Yep, and here’s the simple litmus test.’

“Do I trust any of the people who are collecting large amounts of data about a large number of people?”

No…and furthermore, hell no.

Your ‘n’ key has been sleeping with the apostrophe.

“All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation”

Here’s $10.

Ahh, you know…you’re not wrong; and probably the balanced answer is that the corporations themselves have a huge number of employees with beliefs along a wide spectrum, and there’s definitely some sociopaths at the top like you describe. Another portion of their employees justify it for a paycheck, some that want to get out of the business, some people that are probably true believers in their companies, some in denial etc. I can’t claim to accurately guess at what the breakdown would be though.

I genuinely believe that they’re too proudly ignorant to get it. To them, climate change is something they’re worried about in Ivory tower universities and on the political left. It’s a proud ignorance that says “you smart people aren’t going to tell US what to do.”

Reminder that one of their (former) politicians thought an out-of-season snowball disproved global warming and nobody along the way told him how stupid that was…which is my proof that these politicians don’t even have anyone in their orbit that understands how stupid that was.

Anyway, I still think making obscene amounts of money is their first priority and they either can’t or won’t understand the damage they do.

I pointed it out separately, but this sentence makes it even more clear.

‘Well, let’s step in now and let’s put in place a bill that acts as a deterrent to doing that,” Petroleum Association of Wyoming President Pete Obermueller told WyoFile.

Hey Wyoming congressman/congresswoman, it’s your oil and gas friends and we are going to need you to write some legislation for us here… Oh, Congress is out of session? You’ll need to go ahead and reconvene then, sorry.

THIS SENTENCE, is corruption in plain sight to such an absurd degree that we are expected to be nonchalant in our acceptance of it. I’m sure a lot of people (present company excluded) drove right on by this sentence without stopping to marvel at how at ease big oil and gas are with expecting laws to favor them:

“So rather than wait for that to happen, we thought, ‘Well, let’s step in now and let’s put in place a bill that acts as a deterrent to doing that,” Petroleum Association of Wyoming President Pete Obermueller told WyoFile.

You call my claim wildly wrong and have only this to say?

You fundamentally misunderstand the nature of newsrooms. That you can point to the instances in which they were wrong does nothing to argue that they don’t do their best to verify sources, you’re missing the fact that it’s hard sometimes, missing the fact that mainstream outlets retract statements that turn out to be false later and hedge their bets with wording. Dan Rather lost his career over an unverified source. The NBC headline about the beheaded babies literally says “Unverified reports” in the title.

I think you should read this article about the difficulties of getting the news right in the 24 hour news cycle and educate yourself instead of spewing knee-jerk nonsense which your argument fails to prove. https://www.npr.org/2023/10/24/1208075395/israel-gaza-hospital-strike-media-nyt-apology

False equivalence between Twitter news and mainstream news. Mainstream news has to verify their sources and have a reputation to protect. They retract stories that turn out to be false. As you saw with Dominion, mainstream news has money to protect from slander lawsuits too. It’s not perfect and there is certainly bias, but on Twitter there are no guardrails for misinformation besides community notes.

On the one hand that’s good and on the other it makes misinformation extremely easy. Misinformation spreads like wildfire on Twitter and the corrections don’t. The corrections get buried in “nuh uh, YOU lie” bot spam unless it gets the community notes treatment.

Potato colored in my case.

I think we need to separate giving a fuck from morally wrong. I know that even stealing from Walmart is morally wrong because two wrongs don’t make a right as the old saying goes, but more importantly, by living in this society and reaping its benefits, we agree to abide by its rules too. Justification is way too easy of an exercise to have any bearing on what’s acceptable.

That being said…I also don’t even give a fraction of a fuck about someone stealing from Walmart.

We can admit that something is wrong without caring if it’s enforced or not. Kind of like solo drivers being in the carpool lane. Wrong? Yes. Care? Not a chance. They’ve made their own risk/reward calculations in each case.

But he has a robot maid and nobody has to cook.