TV aerials Middlesbrough primarily operate throughout the North of England with occasional involvement in the other UK and European projects. TV aerials Middlesbrough offer a wide range of services, all related to the reception and distribution of Satellite and Terrestrial transmissions for both commercial and domestic applications.
Councils, Housing Associations, Hospital Trusts and like organisations.
Scripted shows are great, but sometimes you just want to binge some good reality TV. Long-running reality television series such as The Bachelor, Survivor, and Say Yes to the Dress are popular options for scratching that unscripted drama itch, with all of them easy to flick on and devour. However, if you're looking for a change of pace, consider casting your hungry eyes farther afield — like across an ocean.
Reality TV shows are deliciously addictive regardless of where they're from, but different countries' fresh approaches can make familiar formulas exciting and new. There's also a ton of engrossing reality formats that haven't yet found popularity in the U.S., offering a whole new world of engaging unscripted television to explore. Read more...
TL;DR: The Ultimate DevOps Mastery bundle is on sale for £25.41 as of August 1, saving you 95% on list price.
In its 2017 State of DevOps Report, Puppet.com found that DevOps engineers are considered "a significant attribute to businesses". Those that hire people with DevOps skills deploy code with 30 times the frequency of their competitors, with 50% fewer failures.
Despite this, only 18% of those surveyed claimed that their organisations had a DevOps engineer at their company. What's that sound? That my friends is the sound of opportunity.
TL;DR: The Fundamentals of Physics course is on sale for £7.69 as of August 1, saving you 94% on list price.
When you were a kid, being forced to learn things was the worst. You coasted through school doing the least amount of work possible and filled your free time with mindless nonsense.
When you became an adult, you suddenly realised that you don’t know half of what you thought you did. Fortunately, it’s never too late to learn something, and a great place to start is by taking a course in physics. Yes, physics. Stick with us here.
Richard Brody reviews “Toe Tag Parole” and “Hard Times at Douglass High,” by the documentary filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/what-to-stream-alan-and-susan-raymonds-prescient-documentaries-of-police-prison-and-schools
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Whether you've just purchased your first vibrator or are a seasoned dildo user, it's important to learn how to properly care for it. One major safety precaution you need to take — before both solo and partner play — is to clean your sex toy.
While it may not sound sexy, cleaning your toys is essential. "Pleasure products can help you embrace confidence, help navigate intimate desires and boundaries and boost self-love," said Kristin Fretz, co-founder and CMO of Emojibator. "But having an experience like getting a UTI from a vibrator is not just uncomfortable and can be extremely painful if left untreated, but it perpetuates the shame around masturbation and can create individual resistance to self-pleasure." Read more...
TL;DR: The Writing With Impact course is on sale for £7.69 as of July 31, saving you 95% on list price.
Prolific writers make writing look easy, but it's really not the case.
Between finding a unique, zippy opener to decoding a jumble of thoughts and emotions into clean, concise prose, the whole process can be grueling. Yes, even for professional writers. And when it comes to writing persuasively? Forget about it.
As a writing tutor at Cambridge University, Clare Lynch knows a thing or two about good writing and has developed an online course dedicated to making you a better writer. The Writing With Impact course features 5.5 hours of on-demand videos and 30 articles, and will teach you the nuts and bolts of persuasive writing. Read more...
It’s never been easier to start your own business. On the flip side, it’s also never been harder to start your own business. Everyone and their mother is doing it and there are so many different digital ways to reach customers that it can seriously make your head spin.
This massive educational bundle contains 22 individual courses that will teach you how to become a digital marketing rock star. You’ll get lifetime access to 298 lectures and some 28 hours of content covering everything from social media and content marketing to email marketing and paid marketing. Whether you’re looking to grow your own business, land a marketing job, or help a client increase their business, this masterclass will get you where you need to go and take your skills to the next level. Read more...
Twitter just released an update on the massive hack that prompted the Great Blue Tick Silence of 2020, letting us know exactly how many accounts were actually impacted.
