Sasha Akhavi @sakhavi@social.cleverlibre.org

I keep coming back to this quote from Thomas Paine in the Age of Reason as the perfect encapsulation of today's politics, "It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." Once you break with good-faith it's game over. :/

New X/Twitter logo found.

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!

#startup #business #tech #technology @technology

Nurses went on strike.

Then graduate students.

Then school teachers.

Now it’s hotel employees, writers, and actors.

UPS drivers and auto workers may be next.

Many strikes, similar story:

Workers are sick and tired of billionaires and corporations hoarding wealth and power.

Unemployment rates are at a ten year low, there’s increased disparity between executive pay & worker pay and workers are awakening to how companies treat them with little regard especially highlighted by COVID.

These are perfect conditions for workers from Hollywood actors & writers to Teamsters to reclaim some power back from corporations. Fiat✊🏾

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/summer-of-strikes-american-firms-face-650-000-worker-walkouts#

ICYMI, yesterday I wrote about a truly disturbing opinion column by Kathleen Parker for the Washington Post which was far more transphobic than I've seen previously in a mainstream US paper.

Parker suggests that the mere existence of trans people is a danger to children, echoing the eliminationist strain of rhetoric that has been normalized in the Republican party. #trans #journalism #media

https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/kathleen-parker-normalizes-extremism-in-the-washington-post

"OK, when Black dads are present, they're involved. But too many Black dads are just not there! Why aren't they there?"

In the US, a Black man has a 1 in 4 chance of going to jail. Most likely for "drug use," even though white folk do more drugs. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Most Black dads incarcerated have not even been convicted of any crime. They're "awaiting trial," and are too poor to afford bail. You can be waiting for trial for *years*.

It is so shitty to have to use GoFundMe to pay for a homeless kid to go to college. When I started to work on college affordability, I never thought that decades into the work it would still be so hard, particularly for young people, to access an education. And yet here I am having taken in a homeless kid, and even I can't find any other way to get them back to their college without this campaign. Please share, help, beg your friends. This is what desperation looks like. https://gofund.me/604e71ce

"The Federal Trade Commission has opened an expansive investigation into OpenAI, probing whether the maker of the popular ChatGPT bot has run afoul of consumer protection laws by putting personal reputations and data at risk," reports Cat Zakrzewski: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/13/ftc-openai-chatgpt-sam-altman-lina-khan/