Notices by Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​ (dredmorbius@toot.cat)

If US and EU antitrust / competitiveness authorities cannot secure compliance from Facebook and Zuckerberg for existing and longstanding orders, what makes you think a rag-tag bunch of Fediverse admins will fare better?

Facebook are manifestly bad-faith and untrustworthy actors. Preblock, now.

Facebook is a repeat violator at the FTC. There was a consent decree that goes back close to a decade, which the FTC in 2019 found that they violated. The recent news suggests that they may have also been in violation of this latest consent order. And that is really prompting a step back and a close look at: What does it take to make sure that firms across the board are actually complying with the law? ... I think when you have companies that are repeatedly before a law-enforcement agency, you need to ask serious questions about whether these companies are recidivist and whether they have a challenge in abiding by existing laws.

-- Lina Khan, Chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, interviewed by Kara Swischer,15 May 2023

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/on-with-kara-swisher-ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-ai-and-musk.html

At the very least, a precondition for any cooperation would be full compliance with existing antitrust actions, sanctions, consent orders, and the like, for a period at least as long as noncompliance (so, four years in the case of the 2019 order).

#Facebook #Meta #MetaBlock #KaraSwisher #LinaKhan #USFTC #Antitrust #Monopoly #EmbraceExtendExtinguish #EternalSeptember #MarkZuckerberg #FuckZuck #FuckFacebook

@tagomago I'm pretty sure that the rise in containerised cargo has a lot to do with this, and would like to see the relative and absolute trends over time.

In the context of @pluralistic's toot, though, the point is that a lot of our energy consumption is about energy consumption. Note that this somewhat counts against the EROEI of fossil fuels in the sense that there's a lot of unacknowledged energy expenditure in their utilisation.

(How this comares against other energy regimes I'm not entirely sure. Keep in mind that a major utilisation of metabolism in living systems is in supporting metabolic activity: sensing, finding, appropriating, digesting, and exreting food.)

@pluralistic Looking up ocean shipping stats a few years back, I was stunned that one third of all shipping tonnage was oil tankers.

That's down from the 1970s when it was roughly 1/2.

Oil is big business.

Carl Sagan Keynote Speech at Emerging Issues Forum (1990)

Dr. Sagan's 2/9/1990 address before the 5th Emerging Issues Forum at NCSU, broadcast live on NC Public TV. Sagan spoke at the invitation of former Gov. Jim Hunt, co-creator of the Forum. The speech begins at 6:12.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9Xz3ZjOSMRU

Thirty-one years ago, Carl Sagan (host of the original Cosmos television series, think of today's Neil DeGrasse Tyson) spoke on the risks and remedies of global warming and climate change. If you want to have some idea of what we knew and what was recommended at the time, and how many decades we've lost ... Watch and listen.

It's also worth emphasizing that this event was held in North Carolina, at the invitation of the governor of that state, something hard to imagine occurring today.

Though the Republican Party is revealed again as the party of denial opposed to science.

#GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #CarlSagan