I didn’t know Popbitch was still a thing until I saw this excerpt fom it posted on Bluesky:
Oh Glinner, we’re not exactly doing the numbers, are we, bro? I feel that wordsearch thing and the dinosaur colouring book will be vastly more edifying and more intellectually exercising than Linehan’s book, too…
Meta has a new plan to navigate the European Union’s tough new ad privacy rules – charge users $14 a month.
The tech giant is considering getting customers in Europe to pay monthly subscription fees to use Instagram and Facebook if they don’t agree to let Meta use their data to serve them ads, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Users who pay the subscription fee will be able to use Meta’s products without ads.
The monthly fee would start at around €10 ($10.50) for a desktop Facebook or Instagram account, but would rise to around $14 for accounts on mobile devices thanks to the commissions charged by Apple and Google’s app stores.
The new subscription tiers, which could roll out in the next few months, are an attempt to comply with the EU’s crackdown on personalized advertising, according to The Journal.
Yeah, it’s an attempt to comply with the EU’s laws rather than a cynical attempt to screw people out of an excessive amount of money for a service that isn’t worth that much. Fourteen bucks a month? We really are trying to make Oolong’s $1-a-year-for-now deal look lightweight, aren’t we, Mark… then again at least he’s not talking about cutting off the service to Europe entirely, unlike Oolong:
In recent weeks Elon Musk has suggested Twitter could stop being accessible in Europe in order to avoid new regulation enacted by the European Commission.
Musk is increasingly frustrated with having to comply with the Digital Services Act, according to a person familiar with the company. The Tesla billionaire, who acquired Twitter, now called X, a year ago for $44 billion, has discussed simply removing the app’s availability in the region, or blocking users in the European Union from accessing it, the person said. This would be similar to the way Meta is currently blocking people in Europe from using its new app Threads.
The DSA took effect in August and requires large online platforms like X to have effective and transparent systems in place for the moderation and removal of false, misleading, and harmful information. With a wave of misinformation regarding the Israel-Hamas war quickly going viral on X, the platform is likely already in violation of the DSA.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said last week the Commission is officially “investigating X’s compliance” with the new law and formally requested detailed information from the platform on its actions to mitigate and remove harmful or toxic information.
Cash-strapped X could face a fine if it’s found in violation of the DSA. The Commission can impose “periodic penalty payments,” or fines, up to 6% of a company’s global revenue.
So for having the temerity to tell him to stop his platform being shitty and harmful, Husk apparently thinks he cam “punish” Europe or something by cutting off Twitter there. I mean, sure, THAT’LL work, when you’ve already blown the value of your service by 80% why not just cut off hundreds of millions of potential users, the advertisers will LOVE that… I can see him doing that in Australia too, though, now the government here is also on his back about the amount of CSA material he’s also doing nothing about. The problem is, I can’t see them actually succeeding at getting that from him, even though it’s a pissy sum (about $600,000), because as a billionaire he is clearly above all man-made laws, and for all the talk that he could be fined a further $800,000 per day if he doesn’t pay up… well if he’s not going to pay the original fine, I can’t see him paying the even bigger extra. But I can imagine him just turning the service off altogether here just for considering making him do something to protect kids. And what a loss it’d be if it happened, eh…
So Oolong Husk wasn’t kidding about charging Twitter users…
Apparently the plan is to test the subscription model in just two countries, New Zealand and the Philippines (why those two? Who the fuck knows), and from November new users will be paying $1 a year for basic Twitter functionality. Which is cheap, sure, but this is Twitter we’re talking about, it’s barely worth that much… Also, this won’t stay at a dollar per year and it also won’t stay at new users. The end begins here, surely.
Here we go again. As usual, no explanations offered, no copyright infringement intended. And no nudity in this one! Although there is an outstandingly violent Ghanaian poster for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that, well, lives up to that title rather more than the film does…
New Zealand had an election on the same day as our referendum which seems to have ended about as badly… I’ll confess to not knowing much about trans-Tasman politics, so I only really know that others consider Christopher Luxon’s victory at the ballot box a bad thing for progressives over there and that NZ voters basically voted to undo whatever good Jacinda Ardern did…
…and then I saw someone post Oolong’s reaction to Luxon winning and… oh dear. I’m a little worried for my friends in Aotearoa now.
