Capitalism falls down when it’s rigged

04.12.2019/09.57

Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years. He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is ‘rigged’; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle […]

Tesla or SpaceX doesn’t like you? They’ll say you’re an active shooter

24.11.2019/08.01

What does Tesla do to whistleblowers? They tell the cops you’re an active shooter. Apparently, this case about a gentleman called Martin Tripp emerged in 2018 but only today were the police documents released, and are worth reading. Above: Two of the pages from the Storey County Sheriff’s Office over the false […]

Tumblr is now where Verizon’s corporate agenda rule

24.04.2019/08.16

How quickly an opinion can change. I have been on Tumblr for 12 years, signing up in 2007, with my first post in January 2008. For most of that time I have sung its praises, saying it was one of the good guys in amongst all the Big Tech platforms (Google, Facebook) that […]

EU copyright: as far as we’re concerned, link away

13.04.2019/13.45

European Union—www.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre/en/visual-identity, Public Domain; link I’m reading more about this EU copyright directive that was voted in last month. Without doing a full analysis, I can say that we won’t go after anyone who links to our publications. We presently don’t care if you use a brief snippet of our content and link […]

In the wake of terrorism in your own country

20.03.2019/11.47

Above: Flowers at the Islamic Centre in Kilbirnie, Wellington on Monday. On 9-11, I wrote an editorial in Lucire immediately. It was clear to me what I needed to write, and the editorial got quite a few readers at the time. Today is March 20, five days after a terrorist attack on our country, […]

More lies: Instagram’s separate (and now possibly secret) set of ad preferences

02.09.2018/10.55

This post was originally going to be about Facebook lying. It still is, just not in the way originally conceived. Those who follow this blog know that, on Instagram, I get alcohol advertising. Alcohol is one of the categories you can restrict on Facebook. Instagram claims that it relies on your Facebook ad preferences […]