Chickenized reverse-centaurs [Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic] – Amazon turns its workers into gig-economy AI-operated meat puppets. And plenty of other companies are doing it too.
Announcing “The Shakedown” [Cory] – “Giving a writer more copyright … is like giving your kid extra lunch money to replace the money the bullies take at the school-gates every morning. No matter how much money you give your kid, the bullies will take that, too…. excessive buying power in creative labor markets lets giant corporations steal from creators…. “
Chevron bought the US justice system [Cory] – Chevron bought its way out of prosecution for genocide, and is now hijacking the US legal system to prosecute the attorney who fought to protect indigenous people against the company.
Help news, not news-barons [Cory] – Monopolies are killing journalism, and now news-barons want MORE monopolies to solve the problem.
That’s a hard nope.
Google and Facebook’s defenders say they’re driving traffic to news sites. That’s true–but only AFTER Google and Facebook scoop up the revenue.
Ad budgets are finite. Every dollar that advertisers spend on Google and Facebook is a dollar they’re NOT spending on a news site. So the news sites create the content, and Google and Facebook collect the revenue from that content. Nice!
The Internet didn’t kill newspapers. As Cory Doctorow notes here, newspapers survived the invention of the telegraph, movie newsreels, radio and TV. And they were early adopters of Internet tech.
Vulture capitalism killed newspapers. And now the investors who killed newspapers want Congress to grant them an exemption to monopoly law so they can continue to make money. Nope.
Facebook stops recommending political groups [Scott Rosenberg / Axios Login] – Facebook has been a huge factor in driving extremism and hate worldwide–and now they want the tools to control political speech, saying only they can fix the problem they helped create.
You don’t hire arsonists as firefighters.
Justin Long as Pitch Man for Intel [David Sparks / MacSparky] – Justin Long, the former “I’m a Mac” guy for Apple, is now pitching competitive products–Windows machines for Intel.
Apple blogger David “MacSparky” Sparks, who’s also an attorney, is ticked off at Apple’s lawyers for not putting an “I won’t pitch competitive products ever” clause into Long’s original contract, which (Sparks says) is SOP.
“Last week I did something similar on a lease agreement for a donut shop,” he says.
He also says the Intel commercials aren’t as good as the Apple ones were.
The key to the charm of the original Apple commercials was that John Hodgman’s clueless, flailing PC was actually the sympathetic character–just trying to do his job, keep a positive attitude, and make the best of the lousy tools he was given.
The Mac character was a patronizing hipster.
Apple’s message to PC users: You deserve better.
Berets are making a fashion comeback [[Dave Schilling / LA Times] – The beret “has a surplus of bourgeois connotations,” favored by “social climbers,” but it’s “also a globally recognized symbol of revolution and social change.”
I have occasionally thought about getting a beret. I know a guy in his 70s who is a dapper dresser and often wears a beret.
A beret is good protection from the sun for bald guys like me, and, unlike many other hats, it can be easily stuffed in a bag when not being worn.
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