Trump has just spent the past five minutes airing his frustrations about the New York fraud trial while on the stand.
He points his finger at New York Attorney General Letitia James as he yells that the “political hack back there” is carrying out the probe to hurt him.
At the end of the rant, Kevin Wallace of the attorney general’s team asks him, “You done?”
“Done,” Trump says, prompting some laughter from the courtroom.
About damned time. I was checking the LGBT travel advisories a few months ago, and was surprised that the US was green. Absolutely no way should anyone be travelling to Florida.
The only thing I’ll miss about him is his unhinged videos yelling at Shoigu and Gerasimov. Where else am I going to see billionaire completely lose his shit, yell at government officials, and then post that shit online?
I’ve seen a few Western news reports refer to him as a billionaire but even if we say that that’s made up bullshit, everyone agrees that he was very wealthy.
Dude like him must be up to his neck in off the books dark money and assets, so we’ll probably never know.
Aren’t Musk and some other shits doing this from time to time? We just know it’s inconsequential because they don’t have a reason and nothing change anyways.
Seems like the right approach to start their own server, instead of making accounts on some of the flagship instances, which only perpetuates the centralisation dogma.
It also does away with some of the really awkward practices news organizations engage in wrt social media. The number of @JournalistNameCBC handles out there is kind of super cringy, and seems to point to journos having company-specific/company-mandated social media accounts, but without any actual company support for them.
Something like this makes having a company-mandated social media account something they're assigned, just like an email address, rather than something they're personally responsible for.
What I’d love to see is news companies spinning up their own instances, for example, a CBC-owned Mastodon instance, with accounts such as journalistname@cbcnews. It’d work exactly like a company-assigned e-mail address, and would function as such. That each and every post on such an account would be seen as the journalist working under the company, and not their own personal views.
And if a journalist wants his own personal account, well, they can either spin up their own instance, or perhaps a union of journalists would spin up an instance, with journalists setting up their accounts that are not tied to any news agency or company.
Am I being too naive and optimistic here? Maybe. But do I want this to happen regardless, yes!
Upon reading the article more closely, this is what the BBC is doing. My bad!
When I joined Mastodon in the November migration, I wondered why media organisations weren’t spinning up their own servers. Give all the journos an account on that server and there’s your verification right away.
Because a company/org specific site for journalists doesn’t get the interactions with people outside that org but within the sector of coverage unless people do a lot of following of others.
But note also that the first one isn’t associated with a media organization but rather an industry sector.
You can use social.bbc to broadcasts articles that people want to read, but the “what is going on with the energy grid in the UK” will never show up in local there but rather over at mastodon.energy/ … and so that’s where the journalists are… though there’s still a lot going on over at twitter.com/search?q=%23energytwitter
Local isn't a good measure here, though. The BBC local stream is literally just going to be posts by BBC employees.
The global stream isn't a great measure, either, frankly, as journalists primarily want to yet their posts seen, not see a huge field of noise. Those who are doing digging for social media stories maybe want a wider cut of things, but they can still do that through their replies, and through global. Search just isn't going to be as effective as on generalist servers.
But then, search isn't super effective on Mastodon, anyway, and all the big generalist servers are running Mastodon.
There's nothing preventing them from using secondary accounts on .social for research, though.
Does it make sense for NPR to spin up their own instance with the additional administration and server costs? Or is it a better use of their money just to have an account on a larger instance… which also makes discovery of them easier (everyone on mstdn.social sees them in the local feed and relevant hashtags without having to specifically follow them on other servers).
The local mastodon instance helps with authenticity, but hinders the discovery of the “buzz” in local of an appropriately topical instance ( mastodon.energy/explore ).
No of course not everyone or every organisation has the means for that. But those that have should, and others should fan out over different instances: local or regional ones, or thematic ones, instead of congregating on the same three instances because it’s ‘the main one’.
The hashtag #fossilfuels works… but it doesn’t work as well as being in mastodon.energy/public/local were things without hashtags exist and all the content is topical.
Naw, I was too. Haven't been for a year or two, but I've only ever subscribed to them for the shipping. Barely used their streaming when I did cause, also, yarr 🏴☠️
Imagine for a second you were a paid member of a gym, but decided to do most of your exercise outside the gym you just paid for.
