The Best Big Media Merger Is No Merger At All
from the the-promise-of-the-internet-keeps-disappearing dept
The state of streaming is… bad. It’s very bad. The first step in wanting to watch anything is a web search: “Where can I stream X?” Then you have to scroll past an AI summary with no answers, and then scroll past the sponsored links. After that, you find out that the thing you want to watch was made by a studio that doesn’t exist anymore or doesn’t have a streaming service. So, even though you subscribe to more streaming services than you could actually name, you will have to buy a digital copy to watch. A copy that, despite paying for it specifically, you do not actually own and might vanish in a few years.
Then, after you paid to see something multiple times in multiple ways (theater ticket, VHS tape, DVD, etc.), the mega-corporations behind this nightmare will try to get Congress to pass laws to ensure you keep paying them. In the end, this is easier than making a product that works. Or, as someone put it on social media, these companies have forgotten “that their entire existence relies on being slightly more convenient than piracy.”
It’s important to recognize this as we see more and more media mergers. These mergers are not about quality, they’re about control.
In the old days, studios made a TV show. If the show was a hit, they increased how much they charged companies to place ads during the show. And if the show was a hit for long enough, they sold syndication rights to another channel. Then people could discover the show again, and maybe come back to watch it air live. In that model, the goal was to spread access to a program as much as possible to increase viewership and the number of revenue streams.
Now, in the digital age, studios have picked up a Silicon Valley trait: putting all their eggs into the basket of “increasing the number of users.” To do that, they have to create scarcity. There has to be only one destination for the thing you’re looking for, and it has to be their own. And you shouldn’t be able to control the experience at all. They should.
They’ve also moved away from creating buzzy new exclusives to get you to pay them. That requires risk and also, you know, paying creative people to make them. Instead, they’re consolidating.
Media companies keep announcing mergers and acquisitions. They’ve been doing it for a long time, but it’s really ramped up in the last few years. And these mergers are bad for all the obvious reasons. There are the speech and censorship reasons that came to a head in, of all places, late night television. There are the labor issues. There are the concentration of power issues. There are the obvious problems that the fewer studios that exist the fewer chances good art gets to escape Hollywood and make it to our eyes and ears. But when it comes specifically to digital life there are these: consumer experience and ownership.
First, the more content that comes under a single corporation’s control, the more they expect you to come to them for it. And the more they want to charge. And because there is less competition, the less they need to work to make their streaming app usable. They then enforce their hegemony by using the draconian copyright restrictions they’ve lobbied for to cripple smaller competitors, critics, and fair use.
When everything is either Disney or NBCUniversal or Warner Brothers-Discovery-Paramount-CBS and everything is totally siloed, what need will they have to spend money improving any part of their product? Making things is hard, stopping others from proving how bad you are is easy, thanks to how broken copyright law is.
Furthermore, because every company is chasing increasing subscriber numbers instead of multiple revenue streams, they have an interest in preventing you from ever again “owning” a copy of a work. This was always sort of part of the business plan, but it was on a scale of a) once every couple of years, b) at least it came, in theory, with some new features or enhanced quality and c) you actually owned the copy you paid for. Now they want you to pay them every month for access to same copy. And, hey, the price is going to keep going up the fewer options you have. Or you will see more ads. Or start seeing ads where there weren’t any before.
On the one hand, the increasing dependence on direct subscriber numbers does give users back some power. Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement by ABC was partly due to the fact that the company was about to announce a price hike for Disney+ and it couldn’t handle losing users due to the new price and due to popular outrage over Kimmel’s treatment.
On the other hand, well, there’s everything else.
The latest kerfuffle is over the sale of Warner Brothers-Discovery, a company that was already the subject of a sale and merger resulting in the hyphen. Netflix was competing against another recently merged media megazord of Paramount Skydance.
Warner Brothers-Discovery accepted a bid from Netflix, enraging Paramount Skydance, which has now launched a hostile takeover.
Now the optimum outcome is for neither of these takeovers to happen. There are already too few players in Hollywood. It does nothing for the health of the industry to allow either merger. A functioning antitrust regime would stop both the sale and the hostile takeover attempt, full stop. But Hollywood and the federal government are frequent collaborators, and the feds have little incentive to stop Hollywood’s behemoths from growing even further, as long as they continue to play their role pushing a specific view of American culture.
The promise of the digital era was in part convenience. You never again had to look at TV listings to find out when something would be airing. Virtually unlimited digital storage meant everything would be at your fingertips. But then the corporations went to work to make sure it never happened. And with each and every merger, that promise gets further and further away.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: competition, consolodation, silos, streaming
Companies: netflix, paramount, skydance, warner bros. discovery
Warner Bros Rejects Larry Ellison’s Hostile Takeover Bid, Trump Will Likely Intervene In 2026 To Help Ellison Dominate U.S. Media
We’ve noted how Larry Ellison, as part of his attempt to control the entirety of media, had launched a $108 million hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers. Larry, as we’ve seen with CBS and his interest in TikTok, is trying to convert what’s left of U.S. media into a giant safe space for affluent right wing autocrats and the right wing culture war grievance and infotainment complex.
