Rottcodd

As I just noted on another response, mostly it was that I came up with a delicious turn of phrase and couldn't not post it. And yes, while broadly I think that Google deserves every bit of shit that's thrown their way and more - that they could vanish from the face of the Earth tomorrow and the internet could only benefit - this particular incident really isn't a good example.

I have to admit that I was so pleased with that turn of phrase when it came to me that I went ahead and posted it in spite of the fact that this specific incident doesn't appear to be a good example.

It's really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from "Do no evil" to "Don't even bother pretending not to."

Axiomatically, no, since it isn't even AI in any meaningful sense of the term, so it fails to live up to its hype right out the gate.

So... aren't these wannabe twitter competitors going about the whole thing bass-ackwards?

I saw a broadly similar article the other day about some sort of shakeup in the Mastodon board of directors.

It's as if they think the way do do an internet startup is to first appoint a board of directors and hire a raft of executives, then... um... you know... um... do some business... kinda... stuff....

Work toward an eventual full withdrawal from NATO and an overt and full political and military alliance with Russia.

I'm not joking.

Cadbury Mini Eggs.

And any decent quality or better saltwater taffy.

They never really did.

It was all, always, just about themselves. They claimed to love the country because they just saw it as a rightful extension of themselves, and they claimed to love democracy because they just saw it as the process by which they got what they wanted.

Now that they're faced with the fact that the country necessarily also accommodates other people and that democracy means that other people can get what they want, they have no reason left to pretend that they ever really valued either one.

So they're instead diving headfirst into xenophobic fascism, in the hope that they can recreate a world in which the country exists only for them and the government serves only their interests.

Nicely clarified.

Yes - the way I said it leaves the possibility that they have to pay at minimum their profit, and no - that should not be the case. They should have to pay at minimum their total revenue.

This shouldn't be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they're fined less than they made off of it, it's not even really a fine. It's just the government taking a cut of the action.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about exactly that in the USSR in Gulag Archipelago.

He said that in the entire time he was in the gulags, he never met one single person who hadn't been legitimately tried and convicted of an actual crime. And the key was exactly what you describe - the Soviet laws were so extensive and byzantine that whenever any official wanted to disappear somebody, all they had to do was investigate them enough to figure out what laws they'd inevitably broken, then try them for that.

That's how authorotarian scumbags implement a police state while maintaining a superficial appearance of justice and the rule of law.

And it's guaranteed that American authoritarian scumbags know that.

The US economy will be much worse than it is already, the country will be at war and the government will be cracking down on civil unrest.