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MC Fresh Breath

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by MC Fresh Breath

  1. 1 hour ago, Dahobbs said:

    Yes, I agree, you are stupid. But, maybe you can explain how not providing military aid to Ukraine isn't in Russia's interest and doesn't indirectly support its invasion against Ukraine.

    because that's exactly what the original post I wrote said.  right?  so many of you on this board ironically exemplify everything you (rightfully) decry about maga.  Including, apparently, a real inability to read. good day.

  2. 3 hours ago, GW Hayduke said:

    Suggest you not be so sensitive when folks call out your misinformation. Be better. If it wasn’t intentional, you should still be better and shouldn’t just blindly quote from weird sources to support your positions.

     

    You keep doing your thing apparently.  If you keep repeating falsehoods it makes thing true. Accept you were wrong.  I'm done with this stupidity. 

  3. 1 hour ago, GW Hayduke said:

    I get that you are sensitive that I pointed out your misinformation. Be better.

    Because Trump formally recognized Israel's take of the Golan Heights and Morocco's take of western Sahara, isn't evidence Biden is a hypocrite for supporting Ukraine. You should acknowledge and apologize. Be better.

    wow.  OK.  guess I will bold it out for you:
     

    Quote

    For example, President Joe Biden has correctly asserted that “nations have a right to sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The United States, however, has...

    This is obviously difficult for you.  That particular quote is saying that it is rich saying "nations have this right" when the US very selectively "cares" about said right.  The quote never once said Biden caused those issues. The quote about Biden being a hypocrite very rightfully dealt with his utter war mongering regarding Iraq. 

    See?  Let me know if you need help dissecting other paragraphs of "misinformation." 

    Quote

    Be better.

    I quite obviously already am. Your lack of reading comprehension doesn't require apologies from me.  But I will accept them from you if and when you have that moment of clarity.

     

  4. 32 minutes ago, GW Hayduke said:

    Spreading misinformation doesn't make sense to me. 

    Biden didn't formally recognize Israel's hold of the Golan Heights or Morocco's hold of western Sahara.  Trump did.  The fact Trump did all of that isn't an indication Biden is a hypocrite for supporting Ukraine.

    Don't spread misinformation.   

    Show me the quote that said Biden did that.  Maybe carefully re-read a sentence or two before going off on your high horse.  Edit: While I'm at it, why are you digging up your misinterpretation of what I posted in August of 2023?  Could you not have gone off in the wrong direction, oh I dunno, maybe within 3 to 4 months of me posting it?  Or are you incapable of reading dates as well? 
     

     

     

  5. 1 hour ago, mdmost said:

    Yep but you know what happens the second he criticizes Israel. He's in a no-win situation. But yes, he needs to speak out about this and use it to force Israel into a ceasefire. 

    at minimum, he needs to at least not continually do shit like this:

    Quote

     

     The Biden administration is close to approving the sale of as many as 50 American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel, in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter.

    The transaction, which would amount to the largest US foreign military sale to Israel since the country went to war with Hamas on October 7, comes as the administration is also expected to notify Congress soon of a large new sale of precision-guided munitions kits to Israel, the people said.

    The new sales of some of the US’ most sophisticated weaponry underscore the extent to which the US continues to support Israel militarily, even as Biden administration officials criticize Israel’s operations in Gaza, which have killed more than 32,000 Palestinians since October, according to the Gaza ministry of health.

    The sale is likely to be hotly debated in Congress, particularly by members of the president’s own party. US weapons sales to Israel have come under intense scrutiny in recent months and Democratic lawmakers have called for restricting military aid to Israeli until it allows more humanitarian aid into Gaza and does more to protect civilians there.

    Since Hamas’ attack on Israel in October, which killed over 1,200 Israelis, the US has made more than 100 foreign military sales to Israel. Most of those have fallen under the specific dollar amount that requires a notification to Congress, an official familiar with the matter previously told CNN.

    But an $18 billion F-15 sale is large enough that it requires congressional notification, and the administration informally notified the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees of the F-15 sale in late January, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

    The informal notification gives lawmakers and congressional staff time to review the details and ask questions before the State Department sends a formal notification to all lawmakers.

    The top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. James Risch, has already given his approval on the sale, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. A congressional aide told CNN that House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul has also approved the transaction to proceed to formal congressional notification.

    But Sen. Ben Cardin, the Democratic chairman of the committee, as well as the Democratic ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs committee, Rep. Greg Meeks, can still hold up the sale if they raise objections.

