Yeah, I'm having trouble wondering what's wrong with the universe if a judge thinks that Facebook hasn't basically obliterated all competition in social media.

YouTube is not really social media. YouTube shorts tries to be Tik Tok, and Facebook Reels tries to be Tik Tok, but they're fundamentally different things, because short-form video targets an entirely different category of people than social media and largely serves a different purpose — to entertain, not to inform.

Google/Alphabet's social media site was called Google+, and it died because everybody was on Facebook and Instagram, so nobody used it.

YouTube sharing is too public (and hard to use in any other way now that Google+ circles no longer exist), so it's not really a place to share pictures of your family and share stories with your friends. If it competes with anything in the pseudo-social space, it would be Twitter/X, which I would argue is a microblogging site, nota social media site. They have a fundamentally different kind of target audience.

Apple Messages isn't social media at all. It competes only with SMS. Same with WhatsApp. I can maybe understand a judge concluding that buying WhatsApp didn't meaningfully stifle competition, because no platform for basic point-to-point communication is ever going to prevent competition by apps that come on your phone (e.g. Messages).

But saying that Instagram didn't stifle competition is a cop out. Instagram (3 billion) and Facebook (3 billion) are the only two sites left standing that I would consider to be social media sites, with the sad exceptions of Truth Social (6.3 million), and Mastodon (1.8 million).

If you're in an industry where you have somewhere between three and six billion users and your next largest competitor has one fewer zeros in its user count, and all of the other competitors have three fewer zeros in their user count, you haven't just stifled competition. You've effectively eliminated it.

And Facebook/Instagram have incredible amounts of power when it comes to breaking the open web, hiding content behind a login wall that makes it basically impossible to share things with the public unless they are Facebook/Instagram users themselves, which makes it even harder for competitors to break into the space, because everyone has to be a FB/Insta user if they want to see the content that people create on those site. You can't just casually discover FB/Insta content. So that aspect also strongly leans towards Facebook/Instagram being a monopoly.

The only way you can realistically conclude that Facebook and Instagram aren't a monopoly is if you ignore all of the actual social use of social media and treat them as nothing more than a platform for influencers and bulls**t peddlers to make themselves seen by the whole world. And yes, for that narrow space, all of those platforms compete. But for social media itself — sharing of semi-private information with a close circle of friends and family — none of those other sites actually compete with Facebook and Instagram in any meaningful way, which makes this decision downright appallling.

But congratulations, Facebook, on amassing so much power that the government can't rein you in. I weep for the future of our world, because this really should have been open and shut, and Instagram should have been broken off years ago, the second Google+ proved that competing with that behemoth was infeasible.

But if that wasn't enough proof, the abject failure of Truth Social, where even Donald Trump's enormous influence wasn't enough to make a second traditional social media site become large enough to be viable, should be absolute inarguable proof that the Facebook/Instagram combination stifles competition. It does. Massively. Its very existence makes competition almost impossible, ensuring that the only even semi-social sites that can ever exist are those that focus on largely non-overlapping markets like microblogging.

And I really can't imagine how anyone could look at the evidence and conclude otherwise, because it is so incredibly obvious to me.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

I mean maybe, in theory, but how often do prices actually drop on hotels? Prices are usually based on occupancy, so unless somebody cancels a block of a hundred rooms or something, this seems unlikely to make a meaningful difference in hotel revenue.

Meanwhile, if this had happened five years ago, it would have meant not going on trips for me, because traveling with my dad in his last couple of years had a decent risk of having to cancel.

There are people for whom being able to cancel a trip without significant penalty is the only thing that makes travel possible. And if hotels are more concerned with maybe losing a few bucks in rare circumstances than they are with whether the elderly and disabled get to have a vacation at all, then F**K those hotels. They aren't worth doing business with.

Ideally, it should be a hair space (because em dashes in web fonts are borderline illegible without it), but Slashdot does not support Unicode, and   gets silently swallowed by Slashdot's HTML parser. Besides, we all know that AP style is the one true style, and it demands space.

No, an en dash is used for numerical ranges and certain compound hyphentions, not for parentheticals.

Could you please make no em dashes the default so that the 1% of us who actually know how to use em dashes correctly — professional writers and language nerds and so on — don't keep getting accused of using ChatGPT?

Thanks,
The aforementioned

My guess is that the finance team got wind of it, and they're tightening their belt.

If they do end up being that two-faced and there's a Democrat-led Senate and House, that's how you get a 15-person Supreme Court.

They did. From the summary:

I don't know how to read this in any other way besides that Marriott contacted these people and told them that they no longer had reservations.

I also don't know how to read this in any other way besides that Marriott's cancellation of the contract with Sonder was directly responsible for this, which must either mean that the stay was at a Marriott hotel contracted through Sonder, or that it was at a third-party hotel and Marriott decided to not pay Sonder for the rest of that person's stay. In either case, Marriott is at least partially responsible, and in the latter case, may even be guilty of tortious interference with that person's stay.

iPhone is FREEEEEEEEE!

These are basically websites that are wrapped by an app. These developers can currently get most of what Apple provides without using Apple tech, and keep 97% of the profits. Why would they want to keep only 85% for such minimal benefits? For that matter, why are they providing an app when a website will do?

The U.S. rarely attacks or occupies those that didn't recently attack someone.

I mean, the most recent war with Iraq was something of a stretch, though there was at least some justification because of Iraq not holding up its end of international agreements regarding their nuclear program, which were made at least in part in response to Iraq attacking Kuwait just over a decade earlier. Otherwise, it's pretty much peacekeeping actions in response to U.N. decisions, helping out neighboring countries whose leaders ask, etc.

And when we say "keeps alternate parties off ballots", we don't mean "keeps alternate parties off ballots unless they can get at least n% of eligible voters to sign a petition. In the U.S., any party can get on the ballot, including those who just list one of the major party candidates as their candidate (yes, this is weird) just by getting enough signatures. If you can't get that many signatures, you were never going to win anyway, and all you can do is cause less desirable candidates to win by drawing votes from more desirable candidates.

Mind you, we've evolved into a two-party system that basically gives third parties little chance of actually winning any major election, which is, at least in part, a flaw in the way we do vote counting, but that doesn't prevent them from being on the ballot.

So why is Marriott the one telling them that they have to vacate? That kind of notification should be coming from the property owner or Sonder. And more to the point, it shouldn't matter if Marriott cancels their contract with Sonder, because Sonder got paid already, or should have.

Actually, it does. In fact, that's possibly way worse, because unless they kicked you out to an outside website, Marriott literally took a payment from you.

None of this makes the slightest bit of sense. Either Marriott took the payment, in which case they are duty-bound to fulfill or reverse payment, and in the case where this causes severe harm, are liable for damages from that harm, or Sonder took the payment, in which case Marriott's contract cancellation with Sonder shouldn't affect your stay.

Yeah, you missed the part where I said that doing it with an iPad would be impractical because you'd have to find a way to synchronize two of them. :-)

Sorry, slightly off. I think it's actually 24". It's about the size of two 8.5x11 sheets of paper, and it is widescreen aspect ratio, so it ends up being pretty much the same size as two 13" iPad Pro tablets side by side, with a little extra unused width.

• I've burned out more micro-SD cards than I can count by overuse.
• The micro-SD card contacts are a point of failure when equipment gets moved around. And concert day is exactly when you don't want things to go wrong.
• We'd have to manually sync things like PDF annotations between the micro-SD card and the backup, because there's no network at the rehearsal building.

There's just no way in h*** that I'd trust something that boots off an SD card, much less micro-SD, when a failure would be catastrophic. Way too much risk, all of it concentrated on a day when people are rushing as hard as they can to get things set up in under three hours before the concert starts.

I'd much rather have a generic Android tablet for something like that than a pre-built setup or a custom-built setup. It has pretty much the same advantages as the Pi in terms of being able to write software for it or whatever, but likely fewer opportunities for things to go wrong, because the storage is self-contained.

Just my $0.02.

And at that point, they will be worthless.