Speech Samples-Informative & Persuasive Speeches in TedTalks

Informative Speeches

Persuasive Speeches

The Danger of Silence
Being an Introvert is a Good Thing
Why students should have mental health days | Hailey Hardcastle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qq7lDL-bzY
Straw No More | Molly Steer | TEDxJCUCairns
The Power of Coffee | Joseph Saez | TEDxBOHS
GMOs: Why we should give them a second chance | Lee Dong

When It Comes to Big Tech, Enough Is Enough

July 27, 2023 NY Times

By Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren

Mr. Graham, a Republican, is the senior senator from South Carolina. Ms. Warren, a Democrat, is the senior senator from Massachusetts.The digital revolution promised amazing new opportunities — and it delivered. Digital platforms promoted social interaction, democratized information and gave us hundreds of new ways to have fun.

But digital innovation has had a dark side. Giant digital platforms have provided new avenues of proliferation for the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, human trafficking, drug trafficking and bullying and have promoted eating disorders, addictive behaviors and teen suicide. Parents like Kristin Bride, whose teenage son killed himself after being mercilessly cyberbullied, have shared heartbreaking stories with Congress and the public about the potentially deadly consequences.

Nobody elected Big Tech executives to govern anything, let alone the entire digital world. If democracy means anything, it means that leaders on both sides of the aisle must take responsibility for protecting the freedom of the American people from the ever-changing whims of these powerful companies and their unaccountable C.E.O.s. Today we’re stepping up to that challenge with a bipartisan bill to treat Big Tech the way we treat other industries.

A few Big Tech companies generate a majority of the world’s internet traffic and essentially control nearly every aspect of Americans’ digital lives. Platforms are protected from legal liability in many of their decisions, so they operate without accountability. Big Tech companies have far too much unrestrained power over our economy, our society and our democracy. These massive businesses post eye-popping profits while they suppress competition. Google uses its search engine to give preference to its own products, like Google Hotels and Google Flights, giving it an unfair leg up on competitors. Amazon sucks up information from small businesses that offer products for sale on its platform, then uses that information to run its own competing businesses. Apple forces entrepreneurs (and thereby consumers) to pay crushing commissions to use its App Store. A few Big Tech companies stifle all competition before it poses any serious threat.

Big Tech companies also prey on ordinary users. They vacuum up our personal data, often with little care for whether their practices are responsible or even legal. Some Big Tech platforms mislead us when we try to limit the data we share, and they regularly fall prey to massive data leaks that leave us vulnerable to criminal activity, foreign interference and disinformation. Adversaries in China and other countries often store or process our data. And if we want to know how our data is being used or why our posts are being taken down, good luck getting an answer. We’re usually in the dark about where our data goes or how it is used.

Enough is enough. It’s time to rein in Big Tech. And we can’t do it with a law that only nibbles around the edges of the problem. Piecemeal efforts to stop abusive and dangerous practices have failed. Congress is too slow, it lacks the tech expertise, and the army of Big Tech lobbyists can pick off individual efforts easier than shooting fish in a barrel. Meaningful change — the change worth engaging every member of Congress to fight for — is structural.

For more than a century, Congress has established regulatory agencies to preserve innovation while minimizing harm presented by emerging industries. In 1887 the Interstate Commerce Commission took on railroads. In 1914 the Federal Trade Commission took on unfair methods of competition and later unfair and deceptive acts and practices. In 1934 the Federal Communications Commission took on radio (and then television). In 1975 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission took on nuclear power, and in 1977 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took on electricity generation and transmission. We need a nimble, adaptable, new agency with expertise, resources and authority to do the same for Big Tech.

Our Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act would create an independent, bipartisan regulator charged with licensing and policing the nation’s biggest tech companies — like Meta, Google and Amazon — to prevent online harm, promote free speech and competition, guard Americans’ privacy and protect national security. The new watchdog would focus on the unique threats posed by tech giants while strengthening the tools available to the federal agencies and state attorneys general who have authority to regulate Big Tech.

