The Dark Side of Online Platforms: A Critique of LinkedIn and Snapchat

As we navigate the online world, it's easy to take for granted the platforms that connect us with others. However, a closer look at these spaces reveals some disturbing trends. Take LinkedIn, for example. It's a platform touted as a professional networking site, but in reality, it can feel like a shallow exercise in self-promotion. Many users struggle to create profiles, and those who do often find themselves in meetings where they're the only one without a profile picture or background information. This lack of effort can be off-putting, making it difficult for others to take you seriously.

But LinkedIn is far from the worst offender when it comes to online platforms. Snapchat, once hailed as a revolutionary new way to connect with friends and family, has struggled to adapt to the digital age. Despite its popularity among younger users, Snapchat's inability to migrate to the web has left it feeling like a relic of the past. The app's ephemeral nature, which was once seen as innovative, now feels like a crutch for those who can't be bothered to create engaging content.

The failure of these platforms to keep pace with user expectations is particularly frustrating when compared to other services that have successfully adapted to the digital landscape. Take Signal, for example, a messaging app that has found success by offering users a simple, distraction-free way to communicate. Unlike its more popular counterparts, Signal doesn't delete messages after 24 hours, making it easier for users to keep track of important conversations.

But even Signal can't escape the pitfalls of online culture entirely. The rise of social media influencers has created a new breed of "roving gangs" that use their charm and charisma to manipulate others into doing their bidding. These groups often target historic sites, where tourists flock to experience cultural and historical significance. By flooding these areas with influencers, they can disrupt the natural flow of events and create chaos.

The impact of this phenomenon is not limited to the individuals affected by it. Historic sites themselves are feeling the strain, as promoters and influencers descend upon popular destinations to capture "authentic" moments for their social media feeds. This approach not only ruins the experience for others but also threatens the very preservation of these cultural treasures.

War crimes, meanwhile, have become a pressing concern in the digital age. The ease with which footage of atrocities can be shared has raised concerns about accountability and the need for international courts to investigate such events. Despite this, some platforms – including Snapchat – have resisted calls to preserve sensitive content related to war crimes investigations.

In other news, Nancy Pelosi's tweetstorm was caught on camera by the FBI, who were reportedly not interested in her brand of politics. The Twitter bird, a ubiquitous symbol of online communication, has become embroiled in controversy over its depiction as an attack by a red pen. The origins of this design element remain unclear.

Finally, in the world of cryptocurrency, Coinbase's recent foray into listing new coins has sparked both excitement and concern among investors. It appears that some individuals have managed to capitalize on the company's efforts by buying up shares of these new cryptos before they're even listed. This phenomenon raises questions about insider trading and the ease with which information can be leaked.

As we navigate the complex online landscape, it's essential to recognize the darker side of these platforms and their impact on our lives. From the superficiality of LinkedIn to the chaos caused by social media influencers, there are lessons to be learned from each of these examples. By acknowledging both the benefits and drawbacks of these technologies, we can work towards creating a more inclusive and respectful online environment for all.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello welcome back to the level 1 show today is july 27th and we're doing business and social stories this week today today this week we do that every week but today when you say stories it's just some links we want to share with you right right or you know maybe not even share with you just some links we feel like talking about if you want to watch it you know no one's trying to influence you here but if uh you know if youtube wants to promote this absolutely we're definitely getting new subscribers because there was a couple comments over the last few weeks it was like gosh i really wish i could you know just have a list of stories and only click on the ones that i was interested in if only we provided that every time there's a it's called one tab there's a one-time link in the description that will list all of that now for a while we've been hearing just the hints of echoes of this most of the time when people would call it out amazon would be like nah no no we don't want anything to do with your health data i hate this listen we're not getting into the medical game remember zuckerberg tried that for a while too he was a little more ham-fisted about it the amazon people are really good at this kind of thing and they have slithered right in there amazon is going to buy primary health care provider one medical for roughly 3.9 billion dollars all cash too not even any stock there they're just like yeah let me write you a check uh so uh it takes a while for this article to talk about pillpack and some of the other stuff that amazon is doing but amazon wants to be in the logistics of health care delivery and you know you got to wonder they're looking at what mark cuban is doing that's what i thought and trying to undo it yeah so wearables that's a big part of it because they're going to know your health data because you're going to be wearing it on your wrist and like you say medication they want to be a big part of that they're already kind of doing that with their they got like an amazon prescription thing right and now actual physical brick and mortar doctors which is what one medical has and now amazon has and if you are an amazon warehouse worker you probably don't have great health insurance so you'll never get to go to one of those one medical buildings you'll be going to the free clinic but another thing you need to consider is the union amazon instructs new york workers do not sign union cards the digital notices specifically discourage workers signing union cards oh the alu may ask you to sign an authorization card or share a qr code to fill out an online authorization card this is a legally binding document like there's nothing else just this is a legally binding document legally i don't think they can say you shouldn't do this yeah that's as close to a threat as they can get without actually threatening you well the headline is don't sign an alu card with the i like the the cheery blue background with the animated truck like don't do it i think in gadget might be editorializing a little bit but no but the image though there's an image of the the screen at the factory if they're going to this much trouble to tell you not to do it doesn't that make you want to do it more well let's see if they ever actually say don't do it so they didn't say it there oh okay yeah they they absolutely did you know what it was that cheery image too when i read this i had javascript turned off because you know it's easier i didn't see the slideshow but there it is huh there's a smoking gun let's see what else they said that's the one we've seen before now do you think that you know the lawyers went over that over and over and they're like we could prove that in court because it's brand new yeah yeah yeah my favorite part of that so that's clearly like a custom stock image but like they have the the obvious like this was just done in like microsoft powerpoint fun don't don't sign a card but but it's gary's birthday like they have time to sign birthdays he's in the hospital he pulled the disc in the warehouse the robot killed him and he was just laying on the floor for four hours before somebody found him now do you think the person who was tasked with coming up with those slides are they like die hard pro amazon are they sitting there like oh god i don't want to do this they're they're watching the show and just quietly thinking to themselves like what what else can i do is there something else i can do in this in this downturn can i maybe i can go to school for cyber security