     

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/01/politics/biden-administration-f15-fighter-jets-israel

     

    • Rage+1 2
  6. 3 hours ago, GW Hayduke said:

    wtf. Trump was the one who formally recognized Israel's sovereignty of the Golan Heights and Morocco's sovereignty over the western Sahara but somehow that is evidence that Biden is a hypocrite in his support for Ukraine. Make it make sense.

    this doesn't make sense to you i guess:
     

    Quote

     

    In addition, Biden’s claim that the United States “always stands up to bullies” would be news to the Yemenis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and others who have been subjected to massive military attacks by U.S.-armed allies. His insistence that “we stand for freedom” is contradicted by his administration’s support for brutal dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere. Criticism of Russia’s veto of the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the invasion rings hollow in light of successive U.S. vetoes of resolutions challenging the U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama, U.S. attacks on Nicaragua, and Israel’s invasions of Lebanon.

    And, of course, Biden’s insistence that countries must not invade other nations on false pretenses is incredibly hypocritical considering his strident support as a Senator for the U.S. invasion of Iraq on the deceptive grounds that Saddam Hussein had somehow amassed vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, a nuclear program, and sophisticated delivery systems.

     

    Then there is this, which I think only 3 of us on this board disagree with:

     

    https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-has-signed-off-more-bombs-warplanes-israel-washington-post-reports-2024-03-29/

     

    Quote

     

    WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. in recent days authorized the transfer of billions of dollars worth of bombs and fighter jets to Israel, two sources familiar with the effort said on Friday, even as Washington publicly expresses concerns about an anticipated Israeli military offensive in Rafah.

    The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, said the sources, who confirmed a report in the Washington Post.

    Washington gives $3.8 billion in annual military assistance to Israel, its longtime ally.

    The package comes as Israel faces strong international criticism over its continued bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza and as some members of President Joe Biden's party call for him to cut U.S. military aid.

    The United States has been rushing air defenses and munitions to Israel, but some Democrats and Arab American groups have criticized the Biden administration's steadfast support of Israel, which they say provides it with a sense of impunity.

     

    Take care.

  7. 'We are essentially in a new Gilded Age’: As workers get laid off, CEOs and shareholders gobble up hundreds of billions in profits

    https://fortune.com/2024/03/18/gilded-age-layoffs-ceos-shareholders-corporate-profits-inequality/

    Spoiler


    Power and money only continued to be consolidated at the top after the pandemic first hit

    4 min. readView original
    So finds a new report from Oxfam, a British nonprofit focused on eradicating poverty, which analyzed more than 200 U.S. corporations to assess their “inequality footprint.” Most money ends up funneling into the mouths of those at the top, as 90% (or $1.1 trillion) of the combined $1.25 trillion in net profits for those companies analyzed went to paying wealthy shareholders. 

    Executives are doing quite all right as well. CEO pay has ballooned since the pandemic hit, increasing by 31% from 2018 to 2022. “Shareholders and CEO pay have risen to record levels in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis,” according to the report.

    “The rules are being rigged and the companies are helping to rig them,” Irit Tamir, senior director of Oxfam America’s private sector department, tells Fortune, speaking of company taxation that has gone down due to a strong corporate-lobbying presence. 

    This past year has been marked by layoffs in the finance, tech, and media sectors as many CEOs claim to need to downsize in light of economic strain. But it seems as if corporations are doing better than ever. Revenue and profits at Fortune 500 companies grew significantly between 2014 and 2022, hiking even more in the years after the pandemic hit. In the same breath that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced layoffs for more than 10,000 workers in the name of a “year of efficiency,” the company announced a fresh $40 billion stock-buyback option. Less than a year later, Meta announced plans to buy back another $50 billion. 

    While money was seemingly tight for some, it was an equivalent of Christmas for those at the top: Stock buybacks in 2022 hit a record of $681 billion, per Oxfam.

    The consolidation of power at the top has been a decades-long process. The concept of shareholder primacy started to take hold in the 1970s, per Tamir, who added that while companies started to prioritize this group, safeguards for workers were fading as union membership ebbed. In the 1980s, stock buybacks, once banned as a form of stock manipulation, became legal; Tamir says this change, specifically, allowed companies to inflate their stock prices. At the same time, corporate tax rates fell dramatically thanks to a series of tax cuts, first in the Reagan era and again during the Trump administration, while corporations gained more and more ability to directly influence politics, capped off with the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court gave companies and wealthy individuals carte blanche to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.

