WHEN I googled “Is Google good or bad?”, it first took me to a Wikipedia entry “Criticism of Google” with a rather extensive list of misdemeanors.
If it was bad, it would hide this page surely, so I can’t decide yet.
However, the matter has been addressed in court with a US judge deciding Google had spent a fortune designing its search engine so that it became the only search engine to use and thus the one to put your ads on.
A dominant search engine can effectively become a monopoly and thus without competition the options are reduced, and Google could decide what to promote or downgrade but the responses would no longer be accurate.
Too many internet enterprises, Google, Facebook and X have become too big and as they operate internationally, too hard for any single government to manage.
The internet was meant to be the greatest boon to humankind but there is still a long way to go and maybe these enterprises will recognize the concerns and start to develop solutions to manage their use.
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Time to imprison someone
It is almost funny, except that it did happen.
A fake report suggested that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was going to send the far-right rioters to prison cells on the Falklands Islands. They are UK territory, slightly south west of the British Isles, actually about 500km from the bottom of South America and certainly not just a day’s commute away.
This seems like yet another fake news conspiracy item without any credibility but it has gained some support when it was shared by Elon Musk who most people know and many believe although this might puncture his shield of truth.
The post was removed very quickly but many saw it.
How many people would have been silly enough to believe it or worse still to use social media to spread stories like this?
The world needs to wake up to how much damage UNsocial media can cause and to not be so gullible.
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Who coined the expression ‘It’s a strange world’?
Who would steal a child’s toy or actually an adult’s investment? Someone who likes the TV show “Bluey” a lot or the coins he was featured on.
A worker is accused of stealing 64,000 of the A$1 coins which would cost A$600,000 to buy.
It does make you wonder about some people’s thinking, are they just making a criminal profit selling them online?
Selling the coins one by one would take forever and someone would notice and report them.
Of course, most criminals are dumb. Other criminals are cruel, ripping off children. What punishment is appropriate, time in a prison cell with only “Bluey” on the TV?
There are also many other “TV” coins, including Star Trek coins, I have one, or Star Wars coins if you have gone to the dark side.
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Reading the tea leaves
I am amazed at the power that Kamala Harris has, or at least that Donald Trump says she has. As he said, incorrectly, “She’s in power now and look at what is happening.”
The first point is that she is not in power, President Biden is; and the second point is that the stock market is not based on an individual’s performance.
Perhaps Trump is reading the tea leaves and sees that the future doesn’t include him in power and he is panicking./PN