On the plus side, though, it looks like Poland has shifted a bit further left after their election; apparently the ruling Law & Justice party got more votes, but Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition could unite with two other parties that would just put him over the edge. Nice to see somewhere in Europe swing away from the far right for a change. Just wonder what Stefan Molyneux makes of the situation; hopefully Poland is still white enough for him…
I mean… who actually thought Dutton was serious about this? This generation of Liberals has never really been serious about recognising our Indigenous friends. Per Wikipedia, ATSIC delivered a report about the urgency of constitutional reform in 1995. John Howard finally agreed to a referendum on the subject in 2007. A mere twelve years later, and probably because he knew Labor was likely to win that election so he wouldn’t have to actually do it. Then Kevin Rudd didn’t do much about it, Julia Gillard at least did a bit more towards getting a referendum up but Tone Abet took power in 2013 before that could happen, then Malcolm Turnbull rejected most of the proposals of the Referendum Council in 2017, then Scunt finally agreed to a referendum during his second term but noticeably failed to deliver. Whatever else you might say about Albo, at least he kept his promise to hold the referendum and did so without years of dicking about and forestalling unlike SOME people.
So Dutton’s promise that, if the Voice referendum failed, he would hold a referendum on Constitutional recognition when he gets into power was not only a horrific vision of a future in which he’s the Prime Minister, it should also have been obvious to anyone paying attention that he was lying. The Liberal party has no particular interest in recognising Indigenous folks, cos it’s had years to do that and never have, and I feel like someone who was a Queensland cop for ten years in the 1990s would probably have even less interest than most. Anyone who actually believed he was sincere about this should be beaten with sticks, much like Dutton himself.
Ah, the days (said days being March 1963) when the “dynamic” Beatles were just the support act for fucking Tommy Roe and Chris Montez… apparently no one at the time guessed just who on this bill was really about to explode in popularity; after just the first night the Fabs were elevated to set-closing stars by the tour promoter, and messrs Roe and Montez were not happy; George Harrison said the former threatened to quit the tour, and apparently the latter came to physical blows at some point with John Lennon (over what exactly I don’t know). Montez apparently had no idea who the Beatles were before the tour started, but he certainly knew by the end of it…
Contrary to what the ad says, I suspect most people have in fact long forgotten Mr Bowie’s second single of 1970, which Mercury Records apparently politely but firmly insisted he record (or re-record, the original version having appeared on his album) after “The Prettiest Star” tanked and sold only about 800 copies. I don’t know who the hell at Mercury thought this song—even if rocked up a bit with newly added Mick Ronson—would work as a single at all, let alone do better than “Prettiest Star”, but they were shortly proved catastrophically wrong as it did as little business as that song did (indeed, Bowie wouldn’t have a proper hit until “Starman” two years later).
Going through one of the various Tumblr archives I’ve downloaded, I spotted this:
…and I thought it looked weirdly familiar despite never having seen it before that I could remember. It wasn’t the book that was familiar, it was the pose of the character with the guitar, and the haircut and the shades and the face. I thought I’d seen that before somewhere. And I had:
That’s George Harrison, guitarist for some band or other, making a visit to the Haight-Ashbury district with Pattie Boyd who also made it into the book cover. When I saw the cover I was curious as to when the book was published, cos it would’ve been an impossible coincidence for it to predate that photo of George (unless it was a reprint and the publisher did new art for it, which I doubt would’ve been the case somehow), and lo, a quick bit of research indicates it did indeed first appear in May 1968. So it made sense. I’m actually kind of impressed by the sheer nerve involved in taking what I presume was already a well-known and widely published photo (at least known enough by the artist to rip it off) of an international celebrity and turn it into… well, a fairly shitty cover illustration for an evidently fairly shitty piece of pornography. Presumably the publisher was confident that their target audience weren’t Beatles fans and that they were small enough that the Fabs themselves wouldn’t notice…
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