Hello. I took a bit of an extended hiatus. But stuff still happens. So what's up? Australia
took a hard look at children and said, no, uh, uh, social media. A bill recently passed
in Australia that says if you are under 16, no social media for you. Get off. Well, other way
around, if you are a social media company and you have users that are under 16, fine. Not fine. Bad.
You're going to be fine. You wonder, you get me. $30 million of fine. $30 million of you being
fined. It's not 30 million dollars. Man, words. How did I do this before? The bill targets large
social networks and basically just says if you are not doing enough to verify the age of your users,
you're going to be fine, which is great. When has requiring tech companies to collect more
user data ever been bad? Privacy and child rights advocates are not all about this, but the general
public is way behind it, like 80% approval. And like, I totally agree that young kids should not
be on social media. Like it's not good. Advertising the children is not okay and creating an attention
trap to then display as to children is double not okay. And that's what social media is. For the
same time, there's also a lot of established culture and connections online and safety nets.
I think of queer children who are in danger at home and their only safety net is people that they
connect with over the internet. And while they can still use the internet, obviously this just
makes it harder. Joe Biden did the meme. After years of being like, I'm not going to pardon my son.
I have honor. Biden pardoned his son literally like not even five months ago. Quote, I have
bide by the jury decision. I will do that. And I will not pardon him. I was in July.
So what happened? Hunter Biden has been under investigation by Republicans in Congress
for a long time because they wanted a boogeyman. Hunter Biden is a private citizen. He doesn't
hold government office. He's just Joe Biden's son. And unlike Trump's children, he is not
half involved with government. But he did do crimes. Hunter Biden did crimes and was found
to have done the crime. And so he should face punishment, but also also Republicans getting
a majority in Congress and then using all of their time basically to just go after Hunter Biden.
That's fucking dumb and a terrible use of government resources. Reminder,
they showed his nudes on the house floor. Like this, it's a circus. So Biden pardoning his son
here, it makes sense, right? Because he wants to prevent the next iteration of that getting
much, much worse. So if he pardons him now, then they can't go after him more. Does that make it
right? No, of course it doesn't make it right. But also he's a war criminal. So like, whether or
not he pardons his son is a little bit less of an issue. That said, maybe we shouldn't have some guy
in our government who can be like, actually, that's not a crime. Because I said so. Unless that guy's
going to be me, because you can trust me, I'm a philosopher king. And there's no fallacy there.
Reminder, get your flu vaccine and COVID booster. Because on top of RFK being nominated to run HHS,
which is horrifying, Trump has now appointed David Weldon, a 71 year old anti-vaxxer to run the CDC.
Quick interjection, I just want to point out that whenever I call an anti-vaxxer who's a well
understood anti-vaxxer, an anti-vaxxer, anti-vaxxers show up in my comments and say that they're not
anti-vaxxers. I just said that a lot. It's confusing. Because like, RFK is very obviously an anti-vaxxer.
And the amount of people who told me he wasn't or tried to tell me he wasn't, it was off the charts.
This is not a safe place for anti-vaxx sentiment, by the way. Don't, don't try to justify it. You're,
stop it. They don't cause autism. It's so, there's not a discussion. But Weldon is one of those
doctors from Florida who has been making a career for himself by being a hack online and pandering
to conspiracy theorists. And his appointment has a lot of conspiracy theorists happy who previously
said that you can cure autism using industrial bleach. They're very happy about this nomination.
Hell yeah. Look, these nominations are probably not all going through. Like, like, there's definitely
some egregious ones. This one is probably one of the ones that won't go through, but we can't
bank on that. What we can do is try to read the tea leaves and just be prepared. And in this case,
I don't think it is completely out of the question to think that the next administration may put a
temporary hold on distributing vaccines or just try to disrupt the supply chain in some way. So
go get your flu shot. Go get your COVID booster. Google is big mad because they got caught being
a monopoly. The DOJ wants Google to sell off Chrome. Google owns Chrome. If you didn't know
that, Google owns Chrome. And Chrome is the most popular web browser by a gargantuan margin. It's
more than two thirds of browser usage. On top of that, Google has a stranglehold on the search
market and billions upon billions of devices running Android that are then all using Google.
That's because Google is a monopoly. Where did I hear that? Oh yeah, from the court. So the DOJ
has been going after Google for being a monopoly and they're saying, hey, sell off Chrome. Just
flatly divest from Chrome and you can't reenter the browser market for five years. They're actually
pushing for something even wilder, I think, which is that Google would have to share their search
results and add data to their competitors at a marginal rate for a decade. The idea there being
they have established so much of an entrenched monopoly that they need to take active steps to
undo being a monopoly. This is your reminder that the game monopoly is supposed to be a joke on
how bad monopolies are. You don't want that. Is this going to happen? I don't know. It's not
quite there yet and they're almost definitely going to be pushing back as hard as they possibly can.
And as Google is looking a little bit more shaky, what with their weird AI rollouts that have not
gone super well and general destruction of the recent quality of their search, they still
are on top by a huge margin. I've got a feeling this is one of those things that's just going to
kind of disappear, especially as a new administration rolls in. But there may be a tiny chance that in
our lifetime, we would see a giant tech company actually take a bit of a hit. Maybe. Kind of.
If we're lucky.