I am Shocked, Shocked, to Learn That Facebook Puts Profits Ahead of People

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday finally addressed the series of claims made by whistleblower Frances Haugen, denying that the social media company prioritizes its profits over the safety of its users.

“At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook profile. “That’s just not true.”

Well, it's pretty clear that The World's Richest Android has a lying module installed in his central processor. Putting profits ahead of people and public safety is what corporations do. Companies are amoral constructs, only slightly constrained by law and public opinion. The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook has been whitelisting some accounts of celebrities and other VIPs to flaunt Facebook's rules on false, sexually suggestive, offensive or other prohibited content. Supposedly, what was supposed to happen was that their posts were allowed and flagged for review by higher-ups, but in practice, that didn't happen until there was a public blowout.

So they got away with saying stuff that, if you or I posted it, we'd end up in FB Jail.

When you think about how online services work, that just makes sense. It's all about the eyeballs, page views, clicks. The more people who look at things, the more they see the ads of FB's customers and the more money Zuckerberg takes home. If there is a controversial comment that gets people mad, or upset or responding and looking at other things, FB makes more money.

This current flap is about Zuckerberg and Facebook, but let's be real: Amoral, unethical and even criminal behavior is what companies will, by and large, always do if it makes them more money.

Let's list a few, shall we?

• Ford choosing to defend lawsuits instead of fixing the "exploding Pinto" problem.
• Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family aggressively working to flood the country with opiods.
• Big Tobacco
• Exxon and other oil companies having hard data forty years ago of the reality of climate change.
• GM aggressively investing in and then scrapping mass transit systems in the 1940s.
• GM choosing tetraethyl lead over ethanol for an octane booster (the public health dangers of leaded fuels were a known known.)
• Every car company, except Volvo, fighting the installation of seat belts.
• Paint companies making leaded paint for more than seventy years after the hazards of lead paint were known.
• A.H Robins and the Dalkon Shield IUD,
• Firestone's exploding tires.

If you spend a little bit of time looking into it, you'll find no shortage of company after company that knew that its products were defective, harmful or even deadly and did nothing about it until public pressure got too much or the legal issues were too great. A lot of people have forgotten that government regulation and inspection of many industries came about because those industries were deliberately selling ineffective or contaminated goods.

Companies have no core values other than making money. That Facebook operates that way should shock no sentient adult.

Gee. A NBA Player is a Self-Centered Covidiot

Lazar Hayward, a former N.B.A. player, was arrested in Hawaii last week for trying to enter the state with a fake negative Covid test, the authorities said.

Mr. Hayward, a first-round draft pick in 2010, and a woman traveling with him, Raven Randle had uploaded the fake documents onto Hawaii’s Safe Travels portal, the police on the western Hawaiian island of Kauai said in a statement on Facebook. The state requires unvaccinated travelers to quarantine for 10 days upon arrival unless they present a negative Covid test.

The pair were arrested on Sept. 28 soon after they had flown to Kauai from Los Angeles, the police said. They were immediately sent back to California.

That's a misdemeanor beef. Then they have to spring for more tickets to make their court dates. So this could get very expensive for them before they even go to trial. Which is a reason why they may just plead otu.

Laying These Down, Here

And one that is rather timely:

Mitch McConnell is an Economic Terrorist

How else can you describe a man who takes great glee in threatening to wreck our economy (but only when there is a Democrat in the White House)?

The debt ceiling was raised three times during the last presidency without any fuss. That's because Republicans are all for deficit spending when they have the helm.

But now that there's a Democrat in the White House, the Republicans are back to holding the economy hostage. McConnell pulled this same stupid shit in 2011 and, as a result of the threat of instability caused by his tactics, America's credit-worthiness dropped from AAA status. Every time since then, when McConnell and his Party of Stupid floats the risk of a default and economic instability, our nation credit rating goes down.

So, if the national credit rating goes down again, national borrowing costs climb and there is economic instability as a result: Thank a Republican.

Nonverbal Autism

A perspective from an autistic man:

Humans waste a lot of talent because it's easy to not to look past the obvious surface.

Facebook is Down

After well over a decade of research and amassing billions of dollars, Mark Zuckerberg has concluded that there is no way that Facebook is ever going to help him get laid.

So he shut it down.

(It really is down.)

Your Sunday Morning Rotor Noise

Compare a scale-model Hughes-500:

To the real thing:

Does the UK Realize that Its Fuel Shortage Is Brought to Them by the Letters "B," "R," "E," "X,", "I" and "T"?

Fuel shortages are getting worse in some parts of the country, in particular London and the south-east, the chairman of the Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) has said.

Brian Madderson warned the shortages remained a “really big problem” in these areas.

