The Potemkin “Tech” Industry

Russia and China have figured out what Westerners should have known for decades:

Russia has fined Google about US$373 million for allowing users to access, “prohibited” material about the war in Ukraine and other restricted content. The material was said to include materials attempting to discredit Russia’s military, as well as exhortations to protest the Russian government, according to Roskomnadzor, the country’s communications regulator. It added that the company has proven a “systemic” violator of national laws regarding content.

Google has not commented on the fines.

The company’s local subsidiary had declared bankruptcy last month after Russian authorities had seized its bank account to recover 7.2 billion rubles, or US$130 million which the company had been fined for similar violations last year.

The moves are part of a broader regulatory push by the Russian government to place pressure on tech firms, which they accuse of not moderating their content in accordance with Russian laws, and of trying to meddle in the nation’s internal affairs.

The key phrase: “trying to meddle in the nation’s internal affairs”. AC spells out the obvious conclusion.

It is clear at this point all of these tech companies are just subsidiaries of our intelligence apparatus. And given it is no coincidence that every top tech company is just taking orders from intel, that means intel has been throughout our economic system deciding who wins and who loses, and making sure it is their operations who win every time. We were never in a capitalist system, any more than we elected our leaders. All along, the idea you could have a killer app, form a business, and be just like Bill Gates was just a myth. Intel was always deployed domestically, even throughout the world of American business, working against any American who was not on their payroll and under their control.

We’re going to need a new economic theory simply to explain the way in which the “capitalist” system has been functioning since the 1980s at the absolute latest. Everything that we’re taught in microeconomics is observably untrue; the winners in far too many industries are evidently not determined by efficiency or competition or even luck, but rather by the hidden, but heavy hand of secret government funding.

It’s very much like the oft-criticized industrial policy of Japan, only on steroids. Instead of MITI selecting key industries in which to invest for maximizing economic growth, Big Brother is selecting favored corporations in every industry in which to invest for a) gathering information for the Panopticon and b) establishing official narratives.

Among other things, this absconomic theory will explain why modern corporations, from technology to entertainment, are increasingly unable to address the basic needs and preferences of their nominal customers.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Elite Faked Their Vaxxes

As we all suspected even before the likes of Boris Johnson were being publicly “vaccinated” by syringes with the cap on, it appears that a significant portion of the corporate elite may have arranged to avoid the experimental gene therapies to which the masses were repeatedly subjected.

Jose Maria Fernandez Sousa-Faro, president of European pharmaceuticals giant PharmaMar, has been charged by police with being falsely vaccinated against Covid-19. Dr. Sousa-Faro has been caught up in a scandal in Europe involving people being added to the National Immunization Registry in exchange for large sums of money, with many of them familiar faces and household names.

Police allege that Sousa-Faro arranged to be injected with a saline solution instead of a Covid-19 vaccination and paid thousands of dollars to have his name added to Spain’s immunization register, as confirmed by police sources and reported by El Periodico de Espana.

Dr. Sousa-Faro is among more than 2,200 celebrities and European elites on the list drawn up by National Police of those falsely vaccinated against Covid. According to El Mundo, Spanish police carried out the investigation called Operation Jenner which uncovered the vast network of celebrities and elites who have paid money to have their names fraudulently entered on the National Immunization Register, despite refusing to be vaccinated.

The leader of the network was a nursing assistant at the La Paz University Hospital, where he is accused of charging more than €200,000 euros for fraudulently registering 2,200 people as vaccinated in the National Registry against Covid-19. He has been arrested and is currently in custody.

On a surprise scale of 1 to 100, this is about a 4. It was fairly obvious that the globalist elites were getting saline because they haven’t been dropping dead at the same rate as ordinary people. About the only thing I find surprising is that it doesn’t appear to have been officially organized by some high-level WHO agency.

I suspect at least twice as many people are unvaccinated as are presently believed to be.

DISCUSS ON SG


It’s All Fake

And, of course, gay. Karl Denninger contemplates the possibility that social media is a mirage:

Twitter claims that “less than 5% of the users on their system are bots/spam/fake.” Ok, that’s testable. It’s also very material to the value of the company. Indeed its the entire reason someone buys advertising on these sites and thus forms the basis of the entire firm’s value; if the entire site is full of bots and not people then the value of said “advertising” and thus the company’s value is zero.

