Feed Items
Whether it’s Jeff Bezos lobotomizing the Washington Post, Elon Musk turning Twitter into a far right propaganda mill, or Larry Ellison buying CBS, CNN, and TikTok, the country’s shittiest right wing billionaires aren’t being subtle about their quest to dominate what’s left of U.S. media. And Trump’s FCC is paving the way by destroying whatever was left of our media consolidation rules.
After...
I very much promise that you don’t need to know about, or even care about, American football in any way for this post. We should all know at this point that the “blame video games” crowd has not gotten any smaller recently and that video games are blamed for just about everything you can think of as a result. Presidential candidate gets shot at? Video games. Think that America is in a state of...
In a further sign of where the generative AI world is heading, OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Atlas, “a new web browser built with ChatGPT at its core.” It’s not the first to do something like this: earlier browsers incorporating varying degrees of AI include Microsoft Edge (with Copilot), Opera (with Aria), Brave (with Leo), The Browser Company’s Dia, Perplexity’s Comet, and Google’s Gemini in...
Be the Duterte you want to see in the world, I guess.
That’s the new line from Donald Trump, the guy who once told supporters he could personally commit murder and he wouldn’t lose any supporters. He said that last time. He’s president again, so apparently it’s time to see if this adage holds up.
Trump has already pretended the mere existence of foreign gang members anywhere in the world...
Mike Brock’s piece on Sequoia Capital last week laid out a pretty damning case study: a well-respected COO complains about a partner’s Islamophobic posts, senior leadership invokes “institutional neutrality” and declines to act, she resigns, he stays because he made them billions on SpaceX. Brock correctly calls this out as a choice, not neutrality—a calculation about whose value to the firm...
Become a language expert with a Babbel Language Learning subscription. With the app, you can use Babbel on desktop and mobile, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won’t have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you’ll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14...
A lot of GOP politicians align themselves with Christianity, especially the offshoot that believes the richer you are, the more God loves you. (That it tends to dovetail nicely with white Christian nationalism is just a bonus in these Trumpian times.) But somehow they never seem to be able to spend a dime of their own when people are in need.
Just take a look at Kristi Noem, current DHS head and...
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give...
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is danderbandit with a comment about Trump’s assertions regarding the Insurrection Act:
50%? I don’t think so!
“I’m allowed as you know as president, like 50% of the presidents have used the Insurrection Act.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invocations_of_the_Insurrection_Act#:~:text=The%20act%20has%20been%20invoked,the%201992%20Los...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, hypocrisy was on full display as the GOP went from whining about net neutrality to supporting Trump’s attack on social media (which the FCC was too afraid to go on record in support of while also rejecting its own legal arguments about net neutrality), and from defanging the FEC to complaining about Twitter’s moderation practices. We looked at Bill Barr’s...