Bolivar diGriz 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (37) comment rss

  • On the post: Sen. Joni Ernst To Constituents Regarding Medicaid Cuts: We’re All Going To Die, Someday

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 04 Jun, 2025 @ 02:37pm

    Actually, it makes Marie Antoinette look positively caring. More like if her reply to "The price of bread is too high. The peasants are starving" was "Meh. Starving to death? Self-solving problem."

  • On the post: RFK Jr. Wants You To Know HHS Is Committed To Stopping Chemtrails From Poisoning You

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 02 May, 2025 @ 04:13pm

    Huh?

    So this clown is a member of an administration hell-bent on closing down the EPA and allowing industries to dump pollutants into water and the atmosphere. All of which doesn't seem to cause him any concern. Instead his concern for pollutants seems to stop at "if scientists have studied it, found it to be non-harmful or beneficial, then that's a flashing red conspiracy alert, right"?

  • On the post: EU Commission Kicks Off 2025 With Yet Another Plea For Backdoored Encryption

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 11 Apr, 2025 @ 03:34pm

    Pity the poor police investigators

    "...our police investigators, they don’t have access to data"
    Perhaps the police investigators could resort to... investigating? After encryption, what next? "Criminals are meeting each other in parks and discussing future criminal activity without witnesses. Private conversations make investigation by police difficult, therefore we propose that everybody wear a microphone and transmit all conversations (unencrypted of course) for our police investigators to examine at their leisure..."

  • On the post: Vizio Shows What Happens When U.S. Fascism And TV Enshittification Meet

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 11 Apr, 2025 @ 03:11pm

    Fun Facts

    Fun fact: Nazis said to be anti-capitalists, as that was a Jewish thing.
    Actually, Nazis were anti-communist as it was 'a Jewish thing'. Read all about the Anti-Comintern pact some time. Eventually it was the impetus for Germany declaring war on the US, and hence the US consequently deciding that maybe they didn't like Nazis so much after all.

  • On the post: Big Telecom Is Terrified Of New State Laws Demanding They Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2025 @ 03:15pm

    Reason for panic

    I'm wondering if the ISPs are panicking due to the current and projected increase in the size of the low income sector. It might not reduce their profits too much now, but given the current direction of the US that sector is going to be growing rapidly.

  • On the post: Big Telecom Is Terrified Of New State Laws Demanding They Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2025 @ 03:09pm

    gets reduced into disrepair and malfunction such that it gets sold back to the private sector
    I'm not sure how much of the history of the past 50 years you've been told about, but it's not the public enterprises in 'disrepair and malfunction' that get sold to the private sector. This is something that has never ever happened. The private sector has only ever wanted to purchase public enterprises that they can immediately gut and get a payout on.

  • On the post: In Upholding The TikTok Ban, SCOTUS Compromises, And With It The First Amendment

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 18 Jan, 2025 @ 03:23pm

    Being Chinese

    Tiktok had the entire damn US government majorly spooked for…Being chinese
    Tiktok is Singaporean-traded. With a Singaporean CEO. I'm not denying that the Chinese government couldn't lean heavily on ByteDance, nor that the company is responsive to Chinese sensibilities and self-censors to some extent. But a lot of US companies also have Chinese investors. Personally, I'm amused by how much the US seems to be looking at China and saying "Yeah, we'll have some of that!" Over the years I've seen reports of companies opening up subsidiaries in China and having Chinese Party members make the foreign owners an offer they can't refuse, buying the subsidiary for a bargain price with the alternative being prison. Now we see a similar (sell to one of our billionaires or we'll shut you down) scam being pulled off in the US. "Progress"...

  • On the post: LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2024 @ 08:31pm

    Judge Otis Wright? Well, damn! There's a name from the past - remember Prenda Law? Now I am nostalgically remembering the smell of mountains of popcorn...

  • On the post: LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2024 @ 08:23pm

    That they are taking legal action over it suggests not.
    I would imagine that when there's an obvious culprit to blame for the damage, the insurance company would insist that you attempt to get the repair/replacement cost from them first before they'll pay out on the claim.

