Mammon category archive
Amendment, Amended 0
At Above the Law, Joe Patrice discusses the reasoning of a “Constitutional originalist” judge who has forcefully argued that the 2nd Amendment did not “originally” mean what the gun manufacturers and their dupes, symps, and fellow travelers claim it does. A snippet:
Follow the link for his full explication.
The Pusher Men 0
Writing at Psychology Today Blogs, C. Dominik Guess finds the societal implications of the Sackler (think Oxycontin) family’s bankruptcy bargain to be rather disheartening.
A Tale of a Tycoon 0
Meet the (self-proclaimed) brilliant business man and his money laundromat.
Jeopardizing Jeopardy! 0
Brand loyalty is a thing. What else, to pick one example, can explain the continuing popularity of Jeeps, which have a flock of loyal owners despite consistently earning among the poorest ratings from Consumer Reports?
Brand loyalty also cuts both ways, as Susan Krauss Whitbourne points out at Psychology Today Blogs, where she takes an in-depth look at how the producers of the Jeopardy! television game show shot themselves in the foot in their quest for a successor to Alex Trebek.
Her analysis provides an object lesson in corporate hubris. A snippet:
Facebook Frolics 0
The EFF weighs in the inimical implications on Facebook’s decision to wall off its garden from legitimate academic research. A snippet:
Revealing the secrets behind this surveillance-based ecosystem to public scrutiny is the first step in reclaiming our public discourse.
The Zuckerborg is the fast lane of the disinformation superhighway.
The Snaring Economy 0
The EFF explains how Doordash dashed its “independent contractors’ wage slaves’ hopes of equitable remuneration by keeping them from knowing what their tips would be. A nugget:
But what’s good for Dashers wasn’t good for Doordash: the company wants to fulfill orders, even if doing so means that a driver spends more on gas than they make in commissions. Hiding tip amounts from drivers allowed the company to keep drivers in the dark about which runs they should make and which ones they should decline.
That’s why Doordash changed its data-model to prevent Para from showing drivers tips. And rather than come clean about its goal of keeping drivers from knowing how much they would be paid, it made deceptive “privacy and data security” claims.
Follow the link for an explanation as to how Doordash’s claims earned the label, deceptive.
(Broken link fixed.)
Facebook Frolics 0
The Zuckerborg tells researchers, “You can’t track our frolickers. That’s our shtick.”
Who Funds the Voter Fraud Fraudsters? 0
Corporations who profess to protest the voter fraud fraud, among others.
Counter-Factual 0
Will Bunch notes that it has been 52 years since Americans landed on the moon–a feat made possible by science, Science, after all, is the pursuit of fact. He considers why so many Americans now reject science (think vaccines, for example). A nugget (emphasis added):
Indeed, wealthy capitalists and the politicians who aided the backlash and rode it to victories — Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan — were so successful that distrust in science and the conspiracy theories that flow from that distrust now spread as virally as COVID-19 itself, among everyday folks on social media sites like Facebook. Albeit with an occasional booster shot from the most cynical media celebrities like Fox’s Tucker Carlson.
I commend his article to your attention.