The US of A banning TikTok (which is NOT owned by China) while embracing M E T A (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram), plus Microsoft & Google as private data-enrichment cartels!
A hard-to-believe display of stupidity:
Or is it just political faintness?
The story is that the Internet Archive bought books, scanned them, and then made them available to people digitally. However, they only allowed as many borrowings as they had physical copies of the book.
Then, when Covid went into hot mode, they lifted the restriction. So the publishers were keen to turn the Internet Archive into a parking lot, but theyâd rather not have Covid and little kids on lockdown as a context, so now theyâve challenged the whole practice of digital lending of physical books in court.
The court has agreed with them.
Now unfortunately this was not just some district court of Hintertupfingen but a circuit court of New York, but there is still legal recourse and the Internet Archive wants to fight that.
It is remarkable, however, that they not only want to destroy the Internet Archive, but also all the regular bibliophiles who have done the same. So there is the threat of an immense cultural clear-cut.
This is not necessarily something that people can march along with, but the Internet Archive also accepts donations. They are not tax deductible. But publishing the problem is the least that all archive.org users can do.
Interesting, how each top program was a unique live event, dominated by the NFL.
2022 TV RECAP: ITâS THE NFLâS WORLD; THE REST OF US JUST LIVE IN IT
Sportico is out with its annual list of the "Top 100 Most-Watched TV Broadcasts" of the previous year, reporting that - by far - National Football League games dominate the list with 82 of the top 100 programs. There were just five college football games on the list, four political programs, three World Cup games, and two college basketball games.
Good discussion on the history and current state of media. Is media a public service, or just another company selling a commodity to maximize profit? Media's role as the "fourth estate" is increasingly compromised as they shift to the latter goal.
Wasnt sure where to put this...story deals mostly with the dissolving financial trust, but also how the role of media (social) has contributed:
Finance, the media and a catastrophic breakdown in trust John Authers had a ringside seat to some of the most important financial stories of our time. Hereâs what he learnt
Finance is all about trust. JP Morgan, patriarch of the banking dynasty, told Congress in the 1912 hearings that led to the foundation of the US Federal Reserve, that the first thing in credit was âcharacter, before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.
âA man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom,â he added. âI think that is the fundamental basis of business.â He was right. More than a century later, it is ever clearer that, without trust, finance collapses. That is no less true now, when quadrillions change hands in electronic transactions across the globe, than it was when men such as Morgan dominated markets trading face to face.
And that is a problem. Trust has broken down throughout society. From angry lynch mobs on social media to the fracturing of the western worldâs political establishment, this is an accepted fact of life, and it is not merely true of politics. Over the past three decades, trust in markets has evaporated.
