I'm anti-Google, please elect me: Senate hopeful rides tech backlash In another sign that anti-tech sentiment is rising in the United States, the Attorney General of Missouri is using his stance against Google as a platform to run for a Senate seat this November. Republican Josh Hawley was elected to his position in January 2017, having drawn the notable financial support of age-defying venture …
We're already there! Hollywood keep making optimistic-pollyannic Star-Wars / Star-Trek sequels, but we're on a much darker path towards Blakes-7 reality... The slow inevitable trench to Cloud-everything, the reluctant succumbing to government ID-cards and biometrics, large-scale hacks like Equifux, and the Facebook/Google industrial slurp complex...
The big tech oligarchs have such unhealthy ambitions over all our lives and behavioral data, that its hard to have any enthusiasm. Follow big tech talking to investors in conference calls or read what ex-FB-executives say, and its not pretty! At the risk of using a polarizing word, its pretty totalitarian.
Google-Facebook want to connect every cent of physical real-world data to digital profile activity with them in the middle. With every firm you deal with, they'll use trading data to create individual custom pricing and t&c, right into your news feed. Transparency / fairness / openness, hardly the goal here!
Look forward to the day that when you search for a local bar with pizza, Google/FB sells that info to health and car insurers the next time you need a quote. That's the plan... So are regulators going to stop this: Irish-DPC? It paints a dystopian picture of a world that individuals have little control over...
"Look forward to the day that when you search for a local bar with pizza, Google/FB sells that info to health and car insurers the next time you need a quote"
Only when you use a smartphone with Google's OS. There will always be minimalist Linux distributions that one can use, along with Duckduckgo, Ixquick, or another search engine that does not treat users as cash cows. Delete your Facebook account and stop using the Chrome browser.
Anti-tech has become a label. It just about being anti-Google? Anti-Facebook? Anti-data slurping? Or is it something deeper like the culture of computers in businesses? The tone of many articles not just here at El Reg but in the regular press, seem to pushing this. So at some point, the people will get fed up and rise against tech.? Or at least the manipulating, slurping part anyway. Can scary times for IT workerbees be far behind?
Anti-tech has become a label. It just about being anti-Google? Anti-Facebook? Anti-data slurping
Probably just good old-fashioned Republican fear mongering appealing to the basest elements of their electoral base's animalistic responses. Criminals are out to get you! Vaccines are out to get you! Immigrants are out to get you! Stock up on ammo now! We don't need edumacation, we need more police! more army! more nukes! The [insert minority group here] are going to take over!
It's ironic to see Hawley worrying about 'concentration of economic power' and corporatism, considering Koch brothers are running ads, hourly, on all of the Missouri TV stations attacking McCaskill. Koch brothers, through their Americans for Prosperity PAC have announced they are going to spend $300 million during this election cycle to unseat Democrat incumbents. The ads for Hawley have been running for a month. Of course, AFP did this before with anti McCaskill ads to support Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akins.
Note that 501(c)(4) organizations can't support a candidate directly, so they fund a deluge of attack ads against the opposition and call it Free Speech.
You couldn't have imagined that a few years ago when tech companies could do no wrong and politicians lined up to support them, and cash their checks.
I've never had a problem imagining anything that will happen in political-economy. The dialectic is real and abusive to those who think they are a non-participant. Sorry about that, this libertarian is channeling his inner-Marx.
You are talking about Mel Carnahan (D) in 2000. He died in a plane crash 3 weeks before the election and it was too late to replace him on the ballot. His wife took his place and served until 2002 when Jim Talent (R) was elected to replace her. Talent was succeeded by our current Senator Claire McCaskill in 2006.
There was a damn good reason we voted for the dead guy. Ashcroft is a corrupt jerk that only had one good idea in his whole career. Knowing how often he stole other people's ideas in other areas and claimed them, I suspect even the one thing he did right with the no-call list was something he swiped from a flunky.
Like with Trump, the dead guy vote was a message to the system to give us better candidates. So far it appears that the well is severely poisoned and is just making each election worse. The sad thing is, as a someone in Hannibal and being a conservative bent, I hate the current Republican group and want every last one of the twats out of office. Claire may be a lousy Senator who focuses on crap side issues, but at least she isn't always blindly following her party line regardless of what the constituent messages ask for.
My pile of correspondence with Graves has me ready to actively campaign to get people to vote against him this coming round. His voting record on issues has been 180 degrees different since Obama. same issues, changed vote, different party proposing the idea..... of course it must be rational consideration why he reversed stance on all the big issues....
The problem with our state, as with all others, is that the cities will determine the outcome and St Louis and Kansas City will vote early and often.
I live in St. Louis and respectively disagree. Going back to the usurped-election of Bush II, statewide the rural Republicans have outnumbered the city Democrats, with the Libertarian Party getting from 0.5 to 3% in a given statewide race depending on the candidate and which statewide office.
The late Governor Mel Carnahan indeed would have made a good Senator, better than John Ashcroft overall, and Mrs. Carnahan did the same until the next special election when a Fundamentalist Republican male took the seat from her.
Their son Congressman Russ Carnahan was redistricted by the Republican state legislature into the same district where the incumbents Democratic father and then son have held the congressional seat since 1968, and he couldn't beat their voter turnout.
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The Obama administration was more than close to Google, as it hired more than 250 drooling Googlers to serve under Obama.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/09/google-employees-have-enjoyed-revolving-door-during-obama-administration.html
El Reg liberally opined "groundless claims that liberal tech companies are censoring right-wing causes"
On the contrary, there is plenty of historical evidence that Google, Facebook, and other social media companies censor opposing views. Google's infamous "islam is" episode is but one example.
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/01/08/google-censoring-islam.html
El Reg liberally opined "groundless claims that liberal tech companies are censoring right-wing causes"
This pub has gotten so good at "liberal opining" that I almost never come out any more...
Of course like an idiot, today when I did, I clicked on a political article, which guaranteed it would be crap.
Oh well, time to skate until the next BOfH installment.
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