i should have the only way that that image could have been funnier is if they used comic sans or you know what if the truck was like crashed yeah that would be a good addition to that it would be too much work though because they used the same truck and everything yeah it was definitely stuck well amazon does have a problem with unions but that's not their only problem the eu is just eating them alive with antitrust and they have a lot of good points that it's hard to argue against so if you're the amazon lawyers what do you do the answer might be just you know cut off some pieces and give them their pound of flesh some executives have discussed ditching amazon basics to appease regulators the tech giant has faced scrutiny from regulators over his in-house brands this makes me wonder if amazon basics is not doing as well as it has done traditionally considering the reputation for amazon basics is like this is garbage tier yeah yeah it might have a lot to do with it that people have learned not to trust it this meets the requirements of being a double a battery to the extent that they would prevail in court other than that this is not a double a oh i miss sorted and this sorted the apple block well we've kind of already talked about this but this was the other prong in the uh oh no i'm sorry that was amazon i know it was apple wasn't it no it's amazon oh okay so similar thing apple's doing the same thing apple outlines its health technology strategy in a new report according to reuters apple sees your health data and helping you with health care being another trillion dollar industry so they are putting a lot of smart people on this and of course the last time they updated that watch we saw there was a lot of invasive telemetry coming out of that thing well they actually are spending a lot of money even on the r d part they're really concerned about like blood sugar and stuff like that can we passively monitor blood sugar through your wrist like can we outfit your watch with enough sensors that we can figure that out i think they did didn't they well they're close heart rate blood pressure those kind of things and how can we monetize that that'll come later oh well that's easy just insurance companies yeah like that's that's pre-built no problem big pharma would love that how awesome is it gonna be it's like you start to feel funny at like eight o'clock in the morning and then like 8 47 you get an email and it's like that's weird my insurance company has dropped my policy and then at 903 am you have a heart attack and if you're in china you try to leave and your front door won't open we laugh but it's kind of the china thing already did and apple has some uh skeletons some bodies that are buried in the past and people know about them and they will not let them go and they finally had to pay up on this one seems like a fairly small number it is a time apple reaches a 50 million dollar settlement over defective mac keyboards probably only about a tenth as much as they put away to deal with this issue because the macbook keyboards were garbage for multiple generations one of the big nails in the coffin here was people who reported in the class action that they sent their keyboard back and got another broken keyboard in return different serial number but broken in the same way good job good job apple nicely done and oh boy we saw uh several of these headlines last week and here they keep coming seems like everybody else reported it this week apple reads the room and looks to slow hiring in 2023 apple will freeze the head count in some parts of his businesses as the company prepares for more challenging times yeah this is happening for all the big companies not just for the little ones too oh there's also a google story too yeah and uh microsoft of course microsoft presidency's new era quote unquote of stagnating labor pool this is another reuters article now this isn't so much about the economic downturn i'm not sure that's a big part of it but also because the population is dropping here's a shocker people supply and demand affects you so when you stop making more and more humans like rats you go up in value imagine it also a lot of people you know just died or they were tired or a number of other things like that so labor's more valuable it is more valuable but that doesn't mean that they're going on any hiring sprees don't worry microsoft eliminates open jobs amid economic downturn microsoft and google both they had sent offers to people and they hadn't accepted yet and i was like well guess what we're not going to do that anymore you get the follow-up email it's just jk yeah oops and microsoft uh you know in their microsoft way it's like the scorpion and the frog you know they can't help themselves they have to do things that are anti-consumer and then they get called out on it and they walk it back microsoft changes its policy against the sale of open source software in the microsoft store now to be fair to microsoft what was happening here was unscrupulous people were taking open source software changing it slightly and then putting putting it on the uh microsoft store maybe adding ads to it or monetizing it in some other way and so that's what microsoft intended to ban but if you know if you have uh other open source applications they didn't intend to ban like those as a first party thing but kind of as a third-party thing because you know if you want to give critta or something you know that drawing application or other applications a dollar or two or five you can through the microsoft store but the problem is that scammers were setting things up and didn't go to the original developers right i'm sure they didn't consider libreoffice at all during that is that even in their store would they allow that i don't know it's a good question well of course uh you know we got to go through all the big tech companies now it's google's turn google announces a hiring pause for all the same reasons like they literally just copy pasted this article and search and replace microsoft or apple with google only for two weeks but i imagine at the end of the two weeks they'll probably go back and review to see if they want to do another two weeks i'd say it's a hiring freeze until the end of q3 yeah easily and then probably a hiring freeze for q4 we're not in a recession now if you think back to uh the google glass phenomenon everybody was hyped about it and then it came out and it seemed like all at once everybody was like wait a minute that means there's a camera everywhere i don't know if i'm comfortable with this i don't know if i want you watching me pee and google was like what uh let us rethink this so now they've rethought it and they've made some changes and they've added some security but there is a little bit of a caveat there google begins publicly testing its ar glasses the camera enabled assistive glasses won't be able to take photos or video though well hang on they say no photos or video but they're using this to train ai so if they if something happens that they want to train the ai with guess what they have to do have video and audio at least images yeah so they claim that they will do that if they need to train the ai with it but they will anonymize it we all know how effective that is yeah but the sub headline here says won't be able to take photos or video but they wouldn't lie to me would they i think that might be a lie because it can do that to train the ai and of course this one should surprise no one but the economy is falling smartphone shipments dropped to nine percent in q2 because people are uncertain about things and new phones is at the top of the chocolate block for discretionary spending you don't need a new one every year you never did and actually if you can put a new battery in your phone about every year it feels like new all over again imagine if you could go back in time and warn yourself hey instead of buying a new phone every year save money or just put a battery a better battery in it that's all you got to do or you could tell yourself to buy crypto but you have to be very specific about when to sell it these are dates you can buy these are dates you can sell good luck now of course we've seen that the big chinese companies they're getting shut out of the world market they're getting crushed it's been very bad for them huawei i mean they've weathered it but they have not done well so if you are someone if you're a company with ties to china you got to start worrying about that which makes me think that maybe bite dance isn't so hyped