Tag: technology

“Private” Companies

The self-appointed defenders of capitalism very much want you to ignore the fact that every single corporation is a government creation. And as such, not only should they not enjoy the Constitutional protections of the rights possessed by individuals who are posterity of the Founders, they should be subject to the same limits that are imposed on the government.

The necessity of this reinterpretation of what is, and what is not, private, is demonstrated by the latest Twitter documents released by Elon Musk.

All social media platforms work with the US government to censor content, Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday. Documents released by Musk following his purchase of Twitter showed that the platform colluded with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information on elections, Ukraine, and Covid-19.

“Every social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” Musk tweeted, adding that “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”

Musk was referring to internal Twitter communications published by journalist Matt Taibbi with his approval, which suggested that the platform’s senior executives held regular meetings with members of the FBI and CIA, during which the agencies gave them lists of “hundreds of problem accounts” to suspend in the run-up to the 2020 election.

In addition to Twitter, the government was in contact “with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi claimed. “These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest.” CIA agents “nearly always” sat in on meetings of these firms with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Taibbi claimed, explaining that although this task force was convened to fight alleged election interference by foreign states, it made “mountains of domestic moderation requests.”

This is a massive series of constitutional and criminal violations. If, as we expect, it goes entirely unpunished, it will serve as further confirmation of the complete illegitimacy of the current U.S. regime.

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Gammacaust on Gab

Remove Reply and Remove Reply and Block are two killer features that will help Gab continue to grow. @a and his team are absolutely killing it. Only retards and losers with zero reach are opposed to these new features, because it limits their ability to spam threads and their attempts to hijack the posts of others. The vast majority of users will greatly appreciate the ability to ignore the retards.

Gab has, with one fell swoop, successfully targeted its biggest weakness, which was the ability for the ill-intentioned to target and harass users on their own posts. This was extremely detrimental to Gab’s most important users, namely, those with large followings, because they are the ones who possess microphones worth hijacking.

Of course, the very retards and losers who are most affected by the fact that most users would very much like to pretend they don’t exist are now screaming “censorship”, which is literally retarded. Gab isn’t censoring anyone. This is not censorship, this is freedom, because forcing people to listen to those they don’t want to listen to is the exact opposite of freedom.

But it should surprise no one that the Gammas on Gab are viewing these new features as a Gammacaust. Now they are only guaranteed the ability to talk about others on their own posts, which means that everyone else has the ability to exclude them and go back to completely ignoring them. And there is no greater fear for the Gamma than being excluded by his social superiors. They’re apoplectic about losing their self-perceived ability to correct, condemn, and criticize people who have no interest in anything they have to say.

UPDATE: In response to the wailing and gnashing of teeth, I added the following:

Dear Self-Appointed Gab Police,

It is amusing to see how you pretend every response is an intelligent and substantive critique that merits serious contemplation on the part of the original poster. This is not even close to being the norm.

The fact is that overwhelming number of “critical” responses are posted by a) retards, b) gammas, c) fedposters, d) paid hasbara accounts, and e) bots. Most of those responses are, at best, a complete waste of time and an insult to human intelligence.

For Gab to give its users the ability to ignore the constant stream of retardery and fake comments is not censorship, it is freedom and user-empowerment. It’s not taking any power away from you, to the contrary, it is giving you and everyone else the freedom to choose how to engage with others on the platform.

If you wish to respond politely and substantively to this post, please do so, whether you agree with me or not. And if you wish to respond in a retarded and vulgar manner, you can certainly do that too.

I just don’t have to put up with that nonsense anymore, thanks to the wisdom of the Gab team.

Regards,
Vox

UPDATE: Torba weighs in with the only two cents that matter. The key being the “hands off” objective. What he’s doing is the exact opposite of censorship.

Gab’s goal has always been to be as hands off as possible with user content. Instead we want to give you the community the tools to create and shape your own experience. Freedom of association is just as important as freedom of speech.

We have a new feature today that gives you the user more control over your own content and your own experience on Gab. Users now have the ability to moderate comments under their own posts. When you post original content on your profile you are the moderator of the conversation happening under that content because it’s your content on your profile.

The comments are not removed completely from the site, they will still be in the “comments” section of someone’s profile who left the comment–but they will no longer be in the comment section under your content when you remove them.

Users also cannot moderate “quote post” replies to their content because those are new pieces of content on someone else’s page. This is a healthy balance that allows for dissent to still be discovered in quote posts and for spam to be removed from the comment section.

No one in entitled to an audience on someone else’s content. If you want to “dunk” on people’s posts with your own take you can always do so with a quote post to your own audience.

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Creepy Creeps Creeping Creepily

AC analyzes a video of two of the murdered Idaho girls recorded the night of their demise, and concludes that they may have been under surveillance prior to their murders. Which tends to look more than a little suspicious in light of what subsequently happened.

What I describe here may not be surveillance. Surveillance is designed to look normal. The things I see could be normal motions and body postures. But they exhibit many mannerisms common to foot surveillance, so we will use them here as examples of what foot surveillance looks like.

The following is a four hour video shot by a food service truck working in Moscow, Idaho, on the night of the Idaho murders. Kaylee Goncalves, and Madison Mogen, two of the students murdered, visited this truck to pick up some food, and were captured on its internet livestream later in the night. It would be significant if these girls were under domestic surveillance coverage before they were murdered, of course.

It’s really rather startling to see the images through the lens of the commentary. Because, while at first it all appears to be innocent and coincidental enough, as the encounter proceeds, it becomes practically undeniable that, at the very least, the various individuals involved a) are acquainted and b) are up to no good.

I would hope the police have already been examining this video closely as well.

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Free Trade is Dead

In amidst the economic pain and disruption incumbent in the fall of Clown World, there are some significant silver linings:

The founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Morris Chang, says geopolitics is having profound effects on the semiconductor industry.

Speaking at an event in Phoenix Arizona, where his firm was debuting an ambitious $40 billion upgrade and expansion of its new manufacturing facility in the state, he explained the new constraints being placed on the sector by the changing geopolitical scene.

Speaking of the new facility, which is TSMC’s first advanced chip plant built in the United States in over two decades, Chang said there remained a lot of hard work ahead, if it was to be a success.

The upgrades for the facility will enable the phoenix plant to manufacture the chips for Apple’s iPhone, which can perform almost 17 trillion specialized calculations per second. TMSC is planning an even newer facility in the state which will house even more advanced production technology, capable of producing the microchips for future smartphones, computers, and other smart electronics.

In an interview with Nikkei Asia at the event, Chang likened the plant to the first plant TSMC ever built in the US, in 1995 in Carnas, Washington.

Chang said, “Twenty-seven years have passed and [the semiconductor industry] witnessed a big change in the world, a big geopolitical situation change in the world. Globalization is almost dead and free trade is almost dead. A lot of people still wish they would come back, but I don’t think they will be back.”

The death of globalization and free trade is not only a good thing, it is absolutely necessary if Mankind is going to survive, and eventually, thrive. We’ve seen the best that globalism has to offer, and it is nothing more than idiocracy, debt slavery, and a relentlessly ugly monoculture.

It only took 30 years for 300 years of economic theory to be conclusively disproven by reality. But it was always false and totally incompatible with the existence of nations, as my critique of free trade on mathematical grounds demonstrated.

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Nightfall, Reconsidered

It never occurred to me that the people who periodically massacred the scientists in Isaac Asimov’s famous short story, “Nightfall”, were actually the good guys.

Researchers at Boston University have created a new strain of Covid-19 that has an 80% kill rate in humanized mice.

Their names should be posted somewhere, publicly and prominently, in the event that their creation ever “escapes the laboratory”. The Mandarins may well have been onto something when they forcibly shut down technological development in China.

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Germany Braces for Deflation

German leaders fear the German public running out of cash this winter:

On Tuesday, Reuters reported German authorities are moving to acquire emergency cash deliveries to keep their economy running in the event power outages take down electronics-dependent methods of payment.

People familiar with the government plans reported that the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, had begun hoarding extra billions in the event there is a surge in demand for cash, or limits placed on withdrawals.

Government officials and bank authorities are also looking to secure the distribution mechanisms for the cash, giving priority fuel access to cash transporters, according to the sources. The planning sessions have also reportedly included multiple financial industry associations as well as financial market regulator BaFin.

The Reuters article noted, “Although German authorities have publicly played down the likelihood of a blackout, the discussions show both how seriously they take the threat and how they struggle to prepare for potential crippling power outages caused by soaring energy costs or even sabotage.”

Another illustration of how digital currency is a complete non-starter in any scenario that involves interrupted electricity flows. Which also goes for electric cars and the digital economy in general. If the power goes out anywhere along the way, you’re not going to be watching YouTube videos or streaming Netflix.

And yes, the inability to spend credit money is extremely deflationary. As with generals, economists always prepare to fight the last banking crisis.

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50 Percent is a Good Start

But I suspect Elon Musk will soon discover that it’s not enough to cut Twitter’s staff in half.

Elon Musk will ax “around 50%” of Twitter’s staff within the next few days, according to a new report. The immediate terminations could save the new Twitter CEO significant money.

Just days after Musk’s goliath $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, a massive amount of layoffs for the big tech company could arrive as early as Saturday. There could be job cuts of “about 50%” of Twitter’s 7,500-person workforce, according to a report from the New York Times.

“I was told to expect somewhere around 50% of people will be laid off,” Ross Gerber – CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management – told the New York Times. Gerber said he was informed about the layoffs by Jared Birchall – the head of Musk’s family office.

A report from last month claimed that Musk was going to cut Twitter’s staff by nearly 75%. On Wednesday, Musk told Twitter employees that he doesn’t plan to fire 75% of the workforce, according to Bloomberg.

Apparently a substantial amount of bonuses will vest on Tuesday, November 1, so it would make sense to make it a very unhappy Halloween for soon-to-be former Twitter employees.

But I wouldn’t get even remotely excited about the coming changes at Twitter. It’s just moving from Insane Hard Globalist Left to Sane Moderate Globalist Left. It’s still enemy ground run by a corporate celebrity ticket-taker.

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On Returning to Twitter

I don’t see any reason to do so. SocialGalactic is my primary social media, and for public social media I have more followers on Gab than I did on Twitter – 34.5k vs 33k. I see Musk’s antics as just another exercise in gatekeeping, since Parler, Gettr, and TruthSocial have all abysmally failed.. As evidence, consider the way in which those who were never banned or censored are pushing the “come back in, the water’s safe now” narrative in the wake of Musk’s purchase.

The ticket-takers always support the gatekeepers. The charlatans back the frauds.

Caveat: I won’t criticize businesses that utilize every possible channel to reach their customers. Especially in this age of dysfunctional email, any means of communication should be utilized. Arkhaven and Castalia have had Twitter accounts all along, so we’ll probably make use of them again at some point.

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The Gammas in the Manger

Yesterday, I posted the following to Gab, to mark a significant milestone there. While SocialGalactic is, and will remain, my primary social media platform, Gab has become an increasingly effective way to reach those who are outside the community.

It’s official. I now have more followers – 34k – on #GAB than I did on Twitter – 33k – when my account was permanently “suspended” there without any reason being given or anything controversial being tweeted. Thanks very much to @a for persevering through tremendous obstacles to provide everyone with this sound alternative platform.

That’s a really big deal, not for me, but for the alternative platform. It serves as proof that for public figures, Gab is now a viable and credible alternative to Twitter. One of the primary challenges of any social media platform is to provide a compelling reason for people to join it, and one of the biggest attractions for users is the ability to follow the regular postings of the public figures they like and admire.

