The linked article is from California’s office of the attorney general related to an existing lawsuit. As a non-Californian, I am supremely disappointed that this is happening just at the state level, but credit should still go where its due. And if their legal action sets a precedent that makes it easier for other states (or dare I hope, at the federal level if and when we get strong antitrust regulators like we had under Biden), then all the better.
Search results on Amazon are fully pay-to-play anyway. You don’t get anywhere near the top of the list without paying for the privilege. No big deal for slop producers who sell in volume, but basically useless for small businesses or private sellers.
“I have a chip on my shoulder,” she said, describing her drive to prove she can win over private equity in Silicon Valley based on merit, not inheritance or legacy …[T]he young founder hasn’t taken money from her parents for Phia. Instead, she’s insisted on raising outside capital even as some investors remain fixated on her personal life instead of her business venture.
I appreciate the sentiment, but it would be delusional to think her ability to “win over private equity” was divorced at all from her father’s legacy and last name. And actually, I’m not sure I appreciate the sentiment. In 2026, merit is way down the list, like scrawled sideways in the margins, of things that matter to private equity.
I did read the synopsis of it and thought it sounded like an interesting take. I’m not sure I liked the movie enough to bother with the sequel though. As an ending to its own contained story, it felt really tone-deaf.
I just watched The Black Phone last night. Spoiler:
The climax involves the child protagonist killing the villain. When he returns to school, all the kids whisper around him about how badass he is, then he goes to his class, sits next to the girl he has a crush on, and confidently tells her to call him “Finn” instead of “Finny” because he’s personally grown so much from being locked up in a dungeon and haunted by the dead kids who came before him.
How disappointing…
I’m not convinced there’s a conspiracy here. Seems entirely likely that Rotten Tomatoes has no contingency for the release of a movie so blatantly sycophantic and propagandistic that the only people spending money on tickets are those who are already bought into the fantasy.
Not even Amazon - it’s a cheap, travelocity-ass frontend for showing the cheapest existing prices already available. The administration has, admittedly, claimed that they’ve made deals with pharmaceutical companies to make some of their drugs available for as cheaply as they are already available in other countries. But, as the AP notes,
Many of the details of Trump’s deals with manufacturers remain unclear , and drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on many factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost. https://apnews.com/article/trumprx-website-trump-drug-prices-pharmaceuticals-eae897ebf87349510a7795035a3043a3
So if you’re looking for a meaningful, long-term solution to one of the U.S.'s greatest healthcare deficiencies, the administration would like to interest you in this service they constructed with all the forethought and durability of a child’s cardboard lemonade stand.
“There’s several examples, you know from teachers handing out ICE cards and showing how NOT to cooperate… somebody has to lead this and say yes we will cooperate because we have a lot of teachers who are saying I won’t let ICE here.”
Leandra also states on the livestream that ICE cards, which provide very basic constitutional rights, are actually getting students in trouble for being “misinformed.”
“Cooperate. It’s like the ICE ICE baby stuff. Stop. Cooperate and listen.”
This person is a fucking cartoon character.
I don’t know California local politics at all, but surely this is a guaranteed way to immediately put your career on the chopping block in LA, right?
This was exactly the way I thought of my spending habits for a long time. Then a few years ago, Netflix prohibited password sharing, a soft feature they had specifically encouraged in the past, with the explicit purpose of desperately generating additional revenue as other growth streams plateaued. When most users just kind of accepted it, the dam broke and all the other services followed suit.
That was the final straw for me, on top of the proliferation of dedicated per-studio services, price hikes, and pricing tiers that created needless feature lock-outs. As a consumer I get dicked around in every sector in which I’m forced to participate, but this is one sector where I have an option to withdraw from the dicking.
Same. His auteur sensibilities are a pretty perfect match for my taste. I am incredibly fond of all his output (with the exception of Caught Stealing, which I haven’t seen yet), including his most polarizing films - Noah and mother! Even the blemishes on those imperfect projects just make them more interesting.
I watched a minute or two of the first “episode” and it reeked of an artless studio hack misguidedly copying an early-aughts editing style that is as poorly executed as it as an unfit complement to the subject matter. And that’s beside the plastic sheen and evident soullessness that just comes with AI-generated video. This feels like an aging filmmaker experimenting with new technology because he’s more afraid of being left behind than he is able to understand the thing he’s being pressured to engage with.
In the context of the article, this sounds merely like evidence for the appeals case aiming to overturn the order to block information sharing between the two agencies. So…at best they don’t get to continue breaking the law? Which seems appropriate - we can’t just shoot everyone in the back who breaks a privacy law 42,695 separate times. It’s not like they’re teenagers stealing snacks from Walmart.