to do what the us government says they might be trying to think of ways around those sanctions should they come tick tock owner bite dance explores self-designed chips at china and aims for semiconductor self-sufficiency uh cnbc missed a really important reason for this article which is buy down shares are down 25 well everybody shares it down that's a lot i you got to think if you are a bite dance investor you got to be looking at that tick tock band right if it comes you're done i guess you still got the other markets but the us is such a big one and you know the eu's gonna be right behind them if they did it oh yeah i actually i would suspect the eu would go first but since they tend to be a little harsher most of the time and we have the big uh chip bill this week it's not passed yet right but i think we have all but the official green light at this point it seems like yeah uh pelosi got on board which was funny because she just invested in nvidia i don't know give me some time to think about this guys let me just fire up my bloomberg terminal oh no she didn't do it her husband did not she did yeah she probably couldn't do that herself yeah but she figured it out but there is uh the way it is written now it seems like there is definitely the government is picking winners and choosers here they're not supposed to do that chip designers are warm to u.s build despite big benefits to intel this is from reuters amd was was not happy about this they pointed out that was like hey that our biggest competitor is basically just getting billions of dollars and we're getting nothing how's that fair we still make a lot of stuff with global foundries does that count for nothing apparently it does but chip fabs in the u.s maybe yeah samsung also in the 11th hour we have that article too i thought where samsung showed up and they're like we need to spend 200 billion dollars in texas like yesterday oh that was last week i don't think i included it though okay yeah maybe i don't know i saw it i didn't the samsung is really trying to squeak in under the chip sack to get some money too oh yeah i mean why wouldn't you free money free taxpayer dollars and when it comes to big tech companies uh announcing earnings a heavily anticipated one was netflix because we found out uh last month that uh or three months ago netflix wasn't doing well and the forward look was not good so this wasn't about like how many people did you add this was did you lose almost everybody so hilariously the stock price went up based on this news netflix subscriber count of the us and canada dropped by 1.3 million over the last three months guess who got her first notification on netflix saying oh wait wait wait wait wait wait netflix adds extra home feed will block usage in other homes if you don't pay i got this for the first time this week i was trying to watch an episode of 30 rock and it was like two other people are currently using this account two other ones oh there's like three or four people using this one netflix account now it's interesting because um i don't think that this was they didn't say uh ars technical must have got it wrong because they said it was only these countries to start out with i don't know it we got the notification it didn't mention anything i don't think i'd have to look i took a picture of the screen but i i don't think it mentioned anything about payment it just said you can't watch anything right now because other people are using it ah so that's not the same thing they're they're looking at active logins yeah in different locations but this goes further than that this goes into like you know it's crazy because of course you can travel with netflix right but you're only allowed to travel to another location like once per month or something like that and use it so that's going to be brutal yeah people who travel for work screw them what happens if you switch between your phone and you know your home thing yeah what if you eat something bad and you got to sit on the toilet for a while you gotta talk to them you have to like prove to them that it's not netflix please are you i think most people's reaction is going to be probably what your reaction going to be what are you going to do about it i'm going to buy 30 rock and get rid of netflix cancel netflix why would anybody put up with that i just i finally finished my media ingest server it has seven dvd drives so i can format shift my old footage yeah but is it can you also pull uh blu-ray off of that well i've got one blu-ray drive okay but uh uh most of my tv actually came from my my old myth tv setup that it recorded it off of cable at 1280 by 720 and then the commercials were automatically removed by so that's it's and most of that is like 10 years old plus and but the quality is not great well there must have been some pretty strong explicit language in the microsoft mojang acquisition deal because clearly they're able to keep a level of autonomy that you know microsoft is angry about how are we leaving this money on the table what are you talking about no nfd's in minecraft mojang says maybe they they're reverse money on the table with this maybe they'll have more money because they come out and say we're not going to do this and parents that have been burned by terrible things happening will say okay this is great as far as i know the only thing minecraft has done in terms of like monetizing skins was you could get capes if you'd been to minecon you'd get like a special cape on your character that you could enable but other than that like even changing your skin is free have you heard of block first no so i thought maybe chris you'd be hyped to this but block versus apparently the unofficial minecraft nft setup somehow i don't know if they did like a api type of thing or whatever but the thing about it is uh it was they ran off with the money yeah just like the oh it's always a scam it's never good oh man and uh speaking of crypto scams crypto exchange zip mags pauses withdrawals citing circumstances beyond air control it's a singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange and they are suspending business or they're suspending withdrawals to try to keep business going never a good sign you know we had a lot of people write in from the forum and elsewhere that they were having weird problems even with coinbase i've not tried to get anything out of coinbase probably should sketchy i don't know how true that is it's time to start hiding your money in jars i don't know you think we have further fall in the crypto space i don't it's really weird it's a really weird situation it could like i'm kind of torn right now because it could be this could be a perfect time to buy stocks or it could be you're going to lose 50 more this this could be you know the 1929 stock crash this could be the peak of that little blip before it got really bad exactly i mean it came back eventually right well if you i mean if you're thinking about it long term on a 10-year horizon yeah probably safe but you could get it for even cheaper if you time it right yeah uh experienced market people will tell you never try to do that and the heat wave oh we're sweating in here it's warm the central ladder is struggling of course the the lights and stuff don't help but you know we're getting through it just for you however it's not quite as bad here as it is over in europe and the uk which is not yours sorry you're suffering google and oracle cloud servers wilt in the uk heatwave take down websites cloud cloud bursts as the nation is 40 degrees c they also had like uh runways and stuff were just melting roads yeah yeah they actually had to shut things down because the data center just could not handle it i experienced a couple of slowdowns this week it was annoying and uh nvidia also in the cloud world wow i bet this service took some hits this week right engagement challenge anybody trying to play games on the geforce cloud during the heatwave geforce now rolling out 120 fps cloud gaming to all android smartphones i saw a few people on the forum actually underclocking their graphics card to make it stable again because it was too hot in their house in europe now they say to all phones but they give an official supported list i guess the other ones just might be too crappy to deal with it yeah notice the pixel 7 is not on that list oh interesting i just i look at that format like that picture and it's just like that just does not look appealing i yeah mobile gaming i can't i can't understand it don't get it now uh facebook of course as