If AT&T figured they could make more money from crypto than from telecom they'd probably turn off all their telecom services and rebrand appropriately. They don't give a damn about their customers' safety, security, or anything beyond how much money they can be squeezed for. For all the faults of the old Bell System, they WERE devoted to public service. Now AT&T is just busloads of evil clowns.
@lauren well... right.
I have always though it foolish to rely on corporations for public service or look to them for moral leadership.
That a corporation is amoral is a feature, as the alternative opens us up to being caught behind someone else's sense of morality that can go REAL BAD for us.
If we would rather pay AT&T for crypto services than for telecom--if crypto was more valuable to us than phones--then goodness they SHOULD switch over, to better provide what we collectively want.
Safety, security, etc, is the role of government, not corporations.
@volkris @lauren
Some decades ago, I worked with our company's network manager (data and voice) for 5 provinces in Canada - he said that the only easy-to-work-with telco was the one owned by a provincial government (SaskTel). IIRC, BC Tel was one of the worst and I couldn't understand why the gov't didn't take it over; after all, they had taken over the electricity company (now BC Hydro). [PG&E is a great example of why you don't want a power company to be a private corporation]
(OTOH, I doubt that Americans understand how to set up a successful public company: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/crowncorporation.asp)
@PeterLudemann I want to joke that Americans don't even understand how to set up a successful America, much less a successful public company :)
The half-joke is that Americans are so poorly informed about the US government and so poorly educated in matters of basic civics that setting up a successful public company becomes an advanced topic far out of reach of large swaths of the population.
One of the things I have to wryly laugh at (or I'd cry) is he number of friends who every four years stop and ask, How do presidential elections work again?
So many Americans literally don't even know how the head of the executive branch is elected--if they even know there's an executive branch at all--that it's completely unsurprising that they wouldn't know how to set up a successful public company.
But that's just the state of the US these days.
@lauren
@volkris @lauren
Judging from comments I see on Nextdoor (yes, I know, but it's also entertaining and sometimes useful), many Americans have no idea how legislation works nor what a Governor or President can and cannot do.
When I moved from British Columbia to California, I was astonished at how poor the political reporting was. That might be related.
@PeterLudemann Yeah, exactly.
Your experience moving to CA supports* the ax I grind that the state of #journalism in the US is not only really bad and has been getting worse, but it's an ENORMOUS contributor to the social ills that we complain about every day.
Not only is the population amazingly uninformed about how the federal government works, but it's worse: I see reporters every day making statements about government that are outright wrong.
The reporting isn't merely lacking but outright misinformative, as reporters increasingly speak as experts on topics they aren't familiar with.
In such an information environment is it any surprise the US is in such an undermined state?
It won't change until we collectively demand better.
*which is to say, confirms my bias :)
@volkris @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstei
n.org
Is it a coincidence that the US doesn't have a public broadcaster? (BBC, CBC, NHK, ZDF, ARD, etc). Without this competition, private broadcasting of news devolves to a lowest common denominator of "if it bleeds it leads" that gets more eyeballs (and advertising dollars) but presents less information. I get better information about US politics from CBC TV/radio than from any of the American TV/radio outlets (and the US newspapers do a pretty bad job also).
Then there's the decentralized nature of the US republican government system. For all its faults, a parliamentary system usually presents a unified policy that people understand, and can put together laws and regulatory systems that are reasonably coherent. In the absence of a strong leader, American laws become a patchwork of whatever small coalitions can be cobbled together, often needing the support of special interests, with the politicians getting their names on the laws as a reward. This leads to excessively complex and badly written laws that require the courts to interpret them (and the system for appointing or electing(!) judges makes this even worse). Canada, for example, has a Supreme Court that theoretically has similar powers to the US Supreme Court; but in reality it has far less influence because it doesn't have to deal with so many badly written laws (starting with, ahem, the Constitution).
Plus the every-four-years election system (no non-confidence votes to cause the government to fall) leads to mentally exhausting multi-year election campaigns and people naturally just tune out (in Canada the campaign is about 6 weeks).
@PeterLudemann Oh gosh, this is where we part ways.
I actually listen to the BBC regularly... for the lolz, as the kids say.
BBC World Service programming is a joke, constantly putting out segments that are either laughably childish or outright misinformed/misinforming about its subject matter.
My point here being that governmental/public control of media isn't in itself a recipe for success.
In the end it all comes down to us, the consumers, the public. If we want to see bleeding then bleeding will be leading.
If we want propaganda or drama or sweet, sweet confirmation bias, we'll get it.
And apparently we do, so that's what we get.
We get the media and the government that we ask for.
@volkris @lauren
I'm not claiming that BBC or NHK are the gold standard (or even bronze standard) of journalism, but their existence forces the other broadcasters to raise their standards ... CTV in Canada and Asahi/Fuji/etc in Japan have better news than ABC/CBS/NBS/(Fox) in the US.
"Political Watchdog Truth Report" is the 3rd most popular TV program in Japan (where TV is much more popular than in the US), so - at least in one country - there's a market for quality journalism.
https://realgaijin.substack.com/p/japanese-tv-ratings-released-into
@PeterLudemann it's an incredibly low bar, though. Even if that low bar raises for the others, well that just speaks to how awful the others are.
Raising the standards to the level of BBC's broadcasting social media posts that are contradicted by actual investigators' findings just isn't saying very much.
I can't talk about what journalism is like in other countries, but at least in the US, and apparently the UK, there is very good reason that so many have lost faith in the institution.
@lauren
@PeterLudemann My favorite example was listening to BBC reporting in their news break what officials said about a shooting, and then immediately after hearing their normal programming reading off social media posts that were contradicted by the official report they had just broadcast.
Official investigations had found one thing, but never mind that, let's broadcast dramatic tales that we are reading off of Facebook!
I hear that kind of thing all the time from BBC.
@volkris @lauren
Is this a situation of the "official report" being, shall we say, less than accurate? Or a "he-said, she-said" kind of thing? Or a variant of the "person in the street" interview that is popular but far less meaningful than a poll (and polls can be highly misleading).
E.g., I've noticed reporting on Gaza repeating Hamas figures for casualties without much context whereas in Ukraine they were careful to say that they couldn't confirm the numbers (to be clear: this doesn't mean I support whatever Netanyahu et al are saying either).
There are many lazy reporters out there, and lazy news organizations. But some are much lazier than others - and the laziest are those who only go for superficial sensationalist "news", with no background information or follow-up (I'm leaving out those that spew fact-free opinions).
@PeterLudemann the example I have in mind was basically person in the street, except lazier since the reporter didn't actually have to go on the street or conduct an interview.
They just read out posts to Facebook from folks without any of their own first hand knowledge of the situation.
And to be clear: they read it as fact, not opinion.
As I recall someone was shot, the police announced that they'd arrested a suspect after a car chase, and BBC was ignoring that to instead relay what was effectively gossip as to who the perpetrator was.
Yeah, I could cut a little slack if potential biased statistics were involved--there's fog of war there, so to speak--but not in this sort of case.
But I hear respected news outfits doing this kind of thing all the time, misreporting matters of basic fact and appearing to echo man-on-the-street stories that happen to be misinformed.
@lauren
@volkris @lauren
When you notice something LOL-able from BBC, please post it ... I've noticed some risible items (and Brexit coverage was abominable), but maybe I need to recalibrate my BS-meter.