Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios.

[…]

In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google’s global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission’s new Disinformation Code of Practice “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services” and said Google won’t commit to it.

↫ Sara Fischer at Axios

Imagine if any one of us, ordinary folk told the authorities we were just not going to follow the law. We’re not going to pay our taxes because tax law “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’re not going to follow traffic laws and regulations because doing so “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’re not going to respect property laws because doing so “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’d be in trouble within a heartbeat. We’d be buried in fines, court cases, and eventually, crippling debt, bankruptcy, and most likely end up in prison.

The arrogance with which these American tech giants willfully declare themselves to be above EU laws and regulations is appalling, and really should have far more consequences than it does right now. Executives should be charged and arrested, products and services banned and taken off the shelves, and eventually, the companies themselves should be banned from operating within the EU altogether. Especially with the incoming regime in the US, which will most likely grant the tech giants even more freedom to do as they please, the EU needs to start standing up against this sort of gross disrespect.

The consequences for a corporation knowingly breaking the law should be just as grave as for an individual citizen knowingly breaking the law.

It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 million essentially rounds to zero from the perspective of the wealthiest Americans.

The histogram above shows the wealth distribution in red. Note that the visible red line is one pixel wide at the left and disappears everywhere else -- this is the important point: essentially the entire US population is in that first bar. The graph is drawn with the scale of 1 pixel = $500 million in the X axis, and 1 pixel = 1 million people in the Y axis. Away from the origin, the red line is invisible -- a tiny fraction of a pixel tall since so few people have more than 500 million dollars.

Since the median US household wealth is about $190,000, half the population would be crammed into a microscopic red line 1/2500 of a pixel wide using the scale above. (The line would be much narrower than the wavelength of light so it would be literally invisible). The very rich are so rich that you could take someone with a thousand times the median amount of money, and they would still have almost nothing compared to the richest Americans. If you increased their money by a factor of a thousand yet again, you'd be at Bezos' level, but still well short of Elon Musk.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

This dystopic scene of identical robocars clogging an entire block to carry maaaybe 1/4 of a busload of people, was posted by a waymo employee who thought it made his company look good.

Mike Sims:

Yep. The future desired by robocar people is that in a concert hall of 40,000 people, 40,000 private cars just slow-drive around the concert hall from the 7:30pm dropoff until the 11pm pickup time, blocking streets for a mile in every direction, so that they can be ready for their masters at a moment's notice. Think "world's biggest traffic jam, everywhere, all the time". The future!

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead "White Christian Civilization" in its fight against the "International Conspiracy" of Jewish bankers and the "hordes of Coloured people" they controlled. [...]

Before that, he'd been a leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. [...]

Scott's Technocracy Incorporated called for the destruction of all current governments on the continent, to be replaced by the "Technate of North America," a new entity to be run by engineers and scientists. In calling for the abolition of all existing government, the Technocrats advocated what they liked to call a "functional control system" modeled on the telephone network and other large corporations. The Technate would measure the total energy output of the continent and annually allot to each citizen a set number of Energy Certificates, which would replace money. "It will be impossible to go into debt and, likewise, impossible to save income for the future," one Technocracy Inc. brochure from the period says. "It would be impossible to sell anything." [...]

Scott also convinced members that they should begin referring to themselves by a number, not just a name. At one rally, a speaker was announced simply as "1x1809x56." Haldeman, for his part, became 10450-1. [...]

Joshua Haldeman had a weakness for men with fuzzy credentials and big-picture plans to turn society upside down. He believed in shadowy forces that were out to destroy civilization and that manipulated the masses into doing their bidding. He believed that a good chiropractor could cure any disease, but vaccines were a front for totalitarianism. And he believed democracy was for the few, not the many.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

When you finally left the Nazi Bar and closed your Twitter account, you probably did the big data export. Guess what, it sucks! The archive does not list the accounts you followed. Well, the data is technically there, which as we know is the best kind of there:

window.YTD.following.part0 = [ { "following" : { "accountId" : "1236452781755633665", "userLink" : "https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=1236452781755633665" } }, ...

There's no way to determine what the name of that account was. The URL just redirects to the login page, which also means that if they deleted their account, it's gone.

I have exports from 2019 and 2022 that are this same trash. My export from 2013 doesn't even have a list of follows.

Great job, everybody.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.