And as with the Wikipedia/Infogalactic situation, it’s very frustrating for those who go to the effort to provide alternatives to the mainstream platforms to observe how a) most public figures simply will not support the alternatives unless they are literally kicked off the mainstream platform, b) the vast majority of people would rather use a free platform that farms their data on behalf of globalists who hate them and want to see them dead than pay a very small amount to use a platform that is in accordance with their faith and society, and c) most people would rather cry about being deprived access to the mainstream platforms than make effective use of the alternatives.

So, this particular milestone is significant for Gab, because it proves that at least for minor public figures, there is no material advantage to being on Twitter any longer. Most people appeared to recognize this, as the post was liked by more than two thousand users, and yet, it still managed to trigger the Gammas of Gab, as the following comments demonstrate.

  • Space Bear: Also notice how he thanks @a but not to his followers. very telling. I am going to assume (rightfully or wrongly) that it is a tel of narcissism.
  • Travis Hancock: And still, I don’t know what/what you are. Don’t care…..
  • Alex Pazzo: wow you are so much better than other people with fewer followers. SIMP
  • BrotherStephen444: Don’t like you, don’t care for you in the slightest, but, real freedom of speech allows you to succeed in you vainglorious attempt to prove to the world that there are some who actually want to listen to you. Good job, and I am sincere about that. I am also sincere when I tell you to crawl back under the rock you came out from under from.
  • m249saw2004: gross. You equate your social media to actual achievement.
  • ForeverLawless: Yet u only follow 43 people back
  • Theycensoredme: You must be a shill…
  • Mythbuster: Who cares about the number of followers? Get rid of your ego
  • Ozymandias, King of King: It seems important to you, but why?
  • Gerald VonGustav: Holy shit, you’re still grifting here? I for sure thought you would be completely irrelevant for everyone by now.
  • SHELLSHOCK_1986: nice followbots gayboy
  • 7SEAL7: Says a person who only follows back less than 50 people. Numbers mean nothing. People should unfollow number Nazis
  • Up A Damn Mountain: Yeah…but everyone knows there aren’t 34k actual human beings that use Gab actively, so is it REALLY that much of an accomplishment?

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Smart Thermostats are Very Stupid

Contra their sole purported purpose for existing, smart thermostats have been scientistically proven to INCREASE energy usage:

“Engineering estimates from the California Technical Forum …. predict that smart thermostats will produce substantial reductions in energy consumption,” the report, called “The Human Perils of Scaling Smart Technologies: Evidence from Field Experiments,” said. It was released by authors from Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, University of Southern California and University of Alabama.

They studied the smart thermostat impact on energy consumption using data over an 18-month period including more than 16 million hourly electricity use records and almost 700,000 daily observations of natural gas consumption.

“The most relevant estimates to our experimental sample come from Department of Energy Technical Reference Manuals, which are annual reports produced by energy providers and regulators. These reports primarily rely on engineering simulations and survey data to predict the effects of energy efficiency programs at scale.

“These predictions are then used by energy providers to justify expenditures on energy efficiency programs. Mapping these predictions for Californians, which vary by climate zone and the size of a home, to our experimental samples we find that savings of 1.3% and 4.0% are respectively predicted for overall electricity and natural gas consumption.”

However, those thermostats were found to “fail to deliver the expected energy savings.”

The researchers said, in their nearly 100-page report, those thermostats “actually increase electricity and gas consumption by 2.3% and 4.2%, respectively,” the report found. The report explained the problem was not necessarily one of usability. “In fact, researchers observed, nearly all users with the smart devices programmed them almost immediately, and many did so with energy savings in mind,” the report said.

Instead, the problem was with how often and to what extent users overrode the programming to set heating temperatures higher, or cooling temperatures lower, when they wanted to change it.

And this doesn’t even account for the real detriment to installing a smart thermostat, which is that it provides the service provider the ability to shut off your heat and power in the event Alexa hears you saying something that violates the current Narrative.

First, don’t even consider installing one. Second, if you’ve got one installed, replace it with a traditional dumb thermostat that is fully under your control.

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