Posts relating to the USA.
A very interesting analysis on Crikey by Bernard Keane on the turmoil the occident finds itself in. In the opening paragraphs we find this zinger about what the right wing believes it was to protect the west from. Protecting from whom? Name your favourite other—the Soviet Union. Islam. China. Declining birth rates. Secularism. Immigrants. Globalism. […]
Read More… from If you want a slice of the pie, then compete
I’ve been saying this for many years, certainly for at least five, but the most ready example I can find on my blog was from August 2024: we have seen repeatedly how dishonest Big Tech conduct, which is often left unchecked, festers into something appalling, whether it’s anticompetitive conduct or the genocide of Rohingya Muslims […]
Read More… from I’m no longer alone in calling for Big Tech to face bans
With regret, we’ve had to remove free postage for US customers at Libriz. The price had shot up considerably for us, and those of you who have been checking out the site will know that this was carried out last week, and has nothing to do with a certain meeting at the White House. Compounding […]
Read More… from The end of US free shipping at Libriz (hopefully just for now)
Now that the world is waking up to Big Tech and its shenanigans, there is less need for me to post about them. Finally, what was once very evident to me is becoming mainstream thought, from Big Tech’s kowtowing to the suppression of a free press. I posted because it was frustrating to see everyone […]
Read More… from It’s finally mainstream to report what Big Tech has been about for over a decade
For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server. That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager […]
Again, things I’ve been pointing out for over a decade—heck, even over two decades, if you consider early concerns I had over Yahoo!—are now mainstream thought. Ed Zitron’s latest newsletter begins: A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world—watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every […]
Read More… from Everyone now sees the rot economy—and we’re beginning to understand what’s behind it
Former journalism academic Dan Gillmor writes: Post by @dangillmor View on Mastodon People are waking up. Such warnings have been on this blog for over 15 years. The Facebook ones started a bit later when it became evident that they were a bug-filled privacy danger zone, then Twitter. Dan is right: ‘You never […]
This was already in the air in 2019: Platforms can run their course and to me, Twitter had already jumped the shark by 2019. By then I had had three years on the fediverse, two on Mastodon. Who needed Twitter? And who needs it now? You may also like “AI”? Facebook’s bot city […]
I am going to give ourselves a pat on the back over the last few years of redesigns and site developments, helped to no small degree by getting all our sites off AWS (Amazon Web Services), which must be the most disempowering, retrograde set-up for hosting I have encountered in 30-plus years of working in […]
Read More… from Six refreshed or brand-new company websites since 2021
Yesterday, we had to come to a decision about capitalizing Black when referring to Black Americans, with Black History Month. We adopt Hart’s Rules, which is silent on the matter, but the Oxford English Dictionary, which needs to be referred to in tandem, does capitalize Black American, as of the 2011 revision. We were operating […]