we have 2 million or maybe 30 million species of bugs in this world, losing that one won't matter
History is full of examples where causing a single species to become extinct has caused very significant and completely unintended consequences for whole ecosystems.
Saying that driving a few species into extinction won't cause any problems is like saying that deleting a few lines of code from an application won't cause any problems. Sure, there's a decent size chance you may be fine, but would you actually take the risk?
If you think Trump's supporter base will be swayed by EU and Chinese sanctions, then man do you not know anything about them. Because any ill effects of return sanctions are just going to drive them to further support Trump as they believe they're all un-justified attacks on the U.S regardless of what preceded them. They really do believe the rest of the world has been taking advantage of the U.S when in reality it's just U.S companies doing what's most profitable for them regardless of the consequences to the working class and U.S trade balance.
As for the "protection racket" accusation, what protection racket simply tells you to get your business practices in line with local law and doesn't actually spring to action until after several years of non-compliance? Because the EU has been telling Google to stop these particular anti-competitive business practices since 2011, thus giving Google more than enough time to either change their practices or take their business elsewhere. There's nothing that forces Google to do business in Europe if they don't like the consumer protection laws, but if they do, then they will either have to follow those laws or get into trouble with regulators like they are in right now.
If Google doesn't like the EU's consumer protection laws they're completely free not to do business in the EU, similarly to how any company can refuse to do business anywhere if they don't like the local laws. However they still decided to do business in EU with Android and continued to do so after the EU warned them back in 2011 that their forced bundling was against EU laws.
To put it simply: If you don't like the laws in a particular market, there's nothing that forces you to do business in said market and if you still decide to do business in that market while breaking those laws you've got nobody to blame but yourself if you get in trouble because of it.
He thinks his sanctions are going to really hurt the economies of their targets and force them to come to the negotiating table and agree to new trade agreements with terms much more favorable to the U.S than currently existing agreements. What he's referring to here is obviously the future after the EU bows to his sanctions and agrees to new trade agreements that prevent them from levying sanctions against american companies for breaking their laws.
Only problem with this "brilliant" plan is that the European leadership knows exactly what the purpose behind the sanctions is and in the case of Junker and Macron have even publicly stated that they can see this and won't come to the negotiating table while the sanctions are still in place.
As for why he's using sanctions in particular is that it's about the trade deficit he's obsessed with he knows that sanctions against countries and blocks that the U.S has a trade deficit with will be more effective than any return sanctions they may impose on him instead. This is the only part of it that makes any kind of sense, but it's kind of negated by the fact that the targets can retaliate trough alternative means like refusing to recognize U.S physical or intellectual property rights, which then swings the balance in their favor.
To be clear, the "choice" here is between Google forcing carriers and phone vendors to have certain apps on the phone, versus carriers and vendors placing their horrible in-house apps on the phone.
I'm going to call bullshit on that... The issue really is that Google are preventing hardware manufacturers and carriers from freely choosing things like what browser and default search they want to use their services on any device they ship. If what they chose to use when given an actual choice is bad, then consumers will avoid their products and they will either change those choices to better ones or go out of business. This really is about Google limiting consumer choice to push their own services.
The man obviously either doesn't know what he's talking about or then he's being very dishonest in his response to the fine. He also talks about how the EU is trying to prevent manufacturers and carriers from pre-installing Google apps and services when what the EU is actually taking issue with is Google policy of forcing manufacturers and carriers to install all of them on every device if they want to ship devices with any of them, thus locking out competition.
Knowing the kinds of people big american companies tend to hire as executives, I'm going to say that his apparent ignorance of reality stems from an intentional effort to distort the facts rather than actual ignorance.
It's funny how the examples you bring up are mostly just plain eurosceptics and idiots... The fact that you can limit your scope like that and previously made the claim that the tories are intentionally putting on crazies to move the overton window to make themselves look more reasonable it's pretty clear you know exactly who I'm talking about.
What they demand Google to do is simply remove the contract language that forces device makers to use their search and a whole bunch of their other services by default if they want to have the Play Store installed out-of-the-box. All this really does is give consumers and device makers more freedom and a level the playing field for competitors in fields like search and maps.
