I value and respect this response, however it reads more like intelligent, well educated theory and not based enough on history or reality. Apple would never bomb Samsung for 10% share increase because profit is not always that straight forward. For example, people working at Samsung are potential customers, and if they are dead then they are no longer. Also, some people will never be their customer because of the incident, and we've seen companies go under because of consumers not liking their ethics many times. Also with no government stepping in at all. The government should be a referee at a sports game basically, nothing more, nothing less. Many cultures have done horrible ethical things that are part of their culture, corporations untapped are no less capable than their culture. If you say the government should prevent that then it's really no different than saying no culture should be free if you disagree with everything they believe in. Why the pursuit of money is different than that of power is because you can never give any back (power) to get more. Money is constantly tricky and the path to more always involved with giving it away, either to investors, or employees, or banks, etc... Capitalism has natural checks and balances that government does not. Power corrupts far more often, so few are willing to give it away, just look at the ages of our politicians. Money, on the other hand, look how many Athletes like Shaq retire and give money away. He would never kill for another dollar, but a politician might easily kill for one more step up. The U.S. is perhaps the most advanced country in history, yet corporations and people pay daily to kill hundreds of innocent children; their own children, even their future customers, but not only does the government do nothing, rather it is the leader in pushing it. You idea of ethics is only possible when people change their mind, and if tomorrow everyone said ya we should stop doing that then corporations would instantly agree; whereas the government won't change anything for years; and that's in a voting Republic.

So one of your two examples in all of history was a company using another government to do bad things? But you are sticking to the idea that Monopolies are worse than government, no chance. It sounds correct, but it's wrong. At the end of the day if Apple ruled the world and mind of every person it would take seconds to rectify, they have no army, they don't run the judicial system, if everyone dropped their phones it would be over. Same with Google, or Facebook, etc... This idea never plays out. Look at Bud light, almost a monopoly on lite bear, one ad some people don't like and it almost went under. Corporations are people and the slightest cultural change or CEO can change everything instantly. You can't change North Korea instantly even if you were it's leader.

This sounds like an intelligent response, but historically it doesn't pan out at all. Forget historically for the moment and look at all the countries in the world, how many are bad places to live because of Monopolies? Vs. How many are bad places to live because of the government? You're making assumptions about the place you live because in your lifetime it's been relatively good, if you could wake up almost anyone in history from 100+ years ago they would want to shake you silly.

I would assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that you believe what the media told you that Donald Trump is a racist. If you can give me 2 actionable things that he did as President that are racist then I'll admit you are right. Not words, but rather actions. I can make a very strong case that he did more for the Black community than Obama in 8 years - in terms of Prisons, College's, jobs, police reform, etc...

I can also assure you that being a racist and a successful business person in the 2000's in NYC is impossible. This attack is no different than Salem witches, people label other people racist and it is impossible to refute. They can use any example to prove they are right too - if he picks either path both with be evidence that he is racist.

This 'private companies' defense is getting old, and apparently the only real defense for big tech censorship. Let's expand the 'private companies' argument a bit; a hardware store could put up a 'white's only' sign. How well do you think that would play out? A private cake bakery could put a 'straight's only' sign and how well did that work out? Yet these platforms have basically said no conservatives on our platforms, only liberals are allowed to speaks; the rest of you need listen.

Here is the other thing, all of these big tech billionaires are rich because of free speech. Do you think facebook and twitter would have become huge companies if they didn't give everyone a voice? That is essentially why twitter was created. Why do they now try to silence half of the population? Because it is no longer in their interest to promote free speech, because it no longer benefits them - if the playing field was leveled for these people they would no longer win because they are not the best at what they do anymore.

"Terms of conduct" you say; give me a break, do you know how many hate groups per minute post on these platforms? What percent that are blocked are on one side of the political spectrum. Let's put it this way, let's assume that 50% of all bad tweets are from one side - how come 100% of blocked accounts are only on the right?

There is another point above all of this, because most media is filtering the same way, can you name a time or place that the party that was for 'censorship' was historically the correct side to be on? Just because this is private companies on the internet it is still the same game being played. It's just for the first time in history some of these companies are 'powerful' enough to influence massive amounts of people.

This is the general argument I hear when discussing 'reparations' or race-specific justice, ironically from the same people who stand strongly against deporting DACA kids; because a child shouldn't have to pay for wrongs done by their parents.

So the idea that an American citizen that hasn't done anything wrong would have to pay for the wrongdoings of some of the population of many generations ago is astounding. Even if your family actually spent generations fighting against slavery or wasn't even in the country by then - if you are the wrong color some of your stuff should be taken and given to someone else. Wow.

Now children in American turn on the TV to watch 22 (of 24 btw) black NBA millionaires kneeling in protest over the injustice of their country while wearing sneakers made from literal political/religious detention camps. No wonder kids are confused.

I do not want to make the case that BLM and their cause is unjust. Ranking 'justness' of causes is personal and not all that valuable on a large scale. I will make these 2 points about the BLM movement:

#1. Defund the police could be discussed if historically anyone could name one place that had a good standard of living and was peaceful where there wasn't a version of 'police'
#2. Even with good intentions there is no 'Black' movement that will not make things worse. This is the key piece. The only way people get over their internal issues with other races, genders, cultures, etc... is by being exposed to them more. Kids understand this naturally and if we just let it play out they will grow up in this diverse country and move us to where MLK dreamed. No other effort, law, policy, diversity officer, HR person, etc... will do anything but make it worse.

The strange thing about the riots triggered by the George Floyd death was it was really one of the first protests/riots I've seen that all sides agreed. I didn't see anyone defending that cop, and it wasn't as if he had been let off yet. I think without the lockdowns and so many people sitting around unemployed it would have never happened to that extent.

I'm also a bit confused how the media and an entire party claiming 'breaking news' the Russians stole the 2016 election and running with that strong for 3 years after the election isn't inciting violence, but the President claiming this one being stolen was? Is he wrong, yes, but he didn't say storm the Capital, that would be inciting violence. Twitter deciding to censor a USA Today article was likely to have also incited some of that violence, should they take themselves offline? You have a one-sided media and then big tech starts to censor one political side only; lots of those people reached a tipping point.

If you took probability and statistics, if you take a random sample of 65% of voters in a state and one candidate has a 12% lead, statistically speaking the chance of the person behind winning is outside of the margin of error - which is why they can call states so early. PA was outside the margin of error for a Mathematical Theorem (a statement that has been proven to be true), so the math can't be wrong; which means the input was wrong.

I've never seen more excited people or larger rallies for anyone. So for Trump to slightly outperform his polling is hardly shady. I'm in the most liberal state and I witnessed huge random rallies that I've never seen; even for Obama here.

What was shady was in rural counties with 80/20 Trump/Republican supporters, even there the main-in-votes came in about 90/10 Biden. Statistically you can't explain that, there aren't even enough people in those towns. I could see 60/40 for Joe, but 80 and 90+ with 92% turnout numbers in some spots. Wow. I mean you had places with 92% turnout where the historical high was 61%.

I see how easy it is for you to notice that Trump is a 'mentally deficient' person; however what did he do as a President that was bad? His actions and decisions were shockingly good. I hated the guy and disagreed with most of his policies, but he was right with many of them. He was right with dealing with China, he got North Korea to chill, ISIS is all but gone, unemployment was historical record lows, he didn't start stupid wars, he reformed police and the war on drugs, he cut our taxes and simplified the tax code, he kept freedoms for the States, he considered ideas from both sides, and he was willing to change his mind on policy when he was wrong. Trump also at least attempted to keep his promises as President, Biden refused to even tell you his promises. Honestly I can easily see being anti-Trump (I was), but being Pro-Biden is even harder. In his 47 years he's always been on the wrong side of decisions. I mean literally the worst track record of anyone on wars, the war on drugs, taxes, health care, you name it. He is everything that people dislike about politicians; and now he's that and losing his mind and has a corrupt son (can you imagine if that was Don Jr.).

Go look at the First Step Act.

Go look at Black universities and their funding

He actually passed Police reform: https://www.voanews.com/usa/ra...

Don't take it from Fox, take it from CNN's Van Jones: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne...

I can also say that some people started looking for a source of truth. I have a friend in his 50's who had been a CNN watcher and democrat forever. He said he started doing some of his own research to confirm what they were telling him day in and day out and was appalled at how much they had been lying to him.

In his search for a better source of truth, somehow he got on the Qanon/Trump road. When Trump would say extreme things debunked by all media, but then end up true, these people got deeper and deeper. In many cases even ruined their personal lives. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me to find out they ended up in the Capital building.

