Or you're disagreeing with with any of the candidates who could possibly win. The presidential candidates of both major parties not only approved of a genocide, but both were committed to use our tax dollars to fund and arm it. I couldn't vote for either one.

Worked there for nine years, sometimes with people who had two- or three-digit employee IDs. In all their time at the company it had never sold customer data. YMMV

Ship From Vendor - they'll give the vendor your delivery name and address, kind of necessary
Payment Processing - they'll give the payment processor your name and credit card number, again kind of necessary
Alexa and Ring Emergency Response - They'll give the police your name, address and emergency type, rather necessary as well
Etc.

They don't sell your data. Ever.

The difference here is that Amazon never sells customer data. Ever.

I worked at Amazon for 9 years, and security of customers' data is the top priority. I could literally access Jeff Bezo's personnel file with lower permissions than I could access your purchase history or your Ring or Alexa data. We had to complete a refresher course on data protection every year.

And rely on outdated equipment with unreliable firmware to protect it.

The Democratic "leadership" is fine with it. They can give their corporate and billionaire benefactors everything on their wish list, and if voters complain just say, "We'd love to help you, but those meanies on the other side of the aisle won't let us. Maybe if you send us more money we'll try harder!"

Text of the Executive Order starts:
"Only the terrorists would vote for anyone but the greatest president ever! All real 'Mericans would vote for me, so what's the point of elections anyway? Do you want the terrorists to win?"

In case he does, I hope Bill Gates is learning to laugh at the irony my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Or in other words, as people were saying even in the 1960s:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
      "To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer."

How can we mitigate that risk? Like President John F. Kennedy quipped (echoed by Joel Goodman of the Humor Project):
https://www.humorproject.com/d...
        "There are three things which are real:
        God, human folly, and laughter.
        The first two are beyond our comprehension.
        So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)

Or, as I explain in more detail:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and economic] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Here is someone involved in AI who gets that our direction out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction and level of compassion going into it:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it. Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026."

I'm glad to see more AI and technology leaders starting to get that. Another example:
https://www.schmidtsciences.or...
        ""As AI systems advance, we face the risk that they will act in ways that contradict human values and interests--but this risk is not inevitable," said Eric Schmidt. "With efforts like the AI Safety Science program, we can help build a future in which AI benefits us all while maintaining safeguards that protect us from harm."
        The cohort of researchers--including "godfather of AI" Yoshua Bengio at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, OpenAI board member Zico Kolter at Carnegie Mellon University, and "AI Snake Oil" author Arvind Narayanan at Princeton University--will focus their work on research that addresses the critical safety challenges that AI faces."

Ultimately though, guard rails can come off or be jumped -- so we really need AI with a sense of humor -- especially for irony. :-)

--------

And we also need AI developers and funders who root their work more in compassion as a guiding force more than competition.

Something I wrote to Ray Kuzweil on that back in 2000 (put up by someone else I sent a copy to):
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "It will be difficult for you to change your opinion on this because you have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. You were making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in your book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt."

And also in 2001:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
          "Beware that people (usually not well versed in E&E [Ecology & Evolution]) cite ecology and evolution all the time to support a belief, but that does not make it a scientifically valid thing to do. For example, it is common to cite competition as a given in nature, but Lewis Thomas in "Lives of a Cell" points out that most successful organisms participate in effectively collaborative efforts -- like the symbiosis between mitochondria and eukaryotic cells. Likewise, the fact that something is true in most species does not mean that humans (given intelligence and culture) should behave that way -- because if E&E teaches anything, it is that there is a lot of diversity out there."

And in 2007:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "Technologies designed to amplify and extend the scope of corporate greed likely just will not have the same positive basis as ones built out of joy and humor and love. If you ever watch the British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, greed seems much more likely to design "Queeg" than "Holly". Langdon Winner writes about related issues at length in his classic _Autonomous Technology_.
      In short, I feel it likely you are clinging to outdated disprove assumptions about motivation and creativity and economics. And I speculate that the reason is in part ironically from your past success. Those assumptions may be holding you back, and holding on to them may indeed help bring about a very negative side of the singularity you want to avoid."

Also on that theme: https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...
        "No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers.
        Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of "human nature." It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield.
        No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message."

For the curious
Prompt: I am curious about the corporate mergers that resulted in Open Text owning such a large portion of EDI sector

AI Reply:
OpenText’s dominant position in the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) sector was built through an aggressive, decades-long strategy of consolidation, rolling up the largest legacy EDI networks and modern cloud integration platforms under one umbrella.
Instead of building a network organically, OpenText utilized major corporate mergers to absorb billions of transactions and millions of enterprise relationships.

