#paid — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

People @[email protected] · 2026-09-04 · 13:39 UTC

https://www.europesays.com/people/214925/ Von der Leyen: No EU Compensation Paid to Turkish Cypriot Farmers for #compensation #cypriot #CyprusMirror #der #EU #farmers #fmd #for #leyen #no #paid #to #Turkish #UrsulaVonDerLeyen #von

#von #ursulavonderleyen #turkish #to #paid #no

David Boles @[email protected] · 2026-06-15 · 13:09 UTC

The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

For the better part of two decades, the laughter of the United States lived inside a padlocked box. Charles Rolland Douglass, a CBS sound engineer who had spent the war helping the Navy develop shipboard radar, built the device in the early 1950s and guarded it the way a sexton guards a reliquary. The laff box, as he called it, stood a little over two feet tall and worked like an organ: keys for titters, chortles, belly laughs, shrieks, a foot pedal to let a wave of mirth swell, crest, and die on command. Douglass wheeled it from studio to studio himself. Clients heard the output and never saw the mechanism. Only his immediate family knew what the inside looked like, and when he finally stepped back from the work, his sons carried the trade forward like a guild secret. The industry word for what he did was sweetening, which tells you the industry understood the product. Sugar is what you add when the thing itself goes down easier disguised. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/15/the-rented-crowd-neros-five-thousand-the-paris-claque-and-the-box-that-laughed-for-america/

#attention #audience #bots #dialogue #false #history

Chuck Darwin @[email protected] · 2025-01-09 · 19:13 UTC

Last week, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the FCC,
rejecting its authority to classify broadband as a Title II “telecommunications service.”

In doing so, the court removed net neutrality protections for all Americans
and took away the FCC’s ability to meaningfully regulate internet service providers.

This ruling fundamentally gets wrong the reality of internet service we all live with every day.
Nearly 80% of Americans view broadband access to be as important as water and electricity.
It is no longer an extra, non-necessary “information service,” as it was seen 40 years ago,
but it is a vital medium of communication in everyday life.

Business, health services, education, entertainment, our social lives, and more have increasingly moved online.
By ruling that broadband “information service” and not a “telecommunications service”
this court is saying that the ISPs that control your broadband access will continue to face little to no oversight for their actions.
This is intolerable.
Net neutrality is the principle that ISPs treat all data that travels over their network equally,
without improper discrimination in favor of particular apps, sites, or services.
At its core, net neutrality is a principle of equity and protector of innovation
—that, at least online, large monopolistic ISPs don’t get to determine winners and losers.
Net neutrality ensures that users determine their online experience, not ISPs.
As such, it is fundamental to user choice, access to information, and free expression online.

By removing protections against actions like #blocking, #throttling, and #paid #prioritization,
the court gives those willing and able to pay ISPs an advantage over those who are not.
It privileges large legacy corporations that have partnerships with the big ISPs,
and it means that newer, smaller, or niche services will have trouble competing, even if they offer a superior service.
It means that ISPs can throttle your service
–or that of, say, a fire department fighting the largest wildfire in state history.
They can block a service they don’t like.
In addition to charging you for access to the internet, they can charge services and websites for access to you, -- artificially driving up costs.
And where most Americans have little choice in home broadband providers, i
t means these ISPs will be able to exercise their #monopoly power not just on the price you pay for access, but how you access and engage with information as well.
Moving forward, now more than ever it becomes important for individual states to pass their own net neutrality laws,
or defend the ones they have on the books.
#California passed a gold standard net neutrality law in 2018 that has survivedjudicial scrutiny.
It is up to us to ensure it remains in place.
#Congress can also end this endless whiplash of reclassification and decide, once and for all, by passing a law classifying broadband internet services firmly under Title II.
Such proposals have been introduced before;
they ought to be introduced again.