Dear New York Times et al,

He was never a successful businessman.

1. He inherited 400 million dollars and turned that into zero dollars.
2. He went bankrupt 7 times.
3. Some of those bankruptcies were casinos, literally a licence to print money which he couldn't manage.
4. He conned kids with cancer out of money once. That's why he can't run a charity anymore.
5. The following business ventures no longer exist or are insolvent:
a. Trump Steaks
b. Trump University
c. Trump Mortgage
d. Trump Vodka
e. Trump: The Game
f. Trump Ice
g. GoTrump.com
h. Trump Magazine
i. The New Jersey Generals
j. Trump Airlines
k. Trump Entertainment Resorts (filed for bankruptcy FOUR TIMES)
l. Trump Tower Tampa
m. Trump Taj Mahal
n. The Trump Plaza
o. Trump Castle
p. Plaza Hotel
q. Trump Media and Technology Group
r. Truth Social
s. Trump Shuttle, Inc
t. Trump Fire
u. Trump Power
v. Trump's American Pale Ale
w. Trump Marina
x. Trump Casino, Indiana
y. Trump Style
z. Trump World Magazine
aa. Trumpnet, LLC
ab. Trump Entrepreneur Initiative
ac. Trump Fragrances
ad. Empire by Trump
ae. Trump Mattress
af. Tour de Trump
ag. Trump Network
ah. Trumped!
ai. Trump Menswear
aj. Trump Home
ak. Success by Trump
al. Trump Hotel Bedding Line
am. Donald J. Trump Eyeglasses
an. Donald Trump Regency Lighting
ao. Select by Trump Coffee
6. Of the 16 companies that were manufacturing Trump-branded products in 2015, only 2 remain in business less than 10 years later. Neither of those companies are American. One is located in Panama and the other is located in Turkey.

Stop saying "successful businessman". My little company founded in 2014 has been in business longer, employs more people, and makes more income than 99% of his ventures. The difference between him and me is access to capital, which means he gets unlimited bites at the apple, and I get just this one if I'm lucky.

Signed,
a small business owner in Washington

People who can comfortably live off 30% of their income cluelessly explaining savings to people who can barely live off 100% of theirs is a phenomenon I encounter way too often.

YOU'RE NOT BETTER AT BUDGETING YOU JUST HAVE MORE MONEY.

Incredible how just in a few years, the smartphone went from

"a device that's nice to have and allows you to contact people, access your calendar, play games and look up bus schedules on the go"

to

"a device you're absolutely required to own and have access to at all times because if you don't, you don't get a bank account, health insurance, public transit, or basically any online service required for enrollment in a school or an employment contract"

git pull --force-with-leash

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/19/aya-nakamura-black-woman-france-paris-olympics

Can a Black woman really represent France? Well, can a Black woman really represent California? They're both silly questions.

California is about 40 million people. France is about 70 million people. California is about 5% Black. France is about 5% Black. There are more Black people in France than in California, and Paris is Blacker than Los Angeles.🙂🙃

One thing both the United States and France are united on, is being in denial about how Black France is. 🇫🇷🤝🏻🇺🇲

gently panicked article about modern archiving issues. mostly about #tv & #film but applies to #music, too. short translation: all #media is endangered, keep up the #piracy. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/digital-preservation-film-tv-shows-archives-1235851957/

Just saw a meme that pretends that, unlike the US, enlightened European countries tax billionaires at near 50%

This isn't true

Billionaires are business owners and investors. What actually happens is that they take a modest income (for a billionaire) which is taxed like that because income tax is high. Then their business gets tax deals where they pay single digits of corporate tax. Then the profit is paid out as dividend tax

Dividend tax in the Netherlands for example is 15%. So while billionaires are taxed, they're taxed like 20-30% on the vast majority of their actual income, and that's assuming no cute tricks to get around a lot of that, too. Billions can afford you some nice accounting tricks after all

Freedom in technology must include freedom from technology.

We must not create societies where the price of admission is owning a device controlled by one of two trillion-dollar US corporations.

We must safeguard people’s access to public services and the everyday necessities of life via alternate methods.

Technology should always be a progressive enhancement.

Do not let Silicon Valley privatise your access to modern life.

https://mastodon.ar.al/@lrvick@mastodon.social/112079059430275102

#technology #society #access #humanRights

Hey, speaking of rich people and complicit corporate media, did you know two of the three richest men on Earth (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos) and the family that own's Trader Joes, are currently trying to get American courts to declare the core functions of the National Labor Relations Act unconstitutional, and the mainstream media is literally barely reporting it?