Timeline of Major EDI Roll-Ups
OpenText systematically absorbed competing Value-Added Networks (VANs) and cloud players, following a strategic timeline:
[Inovis & Harbinger] --(Merged 2009)--> [GXS]
(Acquired 2014)
  [OpenText Portfolio] ---------- [OpenText Cloud] ---------- [Liaison Technologies]
(Acquired 2018)
(Acquired 2017)
Covisint]

Key Acquisitions That Built the Behemoth
1. GXS Group (2014) — The Foundation
The Deal: Acquired for $1.165 billion.
Why it mattered: This single transaction transformed OpenText from a content management provider into a global B2B powerhouse. GXS itself was an amalgamation of legacy giants—originally spun out of General Electric Information Services (GEIS)—and had already merged with Inovis (which owned Harbinger, TrustedLink, and Peregrine Software).
Scale Added: Over 600,000 trading partners and 12 to 16 billion annual transactions.

2. Liaison Technologies (2018) — The Cloud Shift
The Deal: Acquired for $310 million.
Why it mattered: Liaison brought a powerful, modern differentiator called the ALLOY Platform. While GXS provided massive legacy footprint, Liaison added cloud-native capabilities and sophisticated API-to-EDI translation. This enabled OpenText to cater to mid-market enterprises looking to bridge older EDI architectures with web APIs.

3. Covisint (2017) — The Automotive Monopoly
The Deal: Purchased from Compuware for $103 million.
Why it mattered: Covisint was originally founded as a joint venture by automotive titans (General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler) to handle secure supply chain messaging. Acquiring it locked down highly complex, secure supply chain verticals for OpenText.
The Business Rationale
EDI systems exhibit massive network effects. A supplier prefers a network where their buyers already exist, and vice versa. By executing an M&A roll-up strategy, OpenText cleared out competing infrastructure, captured the critical mass of global traffic, and positioned its OpenText Business Network as the default central utility for enterprise global trade.

Still Curious?
Prompt: did opentext grid network involve maintaining legacy systems or replatforming?
AI Answer:
The short answer is both, but in a highly strategic, phased timeline.

OpenText initially maintained the legacy systems to avoid disrupting global trade, but eventually executed a massive replatforming initiative to consolidate everything into a single, cloud-native architecture.
Because EDI runs the daily supply chains of Fortune 500 companies, a sudden, forced "rip-and-replace" replatforming would have caused catastrophic business outages. OpenText approached this consolidation through a specific two-stage evolutionary strategy:

Stage 1: The "Keep the Lights On" Legacy Phase
Immediately following major acquisitions (like GXS in 2014), OpenText maintained legacy architectures
Minimizing Disruption: They allowed acquired Value-Added Networks (VANs) and translation tools to run natively on their original mainframes and servers.
The "Bridge" Approach: Instead of moving the data, OpenText built software hooks and data-forwarding layers over the acquired platforms so different legacy grids could talk to each other without forcing customers to change their setups

Stage 2: The Replatforming to the "Unified Trading Grid"
By 2020, maintaining dozens of fractured, aging codebases became too costly and inefficient. OpenText launched a massive engineering effort to replatform its entire B2B network into a single cloud infrastructure.
The Cloud-Native Shift: They systematically migrated billions of transaction streams off acquired on-premises hardware and onto a modern microservices architecture known as the Unified OpenText Trading Grid.
Standardizing the Data Engine: Rather than hosting separate translation engines for old Inovis, GXS, or Liaison systems, OpenText consolidated them into a unified "any-to-any" data translation layer.
The API-EDI Convergence: Replatforming allowed OpenText to bake modern web APIs directly into legacy EDI transaction paths, which would have been impossible if they had just kept maintaining the separate legacy systems.

Summary
OpenText used legacy maintenance as a short-term shield to preserve revenue and customer trust, but ultimately used replatforming as their long-term weapon to eliminate operational overhead and unify their monopoly into a single cloud dashboard.

OpenText operates the world's largest B2B integration and electronic data interchange (EDI) ecosystem, anchored by the OpenText Trading Grid.
It processes over 30 billion transactions annually and connects millions of trading partner relationships globally.

AFAIK, they bought up and consolidated all of the legacy EDI platforms.

Business plan
Corner essential piece of electronic processing market buying up companies who had bought up "dead" legacy companies
Maintain in place forever?
Replatform?
Profit!

Jane Jacobs wrote a great book on civilization collapse in 2004 titled "Dark Age Ahead":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."

She makes many good points. That said, like John Gardner wrote in the 1964, "Every generation must learn for themselves what the words on the monuments mean":
"Self-renewal : the individual and the innovative society"
https://archive.org/details/se...
        "The only stability possible is stability in motion."--John William Gardner
        In his classic treatise Self-Renewal, John W. Gardner examines why great societies thrive and die. He argues that it is dynamism, not decay, that is dramatically altering the landscape of American society. The twentieth century has brought about change more rapidly than any previous era, and with that came advancements, challenges, and often destruction. Gardner cautions that "a society must court the kinds of change that will enrich and strengthen it, rather than the kind of change that will fragment and destroy it."
        A society's ability to renew itself hinges upon its individuals. Gardner reasons that it is the waning of the heart and spirit--not a lack of material might--that threatens American society. Young countries, businesses, and humans have several key commonalities: they are flexible, eager, open, curious, unafraid, and willing to take risks. These conditions lead to success. However, as time passes, so too comes complacency, apathy, and rigidity, causing motivation to plummet. It is at this junction that great civilizations fall, businesses go bankrupt, and life stagnates. Gardner asserts that the individual's role in social renewal requires each person to face and look beyond imminent threats.
        Ultimately, we need a vision that there is something worth saving. Through this vision, Gardner argues, society will begin to renew itself, not permanently, but past its average lifespan, and it will at once become enriched and rejuvenated."

Also on ideas from that book: https://fluidself.org/books/ps...
        "Every individual, organization or society must mature, but much depends on how this maturing takes place. A society whose maturing consists simply of acquiring more firmly established ways of doing things is headed for the graveyard--even if it learns to do these things with greater and greater skill. In the ever-renewing society what matures is a system or framework within which continuous innovation, renewal and rebirth can occur.
        Our thinking about growth and decay is dominated by the image of a single life-span, animal or vegetable. Seedling, full flower and death. "The flower that once has blown forever dies." But for an ever-renewing society the appropriate image is a total garden, a balanced aquarium or other ecological system. Some things are being born, other things are flourishing, still other things are dying--but the system lives on. ..."

For example, as I wrote elsewhere on July 4th, even as the USA is facing political issues, the internet has become a place where people provide each other support about health issues in a Patch-Adams-style participatory wellness community. That is an amazing revolution in itself. As Patch Adams said: "The most revolutionary act one can commit in our world is to be happy. (Patch Adams)" Or, I'd add, to help others be happy too.
https://soylentnews.org/commen...

I think a big part of self-renewal in our society may come from both humans and their AIs learning to laugh at the irony in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

You don't live in a country that has been under continual full bore economic, propaganda and terrorist attack by the biggest economy and most expensive military/intel organizations on the planet for half a century. Like Cuba, the fact that the country is still intact, unified, and free is a huge testament to its people and its government. You may not like their culture or their government, but it works for them and we have no right to force anything different on them.

You can also often reduce the risk of cancer recurrence significantly via diet (e.g. avoiding most or all animal products and ultraprocessed foods, and eating lots of greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries & fruits, and nut & seeds) -- especially along with other lifestyle changes like exercise, avoiding smoking and alcohol, stress reduction, good sleep, community, etc..
"G-BOMBS: The anti-cancer foods that should be in your diet right now"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/arti...

Problem is there is not much money in such advice... Especially when there are many vested interest in selling unhealthy food and profiting off of sickness. People who make money off of sickness don't even have to win the scientific argument, they just have to seed enough doubt to confuse people so they keep doing what they were doing. That strategy by industry of intentionally sowing confusion is mentioned here 18 minutes in - and it was based on the success by the cigarette industry (and I'd add the fossil fuel industry) in doing the same thing:
"What The Health - Full Documentary"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"18:24 You know the strategy is not on making their products any safer. The strategy is to just try to confuse the public to introduce doubt. You know.
18:33 there's a famous tobacco industry memo. It's called doubt is our product. That's all they had to do. They didn't have to convince Americans that smoking
18:41 was healthy right. They just had to introduce doubt -- then they would win. If there's just enough controversy people kind of throw up their hands: I
18:49 don't know what to eat. Confusion is their game"

That said, I hope treatments like Moderna's eventually show convincingly that they do a lot more good than harm -- since the process of getting individuals and societies to change their diets can be a very slow one -- as mentioned here about 35 minutes in:
"100 Year-Old Nutrition Professor: 7 Keys to a Long Life | Dr. John Scharffenberg"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"35:26 [Scharffenberg:] They're going by the cholesterol level with the idea that if you lower your cholesterol you will not have heart attacks anymore.
35:32 It's not true. It's not true. And we made a mistake. We should tell them that lifestyle [including a whole-food plant-based vegetarian diet] is important.
35:40 But the problem is we haven't persuaded people to live like they even know they should live.
35:47 Yes. That's our problem. [Interviewer:] And that's why I'm studying to become a therapist, I want to figure out how do we...people know what to do, but... [Scharffenberg:] A lot of them know what to do.
35:55 They don't do it. [Interviewer:] It's hard, yeah. [Scharffenberg:] It's hard."

I used to get classified emails from Fatherland Security for a while, after I had worked at the Coast Guard base upgrading their security system. That was my introduction to what a joke that entire department of the government was, their "alerts" are pure fiction written by someone who has a lot of imagination but no knowledge of infrastructure.