That's most streaming platforms for a large amount of people. They're so inconvenient that people will pay for them, and still not use the service they paid for.
A damning indictment of modern day streaming platforms tbh.
God forgive me, I'm going defend Prime. I always thought that because Prime was also required for faster shipping, they were willing to explore artistic shows that something like Netflix wouldn't touch these days. People likely aren't subscribing or cancelling because of the video offer, so they have more freedom to greenlight interesting concepts.
Prime shows like Solos and Tales from the Loop probably aren't great for getting new subscribers, but they're absolutely wonderful, especially compared to season 47 of [generic low-budget comedy baking reality show]. Shows like The Expanse, Mr Robot, Homecoming are all solid and Prime seems far less likely to cancel shows before they end properly.
I loved what the grand tour was able to accomplish on prime that they simply couldn’t on BBC with top gear. The early seasons are wonky with weird formatting, but when they started focusing more on specials in the later seasons (seamen, eurocrash, the Mongolian special, a massive hunt) have been some of the best top gear content since like top gear season 7
I’m almost impressed by how bad their UI is. It’s like they didn’t even try to create something useful, but simply shoehorned it into the regular Amazon codebase.
The only service with worse UI is Sky, and if Sky is your benchmark, than you’re done.
I so much agree. I would never go to Amazon service to buy new movies (for streaming). It is not easy to see what is in your library and sort/search it.
I think we had Prime before streaming even started, so that was like a bonus.
But lately we hardly use it. The site is so janky and bloated with trash, I’d rather pay shipping and buy directly from a brand website or a normal retailer. Most have free shipping nowadays anyway.
I just bought an Apple USB wall adapter from Amazon because Best Buy was out of them. I spent like 20 minutes inspecting it and the package and watching videos about how to make sure it isn’t counterfeit. Buying a $20 thing shouldn’t be a stressful ordeal.
Netflix cracking down on password sharing, reddit’s API changes, every streaming platform raising their prices, YouTube fighting against adblockers and potentially charging creators for visibility… the list goes on and on, and it seems to be coming from every direction all at once.
Am I missing some huge financial change in the tech investment sphere that has affected Silicon Valley (ie. freakout due to the SVB collapse)?
Or is this just a case of companies seeing each other get away with squeezing consumers, and following suit?
All of them are built on venture capital and borrowing money used to be “free” so investors were fine with borrowing with 0% interest and spending them on all the shiny tech projects. Now with interest rate being 5.25% they all of them all demanding return on their investment and companies that never in their lifetime were profitable are forced to come up with a way to make that money.
At the very least, profitable companies can maintain their valuation. Unlike, say, Twitter valuation which dropped to a third of what Musk pay for because it’s losing even more money after the takeover.
Interest rates are rising up globally, to fight global inflation, and the general feeling of a recession.
This is having several impacts in several ways. Mostly it comes down to VC (venture capital) and lending money being harder to get.
During the good time VC’s threw the net wide and invested in everything they could, knowing that only a select few would truly pay off. Well, it time for those investments to put up or shut up.
This is further having an impact on stock market and public companies. Previously potential has been seen as king. Looking for the next big thing, having lots of users etc. Now being actually profitable and surviving is going to be king.
Think of Tesla as riding this line nearly perfectly (and I’m no Elon fanboy). It rode the potential wave hard, it’s stock price soared, they were the first player in electric cars. They would have an edge on everyone! Then they started plummeting as markets saw the looming interest rates. Then they posted some profitable years, and are soaring again.
I recently read a pretty interesting take that a lot of this started because Silicon Valley Bank failed, and now all these companies have to do something they haven’t really had a necessity to do before — to make profit.
And all of them aren’t run by business geniuses as previously believed, on the contrary, most of the leaders are so disconnected from reality that they genuinely have no idea what people want in a service, they can’t take feedback or advice because “they know better”, and all the other stuff that comes with that.
So they do what they think is right, while missing the whole point of the product they are so desperately trying to make profitable.
