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FTC readies lawsuit that could break up Amazon
  • The complaint is likely to focus on challenges to Amazon Prime, Amazon rules that the FTC says block lower prices on competing websites, and policies the FTC believes force merchants to use Amazon’s logistics and advertising services, according to some of the people.

    Relevant part of the article - they're not going near AWS or the entertainment/filming side of things, just the retail side it looks like.

    Even if Amazon loses every part of a lawsuit like this it won't materially affect their bottom line, so the headline seems like clickbait to me.

  • News: 'Do not release the dog with his hands up!': Black man mauled by police canine following Ohio pursuit
  • The fact that handlers can fake a "hit" wherever and whenever they want is the entire point, and also the reason they resist moving over to technical solutions. Those technologies also come with logging, which is another point against them as far as cops are concerned.

    It's always been about control and cruelty.

  • Amazon is reportedly making employees relocate for return-to-office | Engadget
  • I'm 100% remote and intend to stay that way, but there's definitely a subset of workers for whom in-office is better - either because they don't have the space at home for a dedicated office, they work better in an office environment, they have small kids at home who would interrupt work, and so on.

    The problem is really that companies don't seem to want to give people a choice to do what works best for them, their position, or their team. Where it's possible to WFH that should be the default offering.

  • US supreme court rules against affirmative action in Harvard and UNC cases
  • Compensated at the expense of whom though?

    The taxpayers? Sure, there's an argument for reparations and pumping money into forcing systemic change.

    College students competing for a limited number of slots to schools? I'm less convinced of this, it's a zero-sum game where if you're admitting one person you're denying others from that slot.

    IMO there's probably better ways you could incentivize colleges to aim for a diverse student body that would be more equitable. The goal should equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.

  • The Great Grift: More than $200 billion in COVID-19 aid may have been stolen, federal watchdog says
  • The bigger problem with student debt relief is that it doesn't solve the problem of how that debt is generated in the first place. By all means we should forgive a bunch of federal student debt, even buy out private student loans, but the problem will just start building up again until we're in an untenable debt situation again in the future. It's kicking the can down the road, the same complaint that a lot of people in favor of student debt relief have about the US debt ceiling discussion.

    The perverse economic incentives right now push lenders to loan out as much as possible, and that drives cost bloat at the university level as they expand their cost structure to capture more and more of the available money lent out for education. What I'd like to see is debt relief paired with actual fixes, such as making student debt (either private or both federal and private) dischargeable by bankruptcy.

  • RIP to my Pixel Fold: Dead after four days
  • Don't worry - when Apple makes a folding phone it will be "revolutionary" and then within a few years it will be impossible to find a mainstream or flagship phone that doesn't fold.

    Signed: 3.5mm headphone jack

  • “Microsoft acquired Bethesda after hearing Starfield would be exclusive to PlayStation” Strong allegations being thrown here.
  • When games are developed for "PC" that means "Windows" unless otherwise noted. If something works on Linux or OSX that is usually specifically called out on the game.

    The direction Windows is going with Win11 is concerning enough that a non-trivial number of people (myself included) are planning a move to Linux for desktop workstations once Win10 goes EOL next year. At that point I'd be locked out of games that only work on Windows in the same way I'm locked out from console exclusives. (And yes, I know it's possible to emulate/Wine/dual boot - all of those options still require a license that I'm not interested in.)

    Steam seems to be pushing Linux pretty hard, and it's working for a lot of develoeprs, but there's still a lot of AAA games not jumping on that bandwagon.

  • U.S. Navy Heard What It Believed Was Titan Implosion Days Ago — The Wall Street Journal
  • We wasted resources trying to save a billionaire greed class oppressor while we let struggling brothers and sisters who would have been far easier to save drown by the dozens.

    Have to disagree, this was valuable and real world training experience for military and coast guard resources that would otherwise be running simulation rescues anyway. The gear and people both need to be trained and maintained to be functional, let alone effective, in a real crisis. These are the a similar set of resources (people, machines, systems, etc.) that would be deployed for a fishing boat that sank, or a plane that went down in that area. That Malaysia Airlines flight several years back is an example of international military resources being deployed similarly.

    While I agree the military budget is bloated in many ways, this isn't one of the areas where it makes sense to call it favoritism or greed when the same resources deployed to assist in searching for the OceanGate sub would not have been able to be deployed into the Mediterranean. There's no overlap there, and while money and resources would be of a great help that would not have been instead of the OceanGate search, but rather in addition to it.

    Actually, now that I think about it - is the US military or coast guard even authorized to operate in the Mediterranean? Looks like we have some operating agreements and exercises with Malta but I'm not seeing a lot of readily available hardware that gets deployed there. You're certainly not getting any large scale hardware (cutters, subs, deployment platforms) into the Mediterranean in short order.

    Overall seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how S&R works on a global scale.

  • The expansion of the universe could be a mirage, new theoretical study suggests
  • Some of Einstein's predictions weren't really testable when they were posited. "Not currently testable" doesn't mean they can't be improved upon to be testable, or provoke a shift in thinking that leads to other research pathways opening up. The whole field has been somewhat stagnant and searching for something that can compete with the Standard Model, so ideas like this that could prompt a breakthrough get visibility and traction for that reason alone.

  • Andrew Tate charged with rape and human trafficking
  • I saw a theory that someone said to Tate that "GRETA is after you, gotta be careful" and Tate didn't know what that was so he typed "greta" into Google and got back the top result of Greta Thunberg, which was why he ran his mouth at her on Twitter.

    With how stupid Tate appears to be I consider that to be a real possibility for how it went down. If so it's even more hilarious.

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