Category Archives: Politics

Dark side of the Jedi

Yes, I guess that George Lucas really had no idea that this would hold for well over 45 years, but that happens when you become the real innovator. In this we recognise innovators, but the path of one is often dangerous, perilous and it only works when the competition is at your heels. Consider that Star Wars came out when we had The Omen, Taxi Driver, All the presidents men, Rocky, Saturday Night Fever, the Duellists. All excellent movies, all driving the others to do better, that is why it works, so when I see “reversing the Trump-era award to Microsoft Corp and announcing a new contract expected to include its rival Amazon.com and possibly other cloud players” I merely wonder how stupid Trump actually was. To give $10,000,000,000 to Microsoft when they screw up their console position and hand the number two place to Nintendo with the weakest of all consoles, only to likely lose again in the future to the Amazon Luna and possibly even to Netflix? How delusional can you become? Microsoft tried to attack the Apple tablet market and failed miserably again and again, they blew their mobile market and they are trying to create waves for their Azure market, that is the player we want for the U.S. Defense Department? This all whilst we get a day ago “Microsoft has “paused” SQL Server in its Windows Containers project. Microsoft advises anyone interested in running SQL Server in a container to use the Linux root instead”, so basically the two non entries (Google and Amazon) were a better solution off the bat?

So, this Jedi (aka the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) is off to a rocky start. I had never expected to be any commander in chief so delusional that they would hand the contract to one player, all whilst better solutions (in the worst case merely equal) would be considered without proper vetting? I am not stating to merely give it to Amazon or Google, that is why vetting is an important process, yet in all that, Reuters (at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-pentagon-jedi/pentagon-hits-reset-on-trumps-10-billion-cloud-deal-welcoming-new-players-idUSKCN2EC1YY) gives us “The company cited a 2019 book that reported Trump had directed the Defense Department to “screw Amazon” out of the JEDI contract”, is this how Americans see their national defence, as an ego driver? It would be one thing if Microsoft is the better party, but that hasn’t be the case for some time. 

So when I see “the plan would likely involve a direct award for “urgently needed” capabilities and then a “full and open” competition for multiple suppliers by early 2025”, which we get from John Sherman, acting chief information officer for the Defense Department. My issue here is that when I see ‘urgently needed’, I also remember the joke (not a funny one) that the Zumwalt class represents and the billions spend there, then there are a few more projects, all with pressing needs. And whilst we are getting towards it, the entire Kaseya and Solarwinds debacle shows the larger pressing matter. Security matters! And the matter of security can never be properly investigated if it is appointed to one player, one debatable player mind you. I am not stating that security at Google or Amazon is better, but the Exchange issues, which we get from ZDNet in April shows us “Four zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server are being actively exploited by state-sponsored threat groups and others to deploy backdoors and malware in widespread attacks”, this doesn’t mean that Google and/or Amazon is better. But the debate is on and Microsoft lost top dog and pole position years ago, they are merely in it to remain mediocre, all for the good of the board of directors. They lost to Apple (tablets), then they lost to Google (with Bing), then they lost to Amazon (web services and SaaS) and now surpassed by TikTok (video against China), that is an impressive fail rate. Consider that Bing has a market share of 2.71%, which against Google with 91.95% is slightly too funny for words. 

But this is not about Microsoft, it is about Jedi (all these funny acronyms). So when we consider the dark side of that forceless solution (by Microsoft) and we need to wonder about “the Defense Department also announced its plans for a new multi-cloud initiative known as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, or JWCC. It must provide capabilities at all three classification levels — Unclassified, Secret and Top Secret — and parity of services across all classification levels; integrated cross-domain solutions; global availability including at the tactical edge; and enhanced cybersecurity controls, according to the Pentagon”, not the intent, but the investigative presumption of ‘enhanced cybersecurity controls’, both Solarwinds and Kaseya showed us that and this field is still widely in development, and sources like business wire are setting the Marke that cloud security will double over the next 4 years, a stage of increased visibility will both increase security and criminal activities, the winner remains unknown at present, even if we acknowledge that REvil has the upper hand, we have no way of knowing what happens tomorrow,  if security comes from innovators there is every chance that Amazon or Google will get there before Microsoft will, even Apple has a better chance of showing innovation than Microsoft in the cloud atmosphere at present. The fact of what happens next will be out soon enough, yet my mind wonders why anyone would be stupid enough to award national defence to anyone without proper vetting.  So when we accept that it was meant as “part of a broader digital modernisation of the Pentagon aimed at making it more technologically agile”, wouldn’t you want to vet to broaden the application of data, the security of the system and the application of security towards data, users and access? There is a reason that SELinux had roots going back to the NSA, this they all wanted to throw away? And the media is merely reporting the news, not questioning that time line? Why is that?

Only the agile and versatile remain superpowers, and the former president was willing to hand over 50% of THAT equation? So consider that what was JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) could have become the Darth (Defence Application Reprehensive Technology Hype) defence system. 

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Fictive journey of speculation

This is not about the news, not about the anger against the Catholic Church that decided to see the Indigenous Canadian people “The visit of the delegation of Indigenous people is scheduled between 17 and 20 December 2021”, a setting orchestrated to manage bad news and more is coming. It has nothing to do with that, but orchestrations, yes, that part might apply.

You see, the biggest fear that the corrupt have is the feeling of loss, overwhelming loss, so kill a few of THEIR children and family members and the stage changes, there is an option that this especially applies to the corrupt in police and political fields, because the media does love its exploitation of grieving members that are in the limelight for corruption, and the victims merely need to be willing to spill blood (there are other options to achieve rigor mortis). And I have seen that impact before, these people will suddenly scream as loud as possible that the innocent have rights, but they were never willing to give it to their victims, as it forwarded their cause. Such is life.

No, today is about something else. I found my second short story to add to the bundle. What happens when the abusers get the tables turned on them? Not in any normal sense, not in any degree of realism, what if they vanish of the face of the earth (quite literally) and they are driven into hard labour for their crimes (they will refer to that as slave labour) in a place with a different chronographic stage? Hard labour there for one year will amount to 24 hour here. Welcome to Tartarus, a place of never ending torture, but that place Neds to be kept clean as well and as the abusers of social media and spotlights through specific media sources are grabbed and are added to the Tartarus cleaning staff, what happens as they vanish for days? More important when after a month an old man (or woman) is found and the records show that person to be none other than the 35 year old person a lot of ‘people’ had been looking for? Fingerprints, comparative DNA, they all match up and in their hospital beds they realise that their lives are over, more important, they are about to face their actions by becoming the stuff they cleaned up for what seems to have been a lifetime? The waves of fear it must give, especially them, they were watching in the corridors they were cleaning only to learn in the end that that is where they are about to end. I will not give away too much or there will be no reason to read that short story if it ever gets printed (or published in a place like iBooks). Yet should you not wonder not merely what the upside of one thing is and forget about the downside of the other? You might flip a coin again and again, yet you forget the other side remains in darkness, at times someone will wonder what happened to the other side of that coin, but no one ever considered the darkness it got itself exposed to (unless the toss happens on a glass table). 

You see some will give us “If someone asks for forgiveness over and over, then it is the duty of an individual to forgive them” and “Catholics must forgive the sins of others in order for God to forgive them their sins”, yet what happens when a mother loses her child? Do you really think that forgiveness is in her heart, or is it pitch black with pain and grief? So what happens when the darkness of 1,000 mothers unite? So whilst wonder about “Saskatoon Catholics raised $28.5 million to build this cathedral in 2012, while a written promise to compensate residential school survivors was largely ignored, critics say” (source: CBC), I see no action by Canadian government at present to seize ALL Catholic land in Canada and had that land to the First Nations. As it seems to me, it is all about ‘saving’ the rights and property of the Vatican and we have seen more than enough of that. When we see things like ‘stopping short of’ and “The $25 million — part of the sweeping Indian Residential School Survivor Agreement (IRSSA) — was supposed to help survivors, and also provide counselling and support for their families”, as such what should happen with any organisation that keeps on caressing (read: hand job) themselves and shirk their responsibilities? So what does it take for the Canadian government (other governments too) to set the stage for the Catholic church to actually pay up? I see the need to show the Catholic Church what loss looks like, to lose all lands and catholic locations handed to First Nation, when they see that such actions are possible in the western world, Canadian Catholics can raise money to buy new lands, become protestant, or Anglican, or move to the US (I reckon First Nations would have no problems with that part either). Oh sorry, it was still a bit about the Catholic Church, please forgive me! (forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, nyuk nyuk nyuk)

A sense of real loss is the best wake up call anyone can get, and for the Vatican to lose a nation the size of Canada where almost 40% is Catholic, it gives the Vatican a message, one that has been overdue for well over a decade.  

