Charlatan Magazine
https://charlatanmagazine.com
August 11, 2024
Google’s ubiquitous search engine was found violating U.S. antitrust laws en route to becoming the world's second-largest technology company by revenue at $307.4 billion. The decision in time is set to break the world’s most powerful company into pieces of its former self, and forever change the way we search, review, buy or come to believe in anything. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta writes in his 277-page ruling:
Google’s enjoys a 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices. Processing an estimated 8.5 billion queries per day worldwide, Google, by definition, is a monopolist.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s 1998 “Don’t Be Evil” motto served as its original corporate conscience, a crusader against Microsoft’s monopoly over technology at the time. However, Mehta found that Google resorted to unfair tactics by getting into bed with Apple, Samsung and others to dominate their default search engines, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, and their own artificial intelligence platforms.
Released in March 2023, Google’s Bard now squares off with Bill Gates’ pet pupil, OpenAI, and together represent the top seeds of artificial intelligence. As to the challengers, kindly direct your attention Russia, China and Iran á la Elon Musk and Meta each having their say in the U.S. election crusades.
Harris Walz
Tim Walz brings great big dad energy to the Harris Walz ticket, presumably to winkle out delegates with a midwest mindset.
A former small-town high school football coach who spends his free time hunting and fishing, Walz is the sort of guy that can squat in a deer stand in 10-degree weather and sit for a mugshot, too.
That was a much younger Walz working his first teaching job in Alliance, Nebraska when in 1995 he was arrested for driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone, according to the Dawes County Sheriff's Office. Walz failed a field sobriety test with a blood alcohol level of 0.128 and offered his resignation the following day. Though the charges were later reduced to reckless driving,
Walz credits the arrest as the catalyst for his decision to quit drinking 30 years ago. Today, he swills Diet Mountain Dew (just like JD Vance) both of whom have taken rather different turns from their midwestern roots.
Walz spent 24 years with Minnesota’s Army National Guard, and nearly that long coaching football and teaching geography at Mankato West High School. After joining the U.S. Congress in 2007, and serving 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Tim Walz was elected Minnesota's governor in 2019 quickly signing a raft of progressive laws codifying abortion rights, new gun control laws, and providing free lunch to public-school students. The North Star State is among the first to safeguard access to gender-affirming health care, and 1 in 30 U.S. states to allocate $2 per student to provide menstrual products in each and every public school restroom. Republicans call Walz 'Tampon Tim" and Democrats embrace it.
During the raucous rally where Harris introduced Walz as her running mate, Walz talked about how he and his wife suffered through years of infertility treatments before their first child was born. “It wasn’t by chance,” he said, “that when we welcomed our daughter into the world we named her Hope.”
The remit for Walz now is to ham it up and to connect with an electorate seemingly sullen with the direction of the country. While Harris takes on TikTok, Walz heads back to the midwest to turn those purple states positively blue with good cheer. They’ll need 270 electoral votes for the win and have their eye on Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Thats Pennsylvania and Georgia for Trump Vance, and all as his election interference criminal case returns to Washington DC. Misinformation Age
Though Donald Trump has landed a handful of legal victories lately, his Washington DC federal election subversion case is back on track, meaning he’ll now have to answer for alleged election interference in a court of law.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump resumed on 2 August after supreme court immunity rulings and legal end-runs ultimately landed in the prosecutions favor. But it’s Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, who leads the chorus on public opinion despite any gag order.
Top election officials from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington have warned Musk that Grok began producing false information about state ballot deadlines shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. They’ve accused Musk via X of spreading election misinformation.
While the “rebellious” Grok who’ll answer “spicy” questions is available to premium users on X, that misinformation spreads across social media platforms and reaches millions, according to the letter. The bogus ballot deadline information also looped in Alabama, Indiana, Texas and Ohio whose secretaries of state declined to sign the letter. Grok continued to repeat the false information for 10 days before it was corrected, the secretaries said.
“Our Safety teams remain alert to any attempt to manipulate the platform by bad actors and networks,” says Wifredo Fernández, X’s head of U.S. and Canada global government affairs. “We have a robust policy in place to prevent platform spam and manipulation.” Grok, however, had this to say about Musk's leadership: "Let's not forget your greatest accomplishment: turning Twitter into a dumpster fire."
Microsoft’s 49% share on OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini, represent the lion’s share of artificial intelligence doing all the talking during Election 2024. Every search curates an eerily similar result, and that data, yours, is then sold to the highest bidder.
Elon Musk, the world's richest person, donates $45 million per month to the Trump Vance campaign and unleashes the sarcastic Grok onto to the cause along the way. Melinda Gates was among the first to throw her millions at Harris, though a newcomer has emerged. Of the record breaking $310 million Harris raised in July, two-thirds of that cold hard cash came from real life, first-time donors. And of those real life, first donors all came from red and blue real estate that combined are the color purple.
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