No Justice, No Peace - Protests, Facebook, Tyson Foods, and Tesla
Protests
Across the country, thousands of brave students spent the last week engaging in peaceful protests against the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. In response, university administrators and police attacked and arrested them. Many have been threatened with expulsion, and even those who are merely suspended risk literal homelessness if they lose access to campus housing.
People more qualified than I have weighed in on the state’s violent response to nonviolent dissent, and you can read some of them if you wish. Instead, I’ll address the broader movement among politicians and the media to justify assaulting and arresting kids for the crime of having opinions.
Perhaps the most chilling development this week came when Congress passed the unbelievably cynical Antisemitism Awareness Act, seeking to classify criticism of Israel as ‘antisemitism’ and empower authorities to arrest and prosecute protesters under anti-discrimination laws. Federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination, of course, but our elected officials, in a resounding display of bipartisanship, decided that criticism of Israel’s government should be lumped in with the hate speech members of Congress regularly level at American and secular Jews with impunity.
Zionists and their media enablers have succeeded in framing campus protests as antisemitism, even though many of the protesting students are Jews. Any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, we’re told, and any act of resistance or defiance by students should be met with the maximum possible force because university administrators care more about what’s written about them in the newspapers they read than the safety of their students.
Not content with flooding the news landscape with their lies, Zionists are sending violent agitators to assault peaceful protesters. No shadowy billionaire is funding hundreds of protests across the country, but wealthy Zionists are openly donating to the mobs attacking them.
This authoritarian crackdown is catnip for conservatives and the far right, whose leader finds the violence ‘beautiful to watch’. Our most bloodthirsty politicians lick their lips at the sight of young men and women having their skulls cracked.
We’re expected to cheer the arrests of students protesting against a government doing nothing to disguise its genocidal intentions, and rejecting any attempts at peace. Those in power send riot cops despite the lack of riots, claiming punitive consequences for speech somehow protect it. It is a charade, a farce, a comedia dell’morte we’re told to accept at face value because everyone involved is either lying on purpose, or unwilling to give it a second’s critical thought.
Fortunately we have brave students, faculty, college journalists and others putting their bodies and their livelihoods on the line to stand up for what’s right. The irony is that the only people standing up against bigotry and oppression are the ones being arrested for it, by it.
Once upon a time, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook would have been ways to stay informed about protest movements around the world. Now, Twitter is a Nazi site, and Facebook has decided to stay out of politics:
The company has decreased the visibility of politics-focused posts and accounts on Facebook and Instagram as well as imposed new rules on political advertisers, kneecapping the targeting system long used by politicians to reach potential voters.
Waves of layoffs have eviscerated the team responsible for coordinating with politicians and campaigns, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private personnel matters.
That is not to say that Facebook won’t take money from campaigns, like it does from all manner of sleazy advertisers, but it will dramatically curtail who can see political ads, and where. How? No one really knows, because Facebook hides its moderation systems deep within layers of intellectual property defenses. The EU has opened formal proceedings against the company in the run-up to their next election, on evidence that troll farms run by Putin are spreading pro-Kremlin disinfo.
In a normal world, it would be an existential threat to the continued existence of Facebook that world governments are accusing it of being a platform full of unchecked propaganda and fraudulent sleaze. But, instead, what markets care about is whether Zuck can pivot the company quickly enough to AI. The billion dollars a month Facebook continues to lose on metaverse projects leave little room for (re-)hiring teams to manage risk or protect its users.
So if Facebook is curtailing political posts, what is it showing the billions of users a month who hit its ‘news’ feed? Unsurprisingly, the company’s focus on AI content has made everything much, much worse:
On one of those accounts, I specifically sought out AI-generated content and “liked” it and left comments on it. Within a few hours, the vast majority of all content being recommended to me was the same bizarre AI spam that has been repeatedly going viral both on Facebook and off of Facebook.
AI-run recommendation algorithms are serving AI-generated content to pages and groups populated by bot-run accounts, automatically liking each others’ posts. There are real people caught in the whirlpool, many of whom spend their time posting angry comments about whatever weird shit Facebook decides they need to see. Which, in turn, compels Facebook’s AI to surface more of it.
The author notes that Facebook is rapidly evolving away from an actual ‘social’ network, where people see posts from friends and relatives or find community groups to join for discussion. Facebook has become so obsessed with keeping accounts on its platform for longer that it’s caught and eaten its own tail - engagement bait baits its engagement algorithms into serving more of what appeals to the bots it thinks are Daily Active Users.
When the dwindling number of real humans aren’t being served AI child amputees drowning in puddles or Shrimp Jesus, they’re scrolling through scam ads, scam marketplace listings, and an unknown amount of propaganda, paid for by PACs or Russian intelligence.