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Big Oil in the family

We all have moments where we look at the sky and roll our eyes. Today was my moment when I was treated (by the Guardian) to ‘Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price’, in this I start with “Was it really a secret?” You see, we all want to blame someone else for the problems we helped create. And  when the (what I reverently call) the stupid people are bringing about “An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way”. You see that is is merely one element of stupid. I gave light to ‘Uniform Nameless Entitlement Perforation’ on December 10th 2020 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/12/10/uniform-nameless-entitlement-perforation/), I emphasised on a report by European Environmental Agency (EEA) where. We see that 147 industrial plants create 50% of the pollution, the media seemingly ignored the report I have not see the media go out and bash the nations for these 147 plants, we even had a joke (read: BBC article) by Tim McGrath on how the “Global ‘elite’ will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles”, so how stupid do people need to get?

In case you forgot

This reflects on the now when we see (at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment) “Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels”, just when you think that Americans can no longer become any more stupid, we get the next iteration of ‘stupid is as stupid does’. Statista shows us that in 1975 the US requires 1.747 BILLION kilowatt hours a year, this went up again and again until that number was well over doubled in 2005 (3.8B KwH), then it roughly stays the same. There was one spike in 2018, yet one source gives us “From 2003 to 2012, weather-related outages doubled”, I personally believe it is not all weather related. I believe that energy delivery hit a saturation point around 2005. This is why the last decade has so many of these failings and outages. Consider that it was not merely oil and gas, it was energy, the underlying need that drives this. If you doubt this you need but to read the entire ENRON scandal papers to get a clue on how it has always about greed and not about big oil and gas. When I see ‘Big Oil and gas’ I personally think it tends to be a hidden jab towards the Middle East. There have been carbon neutral solutions for almost two decades. Yes, they were expensive in the beginning, but how much effort was made to push this? It is about profit margins, it is about cheap and it is about exploitation. Oil and gas check most marks, but are they to blame? We can ignore settings like “In the early 1990s, Kenneth Lay helped to initiate the selling of electricity at market prices and, soon after, Congress approved legislation deregulating the sale of natural gas” that was almost 30 years ago, so how was electricity created? How do we get energy? And why is Congress not in the same accusation dock? Until the late 80’s the idea of Electricity at market prices was a lull and instead of protecting that part, it was left to the needy and the greedy.

So when they have another go at ‘Big Oil’ (to be honest, I have no idea what they are talking about), consider that the drive to have your own car started in the 50’s. Forbes gave us in 2020 ‘Traffic Congestion Costs U.S. Cities Billions Of Dollars Every Year’, which is fine, but that too relies on fuel, so when they gave us “New York had the highest economic losses out of any major U.S. city with congesting costing it $11 billion last year. Los Angeles lost $8.2 billion while Chicago suffered the third-worst impact at $7.6 billion.” And how much fuel is wasted in that setting? Do you want to blame ‘big oil’ for that too? This is a case that will go nowhere, the only thing it enforces is something I will touch on a little later. You see, when we saw the messages on how companies had enough of California, they vacated and left, Texas is such a much better place (it actually might be), and Forbes again gave us in February ‘Texas Energy Crisis Is An Epic Resilience And Leadership Failure’, yet how much consideration are we seeing when we get sources feeding us “There are several reasons tech companies shave been moving to Texas – lower housing costs, lower tax rates, less regulations have made it easier for companies to operate in Texas. There is already an abundance of technical talent all over Texas. Any company moving here can tap into a well-experienced talent pool. There is also a well-educated stream of new talent graduating from top schools like Texas, Rice, University of Houston, and Texas A&M.” I am not debating the act, I am fine with the action taken, but when you consider that the following companies moved to Texas, how much of a drain on energy in other places will that give you and when you see the sudden spike in some places requiring a lot more energy, all whilst the other places are not diminishing their offer, because people will always need power, how is ‘Big Oil’ to blame? So lets take a loot at that list and most names moved less then 2 year ago (or are about to move)
Guideline, Contango, Done, Carbon Neutral Energy, Tailift Material Handling, Estrada Hinojosa,  GBS Enterprises, Wedgewood, Verdant Chemical, Ranchland Food, Drive Shack, Invzbl,Markaaz, XR Masters, Elevate Brands, Harmonate, Einride, Green Dot, NRG Energy, Caterpillar,Flex Logix, Leaf Telecommunications, Katapult, Wayfair, Ribbon Communications, BSU Inc, Avetta, First Foundation, 5G LLC, TaskUs, BlockCap, Element Critical, City Shoppe, CrowdStreet, Lalamove, NinjaRMM, Gilad & Gilad, MDC Vacuum, FERA Diagnostics, Roboze, Leadr, SupplyHouse.com, Eleiko, Firehawk Aerospace, International Trademark Association, ZP Better Together, Precision Global Consulting, Loop Insurance, QSAM Biosciences, AHV, Dominion Aesthetics, Sage Integration, Quali, Samsung, Truelytics, Alpha Paw, Sentry Kiosk, ProtectAll, Optimal Elite Management, Ametrine, Digital Realty, Amazing Magnets, Lion Real Estate Group, NeuraLink, Maddox Defense, DZS Inc, The Boring Company, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise,Tesla, Optym, Longevity Partners, Iron Ox, Palantir, 8VC, Bonchon, Titans of CNC, Saleen Performance Parts, CBRE, Slync.io, Baronte Securities, Omnigo Software, Incora, Vio Security, JDR Cable Systems, FileTrail, Sonim Technologies, Murphy Oil Corp, Buff City Soap, Origin Clear, QuestionPro, SignEasy, Sense, Astura, Charles Schwab, Splunk,  Bill.com, Chip 1 Exchange, McKesson, and Lonza. This is not a complete list and I am not considering (at present) which ones are doing it for all kinds of tax hypes. Now consider how many people will move as well. I get it, California is expensive, but how will this change that represents the population of more than one large city impact the power needs in Texas that is already has it fair share of brownouts, and that is just for starters, how many gas and oil energy producing plants will Texas get? Is ‘Big oil’ to blame, or do they merely offer a commodity that EVERYONE needs? Consider that a powerful computer required a 200 Watt power unit in 1997, today it is 600Watt or even higher. There were roughly 51 million units sold last year alone. I cannot state how the division on laptop and desktop is, but the need for energy is unrelentingly large, how large? Consider all the staff moving to Texas and consider how many more energy issues Texas has in the next two years, that is your marker and ‘Big Oil’ had nothing to do with this. 

So when we reconsider “wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US”, how many of these claimants voted against wind farms, against solar power and against nuclear power? They did it for all kinds of reasons and we get it, some are expensive and you do not want your children to go to school glowing in the dark (yet in winter that is a case for less accidents), but in all this blaming ‘Big Oil’ is just too ludicrous to mention. So as for a promise earlier in this article. When the US goes on with silly and stupid court cases, how long until the owners of IP and Patents will consider the US to be too dangerous to remain in? Consider that the US has an IP value of $21,000,000,000,000 (trillion), it represents almost 90% of the S&P 500 value, so what do you think happens when a massive slice of that moves to Asia or the Middle East, optionally to Europe? I reckon that over 70% of Wall Street executives are on a floor above the 30th and there is every chance that well over 40% of them will do a (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEpKcBkkVMY); now consider the stage of blaming the wrong  party. I am not stating that any of the energy delivering components are innocent, yet we are all guilty, in almost every nation. We remained silent when energy prices remained the same (somehow), we have known about alternatives and most people never pushed their politicians, we have known about the dangers of erosion for decades and we see pollution report after report, yet nothing is done. We are all to blame and putting ‘Big Oil and Gas’ in the dock will never ever go anywhere, I reckon that Kenneth Lay set the charter for that. When we realise that we allowed a utility to become profit driven which we clearly get from ‘the selling of electricity at market prices’, we changed a whole range of processes and now that we see the impact we should not cry, we should look into the mirror for blame.