To be clear, it's not exactly a fuel shortage. It's a labor shortage, specificially, a shortage of truck drivers. When the Brits were in the EU, citizens of other EU couontries could work there without visas. For employment purposes, it was akin to a citizen of NY taking a job in FL, except that the New Yorker could easily become a citizen of Florida and the Slovakian who was driving trucks in England couldn't take out British citizenship.

When the Brits left the EU, a lot of truck drivers returned home. This was pushed along by the pandemic, as the drivers opted to go endure the pandemic with their families.

The Brits are trying everything they can think of, incluiding luring retired guys back behind the wheel. But driving a fuel truck requires special licensing and exams and, well, you guessed it, that process is backed up. British industry needs another 100,000 truck drivers who can drive hazardous shit around and those guys are nowhere to be found.

The good times promised by the Brexiteers continue.

S&W: Bring Back the Model 12

Seriously, guys, it was a great gun. Bring it back. In this modern world of most states allowing concelaed carry, it'd be damn nerar perfect.

And if you have to, make it hammerless so that you can ditch the frigging lock.

Right-Wing Violent Lunatics

All of whom, by some coincidence, are Texans.

First, a clown who thinks that a Molotov cocktail is a tool for political discourse:

A man seen on surveillance video wearing an American flag bandanna when he threw a Molotov cocktail into the headquarters of the county Democratic Party in Austin was arrested in Texas, a fire official said.

Ryan Faircloth, 30, was booked Friday in the Travis County jail. He was charged with arson and possessing a prohibited weapon — the Molotov cocktail — according to Austin Fire arson investigator Capt. Jeffrey Deane.

That particular imbecile apparently was all over social media about his actions and proclivities for violence, which made finding him somewhat easy after the authorities released surveillance video. it takes a particular breed of stupid to go out and do crimes while mentioning them on social media. So it doesn't take Inspector Clouseau to find them.

Next idiot: An asswipe who thinks that the proper response to being told to wear a mask is to go into stabby mode:

Police in Texas have arrested a man who was accused of stabbing a restaurant manager with a pocketknife after being told he needed to wear a mask.

The stabbing happened in March at a Jack in the Box restaurant in League City, just southeast of Houston. Authorities had issued an arrest warrant for James Schulz Jr. shortly after the stabbing occurred but he wasn’t taken into custody until this week, police said.

At the time, police said Schulz refused to follow the restaurant’s policy requiring him to wear a mask to protect against the spread of the coronavirus. Police said he then attacked the manager.

Fucking lunatic. It should not be necessary to point out that, when a person who doesn't want to wear a mask in a business is told to wear one, the proper resonse is to say, at the most, "then I'll take my business elsewhere" and leave. Yanking out a knife and stabbing the store/restaurant employee(s) isn't going to get one preferential treatment.

But maybe the etiquette rules are different in Texas.

Finally, we get to a Texan Nazi:

A federal jury in Seattle on Wednesday convicted a leader of a neo-Nazi campaign to threaten journalists and Jewish activists in three states.

The jury deliberated for about 90 minutes Wednesday following a two-day trial before convicting 25-year-old Kaleb Cole of five felony charges, including conspiracy, mailing threatening communications and interfering with a federally protected activity. He could face a decade in prison when Judge John C. Coughenour sentences him in January.

Cole, most recently of Montgomery, Texas, was a leader of a hate I group called Atomwaffen Division. He and four others were charged last year with having cyberstalked and sent Swastika-laden posters to journalists and employees of the Anti-Defamation League in Washington state, Arizona and Florida, telling them, “You have been visited by your local Nazis,” “Your Actions have Consequences,” and “We are Watching.”

So the jury had some coffee, chose a foreman and then convicted the Nazi asswipe. Ninety minutes of deliberation is close to the jury saying "nah, we don't need to leave the jury box; hang the motherfucker."

Hopefully the judge will see his way clear to throwing the book at him.

Speaking of the book being thrown at him, the judge in the defamation case filed against Alex Jones has had it with him and his attorneys playing fuck-fuck games during the discovery process.

A Texas judge has found Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones liable for damages in three defamation lawsuits brought by the parents of two children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre over his claims that the shooting was a hoax.

Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Austin, home of Infowars, entered default judgments against Jones, Infowars and other defendants for what she called their “flagrant bad faith and callous disregard” of court orders to turn over documents to the parents’ lawyers. The rulings were issued on Monday and released on Thursday.

That's called a "death penalty sanction". It's basicaly the court saying "you're such an asshole that you now lose and we'll talk about how much you're going to have to pay."

Which seems fitting, here. Whether or not Jones's attorneys will also be sanctioned is somethng we may see down the road.