In his way sits Netflix, which had already struck its own $82.7 billion deal with Warner Bros. The Warner Brothers board has consistently supported the Netflix deal as the safer option, and this week rejected the CBS/Paramount/Ellison family hostile takeover bid.
While the Ellison deal is higher, Warner’s board is concerned with a few things. One, that Larry Ellison isn’t fully using his own cash to fully back the bid, which could create chaos when it’s time to actually get the money together:
“Warner Bros has raised doubts about Paramount’s financial condition and creditworthiness. The offer relies on a seven-party, cross-conditional structure, with the Ellison Revocable Trust providing just 32% of the required equity commitment while capping its liability at $2.8 billion, Warner Bros said. It noted that the trust’s assets could be withdrawn at any time.”
The Warner board is also nervous that the involvement of Saudi money in the hostile takeover attempt could generate more national security regulatory heat than they’d like, further complicating a deal. In total, they see Netflix as the cleaner, easier, and more predictable path.
The wild card is Trump’s close ties to Ellison, which Trump has spent the last week trying to pretend don’t exist. Ellison has directly promised Trump he’ll take a hatchet to CNN’s occasionally semi-critical coverage of him, and our kakistocracy has some animosity toward Netflix for things like their occasional tendency to include homosexuals in military dramas.
What happens next? Well, Netflix has already begun kissing Trump’s ass in the hopes of regulatory approval, and I suspect you’ll see Netflix executives debase themselves repeatedly and creatively in the new year to appease the President.
If that’s not enough to satiate Donald’s ego, then I suspect you’ll see his DOJ launch a fake antitrust, fake populist intervention sometime in the new year trying to scuttle the deal and redirect the assets back to Ellison so he can continue his goal of creating autocrat-friendly state television leveraging the combined assets of CNN, HBO, CBS, and TikTok (if the Chinese give their approval).
This will be validated and normalized in the press (and by useful idiots like Matt Stoller) as a serious thing and an example of good faith populism, but it’s going to be cronyistic bullshit. Much like we saw when the first Trump administration launched a clumsy blockade of the AT&T Time Warner deal because Rupert Murdoch was mad that nobody would let him buy CNN.
Again, none of this will be reported clearly or honestly by the corporate American press, whose ownership has zero interest in journalism that’s critical of mindless consolidation or their pathetic groveling in the face of authoritarianism. Ideally a functioning government (which we don’t have) would block all media consolidation, but Netflix remains the better of a slate of bad options moving forward.
Netflix has fewer redundancies that would possibly mean potentially fewer layoffs. And they’re slightly less lodged up Donald’s colon (though they’re going to test that thesis to gain approval). And while they’ll certainly fire people and generate plenty of homogenized slop post acquisition, that’s still somehow a better option than letting Donald Trump and his autocrat friends flesh out their dream of state television.
Filed Under: competition, donald trump, larry ellison, takeovers
Companies: netflix, paramount, warner bros. discovery
Senators Want To Hold The Open Internet Hostage, Demand Zuckerberg Write The Ransom Note
from the who-has-time-for-all-this-nonsense? dept
Not this shit again.
A bipartisan group of the most anti-internet Senators around have released their latest version of a plan to “sunset Section 230.” We went over this last year when they floated the same idea: they have no actual plan for how to make sure the open internet can continue. Instead, their “plan” is to put a gun to the head of the open internet and say they’re going to shoot it… unless Meta gives them a different alternative. Let’s bring back Eric Goldman’s meme:
There is no plan for how to protect speech on the internet. There’s just hostage-taking. And remarkably, the hostage-takers are saying the quiet part out loud. Here’s Senator Dick Durbin’s comment on releasing this bill:
“Children are being exploited and abused because Big Tech consistently prioritizes profits over people. Enough is enough. Sunsetting Section 230 will force Big Tech to come to the table take ownership over the harms it has wrought. And if Big Tech doesn’t, this bill will open the courtroom to victims of its platforms. Parents have been begging Congress to step in, and it’s time we do so. I’m proud to partner with Senator Graham on this effort, and we will push for it to become law,” said Durbin.
Read that bolded part again. Durbin is admitting—in a press release, for the record—that he wants Big Tech to write internet policy. He’s threatening to blow up the legal framework that allows everyday people to speak online unless Mark Zuckerberg comes to his office and tells him what laws to pass. This is Congress openly abdicating its responsibility to govern in favor of letting a handful of tech CEOs do it instead.
The problem? The people who benefit from Section 230 aren’t the big tech CEOs. They’re you. They’re me. They’re every small forum, every Discord server, every newsletter with comments, every community space online where people can actually talk to each other without first getting permission from a building full of lawyers.