Meta is still a trillion dollar company, because it makes unfathomable amounts of money from its ad business, and because governments either don’t care or won’t force it to make any reasonable attempt to clean up the toxic sewer its user experience has become.
Tyson Foods
One downside to extreme consolidation in the American poultry industry is that when one of the biggest producers decides to close six of its processing plants, the farmers who depend on them for the entirety of their business are forced to make major, expensive changes:
The switch to eggs, which carries high costs, reflects the tough choices former Tyson suppliers around the country must make following the company's 2023 decision to shut plants in an effort to return to profitability in its chicken business after misjudging consumer demand.
[…]
Former broiler growers must spend millions of dollars on barn and equipment upgrades to produce eggs, a notoriously volatile market, 18 poultry producers, government officials and industry experts told Reuters. Last year, egg prices tanked after reaching record highs due to the worst-ever outbreak of bird flu in poultry.
Swapping poultry production over to eggs also increases the risk of new outbreaks and strains of bird flu, one of which is working its way into our overproduced cattle supply as we speak.
Companies like Tyson operate with little constraint or oversight, so despite politicians on both sides loudly proclaiming their support for patriotic American farmers, there’s little they care to do to protect them when a poultry monopoly decides to reshuffle its balance sheet.
Nor do politicians or regulators care much for the damage companies like Tyson do to the people unfortunate enough to live near poultry processing plants:
Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.
[…]
Researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists estimate that from 2018 to 2022, Tyson Foods produced 87 billion gallons of wastewater at 41 plants.
Incredibly, none of this is illegal, because federal rules don’t govern some toxic chemicals like phosphorus, and most meat processing plants are exempt from water regulations. There are five thousand such plants around the country, each allowed to freely pollute the air and groundwater, destroying the environment and creating potential health risks to anyone in the vicinity.
Not only do these meat conglomerates hold farmers hostage, but they’ve held our entire regulatory and political apparatus hostage for decades, cashing in when consumer prices rise, and hanging farmers out to dry when spending slows, all the while dumping an unknown quantity of toxic sludge into our waterways so we can have cheap, plentiful meat, and a small number of ag barons can remain fabulously wealthy.
Tesla
The big news last quarter was that Tesla had badly missed revenue and production expectations, perhaps because sales in EVs slowed, or competitors released cars that had been updated within the last decade, or the average American EV buyer didn’t want to buy a product from an enthusiastic white nationalist.
In response, Musk fired ten percent of his staff, which is what you do to make investors happy, and it worked! Tesla’s shares rebounded a bit from their lows. Then, this week, Musk laid off a bunch more people because why not. Which people he laid off may indicate Musk’s plan, or lack thereof.
The cuts included most of the supercharging team, an interesting choice since other car companies had recently adapted to Tesla’s charging standards. Charging was also seen as a way for Tesla to gain market share outside its flagging car building business.
The company has also abandoned its ‘gigacasting’ manufacturing method which was supposed to allow it to produce cars more cheaply and efficiently, and which was supposed to undergird the new ‘cheaper’ EV model Musk teased on the earnings call the week before, but the markets do not seem to have done the math.
In fact they are still quite eager to believe whatever wild claims Musk concocts on earnings calls - he says Tesla is also an AI company that will build robots and robotaxis - but the reality looks increasingly stark. People aren’t buying its cars, and with Musk scything staff in key growth areas, the company may be running out of gimmicks to fool investors.
Short Cons
KTLA - “From January 2020 to May 2023, Chen and Hu mailed over 34 million packages with counterfeit postage and shipping labels, officials said. This scheme caused more than $150 million in losses to the USPS.”
The Hill - “The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a fine totaling $200 million to the nation’s four largest mobile carriers, alleging they illegally shared access to customers’ location data.”
CNBC - “The Justice Department unveiled criminal tax fraud charges this week against a prolific bitcoin investor named Roger Ver. He came to be known as “Bitcoin Jesus,” for getting in early on the digital currency and making a fortune.”
Texas Tribune - “A year ago, 40 men died in a detention center fire in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An examination by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica shows that it was the foreseeable result of landmark shifts in U.S. border policies.”
ProPublica - “The IRS has launched a campaign to examine whether wealthy taxpayers are violating the law when using their ownership of sports teams to save large amounts in taxes.”
HuffPost - “An emergency slide that fell off of a Delta passenger jet shortly after take-off last week reportedly turned up two days later outside the home of a lawyer whose firm is coincidently suing the Boeing plane manufacturer over safety issues.”
Gizmodo - “Ashley Madison promotes itself as a dating site that helps people cheat on their partners. But newly released consumer complaints filed with the FTC, obtained exclusively by Gizmodo, should probably give any potential cheaters pause.”
Know someone thinking of raising chickens? Send them HERE!