onfocus

All of the major tech companies conducting another wave of layoffs this year are sitting atop mountains of cash and are wildly profitable, so the job-shedding is far from a matter of necessity or survival.

Short term stock boost is more important than people. Thanks, job creators!

“Costs have come down substantially, and while corporations were quick to pass on their increased costs to consumers, they are surprisingly less quick to pass on their savings to consumers,” Liz Pancotti, a Groundwork strategic advisor and paper co-author, told the Guardian.

ah, just the natural cycle of high prices at the supermarket due to [checks notes] record profits.

The surprisingly good GDP figures prompted Biden aides to launch a more aggressive push to tout the economy’s strength as the presidential campaign heats up, hoping to flip what has long been perceived as one of the president’s biggest political vulnerabilities into an asset heading into the presidential campaign season.

Thanks, Bidenomics! Too bad about the corporate layoffs due to [checks notes] record profits.

Wyden suggested that the intelligence community might be helping data brokers violate an FTC order requiring that Americans are provided "clear and conspicuous" disclosures and give informed consent before their data can be sold to third parties. In the seven years that Wyden has been investigating data brokers, he said that he has not been made "aware of any company that provides such a warning to users before collecting their data."

If you’re curious about why we need much stronger privacy laws in the US, this article is a good start. Thanks Senator Wyden for fighting the good fight.

The researchers warn that this rankings war is likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam, and that it genuinely threatens the future utility of search engines: "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention."

I think domain-specific link curation is going to be extremely important very soon. But I've always thought that so who knows?

California Senate candidate and Congressmember Adam Schiff is calling for a major overhaul of American institutions, including getting rid of the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court and eliminating the filibuster.

More like this, please.

Based on the measures developed for the study, the researchers find that in aggregate, after one year online attention towards a deplatformed personality is reduced by 64% on Google and by 43% on Wikipedia.

Deplatforming is an important tool that we shouldn’t throw out as useless.

Ladapo’s colleagues in science and medicine face the challenge of understanding what drives someone with Ladapo’s credentials — a Harvard education and a stint on the medical faculty at UCLA — to descend so deeply into professional irresponsibility.

The death cult brain worms never rest. We need to continually work to remove dangerous people from positions of power. Please vote accordingly, even in Florida.

As North Carolina and Montana enact new age verification laws effective January 1, residents can’t view sites in Pornhub’s parent company network.

Interesting Republican effort to raise awareness and use of VPNs in red states.

Members of congress who supported objection to counting Biden’s electoral votes are running for reelection. Here they are, drawn together.

If you need a list of people not to vote for, this is a good start.

The decline in crime contrasts with perceptions, driven in part by social media videos of flash-mob-style shoplifting incidents, that urban downtowns are out of control. While figures in some categories of crime are still higher than they were before the pandemic, crime overall is falling nationwide, including in cities often singled out by politicians as plagued by danger and violence.

Questions not covered here: who does rising crime stories serve? Why is the media more eager to report rising crime compared with declining crime?