#khan software

[katzensilber]

Man, this is why I always hated math class.

Khan Academy gave me this easy (or so I thought) problem to solve:

"A factory makes toys that are sold for $10 a piece. The factory has 40 workers, and they each produce 25 toys a day. The factory is open 5 days a week. What is the total value of toys the factory produces in a day?"

I said to myself, okay...

10 times 40 times 25 equals 10,000. That means the factory produces $10,000 worth of value per WORKING day.

10,000 times 5 equals 50,000. And then there are two days per week (the weekend) when no value is produced. So, per week, the total value produced is still only $50,000.

And finally, there are seven days in a full week, so $50,000 divided by 7 equals roughly $7,142.86. That's the total value of toys produced per day. Not "per work day", but "per day", as it specifically says in the problem.

But what does the teacher say as he guides us through it? 10 times 40 times 25 equals 10,000, so the answer is 10,000.

That's it. The end.

He even acknowledges: "So, you might be thinking, 'Hey wait, we didn't use all the information! We didn't use the "five days per week" information!' And yeah, as it turns out, that was information we didn't need."

'As it turns out'?! Are you kidding me right now?! I carefully read the question, precisely calculated exactly what it was asking for, taking all of the provided information into account... and now you're saying I'm supposed to have somehow magically known to ignore one of those pieces of information in order to make it easier for myself?

Just admit that your problem is worded badly, dude. UGH this kind of shit drives me crazy. Why can't people use words clearly >:(

[doom-nerdo-666]

Someone on r/Doom by the name of Sceptron pointed out this Indian Disney show using art from DE.

[elitehoe]

He blinked in that one guys

[karamrafeek]

Help Karam Al-Nabih and his family rebuild their life

Hello everyone, I am Karam Al Nabih from Gaza. All my dreams have been shattered now in Gaza. I am a software engineer in my last semester, but now my home, my dreams, and my university have been destroyed.

My life before and after the war

life before :

life after :

you, my friends, to support, share and donate Any donation will make a difference now to reach the halfway point: 5, 10, 20, 30, or 50 euros.

All my dreams have been destroyed 😞 I hope you share , support and donate

We are suffering from famine in Gaza. My family and I were displaced 4 times from Gaza to Khan Yunis, then Rafah, then Deir al-Balah.

Link donation:

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[northwestdatabase2]

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[biglisbonnews]

My Recent Experience building A Desktop Application for a Portugal-based company I am a seasoned Full Stack Web and desktop Application Developer, proudly extending my professional services both within and beyond Fiverr…Continue reading on Medium » https://medium.com/@muhammadtaifkhan/my-recent-experience-building-a-desktop-application-for-a-portugal-based-company-1544cf750270

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party — and America

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

On the one hand, the anti-monopoly movement has a future no matter who wins the 2024 election – that's true even if Kamala Harris wins but heeds the calls from billionaire donors to fire Lina Khan and her fellow trustbusters.

In part, that's because US antitrust laws have broad "private rights of action" that allow individuals and companies to sue one another for monopolistic conduct, even if top government officials are turning a blind eye. It's true that from the Reagan era to the Biden era, these private suits were few and far between, and the cases that were brought often died in a federal courtroom. But the past four years has seen a resurgence of antitrust rage that runs from left to right, and from individuals to the C-suites of big companies, driving a wave of private cases that are prevailing in the courts, upending the pro-monopoly precedents that billionaires procured by offering free "continuing education" antitrust training to 40% of the Federal judiciary:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

It's amazing to see the DoJ racking up huge wins against Google's monopolistic conduct, sure, but first blood went to Epic, who won a historic victory over Google in federal court six months before the DoJ's win, which led to the court ordering Google to open up its app store:

https://www.theverge.com/policy/2024/10/7/24243316/epic-google-permanent-injunction-ruling-third-party-stores

