Trump fires Democrat FTC commissioners, presaging big tech policy shifts In a surprise Tuesday move, US President Donald Trump fired the two remaining Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, potentially accelerating a shift in the consumer and competition watchdog's stance towards tech and other businesses. Trump axed Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter, leaving the regulator with …
Very interesting article, thanks for the link. I assumed it was something to do with Edgar Allan, but turns out Poe's Law is from a chap called Nathan.
And astonishingly, it seems to actually be named after its genuine creator. (See Stigler's Law of Eponymy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy#:~:text=Examples%20include%20Hubble's%20law%2C%20which,is%20due%20to%20the%20first ).
I am glad Poe does not post here!
There's certainly an increasing tendency around these parts de nier ce qui est, et d'expliquer ce qui n'est pas, which is where this thread started. But Poe was quoting Rousseau, who was having a go at philosophers. What he'd have made of social media, I hate to think.
I believe that 'Midsommer Murders', also known as 'Inspector Barnaby Investigates' was voted the least realistic police drama on British TV. The headcount (and in some episodes it really is 'counting heads') is extra-ordinary for a police force that never requests reinforcements, or, for some reason rarely if ever offers Police Protection to the obvious next victim. But they can be quite good fun all the same, if you leave your critical faculties dormant.
I really don't think the Trump administration are being sarcastic
Sarcoma and sarcasm have the same Greek root: sarx, meaning flesh. In the case of sarcasm it's a likening to the stripping off of flesh, as if by wild dogs. So there may be less of a distinction than is at first apparent.
Sarcasm is not mentioned in 'Project 2025' so that can't be true.
The USA will not have a lot of work for the FTC to do if the Orange Jesus keeps putting tariffs on its trading partners. Those tariffs are paid by the US company importing the goods. Many companies will go broke because their goods will be far too expensive for the Maga faithful to buy when the country goes into a deep recession caused by DJT.
The rest of the world are already busy done new trade deals that bypass the USA.
Next, countries will drop trading commodities in the USD.
Under Trump the country will go from a 1st world to a 4th world pariah inside a year.
Ok, they are fired for doing things in the interest of the citizens of the US of A, because they seem competent and because Trump is a misogynist and racist. Is that a better analysis? It's just that Republicans seem to dislike anything that helps consumers (and hate women and foreigners), so yes, they got fired because they are Democrats[*] or aligned with (some of) their values. So once more farmers, who voted for the Florida Man, are screwed over (see John Deere...) - it's not like people told them...
I hope Europe grows a spine and starts banning products (and companies) from their market that don't follow privacy and repairability regulations (and the latter are refined more in consumer interest). The rest of the world can only benefit from that.
[*] It's not that the Democrats are progressive in any sense if we compare the US parties to a European political landscape... but that's not the point here and just an observation.
Right to repair in the US is not a party specific item. There are people on both sides who support and oppose it.
Kathy Hochul gutted the NY right to repair at the last minute as she is bought and paid for by her donors.
https://www.engadget.com/new-york-right-to-repair-law-kathy-hochul-184654713.html
With John Deere it is the American Farm Bureau Federation that is standing in the way. The orange man doesn't like John Deere as they moved all their production to Mexico.
In terms of Privacy, Europe and the UK are busy doing all they can to roll that back.
>"native-born foreigner?"
I suppose that means "a Native American from one of the tribal areas that spans the US/Mexico (or maybe US/Canada) border". There are such places and such peoples but I think in the Trumpenverse ithe term means "anyone we don't like".
(As for a "non-man", I'm married to one. They're about 50% of the population.)
"... just to watch the employee walk away to her biggest competitor with valuable training and trade secrets."
• Re: training:
(i) Sorry, that's just the way it is; and,
(ii) Businesses keep that training investment by providing employees competitve (or superior) wages and benefits, interesting work, sane, logical management, and opportunities for career advancement, not necessarily on the management track (not everyone wants to be a manager; not everyone can be a good manager).
