mrsbeef
mrsbeef
Ohgod a blog
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Nothing to see here. Move along now. | ED BLOGS DO NOT INTERACT WITH MY POSTS
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mrsbeef · 11 hours ago
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When my mother forgets a word, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher. I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: “You know the time for los jibbities is coming up. You must be so excited!” Oh, is it time for los jibbities already? I must have missed it on my calendar. Are we celebrating something? “Of course! We should all be celebrating, shouldn’t we?” OK, so los jibbities is a happy thing. It’s not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess. “Los heebie-jeebies? Now you’re making things up...and this is my show.” You’re right. The time for los jibbities is coming up. Is this a season? “Yes, the season for love. The season for pride.” OK, los jibbities. “Yeah, sound it out.” Los…jibbities. LGBTs! “Sí, mira cuz you’re gay!” “You couldn’t just say pride season? You couldn’t just… *laughs*
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mrsbeef · 16 hours ago
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“My dad teaching math in Southern California (late 70s/early 80s)”
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mrsbeef · 1 month ago
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I need non-Canadians to know that everything in this thread is true
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mrsbeef · 2 months ago
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Queer and trans communities are under attack!
For the LOVE OF DRAG, we need you to vote.
Whether you’re a fan of drag, a member of the queer community, an ally or a parent, you know what’s at stake in this election.
Hatred towards our community is rising, with trans people and drag performers as primary targets.
Drag culture is under attack. The queer community is under attack. Power-hungry politicians are using misinformation and fear to roll back rights and equality. If they succeed, Canada will be less free, less equal and less safe for our community. 
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mrsbeef · 2 months ago
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Of course. Why wouldn't this happen in 2025
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mrsbeef · 2 months ago
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trying to explain to tumblr that the Middle Class in not their enemy
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mrsbeef · 2 months ago
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THIS IS HOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO FUCKING DO IT AMERICA
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Get fucked Marine Le Pen.
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mrsbeef · 3 months ago
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mrsbeef · 3 months ago
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Israel returned to war again. The bombing is everywhere. We are being exterminated here and the whole world is silent.
In a moment, 400 people were killed, most of them children and women.
There is no food, no drink, and no way out of this hell.
We are dying before your eyes please, don’t leave us alone! Save us, do something protest, donate, participate.
I don’t want to die! Please support me with any amount that will promise me to buy food, drink, medicine and survive me and my family
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mrsbeef · 3 months ago
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There's probably context but I don't need it
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mrsbeef · 3 months ago
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Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading
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I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.
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Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/
It's easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which would confine this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because they have bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a material phenomenon, grounded in specific policy choices and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here – and where we should go next.
Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?
For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.
Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american
But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.
For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.
That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.
OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.
How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo after you bought it? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property. Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:
That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification
That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure
The ability to remotely, unilaterally alter how a device or service works is called "twiddling" and it is a key factor in enshittification. By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?
Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is unbelievably backwards. Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy
This privacy vacuum has been filled up with surveillance on an unimaginable scale. Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:
https://gizmodo.com/data-broker-brags-about-having-highly-detailed-personal-information-on-nearly-all-internet-users-2000575762
To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.
Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops
Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.
Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:
https://archive.is/TD90k
And sometimes, Amazon just sent these recordings to random people on the internet:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/20/amazon-alexa-user-receives-audio-recordings-stranger-through-human-error/
Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are also being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.
*Not one of mine
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#telescreen
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Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexa_%2840770465691%29.jpg
Sam Howzit (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWC_6_-_Darth_Vader_Costume_(7865106344).jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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mrsbeef · 3 months ago
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Here is your mission.
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mrsbeef · 3 months ago
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We are in the south... suffering from famine‼️, save us🙏
Hello, I'm Wasim from Gaza, specifically from Al-Mawasi in the south of the Strip...
We are suffering from famine, there is no food other than flour and its price is 300$... It is very expensive, we cannot afford it...
I struggle every day in crowded queues to get bread to feed my family.😞💔
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Help me and donate to me to buy flour for my family and satisfy their hunger.🙏
I'm nothing without you. You are my last hope.🫂😞😭
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Link campaign ⬇️
✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #290 )✅️
@heritageposts @gazavetters @palestin @palestine @gaza
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mrsbeef · 3 months ago
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Uk peeps!! Let’s get this going! 🏳️‍⚧️🇬🇧
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mrsbeef · 4 months ago
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My headcanon is that Rina Higashikata-Joestar takes her morning coffee sweet, black and thick as tar. She doesn't quite know why, but that's how her husband's always made it, and it boosts her spirits like nothing else.
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mrsbeef · 4 months ago
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Spin this wheel and tell me if you got something you need/want.
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mrsbeef · 5 months ago
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A ceasefire was reached on Sunday🙏🥹, me and my family and the children are without a house or anything from the elements of life, please donate and help us😭😭💔
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