#Trump's bullying is apparently working against #India.
#Reuters: "India will scrap a tax of 6% on digital #advertisements online, easing costs for U.S. tech giants such as #Google, #Meta and #Amazon as a way of soothing U.S. trade concerns."
If you haven’t done this yet, I highly recommend you install Libation and liberate your audiobooks from Audible.
It’s been a month since I first learned of this fantastic, free, libre, open-source project from u/darchangel(not sure if they’re on the fediverse). And unlike so many other OSS projects this one is dead simple to use, accessible to the less technical, and very well documented.
I was able to download my entire Audible audiobook library, with included documents, in just minutes.
If you’re working to de-Amazon your audiobook library please consider abandoning Audible permanently once you’ve liberated your books. Try Libro.fm(referral link).
Libro.fm has a fantastic library, shares proceeds with your designated brick-and-mortar bookstore, and most amazingly is DRM-free and allows downloading.
Amazon has unveiled Nova Act, a general-purpose AI agent that can take control of a web browser and independently perform some simple actions like making dinner reservations or filling out online forms. Read more at @theverge. #Amazon#AI#NovaAct#Tech#Technologyhttps://flip.it/oi.n4J
20 years ago we hardly bought anything online. It was a new thing. Nos people can't deal without buying stuff off/via obe of the most toxic companies on earth... Amazon. People boycott israeli and American products, but amazon?
In the time since Trump's election, many people who perhaps didn't entirely believe me when I spent the past ten years or so pointing out that everything about MAGA and its leader were genuinely fascist, have asked me, often frantically, "what do I do now?" This is a complicated question for me to answer for at least two consistent reasons.
We live in a fascist police state where it's already pretty risky to urge people to impede, resist, or topple that fascist police state and the extraction of profit all this fascism is designed to protect; and let me assure you, it hasn't gotten any less risky to do so now that Downmarket Mussolini is in charge again.
Almost nobody who asks me that question really wants to hear the answer they already know I'd give, if I were free to be completely honest with them. Organizing in sufficient numbers to legitimately "shut it down" or meaningfully "become ungovernable" is hard, almost certainly illegal in a society where billionaires call interfering with profits "domestic" or "economic" terrorism, and comes with a not insignificant degree of personal risk.
What people are looking for when they ask me that question, as far as I can tell, is a safe, legal-ish, and relatively easy way to fight fascism without really changing too much about the society that birthed it. Given that folks already know my answer, sharing it with them is probably going to get me perished some day, and they're typically not going to be interested in what I have to say until they've tried literally everything else first, I usually just decline to answer the question. In this week's episode of Some More News however, Cody and the gang did their absolute best to provide the answers those folks are looking for, without going to prison.
The show is essentially divided into two sections. In the first half, our host provides a frank assessment of the situation Americans who don't want fascism are facing. The Trump regime is acting to install overt fascism with a speed and ferocity that has left potential resisters disorientated and demoralized. Simultaneously, the checks and balances in the US system of government designed to prevent this are failing, or at least do not appear guaranteed to hold. The opposition political party is some combination of useless, out of touch, or openly collaborationist. The courts are more promising, but they didn't stop Trump last time, and the regime is openly threatening to ignore their rulings. The situation is grim, and Cody (rightfully in my opinion) points out that people need a plan for what to do next if, and when, the checks and balances do completely fail.
The second half of the show focuses on nonviolent methods of resisting fascism that scale well depending on the severity of the crisis, and the abilities individual people who want to fight fascism have to work with. As Cody notes, not everyone can start a revolution, but we all have something to offer. While providing examples and ideas, the host talks about the importance of mutual aid, both to mitigate the effects of government neglect, and also to foster the sense of community and "all in this together" necessary to take further resistance activities. Cody also discusses community defense (mostly as a method to stop ICE, but the same principles apply to preventing evictions, or even de-arresting fellow resisters in the face of police repression), while advising folks to stand up for each other, refuse to cooperate with the fascist agenda, and make those enforcing that agenda uncomfortable operating in your communities.