Google's 30% App Tax is a giant drag on all kinds of sectors, as is its veto over which software Android users get to see, so Epic's win is going to dramatically alter the situation for all kinds of activities, from beleaguered indie game devs:

https://antiidlereborn.com/news/

To the entire news sector:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Private antitrust cases have attracted some very surprising plaintiffs, like Michael Jordan, whose long policy of apoliticism crumbled once he bought a NASCAR team and lived through the monopoly abuses of sports leagues as an owner, not a player:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist

A much weirder and more unlikely antitrust plaintiff than Michael Jordan is Google, the perennial antitrust defendant. Google has brought a complaint against Microsoft in the EU, based on Microsoft's extremely ugly monopolistic cloud business:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-files-complaint-eu-over-microsoft-cloud-practices-2024-09-25/

Google's choice of venue here highlights another reason to think that the antitrust surge will continue irrespective of US politics: antitrust is global. Antitrust fervor has seized governments from the UK to the EU to South Korea to Japan. All of those countries have extremely similar antitrust laws, because they all had their statute books overhauled by US technocrats as part of the Marshall Plan, so they have the same statutory tools as the American trustbusters who dismantled Standard Oil and AT&T, and who are making ready to shatter Google into several competing businesses:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/8/24265832/google-search-antitrust-remedies-framework-android-chrome-play

Antitrust fever has spread to Canada, Australia, and even China, where the Cyberspace Directive bans Chinese tech giants from breaking interoperability to freeze out Chinese startups. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the cost of 40 years of pro-monopoly can't be ignored. Monopolies make the whole world more brittle, even as the cost of that brittleness mounts. It's hard to pretend monopolies are fine when a single hurricane can wipe out the entire country's supply of IV fluid – again:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-11-cant-believe-im-writing-about-iv-fluid-again/

What's more, the conduct of global monopolists is the same in every country where they have taken hold, which means that trustbusters in the EU can use the UK Digital Markets Unit's report on the mobile app market as a roadmap for their enforcement actions against Apple:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

And then the South Korean and Japanese trustbusters can translate the court documents from the EU's enforcement action and use them to score victories over Apple in their own courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

So on the one hand, the trustbusting wave will continue erode the foundations of global monopolies, no matter what happens after this election. But on the other hand, if Harris wins and then fires Biden's top trustbusters to appease her billionaire donors, things are going to get ugly.

A new, excellent long-form Bloomberg article by Josh Eidelson and Max Chafkin gives a sense of the battle raging just below the surface of the Democratic Power, built around a superb interview with Khan herself:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-09/lina-khan-on-a-second-ftc-term-ai-price-gouging-data-privacy

The article begins with a litany of tech billionaires who've gone an all-out, public assault on Khan's leadership – billionaires who stand to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars from her agency's principled, vital antitrust work, but who cloak their objection to Khan in rhetoric about defending the American economy. In public, some of these billionaires are icily polite, but many of them degenerate into frothing, toddler-grade name-calling, like IAB's Barry Diller, who called her a "dope" and Musk lickspittle Jason Calacanis, who called her an all-caps COMMUNIST and a LUNATIC.

The overall vibe from these wreckers? "How dare the FTC do things?!"

And you know, they have a point. For decades, the FTC was – in the quoted words of Tim Wu – "a very hardworking agency that did nothing." This was the period when the FTC targeted low-level scammers while turning a blind eye to the monsters that were devouring the US economy. In part, that was because the FTC had been starved of budget, trapping them in a cycle of racking up easy, largely pointless "wins" against penny-ante grifters to justify their existence, but never to the extent that Congress would apportion them the funds to tackle the really serious cases (if this sounds familiar, it's also the what happened during the long period when the IRS chased middle class taxpayers over minor filing errors, while ignoring the billionaires and giant corporations that engaged in 7- and 8-figure tax scams).