On July 15, hackers posted tweets from several prominent, verified Twitter users' accounts, falsely claiming that any bitcoin sent to a certain address would be paid back in double. The scam netted the hackers 400 payments with a total value of $121,000 — a tidy sum for a handful of tweets.
Now, Twitter has revealed what it's learned about how this hack took place, stating that it "relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to [Twitter's] internal systems." Read more...
Last quarter, Facebook made $18.3 billion in advertising revenue, which blew past investor expectations. While the company didn't give numbers for July (when the boycott began), it said its ad revenue growth rate for the first three weeks of July tracked with the rest of its 2020 year-over-year ad revenue growth rate of 10%. Meaning, despite companies from Ben & Jerry's to Unilever pulling their advertising dollars, things are basically the same for Facebook's bottom line, and Facebook expects it to stay that way. Read more...
Susan Glasser writes about Donald Trump’s insistence that the Presidential election, in November, should be delayed, and about the contrast between the President and John Lewis, the congressman and civil-rights icon who died earlier this month.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-is-the-election-crisis-he-is-warning-about
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Amy Davidson Sorkin writes about President Donald Trump’s continued touting of hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for the coronavirus, despite a lack of supporting medical evidence, and his suggestion that the 2020 election should be postponed until the pandemic is brought under control.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-dangerously-distorted-view-of-how-to-keep-america-safe
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Apple has pandemic work-from-home orders and stimulus checks to thank for setting new all-time sales records across a number of its product categories.
Starting with the iPhone, which saw a decrease in sales last quarter, Apple revealed revenue for that product category grew by two percent during the third quarter.
"In April, we expected year-over-year performance to worsen, but we saw better than expected demand in May and June," said CEO Tim Cook during the company's earnings call. "We attribute this increase in demand to several interactive causes, including a strong iPhone SE launch, continued economic stimulus, and potentially some benefit from shelter-in-place restrictions lifting around the world," he explained. Read more...
The Perseverance rover is the size of a small car and more technologically sophisticated than anything you’ve ever seen. | NASA / JPL
Some powerful self-driving tech is on its way to the Red Planet.
NASA’s Perseverance rover launched at 7:50 am ET on July 30, the first day of a flight that will take the fifth NASA rover to Mars. During its mission, the boxy, car-sized vehicle and its extendable arm will be charged with looking for signs of ancient life and gathering data about Mars’s geology and climate. It will even lay the groundwork for eventual human exploration of the planet.
To make all that possible, the rover carries a stunning display of technology designed especially for Perseverance’s historic mission, from pieces of a new spacesuit to an autonomous helicopter, the first aircraft ever sent to another planet. Those tools will help the rover gather data about the planet’s atmosphere, which it can then send back to NASA. There’s also an excavation system that can collect high-quality samples of Martian soil to be stashed and later analyzed by a future mission to Mars.
In the years the new rover is expected to operate, these machines will battle challenges that terrestrial technology never has to deal with, including the Red Planet’s super-thin atmosphere, limited resources, incredibly cold temperatures, and delayed communication with human overlords on Earth.
To give you an idea of how all this will happen, we’ve outlined some of the coolest features that will be on display when Perseverance finally arrives on Mars in February.
Perseverance is armed with advanced self-driving tech
Key to its mission’s success is the ability for Perseverance to self-drive. The vehicle has a computer devoted to its autonomous capabilities, and as Wired explains, it was designed and built specifically for this mission. The autonomous driving feature is essential because Mars is simply too far away for humans to give the vehicle constant, real-time instructions. So the rover needs to fend for itself.
“One of the fundamental constraints of any kind of space exploration — whether you’re going to Mars or Europa or the moon — is that you have limited bandwidth, which means a limit on the amount of information you can send back and forth,” David Wettergreen, research professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, told Recode. “During the periods of time when the robot can’t communicate, autonomy is important for it to enable it to keep doing tasks, to explore on its own, to make progress, rather than just sitting there waiting for the next time it hears from us.”
