Category Archives: politics

Apple vs Epic

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Some of you may have heard of the video game Fortnite, which Epic makes for the cell phone market and sells through Apple’s app store. Associated with that is Epic’s move to make in-app sales—purchases of other products made from within an app—without having to pay the 30% commission Apple charges for in-app purchases via an app that was sold through Apple’s app store.

Some of you may have heard of Apple’s subsequent decision to block Fortnite sales through its app store and of the ensuing antitrust hoo-raw over Apple’s move.

The hoo-raw is centered on government intervention into what should be a free market: government antitrust law and the use of the government judiciary branch to press the beef.

That’s wrong, however legal the beefing might be.

I consider Apple’s use of its facility, here its app store, to be entirely withing Apple’s right to control its property, regardless of how widespread third-party use might be. Walmart, for instance, is not legally required, nor is it morally obligated, to sell any particular third-party product that wants shelf space. To provide space, or not, is a purely business decision, whether the space is physical for physical goods or virtual for electrons.

On the other hand, there’s nothing preventing Epic from selling its output through other facilities than one provided by Apple. There’s nothing preventing Epic or other app producers from forming their own individual app stores or from banding together to form a collective app store or collection of app stores.

Along with that, there’s nothing wrong with app developers selling their output exclusively to or through Android device producers and eschewing Apple device compatibility altogether.

That’s what a free market does. It’s what should be occurring here. Don’t bother with antitrust litigation; instead, set up separate app stores.

As an aside, Alphabet’s Google Play charges the same 30% for the same in-app purchase process, but the current beef only involves Apple. If there is a legitimate legal beef here, maybe it’s in the two biggest players in the app sales business charging the same price. It’s hard to believe that the two entities have sufficiently identical cost structures that they would arrive, naturally, at the same market price.

Danger from In-Person Voting

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It’s quite minimal, regardless of the hysterical panic-mongering of the NLMSM and the Progressive-Democrats. Dr Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator:

“Well, I can tell you it has been safe for me to go to Starbucks and pick up my order,” Dr Deborah Birx told Just The News in an interview when asked about in-person voting.
…
“If you go into Starbucks in the middle of Texas and Alabama and Mississippi that have very high case rates, then I can’t say that it would be different waiting in line in the polls[.]”

Voters just need to pay attention to what they’re doing.

Alphabet’s Political Bias

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…made manifest once again, this time via YouTube, which is wholly owned by Google, which in turn is wholly owned by Alphabet.

During Joe Biden’s presidential nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, both his personal YouTube page and the Democratic Party’s YouTube page saw strong, negative reactions from live audiences. In fact, “Dislikes” outnumbered “Likes,” in real time.
Yet both pages’ “Dislikes” mysteriously dropped in the hours after the Democratic National Convention (DNC) had concluded.

Just The News cited carefully unnamed “experts” positing that

[t]he removed Dislikes could be a signal that YouTube is concerned about fake accounts or bots trying to influence the election or indicative of something else[.]

Of course. But with Alphabet’s history of political bias and censorship, the anonymous claim is hard to take seriously. It’s especially hard to take this claim seriously with Alphabet, through its Google, refusing to answer questions about the disappearances.

Student Debt

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In an article about Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s plan for reducing student loan-centered debt, The Wall Street Journal asked

What do you think would be an effective way to reduce student loan debt in the US?

Getting government out of the way of the economy so graduates can get jobs and pay their debts is the first and most critical step.

For the future, we need to require colleges and universities to publish the median and mean first-five-year annual incomes for their various majors.

In addition, we need to require colleges and universities, either individually or as consortia, to be the sole lenders of last resort to their students

We also need to remove government altogether from the student loan industry, as lender, as loan guarantor, and from any other role.

Finally, the only legitimate way for graduates to reduce their student loans short of repayment is through ordinary bankruptcy. We need to force our government to eliminate its ban on bankruptcy discharge of student debt.

Biden’s “plan” unfairly singles out private colleges/universities by not having their students’ debts ameliorated, a deliberate attempt to punish them; he’ll only mitigate the student debts for graduates of public schools and those who were cheated (under his definition of cheating) by for-profit schools.

Even worse, by making it so students don’t have to repay all of their debt through his forgiveness bit, Biden will greatly diminish, if not destroy, the student loan market, shifting the whole thing onto the backs of taxpayers, unless the methods outlined above are enacted.

Lies and Bigotries of Joe Biden

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Now that the Progressive-Democratic Party has finished its nominating process and formally put Joe Biden at the top of its Presidential candidate ticket, it’s useful to look at him.

Lies:

  • Plagiarized college papers
  • Plagiarized campaign speeches
  • Claimed to have marched with protesters during the civil rights movement when he had not—had not even been an activist
  • Repeated the civil rights activism lie during the just-concluded primary campaign
  • Presaging a Hillary Clinton lie, claimed during a 2007 presidential primary debate that he’d been “shot at” while visiting Iraq
  • During this year’s primary campaign, claimed he’d been arrested in South Africa while trying to see the anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela

Bigotries:

  • Said on an earlier campaign trail, You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent
  • Called then-Presidential candidate and campaign rival Barack Obama the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy
  • Republicans want to put blacks in chains
  • 15% of Americans are just no good
  • If you don’t support me, you ain’t black
  • Picked his running mate on the basis, first, of her sex and, second, of her skin color
  • Poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids
  • Bragged about working well with and getting along well with openly avowed segregationists, Senators James Eastland (D, MI) and Herman Talmadge (D,GA)

Bonus—stupidities:

  • Told a reporter he had a higher IQ than the reporter when the latter questioned his law school record
  • At a townhall, called a questioner a liar
  • At another townhall, called a questioner a lying dog-faced pony soldier
  • At an impromptu outdoor gathering, called a questioner a liar
  • At another townhall, challenged a questioner to a pushup contest in irritated, non sequitur response to a question

Progressive-Democrats claim to be all about character in any candidate who would be President. This is the character of the man they want for President.