After this a device maker can for example start shipping devices running Android forks with the Play Store and other Google services. In other words they can, once Google complies, just plain chose whatever Google services they want or don't want to use in their devices rather than the current all-or-nothing type deal. The current deal even goes as far as banning device makers from selling devices with and without Google services (the only exception being markets where Google services are banned).
In other words all this does is stops Google from being anti-competitive assholes.
You bring up a bunch of alternative app stores in China, but you do know that the Play Store and most of the bundled services (search, maps, etc.) are actually banned in China due to foreign hosted content? Obviously they're going to have local alternatives when the dominant player is not available. Not only that, all the companies you mentioned are all Chinese and the Asian region encompasses way more than just China and in the rest of Asia things are pretty similar in this regard to both Europe and the U.S.
As for search alternatives, it's kind of hard to get one into a profitable state when the dominant player is preventing hardware vendors including your service in their devices and instead having to include all the dominant player's services if they want to use any of them. In other words; If you want to use any of Google's services, you're not allowed to use any of their competitors' services, even in devices other than the ones using Google services. It couldn't a better example of abusing a dominant market position if tried to.
It's that high precisely because it's not supposed to be just a "cost of doing business" but a proper slap in the face for continuing to employ seriously anti-competitive business practices after being told to stop doing it years ago. This is supposed to get Google to stop these business practices ASAP.
What happens to any company that refuses to pay government fines after losing an appeal or not appealing it in the first place, i.e they start seizing Google's european assets and preventing them from doing business in the region. They've got a bunch of big datacenters and loads of money in particularly Ireland so it's obvious they can seize the fine's worth in assets and then some.
In terms of bias the BBC is like cutting up the underside of your forearms (straight cut from the wrist to the elbow, i.e the wrist cut that will actually kill you if you do it right) while Fox News is like jumping in front of a speeding train (i.e a certain and very messy death). One is obviously much worse, but being less bad than Fox News, which people called "Faux News" about a decade before "Fake News" became a thing, isn't exactly much to aspire to.
The idea that the tories would intentionally parade the crazies the BBC uses to (mis)represent their own viewpoint is simply laughable. While they may not be the cleverest bunch of people, as shown by how they've messed up literally everything related to brexit, they're not stupid enough to intentionally use crazies as ambassadors for the party like that.
As for supposedly not making key people available for interview, you do realize that ministers and other key people in government and party leadership do have quite a lot of things they need to take care of do besides talking to the media? As highly as the media thinks of itself, people with proper jobs and responsibilities just aren't going to be at their beck and call 24/7.
What the BBC did for years was try to discredit conservatives as a whole by having the conservative viewpoint represented by the same fringe conservatives (i.e conservative crazies) over and over again in an attempt to give people the impression these people (crazies) represented conservatives as a whole. This giving the crazies some form of credibility is just pure irony considering their real goal.
I'm by no means a fan of the tories, but once I realized that the BBC was doing was just straw manning the conservative viewpoint using crazies I concluded they simply can't be trusted for news analysis. Mind you I'm still looking for a reliable source for analysis as everybody has a pretty bad slant these days.
You really couldn't be more wrong here.... Net neutrality most definitely protects him when Comcast eventually starts throttling and demanding fees for not doing so from various internet content providers they may or may not be in competition with. Sure, it doesn't allow him more choice in terms of ISP, but does protect him from anti-customer business practices that would be deterred by competition if there was any.
With the car industry it's typically either a parent company designed platform that the different brands use as basis for their cars or a product from under the same corporate umbrella. While cases like Tata tried to sell their Nano as a Rover were fairly common in the 1980s and early 1990s (Honda platform Rovers and Mazda platform Fords spring to mind), they're vastly outnumbered by common platform and re-brands from within the same company.
What he's obviously talking about are the half-truths and general dishonesty in the gender pay parity/disparity debate.
If you're not familiar with it or need a refresher, the typical "women only earn x cents on a man's dollar" figures don't control for things like hours worked (as per contract and overtime), years of experience education, if they're working full or part time, specialization, night shift and work during other irregular hours, vacation time, or willingness and ability to bargain for salary. When you start factoring in for those things the myth of the gender pay gap doesn't just die a death by a thousand cuts, it gets properly stabbed by many of the factors that I mentioned (just factoring in for part time work alone get us from 77 to 83 cents-on-the-dollar) and I wasn't even close to thorough in listing factors that cause a skew in improperly done analysis'.
