Tag: politics

She blew the whistle at Meta. Then her career fell apart.

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Eisenstat, Facebook’s former head of election integrity, alleged the social media platform allowed political operatives to mislead the public with sophisticated ad-targeting tools in a 2019 op-ed. Meta has argued that these ad policies were to prevent censorship of political speech.

…

It was hard to find a new job. Eisenstat said she would routinely interview with senior managers who would later ghost her. One institution courted her for months for a leadership role but then told her they wouldn’t hire her. That day, the organization announced a major donation from the philanthropic organization of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

…

many whistleblowers say coming forward has unexpectedly derailed their lives. They say they became isolated among their colleagues, suffered severe professional damage, or were pushed out of the industry altogether. For a generation that entered Silicon Valley with a sense of idealism, viewing tech giants as mission-driven organizations seeking to improve the world, the cold reception to what they consider truth-telling has come as a shock.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tech-whistleblowers-face-million-dollar-150822546.html

Economics Explained: The ‘Surplus’ Concept… That Trump Doesn’t Understand (Paul Krugman)

Posted on by Lone Candle

Calling a political opponent a communist is silly. Not even the Soviet Union or China called themselves communist. They called themselves socialist. Communism is when the productive surplus is controlled by the workers themselves. The government owning a business and deciding what to do with a surplus is just a government elite controlling the surplus instead of an owner or manager elite. Communism would be not a government elite or capitalist elite controlling the surplus, but the workers controlling the surplus. The socialist governments were supposed to be a transition phase to true communism. The closest things to this might be cooperatives where the workers also own the business, although those are done within a larger capitalist system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUXucPRH_-4

The Democrat Who Split MAGA Over the Epstein Files | ‘The Opinions’ podcast

Posted on by Lone Candle

It is not normal for the justice department or the FBI to release the internal files of an investigation. Such files have lots of speculations and falsehoods in them, and releasing them can falsely destroy people’s reputations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1i5jTtkPr0

How Redistricting Turned a Setback Into a Bloodbath

Posted on by Lone Candle

“sometimes, when it comes to gerrymandering, politicians press their advantages too far. Political scientists have a term for parties spreading their vote perilously thin through redistricting: dummymanders. The idea is that, by spreading a party’s voters more thinly across a greater number of districts in order to pick up more seats, a new map will turn strongholds into potential areas of danger. Instead of having five districts where the party can generally count on 60 percent support, say, they’ll create seven districts where their likely share is more like 53 percent — leaving more of them at risk during a wave election.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/11/10/redistricting-dummymandering-history-1894-election-00643350

The next shutdown threat is around the corner

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The bipartisan deal to end the funding lapse includes a long-term agreement on just three of the dozen bills lawmakers need to finish each year to keep cash flowing to federal programs. And those three measures are some of the easiest to rally around — including money for veterans programs, food aid, assistance for farmers and the operations of Congress itself.

Together, they represent only about 10 percent of the roughly $1.8 trillion Congress doles out each year to federal agencies. Under the deal, everything else is funded on a temporary basis through Jan. 30 at levels first set by Congress in March 2024, when Joe Biden was president.

That leaves behind major open decisions about the vast majority of discretionary dollars — including for the military and public health programs — along with the stickiest policy issues. It doesn’t help that House and Senate leaders still haven’t agreed on an overall total for fiscal 2026 spending, amid GOP divisions over how deeply to cut.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/13/shutdown-appropriations-january-30-00649414