They want “big tech” to come to the table, even though (as we’ve explained over and over and over again) the damage from repealing 230 is not to “big tech.” Hell, Meta has been calling for the removal of Section 230 for years.
Why? Because Meta (unlike Durbin) knows exactly what every 230 expert has been saying for years: its main benefit has fuck all to do with “big tech” and is very much about protecting you, me, and the everyday users of the internet, creating smaller spaces where they can speak, interact, build community and more.
Repealing Section 230 doesn’t hurt Meta at all. Because if you get rid of Section 230, Meta can afford the lawsuits. They have a building full of lawyers they’re already paying. They can pay them to take on the various lawsuits and win. Why will they win? Because the First Amendment is what actually protects most of the speech these dipshit Senators are mad about.
But winning on First Amendment grounds probably costs between $2 million and $5 million. Winning on 230 grounds happens at an earlier stage with much less work, and probably costs $100k. A small company can survive a few $100k lawsuits. But a few $5 million lawsuits puts them out of business.
We already know this. We can see it with the DMCA, which was always weaker than Section 230. A decade and a half ago, Veoh was poised to be a big competitor to YouTube. But it got sued. It won the lawsuit… but went out of business anyway, because the legal fees killed it before it won. And now YouTube dominates the space.
When you weaken intermediary protection laws, you help the big tech providers.
Separately, notice Durbin’s phrasing about children being exploited. Can some reporter please ask Dick Durbin to explain how removing Section 230 protects children? He won’t be able to answer, because it won’t help. Or maybe he’ll punt to Senator Graham, whose press release at least attempts an answer:
“Giant social media platforms are unregulated, immune from lawsuits and are making billions of dollars in advertising revenue off some of the most unsavory content and criminal activity imaginable. It is past time to allow those who have been harmed by these behemoths to have their day in court,” said Graham.
Day in court… for what? Most “unsavory content” is constitutionally protected speech. The rap sheet is mostly First-Amendment activity—Section-230 just spares hosting it; repeal means litigating over legal speech, one plaintiff at a time.
As for criminal activity, well, that’s a law enforcement issue, not related to Section 230. If you don’t think that criminal activity is being properly policed online, maybe that’s something you should focus on?
Section 230 gives companies the freedom to make changes to protect children. That was the entire point of it. Literally, Chris Cox and Ron Wyden wanted a structure that would create incentives for platforms to be able to protect their users (including children!) without having to face legal liability for any little mistake.
If you take away Section 230, you actually tie the hands of companies trying to protect children. Because, now, every single thing they do to try to make their site safer opens them up to legal liability. That means you no longer have trust & safety or child safety experts making decisions about what’s best: you have lawyers. Lawyers who just want to protect companies from liability.
So, what will they do? They’ll do the thing that won’t protect children (which is risky), the thing that avoids liability, which tends to be to putting your head in the sand. Avoiding knowledge gets you out of these lawsuits, because under existing distributor liability concepts, knowledge is key to holding a distributor liable.
The only benefits to killing Section 230 are (1) to the biggest tech companies who wipe out competitors, (2) to the trial lawyers who plan to get rich suing the biggest tech companies, and (3) to Donald Trump, who can use the new rules to put even more pressure on the internet to suppress speech he doesn’t like.
I know for a fact that Senator Wyden has tried to explain this to his colleagues in the Senate, and they just refuse to listen.
This is exactly why Techdirt needs your support. When the most powerful people in government are ignoring experts and pushing legislation based on lies, someone needs to keep explaining what’s actually happening. We’ve been doing that for over 25 years, and we’re going to keep doing it—but we need your help to make sure that continues.
Meanwhile, the actual users of the open internet—and the children Durbin claims to be protecting—come out worse off. Senator Durbin and his cosponsors (Senators Graham, Grassley, Whitehouse, Hawley, Klobuchar, Blackburn, Blumenthal, Moody, and Welch) know all this. They’ve been told all of this. Sometimes by Senator Wyden himself. But all of them (with the possible exception of Welch who I don’t know as much about) have a long and well-known history of simply hating the fact that the open internet exists.
The bill isn’t child protection, and it sure isn’t tech regulation. It’s a suicide pact drafted by people who’ve always despised an internet they don’t control. Zuckerberg gets handed the pen; we get handed the bill—and the bullet.
Filed Under: amy klobuchar, chuck grassley, dick durbin, josh hawley, lindsey graham, marsha blackburn, open internet, richard blumenthal, ron wyden, section 230, sheldon whitehouse, sunset
The Summer of Starvation: Amid Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts, A Mother Struggles To Keep Her Sons Alive
from the so-much-unnecessary-cruelty dept
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
Rose Natabo needs to leave one of her starving sons behind. At dawn, she squeezes her firstborn goodbye, then wraps her youngest, Santo, to her back, his legs akimbo at her waist. Taking the hand of her middle child, James, she hurries away toward help, her pink plastic sandals clapping over the dry dirt.