So Musk asked (in public, natch) for the evidence that the “less than 5% bot” claim was true.

Twitter’s CEO refused to provide said evidence, claiming that it would require disclosing “non-public” information.

Well, once you have an agreement to acquire something you get to look. It’s no different than a house; if you think there might be something wrong with the foundation you can have it inspected. Your purchase contract allows you to perform diligence to your satisfaction and further, if the seller is aware of a material falsehood that is part of the representations made he’s required to disclose it.

As someone who has sold a company anything you represent as true is certainly fair game for the buyer to ask to see in evidence and that absolutely includes anything you publicly claimed to be true under penalty of perjury in a 10Q or 10K.

The argument that its “non-public” information that is used to prove this is crap; the entire purpose of the NDA that you sign when you enter into such a transaction and perform your diligence is that you get to look under the Kimono to your satisfaction.

So…. what’s really going on here?

Never mind this report — that basically half of Biden’s “follows” are fake. Worse, 70% of Musk’s are too according to that article.

Would you mind explaining to me how “less than 5% of the accounts are bots” when half of the President of the United States’ accounts and 70% of Elon Musk’s are, by audit, fake?

More to the point: What percentage of “people” (“Daily Average Users” and “Monthly Average Users”) allegedly on these social media sites are actually….. people?

Is there any actual value in these “social media” firms at all or are they all ENRON on steroids?

I know it’s all fraudulent, because I’ve been able to see the difference between a) a blog post, b) a Twitter tweet with 33k followers, c) a Facebook post, d) a Gab post with 30k followers, and e) a Darkstream comment for years. The only two that ever moves the needle much were (a) and (e), with a distinct advantage to (a).

Mike Cernovich told me, several years ago, that he had reached similar conclusions, and his Twitter following dwarfed mine.

DISCUSS ON SG


You Can’t Fight the Market

Even mighty Amazon has finally been forced to submit to the inexorable forces of the market:

Amazon quietly updated its help documentation to state that Kindle devices will start supporting EPUB files.

There’s a catch, though. “Beginning in late 2022, Send to Kindle applications will support EPUB (.EPUB) format,” says the document. This means you’ll be able to send EPUB files to your Kindle via Amazon’s handy Send to Kindle system, which essentially lets you upload documents to your Kindle by emailing them to your Kindle email address. It’s unclear, however, whether Kindles will natively support EPUB files, allowing you to purchase ebooks from Amazon’s library in the EPUB format directly.

This is a big deal for everyone who owns a Kindle and isn’t completely reliant on Amazon’s library. Until now, you had to manually convert EPUB files into MOBI (or another format) to load them onto your Kindle, and this often brought additional issues as the conversion wasn’t always perfect.

Also, the news is notable for the sheer fact that Amazon avoided supporting the otherwise widely supported EPUB format for nearly 15 years (EPUB is an open standard that originally launched in September 2007).

Additionally, Amazon’s document says that – also in late 2022 – its Send to Kindle system will stop supporting MOBI files (ironically, MOBI was Amazon’s long-preferred standard, and the company has its own version of MOBI called AZW).

It certainly took them long enough to accept the inevitable. But it’s a very powerful lesson in learning not to fight the market. It is said that the heart wants what it wants, regardless of what logic dictates, and the same is true of the market. The sooner any entrepreneur or business accepts this reality, the less likely it is to make unnecessary and unforced errors.

DISCUSS ON SG


Mailvox: An Insider’s Take

A friend who correctly called fake news on Jack Maxey of the false Hunter Biden laptop leak also offered me his take on Elon Musk and his recent actions, including the acquisition of Twitter.

Musk is a premier mechanism by which a certain faction of USG routes around the scleroticism of fedgov.

Most obviously with SpaceX contra United Launch Alliance, but also Tesla to counter Chinese electrotech dominance, Boring Company for post-drone swarm underground warfare, Neuralink for 1) controlling said drone swarms 2) AGI via human brain activity cloning.

His entire portfolio of companies is dual use for military purposes. Twitter is the public infowar arena for the Deep State.

Now Musk and by extension this faction own it.

Difficult to tell if this faction is friendly, neutral or hostile. They appear to me to be at the least not obviously friendly. This will be a public, reasonably sensitive test as to whether they are useful, depending on how they handle banned anti-prog accounts and ongoing anti-prog (note the distinction from rightist) speech.