  • On the post: LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2024 @ 08:16pm

    Using a lot of electricity is suspicious
    It's only a matter of time before "the building had solar panels on the roof, which we decided could only be there in order to power lamps for a hydroponic setup".

  • On the post: Kaspersky Leaves U.S., Deletes Itself, Swaps Everybody’s Antivirus For Software Nobody Asked For

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2024 @ 02:26pm

    Re: Correct, but not the entire picture

    The biggest concern is that Kaspersky is effectively an espionage agency of the Russian government and is backdooring systems at their behest.
    That's a pretty major charge. Do you have evidence to support this? Because nobody else does. As with Chinese cars, Kaspersky's true sin is a lot less criminal: It outperforms its US competitors, therefore needs political support to tilt the playing field back the way it should be tilted.

  • On the post: It Always Gets Dumber: Elon Sues The Ad Coalition He Just Rejoined Because He Thinks It’s Illegal To Not Advertise On ExTwitter

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 07 Aug, 2024 @ 04:30pm

    Well, obviously

    "In 2023 and 2024 alone, multiple members of Rumble’s sales team sent emails to GroupM seeking to have GroupM purchase advertisements on Rumble’s platform"
    Translation: Our salespeople made unsolicited calls (emails) attempting to sell advertising to GroupM. They hung up (deleted the messages). Conspiracy!!! Well, I'm off to compile a list of corporations to cold-call, offering my word of mouth promotional services for a high fee. Ignore me at your peril!

  • On the post: Baltimore PD Said It Would Stop Scraping Phones With Cellebrite Following A Court Ruling But It Kinda Looks Like It Never Really Did

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 04 Jul, 2024 @ 02:35pm

    We should admit that there is a definable group of people in this country who are simply more likely to commit violent crime
    Yes. U.S. police, apparently...

  • On the post: Civil Rights Complaint Filed Against Illinois Schools For Using Cops To Handle Normal Discipline Issues

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 29 Jun, 2024 @ 04:11pm

    School Cops

    Public Schools have always been casually likened to government ‘prisons’ — so the presence of armed cops (aka ‘School Resource Officers) to control the unwilling inmates is not really a conceptual anomaly.
    You realize that other countries' schools are not 'government prisons', right? Having cops on site to patrol schools and arrest children is not normal in a first-world nation. Your use of the word 'normal' here actually refers to a decidedly abnormal state of affairs.

  • On the post: RIAA Of Six Years Ago Debunks RIAA Of Today’s AI Lawsuit Claims

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2024 @ 06:04pm

    Oh, right...

    Oh, you mean that Alfred Bester. I initially thought that it was a reference to the author of The Demolished Man - which it was, but of course at one remove.

  • On the post: Australia’s Richest Woman Discovers The Streisand Effect In Trying To Remove Portrait She Disliked

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 29 May, 2024 @ 02:07pm

    Mining and media are two different industries, yes.
    Not in (Gina's home state of) Western Australia, they aren't. Local media there exists to run pro-resource industry advertorials.

  • On the post: Taxing The Internet To Bail Out Media Won’t Solve The Fundamental Problems Of The Media Business

    Bolivar diGriz ( profile ), 23 May, 2024 @ 05:14pm

    Wrong answer

    At first glance the tax collection part seems... ok (although good luck getting any actual money out of those huge tax-dodging corporations!) but the distribution end is, even at first glance, not in any way good. So we have some sort of authority picking and choosing which "worthy" news publishers to siphon the funds to. A simple principle applies here: he who pays the piper calls the tune. Put your cynic's hat on and ask yourself "How long until the newly-replaced board grant $500m to Truth Social?" An alternative? Currently I avoid most news publishers behind a paywall. I pay an annual subscription to those that offer value (e.g. reasonable news coverage, some visibility so I have a chance to see whether I like the site first). But what about those where I follow a link only to hit the paywall? Dunno about you, but I just close the tab... But what if there was a third-party aggregator for microtransactions? Someone the user and the news sites can sign with as customer and vendor, with a price notified and clicked through when I hit the site and a bill at the end of the month? The internet was not originally designed for commerce, and it shows. But the only rational answer is "user pays" for the news that they read, not "create an organization to pass money to the commissioners' patrons".