A couple hours later, the trio are in the back of an ambulance speeding by soccer fields, slums and footpaths. They turn through an iron gate and into the only hospital in Kakuma, a sprawling refugee camp in Kenya’s northern desert. After running from wars and natural disasters, this camp, the third-largest in the world, is their home. They have nowhere else to go. Rose joins a crowd of other mothers checking into the pediatric malnutrition ward.
It is July 8. Rose ran out of food less than three weeks ago after the World Food Program cut rations across the camp. At the hospital, she learns why: WFP lost its funding from the United States, the program’s biggest donor. What she doesn’t know is that aid workers and government officials from both the U.S. and Kenya spent the previous months begging and warning Trump administration leaders that families like hers depended on that food to survive. But for months, nothing changed. So Rose and thousands of other mothers watched their children starve.
Trump’s aides say the funding cuts were necessary to reform America’s broken foreign aid system, and they’ve begun making new investments into Kenya. “What you’ve seen right now,” one senior official at the State Department explains, “is there’s always some period of disruption when you’re doing something that’s never been done before.”
For WFP, that disruption meant telling 300,000 refugees in Kakuma that a little more than half of them will receive a meager portion of rice, lentils and oil some time next month, in August. The rest will get nothing. Rose doesn’t know which group she’s in. And she doesn’t know if her sons will survive that long anyway, especially Santo, who is only 2 years old.
Under the fluorescent lights in the malnutrition ward, nurses try to get an IV into him. But Santo is so swollen with edema — a result of severe protein deficiency — they can only find a vein on his head. Drained of color, his skin peels off in patches like burns. They drip milk into his mouth because feeding too quickly can be fatal. “Their bodies have adapted to starvation,” a nurse explains.
At night, Rose and Santo lie on a small vinyl hospital bed surrounded by a mosquito net. The swelling abates after a few days, but the little boy shrinks to 14 pounds and disappears into a loose, unstrapped onesie meant for a 9-month-old. The nurses tell Rose that God has performed a miracle, but Santo is still a long way from recovery. This is not his first time in the malnutrition ward this year.
Days pass. On July 16, the hospital discharges James, her 5 year old with dark marble eyes. He has somehow overcome a bout of malaria, which can be nine times more likely to kill a severely malnourished child like him. Without other options, Rose decides to send him home to her eldest, 7-year-old Lino, who is still staying with neighbors and relatives, even though she knows they have little food to spare. She has to stay behind at the hospital just a little bit longer, she tells James. Santo needs her.
July turns to August, and Rose becomes a fixture in the clinic. Five-foot-nothing and soft-spoken, she often enters and leaves rooms without notice. Every day, she sees other panicked mothers come to the clinic with sick children, a dozen a day on average. Some leave alone, after their children die.
Rose does laundry, bathes Santo and tidies up around their bed to stay busy. She wonders who, if anyone, is looking after James and Lino and what, if anything, they are eating. She starts asking staff any chance she gets if today is the day they will discharge Santo.
Some of the other mothers are so desperate to check on their children they sneak out at night and walk hours back home. Others abscond altogether. At least one baby died this year after her mother took her from the clinic before she was ready.
Rose considers leaving, too. “I don’t want my kids to suffer alone,” she says as her fingers work over black and white beads of a necklace she’s making for Santo, a traditional charm popular in South Sudan. Rose separated from her husband, who she says abused her, and now raises her boys alone. She inflates her cheeks and presses her face nose-to-nose with Santo. She’s the only one who can make him laugh.
Rose fled her home for Kakuma as a teenager in 2018, after South Sudan’s civil war found her village and left few survivors. She’s now about 23 — she doesn’t know her exact birthday — but still feels like an orphan in need of help.
On Monday, Aug. 4, a young, gentle nurse named Mark Kipsang walks through the pediatric malnutrition ward with a clipboard. Medical staff had promised Rose before the weekend that she and Santo would be discharged soon.
When Kipsang reaches their bed, Rose sits the boy upright and encourages him to greet their visitor. Kipsang offers a hand for a high five, but Santo doesn’t budge. His little feet dangle from the bed, still swollen with edema. Kipsang is worried Santo’s condition will worsen at home and that he’d quickly end up back at the hospital. This year, Kipsang’s ward has seen about six relapses every week on average.
“Has he had diarrhea?” he asks, inspecting the loose skin on Santo’s backside.
“No,” Rose lies.
“Can he walk?”
Rose nods and places Santo on the cold concrete, his shirt slipping from his shoulders. When he stands motionless, Rose holds his hands above his head and wills him forward, his feet barely shuffling. Santo starts to wail, and Rose sighs and lifts him back into her lap.
Santo is not ready to leave. Just then, Kipsang looks at Rose sitting cross-legged and notices what she has kept to herself all this time. Rose is pregnant.
Kipsang sends her straight to the hospital prenatal offices. She pads across the courtyard clutching a worn purple book that shows her first and only checkup was months ago. Rose speaks three languages but cannot read or write. Staff take her blood and conduct other tests and then explain the results as they jot them down in the book. She is extremely anemic, which means she is at risk for fainting, strokes or a preterm birth.