But the FTC wasn't merely underfunded: it was timid. The FTC has extremely broad enforcement and rulemaking powers, which most sat dormant during the neoliberal era:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The Biden administration didn't merely increase the FTC's funding: in choosing Khan to helm the organization, they brought onboard a skilled technician, who was both well-versed in the extensive but unused powers of the agency and determined to use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But Khan's didn't just rely on technical chops and resources to begin the de-olicharchification of the US economy: she built a three-legged stool, whose third leg is narrative. Khan's signature is her in-person and remote "listening tours," where workers who've been harmed by corporate power get to tell their stories. Bloomberg recounts the story of Deborah Brantley, who was sexually harassed and threatened by her bosses at Kavasutra North Palm Beach. Brantley's bosses touched her inappropriately and "joked" about drugging her and raping her so she "won’t be such a bitch and then maybe people would like you more."

When Brantley finally quit and took a job bartending at a different business, Kavasutra sued her over her noncompete clause, alleging an "irreparable injury" sustained by having one of their former employees working at another business, seeking damages and fees.

The vast majority of the 30 million American workers who labor under noncompetes are like Brantley, low-waged service workers, especially at fast-food restaurants (so Wendy's franchisees can stop minimum wage cashiers from earning $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at a nearby McDonald's). The donor-class indenturers who defend noncompetes claim that noncompetes are necessary to protect "innovative" businesses from losing their "IP." But of course, the one state where no workers are subject to noncompetes is California, which bans them outright – the state that is also home to Silicon Valley, an IP-heave industry that the same billionaires laud for its innovations.

After that listening tour, Khan's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Only to have a federal judge in Texas throw out their ban, a move that will see $300b/year transfered from workers to shareholders, and block the formation of 8,500 new US businesses every year:

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-tosses-ftc-noncompetes-ban

Notwithstanding court victories like Epic v Google and DoJ v Google, America's oligarchs have the courts on their side, thanks to decades of court-packing planned by the Federalist Society and executed by Senate Republicans and Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump. Khan understands this; she told Bloomberg that she's a "close student" of the tactics Reagan used to transform American society, admiring his effectiveness while hating his results. Like other transformative presidents, good and bad, Reagan had to fight the judiciary and entrenched institutions (as did FDR and Lincoln). Erasing Reagan's legacy is a long-term project, a battle of inches that will involve mustering broad political support for the cause of a freer, more equal America.

Neither Biden nor Khan are responsible for the groundswell of US – and global – movement to euthanize our rentier overlords. This is a moment whose time has come; a fact demonstrated by the tens of thousands of working Americans who filled the FTC's noncompete docket with outraged comments. People understand that corporate looters – not "the economy" or "the forces of history" – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.

Like the billionaires publicly demanding that Harris fire Khan, private equity bosses can't stop making tone-deaf, guillotine-conjuring pronouncements about their own virtue and the righteousness of their businesses. They don't just want to destroy the world - they want to be praised for it:/p>

"Private equity’s been a great thing for America" -Stephen Pagliuca, co-chairman of Bain Capital;

"We are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able, most vulnerable members of that society. Shouldn’t we judge a society by how they treat the most successful? Do we vilify, tax, expropriate and condemn those who have succeeded, or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being?" -Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo

"Achieve life-changing money and power," -Sachin Khajuria, former partner at Apollo

Meanwhile, the "buy, strip and flip" model continues to chew its way through America. When PE buys up all the treatment centers for kids with behavioral problems, they hack away at staffing and oversight, turning them into nightmares where kids are routinely abused, raped and murdered:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/they-told-me-it-was-going-be-good-place-allega-tions-n987176

When PE buys up nursing homes, the same thing happens, with elderly residents left to sit in their own excrement and then die:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/24/nursing-homes-private-equity-fraud-00132001

Writing in The Guardian, Alex Blasdel lays out the case for private equity as a kind of virus that infects economies, parasitically draining them of not just the capacity to provide goods and services, but also of the ability to govern themselves, as politicians and regulators are captured by the unfathomable sums that PE flushes into the political process:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-private-equity-out-of-control

Now, the average worker who's just lost their job may not understand "divi recaps" or "2-and-20" or "carried interest tax loopholes," but they do understand that something is deeply rotten in the world today.

What happens to that understanding is a matter of politics. The Republicans – firmly affiliated with, and beloved of, the wreckers – have chosen an easy path to capitalizing on the rising rage. All they need to do is convince the public that the system is irredeemably corrupt and that the government can't possibly fix anything (hence Reagan's asinine "joke": "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help'").

This is a very canny strategy. If you are the party of "governments are intrinsically corrupt and incompetent," then governing corruptly and incompetently proves your point. The GOP strategy is to create a nation of enraged nihilists who don't even imagine that the government could do something to hold their bosses to account – not for labor abuses, not for pollution, not for wage theft or bribery.

The fact that successive neoliberal governments – including Democratic administrations – acted time and again to bear out this hypothesis makes it easy for this kind of nihilism to take hold.

Far-right conspiracies about pharma bosses colluding with corrupt FDA officials to poison us with vaccines for profit owe their success to the lived experience of millions of Americans who lost loved ones to a conspiracy between pharma bosses and corrupt officials to poison us with opioids.

Unhinged beliefs that "they" caused the hurricanes tearing through Florida and Georgia and that Kamala Harris is capping compensation to people who lost their homes are only credible because of murderous Republican fumble during Katrina; and the larcenous collusion of Democrats to help banks steal Americans' homes during the foreclosure crisis, when Obama took Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runway" with the mortgages of everyday Americans who'd been cheated by their banks:

https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/

If Harris gives in to billionaire donors and fires Khan and her fellow trustbusters, paving the way for more looting and scamming, the result will be more nihilism, which is to say, more electoral victories for the GOP. The "government can't do anything" party already exists. There are no votes to be gained by billing yourself as the "we also think governments can't do anything" party.

In other words, a world where Khan doesn't run the FTC is a world where antitrust continues to gain ground, but without taking Democrats with it. It's a world where nihilism wins.

There's factions of the Democratic Party who understand this. AOC warned party leaders that, "Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl":

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1844034727935988155

And Bernie Sanders called her "the best FTC Chair in modern history":

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1843733298960576652

In other words: Lina Khan as a posse.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/11/democracys-antitrust-paradox/#there-will-be-an-out-and-out-brawl

[dlxxv-vetted-donations]

The Haboub Family's campaign is nearly fully complete.

This post is NOT being updated and I'm currently not focusing on this campaign as multiple famous people are.

Let's evacuate the Haboub family's most vulnerable members in September. Done

My other promotion lists

The weekly goal by Sep 8

Updated: Oct 1

Verification: link

Member: @mohammedhaboubsblog (Mohammed Haboub)

Payment methods: Google Pay, credit/debit

Donation drive: Crocheted bag raffle

Other: Help promote this family on Instagram.

Summary: The family want to raise $10,000 USD to evacuate 2 members with gunshot wounds and continue their education.

Current progress (Please donate if you can and share!):

SEK 133,838 252,104 / 300,000

Note: $10 USD = 105 SEK

Details about this campaign (outdated):

Update Sep 5: Farah's condition is declining and she needs to evacuate within the week. Awaiting additional details.

The Haboub family consists of 4 people - the twins Mohammed and Farah, and their parents.

Mohammed was shot in the leg and Farah had to undergo surgery for her injury in the Khan Younis Al-Tabieen school massacre.

The donation funds mostly went towards outrageously expensive survival costs, such as Farah's $2,400 USD surgery and the $3,000 rent - both of which we just barely managed to pay for last month.

It was crucial to keep the family housed as the twins have injuries that were more likely to get infected if they were out on the streets.

Now there's a new plan - the twins plan to get evacuated in September to pursue their studies. Both are studying software engineering and have excellent grades.

This is $10,000 USD for 2 adults ($5,000 each), which comes to 102,852 SEK. The campaign goal is now 234,000 SEK, or $22,751 USD.

There's still the $3,000 rent for next month, but it's less of a priority if the twins are evacuated as they were the ones most at risk if the family became homeless.

[facts-i-just-made-up]

CONTROVERSY: Did From Software Use CGI in Shadow of the Erdtree?

