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porkbarrel politics subsidy too much government

Up-to-Date in Kansas City?

META, Data Center, Kansas

Eight-hundred million bucks. 

That’s the investment that “Meta” — the umbrella outfit that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — has agreed to invest in a patch of land in Kansas City’s Northland. The plan is to build a data center at an 882-acred development site. 

“Political leaders who gathered at Union Station heralded the news as a major development for Kansas City and the state.” This private investment “would far surpass the scale of recent projects in the region . . . said Missouri Gov. Mike Parson,” The Kansas City Star relates.

But there’s more.

“Meta spokeswoman Melanie Roe said the company could invest as much as $40 billion at the site in land acquisition, construction, and development of a larger data center.” This is to be a “long term partnership.”

Make that a Big Business/Big Government partnership. The biggest ever, perhaps.

The Kansas City Council had unanimously approved a development plan for the site last April, with data centers there enabled to access to more than $8 billion in local tax incentives. “Incentive watchdog group Good Jobs First says such an incentive award would be the largest ever in American history,” The Kansas City Star explains.

Take it as a word of caution. This is not laissez faire capitalism. This is not “the free market.” It is favoritism. It unites big business and big government.

And even as an investment in future taxes — which is the ostensible justification for the subsidies — the data complex is slated to employ about a hundred workers.

Politicians don’t make the best investors. But they do make easy marks for big corporations.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture social media

F-Book Goes Meta

Metaverse, Facebook, VR, virtual reality

When Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of Facebook’s parent company to “Meta,” months back, a lot of people found this funny.

But for some of us older folks, the name was more funny-peculiar than funny-ha-ha. We’re used to “meta” as in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics — the latter so-called because the book came “after the Physics.” 

So what does Zuckerberg’s desire to take the lead in the “shared virtual reality” market (Meta’s confessed goal) have to do with “after” anything? After real reality, there’s meta-reality? Uh, OK.

I don’t think I’ll be an early adopter of that waste of time. I still have things to do.

But that’s old Facebook news. Now, ready yourself for today’s Facebook news: defending itself from John Stossel’s defamation lawsuit over a bad case of pseudo-fact-checking, Facebook has admitted that its fact-checking is, from a legal point of view, opinion.

“In referring to its frequent use of ‘fact-checker’ labels on posts,” explains The Patriot Post, “the conglomerate stated in its motion for dismissal, ‘The [fact-check] labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion.’”

Truth is, as the New York Post observes, the whole “fact-check industry is funded by liberal moguls such as George Soros, government-funded nonprofits and the tech giants themselves.”

Facebook is moving beyond reality fast. Meta-fast. When bad “fact-checking” is defended as mere opinion, reality refracts to the point of unintelligibility.

Maybe Facebook’s name should be changed to Fraudbook, for while opinion is protected speech, labeling one’s opinions “facts” under the rubric of “fact-checking” sure looks, if not like legal fraud, exactly, certainly fraud in common parlance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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