A third of the women in the hospital’s maternity ward have life-threatening complications that could be treated simply with food. They suffer from anemia like Rose, as well as dangerously high blood pressure. Their babies are born early, weighing too little and with underdeveloped lungs.
Jane Atim, a solicitous nutrition counselor, tells Rose that in order to avoid a dangerous birth, she needs to address her iron deficiency. Rose nods but otherwise sits still on a plastic chair, her fingers laced together. Atim flips through a ledger of two dozen other pregnant women she had seen in recent weeks, all with the same problem. There’s a diagram of a balanced diet on her desk. “How many times a day do you eat?” Atim asks.
Three, Rose lies again. She wants to end the conversation and figures there’s not much point in being honest or complaining. Instead, she lists peas, greens and lentils as her typical daily fare.
Atim knows it isn’t true, but she doesn’t think it does much good to despair alongside the starving mothers. So she tells Rose what she tells everyone: “The best thing for you to do is eat.”
The next morning, three days shy of one month in the hospital, Rose comes apart. “I am leaving today,” she shouts to a group of hospital workers who had gathered around her. The other mothers turn on their beds to watch. Her face is wet with tears. She tells them she doesn’t know who’s taking care of her other kids.
Her doctor relents and signs the discharge papers. “This is not ideal,” he says. He’s worried Santo might have contracted tuberculosis as well. But he says it’s better to discharge Santo than let Rose leave against medical advice and risk her ignoring their recommendations for treatment at home.
Later, Rose collects all of their belongings into the plastic wash basin she’s been using for laundry: two dresses, blankets, soap in an empty powdered milk tin, the iron tablets the prenatal ward had given her and papers describing Santo’s treatment plan. She doesn’t know what the files say, but she organizes them into neat piles anyway. The hospital had prescribed Santo 11 ready-to-use therapeutic food bars, and Rose keeps the packaging of one he just finished. She saves the empty wrappers to prove Santo has eaten them. Some mothers resort to selling theirs.
Rose ties Santo to her back with a blanket printed with monkeys, balances the basin atop her head and cups her lower belly with her free hand. “God help you,” another mother says.
As Rose reaches her sister’s house, Lino and James bound around the corner, through an open gate and beneath a clothesline made of concertina wire. Flanked by a posse of other children all coated in a film of dust, the boys beeline for Santo. They coo over their little brother before liberating a nutritional supplement wrapper from his hands to lick it clean. Rose inspects Lino’s dirty fingernails and picks up James, his brittle arms reaching around her neck; his body feels like an empty bookbag. He has a bad cough.
They look rough, Rose thinks, but they are alive.
It takes more than an hour to walk back to their house. James lost his shoes at some point after leaving the hospital. He struggles to stand, much less walk under the blinding East African sun. “He became so thin this year,” says Rose, whose own sandals have broken. “He’s usually fat.”
Strapped to her back, Santo falls asleep. Rose agonizes over being a mother unable to feed her children, with a pain so deep that she feels something like remorse for having had them at all. “There’s no happiness in it,” she says later.
They walk past the occasional house stripped to a husk. Those families, Rose explains, sold their clothes, chairs and even roofs to afford a ride over the border to South Sudan — a place they had not long ago fled for their lives.
Kakuma once felt like her only possibility for a future. She hoped to go into business for herself, selling food of all things. She’d raise money in case she and the boys were ever granted asylum in the U.S., where her sons could receive a good education.
But she’s abandoned that plan. Now she instead imagines joining those returning to South Sudan instead. “This sickness that came upon her baby has broken her,” Rose’s sister Sunday says, using a camp colloquialism for malnutrition.
“The only time she scared me,” Sunday adds, “was when she told me she wanted to take her kids back to South Sudan.”
On the morning of Aug. 11, Rose disappears into a crowd of hundreds of refugees under a pavilion about the size of a basketball court. Children lie across concrete benches while their mothers crane their necks toward the front, struggling to hear over the din. There, a small team of Kenya Red Cross workers holding clipboards call names on a bullhorn. One at a time, the mothers come forward to lift their kids onto a scale.
This outdoor clinic is functionally a pediatric malnutrition referral center. Community health workers fan across Kakuma to measure the circumference of children’s arms. Any kids in the area with arms thinner than 13.5 centimeters below the shoulder are sent here. They’ve made almost 12,000 malnutrition referrals this year.
Rose sits with James and Santo on either side of her, both half asleep despite the noise. Behind a folding table at the front of the crowd is a harried young Red Cross nutritionist. He said on a previous visit that the turnout shows how far malnutrition has spread. “It’s worse than last year,” he added, “because the food has been cut.”
Rose plops Santo on the scale: about 15 pounds. James is 21. Both weigh more than they did last check up, but still far less than what healthy children would at their ages. Each of their arms measures less than 12 centimeters, meaning the aid workers should prescribe them both therapeutic food.