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The future doorstop

That is how we sometimes see a book, a doorstop, a missile towards our partners (and sometimes really annoying elderly teens), a weight for the papers we need, when a book is not really what we wanted, it gets a secondary function. So even as some saw this specific book as ‘A beautiful defense of the common man and woman against a technological elite’, I consider a book like ‘The Tyranny of Big Tech’ as one that is not stating the issues. 

Did I read it?
Nope, and I do not have to, the article clearly shows a republican (who looks like he recently stopped being a teenager) who is aiming for money from both the left and the right. When we see “According to Hawley, it’s not our politicians, our lawyers, our Ivy League graduates, or our Hollywood celebrities. It’s Big Tech – those big names like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Google that have embedded themselves in our lives to an almost irreversible degree”, I see the beginning of a BS string of texts that will most certainly become debatable and utterly rejectable. You see Zuckerberg attended Harvard whilst designing Facebook, Dorsey came up with the idea for Twitter at NYU, Jeff Bezos was already done with Princeton when Amazon became the idea, Apple was the child of Steve Jobs who attended part of Reed and dropped out, Sergey Brin and Larry Page came from Stanford, so what is left of “not our Ivy League graduates”? Oh and I with my 5G IP am from UTS (Sydney), so there! And when we get to “have embedded themselves in our lives to an almost irreversible degree” we get a lot more. Apple (Macintosh) offered what consumers wanted, Google did the same, Facebook did it even more and created a new digital era and they all OFFERED it to consumers, they planned long term and they won, the small minded people lost. The exception is the Amazon guy who doesn’t need to spend on Shampoo, he offered something to rural people all over the world which they never had access too. In the US this is 60,000,000 people and in the EU it is 125,000,000. One firm aimed for a little over 180 million consumers. The people shops forgot and now Amazon is the bad guy? So this is the setting from the start and the man with the teenager look (Josh Hawley) is already off to a bad start. So when we see “the robber barons reshaped the economy into a corporate monopoly to serve their own ends, in which an aristocratic elite govern above the labouring masses”, all whilst the US government stole from the native Americans whatever they could (99.655% roughly) is like the pot calling the kettle black. In this one pushed what they wanted, the other (current big tech) let the people decide on WHAT they desired and the consumers liked the free 1GB email (Google) whilst the internet providers offered 20MB for a fee. What would you do? That same grocery store (still Google) came up with additional ways to service the consumers (cookies anyone?), the offered shopping, information and choice, whilst those dabbling on the internet wee all about grabbing whatever coins they could get. When the consumers were happy players like Amazon created the Amazon Web Services offering a pay as you go approach, a cloud approach to small businesses. First web services in 2002 and cloud services in 2008, it would take IBM and Microsoft years to offer anything near that, the big tech of then were made basically redundant. And with the pay as you go there was a larger SaaS (Software as a Service) setting. The big 5 became big not because “Big Tech is a direct descendent of the Gilded Age robber barons”, but because they offered choice when the others were unwilling to do so. In this Apple stands alone. They were always the elite DTP solution (a lot more expensive than others) and in 1998 they recognised the needs of the consumer and the iMac was born, all whilst the consumer got the amazing phrase “There’s no step 3!”, an affordable solution in an age where PC’s were still running behind the facts. If you were not up to speed you were either lost or you became an Apple user. All this whilst the writer wants to push “descendent of the Gilded Age robber barons”, a stage none of them pushed for, it merely is in the statements of those who were asleep at the wheel between 1996-2006, they lost it all by not pushing the envelope and 5 companies got ahead. The fifth (Netflix) was like Facebook, it offered something never offered before and whilst we had to seek TV provider after TV provider, they offered what we wanted, movies and specifically movies not hindered by advertisements. They went from sales to rental to streaming and as the firm started in 1998, Hulu, Stan, HBO Max and Disney Plus, some well over a decade AFTER Netflix, so the statement from Josh Hawley is not just bogus, it is utter nonsense. So when we see “Washington, D.C. politicians routinely protect the interests of Big Tech over and against the freedom and well-being of the American people” we see the joke that this book seemingly is. These systems were offered to consumers, you can walk away! I kept my Yahoo account for years later, until the information offered was too outdated or too much adjusted for localisation (against my will), so when we see ‘well-being of the American people’ I wonder what data he can actually produce (raw data, not aggregated and weighted data) and in the grand scheme of things, the US has 320 million people, Europe has 750 million and India has 1.3 billion. All enjoying what the five players are offering. In all that, the US is a mere 15% and on the global scale they do not add up to much, and the US is actually part of that failing. In the era of 1990-2010 American firms remained largely absent on the international scale, relying on someone to pick up the ball and none of them did and the American needs were swallowed by the voice of the consumers, no barons, no lawyers and no politicians. The people wanted what Google offered and Youtube now has over 2,000,000,000 viewers (I am one of them), so far none of the offerers were able to meet this and more important by 2005 both IBM and Microsoft were merely relying on Adobe Flash, these two players had nothing to offer. In 15 years they never really woke up and here I get to use Microsoft against itself with “Microsoft Stream is a corporate video-sharing service which was released on June 20, 2017 that will gradually replace the existing Office 365 Video”, so 12 years of inactivity, in comparison, the Chinese (the makers of Won Ton soup) gave us TikTok one year earlier and now has 100,000,000 active users. Players like IBM and Microsoft have been that much asleep at the wheel. As I personally see it, American BigTech is the only player (all 5 of them) that stops the USA from becoming utterly irrelevant, if they were not there China would be superpower number one and they are close of becoming that anyway, any issues with BigTech and every BS article in every newspaper with  some ‘alleged’ and ‘watchdog’ is merely another delay and it will help China to become the greatest tech power, US politicians (EU politicians as well) are helping China meet that goal.

BigTech, the virgin
BigTech is not holy, it is not innocent and it is no virgin (they got screwed by global politicians again and again, so they are definitely not virgins), BigTech are merely the innovators we always needed and the rest is merely a wannabe player, even Microsoft and IBM have fallen that much from grace. Microsoft had the most powerful console in the world and within 2 years they were surpassed by the weakest console of all (Nintendo Switch), IBM has its own stream of non-successes, and they are all crying to their politicians as to the bad bad tech companies. Most of them had no idea what the digital era was until they were surpassed by a lot of other players (some of them Asian). So when we consider the stage, we need to see the whole stage, not some setting of “Ending Big Tech’s sovereignty is about taking back our own, and we can begin to do that in the lives we live together. Big Tech works relentlessly to force individuals into its ecosystem of addiction, exhibitionism, and fear of missing out. It seeks to create its own social universe and draw all of life into its orbit. But the real social world, the life of family and neighbourhood – the authentic communities that sustain authentic togetherness – can act as a counterweight to Big Tech’s ambitions”, in this phrases like ‘force individuals’ is massively wrong, people have choices. I do not have Facebook on my mobile, I have no need for it there, I do not order from Amazon (I am a support your local hooker kind of guy) and I have currently no Netflix or Disney Plus subscription. That is 3 out of 5, I have an Apple because Microsoft dropped the ball 4 times in the last 5 years and IBM is too expensive for what it offers. I chose! We can all choose and that is where we realise that ‘The Tyranny of Big Tech’ is like a Chicago politician, all hot air and not too much on substance (judging from the article (at https://mindmatters.ai/2021/06/a-book-review-the-tyranny-of-big-tech/). He might at some point present a few parts that are relevant, I am certain that he will, but as a former Missouri’s Attorney General he will tread on places where he knows the answers, so as I see “holding Big Tech accountable where others don’t dare tread. In investigations, in legislation”, I merely wonder how much legislation against BigTech made it through? It matters because it is what you can prove that matters, not what you claim. I made no claims, it is all timeline stuff, including the Chinese parts. 