Because of how badly inaccurate these comparisons tend to get, a parity or close-to-parity situation is actually a case of higher pay for the same work when examined with actual rigor.
Christianity has had the concept of the original sin since really the beginning and in social justice politics it's of such importance that it could easily be described as fundamental.
As much as I despise Gawker (I was genuinely jubilant when they declared bankruptcy), I really don't see any issue here.
We're talking about two distinct publications here and there's nothing that says all publications owned by a particular company have to make up a Sinclair Media type hivemind.
If I know modern day mainstream journalists I'm pretty sure they're going to be the people who cry foul the loudest if this is actually effective at curbing bought followers.
Seeing how Disney decided to start releasing a new Star Wars movie every year I really wouldn't say they're any different from AT&T in this regard. Hell, it's almost if AT&T is copying what Disney was in the process of doing (at least until the first movie that lost money).
I honestly can't say I'm particularly surprised about this seeing how the motivation behind corporate consolidations, when broken down, always come back to wanting to make a profit as big as possible. Disney didn't buy LucasFilm and their IP for any other reason than to make a lot of money from their IP and AT&T's takeover of Time Warner (who owns/owned HBO) is not any more different.
Considering massive the 85.4 billion USD price they had to pay for the whole lot it's kind of obvious that getting parts of Time Warner, particularly HBO, to become drastically more profitable was what was not just plain greed, it was a necessity for the deal to make fiscal sense. You simply don't borrow 85 billion without paying a lot of interest every year or big amortizations.
As an HBO subscriber it seems like this is probably the right time to un-subscribe from their service. I don't find most of their catalog all that appealing and mostly just watch their old shows (Sopranos, The Wire, etc.) along some of their newer stuff (Westworld being the only one I've actively followed even if the un-planned nature of the writing really has really started to show) so it's not like I'm going to miss out on all that much when I move back to Netflix and the local BBC equivalent's streaming service.
You do know that Toys R' Us (and Sears for that matter) had been reducing their number of stores years? Shutting down unprofitable locations is something the all the retail giants have been doing ever since they started being squeezed by Amazon & Co and as we can see from their continued decline, it's simply not enough.
So when you compare Toys R' Us to Sears and other dying-but-not-quite-dead retail giants, you can clearly see that their main difference is just that Toys R' Us took on huge amounts of debt due to the Bain & Co buyout while their competition didn't.
If you look at Toys R' Us' actual per-store sales figures over the last decade or so you can clearly see that the enormous amount of debt and related costs that ended up on their balance sheet when Bain Capital & Co went trough with the leveraged buyout* was absolutely the final nail in the coffin, but it wasn't the root cause of their demise. That was the decline of physical retail in general.
Sure, they'd probably still be around today and be able to limp on for some years, but they'd be in a very similar situation to Sears and many other dying physical retail giants. The unsustainable amount of debt taken on under the incorrect assumption that they were going to grow enough in online retail to offset the shrinking physical retail market merely sped up the inevitable. The significant interest payments that had to contend with ate up any profits and prevented them from making necessary investments, leading to an increased sales decline and finally when they realized that they weren't going to be able to pay an upcoming set of loan repayments (all stemming from the Bain & Co buyout) they really didn't have a choice but to throw up their hands and declare bankruptcy.
*Bain & Co took over the company in a way where the company basically bought itself off the stock market and took the debt from buying all of it's shares on it's own balance sheet, thus ending up with massive debts.
Even if it wasn't an industry as heavy in lobbying as the record industry, lobbyist pushed bills tend to be like slasher villains. No matter how many times and how gruesomely you kill them, they'll be back before you know it.
The worst part about this bill is the (rather aptly numbered) 13th article and how it forces content platforms to automatically scan content for copyrighted works, but completely forgets about fair use for purposes like satire, criticism, education and how nobody's come up with an even remotely accurate automated way of telling those uses apart from copyright infringement. Not only does this significantly increase the cost of trying to create a social media service in Europe, it's also rife for abuse where people use copyright to stifle free speech.
The second really dumb part, the 11th article, is really just the publishing industry shooting itself in the foot. In Germany the publishing house Springer lobbied in a similar law and all it did was cause companies like Google and Facebook to just become careful and not display links to articles by Springer owned publications, which cause readership and advertisement revenue to drop for these publications.
