Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

Walmart didn't just *happen*. The rise of Walmart - and Amazon, its online successor - was the result of a specific policy choice, the decision by the Reagan administration not to enforce a key antitrust law. Walmart may have been founded by Sam Walton, but its success (and the demise of the American Main Street) are down to Reaganomics.

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Another fundamentally useful feature of Google Search has disappeared: cached pages.

'We indexed the entire web over and over again so you can find stuff! But we won't tell you when we found it or what it used to look like!'

Allegedly, this is a new "Russian joke":

Putin has a nightmare because of events in Kursk, and the ghost of Stalin appears to him.

Putin pleads with Stalin: "The Nazis are invading Kursk! My army is retreating! What can I do?"

Stalin tells him: “Do just as I did in 1943! Send your best troops from Ukraine to the front, and get American supplies!"

Just this evening I spoke to a friend who is a professor teaching EE and CS courses. I mentioned that I hoped that Mechanical Engineering wasn't doing the equivalent, which would be to turn into a "Using AutoCAD" degree. He reports that his colleagues in ME have complained about that very thing.
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The White House should stop ignoring Musk’s behavior & insulate agencies against risk, starting with shifting unique agency activity off of X. https://civic-texts.ghost.io/if-x-and-musk-are-not-politically-neutral-democracies-need-to-act-to-mitigate-the-growing-risks/
No American should have to use a private platform to read official statements or interact with our elected representatives or appointed officials.

@brouhaha @teajaygrey So it seems.

Well, Google has decided to essentially become a catalogue for the web, abandoning the notion of indexing knowledge, with only a few particularly noteworthy "authoritative" authors on topics older than 10 years being considered worthy of keeping.

That means corporations and /some/ academic institutions, probably. Everything else? Maybe the corposcum masters like you, maybe not.

It's gross.

@teajaygrey Depending on the search engine it could be worse than on others.

Google is basically deindexing anything older than a decade that isn't backed by a corporation at this point.

@mattblaze
Get well soon!
I would add a reminder that the far-right people. who claim that because vaccination and masks are not 100% effective, we shouldn't use them, are 100% idiots. Vaccines are much more effective than the stats those idiots cite, because even when a vaccinated person gets infected, they usually have only.a mild case, and are significantly less likely to develop Long Covid.

Musk and Trump on nuclear weapons (1:20:48):

Musk: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they're like full cities again. So it's really not something that, you know."

Trump: "That's great."

Musk: "So it's not as scary as people think basically."

Capitalism, Mass Anger and the 2024 Elections https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/14/capitalism-mass-anger-and-the-2024-elections/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

"Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia known as MBS, announced a growing presence in Silicon Valley by dining with investors Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Altman, renting the entire Four Seasons Hotel."

*Shudder*

Just a reminder that LLMs have never provided actual answers to any question asked of them or any actual prompt set forth.

They have, however, provided answer-shaped responses, and we as humans are seriously lacking when it comes to telling one from the other.

Folks, a banana-shaped piece of wood is not edible, and I am embarrassed for our species that you cannot tell the difference.

#BoycottCocaCola
Coca-Cola has been hiding "astronomical levels" of profit in tax havens to shield it from the IRS, a judge found.

They now have to start paying back $16 billion in taxes — enough to wipe out a year and a half in profits.

It's time for every big corporate tax offender to pay up.

In case you were unclear on what "anti-anti-semitism" is, it's the process whereby German gentiles tell Jews whose family survived the Holocaust that they are antiseimitic for criticizing finance capital:

https://mas.to/@Dingsextrem/112957239938974203

Then:

"Grandma, why are you saving those bits of twine and pieces of used foil? You can just go to the store and buy new stuff."

"Grandson, I grew up during the Depression"

Now:
"Dad, why are you collecting all those DVDs and saving files to disk and all that? You can just go to the Internet and find that."

"Kids, I grew up during the Great Ensh*ttification..."

#informationhoarding

I'm liking the informal writing style of the Raspberry Pi RP2350 data sheet:

"I2C is an ubiquitous serial bus first described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and later used by Philips Semiconductor."

"Although not designed for computation, PIO is quite likely Turing-complete, provided a long enough piece of tape can be found. It is conjectured that it could run DOOM, given a sufficiently high clock speed."

#rp2350

State and Local Efforts to Divest From Israel Are Gaining Steam https://truthout.org/articles/state-and-local-efforts-to-divest-from-israel-are-gaining-steam/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Israel Is Torturing Palestinian Prisoners to Death — With US Complicity https://truthout.org/articles/israel-is-torturing-palestinian-prisoners-to-death-with-us-complicity/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

For example, the term "dark patterns" lumps together really sneaky tactics with blunt acts of fraud. When you click an "opt out of cookies" button and get a screen that says "Success!" but which has a tiny little "confirm" button on it that you have to click to *actually* opt out, that's not a "dark pattern," it's just a scam:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/beware-of-the-leopard/#relentless

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Sacramento peeps: On Wednesday August 14th, the #CPUC will be at the Sacto County Board of Supervisors for a public hearing on placing customer service requirements on#cable giants Comcast, Charter-Spectrum and Cox. Public comments at 1pm and 5pm. If you can make it, please go and tell them to stop choking the community cable channels and stop redlining. https://acmwest.org/cpuc/#when