Only funny comment on the story?

But the beloved thing I was thinking about when I saw this story was a little whiteboard I used for scheduling most of my work. I actually inherited it from my predecessor, who I still meet for lunch from time to time... (The next joke requires Unicode, so Slashdot has spared you the attempt.)

Different abandoned IBM site, but I have walked past a few times since then and it looks pretty much unchanged. I didn't try to go in, but from the outside the buildings seem just as they were back then. Difference is that the parking lots are full of unused construction equipment. The site is just being used for storage of inventory by a company that makes the equipment.

Shhh... You aren't supposed to talk about the Cuban invasion. The invasion schedule depends on maximizing impact on the "election" in November. And this time the trick is going to work for sure! ALL those Cuban immigrants now living in America will be so surprised to find themselves drafted into the invasion force. Two birds with one stone time!

Seriously, it's not like Cuba was ever real threat. Not even the level of economic threat that Venezuela once posed with the oil. But it would be funny if Rubio volunteers to be the Generalissimo leading the invasion and then Presidento of the Cuban Republic of Bananas.

Wrong on both counts, though I concur that the selection of stories could be better. MUCH better. Why don't you become a Slashdot editor?

It's pretty sad that so many nerds idolize these fools as role models. Maybe just young wannabe nerds, but they still gobble up this kind of news and gossip.

Even sadder that their petty squabbles and twisted personalities matter so much. This is how the money works these years. But I think the funniest part is that their patron saint Adam Smith is to completely misunderstood. He was mostly talking about how the invisible hand had managed to keep things working up to that time, but at the same time he was removing the cloak of invisibility. I would argue that he therefore deserve a lot, perhaps even the lion's share, of the blame for what has happened to the economies of the world since then.

Just doing some "research" on "crucified on a cross of shareholder value", but I should have asked more about who. As in all of us.

Returning to my modified Subject, I confess I was exaggerating for clickbait effect. I don't think most of the people on Slashdot are that awful and the great insult artists of yore are long gone, too. But there was a time when I thought some Slashdot discussions could be part of actual solutions in the actual world, which has become a funny thought of its own on a website that is simultaneously seriously deficient in funny.

(Yesterday's trip to the library netted an anti-AI book, an anti-monopoly book, and one humor book from a long-dead humorist. Current priority book is neuroscience and still digesting Careless People about the awful people of Facebook.)

Not to mention, as a kid playing Doom you either had to find the BFG or your friend Timâ(TM)s older brother could tell you the secret. Today, a million youtubers have already done full 100% letâ(TM)s plays, and every secret, 100% completion, unlock, etc., is a quick google or gpt search away.

I loved adventure games. The genre just isnâ(TM)t viable today. So many of the old hallmarks of games just donâ(TM)t work or make sense anymore. I donâ(TM)t even think thatâ(TM)s necessarily a bad thing. I can fire up SCUMMVM or an NES emulator or Dosbox if I have an itch to play those games.

Entertainment IS a brutal business.

more racist.

FTFY, even though I think AC was being intentional.

Closest I could find to the nub of the problem. Whether this is going to work would depend on very accurate weather AND climate modeling and I don't think we are anywhere close at this time. Due to butterfly effects, the prediction problem is probably unsolvable, so I think that means we would need a control system with extra capability that is constantly compensating for prior interventions. It reminds me of the fly-by-wire problem for aircraft with negative dynamic stability. Not even theoretically possible for a human to fly the thing if the computer burps.

I still don't know what AC was mumbling about, but the few posts on this story say all that needs to be said about the relevance of the EFF now.

Not worth much, but I do have a couple of takes on the topic. Main one in my Subject, but that's part of a general problem of broken economic models. The big donor may mean well, but the model only works until the donor starts calling bad shots, which is what always happens. But now I think even the "aligned business model" solution angle fails on the dimensional collapse problem, and we humans are NOT going to stop collapsing the dimensions. We're intrinsically simpleminded and will insist on more simplicity than reality involves.

Time for a "discussion" on building "trust" with Claude?

Yeah, same joke but AIs don't call for original humor. Still, I sadly thought the story had more potential for funny.

I'm guessing it was a rush to FP but I had quite a bit of trouble figuring out your intention from that short teaser. You should have given us a hint, perhaps by speculating about the bribery. However I do think Facebook is only "donating" small amounts of cash and most of the YOB's "eternal gratitude" is based on past services rendered. (In the YOB's case "eternal" means about two weeks. Until some other shiny object gets his attention.)

I know it seems intrinsically off topic to mention books on today's version of ye olde Slashdot, but I've been reading a bunch of Facebook histories lately, and serendipitously I'm just now finishing Careless People: A story of where I used to work: Power. Greed. Madness. by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Seems to be a classic case of one of those roads paved with good intentions. I think she got too personal in places, but I think there were a couple of key omissions that bother me more. Most important involved the intrinsic self-contradiction in Zuck's denial of responsibility. So on the one hand Zuck is claiming Facebook didn't cause all those bad things, up to an including lots of deaths, but on the other hand, why are the advertisers giving Facebook so much money? If Facebook doesn't work as advertised to the people buying the ads on Facebook, then this defense becomes "Meta is a total fraud taking money for nothing."

