Category: Politics

How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions

For decades Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google gobbled up their competition to become behemoths of the tech industry, which has drawn attention from Congressional leaders and other critics who claim they’ve stifled innovation in the industry.

Source: How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions

If the government had said, “You know what, guys? You’re big enough already,” most of those acquired companies would probably have continued to offer a nice living to their founders and employees. And the employment market for talent would be richer for it. And taxes would have been paid. But, no, the government bends over, and lets these vertical monopolies accrete ALL the profits in their sector, while they stick out their hand for the next campaign contribution.

I had written this as a draft, and then watched The Laundromat. Not as entertaining as The Big Short, but just as approachable in its treatment of what us arguably one of the most byzantine, global subjects in modern history. I can’t find the final scene online in order to link it, but Meryl Streep’s last line is a powerful summary of the problem I’ve been complaining about here for some time.

“Now is the time for real action. It starts with asking questions. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes, relative to any other segment of the population. These political practices have come full circle and are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.”

Global mega corps like Apple can no longer hide behind the excuse that “everyone is doing it” when it comes to using essentially-slave labor in the orient, and a offshore tax havens to avoid paying corporate taxes, while they accumulate… <checks Google>… two hundred billion dollars (give or take) in their cash on hand. I predict, at some point, they will be pressured to change both of those practices. Maybe that will lead to a domino effect, and to laws being changed. I’m not holding my breath, but I can envision a scenario, even if it’s one in “fourteen million, six hundred and five.”

Mosaics of positions

How many people do you think would agree with me on everything I’ve ever written? Nobody, that’s how many.

Source: Mosaics of positions

This is DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails (my favorite programming stack), amongst many other accomplishments. I follow him pretty closely, precisely because I happen to agree with (almost) everything I’ve ever seen him write. I agree with all of his statements in this article. I’m not on Twitter, and have it blocked on my network. The only reason I’d change that right now is because I’d want to follow his tweets. Luckily, he blogs his longer thoughts on a site that has an RSS feed.

Why? Because of this line:

If I end up in a debate with an employee at Basecamp that hits identity bedrock…

That’s such a good phrase: “identity bedrock.” It perfectly encapsulates why controversial topics are so controversial. Like “core memories” in Pixar’s Inside Out, opinions about things such as, say, abortion, or health care, are literally the values we hang our metaphysical existence on. How we find our place in the world around us. How we navigate conflicts. How we ground our thinking in the face of confusion.

When you look at it like that, how could it not be contentious? How could discussing these things not be taken personally?

I think DHH (and Jason Fried) are onto something about making these social issues taboo on internal company communications platforms. This has made one side, in particular, very upset, and this is telling, but not surprising. The social justice warriors have valid points to make, and I actually support most of them, but it’s their collective effort to shove it all down everyone else’s throats — and badger anyone who dares to object to that approach — that has led to Basecamp’s decision to limit internal company discussion about these things. They have only themselves to blame for this turn of events.

FOLLOWUP: It occurs to me that I would bet actual money that the people offended by this are the same people who would have lavished praise on Twitter, Cloudflare, and Amazon for collectively cancelling Parler from the entire internet. Like, not the kind of people; the literal people.

Doorbell video captures police officer punching and throwing teen with autism to the ground – CBS News

A Ring doorbell captured footage of a police officer in Vacaville, California, throwing a 17-year-old to the ground and punching him in the face on Wednesday, according to the teen’s father.

Source: Doorbell video captures police officer punching and throwing teen with autism to the ground – CBS News

I think these kinds of incidents have always happened, but now that people can record and use surveillance footage to document them, and have platforms like Twitter and Facebook to post them publicly, we’re getting multiple, national stories every week about out-of-control law enforcement. I’m just wondering: Is there any point at which people who defend the police will ever stop saying that there are “just a few bad apples” in police departments, and start admitting that there must be a systemic problem with how America hires and trains the police?

Obligatory: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens This was originally written about mass shootings — and it is more applicable month after month, year after year, since it was first written — but it works just as well for policy brutality.

The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken – YouTube

TL;DW: The McDonald’s corporation forces franchisees to purchase a particular model of Taylor ice cream machines. These ice cream machines are finicky, prone to error, and hard to diagnose, which makes franchisees call someone to repair them. By contract, only Taylor’s repair department is allowed to work on Taylor ice cream machines. It’s expensive. Service makes up 25% of their yearly revenue. There is a secret system to diagnose and repair these machines that most people don’t know about. Someone else made a device to attach to the machine, and an app to read what it detected, and started having some success at bypassing this slow and expensive repair process. McDonald’s told licensees that they could not use this system or they would void their warranty and breach their contract. Taylor is implementing a similar system, but which will continue to keep the franchisees dependent on them to fix the machines.

Gee… This sounds an awful lot like John Deere, huh? This is another good case study for the right to repair.

This is just another naked play to unethically and forcefully create a monopoly on some vertical slice of economic activity, which a perfectly-competitive version of capitalism would have fixed on its own. It’s what all companies strive for now.

The Ease of Tracking Mobile Phones of U.S. Soldiers in Hot Spots – WSJ

The U.S. government has built robust programs to track terrorists and criminals through warrantless access to commercial data. Many vendors now provide global location information from mobile phones to intelligence, military and law-enforcement organizations.

Source: The Ease of Tracking Mobile Phones of U.S. Soldiers in Hot Spots – WSJ

It doesn’t really matter how much protection from government overreach we write into the Constitution, if we allow companies to do the things we won’t allow the government to do, in the name of the Almighty Dollar, and then let the government get the power we deny them in the Constitution through those reprehensible actions, regardless. The whole thing has become a sham thanks to unbounded Capitalism, propped up by our government enabling Amendment-defying behavior by companies, and then looking the other way when it comes to regulating them, while reaching a hand out behind them for campaign contributions.

I just watched The Courier last night. Great movie. When I was young, I would find it so funny the way the Soviet characters would ridicule their Western antagonists, mocking capitalism and the community-destroying greed it produced. I don’t find these things funny any more, because it’s really hard for me NOT to see some truth in that kind of dialog now.

In the post-war, pre-military-industrial-complex, pre-Wall-Street-investment-bank days, I wouldn’t have argued it. Now, monstrous companies are running this country, trampling the balance of power enshrined in our founding documents, and the result has been the decimation of the middle-class, which is crucial to upward mobility. And this is, after all, the American “dream.”

We mock China for having a social score and sham elections, but we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country, and then revoke their right to vote in a system that aggressively prevents any serious change to the status quo. We fly the flag, spend millions on fighter jet passes over stadiums, sing the nation anthem, praise our armed forces, and it all seems to me to be just as jingoistic as military parades in communist countries. How is our system any better, in actual practice?

There is, at least, one important — perhaps critical — difference, but I’ll save that for another time.

Peter Thiel: Competition Is for Losers – WSJ

I am woefully late in coming to this understanding that monopoly is the goal of all venture capital. Peter Thiel, of Paypal, Palantir, Facebook “fame,” literally said this was the goal, in front of God and everyone, in a WSJ op-ed, seven years ago. Like the PG article from the other day, Thiel tells some whoppers to try to make everyone feel better about monopolies.

Even the government knows this: That is why one of its departments works hard to create monopolies (by granting patents to new inventions) even though another part hunts them down (by prosecuting antitrust cases). Source: Peter Thiel: Competition Is for Losers – WSJ

If this isn’t the most-lopsided statement I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what would beat it. First of all, the patent office does not “work hard.” An awful lot of patents are given out like candy for trivial things. Further, software patents — which I’m sure Thiel loves — have been one of the most business-stifling things to ever happen in modern history.

Second of all, the government has only ever stopped the very biggest deals. It would seem that the current “gentleman’s agreement” is that anything under about $30B isn’t worth talking about. So Microsoft buys LinkedIn and Skype and GitHub, when it doesn’t really make much sense for them to own any of them. All the FAANG companies run around, picking up interesting toys in the flea-market bins marked “less than $1B,” and the government doesn’t even bat an eye.

And the government certainly hasn’t broken up any monopolies since AT&T. Given that the “baby Bells” have all since re-merged into the duopoly of Verizon and AT&T — which, mysteriously, line up almost perfectly in their cell phone contract terms — I’m not sure that even this was worth the hassle for the customer. What I am sure of, is that lots and lots of executives pocketed lots and lots of money for all that M&A activity.

If your industry is in a competitive equilibrium, the death of your business won’t matter to the world; some other undifferentiated competitor will always be ready to take your place.