But building an autonomous vehicle for Mars is not necessarily as easy as building a self-driving car here on Earth (and that’s not easy, either). For one thing, the vehicle needs to be primarily concerned with safety, not with speed or the comfort of its passengers. After receiving basic instructions from humans about where it needs to go, Perseverance has to figure out the least-dangerous route on its own. If it crashes, the rover might render itself useless.
“Mars is not a fixed, flat, nice, paved road. Mars is really challenging terrain. There is dirt, rocks, sand, slopes, cliffs — all these things that the rover is going to have to avoid,” explained Philip Twu, robotics system engineer at NASA. “In addition to cameras, the rover is also going to need computers, algorithms, and software to be able to process all that imagery data into essentially a 3D picture that it’s then going to go ahead and use to plan.”
Fortunately for Perseverance, Mars is not a place where a self-driving rover needs to worry about crashing into another car or hitting a pedestrian.
“On Mars, there’s nothing moving around,” said Wettergreen. “They’re moving slowly, so they can take the time to build a detailed model, do a lot of analysis on that model, and then decide what to do next.”
A robotic arm will take samples of Mars that will be studied back on Earth
The vehicle is also armed with a 7-foot-long arm equipped with a drill that’s designed to collect rock and soil samples from beneath Mars’s surface. Those samples will then be stored in as many as 43 containers that the rover carries around on the planet. Once those samples are collected, they’ll be left in tubes that will sit on Mars’s surface for a future mission to pick up.
The arm alone isn’t all that impressive as a piece of space technology. Instead, its virtue is all the stuff that it comes, well, armed with.
“It’s like a Swiss Army knife of scientific instruments,” said Wettergreen. “What’s so amazing about it is all of these different functionalities and capabilities that they’ve been able to pack into such a small package.”
For instance, on the arm is a robotic claw equipped with a laser and other tools, including a camera called Watson that NASA compares to “a geologist’s hand-lens, magnifying and recording textures of rock and soil targets,” which is part of a tool — fittingly named Sherloc — that comes with special spectrometers and a laser. There’s also a tool called PIXL that can analyze incredibly tiny chemical elements and, in NASA’s words, take “super close-up pictures of rock and soil textures” to help scientists figure out whether Mars could have been home to microbial life in the past.
High-tech cameras and microphones will give the rover “senses”
Integrated into the rover are a slew of extremely high-quality cameras — 23 in total — that will help the vehicle survey the planet. The cameras won’t just help Perseverance get around Mars, but they’ll also take images of samples collected on the planet and record the vehicle’s arrival on the surface in full color. Meanwhile, NASA says that so-called “engineering” cameras will take on tasks like helping the vehicle avoid potentially treacherous areas, like sand dunes and trenches, while others will help the system navigate without human intervention.
NASA
There are 23 cameras aboard Perseverance.
At the same time, the rover will pick up sound data through its two microphones. Those devices will listen to the rover as it arrives and travels on the planet. There’s a special microphone that works in conjunction with a laser to study the chemistry of the planet’s geology by zapping it and recording the sound of the zapping. As NASA explains, the microphone hears the intensity of the “pop” made by the laser turning the rock into plasma, which “reveals the relative hardness of the rocks, which can tell us more about their geological context.”
A self-driving helicopter will fly on another planet. That’s a first.
Also aboard the rover is Ingenuity, which will — if all goes as planned — be the first helicopter to fly on Mars as well as the “first aircraft to attempt controlled flight on another planet,” according to NASA. That makes Ingenuity an experiment on its own, one that has undergone extensive testing on Earth. Its mission is to demonstrate that flight on Mars, where it will conduct up to five test flights, is possible, and that flights can be conducted autonomously on the planet.