• Re trade secrets: there are already legal mechanisms to deal with misaporopriation / theft of trade secrets.
Re-enabling general non-compete agreements is just defending bad businesses' bad practices.
Here the law states that a non-compete agreement shoud be:
1) Limited in time, scope and space - which means it can't last too long (a few years only), it can't be too broad (i.e. encompass all IT jobs), and depending on how broad the scope is, limited to sensible geographic area. Anyway, it can't hinder the employee finding a new job.
2) Paid for (and not with a symbolic payment, or it is not valid)
Otherwise is not valid.
This way I believe the interests of the employer and the employee are both addressed. The employer pays the employees for the privilege, and the employees can still find a new job if they wish so, with limitations regarding direct competition.
But I believe Trumpistan would allow slavery again, if they could.
There's already ample precedent in California that bringing across proprietary information to a competitor can get you into legal trouble. There's a fine line between protecting your former employer's interests and preventing you from making a living, though. Fortunately nearly everyone knows where that line is.
"Fortunately nearly everyone knows where that line is."
California is a very pro-employee state. Many other states are not, so the only excuse is their mamma brought them up wrong, I suppose. The politicians are slanted at big business who fund their campaigns. Perhaps some good legislation is to classify corporations as non-human for political purposes so big companies can't inject so much money into the machine. Being a virtual human can be a useful fiction elsewhere for the way certain laws and penalties will be applied.
"Here the law states that a non-compete agreement shoud be:
1) Limited in time, scope and space - which means it can't last too long (a few years only), it can't be too broad (i.e. encompass all IT jobs), and depending on how broad the scope is, limited to sensible geographic area. Anyway, it can't hinder the employee finding a new job.
2) Paid for (and not with a symbolic payment, or it is not valid)
Otherwise is not valid."
It's usually a matter for individual states. Some states won't uphold non-compete clause, some will just about every time and there's plenty in the middle. Should the Federal government mandate how it's done?
For a regular employee, there's already prohibitions in place for things like giving a new employer their old employers sensitive information. I'd suggest that a non-compete is limited to the owners/management of a company being sold/acquired or the person is compensated. The state I'm in will not uphold a non-compete in most cases, but I still wouldn't sign anything that had one since I'd lose if I ever had to hire an attorney to point out to somebody that they aren't going to get anywhere trying to enforce one.
The place where they are nearly always applied are where a business owner sells his company and the new owner doesn't want him taking the money and opening up a new shop down the road since they figured out how to make the widgets faster and at less cost but didn't have the money to invest in the new machinery. I know a couple of people in the music industry that spent a few years off waiting for their non-compete clauses to run out. One of them opened up a new company that only produced the gear that made the best return. They trimmed the tree way back since they didn't need to keep supporting the old stuff/designs.
Right to repair does need to be Federally enshrined. Most things, especially electronic things, are more expensive to build in a garage in low quantities than they can be purchased for anywhere so publishing schematics and BOM's doesn't impact a company's income at all. Way back when my degrees had that fresh ink smell, I thought to build some audio equipment on my own to save a few dollars. Never mind the hours filing rough edges on the sheet metal, my component cost was double what I could buy a new one for. I learned why those things cost what they did. Since then I've also worked with a company that did automotive reverse-engineering (not Munro) and the firms that are in a position to compete on a manufactured product also have the resources to reverse engineer anything they like. There are companies in Asia that have libraries of x-ray'd IC's and can also de-lid a chip, put it under an electron microscope and auto-scan the layout. It's not even all that expensive (relatively) to find out what an unmarked chip really is. At least what sort of thing it is if not the exact OEM part number.
(i) Sorry, that's just the way it is; and,
There's a little more to it than that, I think. Employees who leave somewhere they've received good training for somewhere else just for the money, aren't the ones you want to keep anyway. But they'll probably soon find out that working all the hours god sends (and a few more) for those big bucks, might not be what they wanted, or when they get fired because the big company loses interest or funding.
But there is a case to be made that some companies do deliberately poach trained workers from others. This was a problem in Germany around the turn of the millennium and led to fewer and fewer companies wanting to train. It's gone into reverse over the last couple of years due to the shortage of skilled workers and so schoolleavers are positively wooed with atrractive training schemes. Writ large: the West can also be criticised for importing trained medical staff from all over the world, often leading to shortages in the countries that trained them.
"Employees who leave somewhere they've received good training for somewhere else just for the money, aren't the ones you want to keep anyway."
I can see how it can let a company hold people hostage. If you need certifications for a type of job, finance comes to mind, a company might only send you off for training and the cost to sit the test only if you agree to not work in the business for an unreasonable amount of time. Government is partially to blame since those certifications are a matter of law and since they can be very expensive to obtain, it creates a bunch of binds. There's also the issue of being locked down after you've amassed a fair bit of work experience. It's not like you can leave your trade for a couple of years and do something else at a similar rate of pay. Some can, but not a high percentage.
I have a pretty broad technical skill set, but if I really wanted to make big bucks, I'd have gone narrow and deep instead. I saw that as a trap early on. I also like to shift things around as opportunities present themselves. Many things I've done over the years are things I fell into. I never intended to be an actor, but wound up in several feature films, commercials, etc as an extra. I could have gone that route as I was working a lot for a while (the pay sucked). It just didn't invoke enough of a passion to work as hard as it would need to move up the ladder. My technical jobs are all over the place. The only thing I banned myself from doing was weapons. That didn't mean I didn't do sciency stuff for the US Navy and Air Force. Having a broad set of skills seems to me to open more possibilities. Just unlikely to ever do something worthy of a Nobel Prize.
The problem a job-leaver has is determining whether ${NEW_COMPANY} wants the job-leaver/poachee as a valued, "real" employee, or as an effectively-temporary person with ${FAD_SKILL_DEJOUR} who will be shed in a heartbeat once ${NEW_COMPANY} no longer needs that skill (or outsources it).
I spend a lot of my time not doing my main task, but educating the latest batch of recruits to our India site. As soon as most of them are trained up to be more gain than pain, off they go for a few rupees more. It's not as though we don't pay a high salary and provide the training!
As soon as most of them are trained up to be more gain than pain
Most places I've worked will charge you a pro-rata amount for any training courses you've taken in the previous two years. Soo, say you've been on a course that costs £1000 then, if you leave straight after, they charge you full cost. After 1 year, they'll charge 30-50%, after two years they don't charge anything.
Anooying but I can understand why they do it.
"Most places I've worked will charge you a pro-rata amount for any training courses you've taken in the previous two years. Soo, say you've been on a course that costs £1000 then, if you leave straight after, they charge you full cost. After 1 year, they'll charge 30-50%, after two years they don't charge anything."
I wouldn't agree to an arrangement like that extending for over a year and some outs for family issues. If I needed to leave to take care of my mother, I should be able to leave without incurring any charges. There will be some length of time where it could be considered blackmail. Another consequence would wind up being that the training companies wouldn't be able to charge as much as they have been to provide the training since an employer paying for it would need to see a return in a year or less. Some certifications would also wind up going by the wayside as many are really useless faff.
... in weakening the US Economy and Democracy to futher the interests of their corporate donors.
Effectively they are selling the American People to Oligarchs.
Cyberpunk novels often use a background story of the USA in a not too distant future, that has somehow managed to tumble from _the_ superpower of the planet down to a corrupt conglomerate of monopolistic corporations battling each other, without something left that would resemble a society, democracy, government or a judical system. Extreme Capitalsm as replacement for a Government.
While reading those novels I wondered if/how something like this could really happen.
Turns out, it does not "happen", it gets in fact ordered by the president of the United States. One Executive Order after another.
So we currently watch "The Real American Descent". Season One. One Episode each day. Live on TV and all over the Internet....
I think the overall summary is that they're very hard at work to rob the country blind and destroy any remnant of standing it still has in the world.
You have to admit, they're doing a very, very good job of it. Nobody in the history of the world (to use a Trump stock phrase) has ever done such a good job of destroying the US economically as well as politically. There won't be much left in 4 years. If you have any US assets - especially financial - this is the time to sell.
So, for the MAGA morons, Putin shills, Faragistas and other extremist morons out there, I invite you to haul your heads out of your arses, clean the shit from your ears, have a calming cup of tea, and a good long think about how Trump / Putin / Farage et al really benefit the majority of people, the country they live in and the world in general. Do it without wanking on about how Trump is achieving world peace (a. that remains to be seen and b. there’s nothing noble about giving someone else’s house / country to a dictator so that they can have a bit more lebensraum).
You may start your explanations now…
Just a note here, but while Trump and Putin are actually Presidents in office, Mr Farage, although leader of 'the Reform Party' is a 'backbench' MP, and does not have executive power. To refer to him in the same way as Trump and Putin is unduly flattering to Farage and misleading. Farage had a great deal of difficulty 'explaining' to his followers some of the latest events in USA Russian relations, and some of Elon Musk's recent statements, and I have yet to hear Farage defending either Vance or Trump's treatment of Zelenskiyy at the White House recently.
So, for the MAGA morons, Putin shills, Faragistas and other extremist morons
Isn't there a Tesla showroom you could be firebombing?
I invite you to haul your heads out of your arses, clean the shit from your ears, have a calming cup of tea, and a good long think about how Trump / Putin / Farage et al really benefit the majority of people, the country they live in and the world in general. Do it without wanking on about how Trump is achieving world peace
Ok, so obviously you're one of those far-lefties who can't quite grasp the concept of democracy, diplomacy or peace. Interesting though that you attempt to exlclude peace as a benefit, so presumably are on the side of prolonging pointless conflicts and killing people. You also presumably support high taxation in order to funnel cash to NGOs, high energy costs to support off-shoring and de-industrialisation, and institutional racism that masquerades as diversity. You're pro-censorship and anti-free speech and would prefer to silence any criticism of views that you don't believe in. And you haven't read anything about Freud.
Oh, and you might not have noticed the cost of eggs in the US is falling, but are probably incapable of making an omlette. Then again, the attempts to reduce eggflation have been mildly amusing, ie proposing egglifts from Europe. Luckily some European countries didn't go full Biden and slaughter flocks at the first sign of a false positive from a dubious PCR test.
Luckily some European countries didn't go full Biden and slaughter flocks at the first sign of a false positive from a dubious PCR test.
AND somewhat generously compensate the ranchers financially for ALLOWING the USDA (etc.) to slaughter said chickens!
(well over 100 MILLION of them!)
more generous compensation under Bidas than any recent administration...
It is probably a good thing that the US isn't actually a democracy then ;) Yes they elect representatives using a democratic process but that is as far as it goes.
"Wow. I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought of that."
Probably something along the lines of 'good'.
"Wow. I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought of that."
I wonder if US readers can help me out. I have the impression that US public opinion thinks the Second Amendment was as a defence against government overreach? I know that's not what the text says, nor really subsequent legal arguments, but seems to me that Fat Orange is trying to be as divisive as possible and maybe that's not wise in a nation where approximately 107 million people own at least one firearm, and 16 million of them are keeping assault rifles for....well, something.
"trying to be as divisive as possible"
I think you will find that the other side is doing this.
As to your main point, there are elements on the regressive left that would likely take up arms but they are very much the anarchist types and want to bring the entire uniparty machine down. The rank and file supporters of 'our democracy' are the soys, they/thems and other rent-a-mob types. They are under the pay and control of the donor classes and, so far, have done what has been required in terms of destroying private property and mostly leaving the establishment well alone. It is hard for the donors and PACs to defend people when they destroy govt property, especially federal govt property.