we know it's kind they're kind of abandoning it people have lost trust in it i mean it still makes billions of dollars but it's more and more i think associated with not cool not trustworthy yeah and in fact we'll have a story later where like could you argue that the facebook name in itself is bad to be compared to i would say yes yes absolutely so what do you do well what has facebook always done find the strongest competitor and steal their ideas now they used to just buy them they can't do that anymore facebook revamps its home feed to feel more like tick-tock a constant stream of yeah i found a tick tock account that i like cheat sheets as in s-h-s-h-e-e-t-s it is cool stuff about microsoft excel i bet that has just so many followers on tick tock as well what a great name cheat sheets do they have any hot takes on the macro roll back no well um facebook of course we've covered some stories uh brave browser and then firefox there are other services you can get which will just cut all of that tracking garbage out of the url everything that comes after the question mark in most cases at least for facebook you can clip it right off you don't need it it's all for tracking doesn't help you at all and facebook says um totally unrelated to any of that we've decided to change them facebook has started to encrypt links to counter privacy improving url stripping now facebook responded quickly to g hacks.net which is impressive they were apparently worried about people misinterpreting this they said no that's not why we're doing it but that's probably why they're doing it yeah anytime you send a marketplace link you always have to clip that last part off because it's huge you get this massive link totally just my opinion here but the response from facebook rings is hollow well okay so now you will not be able to clip this part of the url because it's integral to getting you to the right page well that kills marketplace doesn't it yeah and when we share links from marketplace it's like really hilarious technically your account can because they're literally they can build an open graph of how that link was shared which i'm sure is valuable information to them there's no way they would be leaving that on the table craigslist just excited right now because they're like maybe we're going to be relevant again yeah because you can see who shared and you know see how it progressed do people still i don't know a lot of people who use craigslist anymore i feel like marketplace has taken the secondhand market i think craigslist like you used to be able to find really good deals for stuff on there but now it seems like people have these inflated ideas of what their stuff is worth yeah or it's just weird junk i mean and there's weird junk on facebook marketplace but you can usually find decent things on there too or it's a scam yeah so now think about the whole facebook thing that we just talked about and that is clearly maliciously bad for the user so could we not argue that if someone must look someone mistakenly said oh do you work at facebook i they should not be surprised if i get angry about that like no no no no i have nothing to do with that you do not do not compare me with that which makes me think that this lawsuit has merit a company called meta is suing meta for naming itself meta we covered this originally when it first happened when the meta announcement happened well it's come to a lawsuit so for six months these people say they've been trying to negotiate with medic look we have a problem here and nothing crickets or just stonewall like no we're not doing anything about it what are you gonna do god bless them they went to court they're going up against a big legal team but i hope they win i hope they do too this is also an art installation company now the argument is going to be tough yeah because they're different different business styles and markets art installation company so they don't do the art they just install the art yeah either probably like galleries or private homes that kind of thing the verge admitted they'd done business with them before like i guess they did a you know some sort of conference or something yeah these guys had to do art interesting well uh facebook also has a problem with fraud because you can create facebook groups about criminal activity they don't get taken down except i think now there will be a sudden renewed interest and possibly getting rid of those amazon sues admins from over 10 000 facebook groups over fake reviews a lot of these it sounds like from the article were fake review brokers where you could sign up and you know they would give you five bucks to leave a fake review and so what better way to connect with people who are willing to do that for five bucks than through facebook man you can they can keep coming back give them more assignments it's like crowdfunding things it's like okay the plan here in this facebook group is we're going to ocean's 11s and things so we need some volunteers to create a distraction for the pit boss while we hit the we're going to give everybody 100 bucks and you know you'd have a million people want to do that immediately now think about everything that we're telling you about facebook uh it's full of criminal activity uh there's fake accounts galore uh they're getting sued all over the place every the cambridge analytica is coming back to haunt them and so you have to ask yourself you know let's say that you're getting back into investing maybe you do think there's blood in the streets and it's time to buy would you invest in a company that looked at all that and said let's be like that we need some of that in our company microsoft is launching a facebook ripoff inside of teams so actually i went i didn't went digging for this and it is kind of a facebook ripoff but it's also kind of a linkedin ripple i thought it was more they're trying to compete with linkedin i don't think this is something they're trying to do against facebook because facebook's always informal yeah linkedin is for business and i think teams is also for business how awful that is it seems also too like they're trying to give people something like you're in a meeting that's like who is this bozo that's talking and you can give them something to look at it's like oh turns out their number employee number 37 in a fortune 500 yeah oops i don't ever put anything i don't have a profile picture on teams i don't have anything why would you yeah linkedin is also this your your weekly reminder linkedin is uh very bad but i think i mean i won't use it but i could see a lot of people using it from teams this might kill linkedin could be uh snapchat for a long time i've actually sometimes i'll see a snapchat link in some random place and click on it i'm like oh right yeah they don't have a website how stupid is that annoying there is no chance i'm ever installing your app i'm sorry i'll just do without i guess now maybe i don't have to but i'm still not interested snapchat is finally coming to the web after more than a decade is a mobile app why well we've got apps like signal which are not really really stupid for business reasons same thing it deletes after 24 hours but guess what people can screenshot and oh but it tells you save as except not always except that'll be easier to do in a web browser than it will be on a mobile phone a lot easier and tick tock um one thing about tick tock as it takes over the world is even if you don't sign up for it even if you're not part of that world you risk being caught up in it as the roving tick tock gangs do things in your area you know he's like oh don't i don't want to be on your stupid tricks i don't film me but no no it's bad and it's even worse if you're in a historic place that a lot of people want to gather at overrun by influencers historic sites are banning tick-tock creators in nepal prominent tourists and religious sites in nepal are putting up no tick tock sites to keep creators from shooting at the premises they describe like imagine this hell you know you're at a nice place like this a lovely and then they describe how the girls will show up with boom boxes because they have to sink they're going to dub the music but they have to sync up their dance moves right and so that like they will do it over and over and over to the same 30 seconds of music to get the perfect take that's horrifying they should at least give them a few hundred bucks wow or just don't do it in a public place and ruin what's supposed to be like a beautiful historical site for everybody else you need that backdrop remember the ones that were doing it in front of forest fires it's unreal uh it's something well war crimes how about some war crimes we need to preserve those it does seem like we've seen some war crimes yeah you know i've definitely seen some footage where i thought to myself well that ain't right the things are really getting worse they shouldn't have done that but you got to figure out like you know you got to get to the bottom of it you got to search it they're actually international courts that look into this kind of thing but can they get these archives tick tock resists calls to preserve ukraine content for war crime investigations that's not a good look nervous laughter now of course tick tock has nothing to do with china don't worry but remember that china was the one country that didn't condemn this war so they might have some influence there not great good job ars technica and uh this was a late one but you know nancy pelosi is not the only one turns out other people have inside information and they just can't keep a lid on it yes crypto twitter the fbi is reading your tweets just because they're disinterested in nancy pelosi doesn't mean they're disinterested in you oh why is the twitter bird what is the red that's attacking it here i have no idea it kind of looks like it's an embroidered twitter but then when i look at it closely i think it's pen i'm not sure what's going on in this stock photo interesting but yeah so coinbase was going to list a bunch of new coins when coinbase lists a coin that is a huge shot in the arm for that crypto and somehow some friends of this guy found out weird how that happens and bought exactly all of those cryptos that were about to be listed and made quite a nice little chunk of change yeah it's almost like the legislation that's going to affect certain companies huh it's weird it's almost like you could make 60 returns if you did that consistently anyway oh we got a lot of nonsense on friday so many nonsense we will see you guys then youhello welcome back to the level 1 show today is july 27th and we're doing business and social stories this week today today this week we do that every week but today when you say stories it's just some links we want to share with you right right or you know maybe not even share with you just some links we feel like talking about if you want to watch it you know no one's trying to influence you here but if uh you know if youtube wants to promote this absolutely we're definitely getting new subscribers because there was a couple comments over the last few weeks it was like gosh i really wish i could you know just have a list of stories and only click on the ones that i was interested in if only we provided that every time there's a it's called one tab there's a one-time link in the description that will list all of that now for a while we've been hearing just the hints of echoes of this most of the time when people would call it out amazon would be like nah no no we don't want anything to do with your health data i hate this listen we're not getting into the medical game remember zuckerberg tried that for a while too he was a little more ham-fisted about it the amazon people are really good at this kind of thing and they have slithered right in there amazon is going to buy primary health care provider one medical for roughly 3.9 billion dollars all cash too not even any stock there they're just like yeah let me write you a check uh so uh it takes a while for this article to talk about pillpack and some of the other stuff that amazon is doing but amazon wants to be in the logistics of health care delivery and you know you got to wonder they're looking at what mark cuban is doing that's what i thought and trying to undo it yeah so wearables that's a big part of it because they're going to know your health data because you're going to be wearing it on your wrist and like you say medication they want to be a big part of that they're already kind of doing that with their they got like an amazon prescription thing right and now actual physical brick and mortar doctors which is what one medical has and now amazon has and if you are an amazon warehouse worker you probably don't have great health insurance so you'll never get to go to one of those one medical buildings you'll be going to the free clinic but another thing you need to consider is the union amazon instructs new york workers do not sign union cards the digital notices specifically discourage workers signing union cards oh the alu may ask you to sign an authorization card or share a qr code to fill out an online authorization card this is a legally binding document like there's nothing else just this is a legally binding document legally i don't think they can say you shouldn't do this yeah that's as close to a threat as they can get without actually threatening you well the headline is don't sign an alu card with the i like the the cheery blue background with the animated truck like don't do it i think in gadget might be editorializing a little bit but no but the image though there's an image of the the screen at the factory if they're going to this much trouble to tell you not to do it doesn't that make you want to do it more well let's see if they ever actually say don't do it so they didn't say it there oh okay yeah they they absolutely did you know what it was that cheery image too when i read this i had javascript turned off because you know it's easier i didn't see the slideshow but there it is huh there's a smoking gun let's see what else they said that's the one we've seen before now do you think that you know the lawyers went over that over and over and they're like we could prove that in court because it's brand new yeah yeah yeah my favorite part of that so that's clearly like a custom stock image but like they have the the obvious like this was just done in like microsoft powerpoint fun don't don't sign a card but but it's gary's birthday like they have time to sign birthdays he's in the hospital he pulled the disc in the warehouse the robot killed him and he was just laying on the floor for four hours before somebody found him now do you think the person who was tasked with coming up with those slides are they like die hard pro amazon are they sitting there like oh god i don't want to do this they're they're watching the show and just quietly thinking to themselves like what what else can i do is there something else i can do in this in this downturn can i maybe i can go to school for cyber security i should have the only way that that image could have been funnier is if they used comic sans or you know what if the truck was like crashed yeah that would be a good addition to that it would be too much work though because they used the same truck and everything yeah it was definitely stuck well amazon does have a problem with unions but that's not their only problem the eu is just eating them alive with antitrust and they have a lot of good points that it's hard to argue against so if you're the amazon lawyers what do you do the answer might be just you know cut off some pieces and give them their pound of flesh some executives have discussed ditching amazon basics to appease regulators the tech giant has faced scrutiny from regulators over his in-house brands this makes me wonder if amazon basics is not doing as well as it has done traditionally considering the reputation for amazon basics is like this is garbage tier yeah yeah it might have a lot to do with it that people have learned not to trust it this meets the requirements of being a double a battery to the extent that they would prevail in court other than that this is not a double a oh i miss sorted and this sorted the apple block well we've kind of already talked about this but this was the other prong in the uh oh no i'm sorry that was amazon i know it was apple wasn't it no it's amazon oh okay so similar thing apple's doing the same thing apple outlines its health technology strategy in a new report according to reuters apple sees your health data and helping you with health care being another trillion dollar industry so they are putting a lot of smart people on this and of course the last time they updated that watch we saw there was a lot of invasive telemetry coming out of that thing well they actually are spending a lot of money even on the r d part they're really concerned about like blood sugar and stuff like that can we passively monitor blood sugar through your wrist like can we outfit your watch with enough sensors that we can