Free Republic

Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers. During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal “outsourcer-in-chief” for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor. Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad — to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs.

Silicon Valley significantly escalated its war on white supremacy this week, choking off the ability of hate groups to raise money online, removing them from Internet search engines, and preventing some sites from registering at all. The new moves go beyond censoring individual stories or posts. Tech companies such as Google, GoDaddy and PayPal are now reversing their hands-off approach about content supported by their services and making it much more difficult for “alt-right” organizations to reach mass audiences. But the actions are also heightening concerns over how tech companies are becoming the arbiters of free speech in America. And...

A Chinese couple sent their teenage son to an internet addiction treatment camp—and within days, he was dead. As the BBC reports, “boot camps” for internet and gaming addictions have become popular in China, with some being criticized as using harsh military-style discipline on attendees. Some even beat patients or use electroshock therapy. The 18-year-old who died earlier this month in Fuyang had been sent to a camp that promised “psychological counseling and physical training”; according to the Telegraph, the camp said no corporal punishment would be used. Two days after the teen was dropped off by his mother on...

After months of criticism that GoDaddy was providing a platform for hate speech, the Web hosting company announced late Sunday that it will no longer house the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that promotes white supremacist and white nationalist ideas. GoDaddy said in a tweet that Daily Stormer had been told it had 24 hours to move its website domain to another provider because it had “violated” the Web host’s “terms of service.” GoDaddy’s announcement was in response to an appeal from a Twitter user who called attention late Sunday to an online post by Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin....

The Greatest Twitter Account EverPosted: 15th February 2013 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized 1 I was reluctant to get on Twitter… I’m really busy, and I just don’t have time to pay attention to the moronic missives of talentless rappers or some vapid celebutard’s most recent yeast infection. Seriously… if you aren’t banging Kim Kardashian, why would you give a rat’s ass about anything she has to say? But on the other hand, I find that I do like reading the tweets of other hacks… misery loves company, I suppose. But most of all, I enjoy Twitter accounts that...

American employers are trying to hire, but they can't find the right workers for the right price. The U.S. boasted 6.2 million job openings in June, a record level, according to a Labor Department report published on Tuesday. The high number of job openings illustrates a strength and a weakness of the U.S. job market. On the good side, American employers are ready to hire. During the Great Recession, job openings plunged to as low as 2.2 million in 2009. The Labor Department began tracking open positions in 2000. On the downside, employers increasingly say they can't find skilled and...

Internet giant Google has been accused by one of its own employees of “alienating conservatives” with its politically correct left-wing bias. A senior software engineer at the company claimed in a document that was distributed to colleagues that right-wing employees were forced to keep their views “in the closet” to avoid hostility. The unnamed employee’s outburst also triggered a gender row as he suggested “biological causes” and “neuroticism” were responsible for the lack of women in top tech jobs. His arguments that men have a higher drive for status and women are “more prone to anxiety” triggered an angry backlash...

"These data show that between 2007 and 2015, there's substantial increases in suicide rates for both young males and young females," said Tom Simon, an author of the report and associate director for science in the division of violence protection at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the new data Thursday. ... "If you look at suicide attempts by girls, it's typically that girls attempt suicide about four to one or three to one over boys, yet boys complete suicide in the reverse," Tishler said. "That tends, we think, to have to do with the modality...

It never stops. The attacks on conservative opinion are nonstop. Liberals will not tolerate differing opinion! ** Facebook kills conservative stories before they can go viral. ** Twitter blocks users from liking President Trump’s tweets. And now YouTube has partnered with far left groups to target conservative outlets and videos they deem offensive. The liberal partners include “No Hate Speech”, The Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the far left Anti-Defamation League — the group that just put gay Gateway Pundit reporter Lucian Wintrich, who is the grandson of Jewish Nazi occupation survivor, on its hate list.

Jack Ma is working the White House, with a promise to reduce the number of unemployed workers by 14%. Jack Ma was destined to live an ordinary life. He failed the Chinese university entrance exam several times before being accepted by the worst school in Hangzhou, and he was rejected from a dozen jobs – even selling chicken at KFC. Ma was ready to settle into a quiet life as an English teacher in eastern China, a position with few advancement prospects, when, during a trip to Seattle in 1995 working as a translator for a trade delegation, everything changed....

Escorcia explains that coordinating tens of thousands of bots involves the hiring of dozens of operators — who program the accounts and relaunch discussion topics — at a high level of sophistication. In other words, these methods can’t be done by just anyone. “All the political parties use them, the PRI especially; The PAN with (Rafael) Moreno Valle, and I’ve even detected that Ricardo Monreal (from Morena) used them,” he says.

Wanted to avoid running a thread on this, but seeing as how it continues dragging on, guess I'd better. The DOS attacker obviously knows by now that he's hurting us. Have no idea when he/they started the attack, but we discovered it a few days ago. And John has been fighting it ever since. Says it's like whack-a-mole. Every time John gets him blocked or knocked out, he pops up again with a new modified attack. John thought he had a good solution a couple days ago, and we did enjoy one night and most of the next day with...

What's up with FR?

There’s general agreement that this is a golden age of television. But less apparent is the fact that it’s also a golden age of animation, spawned by the same subscription video-on-demand companies — such as Netflix and Amazon — that are ushering TV’s shining period. The rise of streaming services — which are ordering season after season of animated shows for children and adults — has created an urgent demand for original content, leading to a surge in jobs at all levels of production. For now, the deluge shows no signs of letting up. “There’s more animation work now than...

McCain said, “I hope we can again rely on humility, on our need to cooperate, on our dependence on each other, to learn how to trust each other again, and by so doing, better serve the people who elected us. Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio, television and the internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood.” He concluded, “We tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the administration and then springing it on skeptical members, trying...

The bitter 2015 divorce of David and Barbara Mikkelson is the fuel that ignited the battle for the popular fact-checking Web site, Snopes, which is now resorting to a GoFundMe drive to keep it afloat. The showdown takes on added gravity because the popular site, owned by Baday, is one of the outlets that Facebook turns to for verification of stories when it receives complaints of fake news. Fans of Snopes have been responding in droves since Monday, when the company said that Proper Media — both tech partner and part-owner after buying Barbara’s shares in 2016 — has been...

“Hate speech is not free speech,” the Left increasingly insists – particularly on college and university campuses. In my new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies), I show why the very concept of hate speech is a scam. Here are the top seven:1. Twitter decides who has the right to “hate speech” Consider, for example, what Twitter does not consider to be “hate speech.” A Muslim named Obaid Karki, @stsheetrock on Twitter, runs a website headed “Obaid Karki St.Sheetrock’s Painfulpolitics Offensive Comedy Hepcat” and another called “Suicide Bombers Magazine.” He posted this on one of...

From California to London, the tech giants are employing top architects to build spectacular symbols of their immense global power. But they have their critics… We know by now that the internet is a giant playpen, a landscape of toys, distractions and instant gratification, of chirps and squeaks and bright, shiny things – plus, to be sure, ugly, horrid beasties lurking in all the softness – apparently without horizon. Graphics – rounded corners, lower case, Google’s primary colours, Twitter’s birdie, Facebook’s shades of blue – enhance the innocence and infantilism. It is a world, as Jonathan Franzen once said, “so...

What does looking into the hearts and minds of online trolls tell us? That's the question Australian researchers tried to answer in a new study that investigates the psychological profile of trolls — that is, computer users who engage in the disturbing 21st century practice of deliberating provoking, demeaning, and threatening others online. Researchers at Australia's Federation University used an online questionnaire to look closer at a handful of traits — psychopathy, sadism, and empathy — among those who engage in online trolling. The survey included 415 participants, approximately one-third male and two-thirds female, with a median age of 23...