Slashdot Mirror
we have 2 million or maybe 30 million species of bugs in this world, losing that one won't matter
History is full of examples where causing a single species to become extinct has caused very significant and completely unintended consequences for whole ecosystems.
Saying that driving a few species into extinction won't cause any problems is like saying that deleting a few lines of code from an application won't cause any problems. Sure, there's a decent size chance you may be fine, but would you actually take the risk?
If you think Trump's supporter base will be swayed by EU and Chinese sanctions, then man do you not know anything about them. Because any ill effects of return sanctions are just going to drive them to further support Trump as they believe they're all un-justified attacks on the U.S regardless of what preceded them. They really do believe the rest of the world has been taking advantage of the U.S when in reality it's just U.S companies doing what's most profitable for them regardless of the consequences to the working class and U.S trade balance.
As for the "protection racket" accusation, what protection racket simply tells you to get your business practices in line with local law and doesn't actually spring to action until after several years of non-compliance? Because the EU has been telling Google to stop these particular anti-competitive business practices since 2011, thus giving Google more than enough time to either change their practices or take their business elsewhere. There's nothing that forces Google to do business in Europe if they don't like the consumer protection laws, but if they do, then they will either have to follow those laws or get into trouble with regulators like they are in right now.
If Google doesn't like the EU's consumer protection laws they're completely free not to do business in the EU, similarly to how any company can refuse to do business anywhere if they don't like the local laws. However they still decided to do business in EU with Android and continued to do so after the EU warned them back in 2011 that their forced bundling was against EU laws.
To put it simply: If you don't like the laws in a particular market, there's nothing that forces you to do business in said market and if you still decide to do business in that market while breaking those laws you've got nobody to blame but yourself if you get in trouble because of it.
He thinks his sanctions are going to really hurt the economies of their targets and force them to come to the negotiating table and agree to new trade agreements with terms much more favorable to the U.S than currently existing agreements. What he's referring to here is obviously the future after the EU bows to his sanctions and agrees to new trade agreements that prevent them from levying sanctions against american companies for breaking their laws.
Only problem with this "brilliant" plan is that the European leadership knows exactly what the purpose behind the sanctions is and in the case of Junker and Macron have even publicly stated that they can see this and won't come to the negotiating table while the sanctions are still in place.
As for why he's using sanctions in particular is that it's about the trade deficit he's obsessed with he knows that sanctions against countries and blocks that the U.S has a trade deficit with will be more effective than any return sanctions they may impose on him instead. This is the only part of it that makes any kind of sense, but it's kind of negated by the fact that the targets can retaliate trough alternative means like refusing to recognize U.S physical or intellectual property rights, which then swings the balance in their favor.
To be clear, the "choice" here is between Google forcing carriers and phone vendors to have certain apps on the phone, versus carriers and vendors placing their horrible in-house apps on the phone.
I'm going to call bullshit on that... The issue really is that Google are preventing hardware manufacturers and carriers from freely choosing things like what browser and default search they want to use their services on any device they ship. If what they chose to use when given an actual choice is bad, then consumers will avoid their products and they will either change those choices to better ones or go out of business. This really is about Google limiting consumer choice to push their own services.
The man obviously either doesn't know what he's talking about or then he's being very dishonest in his response to the fine. He also talks about how the EU is trying to prevent manufacturers and carriers from pre-installing Google apps and services when what the EU is actually taking issue with is Google policy of forcing manufacturers and carriers to install all of them on every device if they want to ship devices with any of them, thus locking out competition.
Knowing the kinds of people big american companies tend to hire as executives, I'm going to say that his apparent ignorance of reality stems from an intentional effort to distort the facts rather than actual ignorance.
It's funny how the examples you bring up are mostly just plain eurosceptics and idiots... The fact that you can limit your scope like that and previously made the claim that the tories are intentionally putting on crazies to move the overton window to make themselves look more reasonable it's pretty clear you know exactly who I'm talking about.
What they demand Google to do is simply remove the contract language that forces device makers to use their search and a whole bunch of their other services by default if they want to have the Play Store installed out-of-the-box. All this really does is give consumers and device makers more freedom and a level the playing field for competitors in fields like search and maps.
