How good was your weekend?

Mug.

The alluring Persian form.

Nation Demands More Mind-Blowing Guitar Solos

https://entertainment.theonion.com/nation-demands-more-mind-blowing-guitar-solos-1819576265

Arvada woman trying to stomach $500 fine for free airline snack

http://kdvr.com/2018/04/20/arvada-woman-trying-to-stomach-500-fine-for-free-airline-snack/

How good was your weekend? ~ Crid at April 22, 2018 10:39 PM

Yes, America is various. But that picture does not cover the entire variety that is America.

In that picture, we're seeing six graduate degrees (five of them, Ivy League), four Ivy League undergraduate degrees, one Little Sister undergraduate degree, six private school undergraduate degrees, and only one state school degree.

Nonetheless, what a fabulous picture and a refreshingly non-partisan take on it.

Remember the big blowup when a Philadelphia Starbucks barista told a uniformed police officer the restrooms were for customers only? How many stores were closed for "sensitivity training" then?

You daily dose of intrasexual competition:

https://i.imgur.com/wYBsCgk.png

Per this court’s interpretation, it’s criminal stalking in Minnesota to send two or more @tweets to a person knowing they would cause the person to “feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated.”

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/04/court-affirms-stalking-and-harassment-conviction-for-tagged-tweets-in-re-ajb.htm

Here's a thing.

If you watched my earlier link to a speech from this guy you can skip the first five minutes, but you should watch this half-hour, which ends with my favorite word.

andace Owens is the pseudo-left’s worst nightmare: A formidable young black woman saying the emperor has no clothes.

https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/988220591823052801

Huh. I would think going for a dismissal with prejudice would be...better. But, asking for discovery on the DNC's "hacked" server would be priceless.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-20/trump-counter-dnc-lawsuit-seeks-servers-clinton-emails-and-pakistani-mystery-man

If you watched my earlier link to a speech from this guy you can skip the first five minutes, but you should watch this half-hour, which ends with my favorite word. ~ Crid at April 23, 2018 8:57 AM

I like the video and he brings up some very intriguing points. However, in laying the blame solely at the feet of the Big Four, Professor Galloway seems to ignore that the consumer has chosen to shop at Amazon; and that brick-and-mortar retailers have failed to keep up with consumer shopping patterns.

Main Street is not going out of business because of Amazon, it's going out of business because the very people decrying the decline of Main Street USA started shopping at Amazon.

He also ignores that brick-and-mortar retailers have made some egregious cost-cutting inventory choices. For example, I wear a 33.5" sleeve in dress shirts. I used to buy a 34" sleeve and when it shrunk, I had a perfect fit. Not any more.

At Macy's (and other supposedly high-end brick-and-mortar department stores), I am given two sleeve length choices for a dress shirt, 32-33 or 34-35. This translates into a choice between a 32.5" or a 34.5" sleeve - an inch too long or an inch too short. So, I am driven by the retailers' cost-cutting moves to purchase my shirts from a custom shirtmaker or an online retailer. Bye bye, Macy's.

His argument to break up the Big Four is interesting and he supports it well with his Microsoft-Netscape example. I think he has a Socialist's faith in regulation as the creator of a middle class and driver of shareholder value, but he makes a point worth pondering. Unfettered capitalism has always been its own worst enemy.

right & @Wikileaks is a Russian intelligence asset, wouldnt that mean that @xychelsea (Manning) was a Russian spy?

Wouldnt that also mean that when President @BarackObama gave her a commutation he was colluding with the Russians?

Isnt this a fun game?

No no. First, the failure of Americans with respect to Amazon is not that people shop there, it's that they don't hold the firm to standards of even moderate taxation and community participation. Where they can righteously offer lower prices, no one should begrudge customers for shopping with them. But as regards the pass given to the company by the typical standards of corporate citizenship, Galloway's preferred villain —fingered in about a dozen of the YouTubes and interviews I've heard— is "the man in the mirror."

Secondly, in many of those same clips (and I can't do a custom edit for Amy's readership), he squarely confronts & refutes the unsurprising (though mistaken) presumption that a lefty prof at NYC would be socialist.

I think his argument is airtight, if yet untested by a citizenry that needs to get serious about this shit in a hurry. But be clear: That favorite word of mine, the one that ended the earlier link, is capitalist.

Old English is still more legible than Leet Speak

https://twitter.com/BritishMedieval/status/987839864967221249

...he squarely confronts & refutes the unsurprising (though mistaken) presumption that a lefty prof at NYC would be socialist. ~ Crid at April 23, 2018 12:03 PM

I think his argument is airtight, if yet untested by a citizenry that needs to get serious about this shit in a hurry. But be clear: That favorite word of mine, the one that ended the earlier link, is capitalist. ~ Crid at April 23, 2018 12:03 PM

I get that. And I never said he was a socialist, merely that he seems to have a socialist's faith in government regulation to keep the system functioning smoothly and fair.