Consider the choices YOU have, and make choices, it is your right. You need not be on Google, you can select Microsoft Bing. You will lose out on a lot but that is the choice you make. For well over 20 years Google offered choices, YOU were the consumer that selected WHERE you wanted to go and you went there. All whilst Microsoft could not be bothered, it seems to me that the Netscape Victory made them lazy and now they are no longer the relevant company, they are merely the Column B (or C) company. And consider being in a place like Antigo Wisconsin. Now try to buy a game, a DVD, a bluray, a 4K movie, a CD and a book. How many of these items will require Amazon? It was the foundation of 4G (Wherever I am) and it will be the stage of 5G (wheneverI want it), so when will 5G be available in Antigo Wisconsin? Consider these points and consider whatever Josh Hawley is trying to imprint on you and consider what you can find out for yourself. BigTech is not evil, BigTech is because the others became lazy, BigTech merely is and governments do not like the self sufficient organisations, the ones that do not make large contributions to them. In the end if you look into the shareholders and stakeholders of some of these players you get a very different picture, one you need to be wary of.

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Non Comprehension

This is an article that is a little different. To be clear, it consist of an article (from Reuters) and a really weird dream I had, a dream I do not seem to understand at present, but when I think of one, the other one hammers down on me. In the dream I am in a small cubicle, a cubicle with a sliding door, the cubicle is small, barely enough space for 3 people to stand in. I a wearing some kind of hood, not unlike flame proof hood you see Formula one people wear. The hood restricts views to the side, and I kept on hearing ‘Ghost mode deactivating’ and ‘Ghost mode deactivated’, there was a man there, mid or end 30’s, yet I keep on not seeing the face. And the light, there is a small light there, but I seem to be weirdly overreactive to light, almost shunning light. Not sure why. That is all the parts I remember, there is more but every time it is within reach, it slips away. It was decently unsettling. 

The article is quite different, it I found at https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-facebook-rejects-talks-with-australia-publisher-testing-worlds-2021-06-25/ and the headline ‘Facebook rejects talks with Australia publisher, testing world’s toughest online law’ should speak volumes. As I read “Australia’s competition watchdog is looking into a claim that Facebook Inc refused a publisher’s request to negotiate a licensing deal, the regulator told Reuters, setting the stage for the first test of the world’s toughest online content law”, so when we see this some will react. Yet questions keep on forming in my mind. So when I see “Facebook declined without giving a reason, The Conversation said, even though the publisher was among the first in Australia to secure a similar deal with Google in the lead-up to the law in 2020” I wonder what is actually in play. You see, they are putting too much faith in social media, it is the old and ever returning discussion of perception and awareness, yet without engagement it almost means nothing and being on social media the way they do is not engagement, it is almost a fake form of representation. They are all vying for the wrong pile of nothing. It is almost like the Conversation is setting itself up to be someone else’s tool. The conversation has internet, it has a website (at https://theconversation.com), so why does it need social media? The article does give the answer one paragraph later with “The knock-back could present the first test of a controversial mechanism unique to Australia’s effort to claw back advertising dollars from Google and Facebook: if they refuse to negotiate licence fees with publishers, a government-appointed arbitrator may step in”, with ‘claw back advertising dollars’, it is seemingly about the money, it is always about the money. 

Yes, I agree that this is a method that seemingly works, seemingly is the operative word. Yet the mission (of greed) in light of what we see is not to push for borders that everyone pushes, it is about creating engagement, a part many marketeers and market researchers are eager to avoid, those numbers are not that impressive in too many of cases. So whilst we ponder the words of Andrew Hunter, we look at “Hunter did not answer specific questions concerning The Conversation, but said Facebook was planning a separate initiative “to support regional, rural and digital Australian newsrooms and public-interest journalism in the coming months”, without giving details”, yet when we consider that it first launched in Australia in March 2011, and has expanded into editions in the United Kingdom in 2013, United States in 2014, Africa and France in 2015, Canada in 2017, Indonesia in 2017, and Spain in 2018. In September 2019, The Conversation reported a monthly online audience of 10.7 million users onsite, and a combined reach of 40 million people including republications, it is also available in English, French, Spanish, and Indonesian, so the entire ‘regional, rural and digital Australian newsrooms’ becomes debatable. One could optionally argue that Facebook has a circle of stakeholders that is looking out for their own media friends. I agree that my view is personal and optionally debatable as well, yet the issues in play overlap in a weir way, a view with a limited view forward, not to the sides, just like the F1 hood I was wearing in my dream, I could not see the sides other then to turn my head. 

Facebook could be playing a real dangerous game, but it is not one I can see at present. They are slick and hiding behind party lines, giving us ambiguous “journalism in the coming months”, especially when the details are missing, and the media doesn’t rely on day to day, do they? And it is then, at the end of the article where Rod Sims gives the game away with “If Google’s done a deal with them, I can’t see how Facebook should argue that they shouldn’t” with the added “using the term for assigning an arbitrator”, this is about drawing borderlines and the Australian ACCC allowed for this new stage of media war, the sad part is that the ones with money will get their share, they are or will become stakeholders, the small players like the Conversation do not. It seems to be (at least in my mind) a stage that politicians never understood in the first place, or they did and they were fending for themselves, not the people. The pie of revenue is shrinking and the current players want their same share (plus 10%), the fallout will be growing over time, I feel certain of that. I merely wonder what the others will do whilst the larger players ignore engagement (for now), in the old station of a program like AnswerTree, the setting was clear, you can either mail more to keep the revenue, growing cost again and again, and you have the option to mail more efficient, growing engagement is mailing more efficient and in the end better rewarding. Yet in all this, it is not about Facebook, Google or the Conversation. It is about the political players, they are about themselves and it will cost the media a lot more than they are willing to accept soon enough.

It is merely my view, it is speculative but I think it is more on point then even I can admit to.

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Blame Canada

Yes, we remember the song (some of us do), yet we never thought it would go this far, to this extent and to this degree. I thought I was angry when I wrote ‘Faith by the hypocrite’ on June 7th (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/06/07/faith-by-the-hypocrite/), 215 children and now, we see ‘751 unmarked graves found at residential school’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243), and ‘Hundreds of unmarked graves found at Canadian indigenous school’ (at https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadian-first-nation-finds-751-unmarked-graves-former-residential-school-2021-06-24/), so where is the rage, where is the media with their unnamed sources and accusations like they did with Saudi Arabia, they had no evidence then and they are openly ignoring it now. There is no hounding of Cardinals, chasing of Bishops and a lot more is missing, but this is a stage I NEVER ever expected to happen in any Commonwealth nation, mass murder, a mass murder that involved the clergy and optionally members of the law and government as well. When I see “An indigenous group in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan on Thursday said it had found the unmarked graves of up to 751 people at a now-defunct Catholic residential school, just weeks after a similar discovery rocked the country”, I also fail to see a mass of people hunting down the Catholic church and it’s so called ‘benevolent’ actions, how benevolent was it to the hundreds of people, almost a thousand in two locations. This is not a failure, an error. This was as I see it intentional misplacing people, optionally for financial gain, optionally murdered. And at this site we also see “It is not clear how many of the remains detected belong to children, Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme told reporters, adding that oral stories mentioned adults being buried at the site”, enforcing my view of intent, children and adults do not die in an accident and as Al Jazeera even gave us “Pope Francis expresses ‘pain’ after remains of 215 Indigenous students found, but does not offer apology long sought by residential school survivors”, we see a failing, a very large failing from the Deacon at the bottom to the patriarch of paedophiles at the very top and we all just sit back and watch it happen. If our first impulse is to protect the children (any children), the waves of inaction I see is darn right unnatural and when did we ever embrace unnatural actions?