figure that out i think they did didn't they well they're close heart rate blood pressure those kind of things and how can we monetize that that'll come later oh well that's easy just insurance companies yeah like that's that's pre-built no problem big pharma would love that how awesome is it gonna be it's like you start to feel funny at like eight o'clock in the morning and then like 8 47 you get an email and it's like that's weird my insurance company has dropped my policy and then at 903 am you have a heart attack and if you're in china you try to leave and your front door won't open we laugh but it's kind of the china thing already did and apple has some uh skeletons some bodies that are buried in the past and people know about them and they will not let them go and they finally had to pay up on this one seems like a fairly small number it is a time apple reaches a 50 million dollar settlement over defective mac keyboards probably only about a tenth as much as they put away to deal with this issue because the macbook keyboards were garbage for multiple generations one of the big nails in the coffin here was people who reported in the class action that they sent their keyboard back and got another broken keyboard in return different serial number but broken in the same way good job good job apple nicely done and oh boy we saw uh several of these headlines last week and here they keep coming seems like everybody else reported it this week apple reads the room and looks to slow hiring in 2023 apple will freeze the head count in some parts of his businesses as the company prepares for more challenging times yeah this is happening for all the big companies not just for the little ones too oh there's also a google story too yeah and uh microsoft of course microsoft presidency's new era quote unquote of stagnating labor pool this is another reuters article now this isn't so much about the economic downturn i'm not sure that's a big part of it but also because the population is dropping here's a shocker people supply and demand affects you so when you stop making more and more humans like rats you go up in value imagine it also a lot of people you know just died or they were tired or a number of other things like that so labor's more valuable it is more valuable but that doesn't mean that they're going on any hiring sprees don't worry microsoft eliminates open jobs amid economic downturn microsoft and google both they had sent offers to people and they hadn't accepted yet and i was like well guess what we're not going to do that anymore you get the follow-up email it's just jk yeah oops and microsoft uh you know in their microsoft way it's like the scorpion and the frog you know they can't help themselves they have to do things that are anti-consumer and then they get called out on it and they walk it back microsoft changes its policy against the sale of open source software in the microsoft store now to be fair to microsoft what was happening here was unscrupulous people were taking open source software changing it slightly and then putting putting it on the uh microsoft store maybe adding ads to it or monetizing it in some other way and so that's what microsoft intended to ban but if you know if you have uh other open source applications they didn't intend to ban like those as a first party thing but kind of as a third-party thing because you know if you want to give critta or something you know that drawing application or other applications a dollar or two or five you can through the microsoft store but the problem is that scammers were setting things up and didn't go to the original developers right i'm sure they didn't consider libreoffice at all during that is that even in their store would they allow that i don't know it's a good question well of course uh you know we got to go through all the big tech companies now it's google's turn google announces a hiring pause for all the same reasons like they literally just copy pasted this article and search and replace microsoft or apple with google only for two weeks but i imagine at the end of the two weeks they'll probably go back and review to see if they want to do another two weeks i'd say it's a hiring freeze until the end of q3 yeah easily and then probably a hiring freeze for q4 we're not in a recession now if you think back to uh the google glass phenomenon everybody was hyped about it and then it came out and it seemed like all at once everybody was like wait a minute that means there's a camera everywhere i don't know if i'm comfortable with this i don't know if i want you watching me pee and google was like what uh let us rethink this so now they've rethought it and they've made some changes and they've added some security but there is a little bit of a caveat there google begins publicly testing its ar glasses the camera enabled assistive glasses won't be able to take photos or video though well hang on they say no photos or video but they're using this to train ai so if they if something happens that they want to train the ai with guess what they have to do have video and audio at least images yeah so they claim that they will do that if they need to train the ai with it but they will anonymize it we all know how effective that is yeah but the sub headline here says won't be able to take photos or video but they wouldn't lie to me would they i think that might be a lie because it can do that to train the ai and of course this one should surprise no one but the economy is falling smartphone shipments dropped to nine percent in q2 because people are uncertain about things and new phones is at the top of the chocolate block for discretionary spending you don't need a new one every year you never did and actually if you can put a new battery in your phone about every year it feels like new all over again imagine if you could go back in time and warn yourself hey instead of buying a new phone every year save money or just put a battery a better battery in it that's all you got to do or you could tell yourself to buy crypto but you have to be very specific about when to sell it these are dates you can buy these are dates you can sell good luck now of course we've seen that the big chinese companies they're getting shut out of the world market they're getting crushed it's been very bad for them huawei i mean they've weathered it but they have not done well so if you are someone if you're a company with ties to china you got to start worrying about that which makes me think that maybe bite dance isn't so hyped to do what the us government says they might be trying to think of ways around those sanctions should they come tick tock owner bite dance explores self-designed chips at china and aims for semiconductor self-sufficiency uh cnbc missed a really important reason for this article which is buy down shares are down 25 well everybody shares it down that's a lot i you got to think if you are a bite dance investor you got to be looking at that tick tock band right if it comes you're done i guess you still got the other markets but the us is such a big one and you know the eu's gonna be right behind them if they did it oh yeah i actually i would suspect the eu would go first but since they tend to be a little harsher most of the time and we have the big uh chip bill this week it's not passed yet right but i think we have all but the official green light at this point it seems like yeah uh pelosi got on board which was funny because she just invested in nvidia i don't know give me some time to think about this guys let me just fire up my bloomberg terminal oh no she didn't do it her husband did not she did yeah she probably couldn't do that herself yeah but she figured it out but there is uh the way it is written now it seems like there is definitely the government is picking winners and choosers here they're not supposed to do that chip designers are warm to u.s build despite big benefits to intel this is from reuters amd was was not happy about this they pointed out that was like hey that our biggest competitor is basically just getting billions of dollars and we're getting nothing how's that fair we still make a lot of stuff with global foundries does that count for nothing apparently it does but chip fabs in the u.s maybe yeah samsung also in the 11th hour we have that article too i thought where samsung showed up and they're like we need to spend 200 billion dollars in texas like yesterday oh that was last week i don't think i included it though okay yeah maybe i don't know i saw it i didn't the samsung is really trying to squeak in under the chip sack to get some money too oh yeah i mean why wouldn't you free money free taxpayer dollars and when it comes to big tech companies uh announcing earnings a heavily anticipated one was netflix because we found out uh last month that uh or three months ago netflix wasn't doing well and the forward look was not good so this wasn't about like how many people did you add this was did you lose almost everybody so hilariously the stock price went up based on this news netflix subscriber count of the us and canada dropped by 1.3 million over the last three months guess who got her first notification on netflix saying oh wait wait wait wait wait wait netflix adds extra home feed will block usage in other homes if you don't pay i got this for the first time this week i was trying to watch an episode of 30 rock and it was like two other people are currently using this account two other ones oh there's like three or four people using this one netflix account now it's interesting because um i don't think that this was they didn't say uh ars technical must have got it wrong because they said it was only these countries to start out with i don't know it we got the notification it didn't mention anything i don't think i'd have to look i took a picture of the screen but i i don't think it mentioned anything about payment it just said you can't watch anything right now because other people are using it ah so that's not the same thing they're they're looking at active logins yeah in different locations but this goes further than that this goes into like you know it's crazy because of course you can travel with netflix right but you're only allowed to travel to another location like once per month or something like that and use it so that's going to be brutal yeah people who travel for work screw them what happens if you switch between your phone and you know your home thing yeah what if you eat something bad and you got to sit on the toilet for a while you gotta talk to them you have to like prove to them that it's not netflix please are you i think most people's reaction is going to be probably what your reaction going to be what are you going to do about it i'm going to buy 30 rock and get rid of netflix cancel netflix why would anybody put up with that i just i finally finished my media ingest server it has seven dvd drives so i can format shift my old footage yeah but is it can you also pull uh blu-ray off of that well i've got one blu-ray drive okay but uh uh most of my tv actually came from my my old myth tv setup that it recorded it off of cable at 1280 by 720 and then the commercials were automatically removed by so that's it's and most of that is like 10 years old plus and but the quality is not great well there must have been some pretty strong explicit language in the microsoft mojang acquisition deal because clearly they're able to keep a level of autonomy that you know microsoft is angry about how are we leaving this money on the table what are you talking about no nfd's in minecraft mojang says maybe they they're reverse money on the table with this maybe they'll have more money because they come out and say we're not going to do this and parents that have been burned by terrible things happening will say okay this is great as far as i know the only thing minecraft has done in terms of like monetizing skins was you could get capes if you'd been to minecon you'd get like a special cape on your character that you could enable but other than that like even changing your skin is free have you heard of block first no so i thought maybe chris you'd be hyped to this but block versus apparently the unofficial minecraft nft setup somehow i don't know if they did like a api type of thing or whatever but the thing about it is uh it was they ran off with the money yeah just like the oh it's always a scam it's never good oh man and uh speaking of crypto scams crypto exchange zip mags pauses withdrawals citing circumstances beyond air control it's a singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange and they are suspending business or they're suspending withdrawals to try to keep business going never a good sign you know we had a lot of people write in from the forum and elsewhere that they were having weird problems even with coinbase i've not tried to get anything out of coinbase probably should sketchy i don't know how true that is it's time to start hiding your money in jars i don't know you think we have further fall in the crypto space i don't it's really weird it's a really weird situation it could like i'm kind of torn right now because it could be this could be a perfect time to buy stocks or it could be you're going to lose 50 more this this could be you know the 1929 stock crash this could be the peak of that little blip before it got really bad exactly i mean it came back eventually right well if you i mean if you're thinking about it long term on a 10-year horizon yeah probably safe but you could get it for even cheaper if you time it right yeah uh experienced market people will tell you never try to do that and the heat wave oh we're sweating in here it's warm the central ladder is struggling of course the the lights and stuff don't help but you know we're getting through it just for you however it's not quite as bad here as it is over in europe and the uk which is not yours sorry you're suffering google and oracle cloud servers wilt in the uk heatwave take down websites cloud cloud bursts as the nation is 40 degrees c they also had like uh runways and stuff were just melting roads yeah yeah they actually had to shut things down because the data center just could not handle it i experienced a couple of slowdowns this week it was annoying and uh nvidia also in the cloud world wow i bet this service took some hits this week right engagement challenge anybody trying to play games on the geforce cloud during the heatwave geforce now rolling out 120 fps cloud gaming to all android smartphones i saw a few people on the forum actually underclocking their graphics card to make it stable again because it was too hot in their house in europe now they say to all phones but they give an official supported list i guess the other ones just might be too crappy to deal with it yeah notice the pixel 7 is not on that list oh interesting i just i look at that format like that picture and it's just like that just does not look appealing i yeah mobile gaming i can't i can't understand it don't get it now uh facebook of course as we know it's kind they're kind of abandoning it people have lost trust in it i mean it still makes billions of dollars but it's more and more i think associated with not cool not trustworthy yeah and in fact we'll have a story later where like could you argue that the facebook name in itself is bad to be compared to i would say yes yes absolutely so what do you do well what has facebook always done find the strongest competitor and steal their ideas now they used to just buy them they can't do that anymore facebook revamps its home feed to feel more like tick-tock a constant stream of yeah i found a tick tock account that i like cheat sheets as in s-h-s-h-e-e-t-s it is cool stuff about microsoft excel i bet that has just so many followers on tick tock as well what a great name cheat sheets do they have any hot takes on the macro roll back no well um facebook of course we've covered some stories uh brave browser and then firefox there are other services you can get which will just cut all of that tracking garbage out of the url everything that comes after the question mark in most cases at least for facebook you can clip it right off you don't need it it's all for tracking doesn't help you at all and facebook says um totally unrelated to any of that we've decided to change them facebook has started to encrypt links to counter privacy improving url stripping now facebook responded quickly to g hacks.net which is impressive they were apparently worried about people misinterpreting this they said no that's not why we're doing it but that's probably why they're doing it yeah anytime you send a marketplace link you always have to clip that last part off because it's huge you get this massive link totally just my opinion here but the response from facebook rings is hollow well okay so now you will not be able to clip this part of the url because it's integral to getting you to the right page well that kills marketplace doesn't it yeah and when we share links from marketplace it's like really hilarious technically