    “All of those things together have created sort of this perfect storm by which companies have gotten bigger, corporate power is on the rise, and the benefits that they’ve accrued in profit they are funneling to a smaller number of people,” Tamir says, adding that the other stakeholders—the workers—“are losing out.” 

    There are some signs of change. Unionization is growing in popularity after a summer of strikes and some high-profile wins on behalf of workers—like the UAW and, recently, the Starbucks union. 

    “There are some promising signs, but if we don’t continue down that path, we are already essentially in a new Gilded Age,” says Tamir, echoing President Joe Biden’s rhetoric on checking corporations more. 

    While wages remain fairly stagnant, or barely high enough to compete with the pace of inflation, CEOs have given themselves a hefty raise. CEOs were paid a combined $4.1 billion in 2022, per Oxfam’s analysis of the 186 companies that had hard data. Only 5% of the companies examined publicly said they support a living wage. The wage gap continues to widen among larger companies: McDonald’s, for instance, has a CEO-to-worker pay gap of 1,745 to one. Another prototypical American brand, the Coca-Cola Company, has a pay gap of 1,594 to one. 

    The divide is most apparent in the retail sector. Retail workers are often people of color and women, though the top leaders at these companies are often white men, according to Oxfam. While many companies said they were looking to make DEI targets, many came up empty-handed when it came to hard data. 

    “They are talking a good game, but when it comes to actually doing something about it, most are not doing anything that is at least transparent to the public,” Tamir says. “All of these things are technically legal and unfortunately to the detriment of the rest of us.” 

    Tamir says in the long term, even the most wealthy will suffer. Dollar Tree might be the least equitable of the companies from a gender and racial perspective, according to Tamir, and the company recently shut down 1,000 of its stores. 

    “At the end of the day, this is bad for business,” Tamir explains. “Having wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people is not good for an economy.”

    Taking a modern-century spin on “Let them eat cake,” shareholders are having the whole cake, and eating it too. It’s no shock the boardroom is able to stay above the fray as wealthy members are more equipped to weather economic downturns. But it turns out CEOs and shareholders are walking away with an even greater slice of profits than one might think.

  8. 28 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

    oh boy.....

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68534703

    A former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm's production standards has been found dead in the US.

    John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017.

    In the days before his death, he had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.

    Boeing said it was saddened to hear of Mr Barnett's passing. The Charleston County coroner confirmed his death to the BBC on Monday.

    It said the 62-year-old had died from a "self-inflicted" wound on 9 March and police were investigating.

    Did he jump out a window after he shot himself?

    • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
  9. On 2/22/2024 at 5:31 PM, Biff Tannen said:

    Well, didn’t need that nightmare fuel of a video, but dig the track. 

    They just released a studio video of the same tune.  I didn't realize that Coady WIllis of Big Business/Melvins had joined the band.  That's exciting.  Big Business at Hotel Vegas back in 2019(?) or so was one of my favorite gigs in some time.

  10. On 3/2/2024 at 8:58 PM, Captainant said:

    You should use a coding specific tool like GitHub copilot or AWS codewhisperer, those LLMs are fine tuned for code and usually give better results than a generalist foundational model

    yep.  have copilot at work. i still often find the chatgpt engagement a bit better edit: for random tasks.  for sure copilot when i have code in flight is quite a bit more direct.  however i enjoy sometimes 'engaging' with chatgpt for more of the 'why.'

     

  11. 1 hour ago, thunderlounge said:



    Think about this. A person is smart, but people are dumb.

    Now think about facebook as just one example.

    Now, do you think people are bright enough to not be fooled by fake shit?

     

    Really could be a problem in the wrong hands. And it’s already there. I don’t think the tech itself is the scary part, but if people believe the falsehoods created. 

    I agree with that of course.  But the topic also easily crosses into the 'enshittification' topic.  The article mentions the amounts of AI generated crap that is just going to clog up the internet:

    Quote


    Google search? They often lead with fake AI-generated images amid the real things. Post on Twitter? Get replies from bots selling porn. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Look closely at the replies to any trending tweet and you’ll find dozens of AI-written summaries in response, cheery Wikipedia-style repeats of the original post, all just to farm engagement. AI models on Instagram accumulate hundreds of thousands of subscribers and people openly shill their services for creating them. AI musicians fill up YouTube and Spotify. Scientific papers are being AI-generated. AI images mix into historical research

     


    I quote that as someone who uses ChatGPT from time to time.  Mainly to help format code or find an answer that I don't have to read through various Stack Oveflow answers on now.  It also handily comes w/o the derision and arguing that can be present on Stack Overflow.  Doesn't always get things right, but it is usually close.  I also know when I do this I'm helping to train it.  Ah well.