While the device is essentially a drone, it’s specially crafted for Mars, which has less gravity than Earth. This makes ascent easier, but due to the planet’s comparatively thin atmosphere, flight itself is more challenging. As The Verge reports, the blades of the helicopter can make more than 2,000 revolutions a minute, several times the speed of helicopter blades whipping around in Earth’s atmosphere. Ingenuity is incredibly light, weighing in at around 4 pounds.
But the tiny vehicle’s autonomy is not just designed to help with navigation; it’s also build to keep Ingenuity alive.
“Mars is very, very cold. It gets to about negative 130 degrees Fahrenheit at night. That’s pretty cold,” explained Twu. “So the autonomy onboard the helicopter is also involved with finding a way to keep the helicopter warm enough to survive all the Martian nights.”
If the helicopter is ultimately successful, it will help NASA make decisions about where flight could lend assistance during future missions to the planet. Similar drones could serve as scouts that survey the terrain of Mars — especially places that rovers can’t easily get to — or, as NASA says, become “full standalone science craft carrying instrument payloads.”
Will we be seeing any of this tech on Earth one day? It’s hard to say right now, but Twu notes that NASA is famous for its spinoffs.
“Time and time again, we’ve seen that technology developed for NASA missions — a lot of them for space missions — end up having terrestrial applications here on Earth,” he said. “All technology development can cross-pollinate and advances in one area inevitably result in advances in other areas.”
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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2018. | Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images
The record sales that prompted Amazon to pay workers more during the pandemic aren’t abating — so will it reinstate those bonuses?
Amazon registered nearly $89 billion in sales and $5 billion in profit over the last three months, setting company records on both figures and blowing away Wall Street expectations as Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns pushed more shoppers online and into Amazon’s arms.
CEO Jeff Bezos had said last quarter that the company planned to spend around $4 billion on pandemic-related health and safety efforts for its workers throughout April, May, and June, and that those expenses might wipe out all of the company’s profit over the quarter. Instead, Amazon customers surprised company executives by expanding their pandemic-driven purchases beyond low-profit goods like groceries — sales of which still tripled year over year in the quarter — into more profitable “hardline” categories like electronics and “softline” goods like clothing. That’s what helped the company set a record profit, eclipsing the previous record of $3.6 billion in profit in the first quarter of 2019.
For months, the pandemic has transformed Amazon from a popular convenience shopping destination into an essential service as stay-at-home orders pushed more shopping online and as non-grocery brick-and-mortar chains have suffered from temporary store closures. But it also posed challenges for the tech giant. The company suffered from long delivery times as it reworked its warehouse policies to keep up with demand; along the way, it hired 175,000 warehouse and delivery workers to help with the sales boom and to fill in for workers who got sick or chose to stay home.
But the company also faced a labor crisis as some workers said the company’s warehouse safety measures were not adequate or consistent enough, and decried the company’s move to end bonus hourly and overtime pay at the end of May. Amazon ended up announcing another one-time bonus in June, declining to label the bonus as hazard pay, describing it instead as an appreciation for workers dealing with increased demand during an unprecedented time. An Amazon spokesperson on Thursday refused to say whether the company might reinstate the extra hourly or bonus pay even though increased orders and sales show no signs of abating for the company and its workers.
The record quarterly profit and sales figures, which eclipsed Wall Street analyst expectations by a staggering $8 billion, highlight Amazon’s growing power in the US economy. And it comes a day after a committee of US lawmakers grilled Bezos, the world’s richest man, on the business practices that Amazon has used to ascend to its increasingly dominant position.
Much of the lawmakers’ questioning on Wednesday focused on how the company treats and competes with the third-party sellers that account for more than half of the items Amazon sells in its online stores. Amazon revenue from these sellers grew 53 percent in the last quarter, up from growth of just 25 percent in the same quarter last year. Amazon CFO Olsavsky told Recode on the media call that growth in Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service — which lets sellers qualify their goods for Prime shipping by paying Amazon to handle warehousing and shipment of goods — was a main driver in seller fees.
Some critics have argued that Amazon coerces sellers into using FBA by giving better placement to goods that ship with Prime and by penalizing them for late deliveries if they ship on their own. One seller told federal regulators in a letter last year that the practice forces him to charge consumers higher prices than he otherwise would. Amazon, including Bezos in his congressional testimony, has defended FBA as a service that saves sellers considerable hassle.
While Amazon’s business continues to benefit from the pandemic, some other mass retailers are also seeing a boost. Both Walmart and Target have posted standout earnings reports in recent months, and their market share in US online commerce has increased, according to shopping data research firm Rakuten Intelligence, though Amazon’s share is still around seven times larger than Walmart’s.
Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
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The U.S. now has over 4.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and around 150,000 deaths — a staggering toll accounting for a huge percentage of the 16.5 million cases and 656,000 deaths worldwide. Ideally, these distressing numbers would convince America of the desperate need for face masks, social distancing, and lockdowns to get the coronavirus pandemic under control.
All Android smartphones come bundled with earphones for you to get listening to your favourite music or podcasts immediately, but they're rarely that impressive. It's a better idea to purchase a separate pair of headphones or earphones that suit your needs, providing you know what to consider.
First of all, it's important to think about when you're going to be using your headphones. Do you want to block out background noise while you're on your daily commute? Do you want a pair that are great while you're running or working out at the gym? Or do you just want to relax at home, listening to music through your headphones, perhaps even while you sleep? Read more...
Remember back in the 20th century when Congress held "big business" antitrust hearings with the CEOs of Standard Oil, Ford, U.S. Steel, IBM, and AT&T all testifying at the same time? No? That's probably because it never happened.
Despite the fact that all of those giant companies were accused of antitrust violations — and in two of those cases, forcibly broken up by the justice system — you just wouldn't ever stick them in the same room. Their industries are too obviously different. Representatives would have to read up on oil, autos, metallurgy, computers, and telecoms. Try to tackle them all at the same time, and you'd dilute the effect of scrutinizing each one. Read more...
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies remotely Amazon before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law hearing on “Online Platforms and Market Power” | Photo by GRAEME JENNINGS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Jeff Bezos was calm and polite in his first Congressional appearance. But he did nothing to quiet a huge concern.
The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, testified before US Congress members for the first time on Wednesday, but he said little to assuage one of their biggest concerns: that Amazon’s grip on online retail gives it the power to make or break small merchants on a whim.
Bezos, along with the CEOs of Apple, Google, and Facebook, appeared via videoconference before a bipartisan group of 15 US House members who have been investigating the four tech giants over the last year. The stated goal of this antitrust subcommittee’s investigation has been to document whether these corporate titans abuse their power in industries ranging from retail to social networking, and to evaluate whether the country’s antitrust laws are modern enough to guard against such abuses.
“Their ability to dictate terms, call the shots, upend entire sectors, and inspire fear represent the powers of a private government,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), the chair of the subcommittee, said in his opening remarks at what was a five-plus hour hearing.
For Bezos, much of the questioning from lawmakers focused on how Amazon competes against, and profits from, the 1.7 million small- and mid-sized merchants who help stock Amazon’s digital shelves. Amazon boasts that 60 percent of its retail sales now come courtesy of these sellers, rather than from Amazon stocking and reselling goods itself.
But some Amazon sellers have complained over the years that as Amazon’s market share in US online commerce has increased — to about 40 percent today, which is about seven times more than the next competitor — the company has squeezed and otherwise harmed them in new and different ways because they have no viable online alternatives.
According to Cicilline, Amazon sellers have told the subcommittee that “[Amazon has] never been a great partner, but you have to work with them.”
One concern has been the data Amazon uses from its own merchants to help inform what products to develop under its own private-label brands, such as Amazon Basics. In April, the Wall Street Journal published a report stating that Amazon employees have used data from individual sellers to help Amazon decide which private-label products to pursue. That contradicts what a top Amazon lawyer, Nate Sutton, told Congress earlier this year when he said that Amazon’s policy is to only use data on a product when there are at least two sellers selling it.
