Free Republic

Theme Players take the part of land owners, attempting to buy and then develop their land. Income is gained by other players visiting their properties and money is spent when they visit properties belonging to other players. When times get tough, players may have to mortgage their properties to raise cash for fines, taxes and other misfortunes

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Thursday announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the tech giant of engineering an illegal monopoly in smartphones that boxes out competitors and stifles innovation. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New Jersey, alleges that Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone market and uses its control over the iPhone to “engage in a broad, sustained, and illegal course of conduct.” The lawsuit — which was also filed with 16 state attorneys general — is the latest example of the Justice Department’s approach to aggressive enforcement of federal antitrust law that...

Jack Poso 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec What was Donald’s favorite game as a child? Mrs Trump: Monopoly…and he was always building with blocks 9:57 PM · Mar 1, 2024

Your PC without this CPU feature won’t boot Windows 11 24H2 KEY TAKEAWAYS Windows 11 24H2 update requires the POPCNT CPU feature, making it impossible to run on super-old PCs. Modern CPUs support POPCNT, so if you recently bought a new PC, you won't have any issues. PCs older than fifteen years will be affected by this change and won't be able to boot Windows 11 without POPCNT support. Windows 11 24H2 is the next big update that Microsoft will roll out later this year, and it might finally put an end to the practice of running Windows unofficially on...

San Francisco jury finds that Google ‘maintained monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive conduct’.. Google lost an antitrust case over the market power of its app store on Monday, a blow to the search giant as it faces other legal challenges to its search dominance and ad tech business.. Videogame maker Epic Games sued the search giant in 2020, alleging it used its dominant position to squeeze excess profits from app developers. The San Francisco jury reached a unanimous verdict after deliberating for less than four hours. The loss comes as Google battles more antitrust challenges, including a landmark trial...

Imagine a world in which two asset managers call the shots, in which their wealth exceeds current U.S. GDP and where almost every hedge fund, government and retiree is a customer. It’s closer than you think. BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group — already the world’s largest money managers — are less than a decade from managing a total of US$20 trillion, according to Bloomberg News calculations. Amassing that sum will likely upend the asset management industry, intensify their ownership of the largest U.S. companies and test the twin pillars of market efficiency and corporate governance. None other than Vanguard founder...

Not the way to slash property prices in the game. A Monopoly match in Belgium turned into a bloodbath — and not in the figurative board game sense — after a perturbed neighbor confronted the players with a samurai sword. The fracas occurred around 5 a.m. April 2 while a group of four gamers was playing the classic strategy game outside on the sidewalk in Forest, Brussels, per local outlet La Libre. The noise reportedly awoke the neighbors, who came outside brandishing a stick at the rowdy players, who may have been homeless, according to France’s Midi Libre. This resulted...

Over the past few months, we’ve asked Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) questions about how they spend ratepayer dollars on advertising and sponsorships. Stay tuned for a future Springs Taxpayers United article about sponsorships. Right now, we’ll focus exclusively on the CSU advertising budget. We wondered why a monopoly utility needs to advertise at all. No one in their service area has a choice on which utility to use. The local advertising company Vladmir Jones handles the advertising account for CSU. Through a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request, we asked for all of the 2022 advertising expenditures. Vladmir Jones invoices...

The cost of a dozen eggs has now surpassed the price of a pound of beef, marking the first time that’s happened since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping data in 1980. The average price of a dozen large Grade A eggs ran at $4.82 in January 2023, while a pound of ground beef was $4.64. In January 2022, eggs were $1.93, and beef was $4.77, but egg prices have soared by 70% in the last year alone. Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy group, says the “real culprit” behind sky-high prices is a “collusive scheme” among top U.S....

Spotify's (SPOT.N) CEO Daniel Ek renewed his attack on Apple (AAPL.O) on Wednesday in a series of tweets alleging the iPhone maker "gives itself every advantage while at the same time stifling innovation and hurting consumers". Ek tagged a number of sympathetic business leaders in his 21-tweet thread, including Musk, Microsoft president Brad Smith, and Proton founder Andy Yen. On Monday, the world's richest person Elon Musk criticized the fee Apple charges software developers - including his Twitter business - for in-app purchases, and posted a meme suggesting he was willing to "go to war" rather than pay it.

