Voltaire2
Voltaire2's JournalThe enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot
How could this happen? Owners of Chamberlain MyQ automatic garage door openers just woke up to discover that the company had confiscated valuable features overnight, and that there was nothing they could do about it.
Oh, we know what happened, technically speaking. Chamberlain shut off the API for its garage-door openers, which breaks their integration with home automation systems like Home Assistant. The company even announced that it was doing this, calling the integration an "unauthorized usage" of its products, though the "unauthorized" parties in this case are the people who own Chamberlain products:
https://chamberlaingroup.com/press/a-message-about-our-decision-to-prevent-unauthorized-usage-of-myq
We even know why Chamberlain did this. As Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo points out, shutting off the API is a way for Chamberlain to force its customers to use its ad-beshitted, worst-of-breed app, so that it can make a few pennies by nonconsensually monetizing its customers' eyeballs:
Much more here:
[link:https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain|
NYT Normalizing nazis is fit news.
Trump Family Trial Style
Ivanka Trump and her siblings dress for court — and the cameras.
Welcome to the new season of Trump family trial style. It involves a somewhat different look for the brand — one that is notably … well, blue.
The guest star of the week was Ivanka Trump, making a reluctant return to center stage after announcing on Instagram last year that she was stepping out of the political limelight. She was the focus of this week’s final scene, flying up from her home in Florida, emerging from the bowels of a black town car to make her entrance in a navy wool coat and navy pantsuit, a black leather tote clutched in one hand, tiny pearl studs in her ears and with her blond hair falling in soft waves around her face, the picture of gentle, pulled-together professionalism and good will.
...
Paywalled NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/style/ivanka-donald-trump-new-york-fraud-trial.html
This sort of horseshit is shameless. The Trump Crime Family is just entertainment, folks, and fashion too! Now go consume. And get back in the office.
Amazon is a ripoff (Cory Doctorow on Enshittification )
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queensThere's a cheat-code in US antitrust law, one that's been increasingly used since the Reagan administration, when the "consumer welfare" theory ("monopolies are fine, so long as the lower prices"
shoved aside the long-established idea that antitrust law existed to prevent monopolies from forming at all.
The idea that a company can do anything to create or perpetuate a monopoly so long as its prices go down and/or its quality goes up is directly to blame for the rise of Big Tech. These companies burned through their investors' cash for years, selling goods and services below cost, or even giving stuff away for free. Think of Uber, who lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in for their first 13 years of existence, a move that cost their investors (mostly Saudi royals) $31 billion.
The monopoly cheerleaders in the consumer welfare camp understood that these money-losing orgies could not go on forever, and that the investors who financed them weren't doing so for charitable purposes. But they dismissed the possibility that would-be monopolists could raise prices after attaining dominance, because these prices hikes would bring new competitors into the market, starting the process over again.
...
A long but as always very interesting essay by Cory on the antitrust case against amazon.
The party of irresponsible bullshit just delivered
a massive pile of irresponsible bullshit.
Well done, you fascist clowns. Take a bow.
'Real Time with Bill Maher' returning to HBO without writers amid WGA strike
Source: nbc news
Bill Maher's political talk show will return to the HBO lineup for new episodes without writers amid the dual Hollywood strikes, he said on social media Wednesday night.
"Real Time is coming back, unfortunately, sans writers or writing," Maher said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. "It has been five months, and it is time to bring people back to work."
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/tv/real-time-bill-maher-returning-hbo-writers-wga-strike-rcna104978
SCAB
Ana and the intentional fallacy of the hasty generalization.
The tweet:
"I'm a woman. Please don't ever refer to me as a person with a uterus, birthing person, or person who menstruates. How do people not realize how degrading this is? You can support the transgender community without doing this shit."
The informal fallacy of generalizing from the particular (aka 'the hasty generalization') is a standard HORSESHIT TECHNIQUE for scoring rhetorical points. The HORSESHITTER picks a particular example, devoid of context, and then proceeds to claim it is now the general condition.
A simple example. An unusually cold day in June happens. The paid PR agents of the fossil fuel industry, in unison, claim that this proves global warming is a hoax. They've just generalized from the particular.
In the case of Kasparian, she chose a particular situation, a reference to 'pregnant people' instead of 'pregnant women' in specific medical contexts, to infer that Kasparian, and all women, are now being referred to, in general, as 'a person with a uterus'. This is a deliberate bad faith argument, she is lying and she knows she is lying.
The only real issue here is why she chose to do this. The follow on issue is why the flying fork do we keep falling for this sort of vile nonsense.
Top Ten Conservative Idiots on Mastodon!
I got myself off the fascist platform 'twitter' two months ago. We all should. Today I stumbled over our own Top Ten Idiots on Mastodon:
https://mstdn.party/@Top10ConIdiots/109718124334539161
Now we need a way to embed 'toots' the same way twitter works.
Please boycott twitter
Don't go there.
Don't link there.
Delete your account.
It really isn't a lot to ask.
Trouble at Merde Largo
https://twitter.com/baddcompani/status/1557136913957474305?s=21&t=b-wjSYLkls3C-iV0KSV-OQThe replies are great too.
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