On Wednesday, Bezos told Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who represents Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, that the company’s investigation into violations of the policy outlined in the Journal report was ongoing. “I’m not satisfied that we have gotten to the bottom of it, and we’ll keep looking at it,” he said.
And Jayapal made her point clear: “So you might allow third-party sellers onto your platform. But if you’re monitoring the data to make sure that they’re never going to get big enough that they can compete with you, that is the concern that the committee has.”
Bezos argued that other retailers don’t even have such a policy, which is completely beside the point — no other US retailer operates a marketplace even close to the size of Amazon’s. But worse, Bezos not providing an update on the investigation just means that the concern over these potentially anticompetitive practices remains unsettled.
The lawmakers also questioned Bezos on what some view as an increasing cut of sales that Amazon takes from small merchants. According to a recent study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit that advocates for a strong economy built on independent businesses versus giant corporations, Amazon collected 30 percent in fees on average in 2019 from a given sale that a seller made. That number was up from 19 percent five years earlier, according to the ILSR estimates. Some sellers have said Amazon’s cut is even higher than that. In an episode of the Land of the Giants: The Rise of Amazon podcast last summer, one Amazon toy seller told Recode that Amazon now collects fees that equate to nearly half of each of his company’s sales, when including the cost to advertise his products on the site.
Bezos’s defense of these increases centered on the value he says Amazon is providing in exchange for these fees. The CEO talked up Amazon’s advertising platform as a way for businesses to get discovered — but some sellers and brands see it more as a tax simply to do business on the platform. But the CEO did little to put to rest the open question of whether small businesses on Amazon can be successful without giving his company a bigger and bigger cut of their earnings.
Bezos also mentioned how Amazon’s warehousing program Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), allows merchants to store, ship, and have customer service taken care of, through Amazon. In order for most sellers to qualify their goods for Amazon Prime delivery, they have to pay for FBA storage. And Bezos admitted that Amazon’s algorithm that determines in real time which seller wins a given sale, indirectly factors in whether a seller is a customer of FBA. This admission could offer additional ammunition to critics who argue that Amazon is using its control over the largest US e-commerce marketplace to essentially force its merchants into paying for more and more services, such as FBA.
Then there’s the frequency with which Amazon changes its policies and the algorithms that power its platform in ways that can make or break its merchants’ businesses, essentially overnight. One Congress member told Bezos the story of a textbook seller on Amazon who says her business was kicked off of the platform without notice or explanation after her business had grown large. Seemingly arbitrary suspensions by Amazon are not a new complaint.
Bezos said he was “surprised” to hear about such a story and that he would like to speak to the seller. But he also countered with a defense that he believes such treatment is not “systemic” at Amazon.
For Bezos, this was his first time testifying on Capitol Hill, at least in part because Amazon has, for the most part, been a good thing for millions of online shoppers. As I’ve written before, Amazon offers buyers incredible convenience, good prices, fast delivery, and a vast selection. And US antitrust enforcers typically favor companies that treat consumers well and keep prices low, while typically targeting business practices or mergers that they believe will harm consumers, such as by raising prices for a product or service.
But Amazon is now worth $1.5 trillion, and Bezos is the world’s richest man. Along the way, media and regulatory scrutiny has intensified. The Federal Trade Commission has been probing various Amazon business practices over the last year to see if Amazon has violated existing antitrust laws. And the House antitrust subcommittee will next issue its own report concluding its investigation that could argue for new or modified antitrust legislation that can account for the harm to innovation and competition that some legislators say is done by tech giants like Amazon, even while they seemingly treat consumers well.
Even if Bezos didn’t shut down lawmakers concerns about potentially anticompetitive practices, his first Congressional testimony at times came across as the most authentic of the CEOs at the hearing. At the same time, he on several occasions politely dismissed anecdotal seller complaints presented during the hearing as one-offs, rather than being core to Amazon’s DNA.