In many places, searching the web is a gateway to a wider world of information, but in Russia, it is part of a system that helps trap people in an alternative reality. Shortly after 20 people were killed in a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk in June, Lev Gershenzon - a former manager at Russian tech company Yandex - typed the city's name into its search engine to find out more. The results he got back shocked him. "The sources that ranked at the top of the page were strange and obscure," he told the BBC....

There is no bigger threat to democracy in our country than the power of Big Tech companies to control what information we as citizens are allowed to share. The monopoly power that companies such as Google and Facebook have over the online advertising market gives the far-left employees of these firms far too much control over what ideas can be shared on their platforms. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Kennedy (R-LA) dealt a huge blow to these monopolists last week when they successfully attached an amendment to the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act that forbids Big Tech firms and...

Roman Balmakov interviews the head of the American Cattle association. Video at link. My Summary below.

On August 2, 2022, Xcel Energy submitted its plan to spend more than $300 million on building 730 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations and increasing the use of electric school buses to the Public Utilities Commission (PUC). The proposal would force Minnesota families and businesses to pay higher electricity prices to finance the construction and operation of the EV chargers, plus a 10 percent government-approved profit for Xcel Energy if the PUC gives Xcel its blessing. Goals are not mandates.. The point of a monopoly electric utility is to provide reliable, affordable electricity to the customers who are forced to...

Bill Gates has secured legal approval for the controversial purchase of thousands of acres of prime North Dakota farmland, after the deal drew fury from the state's residents. The state's Republican Attorney General Drew Wrigley had inquired into the land sale, and on Wednesday issued a letter saying the transaction complied with an archaic anti-corporate farming law. The Depression-era law prohibits corporations or limited liability companies from owning farmland or ranchland, but allows individual trusts to own the land if it is leased to farmers, which Gates intends to do. Gates is the largest private owner of farmland in America...

... Business Insider columnist Josh Barro suggested that woke capitalism provides a form of parapolitical representation for workers and corporate consumers. Given their perceived political dis­enfranchisement, woke capitalism offers them representation in the public sphere, as they see their values reflected in corporate pronouncements. Others have suggested that corporations have gone woke only to be spared cancellation by Twitter mobs and other activists, that wokeness is a good “branding tool,” or that progressive shareholders also demand corporate activism. But woke capitalism cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of placating coastal leftists, ingratiating left-liberal legislators, or avoiding the wrath of activists....

But rushing to replace gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles would hand the keys to the American transportation sector to China, given Beijing’s near-monopoly on rare-earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which are used in the high-output motors of most electric vehicles. ... manager at a state-owned rare-earth enterprise based in Ganzhou: “The new company will enforce stricter rules on the production quantity as well as the export volume of rare earths, which may also drive up prices.” In May, the International Energy Agency reported that an electric-vehicle motor requires “upwards of 1 kilogram,” or more than 2 pounds, of rare-earth...

Elon Musk argued in recent remarks that “government is simply the biggest corporation, with the monopoly on violence.”Musk — who serves as chief executive of both Tesla and SpaceX — made the remarks during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit, where he also slammed President Biden’s domestic agenda.“It does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation, and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation, which is the government,” he commented.“Government is simply the biggest corporation, with the monopoly...

I’m the founder of MeWe, the ad-free social network with data privacy and no content amplification or newsfeed manipulation. MeWe competes directly with Facebook. On June 27, 2019, I wrote an op-ed in this newspaper headlined “I Compete With Facebook, and It’s No Monopoly.” I’ve changed my mind. MeWe continues to succeed, albeit on a modest scale. Two years ago the platform had five million users and no revenue. Today it has nearly 20 million users and is breaking even with millions of dollars in revenue. Yet despite MeWe’s growth, Facebook’s troubling actions over the last two years have caused...

"This incredibly eye opening documentary reveals something astonishing: the majority of our world is owned by the very same people. Because of this they can control the entire world and impose their wicked agenda onto all of humanity. This is the time to expose them and to rise up as one to defend our freedom. The name of the two companies who virtually owns the world’ are Vanguard and BlackRock. They are at the heart of the Deep State or Cabal. Their plan is the Great Reset where they want to enslave every human on earth."