Biden Brings Socialism to Washington
Arguing US consumers and workers have been harmed by Washington's easy acceptance of corporate consolidation, President Joe Biden announced Friday a wide-ranging effort to bolster antitrust enforcement.
Biden plans to sign an executive order promoting competition in the American economy, encompassing everything from rulings on Big Tech mergers to airline ticket pricing and hearing aid purchases, the White House said Friday.
"For decades, corporate consolidation has been accelerating," according to a fact sheet released by the White House that described the initiative as "a whole-of-government effort to promote competition in the American economy."
The document cited earlier moments in US history when presidents confronted corporate power, such as the trust busting push by President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century that gave "the little guy a fighting chance."
The order outlines 72 initiatives across the federal government and announces the creation of a White House Competition council to monitor progress.
Among the measures, the order calls for greater scrutiny of mergers involving large tech companies, including so-called "killer acquisitions" that are meant to remove a competitive threat.
The plan also orders the Federal Trade Commission to establish rules on the surveillance and accumulation of data at tech firms and to ensure small businesses are given a better chance to compete with large companies that own and operate online retail marketplaces.
Other measures call for the Health and Human Services department to establish rules to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter and to ensure more transparent disclosure of airline baggage fees and other ancillary charges.
The policy also includes provisions to protect workers from being forced to sign non-compete agreements when starting a new job and to ensure better competition in the freight rail and maritime shipping industries.
NIST Graded Our Post-Quantum Cryptography. Zero Failures.
NIST's Algorithm Validation Test System generated test vectors nobody had seen, we answered them over the ACVP protocol, and NIST graded the result: 2,130 cases across ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in every parameter set offered, zero failures, demo certificate A11025. This is what that proves, where we deliberately drew the claim narrower than NIST's own matrix, and why the FIPS 140-2 sunset on 21 September makes the distinction between being graded and grading yourself worth understanding.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
People treat the Jack Sparrow line as a joke. The attribution is a joke. The sentence is not. Forty years in markets says the same thing Epictetus said in 125 CE and Robert Merton named in 1948: the event is finite, and the story you appoint to govern it is not. This essay walks the quote back to its actual sources, draws the loop that turns a feeling into an order, and sets out the four places a rule written in advance cuts the loop. Faith is not a hedge. It is a stance.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
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