This then transitions into a discussion about mobilizing to protest or otherwise directly oppose the regime. Cody reminds viewers that even small groups can be extremely disruptive, and to be effective protest actions need to be aggressive, loud, and disruptive; pointing to the anti-Tesla protests as an example of how this works in action. While cautioning against violence, the host speaks out in favor of chasing Republicans and regime officials out of public spaces, and punishing companies and private sector entities that collaborate with or enable the fascist agenda. Cody also encourages Dem politicians to resists the regime as if they're the Nazis, because they effectively are. He talks about the importance of federal workers staying behind to muck up the fascist state from the inside, and why it's vital for other resisters to support these folks. He also talks a bit about weaponizing our exhaustion to participate in actions designed to sabotage the regime, where applicable.
Finally, while Cody probably isn't an anarchist, he closes the episode talking about how human development, society, and our ability to overcome crises depends on helping each other and cooperation in a way consistent with anarchist principles.
This one is worth your time.
Resistance 2.0: How To Survive The Next Four Years - Some More News
Look, I won't want to give people the impression that, by themselves, boycotts are going to end fascism. By that same measure if the rich nazis paying for all this fascism do have a soft underbelly, it's definitely their ties to the capitalism system and their need to keep accumulating profit. It's not going to be the knockout blow, but cutting the flow of capital to corporations and businesses that support the Trump regime's fascist agenda does hurt and hinder these nazis; which is easily demonstrated by observing the panicked reactions of both Elon Musk and the Trump administration to the ongoing Tesla protests and boycott actions. Furthermore, while many Americans have not yet realized the only way out of this is to "shut it down" so hard it's impossible to do fascism for profit anyway, data shows that an increasingly large number of people (particularly younger and nonwhite people) who don't like fascism, broadly support boycotting companies that collaborate or comply with Trump's fascist agenda.
Exclusive: 20% of Americans support boycott of firms aligning themselves with Trump agenda
"One in five Americans plan to turn their backs for good on companies that have shifted their policies to align with Donald Trump’s agenda, according to a new poll for the Guardian.
As high-profile brands including Amazon, Target and Tesla grapple with economic boycotts, research by the Harris Poll indicated the backlash could have a lasting impact.
“Companies and consumers are playing a high-stakes game of chicken – corporations betting on convenience winning out over conviction, while consumers wield their spending power like a weapon,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at the Harris Poll.
“The data suggests this is a miscalculation,” she said. “When 20% of Americans are permanently changing their consumption habits and nearly a third of boycotters say they’ll hold out indefinitely, convenience may no longer be the decisive factor companies think it is.”
When asked about the boycotts that have been making headlines over the last few weeks, 36% of Americans said they are or will be participating."
Again, I don't want to get too carried away because history tells me that when you actually do make these rich nazis suffer consequences for their actions, they're going to try and make you keep paying them by force; at which point all hell will break lose, just like it did during the formative years of the American labor struggle. Right now however, nobody is really doing enough to make it cost more to be a nazi than corporate CEOs and investors gain from supporting the new nazism, and that's a situation that isn't good for any of us who don't want fascism. Boycotts are obviously only a start in the fight back against fascism; but a start, is definitely better than doing nothing.
Please, when linking to books, do not link to Amazon. Find the author's website, or the publisher's website, or some independent bookshop. But don't link to Amazon.
Besides all the other reasons, here's why: When I finally get the cookie banner to close, I am not on the book's page (or any product's page) anymore, but on the front page. It sucks.
South America – Stories | Droughts in the Amazon | Musuk Nolte
Elidia Carolina lives with her partner and their two-year-old daughter in a “floating house” built on stilts. Due to the droughts, the area around their home now resembles a desert, and they must walk almost 2km to reach the shore of the Solimões River. Manacapuru, Amazonas, Brazil, 3 October 2024.
"According to six people who have worked closely with him across Amazon, Blue Origin and The Washington Post, the decisions are part of a marked shift in Bezos’s strategy towards Trump. These people painted a picture of a shrewd capitalist, making practical calculations to protect his businesses.
But they also believe Bezos is operating with a dose of fear about Trump, as well as resentment towards what he considers to be the Democrats’ “vilification” of Big Tech during the Biden administration.
Several of these people pointed to Amazon’s loss of that $10bn contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project (Jedi) — the knockout punch of Bezos’s ugly battle with Trump during his first term — as a watershed moment.
“There was a joke at the time that it didn’t cost Jeff Bezos $250mn to buy the Post, it cost him $10bn,” the newspaper’s former editor Marty Baron tells the Financial Times.