Considering that Ivan Throne has already managed to get himself banned from the New and Improved Twitter (Musk edition), I am confident that all of Musk’s blatherings about FREE SPEECH are nothing more than empty rhetoric and advertising to bring all the basic conservatives and their gatekeepers back into the conservative sheepfold.

As far as I’m concerned, literally nothing has changed.

Furthermore, I note that the Enlightenment value of consequence-free freedoms of speech and expression is neither a Christian moral value nor a societal virtue. Societal virtue is determined by qualititative measures, not quantitative ones.

A society or an institution that permits everything is better described as licentious, not free, while a society or an institution that bans blasphemy, obscenity, and vulgarity is fundamentally different than one that bans the existence of opinions about historical events, sexual behaviors, and certain nations.

Musk’s faction is almost certainly more libertarian and licentious than the social justice faction, but it’s entirely possible that, given his predilection for dabbling with women enamored of spiritual darkness, that it is even more deeply wicked.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Funding Challenge

Karl Denninger reminds us that what appears to be a financial battle of rival capitalists is, in fact, absolutely nothing of the sort:

I do not believe for a second that, should Elon succeed, he will publish who decided what and on what basis; not algorithmically nor on a personal basis along with naming each and every person with a finger on the button. That data, by the way, I’m very certain Twitter has stored in their systems since every firm and organization that touches anything related to a customer always has an audit trail on it so you can fix errors — legitimate errors. In addition said audit trail is necessary for accountability because rogue employees do exist and its not at all uncommon to have to find out who did a given thing and take care of said person’s insolence.

Plenty of people point to Section 230 in this regard, but that’s not really the issue at all. Section 230 only addresses liability, not activity. I warned back when it was debated (and I was an Internet CEO at the time, thus knew damn well how this all intermeshed) that Section 230 was extraordinarily-poor in its crafting and would be abused for that reason. Bad laws are always abused. It was simply a matter of how, not what.

The real argument, as I pointed out back in the 1990s and have maintained (including in my filings to the FCC on net neutrality and in this column) is that there are multiple types of Internet services and they are not the same. We used to look at the character of services provided to determine if there was a common public interest in some sort of regulation. That all went down the toilet with the post-2000 craze of “social media”, along with the abuse of Section 230 which was in fact used to shield bad actors doing things that were blatantly illegal (such as promoting sex trafficking.)

The problem we have today is a function of the evolution of abuse enabled by that bad law. It is no longer possible to set up anything other than your own infrastructure to create a potential Twitter competitor, for example, because the existing firms control the infrastructure and will ban you. AWS and other “cloud” providers have proved this repeatedly.

Then, and this is the kicker, having spent money to build it you have to fund its operation somehow. Twitter, Facesucker, Google and similar do not set their policies in a vacuum; they set them based on how they fund their business. You can spend billions building infrastructure but if you can’t come up with a funding model that works you’re ultimately headed for bankruptcy. The real problem lies there and I’m reasonably certain Musk knows it.

I, too, am aware of this being the primary issue, which is why UATV, Castalia, and Arktoons are all built around a subscription model that relies upon their subscribers and prioritizes the interests of those subscribers over everything else. In a world that is fake, stupid, and gay, in which centralized financial giants propped up by governments and central banks determine the winners and the losers, going direct to the clients/customers/users and providing them with the goods and services they actually want is the only viable path for business anymore.

The contract economy is done. The advertising economy is done. The corpocracy cannot be trusted to live up to even the simplest and most basic of its obligations. Go local and/or go direct, or go under.

DISCUSS ON SG


Mailvox: It Was Their Choice (German Edition)

We know the Narrative has shifted, since governments and corporations are now attempting to escape responsibility for the very gene therapies they mandated for their citizens and employees:

Was recently privy to some internal discussion at a large, German software company which indicated that employees filing for additional medical reimbursement for vaxx-related injuries are being told that it was their personal choice to be vaxxed or not. 

This flies in the face of the policy of said company which had it’s own private mandate in the US division.  Employee identification badges which also serve as office entry passes for electronic locks were disabled until they provided vaxx documentation in an internally developed software application.  Until the documentation was posted into the app, access was denied.  There was discussion of allowing religious or medical exemptions, but deadlines were shifted and there was never a final, final date enforced for the exemption to be put in place.  