FIJMU News 5-23-24 by Scrute Schroedinger

With the new trailer for Elden Ring's upcoming DLC, sharp eyed viewers think they may have caught From Software in the act of using computer generated imagery.

According to Computer Graphics expert Khan Putretsper, "I've seen quite a few pixels in my day and I'm certain the trailer contains at least three. This may not have been shot on film, it may not even have any live action footage in it whatsoever."

With recent controversies over Disney using AI in their films, novelists using ChatGPT writing in their stories, and even certain celebrities such as Hatsune Miku using autotune and pitch-shifting technology to change their voices, From Software is the latest to face accusations right as their new work is released.

Computer Generated Imagery or "CGI" was first used in the film "Tron," which lost its special effects nomination for such a cheat. Still, CGI has been used on films such as James Cameron's "Avatar," M. Night Shyamalan's film "The Last Airbender," and Netflix's series "Avatar: The Last Airbender." Now From Software will have to face the scrutiny of its audiences. According to gamer and watchdog group founder Luigi Samus Zeldasen, "I'd hate to see a game like Elden Ring stoop use a computer for its imagery, but I've seen the new trailer myself, and I don't think that tower of ten thousand skinned bodies is real."

Troubling words indeed.

[mariacallous]

Today, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against farming equipment manufacturer Deere & Company—makers of the iconic green John Deere tractors, harvesters, and mowers—citing its longtime reluctance to keep its customers from fixing their own machines.

“Farmers rely on their agricultural equipment to earn a living and feed their families,” FTC chair Lina Khan wrote in a statement alongside the full complaint. “Unfair repair restrictions can mean farmers face unnecessary delays during tight planting and harvest windows.”

The FTC’s main complaint here centers around a software problem. Deere places limitations on its operational software, meaning certain features and calibrations on its tractors can only be unlocked by mechanics who have the right digital key. Deere only licenses those keys to its authorized dealers, meaning farmers often can’t take their tractors to more convenient third-party mechanics or just fix a problem themselves. The suit would require John Deere to stop the practice of limiting what repair features its customers can use and make them available to those outside official dealerships.

Kyle Wiens is the CEO of the repair advocacy retailer iFixit and an occasional WIRED contributor who first wrote about John Deere’s repair-averse tactics in 2015. In an interview today, he noted how frustrated farmers get when they try to fix something that has gone wrong, only to run into Deere's policy.

“When you have a thing that doesn’t work, if you’re 10 minutes from the store, it’s not a big deal,” Wiens says. “If the store is three hours away, which it is for farmers in most of the country, it’s a huge problem.”

The other difficulty is that US copyright protections prevent anyone but John Deere from making software that counteracts the restrictions the company has put on its platform. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it so people can’t legally counteract technological measures that fall under its protections. John Deere’s equipment falls under that copyright policy.

“Not only are they being anti-competitive, it's literally illegal to compete with them,” Wiens says.

Deere in the Headlights

Wiens says that even though there has been a decade of pushback against John Deere from farmers and repairability advocates, the customers using the company’s machines have not seen much benefit from all that discourse.

“Things really have not gotten better for farmers,” Wiens says. “Even with all of the noise around a right to repair over the years, nothing has materially changed for farmers on the ground yet.”

This suit against Deere, he thinks, will be different.

“This has to be the thing that does it,” Wiens says. “The FTC is not going to settle until John Deere makes the software available. This is a step in the right direction.”

Deere’s reluctance to make its products more accessible has angered many of its customers, and even garnered generally bipartisan congressional support for reparability in the agricultural space. The FTC alleges John Deere also violated legislation passed by the Colorado state government in 2023 that requires farm equipment sold in the state to make operational software accessible to users.

“Deere’s unlawful business practices have inflated farmers’ repair costs and degraded farmers’ ability to obtain timely repairs,” the suit reads.

Deere & Company did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Instead, the company forwarded its statement about the FTC's lawsuit. The statement reads, in part: “Deere remains fully committed to ensuring that customers have the highest quality equipment, reliable customer service and that they, along with independent repair technicians, have access to tools and resources that can help diagnose, maintain and repair our customers’ machines. Deere’s commitment to these ideals will not waiver even as it fights against the FTC’s meritless claims.”

