Looking at the line-up of Tech Big Bros at the inauguration, one would find it difficult to argue that a new oligarchy is replacing the old. Here is Matt Stoller’s take.
“Is the symbolism of the inauguration a signal of coming policy choices on antitrust? Certainly, that’s the consensus. CNBC is broadcasting interviews with happy private equity executives from Davos, and there’s a sense of overwhelming joy from dealmakers who think that Trump will foster more mergers. This morning, Pepsi’s CEO Ramon Laguarta publicly praised the Republicans on the Federal Trade Commission for opposing the Robinson-Patman Act lawsuit last week, suggesting he thinks that the company is going to get out from under the law. There’s a hope that flattery and donations can lead to the end of pesky antitrust cases.
The Washington Dulles airport runways were full of private jets ferrying people to and from the inaugural festivities, and there are rumors that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, will be involved in everything from buying TikTok to taking over Intel.”
A strong antitrust push followed the Gilded Age. What will happen now? From Big, Antitrust in an Oligarchy
As the Internet becomes the mainstream media, there is a pressing need to reconcile its behavior with what we require of legacy media. It goes beyond Section 230.
“In the pre-internet era, turning 18 in America conferred a very specific, if furtive, privilege: the right to walk into a store and buy an adult magazine.
Technically, it still does, for those hypothetical teenagers who prefer to get their smut in print. For practical purposes, however, American children can access porn as soon as they can figure out how to navigate a web browser. That’s because, since the 1990s, America has had two sets of laws concerning underage access to pornography. In the physical world, the law generally requires young-looking customers to show ID proving they’re 18 before they can access adult materials. In the online world, the law has traditionally required, well, nothing. Under Supreme Court precedent established during the internet’s infancy, forcing websites to verify the age of their users is burdensome and ineffective, if not impossible, and thus incompatible with the First Amendment.”
From The Atlantic, The Future of the Internet Is Age-Gated
As a physician I made many decisions daily. As a surgeon, some of those decisions had immediate consequences, consequences that, bad or good, were difficult to dissociate from my choices rather than other knowns or unknowns.
“No decision is made with certainty. Not a single one. If there were no uncertainty, there would be no decision to make!
And what that means is that whatever framework we build for making life’s hardest decisions has to do three things:
It has to incorporate the important outcomes you—the decision-maker—are interested in.
It has to prioritize those outcomes according to your values
And it has to defang the uncertainty. …
One last thought. The goal is never perfect decisions — they don’t exist. The goal is good decisions. Decisions you’ve thought through, felt through, and tried on. As Herbert Simon has noted, we’re not looking for optimal choices but ones that are good enough, given everything we know right now.”
While it is a bit too math-heavy for me, much of this resonates. From Medium’s, The Anatomy of a Good Decision
ACSH gets a lot of criticism for being a “corporate shill,” which we are not. Interestingly, we rarely hear that we are inaccurate. In fact, we are truthful if you look at the findings on fact-checking websites. We cannot say the same for some posts on X or Meta.
“Zuckerberg’s decision to follow the lead of that intrepid and omnipresent truth-seeker, Elon Musk, and set up an X-like system of “Community Notes” is another political act, of equal cynicism. Handing off authority for fact-checking to “the community” has practical advantages for Meta, as it did for X. The community doesn’t send invoices. Fact-checking, like content creation, is unpaid labor that users, or at least some small subset of them, will contribute for free. And by “democratizing” fact-checking, Meta gains a buffer against criticism. Responsibility, and blame, is shifted onto the faceless community."
From the new Substack of Nicolas Carr, Truth Doesn't Scale
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