All of this is in light of the recent notification that the vaccine “policy” (it’s a mandate) is only “suspended” currently.  It hasn’t been eliminated or revoked… it’s only suspended.  

In other words, this corporation still has a mandate, but it’s going to try to pretend it never existed in the first place. Even if the courts are entirely corrupt, that’s a bold move, Cotton. We’ll see how that works out for them.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Renaissance Man

It turns out that the Russians were telling the truth, there is a direct tie between the Biden crime family and the US bioweapon laboratories in the Ukraine, and the FBI was in possession of the evidence proving that for more than 15 months prior to the Russian special military operation there:

Russia’s assertion that President Biden’s son Hunter was “financing . . . biological laboratories in Ukraine” was based in truth, according to e-mails reviewed by The Post.

A trove of e-mails on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — the existence of which was exclusively reported by The Post in October 2020 — found that he played a role in helping a California defense contractor analyze killer diseases and bioweapons in Ukraine.

Moscow has claimed that secret American biological-warfare labs in Ukraine were a justification for its unprovoked invasion of the neighboring country last month. It doubled down on the accusations Thursday, claiming the labs produced biochemical weapons at the Biden family’s behest.

“US President Joe Biden himself is involved in the creation of biolaboratories in Ukraine,” Russia’s State Duma speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin said, according to state media.

“An investment fund run by his sun [sic] Hunter Biden funded research and the implementation of the United States’ military biological program. It is obvious that Joe Biden, as his father and the head of state, was aware of that activity,” Volodin continued, demanding a US Congressional investigation and a White House explanation.

US intelligence officials had earlier dismissed Russia’s messaging as war propaganda, explaining that Ukraine’s network of biological labs dedicated to pathogen research were not secret, and had publicly received funding from Washington.

However, Russia’s new claim that the first son’s investment fund was involved in raising money for biolab projects in Ukraine was accurate, according to e-mails involving Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine, first obtained by The Post and initially reported on by The Daily Mail Friday.

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners invested $500,000 in the San Francisco pathogen research company Metabiota and raised millions more through firms that included Goldman Sachs, according to the e-mails found on the computer, which was abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 as Joe Biden ran for president.

Hunter introduced Metabiota to officials at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where he was a board member, for a “science project” involving biolabs in Ukraine, the e-mails show.

A memo from a Metabiota official to the then-vice president’s son in 2014 said the company could “assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia.”

Hunter’s a busy guy right out of a Bond film written by scriptwriters on an LSD trip. Who would have imagined that when Hunter’s not painting million-dollar paintings, banging prostitutes, banging his relatives, banging his underage relatives, smoking meth, or sitting on the board of major international petrochemical corporations, he’s constructing secret weapons labs in Ukraine.

Some might conclude from all this that he’s just a figurehead intended to be a fall guy for the dark financial forces of the pedocracy, but I think he’s just an example of peak Sigma grindset, the perfect ideal of the modern, multi-talented, 21st-century Renaissance man.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Ticket is No Guarantee

Eventually, the wicked tire of paying the price to pretend their servants are successful:

Investors at BuzzFeed are reportedly pressuring CEO Jonah Peretti to close down its entire money-losing news operation as senior journalists announced their resignations on Tuesday.

Mark Schoffs, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, and two of his top deputies quit in the latest sign of turmoil at the cash-strapped company.

Schoffs informed staffers at the online publication that he would be stepping down on Tuesday, according to The Information. Tom Namako, Schoffs’ deputy news editor, and Ariel Kaminer, the executive editor of investigations, also announced that they planned on leaving their posts, according to the report.

Journalists working for the site have been told that more job cuts are in the offing, The Information reported. Fewer than 30 journalists in the 100-person newsroom have already been offered buyouts, according to CNBC. The reporters who were offered exit packages cover investigations, inequality, politics, and science. Many of them have worked for BuzzFeed for more than a year.

The news operation at BuzzFeed loses around $10 million per year, CNBC reported. BuzzFeed is expected to lose between $15 million and $20 million in the first quarter of this year.

Imagine how much content we could produce if we were willing to burn $80 million per year. And keep in mind, this is what supposed “success” looks like. Who needs it? Who even wants it?

DISCUSS ON SG