Elsewhere in the statement, Deere accused the FTC of "brazen partisanship" filed on the "eve of a change in administration" from chair Lina Khan to FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson. The company also pointed to an announcement, made yesterday, about an expansion to its repairability program that lets independent technicians reprogram the electronic controllers on Deere equipment.

Nathan Proctor, senior director for the Campaign for the Right to Repair at the advocacy group US PIRG, wrote a statement lauding the FTC’s decision. He thinks this case, no matter how it turns out, will be a positive step for the right to repair movement more broadly.

“I think this discovery process will paint a picture that will make it very clear that their equipment is programmed to monopolize certain repair functions,” Proctor tells WIRED. “And I expect that Deere will either fix the problem or pay the price. I don’t know how long that is going to take. But this is such an important milestone, because once the genie’s out of the bottle, there’s no getting it back in.”

[roseofhybrids]

One of the bigger parts of this idea I'm not sure about is who exactly is still alive 1500 years later

like Uzi, N, and V of course, and J is also a disassembly drone so her too. Nori also has the solver, so would make sense for her to still be around if the disassembly drones are

but then there's Khan, Lizzy, and Thad

so far, I think there's two ways to go about it:

option 1, being normal worker drones, they all grow old and eventually pass on, and the immortals just have to live with that

option 2, Uzi puts them through a similar procedure to what CYN did with the alphabet trio, but with less trauma and mutations. Basically, she infects them with the less version of solver that the disassembly drones were given, but doesn't give them the new limbs (unless they ask for a tail or something) option 2B, Uzi adds them to the solver hivemind after they die and can make holograms of them to chat now and then. They are still themselves, they just don't have bodies and their minds live in the solver cloud thing (this option leaves room for Doll to come back, since she got slurped by the solver and all)

on one hand, the first option gives some gravity/consequences to them living this long. They still have each other, but inevitably they have to watch loved ones leave them, and they have to just sorta move on after

but on the other hand, this is already a crack idea, so might as well have those guys still around. Happy ending, everyone lives forever. It could also be a situation where, the drone has to die first and come back as a zombie drone before the solver can be added to them. Meaning only some drones can be made immortal, and that it's really up to chance whether their software decides to spontaneously revive them (which would also fix the logistical problem of them making all their descendants and loved ones immortal, because if no one ever dies but are still having kids eventually you're gonna run out of room)

I lean slightly towards the first option because, as I said, consequences of immortality

but also I think 1500+ year old Thad and Lizzy would be really funny

[karamrafeek]

Help Karam Al-Nabih and his family rebuild their life

Hello everyone, I am Karam Al Nabih from Gaza. All my dreams have been shattered now in Gaza. I am a software engineer in my last semester, but now my home, my dreams, and my university have been destroyed.

Life before:

Life After :

All my dreams have been destroyed 😞 I hope you share , support and donate

We are suffering from famine in Gaza. My family and I were displaced 4 times from Gaza to Khan Yunis, then Rafah, then Deir al-Balah.

Our campaign is vatted by:

@nabulsi :Clickhere

@since-times-long-forgotten :Clickhere

@rainbowywitch: Clickhere

@gazagfmboost: Clickhere

Also verfited By watermelon:

Look line 75:

my link go fund me :

currently raised €9,517 / €20,000 !

if donating on gofundme is not supported in your country you can donate via paypal link :

@el-shab-hussein @90-ghost @blackpearlblast @newsfrom-theworld @tsaricides @sar-soor @mee-op @soon-palestine @witchyw @fairuzfan @sayruq @palipunk

@ibtisam @riding-the-wavez @vakarians-babe @7amaspayrollmanager @fairuzfan @fallahifag @sayruq @humanvoreture @kaapstadgirly @sar-soor @dimonds456-art @plomegranate @commissions4aid-international @nabulsi @stil-lindigo @soon-palestine @communitythings @palestinegenocide @vakarians-babe @ghost-and-a-half @7amaspayrollmanager @kaapstadgirly @annoyingloudmicrowavecultist @feluka @marnota @toughknit @flower-tea-fairies @the-stray-liger @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @vivisection-gf @communistchameleon @troythecatfish @the-bastard-king @4ft10tvlandfangirl

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 18, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 19, 2025

Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.