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-02-22-americas-richest-men-ask-courts-make-unions-illegal/

Although this story seems complex, the essential point here is that these rich maggots who have both a vested interest in stopping unions, and own companies with a documented history of unionbusting, want to stop the board that rules on NLRA cases, from hearing cases in their administrative courts. This matters because these courts allow in particular, workers who've been fired for organizing unions by big corporations like Amazon, Tesla, and Trader Joe's to quickly get a ruling that stops those companies from union busting by simply axing the organizers. The rich guys, using essentially the same arguments that were refuted by SCOTUS almost 90 years ago, would prefer those cases be heard in federal court, because it would *guarantee* "that by the time they reach the bench, those organizing campaigns will have become a dim memory." Furthermore, it's entirely possible that the richest folks in the oligarch class won't stop there, and might even ask a very anti-union SCOTUS to literally toss the NLRA altogether, leaving workers entirely exposed to whatever predations these rich maggots want to enact upon them.

In other words, and to quote the author of this article:

"in a time of stratospheric economic inequality and overwhelming public support for unions, they want the courts to strike down workers’ right to collective bargaining? One of the fundamental landmarks of the New Deal? Shall we negate all of America’s mid-20th-century social progress? All of Roosevelt’s legacy? How about we revisit World War II and surrender to the Nazis and Japan?"

Naturally, you would assume this might be bigger news than it has been. But the truth is, corporate media in America has a vested class interest in keeping this one on the downlow because they too are owned by rich (mostly) American oligarchs; in the case of a paper like the Washington post, their boss, Jeff Bezos, is literally one of the oligarchs bringing the case before the courts through his EvilCorpTM, the American multinational corporation and technology company Amazon. When the same guys busting the unions, own the papers, it's clearly possible to gut the right to collectively bargain with barely a whisper leaking out into the mainstream discourse. In the immortal words of Frank Zappa, "they just takes care of number one, an' number one ain't you; you ain't even number two..."

#NLRA #Unions #ElonMusk #Amazon #TraderJoes #UnionBusting #Neofeudalism

Some of you know today as π-day.

But the real insiders know that today is the 30th anniversary of the 1.0 release of Linux.

TIL that the world of braille embossers/printers is dominated by greed. I am not surprised, but I am disappointed. A dot matrix printer knock-offs (because that's what they are) are sold for $1500 to $5000 apiece, and often require $500 software to convert text documents for print. Even stupid Dymo-like electric label maker costs $1200. C'mon, it's EXACTLY the same as regular Dymo, but with different character set!

There are open source embossers, like BrailleRAP, and despite their looks, they seem to give performance comparable to cheap commercial embossers, for under $250.

I wish these were widely available everywhere. Maybe at least in every library, or something. But even if they were...

Turns out, it's only policy makers who get stressed when students talk about race. None of the 67 students in this highschool study reported increased stress when participating in an anti-racist intervention while many reported growth in awareness of social inequality.

This is the first real data I've seen on this topic and it appears, once again, that the fears of harming students is just a boogeyman in the minds of right-wing politicians.

https://news.ncsu.edu/2024/03/anti-racist-school-program-study/

@academicchatter @edutooters

We worry about providing Universal Basic Income because people might stop working, but here's a thought: maybe, just maybe, with a little financial security, people might actually pursue work they truly choose rather than work to just not die. Imagine that world for a moment.

#shitpost

Last night I watched John Oliver's segment about Boeing and how they turned focus away from making quality products in favor of inflating their own stock price though buybacks and cost-cutting. Wow! It's the same toxic shit at my workplace and at many other orgs out there. Yeah Boeing is being naughty but this is a systemic problem for the tech industry and other industries as well. Business majors are ruining everything. My takeaway wasn't just "Boeing bad", it's that our whole civ is fucked.

TL;DR when EU law references a harmonised standard, that standard MUST be made available to every citizen of the EU. For free. As it is considered to be part of the law. And thus public interest is a given.

I CANNOT OVERSTATE HOW BIG THIS DECISION OF EUCJ IS!

Press release:
https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2024-03/cp240041en.pdf

Decision text:
https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document_print.jsf?mode=req&pageIndex=0&docid=283443&part=1&doclang=EN&text=&dir=&occ=first&cid=6475952

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle #tech #google #web #internet #LLM #LLMs #enshittification #technology #search #SearchEngines #SEO #SEM