After this a device maker can for example start shipping devices running Android forks with the Play Store and other Google services. In other words they can, once Google complies, just plain chose whatever Google services they want or don't want to use in their devices rather than the current all-or-nothing type deal. The current deal even goes as far as banning device makers from selling devices with and without Google services (the only exception being markets where Google services are banned).
In other words all this does is stops Google from being anti-competitive assholes.
You bring up a bunch of alternative app stores in China, but you do know that the Play Store and most of the bundled services (search, maps, etc.) are actually banned in China due to foreign hosted content? Obviously they're going to have local alternatives when the dominant player is not available. Not only that, all the companies you mentioned are all Chinese and the Asian region encompasses way more than just China and in the rest of Asia things are pretty similar in this regard to both Europe and the U.S.
As for search alternatives, it's kind of hard to get one into a profitable state when the dominant player is preventing hardware vendors including your service in their devices and instead having to include all the dominant player's services if they want to use any of them. In other words; If you want to use any of Google's services, you're not allowed to use any of their competitors' services, even in devices other than the ones using Google services. It couldn't a better example of abusing a dominant market position if tried to.
It's that high precisely because it's not supposed to be just a "cost of doing business" but a proper slap in the face for continuing to employ seriously anti-competitive business practices after being told to stop doing it years ago. This is supposed to get Google to stop these business practices ASAP.
What happens to any company that refuses to pay government fines after losing an appeal or not appealing it in the first place, i.e they start seizing Google's european assets and preventing them from doing business in the region. They've got a bunch of big datacenters and loads of money in particularly Ireland so it's obvious they can seize the fine's worth in assets and then some.
In terms of bias the BBC is like cutting up the underside of your forearms (straight cut from the wrist to the elbow, i.e the wrist cut that will actually kill you if you do it right) while Fox News is like jumping in front of a speeding train (i.e a certain and very messy death). One is obviously much worse, but being less bad than Fox News, which people called "Faux News" about a decade before "Fake News" became a thing, isn't exactly much to aspire to.
The idea that the tories would intentionally parade the crazies the BBC uses to (mis)represent their own viewpoint is simply laughable. While they may not be the cleverest bunch of people, as shown by how they've messed up literally everything related to brexit, they're not stupid enough to intentionally use crazies as ambassadors for the party like that.
As for supposedly not making key people available for interview, you do realize that ministers and other key people in government and party leadership do have quite a lot of things they need to take care of do besides talking to the media? As highly as the media thinks of itself, people with proper jobs and responsibilities just aren't going to be at their beck and call 24/7.
What the BBC did for years was try to discredit conservatives as a whole by having the conservative viewpoint represented by the same fringe conservatives (i.e conservative crazies) over and over again in an attempt to give people the impression these people (crazies) represented conservatives as a whole. This giving the crazies some form of credibility is just pure irony considering their real goal.
I'm by no means a fan of the tories, but once I realized that the BBC was doing was just straw manning the conservative viewpoint using crazies I concluded they simply can't be trusted for news analysis. Mind you I'm still looking for a reliable source for analysis as everybody has a pretty bad slant these days.
You really couldn't be more wrong here.... Net neutrality most definitely protects him when Comcast eventually starts throttling and demanding fees for not doing so from various internet content providers they may or may not be in competition with. Sure, it doesn't allow him more choice in terms of ISP, but does protect him from anti-customer business practices that would be deterred by competition if there was any.
With the car industry it's typically either a parent company designed platform that the different brands use as basis for their cars or a product from under the same corporate umbrella. While cases like Tata tried to sell their Nano as a Rover were fairly common in the 1980s and early 1990s (Honda platform Rovers and Mazda platform Fords spring to mind), they're vastly outnumbered by common platform and re-brands from within the same company.
What he's obviously talking about are the half-truths and general dishonesty in the gender pay parity/disparity debate.
If you're not familiar with it or need a refresher, the typical "women only earn x cents on a man's dollar" figures don't control for things like hours worked (as per contract and overtime), years of experience education, if they're working full or part time, specialization, night shift and work during other irregular hours, vacation time, or willingness and ability to bargain for salary. When you start factoring in for those things the myth of the gender pay gap doesn't just die a death by a thousand cuts, it gets properly stabbed by many of the factors that I mentioned (just factoring in for part time work alone get us from 77 to 83 cents-on-the-dollar) and I wasn't even close to thorough in listing factors that cause a skew in improperly done analysis'.
Because of how badly inaccurate these comparisons tend to get, a parity or close-to-parity situation is actually a case of higher pay for the same work when examined with actual rigor.
Christianity has had the concept of the original sin since really the beginning and in social justice politics it's of such importance that it could easily be described as fundamental.
As much as I despise Gawker (I was genuinely jubilant when they declared bankruptcy), I really don't see any issue here.
We're talking about two distinct publications here and there's nothing that says all publications owned by a particular company have to make up a Sinclair Media type hivemind.
If I know modern day mainstream journalists I'm pretty sure they're going to be the people who cry foul the loudest if this is actually effective at curbing bought followers.
Seeing how Disney decided to start releasing a new Star Wars movie every year I really wouldn't say they're any different from AT&T in this regard. Hell, it's almost if AT&T is copying what Disney was in the process of doing (at least until the first movie that lost money).
I honestly can't say I'm particularly surprised about this seeing how the motivation behind corporate consolidations, when broken down, always come back to wanting to make a profit as big as possible. Disney didn't buy LucasFilm and their IP for any other reason than to make a lot of money from their IP and AT&T's takeover of Time Warner (who owns/owned HBO) is not any more different.
Considering massive the 85.4 billion USD price they had to pay for the whole lot it's kind of obvious that getting parts of Time Warner, particularly HBO, to become drastically more profitable was what was not just plain greed, it was a necessity for the deal to make fiscal sense. You simply don't borrow 85 billion without paying a lot of interest every year or big amortizations.
As an HBO subscriber it seems like this is probably the right time to un-subscribe from their service. I don't find most of their catalog all that appealing and mostly just watch their old shows (Sopranos, The Wire, etc.) along some of their newer stuff (Westworld being the only one I've actively followed even if the un-planned nature of the writing really has really started to show) so it's not like I'm going to miss out on all that much when I move back to Netflix and the local BBC equivalent's streaming service.
You do know that Toys R' Us (and Sears for that matter) had been reducing their number of stores years? Shutting down unprofitable locations is something the all the retail giants have been doing ever since they started being squeezed by Amazon & Co and as we can see from their continued decline, it's simply not enough.
So when you compare Toys R' Us to Sears and other dying-but-not-quite-dead retail giants, you can clearly see that their main difference is just that Toys R' Us took on huge amounts of debt due to the Bain & Co buyout while their competition didn't.
If you look at Toys R' Us' actual per-store sales figures over the last decade or so you can clearly see that the enormous amount of debt and related costs that ended up on their balance sheet when Bain Capital & Co went trough with the leveraged buyout* was absolutely the final nail in the coffin, but it wasn't the root cause of their demise. That was the decline of physical retail in general.
Sure, they'd probably still be around today and be able to limp on for some years, but they'd be in a very similar situation to Sears and many other dying physical retail giants. The unsustainable amount of debt taken on under the incorrect assumption that they were going to grow enough in online retail to offset the shrinking physical retail market merely sped up the inevitable. The significant interest payments that had to contend with ate up any profits and prevented them from making necessary investments, leading to an increased sales decline and finally when they realized that they weren't going to be able to pay an upcoming set of loan repayments (all stemming from the Bain & Co buyout) they really didn't have a choice but to throw up their hands and declare bankruptcy.
*Bain & Co took over the company in a way where the company basically bought itself off the stock market and took the debt from buying all of it's shares on it's own balance sheet, thus ending up with massive debts.
Even if it wasn't an industry as heavy in lobbying as the record industry, lobbyist pushed bills tend to be like slasher villains. No matter how many times and how gruesomely you kill them, they'll be back before you know it.
The worst part about this bill is the (rather aptly numbered) 13th article and how it forces content platforms to automatically scan content for copyrighted works, but completely forgets about fair use for purposes like satire, criticism, education and how nobody's come up with an even remotely accurate automated way of telling those uses apart from copyright infringement. Not only does this significantly increase the cost of trying to create a social media service in Europe, it's also rife for abuse where people use copyright to stifle free speech.
The second really dumb part, the 11th article, is really just the publishing industry shooting itself in the foot. In Germany the publishing house Springer lobbied in a similar law and all it did was cause companies like Google and Facebook to just become careful and not display links to articles by Springer owned publications, which cause readership and advertisement revenue to drop for these publications.