And therein lies one of his problems. Even if Bezos is right and Amazon only rarely abuses its position over its own sellers, the complaints shared during the hearing show that the company has grown so big and powerful that even abuses of neglect have the power to crush the small businesses that power Amazon’s success — but also are so dependent on the platform that it can crush them without even noticing.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/29/21346584/jeff-bezos-amazon-antitrust-hearing-congressional-testimony-power-to-make-or-break-small-merchants
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There was yelling. There was butt-kissing. There was Jeff Bezos forgetting to take himself off mute. Another congressional hearing where members of congress get to blast tech CEOs with questions - some crucial, some nonsense - is in the books.
As a hearing on antitrust law, it was a historic moment of reckoning with the most powerful companies and people the modern world has ever known. It was also at times ridiculous and awkward, thanks to political theatrics, and the fact that all the CEOs appeared virtually via video conference because of coronavirus precautions.
Jeff Bezos hasn't been asked a single question by Congress yet, so the world's richest man is having a snack..pic.twitter.com/zMZ4iEuHyY
You can always count on our less-than-tech-savvy Congresspeople to ask some really dumb questions whenever they host the big tech companies for a hearing.
However, the dumbest question asked at Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on antitrust issues wasn’t concerning lack of tech knowledge. It was a question about cancel culture.
You might be thinking, what does cancel culture have to do with antitrust laws? And you’d be right for asking because the answer is nothing. But that didn’t stop Republican Congressman Jim Jordan from asking Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai about cancel culture. Read more...
The CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon digitally gathered on Wednesday for a grilling in front of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law.
At issue were each company's alleged anticompetitive practices, and Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jeff Bezos were all given time to have their say. It just so happened that some executives got more of a "say" than others.
Over the course of approximately five and a half hours, both the number of questions directed at each CEO and the time allotted to answer said questions varied widely. Thankfully, Mashable's Sasha Lekach tallied it all up: Read more...
Richard Brody reviews Philippe Collin’s 1996 film, which stars David Warrilow and follows the philosopher Immanuel Kant leading up to his death.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/what-to-stream-the-last-days-of-immanuel-kant-a-physical-comedy-of-the-philosophical-life
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies virtually before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law on Online Platforms and Market Power in Washington, DC, on July 29, 2020. | Mandel Ngan/Getty Images
At a historic antitrust hearing, many conservatives focused on political drama instead of asking big tech CEOs questions about their market power.
Wednesday’s congressional antitrust hearing was a historic occasion, offering Congress a chance to grill four of the most powerful men in the world, who control four companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google — each so massive that they rival nation-states in their power. Observers have grown increasingly concerned about the unprecedented and outsized impact of these companies on the economy, the millions of American citizens who use their products, and the thousands of smaller businesses that try, often unsuccessfully, to compete with them.
But the Republican members of the hearing instead primarily focused on one specific thing: unfounded claims that tech companies are biased against conservatives.
“I will just cut to the chase. Big tech is out to get conservatives. That’s not a suspicion, that’s not a hunch, that’s a fact,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who from the onset of the hearing has been leading Republicans on the committee in questions about anti-conservative bias. At one point, he repeatedly yelled at a Democratic colleague, Rep. Mary Scanlon, interrupting her allotted questioning time because he took offense to her implication that his focus on anti-conservative bias was promoting “fringe conspiracy theories.”
It’s not surprising that many Republican committee members are choosing to focus on supposed tech bias. But it is a significant distraction from what really matters: whether tech companies have used their power to crush their competition and exploit users’ online behavior and data in a manner that hurts Americans of all political persuasions.
Allegations that social media platforms have an anti-conservative bias has for years been a rallying cry of President Trump and the Republican party. And leading up to Wednesday, Republicans attacked the focus of the Democrat-run House Judiciary subcommittee hearing — calling on it to focus more on anti-conservative bias and for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to appear. Twitter is a small company compared to, say, Facebook, but it has recently taken measures to moderate President Trump’s posts for violating policies around misinformation and hate speech, enraging Republicans.
Democrats, meanwhile, tried to steer the conversation back to issues more directly relevant to antitrust, like if and how these companies intimidate their competition, such as when Facebook acquired its then-rival Instagram in 2012; or whether these companies exploit their users’ privacy, like how Google tracks individuals’ online browsing across the web with cookies; or if Apple is shutting out its competitors by taking an unreasonable cut of profits coming in from independent app developers in its App Store.
What really matters here is whether these companies’ business practices are ultimately harming consumers, most of whom have no choice but to use Big Tech in one way or another if they want to do basic things online like search the web, order goods, or stay in touch with their friends.
In an earlier era, Republicans and Democrats on the committee might have come together to try to focus on what’s been seen as an area of relative bipartisan agreement: protecting the free market. That didn’t happen at today’s hearing. Instead, it was a display of partisan divides.
While it’s true that many rank-and-file corporate employees at Facebook, Google, and Apple — who tend to be college-educated individuals living in major metropolitan areas — identify as politically liberal, like many others in their demographic, there’s no definitive proof that Facebook, YouTube, Google, or any other major tech platform discriminates against conservative content.
In their testimony, Republicans at Wednesday’s hearing cited investigations from right-wing news outlets and groups, like Project Veritas and Breitbart News, but at most, these sources seem to indicate that many Big Tech employees hold liberal political beliefs — a phenomenon that is neither illegal nor inherently conspiratorial.
Historically, the types of content and pages that consistently perform well on Facebook are often right-leaning news and pundit pages, like Breitbart News and Ben Shapiro. And as my colleague Peter Kafka wrote this spring, these same tech companies often face criticism from Democrats over how their platforms incentivize users to post polarizing and politically extreme content because their algorithms prioritize engagement — and polarizing content is good at getting users to engage with it.
After Jordan used his initial allotted round of time for questioning Google CEO Sundar Pichai about alleged anti-conservative bias (based on leaked emails from a former Google marketing executive which said the company used its products to reach Latinos with voting information in the 2016 presidential election), he twice interrupted Democratic colleague Rep. Mary Scanlon (D-PA) to yell at her across the floor — initiating a screaming match with Democratic subcommittee chairman David Cicilline, who tried to maintain order.
Jordan reacted this way after Scanlon said she would like to focus her questioning back on antitrust issues instead of what she called “fringe conspiracy theories.” After Cicilline’s repeated calls for order — and after another person on the congressional floor, unidentifiable from the livestream, yelled at Jordan to “put your mask on!” — Jordan let up and let Scanlon continue questioning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with her allotted time.
The entire debacle was another reminder that today’s hearing is mostly a political spectacle, a moment primed for soundbites, and many Republicans at the hearing chose to use their time with these powerful company leaders to promote their own political agendas. Congressional hearings like this one aren’t expected to directly lead to antitrust action, but they can help set the stage for that when politicians strategically use their time to extract answers from leaders with pointed — and unified — lines of questioning.
Ranking Republican James Sensenbrenner did offer a narrow window of measured optimism for bipartisan cooperation toward the end of the hearing. He said that antitrust probes hold a meaningful and historic place in American government but that, in the case of tech, regulators need to revisit old decisions and step up enforcement of existing laws rather than write a whole new set of rules.
But largely, Sensenbrenner’s Republican colleagues were uninterested in discussing antitrust issues, under new or existing laws alike. As one Democratic congressional staffer told Recode, Republicans seemed more interested in creating explosive confrontations by decrying alleged “liberal bias” that are made-for-replay on conservative cable TV (indeed, Jordan’s clips have already been a subject of discussion on Fox News). Today’s hearing was a sign that in the current hyper-polarized political climate, it’s unlikely Congress will lead any real, meaningful, bipartisan legislative effort to rein in Big Tech anytime soon.
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from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/29/21347128/big-tech-antitrust-hearing-facebook-zuckerberg-amazon-bezos-apple-cook-google-pichai
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