Damn, they’re not? These seem like such a good solution to so many housing and environmental problems. I’ve wanted to build one for a while, but I’d want it to be in CA…shame.
You ever seen a cheesemonger in the Netherlands cut the wax off a wheel of Gouda? It’s legitimately impressive. Fuck I need some Gouda now. They make a goat variety which makes my mouth water…
Probably, but not necessarily. My understanding is that the overturning of Chevron means that the courts don’t have to defer to agency expertise anymore, but until EPA’s regulatory power is completely taken away, they can still implement these kinds of rules. Someone would have to bring a case against this particular regulation and argue that harm was caused by it, and that case would have to go through the courts and make it to the Supremes. At that point the Nine Robed High Priests of the Imperious Court could decide that they know better than the experts and then squash the regulation. So it’s not automatically nullified by the overturning of Chevron, but with a bit of work it definitely helps.
I was in second grade when the school district started thinking about providing internet access for a few computers. You could just add a period at the end of a URL to get around the filters. No idea how or why it worked, but I told everyone. Those were the days.
Thank you for the thoughtful answer. This is so frustrating, and is very similar to other situations where megacorps decide that paying fines is cheaper than following the law.
Another terrible byproduct of all this is the false incentive structure it sets up. Rather than investing in people who are capable of producing unique and creative products, it incentivizes people to make more quantity of shitty content rather than high quality stuff, and that will ultimately make the eventual consumer product that’s based on shitty stolen work, well, shitty.
Here’s what I don’t understand: these are the wealthiest corporations in the world. They literally have trillions of dollars at their disposal. Since they clearly believed there was value in the videos they stole, why could they not just ask the creators’ permission, and if they consent, pay them a fair fee for access? If they don’t consent, why not just hire a creative to make some more content for them to use? I mean, Apple owns a massive production studio for fucks sake. Tim Cook farts money, I don’t think a thousand dollar investment in a real person is going to break the bank. They could even order up a whole new show just to train the model.
Instead, they piss off creatives by stealing their work. Just use your money for once. Invest in content. Everybody would be happier, they’d garner some trust, and nobody’s livelihood would be harmed.
But no, instead they choose the most devious, underhanded, selfishly shitty way to conduct their business. Fuck these evilcorps.
He might be my worst nightmare: an intelligent, opportunistic, disingenuous, duplicitous, hateful, proudly misogynistic, election-denying, authoritarian-curious chaos agent, wrapped in a young relatively attractive white man’s body. He will do a far better job than Trump ever could at making their sick regressive and paternalistic fantasies come true for all of us.
That was an awesome piece. And like Wittes said, Lawfare really has been on top of this issue for longer than most. This part in particular drove it home for me:
it is possible to be at the same time a threat to democracy and a victim of a horrible crime. The fact that Trump has been shot emphatically does not mean that his behavior does *not *threaten American democracy—just as the fact that Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, was assassinated did not acquit him of being a corrupt authoritarian. That Trump is also a corrupt authoritarian surely cannot justify his attempted assassination or any political violence, but just as surely, the fact that a person attempted his assassination does not nullify the threat he poses. The two facts must be allowed to coexist.
We need skeptics to push back against these insanely wealthy business people who think that we’ll just take their word for things that that they then actively undermine in favor of profits and products that will not benefit society or make up for the intellectual theft that was required to build them. Ignoring or pretending these issues don’t exist does not make them go away.
Giving blind faith and loyalty to a company that does not care about you is how we get nefarious and self-centered powerhouses like google and facebook. Companies that large, that can influence the entire world on a whim, should not exist. If more people had listened to those of us sounding the alarms about these companies years ago, we might have saved ourselves a lot of grief.
I’d just ask that you take a step back, think about the motivations of the people you hold in such high regard, and allow skeptics the space to keep conversations like this going, before it’s too late.
Pending Train is pretty darn close to what you're describing. I only got through the first episode, it falls prey to a lot of annoying little tropes, but it's a cool concept for sure.
My selfish question: is my VPN still secure? This wouldn’t impact the fact that the traffic itself is encrypted, right? They’d just be able to see that my connection is behind a VPN which is communicating with other servers? Previously it was just my ISP that could know that, now the DTRA can too?
This still seems like a big security risk, though I’m not entirely sure how.
Ah yeah, I didn’t think about the burning tires thing…good point.