Slashdot Mirror
Why Google and Amazon Are Hypocrites (om.blog)
Amazon earlier this month responded to Google's decision to remove YouTube from all Fire TV products and the Echo Show. Google says it's taking this extreme step because of Amazon's recent delisting of new Nest products (like Nest Secure and the E Thermostat) and the company's long-running refusal to sell Chromecast or support Google Cast in any capacity. Veteran journalist Om Malik writes: This smacks of so much hypocrisy that I don't even know where to start. The two public proponents of network neutrality and anything but neutral about each other's services on each other's platforms. They can complain about the cable companies from blocking their content and charging for fast lanes. The irony isn't lost on me even a wee bit. They are locked in a battle to collect as much data about us -- what we shop, what we see, what we do online and they do so under the guise of offering us services that are amazing and wonderful. They don't talk about what they won't do with our data, instead, they bicker and distract. So to think that these purveyors of hyper-capitalism will fight for interests of consumers is not only childish, it is foolish. We as end customers need to figure out who is speaking on our behalf when it comes to the rules of the Internet.
Nobody.
Next question?
#DeleteFacebook
A good parallel is Uber and Lyft. They both use the same infrastructure (roads). Should they be required to support each other's services? No. They're competitors. Similarly, Google and Amazon use the same infrastructure (the Internet). Net neutrality should allow them to compete on the shared infrastructure, just as others compete on their shared infrastructure.
Who the hell said that? Google and Amazon are acting in their own interest. On net neutrality, their interests align with ours. I'm not sure I'd call it hypocrisy, because the point is the same in both cases: corporations are going to serve their own interests, including when that has a detrimental effect on healthy competition. If you are trusting anyone to do anything else, you are a fool.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
YouTube on some Amazon gadget or Amazon selling some Google toy is two kids petty bickering I can easily ignore.
Net neutrality is something that WILL affect me, no matter how hard I try to ignore it being eliminated.
This smells of a rather desperate attempt to shill, after all sensible arguments have been gone for a long, long time, so what's left is whataboutism and deflection.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
None of this has anything to do with Net Neutrality, though, and it's important to make people aware of the fact that whoever wrote the original story has not the slightest clue about net neutrality. It's important, because the enemies of net neutrality are aggressively pushing all kinds of false narratives about it.
His complaint is valid and very much a concern but it is irrelevant to the companies position on net neutrality. This is an example of the behavior you should expect from the big providers one NN has been killed and it argues against killing NN but google's & amazon's opinion on NN is not germane to the subject
Spoken like someone who always cheats if he can.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If the device can access the Internet, it can play youtube. Apparently, the Fire is some kind of walled-garden already, so negotiations about what are in or out actually make sense. If Amazon wants youtube in their walled garden, they appease Google. Otherwise, they tear down the walls. They can get youtube either way.
Amazon's store front doesn't sell everything in the world. There are many products not listed for many reasons. There is no store-provision neutrality law nor even debate on the topic. Every online storefront in the world decides what it will and will not carry, including Amazon. If people really want Google products, they are free to buy them from Google's storefront, at the same price they would have been on Amazon anyway (and with less risk of accidentally getting a knock-off).
I don't have to buy Amazon products to use their services. Shopping and viewing shows from any modern computing device is still possible. I don't have to buy into Amazon gadgets to use their service.
The same cannot be said if, for example, my ISP decided that access to YouTube is not part of my internet channel package, and I have to pay $30/mo more for the privilege.
more importantly, there has been no allegations in more recent times. Every allegation is 30yrs old. If we are going to remove everyone from any elected or government position based on any sort of thing they did 30 years ago, under the scrutiny of 2017 views (bear in mind that in alabama, asking parents for their underage kids hand in marriage was not _that_ uncommon; Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13yr old Cousin only a about decade earlier) then we better start throwing every single one of them out and look for robots to replace them. Because nobody, and I do mean nobody, is going to be able to live an entire life without coming to a moment of change in ones life. I am not condoning anything he did, but it's also important to understand we cannot try people today for things they did before there was a stigma against it. Any one of us are already guilty of doing something perfectly acceptable when we were in high school that is now, or in the future, will be socially unacceptable. In 15yrs even practical jokes are going to be considered 'bullying' and subject to zero tolerance. Too bad you stuck that tack in your friends chair when you were 17, its totally going to ruin your chances of being elected to Congress when you are 50, because you show a pattern of behavior of being a bully and dehumanizing others. Forget that everybody used to love you for things they called 'antics' and often encouraged the behavior and cheered at these jokes.
Date Rape: that was something that didnt exist as a term until the mid 90s. Until then it was something of a he-said / she-said encounter often written off to after-sex regret (which in some cases still is just post-regret). There was a complete shit-ton of it going on in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Going somewhere to park and make-out was usually a guarantee of leading to sex; which is why they always told girls to never put themselves in a compromising situation. There was no "no means no" back then. Intervention and education are the only way to change someones way of thinking.
Statutory Rape: IE the age at which a child is considered mentally mature enough to actually consent to sex, and anything below that age is considered rape no matter how many times that person says yes or initiates. However, they made provisions for things, even to this day, for parental consent. "Parental consent is needed in Alabama and Utah at age 14" according to their current legislation.
So is a 30yr old dating a 14yo, possibly in search of a wife, creepy? You bet. But so is a 60yr old dating a 20yr old. And nobody calls that out, even to this day. Its taken well over a 100years to overcome racism after the abolition of slavery. One cannot expect to go back in time and hold people accountable for sexism during the 70s only a decade after the birth of feminism.
IMO IF the ONLY allegations they can find, true or otherwise, are from 30 years ago then I think it has no bearing on the issue at hand and his ability to represent the state of Alabama. If the allegations are true, then at some time, more than 20yrs ago, he quit acting this way and changed his way of thinking and acting. The Washington Post even ran an article where THEY went to Australia, to a small religious town where Moore lived for a time, in search of any sort of political dirt they could dig up, as they love to do to any non-freepass-democrat. The Washington Post admitted flat out that they have never been able to find any other place or time that someone would say that he was anything but the nicest person.
Fine. If we do that hard enough, the only people that can run for office will be penniless eunuchs, and they might base policies on facts.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Some of the accusations against Franken are dubious. They're of behavior far short of stalking malls for underage girls, which is what got Moore banned from some malls. Franken acknowledged and apologized. Franken called for an investigation into his activities.
There are indeed hypocrites in both parties, but Franken doesn't show that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There's no comparison between two internet based corporate giants throwing hissy-fits at each other and net neutrality. This is a moronic comparison. Yes, there are similarities, but to derive that either company endorsing Net Neutrality is a farce due to this scuffle is just stupid. Net neutrality is an issue because private companies hold the reins to the internet (when they shouldn't) and our pro-corporate America government wants to take away the existing blinders that prevent these companies from prancing into our living room and shitting on the carpet. The comparison here is apples to orangutans.
You have to be smarter than the machine you're working with.
On the other hand, this observation doesn't appear to apply to women.
Life expectancy of women at the age of 15 years has however changed dramatically over the last 600 years and by a decade and a half since the mid-Victorian period.
One wonders what socio-economic forces might explain this
Childbirth has become much less hazardous.
Franken is still in the Senate. So hypocrites abound in both parties. News at 11
Franken has announced his resignation, a majority of Democratic Senators have called for his resignation, the news on this was last week.
Roy Moore has received the personal endorsement of the Republican President(who campaigned for him just this weekend), their PACs(writing checks to pay for advertising to his benefit), and the rest are barely able to tepidly criticize him as they pray they won't have to accept him into the Senate due to some vague impropriety in the election or something(Shelby has already raised this issue in conference). Which is why there's already a plan by Republican Elections Supervisors to throw a wrench into the counting system just so they can come up with an excuse for a new election that doesn't force them to take a moral stand(after all, any kind of moral stand would necessarily subject them to personal and individual scrutiny, while an election being faulty is easy to cadge as an isolated mistake).
Watch it happen, the Alabama Senate election will be declared invalid, and they'll re-run it.
Net Neutrality is not about the WWW or about servers.
It is about routers.
Internet routers should not discriminate. That is net neutrality. If a server wants to discriminate, that is just Freedom.
they should have shitcanned him before he even filled out the paperwork.
Who is "they"?
If there is a more than 1% chance that someone is guilty of any major crime or morally questionable action, find someone else, because the pool of eligible candidates is in the millions.
The number of adults with a 99% chance of having never done anything morally questionable is precisely zero.
Sorry if my euphemisms were a bit too vague. I'm talking about a relatively low number of major actions (corruption, ephebophilia/pedophilia, sexual harassment) that aren't covered by laws, but could similarly tarnish a campaign. The number is still going to be quite small, but we don't need very many candidates.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'm saying that you make it clear that power behind the party is not going to be on Moore's side
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED. The establishment overwhelmingly backed Luther Strange, and was vehemently opposed to Moore.
Most political analysts believe that the establishment opposition actually helped Moore's candidacy. The GOP establishment is not very popular in American, and even less so in Alabama. Every time Mitch McConnell says Moore should drop out, his poll numbers go up.
Here is one other guy that won despite strong opposition by the GOP establishment: Donald Trump.
There is one picture, and if you bother to actually look at it, it's using the camera angle to fake groping - kind of like those photographs of a tourist 'holding up the leaning tower of Pisa'. Tasteless, perhaps, but not 'evidence of assault'. And you might want to account for the context of the joke - i.e. whether it was consistent with the general cut-up nature of that USO backstage scene.
No, the Democrats got played on this one - and yeah, they're way to easily played this way. That Breitbart chick that tried to dupe the Washington Post almost got away with it too.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
For some reason, being disgraced is not enough of a reason to convince voters. Some of them like the crazy uncle style of politician. In Alabama they're single-issue voters; tell them how the candidate stands on the abortion issue and that's all they need to know.
Even the hypocrite Newt Gingrich, who turned out to be a much bigger sleazebag than Clinton, was making a comeback on the Trump coat tails. All the voters want is someone on their team who can shout and rail against the other team. No one gives a shit about what's good for the country, they just want their chosen team to win.