    But yeah, I think there is going to be more and more trust issues with electronic data of any type.  Not sure what the answers will be. 

     

    • Hook 'Em 1
  12. 12 hours ago, Chopper said:

    I was too busy chortling to read gsoda's words as closely as I'm sure they deserve. A bit of punctuation and capitalization on his end would have helped. However, Judge McCormick's ruling forcing Mosk to return his $85B bonus was clear in logic and seemingly addressed all aspects of law.

    This being the US, Elmo has the opportunity to appeal McCormick's ruling to a higher court.  Bear in mind, McCormick is the very same judge who stepped in when Elmo tried to renege on his offer to purchase twitter, and she forcefully kicked his ass all over the place. I'm sure we'll get to see how he does in a rematch!

     

    I regret to inform you that Musk doesn't have much of a point. He filed a lawsuit basically alleging breach of contract. Here's a pdf of Musk's complaint where you can read it all for yourself. https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rYCUmwA4Xxpw/v0

    If you do read it I suggest you immediately search for a contract between Altman and Musk, or OpenAI and Musk, or indeed Musk and anyone pertaining to OpenAI.

    Can't find a contract? Oh, that's right...interestingly, there isn't one. The burden he'll have to meet to prove contractual breach is very high and for a person with his resources and experience to not have a contract at the inception of a business or charitable enterprise will be extremely difficult to overcome when he's suing over an alleged breach. He attempts to assert some sort of informal agreement but his claims border on ludicrous.

     

     

    Thanks, I had not dug into deep.  Guess I was more into the idea of non-profits and tax breaks and knee jerked a bit.

    The non-profit issue  apparently is why he went the contractual route:

    Quote

    Does Musk even have standing to sue? “One of the differences with nonprofits compared to other companies is that, generally, no one other than the state attorney general has standing to sue for the kind of stuff that he’s complaining about, like not following your mission,“ Peter Molk, a professor of law at the University of Florida, said of Musk’s lawsuit. That’s most likely why Musk’s lawyers are presenting the case as a breach of contract instead of attacking the company’s nonprofit status.


    But as you noted:

    Quote


    Was there actually a contract to breach? The lawsuit puts forth a sprawling agreement that is made up of conversations and documents, and that makes it harder to show whether there was a binding contract — and what it might have involved.

    And again, as you note, the whole thing probably isn't going to work out for Musk.

    Quote

    What was required of OpenAI? Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School who advised the A.I. company Anthropic on its corporate governance structure, said the contract Musk claims OpenAI and Altman breached contains “a hole you can drive a truck through.” OpenAI’s certificate of incorporation, which Musk’s lawyers claim is part of the deal, says the A.I. maker will seek to open its work to the public for its benefit “when applicable” — and OpenAI can easily argue that it is adhering to this term, which is vague.


    This all from an NYT summary.  And I know I make an assumption that I can trust that summary or even fully understand it all.  As a side note, your archive link didn't load for me. But truthfully I'm not going to read a 35 page document.  I have no sympathies or rooting interests for any billionaires.  But from the same NYT summary this was more what piqued my interest:
     

    Quote

     

    Will this case help catch the attention of the California attorney general? OpenAI’s new board was appointed after the previous board briefly removed Altman as the company’s chief executive. The short-lived mutiny raised questions over whether the company’s corporate structure allowed OpenAI’s for-profit arm to creep away from the parent company’s nonprofit obligation to focus on civic duties over shareholders. The progressive consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen has already petitioned California’s attorney general, seeking OpenAI’s dissolution for failing to “carry out its nonprofit purposes.”

    “That petition and Musk’s lawsuit have a more than trivial overlap,” said Joseph Grundfest, a corporate governance expert at Stanford Law School and a former S.E.C. commissioner.

     

  13. 5 minutes ago, NoName said:

     

    the demands are really and truly incredible, even based on the dumb lawsuits Elon has fired off lately.

    GHloNpKW4AAVH5p?format=jpg&name=large

     

     

    I don't know about the demands, but in this particular instance, Musk may have a salient point.  It would seem having startups begin as non-profits for tax purposes and then "re-launch" as a profit seeking venture seems wrong.  Not sure what can be done, but yeah.

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