Look at spez’s “we’ll stay profit-focused until profits arrive” and Musk’s rush to get at least some ROI on his $44 bn middle age crisis toy.
They raised the price by 1 whole dollar after however many years and y’all are acting like it’s the tech apocalypse. This is hardly on the same scale as what Netflix is doing.
That reason is wages not keeping up with inflation. Eg, if the US min wage kept up with inflation, it’d be something like $25/h (vs $7.25 federally today). I think you’d be able to afford an extra buck a month for music if you got paid that much more. And that’s just inflation. Don’t look up tying it to productivity cause that’ll just be sad.
The market. With the post covid shift, the market is asking for profitability over growth. So like every company public or wanting to go public is more interested in profitability.
My company went public a few years ago and we felt similar pressures from the market starting earlier this year maybe before.
Aside from the VC funding that others have mentioned, being a publicly listed company means that there is a never-ending pursuit for increasing profits. Investors who buy stocks want to see a positive return. The problem with some tech platforms is that their product / service offering is already ideal, so their choices are to either spend money to innovative and build something new (risky!) or simply raise prices. Subscription pricing is ideal because it provides a consistent revenue base and allows the company to forecast what revenue is likely to be in the future.
Average daily Sign-ups to Netflix reached 73k during that period, a +102% increase from the prior 60-day average. […] Cancels also increased during this period, but not as much as Sign-ups. The ratio of Sign-ups to Cancels since May 23rd is up +25.6% compared to the previous 60-day period.
…in an effort to force the Biden administration’s defense department to rescind a policy of leave and expense reimbursement for service members and their dependents traveling for abortions.
I can only assume this is for bases that don’t have the means to just do it themselves. I was a surgical tech in the Air Force, and every hospital I was stationed at provided abortion services.
The VA does, too.
Cuz abortion services ARE FUCKING HEALTHCARE. You want to destroy a service member’s mission readiness? Give them a kid they can’t support.
You don’t want to pay service members to travel for abortions? Fine. Fine. Equip and staff every single military base with an OBGYN clinic w/ surgical capabilities. Don’t want to give them med leave to recover from an abortion? Fucking FINE. Schedule a uteroscopy and biopsy along with it so we can throw in a cancer screen, nab any polyps, ablate any endometriosis, etc; and give them extra leave for those, cuz damn was that one a bleeder! She’ll need extra time to recover for sure!!
Then declare a state of emergency in the Y’all Qaeda infested regions of the US on the basis of denied healthcare leading to the current and worsening humanitarian crisis; and in doing so, enabling the VA to provide abortion services to non-veterans under section §1784 of title 38, United States Code.
This dystopian GOP shit is maddening. We need to stop trying to argue with it, and start finding ways to just work around it. Fuck em.
The problem with that is that it may have been legal at the place it was done, but states would absolutely place police next door to wait for those women to come out. They already have laws that criminalize women who go out of state
How is that legal? I thought states can only enforce laws that are broken in their own jurisdiction? Interstate would make it a federal matter, no? (In regards to women going out of state)
It’s almost certainly unconstitutional, but there’s not specific case law so it has to be litigated to know for sure. So there needs to be people charged who have the means and willingness to go through several years of trials and appeals. And they have to maintain that motivation for a long time - some cases drag on for a decade or longer.
The point isn’t to make it illegal forever, it’s to scare people and organizations without the resources to engage in a legal fight to stop supporting interstate care for the next three or five or ten years.
Then we need to do the short term solution while we work on the long term solution. I’m kind of sick of one side trying to keep it a fair fight. GOP politicians have all shown they don’t care about that and will employ any means necessary to get their policies enacted while doing everything they can to disrupt the policies on the other side
That’s what you get when you vote right wing into your government. Fascists feel accepted and they are only against molestation when done by the evil foreigners. When it’s done by their own they see women as cattle for men to ogle and touch. Never believe their lies about being for “equality” or women’s rights.
Don’t think so in this case - we were all expecting him to be assassinated somehow, and the old ‘sushi dinner with a nice cup of tea after’ wasn’t very likely. Should have had a sweepstake on his life expectancy - guessing 60 days would have been pretty impressive.
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