Don't get me wrong, we need some form of regulation of the economy, whether government or otherwise. As I mentioned, unfettered capitalism is its own worst enemy, too often devolving into monopolies, cronyism, and collusion - much like we're seeing now with the Big Four.

Government oversight, with its virtually limitless "for the people" basis for authority, always brings with it the question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And human civilization has not found a good answer for that yet. Private oversight too often devolves into a private club for the benefit of existing members.

As for the lack of community involvement and corporate citizenship by online companies, he's made some very good points. Apple hiding its profits in a tiny subsidiary in England does neither England nor the US any good.

I used to work for a grocery chain when Walmart was the big threat. The Bentonville chain could sell the same products we did, but at cost to lure in customers, and make up any lost profit up with non-grocery goods.

We could not compete with racks of clothing, school supplies, or kitchen supplies available for impulse purchase. Walmart changed retailing. The old model had customers doing a discount chain shop once per month. Walmart turned it into a weekly trip, disrupting the weekly trip that grocery business models were built on. Amazon has done the same thing to Walmart, Target, and Kroger.

People complained then that Walmart was not locally-conscious or conscientious; that the company was not a good corporate citizen. Given modern advances in technology, we may need to revamp our definition of good corporate citizenship to keep up. A digital company based in Seattle simply cannot physically satisfy the good corporate citizen needs of far-flung towns.

As we saw in the recent Congressional Facebook grilling and Microsoft questioning 20 years ago, our legislators do not understand technology, nor are they intellectually equipped to legislate for a global and/or digital economy.

That Congress has turned its opportunities to learn something into grandstanding photo ops is a reflection of the politicians we elect. No one was there to listen to Zuckerman or Gates and learn something, they were there to give speeches and produce soundbites for the evening news.

That we continue to elect such naifs and opportunists is on us, the electorate, not on Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos, who are merely playing by the rules in effect.

Galloway's voice is a necessary one for the debate we need to have. I hope for our sake he keeps it up, even if I don't always agree with him.

Kanye Trump -

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/04/kanye-west-2024-posters-hit-streets-of-la-chicago-and-new-york-city-following-weekend-tweets/

The balls on this guy.

https://twitter.com/SeanParnellUSA/status/988144935311499266

I've grown to hate the term 'tech' for classifying companies. Lets be honest, there really isn't such a thing. What does facebook do? It sells advertising. What does google do? It sells advertising. That they use computers and the internet to do this is irrelevant. They are media companies. The NY Times, WSJ, Chron, they all offer online versions these days. In what way are they different?

Same with Amazon. A lot of what they are just doing what Sears did decades ago. They are a catalog company. That they put the catalog on the internet isn't that big of a change. Plenty of other companies are doing the same. They are also a media or cable company with their movie and TV show distribution.

But if you claim you are 'tech' then you can get around the old regulations tied to your business. That gives these companies an unfair competitive advantage. Same with the tax loopholes. So it isn't the markets that have failed as Galloway claims. It is the government. The markets are reacting quite rationally. If you have a competitor who doesn't have your regulatory costs and can pay a fraction of your tax bill then there really is little reason to compete. You may be able to offer a better product. But those two costs are far more than your profit margin. So there is no way to compete on price.

So go ahead and do what Galloway says. Use anti-trust to break up facebook, google, apple, and amazon. It won't make a difference. They will still have their government given advantages. No benefit will come to us.

Instead I say classify them correctly. Abolish 'tech' as a label. Want to do media, then you are a media company with all the rights and regulations associated with it. Want to sell food, you are a grocer. Being a tech grocer isn't a thing. You are a grocer. Uber is a cab company. If you stop giving favored treatment to companies that are 'on the internet!' then the markets will fix themselves and the problem will go away.

Cybersecurity is hard. It is even harder when you disable things like screen locks because they're inconvenient. Someone with skills and inclined to do harm could have made very good use of target like this.

Near the end of an essay published Friday, New York Times writer Amy Chozick reveals something she claims to have never told anybody before while covering the Clinton campaign.

"I never told anyone this, but one time when I’d been visiting the Brooklyn campaign headquarters I found an iPhone in the women’s room," Chozick wrote in the piece adapted from her forthcoming book, "Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling." "I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to belong to Mr. Podesta’s assistant because when I picked it up, a flood of calendar alerts for him popped up."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/potential-john-podesta-cybersecurity-hazard-newly-revealed

So it isn't the markets that have failed as Galloway claims. It is the government.

