Sorry I'm so cynical, but I can't help suspecting that the Met failed to properly investigate the woman that drove her £100,000 Land Rover Defender 4x4 - marketed as 'unstoppable' - into a London school playground, killing 2 children, because she seemed a bit posh.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Richard Murphy sees in Deepseek a challenge not just to US AI, but to the very foundations of US capitalism...
"US capitalism has three core ideas at its heart. The first is that ownership is king. Protecting whatever is created from replication is the first tenet that it follows... Concentrating the power of ownership in the hands of a relatively few people is all US capitalism is about now.
"Second, as a result, secrecy prevails. The patent lawyer is the architect of business success in these enterprises... Massive barriers to entry for competitors are built and vigorously defended, completely contrary to the ideas of free markets.
"Third, the goal is to maintain this situation for as long as possible, allowing for the maximum extraction of profit from the consumer through extortionate rents. The consequence is that US capitalism is frequently bloated with high costs...
"In summary, then, big US business is inherently anti-competitive by nature, is monopolistic by choice, and is, in most cases, very likely to be grossly inefficient as a consequence... What Deepseek has really done is challenge this model."
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/01/28/is-deepseek-the-start-of-an-assault-on-the-whole-of-us-capitalism/
[#]deepseek #ai #capitalism #business
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Google Maps will rename Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in US. Another reason to stop using Google.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Just discovered Existential Comics is now on Mastodon...
@existentialcomics
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Two hundred UK companies sign up for permanent four-day working week - more than 5,000 workers to benefit from reduced hours with no loss of pay... https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/27/two-hundred-uk-companies-sign-up-for-permanent-four-day-working-week
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Interesting article on the South African roots and racist/fascist links of Musk, Thiel, and the rest of the 'Paypal Mafia'...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
@RichardJMurphy for Chancellor !
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
George Monbiot for Prime Minister !
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/26/labour-building-housing-market-private-developers
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
"Research shows that the price of sending a standard parcel via Amazon in the UK has more than doubled since 2017. Meanwhile, the income from the advertising fees that independent sellers must pay to stay visible to customers exploded: a nearly 17-fold rise from 2017 to 2022. International research even shows that Amazon uses its chokehold over sellers to pocket more than half of sellers’ revenues in fees."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/25/labours-decision-to-muzzle-regulators-in-the-name-of-growth-will-backfire-horribly
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
The UK government has ordered Labour MPs to oppose the climate and nature bill, which more than 80 Labour MPs, including several ministers, had publicly signed up to support. The reason: the bill would require the UK to meet the targets it has already agreed to at Cop and other international summits.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/23/labour-mps-ordered-to-sink-landmark-climate-and-environment-bill
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Stiglitz on America's economic prospects under Trump:
"No country can truly prosper if large portions of the population suffer from deficiencies in education, health, and nutritious food. In America, around 16% of children grow up in poverty, overall performance in international educational assessments is mediocre, malnutrition and homelessness have become pervasive, and life expectancy is the lowest of any major advanced economy. The only remedy is more and better public spending."
So the opposite of what Trump/Musk are planning, then.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
The UK government is preparing to approve controversial expansions to three London airports. What could highlight more clearly the inconsistency of its policy platform: you can't both maximise economic growth and achieve net zero within a reasonable, let alone a legally binding, timescale. I hope UK environmental organisations will expose this in court - and halt the airport expansions.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
As a lot of new people seem to be joining here, I thought I should have a go at an #introduction.
I am I guess a bit unusual in having been a serial entrepreneur, and a business advisor, but also a life-long socialist. I started my first business while still at school, and another at university; then I discovered social enterprise - using business models and methods not for private gain, but for common benefit. I got involved in the wholefood co-op and radical bookshop movements, then went on to work in social enterprise development, setting up a co-operative specialising in organisational structure design, writing a number of technical guides on this, and on how to restructure conventional organisations as co-ops and social enterprises - and indeed advising on some of the largest transformations to social enterprise in the UK. I went on to work internationally on the development of legislation and financial support for social enterprise, both for governments and international aid bodies.
Throughout I also worked with universities, first in cultural history and then in social enterprise. Alongside my PhD I taught on the Keele University 'American Mind' course - a broad cultural survey course. I've studied many aspects of history, culture and the arts - and been a part-time practitioner in both pottery and music (guitar) - but my main early focus was on literature. Later, naturally, I became more involved in teaching and researching social enterprise development, working with a number of universities and other organisations.
[#]socialenterprise #coops #companylaw #business #economics #universities #culture #arts #literature #history
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
I see the dollar has fallen off a cliff today...
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
The French Human Rights League (LDH) is asking the public to join them in a mass exodus of X, formerly Twitter, on January 20...
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/01/15/french-group-encourages-mass-departure-from-elon-musks-x-platform-on-us-inauguration-day
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Interesting proposal from Gabriel Zucman, of the Paris School of Economics and École normale supérieure...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/20/trump-threatens-a-global-trade-war-europe-must-unleash-a-radical-alternative
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/jan/20/trump-is-back-how-do-we-prepare-for-life-under-a-brutal-regime-of-ai-climate-crypto-madness
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
"The economic aim [of the liberal international order] was to keep the world safe for global free markets... by “designing institutions… to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy” and establishing “rules set by supranational bodies operating beyond the reach of any electorate”. This was the project of neoliberalism."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/19/postwar-liberal-order-populism-rise
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
"The New York Times did a poll in the first week of this year asking whether the political system in that country was broken. What they discovered was that 59 per cent thought it had been broken for decades. Only nine per cent thought it was not broken. Most of those in between thought it had been broken for a few years." - https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/01/19/the-political-system-is-rotten/
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
"If you took functional MRI scans of a healthy ‘normal’ person, a person with a personality disorder, and a business tycoon with a track record of exploitation, chances are you would find that the MRI scan of the tycoon was more closely matched with the MRI scan of the personality disorder...
"When there is an overabundance of environmental stimulation that is singularly focused on profit-making then it is inevitable that our impressionable children and adolescents (and some adults) will suffer from impaired cognitive development and/or altered brain function...
"Being surrounded by consumerism all the time will make you shallow, greedy, miserable, and more likely to be aggressive. And when I say ‘make you’, I don’t mean a temporary psychological state, I mean it will alter the structure and function of the brain itself.
"It is not just consumerism via adverts, T.V. and film. Disproportionate exposure to the ‘celeb-lifestyle’ and ‘fashion-based ideals’ is also likely to have a detrimental effect on the developing brain."
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
=> This profile with reblog | Go to GeofCox@climatejustice.social account This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini