"Meta estimates that ten percent of the company’s annual revenue comes from fraudulent ads on its services – amounting to a dizzying 16 billion dollars.
– Meta is earning billions from consumers being scammed. Even if the company gets fined – a process that takes years – the fines we have seen so far only amount to a fraction of these profits. In other words, Meta has no incentive to solve the problem. Meanwhile, the company doesn’t lift a finger to help its users, whether their profiles are misused in the scam ads, or they fall victim to the scams, Myrstad says. "
It should be easy: 10% of revenue from fraudulent ads? Fines amounting to 15% of the total revenue. This way, Meta will be incentivized to invest ~5% of its revenue on getting rid of that 10%.
Considering that 10% percent estimate seems to come from Meta themselves, if they were fined that amount what would stop them from just estimating lower next time?
Obviously you would have some estimation from government-authorized auditors. Yes there is the usual risk of bribes etc with the money at play here but then the risks for the corporation climb as well.
Yes but also include accountability in the boardroom. If illegal things happen, a human needs to see court, not a company. Let the "risk takers" actually take on risk.
The US Postal Service seems to derive upwards of 90% of their revenue (Or at least of the mail I receive) from similar scams. Are they going to have the same fines applied to them?
And you can't escape. Facebook is less of a concern because you can just not go to the website and you're good. The US Postal Service is the basis of an entire huge industry devoted to finding you at your physical location to try to scam you.
You have a very different profile of junk mail than I do. While the services may be overpriced or of dubious quality, they are rarely outright scams the way FB marketplace frequently is.
The US Postal Service doesn't serve the American people, by its own admission. I can find the quote from the Postmaster General if you like, but the gist of it was "the 400 direct mailers are our customers". They are a spam company that has outlived its usefulness, if ever it had any. Don't fine them, dissolve them.
How would you find a government entity? This is just moving money from one government budget to another.
The USPS is like this because of the persistent belief that it's not enough for government entities (think USPS, Amtrak, etc) to provide a good service for the citizens - they must also (try to) turn a profit.
If we as a society considered it acceptable for the USPS to spend money to ensure everyone in the US had mail access without selling out to corporations to turn a profit, they wouldn't need to have products like EDDM blasting spam to entire zip codes.
The whole governmental agencies should be profit seeking businesses needs to died ignobly in a ditch. The reason we pay taxes is so that we don't have to handle the logistics of running the thing we pay for.
From the sources I have seen, that 10% was a projection for 2024, with goals to significantly reduce it in 2025 and 2026 onward. It also includes "banned" goods, which are not necessarily fraudulent nor illegal. I have not seen any data on whether or not Meta has achieved their goals of reducing fraud and banned goods advertising.
And somehow they are allowed to continue operating, and we accept them saying "we couldn't possibly actually police all this content! There's just too much of it. We're too large for such concerns!"
I really wish the rest of us could turn around and say, to their faces "That sounds like a you problem"
> Linux excels over Windows in the area of security by a wide margin
No, this is wrong but might be true if you are talking about Linux package manager vs. Random Windows .exe on internet. But if you are talking about Secure Boot, encrypted disk, sudo etc. Windows is more secure but it looks like https://amutable.com/ will make Linux more secure like Windows.
Edit: Some insecure things on Linux: Dbus (kwallet etc.), sudo, fprint, "secure boot".
As I Swede, I must say this list of countries are the countries I love the most in Europe (well, I like the weather in Spain and Italy, but I mean politically).
I would like our countries to integrate more, maybe with a common army. In the Nordics we already have begun to integrate our Air Forces to a common Nordic Air Force. Why not extend that to UK, France, Netherlands and Germany? These countries together could form a quite powerful army, air force etc. that could safeguard Europe against external threats.
The Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto found the operation superfluous and ridiculous, calling it a joke, and urged that it be carried out under NATO coordination.
It's just that I also want that split (north vs south, sort of). The EU of today is dysfunctional, largely because of this immense cultural split.
Now I want to delay this split though. At the moment we need EU unity.
> At the same time we need to realize that the US actions are clearly meant to tear the EU apart.
Generally true with one small but very important correction - the US actions are clearly meant to bait the EU into breaking itself apart.
> It's just that I also want that split (north vs south, sort of).
You've been had. Trump is smarter than you, you've bitten his bait and you're hanging on his hook... and you were doing so well initially.
> The EU of today is dysfunctional, largely because of this immense cultural split.
There's no cultural split, there are only politicians on varying levels of corruption and the leading EU countries are in the center of it all. That's the problem that needs addressing.
> You guys are all really purist with your shade of white.
A lot of the nationalist theatrics you see in political space lead to inflaming the small differences between similar peoples and getting them at each other's throats. That was clearly seen in the run-up to the tragic war between Russia and Ukraine.
It's telling that I don't see any politician in the EU addressing that threat. You'd think EU politicians would know better given the long history of bloody intra-European wars.
P.S. I reformulated my previously downvoted comment in order to make it more precise and less stingy. That will also help me understand the reason for the explanation-less downvoting - is it the truth in the content or the blemishes in form that caused it.
