The Playing Lose-Lose Games is Dumb Edition

Jim and Kristine talk about the reignition of the Trump regime's trade war between Canada and the United States, including an honest assessment of how it might affect Webcology's coverage of the tech world in the future. The US is trying to force Canada into annexation by punishing it economically, using many of the technology platforms we cover to intentionally deliver destabilizing misinformation and propaganda to Canadians. At the same time, the brutal tariff regime will badly damage the American economy as the cost of nearly everything, including the cost to make automobiles, rises dramatically. Canada will never agree to be annexed and there are never winners in a trade war. The biggest casualties of trade wars tend to be the working people who have the most to immediately lose. Ultimately we all lose as the ripples affect and degrade everything from the nearest factory floors to the local diners, retail stores, schools, churches, artists, and such. Many of the stories we look at each week involve technologies owned and operated by the same technologarchs whose incessant greed and carelessness helped put our society in the desperate and fragile place it's in now. We will continue to try to be reasonably objective when talking about technology but these are not entirely reasonable times. We hope the listeners will understand and still find value in our thoughts about the Webs that bind us. Meanwhile: - RIP Dolly Parton - Love to Tibet and Nepal - Google tries to cope with the onslaught of AI Slop - A new Twitterer now in town - MTurk is dying - Tag Manager Merger - Google Bugs Abound - Unowned code and unintended corporate consequences - Meta settles small and goes lower still - NVIDIA to buy open source AI model host Hugging Face - Penske file judge says AI Overviews seem really unfair - Meta not going to obliterAIte thousands of jobs after all - A kill switch for Creep-glasses - Lots of LinkedIn AI slop prompts reporting of AI slop- Reddit less special to AIs - and so much more on Webcology, a show that dislikes featuring losing propositions but often has no choice.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy