Trump renames things to "America' as a 'fuck you' to other countries and because to him (and his followers) America means "USA". He's happy to make hateful yet empty gestures that to his base seem to show support for the country while he's robbing it blind and demolishing it. Renaming South Park to South America mocks Trump's renaming of things, but also names South Park after another continent. A continent full of people Trump has repeatedly insulted and bombed. A continent he invaded to take their natural resources.
I don't think his base is as happy as you seem to believe. I lurked thedonald during the early days of your Special Military Operation, and it is now as anally moderated as r/politics, r/europe, and Russian social media -- inconvenient submissions get removed, detractors get banned. the orange man will eventually shit himself in public and the commissars will ban anyone mentioning it.
a significant percentage of his supporters voted for a respite from the clown world antics of the previous administration and nothing else. the percentage of those who want neocon MIGA bullshit is insignificant, as demonstrated by him trampling over ¡Jeb! and the rest of those fucks in 2016. and now that he had definitely lost that significant chunk, I think republicans will lose the midterms and they won't be in power again until after 8 years of AOC's Clown World Pro Max happening against the background of accelerating decline of your empire.
> The reviewer isn't contributing to Google's revenue at all,
In theory, good reviews drive traffic to Google because people come to trust it as a dependable source of important information. In reality, Google is big enough that they don't have to care. They figure that people will keep using Google no matter how many times Google lies to you. Seems like they're right because their AI overviews lie constantly. https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google...
People do both. Some choices aren't worth the time and effort of detailed analysis and contemplation and some are basically instinctual, but there are plenty of times that choices are carefully considered and well reasoned before being made and acted on.
If those "variety of services" are worth anything they should remain popular. There are countless ways to advertise them to people. I'm guessing many devs who were regularly browsing their documentation had ad blockers anyway.
Company creates a free core product, possibly open source, etc.
Company creates rich help docs and other useful resources.
Customers who use their core free product are frequently engaged with the company and it's helpful resources.
Said company offers additional services such as coursework, cloud services, analytics, etc.
Since customer knows and trusts the core free product, and knows the company is trustworthy, they may be inclined to purchase something.
Now, few coders use these learning resources (ai fetches it for them), they do not know anything about the company and they never engage with the company to see their additional offerings.
Therefore the company now has to advertise by spending heavily on Google/meta/etc. to a cold audience that doesn't even know who they are, because everyone using their system/sdk/library/etc. doesn't know anything about them because ai just steals all their resources and regurgitates it to the coder.
Maybe? If they aren't we should change our laws so that they would be. We don't have to normalize or accept companies wiretapping and spying on people just because spying makes those companies more profit.
Is a tesla spying on you by default and uploading onboard audio and video? If so, yes definitely that is a crime.
If the Tesla is monitoring for whether you are awake behind the wheel and sounds the alarm without that information ever leaving the car, that is another thing entirely.
They get to make money off of you for the rest of your life. They'll sell ads to companies, and they'll sell your data to anyone willing to pay enough for it.
I think that people just don't know about it. When directly confronted with it they react pretty strongly. Companies have done a very good job of hiding what they're doing from the public. They know people aren't going to read their 15,000 word EULA written in deceptively phrased legalese, and they wouldn't understand it if they read it anyway. Most Americans can't even read at a 6th grade level. People just have no idea what's being collected or what's being done with their data.
If really you want to see how people feel about being surveilled there's plenty of videos online showing people freaking out at someone just taking photos/video in public. A ton of people are absolutely convinced that the law protects them from being recorded in public. They're not going to imagine that a "respectable" corporation would be allowed to do it to them in their own homes.
> I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in (or at the very least the option was so well hidden I didn't see one). Of course the sign up asks for PII like my name and phone number.
The only solution we have to this is to return the TV as defective and buy something else until you find something that works without an account or an app. A sane country would have regulations that make spying on you illegal but our government works for corporations instead of the public so they'll never protect us when there's money to be made off of us.
> our government works for corporations instead of the public
Yes, but we cheat ourselves out of change with learned helplessness. Did you see how much hatred the business community directed at Lina Khan when she started dusting off the old antitrust machinery? That happened recently. It can happen again. It was on the ballot, and it will be again.
Yes, I saw that too, it was quite remarkable. Still, learned helplessness would have us believe that such an appointment was impossible and yet it happened, and it happened in a Democratic party that leaned "more lib than left" to an even greater degree than it does today, or will in 2028.
So when the billionaires twirl their moustaches and say "Silly kids! You can't possibly defeat me, why do you even try?" (or, more realistically, sponsor a lackey to promote that message) one should try to have at least as much gumption as a child facing down a cartoon villain who recognizes this as smack talk rather than deep philosophical truth. The progressives of 100 years ago faced down the first round of Robber Barons and won. We've done this before and we can do it again.
You'll notice that this was not a popular discussion.
HN users don't like it when billionaires are dissed, as many want to achieve that, for themselves. Very much a reflection on the demographics of this site. Maybe not a bad thing, but kind of amusing.
Even if every single person who wants dumb TVs bought a smart TV and returned it as defective, I doubt it would even be a noticeable increase to the number of defective TVs returned.
The opponents don't have to astro-turf. They can express their genuine feelings about the merger and the well known problems of media consolidation. Paramount has to astro-turf because there isn't any actual support for what they want outside of the small number of people who will make a ton of money in the deal.
At the very least the people responsible need to be treated like the dangerous psychopaths that they are and be imprisoned for the rest of their lives for the safety of the public. These people don't care about anything except getting more wealth and power for themselves and we have the ability to place limits on the kinds of behaviors that will get them what they want. Right now we're just rewarding them no matter how many people they mass poison or murder.
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