your account can because they're literally they can build an open graph of how that link was shared which i'm sure is valuable information to them there's no way they would be leaving that on the table craigslist just excited right now because they're like maybe we're going to be relevant again yeah because you can see who shared and you know see how it progressed do people still i don't know a lot of people who use craigslist anymore i feel like marketplace has taken the secondhand market i think craigslist like you used to be able to find really good deals for stuff on there but now it seems like people have these inflated ideas of what their stuff is worth yeah or it's just weird junk i mean and there's weird junk on facebook marketplace but you can usually find decent things on there too or it's a scam yeah so now think about the whole facebook thing that we just talked about and that is clearly maliciously bad for the user so could we not argue that if someone must look someone mistakenly said oh do you work at facebook i they should not be surprised if i get angry about that like no no no no i have nothing to do with that you do not do not compare me with that which makes me think that this lawsuit has merit a company called meta is suing meta for naming itself meta we covered this originally when it first happened when the meta announcement happened well it's come to a lawsuit so for six months these people say they've been trying to negotiate with medic look we have a problem here and nothing crickets or just stonewall like no we're not doing anything about it what are you gonna do god bless them they went to court they're going up against a big legal team but i hope they win i hope they do too this is also an art installation company now the argument is going to be tough yeah because they're different different business styles and markets art installation company so they don't do the art they just install the art yeah either probably like galleries or private homes that kind of thing the verge admitted they'd done business with them before like i guess they did a you know some sort of conference or something yeah these guys had to do art interesting well uh facebook also has a problem with fraud because you can create facebook groups about criminal activity they don't get taken down except i think now there will be a sudden renewed interest and possibly getting rid of those amazon sues admins from over 10 000 facebook groups over fake reviews a lot of these it sounds like from the article were fake review brokers where you could sign up and you know they would give you five bucks to leave a fake review and so what better way to connect with people who are willing to do that for five bucks than through facebook man you can they can keep coming back give them more assignments it's like crowdfunding things it's like okay the plan here in this facebook group is we're going to ocean's 11s and things so we need some volunteers to create a distraction for the pit boss while we hit the we're going to give everybody 100 bucks and you know you'd have a million people want to do that immediately now think about everything that we're telling you about facebook uh it's full of criminal activity uh there's fake accounts galore uh they're getting sued all over the place every the cambridge analytica is coming back to haunt them and so you have to ask yourself you know let's say that you're getting back into investing maybe you do think there's blood in the streets and it's time to buy would you invest in a company that looked at all that and said let's be like that we need some of that in our company microsoft is launching a facebook ripoff inside of teams so actually i went i didn't went digging for this and it is kind of a facebook ripoff but it's also kind of a linkedin ripple i thought it was more they're trying to compete with linkedin i don't think this is something they're trying to do against facebook because facebook's always informal yeah linkedin is for business and i think teams is also for business how awful that is it seems also too like they're trying to give people something like you're in a meeting that's like who is this bozo that's talking and you can give them something to look at it's like oh turns out their number employee number 37 in a fortune 500 yeah oops i don't ever put anything i don't have a profile picture on teams i don't have anything why would you yeah linkedin is also this your your weekly reminder linkedin is uh very bad but i think i mean i won't use it but i could see a lot of people using it from teams this might kill linkedin could be uh snapchat for a long time i've actually sometimes i'll see a snapchat link in some random place and click on it i'm like oh right yeah they don't have a website how stupid is that annoying there is no chance i'm ever installing your app i'm sorry i'll just do without i guess now maybe i don't have to but i'm still not interested snapchat is finally coming to the web after more than a decade is a mobile app why well we've got apps like signal which are not really really stupid for business reasons same thing it deletes after 24 hours but guess what people can screenshot and oh but it tells you save as except not always except that'll be easier to do in a web browser than it will be on a mobile phone a lot easier and tick tock um one thing about tick tock as it takes over the world is even if you don't sign up for it even if you're not part of that world you risk being caught up in it as the roving tick tock gangs do things in your area you know he's like oh don't i don't want to be on your stupid tricks i don't film me but no no it's bad and it's even worse if you're in a historic place that a lot of people want to gather at overrun by influencers historic sites are banning tick-tock creators in nepal prominent tourists and religious sites in nepal are putting up no tick tock sites to keep creators from shooting at the premises they describe like imagine this hell you know you're at a nice place like this a lovely and then they describe how the girls will show up with boom boxes because they have to sink they're going to dub the music but they have to sync up their dance moves right and so that like they will do it over and over and over to the same 30 seconds of music to get the perfect take that's horrifying they should at least give them a few hundred bucks wow or just don't do it in a public place and ruin what's supposed to be like a beautiful historical site for everybody else you need that backdrop remember the ones that were doing it in front of forest fires it's unreal uh it's something well war crimes how about some war crimes we need to preserve those it does seem like we've seen some war crimes yeah you know i've definitely seen some footage where i thought to myself well that ain't right the things are really getting worse they shouldn't have done that but you got to figure out like you know you got to get to the bottom of it you got to search it they're actually international courts that look into this kind of thing but can they get these archives tick tock resists calls to preserve ukraine content for war crime investigations that's not a good look nervous laughter now of course tick tock has nothing to do with china don't worry but remember that china was the one country that didn't condemn this war so they might have some influence there not great good job ars technica and uh this was a late one but you know nancy pelosi is not the only one turns out other people have inside information and they just can't keep a lid on it yes crypto twitter the fbi is reading your tweets just because they're disinterested in nancy pelosi doesn't mean they're disinterested in you oh why is the twitter bird what is the red that's attacking it here i have no idea it kind of looks like it's an embroidered twitter but then when i look at it closely i think it's pen i'm not sure what's going on in this stock photo interesting but yeah so coinbase was going to list a bunch of new coins when coinbase lists a coin that is a huge shot in the arm for that crypto and somehow some friends of this guy found out weird how that happens and bought exactly all of those cryptos that were about to be listed and made quite a nice little chunk of change yeah it's almost like the legislation that's going to affect certain companies huh it's weird it's almost like you could make 60 returns if you did that consistently anyway oh we got a lot of nonsense on friday so many nonsense we will see you guys then you\n"