A person who met Bezos days after the Pentagon blow says he was “deeply hurt” by the ordeal. “He sat there going: ‘This is not right.’”
For Bezos there are enormous financial risks to Trump 2.0. His business interests are vulnerable to the tax and tariff debates in Washington, and hold tens of billions of dollars in government contracts spanning national security and space. They are also subject to significant oversight and pressure from regulators.
Perhaps most important to Bezos is the future of Blue Origin, his passion project that aims to make space travel accessible, as the company vies to win US government contracts — often in competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX."
"[A] team of researchers recently set out to determine just how much companies like Amazon, Apple and Google are using the data gathered through their voice assistants to profile us –– track and monitor our behavior –– across the internet.
(...)
The study focused on the behaviors of the three biggest voice assistant platforms: Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. What researchers found was that how concerned you should be about your smart assistant profiling you varies greatly depending on which device you use.
But in order to figure this out, they had to essentially trick voice assistants into profiling them.
They downloaded publicly available information that Google compiles on every user based on their searches, like gender, age range, relationship status and income bracket. Using those labels, they were able to design questions that could easily convince the platforms that they were, for example, married, had children or were a homeowner not a renter.
The researchers then recorded themselves asking these questions and replayed the audio to voice assistants over and over again. Over the course of 20 months, they conducted 1,171 experiments involving nearly 25,000 queries.
(...)
What they ended up finding was that Alexa exhibits the most straightforward kind of profiling behavior: It’s all based on your interest in products.
(...)
However, with Siri and Google Assistant, things are more complicated.
After reaching out to Apple to get their data, the company insisted “they had no data on us,” Choffnes says, “which means we couldn’t even test anything or prove any hypothesis about whether there was any profiling happening.”
(...)
Meanwhile, Google Assistant was the strangest of the bunch. The researchers found that it was clearly profiling its users but often incorrectly." https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/03/17/voice-assistant-profiling-research/
The capitalist mindset. #Amazon is just another store. #Turkey is just another holiday destination.
A #Cybertruck is just another mode of transport. #Nestle is just another coffee brand.
Factory farmed #chicken is just another source of protein. #LLMs (#AI) are just another tool.
#Capitalism needs you to ignore the social and environmental costs, and think only of personal benefits.
Is KDP Select/KU just a backdoor path to Amazon monopoly?
Have any authors done comparisons between publishing wide (maybe Draft2Digital) VS KDP for initial releases?
I know some authors just poick one thing and stick with it. And some genre's are almost exclusively KDSP Select these days.
Interested to know if it is such a vastly different market share for your genre that it isn't worth it. And if is worrying that your exclusivity benefits Bezos.
You have purchasing power, use it wisely. You think you are an individual who has no impact but your subscriptions, preorders and purchases to these companies matter a lot.
If you dislike something a company or a brand is doing, stop buying that brand and stick to it. Don't go back just because they wised up and said sorry.
Make them prove it. Make them sorry they did it in the first place. Make it financially the worst decision they ever made. This is the only way they learn because the board members at the company only care about profits and making the shareholders happy~
Amazon geht verstärkt gegen Produktfälschungen vor
Mehr als 15 Millionen Fälschungen hat Amazon im vergangenen Jahr entdeckt. Um die gefakten Markenprodukte zu entdecken, setzt der US-Konzern auch immer stärker auf Künstliche Intelligenz.
Never do anything with Amazon. Shopping, streaming, hosting, whatever. Hell, never do anything with US Megacorps if you have the choice. They're just outright dystopian-level evil.
And yes, of course it's ironic the only public platform where creators (like Brew) can live off their work is owned by one of said megacorps. #capitalism#extortion#Amazon#USA
It’s clear from this that Ireland should be stripped of the authority to enforce GDPR and, really, people farmers – and the business model of people farming in general – should be banned in the EU.
aral
For quite some time I knew that the #irish#dataprotection institution was an underfunded, understaffed, weak #pontemkin village #bigtech was taking advantage of - and only #noyb was really getting on their nerves.
I ordered it yesterday and will have the book in my hands tomorrow ( certainly not from #Amazon, but local bookshop! )
Well ... feels like another not so nice day coming. :mastoshrug: