Now that the quartet has been launched, it’s evident that Tesla’s naming strategy is all wrong. This is what they should be called.
On a related note:
Since I haven’t seen the March 15 video now circulating on OnlyKlans, I mean, Twitter, I can’t use the DIA reporting form. But those who have, should.
If it were a New Zealand website doing the distribution, a warning would have been issued at the least; and I bet it would have been blocked by now. The person running the site would probably have been charged. Basically what our government is signalling is that a foreign fascist sympathizer has greater freedoms than the rest of us. And what the opposition parties are signalling is that that’s OK, too, because here’s a real thing that they can sink their teeth into, but they prefer to gaslight over other stuff.
I know from first-hand experience that those who hold political office are not always the smartest. When you run against others for the same job, it doesnât take long to spot the less intelligent, some buoyed by privilege, others by an unshakeable belief in their invincibility.
Its headline: âIs America’s infatuation with billionaires finally coming to an end?â
Amanda Marcotte begins, âIt has long been evident that Elon Musk is a moron, at least to those willing to see it. Well before the Tesla CEO overpaid for Twitter in the throes of a tantrum, there was a chorus of mostly-ignored people pointing out, repeatedly, that Musk’s mental maturity appeared to have stagnated around the sixth grade.â
After citing a handful of cases where Musk fell short, âThe business and tech press would be startled at his dumb behavior, but within 48 to 72 hours, it was all forgotten and Musk went back to being covered as if he were a genius, if perhaps an eccentric one.â
I only personally know one milliardaire and he was a cut above the rest of us in brains.
But Marcotte notes that Musk, D. J. Trump, Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried are hardly geniuses, and takes aim at Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, too.
If we can get this into our heads, we might stop a similar worship in this country. Just when did this start? Thatcherism? Rogernomics? Just because someone has made a few bob doesnât make them a political messiah or great leaderâso stop being their fans and start choosing people to support based on merit.
Here in Aotearoa we appear to have two main parties bereft of ideas, with the opposition so desperate it wishes to import the culture wars from the US while gaslighting whenever possible. Neither is particularly palatable to me, and thanks to MMP, Iâm going to be quite happy to look at the next tier, as I have done for more General Elections than not. Greens? TOP? Not ACT.
When I think about some rich guys Iâve had run-ins withâincluding one I had to sue at the start of my career (and beat)âthereâs one thing that ties them together. They have to be slaves to the system, the establishment. They have to play by its rules in order to retain their directorships and social standing. They have to walk the tightrope of convention. They have to conform. Ironically, the more to the right of politics you go here (and the more individual freedom is preached), the more conformity there appears to be. Conformity is valued over merit or honour. This explains Sam Uffindell.
How bloody boring is that? Iâm so deeply grateful, particularly to my family, for giving me the chance to be my own person and walk the freer path that I create. My grandmother, mother and father all happy to support my interests as an infant and letting me draw all over newspapers and magazines. My mother for encouraging me to follow my interests in design. My father for literally working behind the scenes for decades to help build my businesses. Conformity is for suckers. Innovation and societal advancement never came from conformity, and societies are better for it.
This isnât a dig at Red Points or Hearst this time, since I received an apology and they did what they said: the DMCA claim notices were withdrawn and they have revised their systems. If anything, Hearst SL wound up quite cordial, as their New York office has tended to be in my dealings with them.
This is a dig at Google who only today sent what appears to be the final confirmation that our URLs have been reinstated.
This sorry saga began on August 17 and essentially Google told people searching for various terms that we were thieves till today.
The fact this virtual monopoly can libel someone with impunityâand has done so for yearsâshould disturb any right-thinking person.
Speaking of Google, we gave in and connected the revised about.shtml page on the Lucire website to a current page. This was a page we hadn’t linked since the 2000s, but kept coming up high on site:lucire.com searches on Google and, formerly, Bing.
Since I typically don’t use Google for searches, and have not done regularly for a dozen years, I had no idea until investigating the collapse of Bing’s index recently. (ItÊŒs still just as compromised, despite claiming it has a higher number of results for any given search. I see no real evidence of this.)