> You guys are all really purist with your shade of white.
That's the major goal of all the theatrics you see in political space - to have very similar peoples get at each other's throats. It was wildly "successful" in provoking the idiotic war between Russia and Ukraine.
It's telling that I don't see any politician in the EU addressing that threat. You'd think EU politicians would know better given the long and bloody history of idiotic intra-European wars.
As a Swede I must confess I don't know much about Greenland. But if Denmark goes all-in on Greenland, you can bet the other Nordic countries will be involved too.
Not sure how this will play out. Really strange situation and as I said I don't even know how much Denmark cares about Greenland. Any Danes here that can tell us more?
I'm Danish, we don't really care about whether or not Greenland is a part of our Kingdom (I'm sure some people do but it's certainly not the majority in my opinion). That being said it's not like it's ours to sell or give away, so it would be more relevant to ask someone from Greenland. I think the most likely outcome is that Greenland decides to leave our Kingdom and become something like the Marshall Isles.
The whole national security part is a lie though. The US can already do whatever they want up there. Well except for having nuclear weapons, but they'd probably be allowed if they asked.
I think some of our politicians care that they'd lose any form of geopolitical relevance without Greenland, but it's not like our population in general supports that.
I can't help wondering if that's really what all of this is about - the Nordics can't really fight the US and Russia at the same time (though given their history I suspect they'd try).
But they are not fighting russia. Also putin can't really fight anywhere else but Ukraine. Special operation in Baltic state is maximum of russian ability unless there is a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Not yet no (and I seriously hope that it will never happen), but a ceasefire in Ukraine looks like it might happen tying down troops from the UK, France and others and then a threat to Greenland from the US drawing off more troops and attention perhaps leaving Russia open to attack one of the Baltic states?
That would deter even the United States, I believe. The problem I see if it's worth it. As I said, as a Swede I don't really care about Greenland, but Denmark is part of the Nordic Family.
The US has military bases all around Europe from which they would be able to do actions to keep NATO from mobilising.
In 2024 I spent a day protesting outside the Swedish parliament against US base also in Sweden.
We warned about Trump probably winning the US election and how unpredictable he is, but the proponents disregarded all our arguments: "Trump being president again? Pfft.. That will never happen", "Provision for US leaving NATO? Pfft. They won't", "Rule against nukes on Swedish soil? Pfft. The US are our friends and will respect our wishes.". The vote passed, and here we are.
He's discussing motivations at the time of its founding. I suppose one could argue that perhaps Peter Thiel's heart has grown two sizes since that day?
(It's one thing to ask people to be fair in responding to your actual comment and not a strawman. It's another to ask us to pretend we were born yesterday. We do in fact have external sources of information about Lonsdale's political allegiences.)
There are many documented links with Peter Thiel, the much more influential founder of Palantir. Epstein and Maxwell had their hands all over the Silicon Valley spooktech sector of which Palantir is an integral part.
But when you talk about "the Jeffrey Epstein Friends Club that runs SV" in a discussion starting with Lonsdale you are implicitly and probably intentionally tarring him by association. It's a serious enough charge to lay against someone that one shouldn't do it, even by allusion, without evidence.
This is also a discussion about Palantir more broadly, but of course Lonsdale is tarred by that association, that's not my doing.
If he finds Epstein association distasteful then as someone with ample means and no need to fear retaliation against his employment, he certainly should have publicly repudiated his close associates with Epstein ties. Has he done that?
That depends if he was involved in or aware of Epstein's trafficking. Given Thiel is rather well-known to be gay, I sincerely doubt he had anything to do with underage girls. We aren't yet sure if Thiel was aware of Epstein's other activities either; the only thing we do know is that they did visit at least once and Epstein extended an invite to visit him on his island. Whether Thiel accepted either, we cannot yet say.
If you're Lonsdale, you don't speak against a longtime close friend on the basis of bad optics when you have no way to know whether he actually did anything wrong. There are a whole stack of other, more-powerful people we can and should look at hard over their presence in the files. If further evidence is released against Thiel, Lonsdale, et al. we should reconsider their behavior. Until that point, it's wrong to tar them over this.
Let’s call them bureaucrats, but let’s not forget that their baseline is to be public servants, while that of product managers is to increase profits :-) . I think the system is working as intended though, because increasing profits can be a great driver for innovation and service to the consumer, until it’s not and the “immune system” (the bureaucracy) must be called on to fight the uncontrolled pathological growth…
> ALL OF THE LEGALLY SANCTIONED GOVERNMENT MONOPOLIES HERE.
This is the kinda claim that really needs citations, and ideally some commentary on how the examples demonstrate the point you’re trying to make. Otherwise it’s impossible to reply to, and just comes across a little shrill and conspiratorial. Which I don’t think is your goal.
– Meta is earning billions from consumers being scammed. Even if the company gets fined – a process that takes years – the fines we have seen so far only amount to a fraction of these profits. In other words, Meta has no incentive to solve the problem. Meanwhile, the company doesn’t lift a finger to help its users, whether their profiles are misused in the scam ads, or they fall victim to the scams, Myrstad says. "
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