• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • Absolutely. Between Ticketmaster and LiveNation, almost every performing venue in the United States is completely dominated.

    We desperately, desperately need legitimate anti-trust actions in the United States; we need something that will reintroduce some actual competition into the market.

    The first failure of the federal government that led to this path was in the 1990s and the Microsoft Antitrust Trials. That was the point at which there really could have been another way–but the billionaires, at that point, had all the inroads to government that the Reagan Administration made possible. Because Microsoft could buy politicians, the vast majority of people on the planet have never used any operating system other than Windows, and the Microsoft company gets billions upon billions of dollars from state/federal/municipal contracts.

    Google and Apple, then, just followed the path that Microsoft bought and paved through government regulations. And that made it easy for other billion dollar companies like Ticketmaster and LiveNation to do the same thing in other realms–simply buy the laws, buy the politicians, buy the system that’s supposed to regulate them, and then use that system to remove all competition.














  • The consumer-side AI that a handful of multi-billion-dollar companies keep peddling to us is just a way for them to attempt to justify AI to us. Otherwise, it consumes MASSIVE amounts of our energy capacities and is primarily being used in ways that harm us.

    And, of course, there’s nothing they direct at us that isn’t ultimately (and solely) for their benefit–our every use of their AI helps train their models, and eventually it will simply be groups of billionaires competing against one another to form the most powerful model that allows them to dominate us and their competitors.

    As long as this technology remains determined by those whose entire existence is organized around domination, it will be a sum harm to all of us. We’d have to free it from their grips to make it meaningful in our daily lives.




  • Pro-Palestine protestors really seem to get the pigs into a rage. They must believe that they’ll be able to get away with it.

    And so far, it looks like they have. Right now, in the U.S., the Trumplicans (and Leon) are revoking the visas of international students who took part in protests to support Palestine. I’d guess for every couple we hear about there are a hundred more we don’t.

    It seems strange the countries all over the world are using similar violence against anyone protesting the Zionist genocide.