Big Tech Censorship

Facebook and Twitter and probably a bunch more are censoring people that I want to hear from, Trump in particular.  Chris Wallace had a Facebook censor on Fox this afternoon.  Said censor was very firm that Facebook had every right to post who they felt like posting and censor who ever they pleased.  Kinda like a newspaper, you get to publish on the op-ed page only if the editor thinks you are good for circulation and not too offensive.  

  The best fix for this problem is to use the old Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up the big sites.  They are clearly monopolies.  Once Facebook or Twitter is broken up into two or three piece, the pieces will have to compete with each other for advertisers and members.  One piece or the other piece will decide that giving guys like Trump access is good for business.  That’s the proper fix.  Unfortunately it won’t happen as long as Biden is president.  He and his like the solid leftwing spin that Facebook and Twitter are doing right now and will simply tell the anti-trust division at the Justice Department to lay off.  Keep things the way they are.  By now, Facebook and Twitter are so big and cover so much of the market that a new startup doesn’t have much chance of getting starting going up against them.  Trump might have the money to do a startup, he has talked about it, but that is a very long shot.

   The Facebook guy Wallace had on TV suggested that Congress might pass something like a fairness doctrine for Facebook and Twitter.  Same objection applies, Biden would veto it. 

   So until the voters vote in a solid Republican Congress and a Republican president, we are stuck with Facebook’s censorship. 

Mother's Day.

 On the top is a picture I took of Mother, Janet K. Starr, back in the winter of 56-57 at Cannon. She lived til 91. Her health kept up right to the very end when a stroke carried her off. She died back in 2010. She was a great Mom and I still miss her. She raised her three boys right, and she did a lot of raising of her six grandchildren. On bottom is the last good photo I have of her from 2009. 

Texas to East Coast pipeline shut down

 This just hit Fox TV news a few minutes ago.  It is being said that a cyber attack has caused the pipeline shutdown.  They are talking about horrible price spikes for gasoline.  As of this writing, no forecast of repair time.  Could be anything.

Some questions for the pipeline owner.  

1. Are you using Windows to control or monitor anything?

2.  Are you using the public internet or the public telephone system to control or monitor anything?  

A yes answer to either question means they are guilty of gross negligence and should be sued down to their socks.

Fox News sound is noisy

The TV was making a high pitched little chirp.  It got to the point I got up from my chair and walked around the house checking for leaky faucets dripping or a water leak somewhere.  Didn't find anything and careful listening made me decide the noise was indeed coming from the Fox sound track on TV.  Fox needs to move their studio to a quieter part of town to cut down on the emergency vehicle sirens and heavy crashing noises from the street and odd things like that chirp.  

Warren Buffet Breaks NASDAQ

 According to the Wall St Journal, the NASDAQ computer systems can only handle stock prices less than $429,496.7295 per share.  Warren Buffet's share price has climbed to $421,000, close to the limit.  With a little more good luck on Warren's part, NASDAQ will no longer be able to trade his stock.  The magic number of NASDAQ's limit is otherwise known as 2 raised to the 32nd power.  Which says the software guys chose to store stock prices as 4 byte integers back when they wrote NASDAQ's software.  Far as I am concerned a couple of hundred dollars a share is a perfectly reasonable share price.  All of my stocks are $50-100-200 a share.  So going with a 32 bit integer and a max share price of a little less than half a mil per share was, and still is, a perfectly reasonable design decision.  

The WSJ article goes on to say that NASDAQ is considering rewriting all their software to support Warren's fantastic share price.  That's Wall St weenies for you.  Me, I would tell Warren to do a stock split if he wants to continue trading on NASDAQ.

Biden on Taxes.

 

Watched Biden on TV the other day.  A lot of happy talk about taxes.  The Democrats want to pass some $4-5 TRILLION dollars of welfare spending and get away with calling it Corona virus relief.  Even the Democrats fear that just printing that much new money might crash the US currency.  Right now the US greenback is respected all over the world.  If you have greenbacks you can spend ‘em and buy stuff anywhere.  The US has never reneged on its debts.  The greenback is accepted worldwide because the Americans have plenty of stuff to sell, at reasonable prices.  But if we print too many new greenbacks, people might get the idea that since there are so many greenbacks floating around that each one is worth less.  Once that idea gets around people will stop accepting greenbacks and the US currency is crashed.  Nobody, not even Democrats, wants to risk that. So Biden was talking about this little tax hike here and that little tax hike there would be enough to raise $4-5 TRILLION.  Somehow I had trouble believing these stories.  I am thinking that raising $4-5 TRILLION of new tax revenue is going to crash the economy and raise my taxes a lot.  And I don’t make anything near the $400K tax hike floor that the Biden people keep talking about. 

Forbidding Office Political Talk caused half the employees to quit.

 Small startup Basecamp decided to curb political conversations at work.  It is not clear whether “conversations” were verbal, around the lunch table or postings on Basecamp social media.  Prior to the no political talk blowup,  Basecamp was trying to present a worker friendly workplace, shorter work weeks in the summer and paying everyone doing the same job the same money. 

   A couple of small companies, Redfin and Harmon Brothers LLC, came out supporting Black Lives Matter which has caused them some internal turbulence. 

   I don’t remember this sort of issue back when I was working.  I retired before Facebook or Twitter was invented.