This reveals Thiel’s cognitive bias. These “undifferentiated competitors” — in his terminology — are small businesses that would make their owners a comfortable living, and provide good job opportunities in their local market. Yes, if it folds, someone else may come along and take your place. I feel that’s a humane cycle of life. Thiel thinks this is a tragic notion, when he can be the guy who provides the capital to corner a market, and then extract all the profits that would have gone to those smaller businesses.

Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

Bullcrap. Utter VC narrative-spinning bullcrap. There are millions of small businesses being run out of business or bought up to further fuel multi-national corporate behemoths, who were too big decades ago, in this twisted game to become the largest companies in the world.

History is going to judge this period in human development as the time where we either decide how big is “big enough,” or whether we become a planet of corporations instead of governments. We’re running out of time to make the call, and if we don’t, we will eventually get the latter.

You can say that it’s unethical to tell Peter Thiel, “No, you can’t have any more,” but if we find the collective will to start doing that to the billionaires of the world, in another generation, it will matter more which company you work for, than what nation you are a citizen of. It already does in China, where working for Apple — as detestable as the working conditions are to Americans — it’s still one of the best jobs in the country. It already does in Alabama, where working for Amazon was seen to be so good — despite all the press to the contrary — that they overwhelmingly rejected the call to unionize. Those people would work for Apple or Amazon no matter what country they had to do it from.

(Makes you wonder who was running all the pro-union stuff in social media, huh?)

Police pull guns on and spray Black-Latino Army officer during traffic stop, lawsuit says

Two Virginia police officers have been sued for drawing their guns on a uniformed Army officer during a traffic stop and pepper spraying him.

Source: Police pull guns on and spray Black-Latino Army officer during traffic stop, lawsuit says

Is U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario a “good enough” person for Candace Owens to “support” as a victim for BLM?

I can feel my willpower slipping to stay off Twitter with this sort of hot take.

The College Admissions Scandal

I didn’t pay any attention to the recent college admissions scandal, because I just didn’t care. It affected a strata of society that I can’t even smell. It didn’t affect me. At all. I thought it was ridiculous that so many people got collectively upset about it, because it’s just the way the world works. The documentary points out that it’s always been possible to give an indecorous amount of money to a university to get a placement. $50M to Harvard will get your kid in, but do you realize how little money $50M actually is when you’re a multi-billionaire?

I think the public backlash was so significant because it brought the pay-for-play action down by an order of magnitude. Instead of being the realm of billionaires, it made it accessible to the $100-million-aires. It involved people who were D-list celebrities and popular YouTubers. Combined with the fact that people feel entitled to get incensed by anything and everything on social media these days, this scandal led to an out-sized reaction.

Parents went to jail for being conned into a payola scam, when they didn’t even make checks out to the coaches. The guy at the center of it all flipped immediately, sang like a bird, and is still free. The colleges kept all the money. What about the athletic directors who looked the other way, while their coaches accepted bribes? Making Lori Laughlin-types go to jail for a few months might make the Twitter rabble feel better, but it is not justice.

The DOJ held press releases about this case, because they want “us” to feel that they “did something,” but do you realize how few spots were actually affected, and how little shutting this down matters? Singer admits to helping 750 families over 25 years. There are 7 universities listed in the Wikipedia page on the scandal. I quickly searched for the enrollment number for each, divided by 4, and added them up into a back-of-the-napkin estimation of what must have been around 1,175,000 possible admission slots over this timeframe. We’re talking maybe 1-5 slots at one of these schools in a year, out of 1,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 freshmen. People are starting to sue about this, but if you didn’t get into one of those schools during this time, it’s pretty hard to blame Singer’s involvement unless you can specify which particular non-athlete took a slot for your prospective sport.

So nothing really changes here. These elite schools continue to be untouchable. The costs of higher education continues to rise at three times inflation. The athletic directors still run the schools. People will continue to try to find cracks in the process, and games will still be played in athletic recruiting. And, as the last line of the documentary pointed out, the “back door” is still open to the billionaires. The DOJ hasn’t actually done a single thing of significance here.

This is what aggravates me about the scandal. Not the fact that it existed, but the fact that when it blew up, nothing that matters to anyone has changed, and I knew this would be the case. In fact, if you want to get really cynical about it, I almost see this as the billionaire-class whipping the government into action to stop the 100-million-aire class from encroaching on what they perceive as their territory. This is why I didn’t give a crap about it before, and why I care even less about it now. All the wrong things are being addressed here, and there’s literally nothing I can do about it.

Harvey Weinstein, Again.

I watched Untouchable the other night. I thought it was closer to its 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes than the 71% at Metacritic they list on the IMDB page. After reflecting on what I saw, what struck me about it was how depraved Harvey is, and I don’t mean about all the obvious rape and assault. The problem is actually much worse than it appears, and it’s already pretty bad. “They” say rape isn’t about the sex, it’s about power. At least, in this case, “they” are exactly right, and spectacularly so.

Look at his second wife. Smokeshow! And not just a trophy; a successful woman on her own. He had 2 kids with her, so they had sex at least twice. She seemed honestly taken aback when the scandal broke. This activity is something, given his schedule, I can credibly believe that he could hide from her. In my estimation, she spoke from a place of relative normalcy about the marriage, so I’m relatively sure he could have been getting at least some sex at home.

Hugh Hefner built a media empire on the “backs” of some of the most beautiful women in the world. In the process, he had scores of willing, live-in girlfriends for decades, even though he wasn’t a great-looking guy. He was rich. He was connected. He could give these women a boost in finding fame and fortune. I watched The Girls Next Door, and read about what happened afterward, because it was fascinating to see how all of this worked. The “naked” trade of a consensual sex life for access to money and other rich people. As I understand how the system worked, most of these girls found other boyfriends at the parties Hef threw, and moved on naturally, of their own accord, and everyone involved seemed to feel this system was a good trade.

Given Harvey’s empire, and the enormous wealth and influence he wielded in the movie business, it would seem to me that he could have done essentially the same thing as Hef, and on an even grander scale, given the larger and more-reputable business. It would have been nothing to him to keep a bevvy of beautiful women on hand, put up in nice places, for him to visit on his whim. It’s clear that women who want to work in movies are a little different than women who want to pose naked in magazines, but, for purposes of this discussion, you can leave them out of it entirely. With his wealth and connections, he could have kept a stable of pure, gold-digging girlfriends. But he didn’t do that. He coerced women. Aspiring actresses. Assaulted them. Raped them. For decades.

It wasn’t about the sex. It was most definitely about the power and the subjugation. To me, this doubles the horror of the scandal.

And don’t give me the BS that people didn’t know. Everyone knew.  Everyone. By the time the scandal finally broke, even I had seen and heard enough rumors to know he was a monster. The fact that his brother, the people in his company, and the entire industry looked the other way for 40 years triples the horror.

 

Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively – Glenn Greenwald

We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday.

Source: Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively – Glenn Greenwald

Glenn brilliantly sums up what’s been bothering me lately. For a long time, liberals have ducked-and-covered in the Free Speech debate, saying that online censorship was a private matter, and therefore did not run afoul of the First Amendment. But Congress has been applying more and more pressure to get Facebook (in particular) to censor their content in a way they find acceptable.

Once a platform becomes as ubiquitous as Facebook, Twitter, or Google (or Amazon), it should be regulated as a “common carrier,” and not censor at all. They have become de facto services of the public, like water or electricity, and should be treated as though they were. We don’t allow the water or electric companies to dictate who can be served, or what those resources are used for.

Libel and threats can still be prosecuted as the illegal acts they are. We lose nothing in preserving freedom of speech on these platforms. All the incitement and insurrection in the Capitol that was facilitated by social media is being prosecuted, and hard. That’s precisely how the system should work: Say whatever you like, but be prepared to suffer the legal ramifications if you cross over into illegal speech.

We are letting these companies redefine what it means to live in America. Congress is encouraging them to redefine it. At this point, I guess there are two kinds of people. Those that think that the First Amendment is, perhaps, the purest written form of freedom ever written down, and feel we should do ever more to preserve it, and those that think this was a Bad Idea, and feel it’s time to repeal the notion of it.

Orwell’s depiction of Oceania has already become reality in China. Even further, they have already implemented a social scoring system like the one depicted in the Black Mirror episode, Nosedive. What’s so utterly disappointing is to see all of this taking shape in the United States, the very last place it should, by the ideals of our founding. There’s a reason why the US has fallen to 27th place on the list of free countries.