The nutritionist tells Rose to follow him. He unlocks a heavy steel door that opens into a vault typically filled with nutritional supplements. Now, save for a couple boxes torn open on pallets, the room is empty. “We don’t have Plumpy’Nut anymore,” he says. (U.S. funding cuts disrupted the global supply chain that moves therapeutic ready-to-use food all over the world, The New York Times reported, stranding it in warehouses and at shipping companies.) He hands Rose a few bars of what remains for Santo and a different, less dense, supplement for James. They head back home.
Rose gives birth to her first girl two months later, on Oct. 5. It’s a Sunday, which is what Rose names the baby.
Her family still struggles to get food, even though WFP has started giving out more rations after a recent grant from the U.S. She rests under a tree with the children outside their dark, squat home, watching them sit listless in the heat.
All three of her boys have backslid. Lino and James are even thinner. The color has again drained from Santo’s skin and the edema returned to his legs, arms and face. He has lost 1 pound since the August weigh-in with the Red Cross.
Still wearing the black-and-white necklace his mom made him, Santo can hardly open his eyes or sit upright. It’s clear he needs to go back to urgent care. But she’s afraid to risk bringing her newborn to the hospital, where she might catch an infection.
They’ll all stay at home for now. This time, Rose has to choose baby Sunday.
Filed Under: blood on their hands, donald trump, hunger, kenya, marco rubio, starvation, usaid, world food program
Daily Deal: PiCar-X Smart Video Robot Car Kit for Raspberry Pi 4
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
Dive into the world of robotics, programming, and electronics with the PiCar-X, an engaging and versatile smart car designed for learners from elementary school to advanced hobbyists. Combining powerful features, exceptional quality, and a cool design, this robot car kit delivers an engaging learning experience in robotics, AI, and programming. Beyond being an educational tool, its powerful Robot Hat provides abundant resources for you to design and bring to life your projects. Plus, it comes with 15 comprehensive video tutorials, guiding you through each step of discovery and innovation. Embark on a journey of discovery and creativity with Picar-X, where young learners become budding innovators. The Robot Car Kit without a board is on sale for $80. The kit with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board and 32GB SD card is on sale for $110. There’s also the kit with a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 32GB SD Card available for $141.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
SD Governor Gets Shitty After Town Announces It Won’t Be Pitching In With Upcoming ICE Raids
from the fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-Rhoden-on dept
If there’s anything the GOP/MAGA party can’t stand, it’s people who won’t fall in line. It openly courts fascism while still pretending its ultimate concern is the protection of (certain) civil liberties. It cheers on politically motivated prosecutions while still making mouth noises about “activist judges.” It’s a land of contrasts, to be sure. But the US — under this leadership — certainly isn’t “a place of honor.”
Earlier this year, the man chosen to fill dog-killer Kristi Noem’s kitten heels after her elevation to DHS Secretary, announced that he was bringing ICE to South Dakota.
Today, Governor Larry Rhoden announced Operation: Prairie Thunder – a comprehensive, targeted public safety initiative to protect South Dakotans, especially in the Sioux Falls metro area.
“We are keeping South Dakotans strong, safe, and free. When it comes to safety, one of our biggest opportunities to move the needle is right here in Sioux Falls, and that’s where Operation: Prairie Thunder comes in,” said Governor Larry Rhoden. “We are taking decisive action to hold criminals accountable and protect our communities.”
Whew. Sounds like a lot. This July announcement claimed all kinds of good things would be happening in terms of crime prevention and enforcement. But it was actually just more of the usual “war on drugs” stuff: saturation patrols, a few more helicopters in the air, and a concentrated effort to round up anyone who may have given law enforcement the slip while paroled or on probation.
But the part that meant the most is this:
The comprehensive effort to support ICE’s work includes:
- Equipping the South Dakota Highway Patrol to assist with ICE’s actions to keep America safe – a partnership that the Governor previously obtained;
- Activating six SDNG soldiers to assist ICE with administrative functions; and
- Enabling DOC to work with ICE to deport offenders and transfer violent offenders for federal incarceration and assist ICE with processing and transportation of illegal alien criminals.
In other words, it was just a convenient excuse to roll hard with local law enforcement while riding shotgun with Trump’s bigots-in-masks kidnappers.
Since this announcement, “Prairie Thunder” has moved past Sioux Falls and into other towns, including Yankton, Belle Fourche, and Huron. Press releases and appearances from Governor Rhoden claimed this saturation+ICE had been a huge success.
Troopers jailed 75 people in total across the two operations, according to the release — 42 on drug charges and 33 on non-drug charges — and 19 people were charged with drug offenses but not detained.
The patrol interviewed 25 people on behalf of ICE, the release said, 21 of whom were held for the federal agency.