And when I see ““Canada will be known as a nation who tried to exterminate the First Nations,” said Bobby Cameron, Chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, which represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan. “This is just the beginning.””, at this time I tend to agree and the lack of arrests is just staggering, so how long until 2-3 head honchos of the Catholic Church are ‘relocated’ to a nice place in Vatican city? 

And there is also the issue with the media, I see a lack of media supporting Bobby Cameron. Yet I also see something familiar, it was 40 years ago that I saw Brubaker, it was one of the first Robert Redford movies I saw, and it had an impact, but not to the degree it should have had and now when I think back towards Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal by Tom Murton and Joe Hyams, I am hit by some of the similarities and I am massively surprised that so far I seem to be the only one making the link, the train of thought that people in ‘assumed power’ had in those days, taking coins left right and centre is baffling, how the aftermath of then seems to be similar to what we see in Canada now and the media is not all over it. How weird is that?

I also see a lack of media asking questions of the Catholic church and I see a lack of actions all over the place, but I do acknowledge “We are treating this like a crime scene”, the entire article mentions the word Crime twice, how odd is it not? I also see the political need and savvy when we see ‘Justin Trudeau fires back at China after it calls to investigate Canada’, yet the stage of almost 1000 corpses in Canada is one that no one in the Commonwealth ever saw coming, an approach to genocide, but Justin Trudeau had a beard, it might be his one upside to the Covid era. The man looks better with a beard. I do get his response, but it was the wrong one to give at this time. You see it is all well and good to give us “a Canadian truth and reconciliation commission had worked from 2008 to 2015 to address the mistreatment of the indigenous population”, yet they failed to find the two hundred and fifteen and the seven hundred and fifty one dead people in that time, so I reckon Canada has a larger issue and this becomes the this large event that involves the Catholic church, as such the gloves need to come off and the large non-accountability events for the clergy needs to stop, as well as making the church tax accountable, the cost of digging into the past is growing and the church has had enough mulligans (with or without a blessed golf club). And as I personally see it “there may have been markers for the graves at one point but that the Roman Catholic church, which oversaw the cemetery, may have removed them” that some people were aware of the criminal activities and decided to hide what they could. Yet, as I see it, the larger stage is unmentioned, the media has too much to gain by not mentioning speculated optional Catholic Criminal Events. And my evidence? Considering that Google search reveals 225,000 hits on ‘Bobby Cameron’ in all this (total of both events), and the journalistic farce called ‘Jamal Khashoggi’ with no evidence had 10 times more hits on the international stage within 2 days. Oh, that is before we get to UN essay writers (Agnes Callamard) giving us their speculated view with ‘CIA conclusions’ in all this, how active has she been in regards to the Canadian events? I will tell you “Bobby Cameron”+”Agnes Callamard” gives you ZERO hits on Google search, so what is going on with the rights of the people that are part of the Canadian First Nations group? 

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Conjecture

To understand this piece, we need to consider the meaning, when we use conjecture we imply and mean “an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information”, the media tens to be in this state well over 90% of the time. They call it something else, something like ‘from sources who revealed this under condition of anonymity’, or perhaps you have heard the statement ‘people close to the matter revealed to us’, yet it remains conjecture, the information was not complete, it almost never is. So when the Middle East Eye handed its readers the headline ‘Can Saudi Arabia develop a major domestic arms industry by 2030?’ Early this morning (18 hours ago), I had to think this through. I saw the setting last year, or the year before and I shrugged at it. You see ‘a major domestic arms industry’ is generic, too generic. Yet the setting is interesting as it will remove billions in revenue from the EU and the US. This after all the BS the US and the European nations gave them is actually refreshing. But the generic side remains. It is hand weapons, armoured vehicles, naval vessels, airforce crates (an old term for airplanes) the list goes on and they cannot have it all, but a nation like Saudi Arabia could set in motion armoured vehicles and hand weapons. I want to continue, yet lets take a look the article (at https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-develop-national-arms-industry-vision-2030) first. We get to see “Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) – a state-owned defence company – set up a joint venture with the US aerospace and defence giant Lockheed Martin, which, according to a SAMI statement, “will develop localised capabilities by transferring technology and knowledge, and by training a Saudi workforce in manufacturing products for, and providing services to, the Saudi armed forces”” is point number one. Then we get “Riyadh has successfully been able to divert some money formerly earmarked for imports to developing domestic alternatives and has reaped the benefit in terms of Saudis employed, but the goal of going from two percent domestic spending in 2018 to 50 percent domestic spending by 2030 is unrealistic if Riyadh wants to maintain its capabilities and maintain an arsenal of the best equipment,” she said” which they get from Emily Hawthorne, Stratfor’s Middle East and North Africa analyst. Yet I am not entirely convinced. I agree that 50% will be a tall order, I am not sure if 50% can be reached by 2030, too much needs to happen. Yet 2035? Is that out of reach? I am not convinced. You see, we all focus on one side, but this entire enterprise has two sides and we seemingly forget that. You see point one gives us ‘training a Saudi workforce in manufacturing products’,  my issue is that this is a focal point not a destination. You see, the military is a destination, The focal point of that workforce needs to grow beyond that. To see this we need to look back at WW1, yes that long back! You see no matter how amazing the Sopwith Camel was (I think the New Zealand Airforce still might have a few), it came from the Sopwith Pup. A plane that was introduced by Sopwith Aviation Company in 1916, during the war, yet the company was founded  on 15 December 1913 before WW1, implying that the design was altered for war, which makes perfect sense. That timeline shows that there is a larger stage to any plane, often used for war later on, that premise changed as the arms industry saw the massive benefits of wealth during WW2. It changed nearly everything. The arms industryu continued, but came from something else and it also came from a direct need. For the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (as my personal conjecture goes), it is in one part to strengthen national defence and it needs to diminish import in this area. A stage the others never had, they were always about the export. I tried to hide that clue in an earlier story named ‘The impact of insanity’ on January 20th 2019 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/01/20/the-impact-of-insanity/), the clue was “The idea came from a famous Dutch bank robber named Aage M (70’s)”, it was a clue, because outside of the Netherlands this man and his book would be widely unknown. I used an engineering solution and made it into a stealth weapon (we all have a bit of Alfred Nobel in us). The secondary clue is seen now (which was unintended), but in the original story I did write “Yet, the brain needs nourishment, in my case it is music, I found out that different scores, will set my mind in different directions and it is not set in the style of music, Whilst one album gave me the brain jump to get me to find the Zumwalt pounder (initially merely a solution to take down the Iranian navy), it was David Bowie, and his album ‘the Next day’ that pushed me to make an initial design of the Elder Scrolls X (formerly known as ES6). I never figured out why it happened, merely that it does”, the underlying part I that other elements drive us to push other areas forward, the Military push is NEVER from the military, it comes from somewhere else, and in this case it is most often civilian needs. We look at the internet and decentralised computing (as DARPA brought it), but the stage is almost never in that direction. It is a business need that fuels a consumer drive and it then becomes a military option. That is more often the case. So look and consider Saudi Arabia, or as the fat cats say, a lovely large sandbox. This sandbox has it own approach, its own needs, elements and drives. We in the west think we know, but there is too much we do not and cannot know. 

So I give you an alternative, we tend to seek an understanding of what is available, yet what is the stage of observation? We look at planes, we look at drones, but what if we take this in another direction? What if we redesign a much older concept?

