Here's an action link for the Texas Center for Justice and Equity if you feel the same way.
I'd like to introduce the gizmodo.com writers to the term Pyrrhic victory. One look at /r/all and it's become nothing but reposts and memes that are hours, if not days old.
Reddit drove out its most important users - the moderators and content creators. They have enough old content to keep their viewership for awhile, but they'll never regain the community trust they've lost. And this will continue to kill their influx of new material, which will inevitably erode the viewer base.
Do I think reddit will die? No, it will continue on, just as have slashdot and fark and other staple communities from the same era, but the highwater mark of the community as the "front page of the internet" is long past.
Lemme tell you about Blackjack Smith,
Shooting straight law, dealing justice,
Rode to DC to solve an itch
To jail a traitorous orange bitch
They thought a Cannon would save the lump
that ripped off America in the name of Trump
but her blast of bullshit couldn't delay
the Sword of Damocles coming down on its prey
Blackjack laughed as he held the cards
There was no need to bluff with these retards
Georgia was lookin' jealous of DC
And pretty soon there would be indictments three
Ivanka's shaken and Jared's pale
The Saudis can't hide them from Donnie's fail
Giuliani's squawking, Meadows is talking
O big daddy Trump, you're going to jail
Chorus
Ohh, keep on indictin', Mr. Blackjack Smith
The GOP is rolling in a mess of traitor shit
The Union looks to you to set the record straight
And purge the Presidency of Donald's hate
Not that I'm ever going to use the app, but I'd like to point out as to why the collection of this specific dataset is particularly dangerous.
Threads scrapes Health and Fitness information. Why is this a problem? Because Meta is already illegally scraping hospital websites for your records. Speaking as a data analyst, it doesn't take much (like one line of code in some cases) to match your Threads account to your hospital records in a database. To assume Meta isn't attempting to do so as we speak is naive - there's simply too much money to be made.
In an age where we've had to start underground railroads to help women across state lines to keep the right to choose, combined with the push from the far right to criminalize helping them, this sets up a frightening scenario:
Meta finds that you've scheduled an abortion through the hospital across state lines. With Threads on your phone, they can now track you as you travel to that appointment. It only takes one more step, or a law like this one tailored towards abortion, to notify law enforcement to pick you up enroute.
Combined with Meta's overall right-leaning politics, it just doesn't make sense to make yourself vulnerable to them, especially if you're a member of a minority population or have any sort of health condition. There's simply too much potential for abuse, and Meta has shown itself more than willing to abuse its users.
Kbin is so goddamn good it's scary. Reads and posts to both Lemmy and Mastodon, can subscribe by user, community (magazine), or domain. It's new and still under development, so expect bumps, but it absolutely crushes Reddit once you get your subscriptions set.
The title is mainly clickbait. The bonds they're talking about were sold in 1938 by the US backed Republic of China, which at the time was fighting a civil war with the Peoples Republic of China (Maoists). The RoC lost, and retreated to Taiwan. The PRoC then assumed control of the country, and decided that it wasn't interested in paying the debts of the government it had just vanquished.
However, under international law, when the PRoC took over China, they also assumed responsibility for paying those bond holders. Nobody has gotten them to pay up except the UK when the transfer of Hong Kong was up for consideration.
So basically, this is a 70 year old debt that was taken out against China's former government, and the current government really has no urgency to address it.
As @mazelado pointed out, this is an opinion piece by the Heritage Foundation, so the motivations in writing it are suspect, especially as it's specifically pushing the Biden administration to fight this very old fight. You would have thought that if had really been a pressing matter, Trump would have handled it when he started the US / China tradewar right before COVID, as it was clear Don didn't have any qualms pushing potentially destructive diplomatic policies that were unpopular to the Chinese.
There's a fundamental disconnect in how the economists in this paper view profit and how companies view profit. Essentially, their theory is that if we raise interest rates, this will subdue demand, and thus tame inflation as companies drop prices to compete for a smaller market share.
The problem is that the companies that control the core essentials - food, energy, and to a growing extent housing - are effectively monopolies. Markets that had hundreds of competitors in the past now only have a few dozen at best, and they actively use their vast power and influence to reduce the capacity of any smaller players to participate, let alone compete in the market.
You can't reduce demand on core essentials, because people can't do without. As a result, in a monopolistic market, an interest increase only harms the consumer when it comes to core essentials unless a company decides to reduce prices and subsequently their profit.
There is no publicly traded company on earth that will voluntarily decide to lower their profit. The only way they'll do it is if it's hurting their bottom line - aka through competition. With no competition to reduce market share, effectively the company can simply keep pace with interest rates by continuing to profiteer, especially when they're operating in markets without price controls. In those that do, the companies often engage in aggressive regulatory capture to ensure a steady profit margin well above cost, regardless of the market conditions.
In our current situation, interest rate increases will do little to nothing in the short term save to tighten lending and push home ownership out of reach of the middle class. We will not see drops in prices, only a leveling off from increases, as consumers have come to accept them as the new normal. Rate increases do nothing to address the core issue, which is that the extreme consolidation of wealth in a handful of companies has given them a power over our economy far greater than the central banks that claim to run it. If anything, those rate increases encourage the same consolidation of wealth and monopolistic markets that have led to our current economic state.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.
In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.
I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.
What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.
Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.
But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.
And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.