But a lot of locals in a red-coded state weren’t convinced this had anything to do with real crime. The towns targeted by “Prairie Thunder” weren’t exactly hotbeds of criminal activity. Huron, in particular, is the state’s most diverse city, which raised obvious questions about why it was next on list after the Thunder had rolled through the state’s most-populous city, Sioux Falls.
[T]he November patrols raised concerns for the city’s Hispanic community, according to Republican state Rep.Kevin Van Diepen, who’s also a former police chief.
He said many residents believed that ICE — not state law enforcement — was behind the saturation patrols in the city of 14,000.
The governor had never announced this unexpected expansion of the program to other South Dakota cities. But it’s clear that Prairie Thunder is still an ongoing program. The city of Brookings (pop. 23,377) decided it wasn’t going to play nice with ICE or the governor’s desire to keep all of this under the radar. An extremely short post on the city’s official website let every resident know what was headed their way, as well as making it clear the city had no desire to pitch in with ICE’s deportation efforts:
The City of Brookings has been made aware that Operation Prairie Thunder, an anti-crime task force with the State of South Dakota, will be in the Brookings area Dec. 17-19. The City of Brookings will not be participating in these operations.
That low-key tip-off was all it took to provoke Governor Rhoden to say some really dumb shit into live mics.
The governor voiced his disapproval with the city of Brookings Friday afternoon, suggesting that the broadcasting of when and where stings, saturations or any other temporary, concentrated policing will take place undermines law enforcement operations — and the men and women carrying out that work.
“For security reasons, we are not going to comment on operational specifics. It’s unfortunate that the City of Brookings would jeopardize an anti-crime operation and put the safety of our officers at risk by publishing this information,” he said in a statement provided to The Dakota Scout. “In South Dakota, we enforce the rule of law.”
This is dumb for several reasons. First, even the mayor of Sioux Falls issued statements distancing himself and his city’s police officers from ICE activity related to “Prairie Thunder.” So, even at the initial flash-point of the operation, politicians knew it would be bad for political business to be thought of as complicit in ICE raids.
Second, saturation patrols are often announced ahead of time by the cities and law enforcement agencies engaging in them. We hear radio announcements for these patrols ahead of every major holiday. Local cops also let people know ahead of time if they’re going to be running sobriety checkpoints. None of these notifications have ever been portrayed as “jeopardizing anti-crime operations” by local politicians.
Finally, go fuck yourself, Governor Rhoden. What ICE does has almost nothing to do with the “rule of law.” And the administration overseeing ICE only cares about the “rule of law” when it needs to get the Supreme Court to sign off on its latest constitutional violations. You’re nothing but a Kristi Noem understudy, which means you’re incapable (or unwilling) of doing anything that doesn’t align exactly with the New MAGA Order.
If ICE wants to perform a bunch of crimes of opportunity in Brookings, it should still be able to do so even if its officers are being filmed, insulted, or otherwise treated like the pariahs they are. You serve the state, not Donald Trump and his fleeting whims. If it won’t hurt your brain too much, try to remember that now and then.
Filed Under: brookings, dhs, ice, kristi noem, larry rhoden, mass deportations, prairie thunder, south dakota
TikTok Deal Done And It’s Somehow The Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse
from the mission-accomplished! dept
There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly worse. Quite an accomplishment.
The Chinese government has signed off on the deal, which involves offloading a large chunk of TikTok to billionaire right wing Trump ally Larry Ellison (fresh off his acquisition of CBS), the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance), and MGX (Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm), while still somehow having large investment involvement by the Chinese:
“The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent will be owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
There’s also a smattering 5% of investors that may or may not include folks like right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch. It’s worth noting that none of this was really legal; the law technically stated that TikTok shouldn’t have been allowed to exist for much of this year. Everyone just looked the other way while Trump and his cronies repeatedly ignored deadlines and hammered away at the transfer.
The deal purportedly involves “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” but given you can’t trust any of the companies involved, the Trump administration, or what’s left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely nothing. Oracle will be “overseeing data protection,” but that means nothing as well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long history of his own privacy abuses.
Also, this seems to ignore that three years ago, during the Biden administration, it was already announced that Oracle was overseeing TikTok’s algorithms and data protection. It’s kinda weird that everyone seems to have forgotten that. This is all, more or less, what was already agreed to years ago. Just shifting around the ownership structure to give Trump and his friends a “win.”
It wasn’t subtle that the goal was always for Trump’s buddies to just basically steal a big ownership chunk of a Chinese short form video company that U.S. tech companies couldn’t out innovate. Offloading the company to his friends at Oracle and Walmart was Trump’s stated goal during the first administration, only thwarted because he lost the 2020 election. Everything else was decorative.
You might recall that Democrats made a point to join forces with Republicans during election season in support of a ban unless a big chunk of ownership was divested. Now that it’s happened, it’s basically shifting ownership of TikTok to a huge chunk of Trump’s authoritarian allies, while somehow still maintaining the supposed problematic tethers to the Chinese? Impressive. Great job.
You might also recall that folks like Brendan Carr spent literally years whining about the propaganda, privacy, and surveillance threats posed by TikTok. And their solution was ultimately just to shift a small part of ownership over to Trump’s autocratic buddies while still retaining Chinese involvement. Now, with the problem made worse, you can easily assume that Carr will probably never mention the threat again.
Republicans obviously take majority responsibility for this turd of a deal and the corrupt shifting of TikTok ownership to Trump’s buddies. But it can’t be overstated what an own-goal supporting this whole dumb thing was for Democrats, who not only helped Trump’s friends steal partial ownership of TikTok, they saber-rattled over a ban during an election season where they desperately needed young people to vote.
As I’ve spent years arguing, if these folks were all so concerned about U.S. consumer privacy, they should have passed a functional modern internet privacy law applying to all U.S. companies and their executives.
If they cared about propaganda, they could have fought media consolidation, backed creative media literacy reform in schools, or found new ways to fund independent journalism.
If they cared about national security, they wouldn’t have helped elect a New York City real estate conman sex pest President, and they certainly wouldn’t have actively aided his cronyism.
This was never about addressing privacy, propaganda, or national security. It was always about the U.S. stealing ownership of one of the most popular and successful short form video apps in history because companies like Facebook were too innovatively incompetent to dethrone them in the open market. Ultimately this bipartisan accomplishment not only makes everything worse, it demonstrates we’re absolutely no better than the countries we criticize.
Filed Under: autocrats, competition, donald trump, larry ellison, national security, own goal, propaganda, security, social media, stupidity
Companies: bytedance, mgx, oracle, silver lake, tiktok
RFK Jr. Exacts Revenge On The AAP: Claws Back Millions In Approved HHS Grants
from the bobby-strikes-back dept
As RFK Jr. continues to dismantle public health in this country policy brick by policy brick, there have fortunately been some consistent sources of sanity for the public to turn to. One of those sources has been the American Academy of Pediatrics, an important organization that provides guidance and dispenses funds to healthcare professionals and researchers to provide for the public health of American children writ large. Because the AAP is made up of medical professionals that are sane, it has been a vocal critic of many of Kennedy’s policy decisions, particularly when it comes to Kennedy’s war on childhood vaccines and his misinformation about autism.
While Kennedy used to fashion himself a liberal, he has become a remarkably quick learner when it comes to the finer points of facism from his boss. His latest move is downright Trumpian: HHS has yanked back millions in approved grants to the AAP.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has canceled millions of dollars in grants awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it said on Wednesday, including ones the group said were aimed at reducing sudden infant death and early detection of autism.
The move comes as the AAP, a vocal critic of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenged vaccine policies enacted under his leadership in federal court. Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccines, has accused the organization of accepting funding from drug and vaccine makers to further their interests.
“These grants, previously awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, were canceled along with a number of other grants to other organizations because they no longer align with the Department’s mission or priorities,” an HHS spokesperson said.
SID and autism detection are the headliners and for good reason. This is a cruel move that will likely result in some increase in the deaths of babies. It also takes away detection of Kennedy’s favorite hobbyhorse in autism spectrum diagnoses. Those are two things that Kennedy claims to very much care about, yet here we are.
But those aren’t the only things those grants funded. There are also things like mental health services and healthcare access in rural areas, the latter of which tend to be Trump territory. It seems that those who voted for Trump often times are his preferred victims.
CEO Mark Del Monte explains how bad this is and what they try to do about it.
“The sudden withdrawal of these funds will directly impact and potentially harm infants, children, youth, and their families in communities across the United States,” said Del Monte, adding that the group is assessing its options, including potential legal action.
No explanation I can find has been given for these clawbacks of previously approved grants. In lieu of such an explanation, we can but speculate, and the most reasonable speculation out there is that Kennedy is big mad that AAP has disagreed with him, and denounced him, at times. And so he punished American children and rural areas in desperate need of more access to healthcare.
He’s an egomaniac, in other words. And while that sure does make him fit in nice and comfy in the Trump administration, he remains likely the worst HHS Secretary in its nearly 50 years of existence.
Filed Under: fascism, grants, health and human services, retribution, rfk jr., vaccines
Companies: aap
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Have Yourself A Very Meta Christmas
from the ctrl-alt-speech dept
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
In the last Ctrl-Alt-Speech of the year, Mike and Ben round up the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation with the following stories:
- Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content | Global development (The Guardian)
- Facebook is testing a link-posting limit for professional accounts and pages (Techcrunch)
- Meta adopts new age-check system to meet global child safety laws (FT)
- Russian ban on Roblox gaming platform sparks rare protest (Reuters)
- OpenAI hires George Osborne to spearhead global ‘Stargate’ expansion (FT)
- Oscars Bolts From ABC to YouTube Starting in 2029 (Hollywood Reporter)
Filed Under: content moderation, george osborne, oscars, podcast, russia
Companies: facebook, meta, openai, roblox
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