So consider the previous image and consider the Battle of Fleurus (1794) where they were used first. In those days they had to be big, but today, with what we have in electronics, we could suffice with something that could be found at Toys-R-Us. Did SAMI ever consider (perhaps they did) to use a whole range of stealth kites? We tend to look at it as something like 

Yet that was then, that was civilian, so who considered redesigning that kite in dark colours, make it more stealth like and give it its lightweight electronics that allow for a 25 mile observation with a 5G connection to its base station? No fuel, a silent observer in the night and one most ground forces will not see until it is too late. The Middle East is a different stage, its theatre of war is on grounds seldom seen in the west, as such different solutions will work. A thought that I have not seen explored by DARPA (speculatively) and Raytheon/Northrop Grumman (less speculatively). We all need to consider that the offered information comes from conjecture (even mine) as such I have n clear image of what actually is, but I can see where others did not look (which gave me my 5G IP) and now SAMI has another venue for investigations on what could be done to spend less in other nations (feel free to financially support this poor poor blogger) and consider what else no one has been looking at, because in one of the other stories I left another link, which involves two valves that apparently do not yet exist and that opens up other venues of export. It even gave me a third idea just now. It reflects on an old premise that started the origin of Ceramic glaze, it had different functions, now consider the two-part epoxy adhesive, consider that if it is in two parts, it is an adhesive, yet what if the container it holds has two liquids as well, separate innocent, but if you remove the separation you get a secondary reaction, a chemical reaction that does something else, we now have a nice little chemical detonator, no danger there, until it changes the compound it reacts too, we now have a different setting. All elements that have been abandoned for larger and more accurate electronics. Yet what happens when we change the need of electronics? They need batteries and they tend to have their own flaws, chemicals do not, we are all about relying on the latest ‘electronic’ solutions all whilst the people forgot to look at the other solutions. You see “It has some disadvantages too, e.g. higher cost per detonator and the need for intensive training for users”, when timing is not essential, chemical detonators have their own benefits and in mass production they are cheaper and the need for a larger trained workforce and assembly environment becomes less so, all elements that are not what the seller wants to give you, but the buyer can rejoice when it is faced that way. It does not apply all over the place, but the question becomes, what allows for a different curve that allows for a real application of reducing the investment a cost of developing an arms industry that is applicable to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by 2030, there were two elements, the first is ‘develop a major domestic arms industry by 2030’, the second is ‘spending around 50 percent of its military budget on local sources’, yet that could be seen in two parts as well, spend 50% less of its budget and spend amount X on local sources. If $10B is spend in the US and you can reduce it by Spending $7B less and $2B on local sources the trip is near complete. Consider in that the cost of a US drone (like the MQ-1 Predators) all whilst a refurbishes Kite might cost no more than $15,000. So we get $40,000,000 versus $15,000. Yes the MQ-1 Predators can do a lot more, but how effective is that in Saudi Arabia? Most look at how cool you can fly for $40,000,000, all whilst 15 kites can cover a lot more ground and these groups merely have to observe and guide the MQ-1 Predators to its destination. It is conjecture that we know what is out there, all whilst the term conjecture implies we never knew. Be honest, how many of you considered the deployment of a stealth Kite? A device that uses no fuel, makes no sound and in the dark desert is seemingly as invisible as the night. 

All this whilst we need to consider that as SAMI becomes more successful, the US and the EU will miss out on billions each year, a station that they themselves had a hand in creating. In that time I came up with two additional novel ideas (that might not work). Have a great day!

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Non Chinese Harmony

Yes, we see and look at at harmony and we take turns into getting it and optionally capturing it, but harmony based on greed, on sales margins is not harmony, it is one sided lust. When we get that part we can get to the second part, it is a setting in a few parts. First there is ‘UK Huawei 5G ban hammers top line’ a week ago (at https://au.news.yahoo.com/huawei-profit-revenue-5-g-uk-rollout-151601892.html) there we see (yet again) “Dowden admitted the move would set back efforts to establish 5G in Britain by up to three years and cost the telecoms industry billions. However, he defended the move by citing national security concerns”, which is what I had already established in 2019 (the three year delay that is), in addition we see with: ‘Huawei’s HarmonyOS already has 134,000 apps, over 4 million developers have signed on’ (at https://www.gsmarena.com/huaweis_harmonyos_already_has_134000_apps_over_4_million_developers_have_signed_on-news-49552.php), which gets you to an earlier story I had on August 16th 2019 with ‘The slammer got slammed’ where I gave the reader (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/08/16/the-slammer-got-slammed/) “the message is not that there are 565 players, it is that they are all looking in a similar direction whilst the none excavated the gold mine that was right behind them, a first lesson that the classics can inspire towards a new direction. Now that I see their direction I found two other fields that had not been considered to the degree it needed. Saudi Arabia is giving us Neom City, but there is a lack in one direction and now that this can be exploited we see even more options. You only had to be willing to get your hands dirty in the most literal of ways. And all this is pushed even more through the impact of the European economy”, These sides all impact on what I wrote yesterday, as well as “Huawei announced that over 4 million developers have signed on to build on the Harmony platform and that there are already 134,000 apps using HMS Core. HMS Core itself keeps evolving and yesterday’s event saw the launch of version 6.0 with extended support for Huawei’s cloud services”, now we can set the elements together when you realise that (also shown yesterday) that Saudi Arabia has a 5G that is the fastest 5G, Saudi Arabis has a setting that will allow development of all kinds of apps, all kinds of 5G solutions that most places cannot equal with. This setting was seen 2 weeks ago with ‘Saudi Arabia witnesses expansion of 5G services’ in the Arab News (at https://www.arabnews.com/node/1873006/saudi-arabia) where we see “5G services have been extended to 53 governorates of the Kingdom as compared to 51 in the fourth quarter of 2020” what the article doesn’t say or winks at is the fact that in the setting they have now, they have a speed and a 3 year advantage in creating a lot more software solutions that require 5G, in this Saudi Arabia is not alone, South Korea and they are both twice as fast as Canada and well over 60% faster than Australia (in third position). But that setting opens up a lot of options for two nations, all whilst the US is nowhere near ready, as are most of the EU nations. But the danger of the EU and US losing more ground to others is now a direct danger because of HarmonyOS. There is no way to proof this, yet consider “Developers from China, Europe, Latin America, the Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa can participate. The monetary prize pool is $1 million, but Huawei will offer practical awards too, including marketing support, cloud resources, incentives for using HMS Core’s payment system and more”, a setting that puts the US in a non contender field and when we consider the applications, and the fields where dozens of apps are reengineered, Huawei now has the ability to become a mobile power broker within two years, all whilst you now get to mull over “the move would set back efforts to establish 5G in Britain by up to three years”, all whilst someone will wake up realise that the rest of Europe is largely falling behind too. Even as I gave warnings 3 years ago, others laughed at me and told me I was insane, now we see that the moment has come  and I was a lot more correct that even I expected to be, I actually thought it would take longer, and to be honest Saudi Arabia was not part of the equation, but with the 5G they now have they are part of the power play that is most likely to hit us over the next 2 years, and before mot of Europe is ready for 5G. 

The second part is seen in ‘Zain KSA is the fastest in 5G and data performance in Riyadh’ (at http://www.tradearabia.com/news/IT_383015.html) where we see “Zain KSA was also recognised for having the fastest YouTube video start time and browsing websites, which supports customers with surfing the website, music (song downloads) and social media trends and photo uploads”, which implies that the KSA could become a large streaming hub for a lot of the Middle East and for Europe as well. Clouds and cloud solutions in a place where the network and internet is well over 700% faster than anything the US has and almost twice as fast for 3-5 years than Canada and Australia, so as we see the impact of the economic dangers that the US and the EU faces at present, do you really think that the political views on BigTech makes any sense? BigTech is required to lessen the lag that could end the economic situation that the US and the EU faces. And that lag is increasing with every new less intelligent (read: stupid) decision the current administrations are making. A setting of greed is about the strangle a lot of nations and we are all letting that happen, a setting of everyone wants a share, a slice of the action, all whilst they had no part in creating any of it. I set that tone yesterday and whilst we give court time to people lacking imagination and innovation, TikTok (at $250B) surpassed all others but YouTube, now HarmonyOS is about to become the direct competitor of Android giving a setting where one third of mobile OS solutions is no longer American, it will be Chinese. All because some people made decisions absent of evidence. To them Harmony is overrated, I wonder how they see that closer to December 2022. A setting that is nearing faster as 4 million developers are using HarmonyOS to create a new economic wave for themselves, a stage that benefits China and it benefits the US a lot less so. 

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In earlier news

This partially reflect on what I stated yesterday in ‘The stage of what is’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/06/20/the-stage-of-what-is/), it is however now that I take notice of news that Reuters gave us on the 18th. There we see ‘China must develop unified, open-source smart car OS -ex-minister’, now for the most it comes to be in the ‘bla bla bla’ shape. I never much cared about cars, but for some reason I took notice of ‘China must develop’ (at https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-should-develop-unified-open-source-smart-car-operating-system-says-ex-2021-06-18/), for the most, I do not care, but the notion of that part of the sentence made me stop and read the article. There we see “the world’s biggest auto market, should develop its own unified, open-source operating system (OS) for smart vehicles, as well as auto chips, to maintain its advantage in the electric vehicle (EV) industry” there was nothing to disagree with, it is in any national interest to further its goals whether it is China, the US, India, the United Kingdom or Australia, we all have national interests. Yet when I took notice of “China should learn from the United States’ curbs on Chinese technology companies and boost its independence in vehicle-related technology” the cogs in my skull started to spin, which took more alarm to “U.S. President Joe Biden in April said the United States must ramp up production of electric vehicles to catch and surpass China”, which was interesting as I thought that the US (with all its marketing) was ahead of China in that field. So we have a different setting, one wants to catch up (and Democrats do not do that too well, all talk and no achievements tends to do that), China wants to make more headway optionally unbalancing the automotive industry even further. Yet it is the end that gives us “The Harmony operating system of Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies Co Ltd (HWT.UL) can be used in vehicles as well as smartphones” and that is the killer. I talked about that yesterday, I stated that HarmonyOS was a much larger problem and now we see the direct impact in a second industry, all whilst the Democrats (Republicans too) want to wage war on BigTech, yes, when was that EVER a good idea? So you are gearing up for the marathon and the first think you do is shoot yourself in the foot, now we see that the idiot athlete is shooting itself in both feet, so where do you think that athlete will end? Wanna buy a wooden spoon for the awards? 

Yesterday I also referred to an earlier story from 2020, where I mentioned “if HarmonyOS catches on, Google will have a much larger problem for a much longer time. If it is about data Google will lose a lot, if it is about branding Google will lose a little, yet Huawei will gain a lot on the global stage and Apple? Apple can only lose to some extent, there is no way that they break even”, now it seems that this was less accurate, and ‘if HarmonyOS catches on’ should be replaced with ‘as HarmonyOS is catching on’, you see if China gets the advantage there, it can offer that solution to Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK all fighting to gain the upper hand in Europe. Do you think that they will ignore the HarmonyOS solution whilst the US is marketing itself ahead without evidence of actually being ahead? The damage to Google and Amazon will add up a lot more in this way and as HarmonyOS gains momentum, it will also gain momentum in 5G domotics and smart-wear. Yes, the Americans will say no, no, no, we already have something, so buy OUR solution. Yet the numbers from Tom’s guide (less than a month ago) give us: 

And now compare that to Statista from September 2020, yes there is momentum but when you are trailing by 80% to number one, you have a massive problem.

Consider that Australia is wielding a 5G solution 300% faster than the US, do you think it does not matter? Think again, the US is desperately behind nations it used to look down on and China is ahead, by a lot and with the HarmonyOS trump card (also a card Donald Trump handed them) the headway that China is making in 5G will change the setting of who Europe aligns with, they have no choice, their debts are crushing them and China would be a way out, so at what point will the US dump the BigTech BS that is largely its own fault and was created and grew as the other players became complacent? We can now use the line the US tended to use against all of us against them

Winners talk, bullshitters walk

A stage they set in motion and fuelled by relying on buying IP (and viagra) and not working hard to keep innovative ahead of the game, now they get to see the other side of the equation, one where they are in line to lose industry after industry because the shots were called by stupid people. How is that working out for them? So as President Biden is trying to create a united front against Huawei (China) he will be noticing that the armour used is less and less effective, as HarmonyOS matures (towards version 2), America’s only way is to find a solution with players like Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM and Microsoft and their BigTech front will have to collapse, or they need to accept that China takes all in the end. That is the setting and when politicians from both sides of the aisle are crying ‘regulate BigTech’ its own enemies within will delay matters more and more, which works out nicely for Huawei, so when France or Germany allows HarmonyOS (Germany is more likely), HarmonyOS will sweep the landscape from automotive to 5G domotics and that is just the start, the backset for Google will grow. The issue is that Google still has options and the lag is not that large, but in that setting US politics need to grow up and wake up, the latter part is more important at present. So whilst we needed to take more notice of earlier news, the news that was earlier and needed to be properly addressed was in 2020 and that was not done, and now the US has a massive problem in multiple fields, so how is that coming across? And as the Daily Telegraph apparently gave its readers two days ago that Trump admitted defeat, we see that the former American El Jefe was almost 6 months late in learning simple top-line statistics, so what happens when this president is unable to learn from those blunders and make matters worse? Lina Khan is merely a first step (which I am not blaming her for), but not the only step. When we see losers crying foul (at https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/google-asks-court-to-narrow-scope-of-rumbles-antitrust-case-in-mtd/) on the setting of ‘monopolisation of the online video-sharing platform market’, all whilst Tik-Tok (a Chinese invention no less), grew by well over 110%, in addition to the stage that YouTube was bought in 2006 by Google and they made something real from it (they bought it for less then $2B) and it made them $20B in 2020, so a decent invention, all whilst Rumble came 7 years after YouTube and is a Canadian solution almost no one has heard of, so they seemingly try to make their money in court (as I personally see it), and this wave of crybabies is stopping US innovations, you see if these players had true innovation they would be in the game, Tik Tok came three years after Rumble and surpassed them (almost overnight), and is now valued at $250,000,000,000, which is the impact of innovation. It is time for the US and its FTC to stop whinging with BS court cases and have a larger look at the industry and the impact that others have, especially when they should not need to waste time in courts. 

The US wants to be number one, but in the process has no issues tying the hands of people who can make that happen behind their backs, how will that ever result in any option to win? 

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The stage of what is

Yes, we all have that and I am no exclusion, ‘what is’ is the first part of a question that is dangerous. The answer that follows tends to be subjective and personal, as such it is loaded with bias, not that all bias is bad, but it defers from what actually is. This was the first stage when I saw ‘Lina Khan: The 32-year-old taking on Big Tech’. Then we get “when it comes to unfair competition, there is one sector that has been singled out by Democrats and Republicans alike: Big Tech”, this is the beginning of a discriminatory setting. There are two sides in this and let me begin that Big Tech is not innocent, so what is this about? Lets add ““What became clear is there had been a systemic trend across the US… markets had come to be controlled by a very small number of companies,” she said”, now we need to realise that there are two parts here too, in the first she is not lying and for the most, she is correct. 

So why do I oppose?

The US, most of the Commonwealth and the EU all have a massive failing, they have no clue what they are doing. I have seen that side for over 30 years and it is the beginning of a larger stage. You see the big tech part needs to be split in two elements big tech and those who ‘use’ (or abuse) the elements of big tech. Big tech was more than the FAANG group (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), in the beginning there was Microsoft, IBM and Sun as well (there were a few more players but they were gobbled up or ended up being forgotten. When we see charts of technology and market capitalisation we see Microsoft in second place, so why is Microsoft left outside of the targeting of these people? Microsoft is many things, but it was never innocent or some goody two shoes, the same can be argued for IBM, IBM have been gobbling up all kinds of corporations in the last 20 years, so why is IBM disregarded so often? It it nice to target the companies with visibility towards consumers, but that puts Microsoft with more than one issue in the crosshairs, but they are ignored, why is that?

Then we get back to the BBC article (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57501579) where we see “Her general criticism is that Big Tech is simply too big – that a handful of large US tech firms dominate the sector, at the expense of competition”, she is not incorrect, but there are more sides to that story. In 1997 I gave an idea to bosses (in a software firm) on consumers messaging each other and for a firm to be in the middle of that. Being a gateway and a director of messages and giving visibility to people of other matters (I never used the word advertising). It was founded on a missing part when Warner Brothers created (in partnership with Angelfire) a website hub. So fans of Babylon 5, Gilmore Girls and a few other series could Create their own webpage, they got 20MB for free and an address, like in Babylon 5 I was something like Section Red number 23 (I forgot, it was 25 years ago), the bosses stated that there would never be a use for that, it was not their business and there was no business need for something like that and 4 years later someone else created Facebook. Now I am no Facebook creator, what I had was in no way anywhere near that, but that is a side a lot of people forget, the IT people had no clue on what the digital era was bringing and what it looked like, so as they were unaware, politicians had even less of a clue. So when Google had its day (search and email) no one knew what was going on, they merely saw a free email account with 1GB of storage and everyone got on the freebee train, that is all well and good, but nothing is for free, it never ever is. 

As such a lot of companies remained inactive for close to half a decade, Google had created something unique and they are one of the founding fathers of the Digital age. Consider that Microsoft was clueless for close to a decade and when they started they were behind by a lot and there inaccurate overreaction of Bing, is merely laughable. Microsoft makes all these claims yet it was the creators of Google who came up with the search system and they got Stanford to make this for them, just look it up, a patent that is the foundation of Google and Microsoft was in the wind and blind to what would be coming. By the time they figured it out they were merely second tier junkyard vendors. And (as I personally see it) the bigger players in that time (IBM and Microsoft) were all ready to get rich whilst sleeping, they were looking into the SaaS world (diminishing cost to the larger degree), outsourcing as a cost saving and so on, as I see it players like Microsoft and IBM were about reducing cost and pocketing that difference, so as Google grew these players were close to a no-show and do not take my word for that, look at the history line of what was out there. In retrospect Apple saw what would be possible and got on the digital channel as fast as possible. Yet IBM and Microsoft were Big Tech, yet they are ignored in a lot of cases, why is that? When you ignore 2 out of 6 (I am not making Netflix part of this) we get the 2 out of part and that comes down to more than 30%, this is discrimination, it grows as Adobe has its own (well deserved) niche market, yet are they not big tech too? One source gives us “As of June 2021 Adobe has a market cap of $263.55 B. This makes Adobe the world’s 32th most valuable company by market cap according to our data”, which in theory makes them larger than IBM, really? Consider that part, for some reason Adobe is according to some a lot larger than IBM (they are 112th), so when we consider that, can we optionally argue that the setting is tainted? In a stage where there are multiple issues with the numbers and the descriptions we are given, the entire setting of Big Tech is needing a massive amount of scrutiny, and when I see Lina Khan giving us “markets had come to be controlled by a very small number of companies” I start to get issues. Especially when we see “there is one sector that has been singled out by Democrats and Republicans alike: Big Tech”. You see singling out is a form of discrimination, it is bias and that is where we are, a setting of bias and to some extent, we are all to blame, most of us are to blame because of what we were told and what was presented to us, yet no one is looking to close to the presenters themselves and it is there that I see the problem, This is about large firms being too large and the people who do not like these large firms are the people who for the most do not understand the markets they are facing. Just like the stage of media crying like little bitches because they lose revenue to Google (whilst ignoring Bing as it has less than 3% marketshare). 

The who? The what? Why?

This part is a little more complex, to try to give my point, I need to go back to some Google page that gives me “What is Google’s position on this new law? We are not against being regulated by a Code and we are willing to pay to support journalism—we are doing that around the world through News Showcase. But several aspects of the current version of this law are just unworkable for the services you use and our business in Australia. The Code, as it’s written, would break the way Google Search works and the fundamental principle of the internet, by forcing us to pay to provide links to news businesses’ sites. There are two other serious problems remaining with the law, but at the heart of it, it comes down to this: the Code’s rules would undermine a free and open service that’s been built to serve everyone, and replace it with one where a law would give a handful of news businesses an advantage over everybody else.”

This is about that News bargaining setting. Here we get ‘by forcing us to pay to provide links to news businesses’ sites’, and I go ‘Why?’ A lot of them do not give us news, they give us filtered information, on addition to this is that if I am unwilling to buy a newspaper, why should I pay for their information? If they want to put it online it is up to them, they can just decide not to put it online, that I their right. In addition some sources for years pretty much EVERY article by the Courier Mail get me a sales page (see below), this is their choice and they are entitled to do so.

Yet this sales pitch is brought to us in the form of a link to a news article. It still happens today and it is not merely the Courier Mail, there are who list of newspapers that use the digital highway to connect to optional new customers. So why should they get paid to be online? In the digital stage the media has become second best, the stage that the politicians are eager to ignore is that a lot of the ‘news bringers’ are degraded to filtered information bringers. In the first why should I ever pay for that and in the second, why would I care whether they live or die? Do not think this is a harsh position, Consider the Daily Mail giving us two days ago ‘Police station is branded the ‘most sexist in Britain’ after investigations find officers moonlighted as prostitutes, shared pornography with the public and conducted affairs with each other on duty’, so how did they get to ‘most sexist in Britain’? What data do they have and hw many police stations did they investigate? There is nothing of that anywhere in the article, then we get to ‘after a series of scandals’, how many is a series of scandals? Over what time frame? Then we get to ‘Whatsapp and Facebook groups used to exchange explicit sexual messages and images have been shut down’, as such were the identities of the people there confirmed? How many were there? What evidence was there? All issues that the Daily Mail seems to skate around and ‘In the latest scandal, PC Steve Lodge, 39’ completes the picture. Who else was hauled to court and is ‘hauled’  a procedural setting in an arrest? When one rites to emphasise to capture the interest of the audience it becomes filtered information, it becomes inaccurate and therefor a lot of it becomes debatable. Well over a dozen additional questions come to mind of a half baked article on the internet, and they get paid for that? And as we consider ‘He was alleged to have’ we get the ‘alleged’ part so that the newspaper cannot be held liable, but how accurate was the article? That same setting transfers to Lina Khan.

The article gives us ‘or rather a perceived lack of competition’ as well as ‘markets had come to be controlled by a very small number of companies’, they are generalising statements, statements lacking direct focal point and specifications. In the first ‘perceived’ is a form of perception, biased and personal, ones perception is not another ones view of the matter. It is not wrong to state it like that, but when you go after people it is all about the specifics and all about data and evidence, as I see it evidence has been lacking all over the board.
And when we consider ‘markets had come to be controlled by a very small number of companies’ I could add “PetSmart has 1650 shops in the US, they could set the price for tabby’s on a national level, is that not a cartel foundation?” Yet these politicians are not interested in a price agreement of pets are they, it is about limiting the stage of certain people, but by doing so they will hurt themselves a lot more than they think. On November 14th 2020 I wrote the article ‘Tik..Tik..Tik..’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/11/14/tik-tik-tik/), where I wrote “if HarmonyOS catches on, Google will have a much larger problem for a much longer time. If it is about data Google will lose a lot, if it is about branding Google will lose a little, yet Huawei will gain a lot on the global stage and Apple? Apple can only lose to some extent, there is no way that they break even”, and a lot ignored the premise, but now as HarmonyOS has launched (a little late), the stage is here. When it is accepted as a real solution, Google stands to lose the Asian market to a much larger degree and all because a few utterly stupid politicians did not know what they were doing, more important Huawei still has options in the Middle East and in Europe. So the damage will add and add and increase to a much larger degree, especially if India goes that way, for Google a market that could shrink up to 20%, close to 2,000,000,000 consumers are per July 1st ill have an alternative that is not Apple or Google, that is what stupidity gets them. My IP will connect to HarmonyOS, so I am not worried, yet as I see it the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) better start getting its ships properly aligned, because if HarmonyOS is indeed a decent version from version 2 onwards the US tech market could shrink by a little over 22.4%, the US economy is in no way ready for such a hit, all because politicians decided to shout without evidence and knowhow of what they were doing, a nice mess, isn’t it?

The stage of ‘What is’ depends on reflection and comprehension and both were lacking in the US, I wonder what they will lose next. 

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