So who am I blaming? I'm blaming Trump/Qanon, the media, and those that chose to go down that road. I'm blaming everyone. Throw in a lockdown, BLM riots that society claims is healthy during a pandemic, and you can see how we got here. The woman in California that is told she can't run her business outside but Hollywood just 20 feet away can, wow I mean the British tax on tea wasn't nearly that in-your-face bad. If both sides don't understand how we got to this place it'll only get worse. Also more states should look at how Florida does their voting.

I can tell you that the majority of Trump supporters did not take him at his word about the election going to be stolen. They guy shoots from the hip and says all sorts of crazy stuff. The irony is his actions ended up being really good.

He's the first president in my lifetime to not start a new war. He did more for the Black community (real law, action, and prison release) than Obama. I could go on, but I wish the election didn't end up shady statistically. Trump got more votes than Reagan and Reagan won 49 states. Trump had a larger lead than any Republican has in decades in 4 or 5 states, leading from 0-99% of the vote count. Was it stolen? Probably not, but the media spent 3 entire years telling us that the last one was stolen by Russian mind control. They literally spent 3 years telling us that Trump stole the election because of Russia!!! Well come to find out that is false (still confused as to how contextually that would even work, since so many countries and parties try to influence voters), and now even before the count was over the media confirmed for a fact that this one wasn't stolen.

At the very least those that believe it was stolen, their concerns should be entertained. If it was Bernie, Obama or Bill Clinton it would have been easy to understand, but having Biden get way more votes (like 22% more) votes than Obama, it's difficult to fathom.

Of course they should have had backups, or better security, or on and on... but this has to be the only part of society that we blame and go after the victims of crimes. Can you think of another crime that the majority react and find ways to tear apart the victim involved?

This sounds like a post from CNN. A bunch of what-if's, followed by blaming the Russians. I'm open to the discussion but you have to somehow provide me 2 things to get me to even consider this scenario.

1. Give me context. How many other countries 'meddle' in our election. If fake news and random facebook posts are attempts to 'hack' our election, then there is zero chance that only Russia was involved. Of course they are trying to influence our elections, virtually everyone is. If Saudi Arabia or France was trying to 'meddle' and posted facebook ads for team Clinton would we know? How many elections before has this happened. How many total 'fake news' or ads where there? If it's 1 ad per million than so what. I seriously need context and no one is added any to this discussion. 2 years and not once has CNN given any context to this. How many people in power worldwide know the Clinton's, she was Secretary of State if you didn't know that. How many contacts do they have in the US? How much did they tweet? Post? Call?

2. Please explain to me exactly how the 10,000 people in Michigan that decided to not show up was directly related to Russians? I mean seriously. Was anyone physically threatened in the entire country by a Russian? Were there Trump vans blocking polls? The argument you seem to be making is that Americans are so dumb that Russia puts a fake ad on facebook so we believe it and therefore do not go and vote for a Clinton. The only way this works (because I'm not seeing actual 'hacking' being blamed) is if people are so easily persuaded in voting for the wrong person that anyone could do it. Of course this then begs the question of why doesn't everyone put out dumb ads? This falls flat on itself as no one is able to make a decision because we're so easily duped; or we're so stupid as a whole that we deserve whomever they want us to vote for.

Whenever one side loses they look for reasons; CNN and the dems sat around a table and threw out ideas. Russia and Trump stuck enough and they ran with it, and ran with it, and pushed it, and ran with it, and ignored real news, and ignored context, and ran with it...

I've actually switched to Brave recently. Still can't live without Chrome or Firefox, but Brave has been working well.

I used to think exactly like this, could have written this post myself, but there is more logic to apply to this. Remember that these workers in China are actually doing better now than before these jobs came in. The next step for them is to start to demand all the above that you mention (labor laws, minimum wage, working hours, etc...); can you think of a country that didn't start at the bottom?

Do you think that Norway a thousand years ago had environmental laws and overtime rules?

The cheap labor in China actually improves the standard of living for millions of people worldwide buying their products while also slightly improving their standard of living as well. When, and it's already happening, they start demanding more rights the prices rise and the cheapest labor shifts to India and other poor highly populated areas looking for any wage. If the government was a democracy the process would be much quicker and poverty worldwide would shrink quicker. We need to let people start at the bottom; not eating at McD's hurts the young kid trying to make enough to get an education to not have to work at McD's.

Now, we can play a role in minor improvements, myself prefer to buy something at Target over Walmart because Target treats their employees better.