Admittedly, people might seek an ‘About’ page, so instead of their reading a 2004 page, we took the content from our licensing website and created a new one. The old one is linked from there, as it’s quite a novelty.
Nine days since the first DMCA notice was lobbed against us, the saga has finally reached the powers-that-be at Hearst SL.
And once it did, things began happening quickly. Iâve heard from their head of legal, and what heâs outlined to me seems like a good resolution to the whole saga.
He tells me some changes have been made to Red Points Solution SLâs processes, which I think is a good outcome if it saves others the grief of what Iâve had to deal withâespecially while contending with publishing deadlines and the day-to-day running of a company. It was a bigger distraction than I would have liked to admit.
In a gesture of goodwill, I offered to set to private the two stories we published on the Lucire website over the whole affair.
I suggested to him that I update everyone here, since you might have thought that the disappearance of the two articles was down to Red Points!
I shudder to think what would have happened if I didnât have contact email addresses for senior VPs at Hearst Communications, Inc. or former Lucire team members who wound up working for Hearst. Or how someone without a legal background specializing in IP would have felt. Not everyone would be in this position.
Itâs still concerning to me that Google continues to state that results have been removed in site searches for us, and for the topics those articles covered. Basically, theyâre saying weâre thieves, and I donât think thatâs fair dinkum. As Google works at a glacial pace, I assume the notices will eventually disappear once they receive Red Pointsâ withdrawals.
Iâve also received an apology from Red Pointsâ CMO. The gentlemanly thing to do is to accept it. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for Google to stop saying we stole stuff.
This is too good. Now, Hearst Communications, Inc. was sensible enough to realize that what I raised was real, and a senior VP put me on to a colleague dealing with Hearst Magazines International. Nothing yet, but I wrote a release, sent it to a few colleagues, and published it on Lucire describing what had happened. As it’s going in to Lucire, unlike Google, I’m really careful about libel.
Just now, Red Points Solution SL has been by and issued another notice. They canât deal with the negative publicity so they play the only card they know how: issuing another DMCA notice to Google and leaving Hearst SL wide open to a penalty of perjury.
I mean, I’ve seen stupid (like that time a former disgruntled staffer wrote an anonymous note to people who knew me but hand-addressed the envelope), but this is like walking into a trap (that I didn’t even realize I had set!).
Now, what if word got out even more widely that Red Points Solution SL is shutting down free speech? Time to send the release more widely?
If only I had more timeâbut this might be tomorrowâs free-time project.
Iâve done a bit more digging and itâs usually fraudsters who engage in this behaviour. You can read more about them in Techdirt, Mashable and Search Engine Land.
With their millions of dollars, I guess these two Spanish companies are now in the same game of fraud.
Itâs a well written piece, covering ad fraud, the incentivization of ad fraud, and real-world examples, including this:
Not an ad pro but suspected the same during my time at Wistia and ran a test. 1/2 normal creative, 1/2 smoky the bear public service announcement creative. After a month the bear had driven 85% as many conversions as the branded ads. We stopped retargeting after that.
The world’s biggest con continues. The con artists don’t need to do three-card Monte any more. They can just get into ad tech. Rand’s piece is well worth a read.
Let fellow Tweeters have the say on today’s events in the USA.
I feel 0 smugness about living in NZ right now. America is exporting their brand of fascism. Itâs already here. We are 18 months from a potential change in government. Weâve seen how quickly a country goes backwards. I was there for it. Iâm sad and Iâm angry and Iâm scared.
It's why I also returned home from the US & won't stand idly aside & watch it happen here. All the same ingredients are now in place in NZ, including media that are either actively agitating for it, incompetent, or staying silent out of fear of being accused of left wing bias.
— 🇺🇦Lying ex tobacco lobbyist🇺🇦 (@rugbyintel) June 25, 2022
Only Maori media is sounding the alarm because it's more than a job to them. They're not fooled, they've had 150 years of smiling, lying pakeha telling them to trust them & then fuck them over.
— 🇺🇦Lying ex tobacco lobbyist🇺🇦 (@rugbyintel) June 25, 2022
There are a few experiments going on here now that this blog is on the new server. Massive thanks to my friend who has been working tirelessly to get us on to the new box and into the 2020s.
First, thereâs a post counter, though as itâs freshly installed, it doesnât show a true count. There is a way to get the data out of Yuzo Related Posts into the counterâeven though thatâs not entirely accurate, either, it would be nice to show the record counts I had back in 2016 on the two posts revealing Facebookâs highly questionable âmalware scannerâ.
Secondly, we havenât found a good related post plug-in to replace Yuzo. Youâll see two sets of related posts here. The second is by another company who claims their software will pick up the first image in each post in the event that I have not set up a featured image or thumbnail; as you can see, it doesnât do what it says on the tin.
Some of you will have seen a bunch of links from this blog sent out via social media as the new installation became live, and I apologize for those.
Please bear with us while we work through it all. The related post plug-in issue has been the big one: there are many, but they either donât do as they claimed, or they have terrible design. Even Wordpressâs native one cannot do the simple task of taking the first image from a post, which Yuzo does with ease.
Recently a friend recommended a Google service to me, and of course I responded that I would never touch anything of theirs, at least not willingly. The following isnât addressed to him, but the many who have taken exception to my justified concerns about the company, and about Facebook, and their regular privacy breaches and apparent lack of ethics.
In short: I donât get you.
And I try to have empathy.
When I make my arguments, they arenât pulled out of the ether. I try to back up what Iâve said. When I make an attack in social media, or even in media, thereâs a wealth of reasons, many of which have been detailed on this blog.
Of course there are always opposing viewpoints, so itâs fine if you state your case. And of course itâs fine if you point out faults in my argument.
But to point the âtut tutâ finger at me and imply that I either shouldnât or Iâm mistaken, without backing yourselves up?
So where are you coming from?
In the absence of any supporting argument, there are only a handful of potential conclusions.
1. Youâre corrupt or you like corruption. You donât mind that these companies work outside the law, never do as they claim, invade peopleâs privacy, and place society in jeopardy.
2. You love the establishment and you donât like people rocking the boat. It doesnât matter what they do, theyâre the establishment. Theyâre above us, and thatâs fine.
3. You donât accept othersâ viewpoints, or youâre unable to grasp them due to your own limitations.
4. Youâre blind to whatâs been happening or you choose to turn a blind eye.
Iâve heard this bullshit my entire life.
When I did my first case at 22, representing myself, suing someone over an unpaid bill, I heard similar things.
âMaybe thereâs a reason he hasnât paid you.â
âThey never signed a contract, so no contract exists.â
As far as I can tell, they were a variant of those four, since one of the defendants was the president of a political party.
I won the case since I was in the right, and a bunch of con artists didnât get away with their grift.
The tightwad paid on the last possible day. I was at the District Court with a warrant of arrest for the registrar to sign when he advised me that the money had been paid in that morning.
I did this case in the wake of my motherâs passing.
It amazed me that there were people who assumed I was in the wrong in the setting of a law student versus an establishment white guy.
Their defence was full of contradictions because they never had any truth backing it up.
I also learned just because Simpson Grierson represented them that no one should be scared of big-name law firms. Later on, as I served as an expert witness in many cases, that belief became more cemented.
Equally, no one should put any weight on what Mark Zuckerberg says since history keeps showing that he never means it; and we should believe Google will try one on, trying to snoop wherever they can, because history shows that they will.
Ancient history with Google? Here’s what its CEO said, as quoted in CNBC, in February. People lap this up without question (apart from the likes of Bob Hoffman, who has his eyes open, and a few others). How many people on this planet again? It wasn’t even this populated in Soylent Green (which supposedly takes place in 2022, if you’re looking at the cinematic version).
If you’d rather not read every Facebook entry I made on my blog this year, here’s a helpful video by Simon Caine on all the shitty things they’ve done over 2021. As we still have a couple of weeks of 2021 left to go, I’m betting they will still do something shitty that deserves to be in this video.