The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.

“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”

The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.

FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.

Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”

Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”

It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “​​[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”

“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.

Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”

Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “It is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”

Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.

Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.

Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”

Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.

Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.

Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.

There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.

The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.

Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.

Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.

But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[littlegermanboy]

hi everyone, karam (@karamrafeek) asked me to share his story with you all. he is a 23 year old software engineering student at al-azhar university. before october 7th, he was eager to finish his degree, and lived in north gaza with his family

now, both his university and his home have been reduced to rubble. he was displaced with his family 4 times, from gaza city, to khan younis, rafah, and deir al-balah. they are all subject to the harsh conditions of a tent shelter, famine, and endless danger of bombings. in addition, his mother is in desperate need of medical care for illnesses that are made worse by displacement and exposure to the elements.

if you are able, please donate to karam to help him and his mother escape gaza for a new life, where his mother can get the medical attention she needs and he can finish his degree as a software engineer. as of july 9th, €9,270 / €20,000 has been raised. his gofundme outlines where all of the money will go - €10,000 will go to evacuating himself and his mother, €3,000 will go to his mother's treatment, €3,000 will go to his studies, and €4,000 will go toward cost of living expenses in egypt. additionally, his campaign is verified here by nabulsi. if you're unable to donate, please share.

[laraali8]

Please help me and my family from this damn war and help me spread my campaign and donate for us🥺🍉

●Hello everyone, I am Lara, 20 years old, studying software engineering👩‍💻. I was supposed to be in my third year and I was about to become an engineer until the damned destruction came and destroyed our lives, our future and our memories...

I want to share with you my story and my family's in this war🥺🍉💔

●In October, my family and I were displaced after the occupation spread leaflets and asked us to evacuate to the south. My family and I were displaced to Nusairat in a school and lived there for 3 months (where we lived 50 people in one row, imagine the number of people!! There was no privacy, no comfort, no sleep due to the heavy shelling. We also suffered from a flour crisis and a lot of suffering...)

●Then the school became unsafe. The occupation threw leaflets to evacuate the school and bombed and shelled us. Then we were displaced to Khan Yunis and spent days sleeping in the street until they donated a tent for us

(you know what it means for 8 people to live, my mother, father and sisters in a small tent... and here begins another suffering for my family, where there is no privacy, no cleanliness, no None of the necessities of life were present)

●We stayed in Khan Yunis for two months until the occupation used the tents of the displaced and our tent was hit by shrapnel, and my sisters and I sustained serious injuries. Then another suffering begins with displacement to another place. We were displaced to Deir al-Balah in a nylon tent on the beach that did not protect us from the cold of winter, the harsh air, the rain, the insects, or anything else.

《 At that time, our neighbor heard the news that the occupation had completely destroyed our neighborhood. Our house was destroyed, and with it our dreams, our children, and our future were destroyedAnd now we are homeless》

● Now we are suffering from high prices of food, flour, and detergents. We live on the tekke. We have no source of income (because my father's profession before the war was daily, and now he has lost his job and cannot work because he has become ill).

☆ Now I find myself in a position where I must humbly ask for your support for me and my family, to provide them with food and clothes because our clothes are worn out, and to obtain the simplest necessities of life that the occupation has prevented us from obtaining

☆ Every donation, no matter how small, will make a big difference in helping us rebuild our lives and provide necessities for my family. We are in a fragile situation, and your support during these extremely difficult times will give us hope in the midst of despair. Your generosity will not only help us get food and the necessities of life again, but will also restore our faith in the kindness of humanity.🥺🙏

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #241 )✅️

Please donate and share my campaign 😭👇