Democratic values work really well. Things like public education, transparency laws, public discourse, and campaign finance reform all have been good for society. And it’s why the conservatives (and to some extent the Liberals) oppose them. Stronger democratic controls on social media would be a big step away from fascism.

This is a popular misconception on the right. Regulation with democratic controls is better than letting privately held propaganda machines drive the public into fascism.

While no platform can deliver The Truth, it is the role of journalists to deliver context and accurate data. And social media helps deliver both well researched content and pure drivel. We need regulation and democratic controls of regulation.

Fox News argued that it’s their constitutional right to spread malicious lies and half truths. And the courts sided with them. Even when those lies killed countless numbers of people. In canada Pollievre wants the same thing: media that is run by the “free market” (meaning all propaganda). I think politicians will have to choose between what donors want and what services the public good. And being politicians you know how they’ll vote.

In all fairness, a fringe economist told him that. Navarro still hasn’t been able to successfully explain to anyone why tariffs won’t raise prices. He gets as far as “they can’t raise tariffs on the largest market in the world” as if there weren’t high tariffs on the us before.

Food conglomerates had tried to sell a more efficient vision of the kitchen to working mothers:

Less food prep time meant more time for family and career. But it also meant more sales of processed food and the extinction of the skills required to prepare food.

The children of the seventies and eighties were among the first to experience this change toward preprepared foods.

Many smokers don’t know that nicotine salt (or nicsalt) is horrendously addictive compared to freebase nicotine. And nicsalt is the primary form of nicotine in tobacco and some vapes. Cigarette companies sneakily add more to the rolling paper to make cigarettes more addictive.

It is orders of magnitude more difficult quitting nicsalt. It’s why many people who successfully quit recommend starting with stronger freebase nicotine vapes or lower nicsalt and then trying to scale back from there eventually moving to freebase.

Nicsalt is so addictive you can be going into withdrawal while vaping freebase nicotine.

Edit: gums use Nicotine polacrilex which was engineered to increase bioavailability over freebase. Most gums and patches are hard to quit because manufacturers offer no guidance on tapering dosage although you figured this out on your own. You’re smart.

The permissions on their extension allows for them to read site data so they definitely could operate as a data broker. However their tos has no mention of any data sharing so you are likely correct that they just take a commission. Great site imo

If you have multiple extensions installed honey always secretly steals the revenue from competitors without asking for consent. Most other extensions will ask if you want to activate cashback. Honey just disables their competitors and steals that affiliate revenue. It should be classified as malware

Topcashback consistently beats honey and others out (almost all competitors beat honey btw). And they pay out and have customer support. Easily thr best way to sell your personal data to a shadowy data broker

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I think you’re right and that I’ve horribly misunderstood how this data is collected and used. According to their yearly report, mozilla’s advertising revenue is explicitly not drawn from user data and is only related to tiles and default search engine sponsorships. The fact that they are not selling this information is heartening and it inspires confidence that they have not flipped on the ad money spigot.

I appreciate your informed response but no system other than advertising-abstinence is fool proof.

Im saying this as a supporter. My browser of choice is firefox and I send them money regularly. And I understand their need to generate more revenue. But there has never been a company who has sold customer data discretely. My understanding is that every piece of data that’s sold can be de anonymized when combined with other data sets. And the data is horsetraded until it gets into some very marginal actors’ hands.

Mozilla’s need for money is largely driven by massive mismanagement. It should have been fully funded in perpetuity through establishing a foundation that operates off interest payments but they decided to try and build a headquarters in Mountainview. They also operate offices in some of the most expensive cities in the world. They have made expensive software aquisitions. These are not necessary and have only whetted mozilla’s thirst for other revenue sources. It’s guaranteed that they will look for more customer data to sell because that’s the path of least resistance.

I wish them luck but I also wish they’d not chase advertising money.

Even if Mozilla takes precautions to avoid de-anonymizing our data, any private data sold to data brokers becomes a part of the puzzle for learning our identities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification

Even knowing something a trivial as two movie ratings led to a 68% success rate in learning an identity.

Everything you wrote lined up with the article on wikipedia so if you got something wrong I didn’t see it.

I’m referring to the book “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” the title of which mocks the oft repeated defense of bubble investors:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13882/w13882.pdf

But their point is that every single asset bubble ended up popping, despite the protections instituted by banks and governments. They also point out that the bubbles have been getting bigger and bigger

I’m not sure what you mean, but no, I don’t think that and I didn’t write that but i can understand the confusion because it’s not well known how QE works. Some forms of QE prevent crashes. The Fed can achieve this by taking the bank’s failing debt instrument off the books, and swapping it for a t bill.

Sorry I appreciate your comment. So I read (erroneously?) that central bankers had done away with the reserve ratio in the fractional reserve banking article. And that just seems like a reckless thing to do given how prone to bubbles our economy is.

One of the main points in “this time is different” is that despite the math, we are experiencing greater and greater asset bubbles and at no point in world history were things actually different.

Thanks for the reply. I hope you don’t let my spelling or use of ex nihilo (this is the exact language used by the fed and economists, I didn’t just make it up) turn you off, because at a policy level they are pursuing policies that keep real estate prices high.

This seems like an already failed banking model which places lenders at the front of the pack and will lead to only larger asset bubbles. Japan’s Kiretsu system of banking led to banks taking out loans to cover up their own investment losses as they had put their money into an asset bubble which collapsed. Banks then committed wholesale fraud by disguising such losses on their books. The Japanese government then used quantitative easing. They create money ex nihilo, swap the money for a t bill, then they bought the toxic assets by giving t bills to the bank. The bank doesn’t sell the t bill, they merely collect interest on it.

The main effect is a system in which bubbles are never popped and consumers suffer a declining standard of living in order to keep asset prices high.