Oh bullshit it’s entirely about controlling narratives around Israel, and now that they owe Trump it’s about censoring any opposition as well.

The TikTok ban was always an egregious attack on free speech.

Why would you be inclined to think that?

Why? Because tech companies have shown to bbe honest and transparent? Because their flouting of the law has ever been anything but extreme self interest?

FFS Grok is openly a revenge porn and CSAM generator. These aren’t good people and they aren’t the sort we want as champions of speech because they are not interested in anything but their own profits.

Free speech absolutism is a nonsensical position.

A car without gas is still a car, but you need to work to get it anywhere.

Wow if Marc Andreesen said then it must be true.

“Peace deal”

The latest demand for Ukraine to just completely surrender.

How can such an authoritarian state be compared to Switzerland?

Its not, but we have a government that sees starving the population as a political tool.

Can you find any examples, ever, of the government threatening stores for giving discounts?

They are trying to starve people as a political tool.

Not for food stamps, but here's the feds going after a pharmacy for gift cards and co-pay waivers from 2015: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ednc/pr/pharmacy-company-agreed...

Here's one for a pharmaceutical company, the details aren't quite clear but it sounds like they were funding co-pay assistance programs for their medications specifically but not others: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/teva-pharmaceuticals-agre...

Here's a broader NPR article from 2008 covering the same idea: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/09/6091508...

Here's a 2024 article on the possibility of subsidizing outpatient housing for drug rehab being a violation of the statutes: https://www.startribune.com/many-minnesotans-in-addiction-tr...

Here's a attorney website noting that any exchange of cash for EBT benefits is a violation of the law: https://usda.attorney/snap-violation/ and a discount that is explicitly for EBT users is almost certainly a violation of that.

Realistically the fact that there is an entire process for getting a waiver for "incentives" for SNAP recipients (https://www.fns.usda.gov/form/snap-incentives), and that particular site has been up since before Trump took office and this one from 2023 for a government program that specifically says you must apply for a waiver: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/healthy-incentives suggests that this is another one of these cases in this administration where the brokenness of the system that has always been there is only finally coming to light for a lot of people.

Conservatives were not wrong when they said (paraphrasing) that a government powerful enough to give you everything is a government powerful enough to take away everything too. It's just in this weird timeline we find ourselves in, it's the "conservative" party that's being the monster they feared for decades.

Maybe don’t let assholes openly spout racist bigoted rhetoric.

They should have tossed him. They didn’t and now the way get to deal with the fallout of tacitly endorsing his positions.

lol, Silicon Valley has always been evil.

For certain values of "always". I feel many of the original tech startups were genuinely interested in research, pushing limits, etc. Intel/AMD weren't "evil" as far as I can tell - nor the EDA infrastructure.

The social media era (Fbook) is when it started feeling like "majority of new companies are evil". Of course, if Palantir is Sauron, Oracle is Morgoth..

/Almost/ always

I'll give you Xerox.

The rest ...

I was thinking back even farther: Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, Community Memory, etc.

Silicon valley is a place.

Government contracting is an activity.

The two should be very far apart and yet somehow they're joined at the hip.

Always have been.

In large part, government contracting is what created Silicon Valley. https://steveblank.substack.com/p/if-i-told-you-id-have-to-k...

Government contracting is the only reason silicon valley exists. It'd just be another valley.