I think the "Facebook as a drug" aspect also deserved much more consideration. The tobacco industry as a bad example did get mentioned once, but the entire internet.org => Free Basics scam is a classic drug dealer story. Giving away free samples to get the suckers hooked and turn the blind eye when the addicts start doing bad stuff to pay for their next fix. I actually think that psychological addiction has become a bigger threat to society than chemical addiction. In general psychology is bogus hokum, but the applied psychologists have learned several things about selling soap, widget cleaning services, and politicians (with the dirtiest widgets of all). (Not sure I should go into the historical details because of the ageism thing, but I remember free cigarettes with my C-rats, though I never made the transition to full addiction. I was saved by a psychological block against paying to literally burn the product?)

Another fundamental problem is at an even higher level and I'm still unsure how to describe it. One hand is the "unite the world with better communications" thing but the other hand is the "divide and conquer" tactics of the worst abusers of Facebook and Instagram. But all in all I definitely haven't found any evidence for Facebook/Meta making the world better. In the book she argues that this part is much worse than I thought, but I'm too personally inclined to lean in that direction so I want to reserve judgment and read a few more books...

I feel like I need to add the personal disclaimer thing... I decided Facebook was a seductive waste of time some years ago. I had one of the old university-linked accounts so I was on for a long time, but my solution was to cut it to 5 minutes/day using timers. I think I was probably using Facebook at least half an hour per day before that, but the five minutes was enough to see the main news from actual friends and it also broke the urge to visit Facebook, so many days got skipped entirely. Never felt like I was missing out. Then in 2022 I was assassinated on Facebook. There was no option to find out why, only an option to submit to Zuck or be dead, and I'm not much inclined to submit. I did exercise the option to download "my" data from Facebook and spent a while looking through the small amount of recent stuff, but didn't find anything interesting. Leaving me with the hypothesis that it was some kind of politically motivated hit job?

Can I go now?

Unclear to me what distinction you are trying to make. My suggestion for a tax-based solution approach involves focusing on the effects of monopolistic practices on profits, and it does not matter which form the monopolistic practice takes if profits can be linked to that practice. I'm not saying it's a trivial problem, but I think there are clear indicators of abusive situations. In this case, the critical metric is that customers have no freedom to choose where their apps are coming from.

It might be possible for Apple to argue this is a kind of natural monopoly over security concerns, but I'm saying that should not matter. The profits that come from "gatekeeper" status should still be taxed at a higher rate.

In solution terms, this example seems quite similar to what should have been done to Microsoft a LONG time ago. Imagine if Microsoft had been divided into several competing daughter companies, each starting with a copy of the OS source code and equal resources, both physical and human. The larger the company, the easier it is to achieve reasonably equal divisions, though some minor financial adjustments might be necessary to balance the books. After that, the daughter companies would have competed to provide the best versions of evolving OSes and the customers would have had real choices. If the Apple Store was split between several competing companies, it would work in a similar way. One of the new stores might focus on attracting more developers with lower fees, but I'd be inclined to use the store that focused on fewer apps of higher quality.

You seem to be arguing with a cloud of no ones about nothing substantive, though you do raise the freedom issue in the mist.

However I see most problems in terms of time these years. The humans making the decisions are mostly motivated by short term considerations. They are trying to claim as much money as possible before they die. Freedom and innovation are mostly irrelevant to their business decisions. In particular, the current winners see freedom and innovations as threats. They don't want customers who are free to change to innovative goods and services from some company that might become tomorrow's winner.

However the interesting aspect of this story (to me) is that it again shows how complicated it can be to figure out what a monopoly is. This is a job for SuperAccountant! First we have to figure out which parts of the profits are coming from anti-freedom monopolistic behaviors...

The main problem I have with a wealth tax is that it depends on the timing. I don't see any natural way to decide when it should be assessed. Also how do you decide what time period of wealth accumulation to consider? Maybe you can clarify how you justify it, but I think it's a can of worms, even though I do think there are basically two fairly simple mechanisms for great fortunes: Inheritance and crime. But still don't know where to draw the line for "great"...

I think it makes more sense to look at it from a freedom perspective. I think there are at least three natural metrics to detect harmful monopoly behavior that justifies a higher rate of tax on the profits from those sources.

(1) Customer choice. Less than three is too few and the optimum for most people is probably around five. There are actually problems ("The Paradox of Choice") when the number of choices is too large, but it's generally not regarded as a monopoly problem.

(2) New competition. If wannabe competitors can't get into the niche, then there is something wrong there.

(3) Employee freedom. If people working in the niche basically have to work for the leading company (or one or two competitors), then it's a signal something is wrong and the leader's profits should get taxed harder.

I think there are two stable situations here. If it's a natural monopoly then some of the tax money should be used to regulate the monopolist and to fund research to break the monopoly. (Shades of FM radio?) If the monopoly is not natural, then the monopolist should be motivated to divide into competing companies. Not a penalty for success, but rather an incentive to reproduce the good ideas in more companies. Some loss of efficiency, but honest competition drives innovation.

Quoted against censor moderators. Some agreement with the content...

But if they can get it to the current SCOTUS with appropriate "incentives" to the YOB (Yuge Orange Buffoon), then this time the trick might work. "That trick never works" might have a limit after all.

"A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves" is the trick I most wish would work.

While we're on the topic of corruption... Meanwhile, back at the World Cup, the last host country has eliminated itself. No possible path to an untainted victory. Let me be clear that I mean tainted in the worst way. If England wins, some might argue that victory is tainted in a way, but I argue it was AGAINST England's interests and they will have overcome it anyway. They still won that game, really won it, after 35 minutes with only 10 men on the pitch. (And I feel most sorry for the keeper who had that bad PK... What a way to leave.)