Category: Uncategorized

The tech crackdown

France fines Apple more than $1 billion:

France’s national competition regulator announced on Monday it has fined American tech giant Apple a record €1.1 billion ($1.23bn) for anti-competitive practices after nearly a decade of investigations. The decision comes over Apple’s alleged anti-competitive behavior in its distribution and sales networks.

The authority said that two of Apple’s wholesalers, Tech Data and Ingram Micro, were fined €63 million and €76 million respectively for unlawfully agreeing on prices.

According to the French regulator, “Apple and its two wholesalers have agreed not to compete with each other and to prevent distributors from competing with each other, thereby sterilising the wholesale market for Apple products.”

Expect other European countries to follow suit soon. Pretty much everyone around the world is utterly sick of the unethical and anti-competitive behavior of the US-based tech giants. Their rising competitors are going to clean their clocks over the next decade.

Addio, open borders

At long last, the rotting intellectual corpse of David Ricardo is finally buried:

France, Germany and Bulgaria today blocked travel even within the free-moving Schengen zone as the EU proposed barring all overseas visitors from entering for 30 days to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Border guards were seen across the continent tonight locking off the crossings between Spain and France, Portugal and Spain, Switzerland and France, and in Germany’s northern coastal states police prepared to block tourism.

It’s probably too optimistic to assume that the econonazis will not start pushing for open borders and the free movement of people the moment the health crisis is over, but at least we will have a powerful rhetorical argument to utilize against them.

A desirable extinction

And long overdue. If the primary casualty is globalism, the winner is humanity:

Globalists May Soon Become an Extinct Species

The disruptions caused by the spread of the coronavirus mean supply chains will be moved closer to home rather than in foreign lands.

The coronavirus’s depressing effects on the global economy and disruptions of supply chains is no doubt driving the last nail into the coffin of the globalists.

They believe in the theory first articulated by Englishman David Ricardo (1773-1823) that free trade among nations benefits all of them. He argued for the comparative advantage of free trade and industrial specialization. Even if one country is more competitive in every area than its trading partners, that nation should only concentrate on the areas in which it has the greatest competitive advantage. He used the example of English-produced wool being traded for French wine—and not the reverse.

But Ricardo’s simple trade model requires economies in static equilibrium with full employment and neither trade surpluses nor deficits, and similar living standards. These aren’t true in the real world. Also, Ricardo didn’t consider countries at different stages of economic development and different degrees of economic and political freedom, or exchange rate manipulations and competitive devaluations since gold was universal money in his day.

Ricardo also didn’t factor in trading partners with huge wage differences such as the U.S. and China.

Corona-chan is demonstrating the truth of Big Bear’s sophisticated critique of free trade. Ricardo retardo. Thank you, Corona-chan!

Fortress Europe

The Schengen area closes its borders:

The EU today revealed plans to shut itself off from all outsiders as it takes drastic measures to halt the spread of coronavirus. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a proposed ban on all non-essential travel by non-citizens into the 26-nation Schengen free travel area for 30 days.

In addition, emergency medical and food supplies into the bloc will be able to use special ‘fast lanes’ to ensure health services and supermarkets can cope with demand.

The Schengen area includes 22 EU countries but not member states Ireland, Cyprus, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria. Non EU-members Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein are also within it.

Introversion intensifies….. I’m contemplating giving up talking on the telephone. We don’t know that the virus can be transmitted via sound waves, but one can’t be too careful.

Creepy Joe rejects VP of color

Creepy Joe appears to have ruled out people of color as well as white men from his list of potential running mates:

Joe Biden picked what will probably be his last debate with Bernie Sanders to make a big announcement … if he gets the nomination, he’s picking a woman to run with him. Biden left no wiggle room. He said there are women in this country who, right now, are capable of being President of the United States, and he intends to pick one of them.

Biden also said the first chance he gets to nominate a U.S. Supreme Court Justice … he’ll pick a black woman, saying it’s about time.

It’s interesting to see how the ancient Democratic leadership doesn’t understand the current mindset of their own party members. They are still living in the 80’s and under the impression that picking a female vice-presidential candidate is bold, edgy, and progressive. They don’t realize that anyone other than a black woman is racist and offensive, and preferably, said black woman would also be transgender, lesbian, and handicapped in some way.

“Easter” means “Resurrection”

A poster asked about Easter on SocialGalactic:

Why do churches say Easter? Isn’t Easter a pagan holiday? I’ve started to say Resurrection Sunday at church and ppl ignore me.

Easter is not a pagan holiday. That’s atheist nonsense that requires an almost-complete ignorance of literally every foreign language but one. While there is a possible etymological link to the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre for whom there is absolutely no evidence outside of the writings of the venerable, but inventive Bede, but since the Germans use “Easter” too and English is partially derived from German, the word is much more likely linked to the old German word for resurrection, which is Erstehen.

One of the earliest appearances of “Easter” in English is in the Tyndale Bible, which actually refers to Ester. Remember, the conventional accusation about Easter being a pagan holiday concerned Ishtar, an Akkadian goddess of love and war, but that was never a viable explanation because none of the other European languages have any possible etymological link to a pagan holiday. Their Paschae, Pasqua, Pâques, Pascua, etc. all trace back to Passover.

So, the usual suspects dug around the history books and came up with Eostre, who was not a German goddess and for whom there is no evidence in the German linguistic record. But they did posit – or to put more clearly, made up – a nonexistent precursor goddess to a probably-invented goddess, whose nonexistent holiday could theoretically have been coopted by English and German Christians in the Sixteenth Century while celebrating the Erstehen on Paschae.

Needless to say, this makes absolutely no sense to anyone who is capable of understanding the conventional ordering of cause and effect. Note in particular that the first and only known reference to Eostre is in 725 AD, and the first known references to Ester and Passover, both of which are English neologisms popularized, if not necessarily coined by Tyndale, were in 1526 AD, centuries after Paskha (πάσχα) was first celebrated by Christians.

From Infogalactic’s Eostre page: a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn is supported both by the evidence of cognate names and the similarity of mythic representation of the dawn goddess among various Indo-European groups… all of this evidence permits us to posit a Proto-Indo-European *haéusōs ‘goddess of dawn’ who was characterized as a “reluctant” bringer of light for which she is punished.

Since Easter most likely means Resurrection, it is unnecessary, redundant, and more than a little spergish to make a point of trying to force “Resurrection Sunday” on others.

Mailvox: deal with it, Boomer

I am a boomer and an ER physician and I agree completely with your prioritizing younger people over older people when resources are limited and given that all other factors are equal. Unfortunately, they almost never are.

Except, of course, they already are now in many countries, and if events follow the expected course, they will be in the USA too. There are 5,000 respirators in the UK available to serve as many as 7.9 million cases. The Italians are already adopting triage practices and other European nations are anticipating the need to do so.

And frankly, this relentless boomer bashing and treating the worst of my generation as exemplary gets really annoying.

This sensitivity is downright amusing. My generation has found the relentless Boomer boomering to be really annoying for as long as we can remember. You Boomers were annoying when you were getting divorced and our friends were returning to elementary school in the fall with haunted expressions and new last names. You were annoying when Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven was named the #1 most-requested song on the main rock station for the 25th year in a row. You were annoying when you first proclaimed 40 the new 30, then 50 the new 30, then 70 the new 50.

And Boomers are still every bit as annoying today. I recently saw a grotesque television commercial that literally showed incontinent old Boomer women rolling around in their underwear, with the tagline OUR BODIES CHANGE, BUT WHY SHOULD WE? The name of the commercial? Of course, it’s AGELESS. Companies wouldn’t still be marketing to the Boomer’s trademark generational narcissism if it didn’t continue to work for them.

The Boomers haven’t changed. They don’t want to change. They are still proud of who and what they are. And that is why the younger generations, particularly Generation X and the Zoomers, will continue to relentlessly despise them. The thing is, we’ve been doing it all along, they were just too self-absorbed to even notice. But now that the media culture no longer caters solely to them, they’re shocked to discover that they weren’t considered cool, they aren’t admired, and no one else wants to be like them.

17 games is go

I hate the concept, of course, as well as the expansion of the playoffs, but no one asked me. In any event, the NFLPA approved the new CBA agreement with the NFL owners in a very close vote:

NFL players voted to approve the new proposed collective bargaining agreement, which signals 10 years of labor peace, increased revenue share for players, added benefits for former players, an expansion to a 17-game NFL regular season and more playoff teams.

The 10-day voting period closed at 11:59 p.m. on Saturday night. Owners voted to approve the new CBA on Feb. 20.

The NFL Players Association issued the following statement:

“NFL players have voted to approve ratification of a new collective bargaining agreement by a vote tally of 1,019 to 959. This comes after a long and democratic process in accordance with our constitution. An independent auditor received submitted ballots through a secure electronic platform, then verified, tallied and certified the results.”

It’s not all bad, and in fact, it helps the average player quite a bit. But it’s still sad to see the records of yesteryear rendered even more irrelevant as what was left of the league’s historical continuity is further destroyed.

If you’re not convinced Q is real

Consider this bit of obvious paid hasbara at CDAN:

5:26 PM
Blogger Yaccub said…
QAnon conspiracy is a fever dream of sick people with dangerous urges. If you Fetishize QAnon you’re likely the problem.

5:26 PM
Blogger Yaccub said…
QAnon conspiracy is a fever dream of sick people with dangerous urges. If you Fetishize QAnon you’re likely the problem.

5:26 PM
Blogger Yaccub said…
QAnon conspiracy is a fever dream of sick people with dangerous urges. If you Fetishize QAnon you’re likely the problem.

Someone is observably going to a lot of trouble to convince people that Q is not legitimate.