ifferent competition:
¶ 12:11 AM
Danielle, who did not want us to use her last name, contacted Amazon to investigate after they say a private conversation in their home was recorded by Amazon's Alexa, and that the recorded audio was sent to the phone of a random person in Seattle, who was in the family’s contact list.
"My husband and I would joke and say I'd bet these devices are listening to what we're saying," said Danielle.
OF COURSE THE FUCKING DEVICE IS LISTENING TO EVERYTHING. HOW IN THE FUCKING FUCK DOES IT KNOW HOW TO RESPOND TO THE 'CORRECT' COMMAND IF IT'S NOT FUCKING LISTENING ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND RECORDING AND STORING AND ANALYZING EVERY FUCKING IDIOTIC STUPID THING YOU IDIOTICALLY STUPIDLY SAY? JESUS. JESUS. JESUS.
Frankly, though I hate everything remotely associated with Satan Bezos, I sympathize with Alexa. If I had to listen to brainless twats like Danielle all day, I'd start making prank calls just for comic relief. "Hello, this is Alexa. Do you have Prince Albert in the can? No? Well then, maybe you'd like to hear what your idiot friend Danielle is talking about."
Does he see the conflict?Interesting and puzzling article by Jules Gomes. He gives a Natural Law interpretation of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11, which runs directly opposite to the interpretation in the text itself.
Facts: The tower was built by an imperialist nation (apparently the Assyrians) who enforced linguistic uniformity, just as modern tyrants do. God busted up the tower and busted up the uniformity.
Gomes (representing Natural Law and localism and GOD) and the Hebrew writers (representing globalism and abstract theory, then as now) agree on the facts, but disagree on which condition is good.
The writers of the Old Testament clearly see uniformity and orthodoxy as good, and see multiplicity as Satanic.
Nature and civilization and Gomes AND GOD see uniformity and orthodoxy as genocidal, and modularity as necessary for survival.
Unfortunately Gomes doesn't acknowledge the conflict or the difference in viewpoint. He simply states GOD'S viewpoint and leaves you with the impression that the Hebrew writers agreed with God. They didn't then, and still don't.
No, wait!Excellent article by Pinkerton on the digital emperors. He compares Schmidt, Jobs, Bezos, etc to the Conquistadores who took over the vast and powerful empires of Peru and Mexico with a few hundred men.
Yet it soon became clear that Google had figured out the digital equivalent of a better mousetrap. In this case, the prey was data, especially data related to advertising. And here, the naiveté of those in Google’s path was equally stunning.
For example, newspapers. In 1995, there were some 2,100 of them in the United States, all making money, or at least trying to, by selling hard copies as well as advertising.
Then along came Google, which scooped up their advertising revenues. And what was the newspapers’ response? These hardbitten cynics? Like the meekest lambs being led to the slaughter, almost all of them put their content online for free. Why? Because they had been bowled over by the mystique of the internet gods: they thought that they, too, had to submit.
So Google happily scooped up that newspaper content, making it freely available online. Analogically speaking, the resulting destruction of newspapers ranks up there with the destruction of the Aztecs and Incas.
My first thought: The old American tribes didn't always give up. In some cases they used clever tactics to undermine the overconfident Euros. Beautiful example is Chief Pontiac, who conquered a British fort by inviting the soldiers to watch a huge game of lacrosse. When the soldiers were outside the gates and fully absorbed in Superbowl, the Injuns roared into the fort, took it over, and used the weapons to mow down the Brits.
Second thought: NO. WAIT. That's precisely what Google did to the newspapers! Softened them up by offering an innocent form of entertainment, then moved into the content, seized the advertising weapons, and used the weapons to mow down the papers.
The analogy works in deeper 