So...maybe instead of shackling these internet giants, we should unshackle their erstwhile competitors? and lower the barriers of entry into the market and maybe attract new players?

Remember there is a reason why the major companies got on board with ObamaCare: the employer mandate would insure that they would never face a newer, nimbler competitor in their market. No one would ever get big enough to become a threat, since there was too much incentive to stay small.

Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.

What's more dangerous: rugby, or a walk in the woods? At Pennsylvania State University, the administrators apparently think it's the latter.

The student "Outing Club," which has gone backpacking, kayaking, and hiking in state parks over the course of its 98-year-existence, will no longer be allowed to host outdoor events after administrators conducted a risk assessment, according to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

https://reason.com/blog/2018/04/22/penn-state-outing-club-safety

> maybe instead of shackling these
> internet giants, we should unshackle
> their erstwhile competitors

✓

But if you claim you are 'tech' then you can get around the old regulations tied to your business. That gives these companies an unfair competitive advantage. Same with the tax loopholes. ~ Ben at April 23, 2018 1:46 PM

Again, Congress does not understand tech, thinking it is an industry unto itself and not simply a way of getting something done.

Facebook is an updated AOL, a media company. Twitter is a broadcasting company, again media.

If the old regulations unfairly hamstring newly emerged companies using new technologies, like Facebook or Twitter, perhaps the regulations need to be reviewed and rewritten. Instead, we're trying to govern the Internet using the 1934 Telecommunications Act.

So...maybe instead of shackling these internet giants, we should unshackle their erstwhile competitors? and lower the barriers of entry into the market and maybe attract new players? ~ I R A Darth Aggie at April 23, 2018 2:09 PM

Exactly.

Apropos of both these comments: FedEx is eating UPS's lunch because UPS is classified as a "trucking" company and hobbled by trucking regulations (2010 article from The Hill). FedEx is classified as an airline/railroad. They face different regulatory hurdles, UPS falls under the NLRA and FedEx the Railway Labor Act - but they're in the same business.

Because they're classified differently, they have to deal with very different unions, UPS with a Teamsters union that can go on strike and FedEx with a union that cannot.

As Amy has said before, it is good to help out other people.

The Science Behind How Sportsmanship Helped Desiree Linden Win Boston

Also, the Galloway video was a good one. I don't necessarily think he is a socialist, although he does seem left of center, sort of like an old-line Democrats before the hard left took over the party.

IMO, socialists might be perfectly happy if Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple WERE monopolies. They could be like governmental entities controlling "the means of production", as it were, even if they aren't actually part of the government.

I personally do not think they need to be broken up at this time, but as IRA said, the barriers to entry need to be broken down for smaller competitors. I'm sure the mild deregulation and lower corporate and pass-through taxes passed last year have helped in that regard, but there is much more to do.

If these Big Four do need to be broken up in the future, it will be because they have simply become big enough to nearly completely buy off all levels of government and to effectively run our lives, effectively being quasi-governmental regulatory entities in their own right.

So...maybe instead of shackling these internet giants, we should unshackle their erstwhile competitors? and lower the barriers of entry into the market and maybe attract new players? ~ I R A Darth Aggie at April 23, 2018 2:09 PM

I'm all for that on the regulation side. We overregulate things way too much. But on the tax side you are going to have to cut spending a lot to make that work. The big 'tech' companies pay an effective tax rate around 2-4%. Walmart is 19%. Exxon and such are around 50%. The middle is around 29%, but that should drop next year. The tax disparity explains why when Amazon gets into a business everyone else gets out. If you are paying Uncle Sam 30% and Bezos is paying 3% you flat can't compete.

And I see this loopy tax treatment in my own life. Back in 2010 I became an independent contractor. Since then there is zero correlation between how much money I make and how much taxes I pay. How I make my money is important. How I spend my money is important. But last year I made less money and had to pay $5k more in taxes. My tax rate varies 10-18%, which is less than I paid as an employee (22%). I don't even try to guess how much I owe anymore. I just pay the minimum required to not owe a penalty and then I settle up in April. My experience is that how much I owe is a completely unpredictable number. I have to wait till everything is in before it can be calculated.

So back on topic, if you want to drop the corporate tax rate down to 4% or even 0% I'm interested. But the federal government already spends more than it takes in and corporate taxes are 10% of revenue.

> Congress does not understand tech

As someone put it the day the Senate testimony started, 'Zuck has been called in to explain the internet to Grandpa.' We're lucky there was no chat about a "series of tubes" or "Wargames."

Galloway describes the probable patterns of Zuck's preparation.

It was always going to be a bloodbath.

Seriously, this guy has seen some shit.

What's a Greater Leap of Faith: God or the Multiverse?

https://www.prageru.com/videos/whats-greater-leap-faith-god-or-multiverse