Burning Teslas will be touted as standing up to tyranny when in reality they are destroying someone's private property and just making the 'us and them' problem worse.
"The President can dispense with procedures with a single signature ?
Wow. I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought of that."
Checks and Balances relies on the US Congress getting off of their lazy butts and doing some work of Checking and Balancing.
"Jan 6th 2021 was a violent coup attempt"
Uh huh. The ones who spout 'our democracy' are currently the ones calling for the destruction of private property and violence against those they disagree with (such as Telsa owners) and the administration. They are not even simply targeting republican supporters any more, it is just anyone and everyone who doesn't comply.
The theory is that you hire someone who has few skills but you think is smart enough to learn. You pay them and give them training in something. Now, they have skills and you're hoping that they'll do some work for you, but they choose to leave because they now have skills and can more easily find a different job, meaning the money you spent while training them is wasted. And, to be fair to them, that sometimes happens. The problem, as usual, is that there are limited cases where non-competes make sense, but employers decided to use them for lots of other situations, most of them clearly abusive to the employee and anticompetetive to everyone else. A lot of people misusing something can break it for everybody.
"Which is why the new US motto is: "this is why we can't have nice things'"
Simples, the political left in the US, and same in the UK and EU, is run by a bunch of super wealthy elites beholden to their oligarch donors who have convinced the rank and file proles that all their problems have been caused by some other mega rich elite people and instead of actually trying to fix the problem (because these forever problems ensure continued employment of the ruling classes) they tout the line that 'if it wasn't for X you would have Y'.
A good example of this is people waving signs with the slogan 'Burn a Tesla: Save Democracy' or 'We must destroy Telsa to save America'.
Really it is super extra funny seeing people who have blithered on about climate change in their timeline getting rid of their EV for a petrol car. It just shows how petty and shallow they really are.
but they choose to leave because they now have skills and can more easily find a different job, meaning the money you spent while training them is wasted. "
Yes, but the person you hire to replace them likely got some training at their previous employer and it's not that everybody is going to bolt once they've smartened up. If they have, they'll realize that the other company is a den of self-entitled bastards that are just as bad. Yes, the starting pay is better, but they won't give you a rise later just like where you are now.
Ideally, a company should have an understanding about who their best people are and compensate them well enough that they never want to leave. That's not always salary. It could be more flexible time they need to attend to family matters. They might have a young family and want to be able to attend their kid's sporting events, recitals, etc. There's a big need to figure out what motivates the best employees and see what can be done.
I just checked and almost all the posts on this thread have been downvoted in the last few hours (I've been out this evening). Now I generally attribute the unexplained downvotes my posts receive to one of my 'stalkers'. These are people who seem to downvote anything I post, (even if it is merely a request for information) due to having taken a strong dislike to an earlier post I made concerning a political comment. But there are too many downvotes above, without explanation, of purely factual, joking or perfectly harmless posts.
Anyone any idea what is going on?
I know exactly what you mean ;) There are certain threads where several people are expressing similar views and all have lots of upvotes, but one of them mysteriously also has a pack of downvotes. It is not exactly subtle!
Basically, they think people won't notice the weirdness, and/or that we give a toss about downvotes.
Since resuming office, Trump has fired regulators at the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
AND hired Leo Terell aka "Leo 2.0" as the head of the DOJ's CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION!
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
NO! MORE! DEI!
the Federal Election Commission
because of BLATANT tolerance of OBVIOUS voter fraud
National Labor Relations Board.
Again, NO MORE DEI!!!
Ya got to look at the GOAL here. Besides DOWNSIZING, the "Permanent bureaucracy" i.e. leftist-DEI-activism CLOWN PARADE, has GOT to GO!!!
This is "Step 1".
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
