The Death of the Mind

 
Thanks in large part to pandemic social spending, employment recovered from the 2020 recession in record time (Chart: Apricitas Economics, 4/8/23).
A ban on evictions. Required paid leave. Continuous Medicaid coverage. Free school meals. Emergency SNAP allotments. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. Child tax credit expansion. Thousands in stimulus checks.
These measures were part of a suite of policies the US government passed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic fallout it precipitated. They were meant to blunt the damage, to protect the population from a much darker alternative.
And they were remarkably successful. The government boosted incomes of the worst-off in a way that would have appeared totally alien in 2001 or 2008….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/nyt-blames-american-public-for-collapse-of-pandemic-safety-net/

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.
But that was just the start.
After its tactical retreat, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
This new company has been a blistering mess as well. Executives there have been so cheap they’ve refused to pay residuals to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/12/congress-urges-doj-to-review-the-time-warner-discovery-merger-mess-amidst-chaos-and-ongoing-layoffs/

California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) nominally to protect children’s privacy, but at the same time, the AADC requires businesses to do an age “assurance” of all their users, children and adults alike. (Age “assurance” requires the business to distinguish children from adults, but the methodology to implement has many of the same characteristics as age verification–it just needs to be less precise for anyone who isn’t around the age of majority. I’ll treat the two as equivalent).
Doing age assurance/age verification raises substantial privacy risks. There are several ways of doing it, but the two primary options for quick results are (1) requiring consumers to submit government-issued documents, or (2) requiring consumers to submit…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/12/recent-case-highlights-how-age-verification-laws-may-directly-conflict-with-biometric-privacy-laws/