Our legislation would guarantee common-sense safeguards for everyone who uses tech platforms. Families would have the right to protect their children from sexual exploitation, cyberbullying and deadly drugs. Certain digital platforms have promoted the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, suicidal ideation and eating disorders or done precious little to combat these evils; our bill would require Big Tech to mitigate such harms and allow families to seek redress if they do not.

Americans deserve to know how their data is collected and used and to control who can see it. They deserve the freedom to opt out of targeted advertising. And they deserve the right to go online without, say, some A.I. tool’s algorithm denying them a loan based on their race or politics. If our legislation is enacted, platforms would face consequences for suppressing speech in violation of their own terms of service. The commission would have the flexibility and agility to develop more expertise and respond to new risks, like those posed by generative A.I.

Our bill would set clear rules for tech companies and impose real consequences for companies that break the law. For the giant companies, anticompetitive practices — like exploiting market dominance, tying the sale of one product to another, charging customers different prices for the same product and preventing employees from working for competitors — would be prohibited. The bill would set a high bar for mergers and acquisitions by dominant Big Tech platforms and make it possible to block and reverse harmful deals.

Reining in tech giants will be hard, but it’s a fight worth fighting. If we win, Americans finally will have the tools they need to combat many online evils harming their children and ruining lives. And small businesses will have a fighting chance to innovate and compete in a world dominated by tech monopolies.

No company, no industry and no C.E.O. should be above the law. These reforms will ensure that the next generation of great American tech companies will operate responsibly while remaining on the cutting edge of innovation.

It’s time for Congress to act.

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What’s in a Name? Musk/Twitter Edition

byPAUL KRUGMAN July 27, 2023 NY Times

I have (well-managed) arthritis and take pain reducers every day. I normally buy generic acetaminophen; but many people still buy brand-name Tylenol, even though it costs much more.

There’s a long-running debate among economists about why people are willing to pay a premium for name brands. Some emphasize ignorance — one influential study found that health professionals are more likely than the public at large to buy generic painkillers, because they realize that they’re just as effective as name brands. Others suggest that there may be a rational calculation involved: The quality of name brands may be more reliable, because the owners of these brands have a reputation to preserve. It doesn’t have to be either-or; the story behind the brand premium may depend on the product.

What’s clear is that brand names that for whatever reason inspire customer loyalty have real value to the company that owns them and shouldn’t be changed casually.

So what the heck does Elon Musk, the owner of TAFKAT — the app formerly known as Twitter — think he’s doing, changing the platform’s name to X, with a new logo many people, myself included, find troubling?

It’s important to distinguish between corporate rebranding — changing the official name of a company — and changing the names of the company’s products. Google renamed itself Alphabet, presumably to convey to investors its aspiration to be more than a search engine, but the search engine itself is still named Google. Philip Morris renamed itself Altria, presumably in part to diminish its perceived association with lung cancer, but its customers still smoke Marlboros.

Changing product names is more problematic, because it risks losing customer loyalty, so it tends to happen only when there’s a real problem with the existing name. It was definitely a good idea to change the name of Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda to 7Up. It’s actually remarkable that it took PepsiCo so long to realize that in an America that has changed (for the better), the Aunt Jemima brand name had to go. But absent such good reasons, sensible businesses keep the brand names their customers keep buying.

So what was wrong with Twitter as a brand name? Nothing, as far as I can tell. It was friendly-sounding and a bit funny, and resonated with the role of the platform as a place for people to chatter about a variety of subjects. The Twitter logo was also fine — distinctive, instantly recognizable and without any obvious negative connotations.

But Musk has nonetheless ditched all of that in favor of X, a harsh-sounding name with no relationship to what the platform does.

Furthermore, the new logo — a slightly embellished version of the letter X — is problematic in several ways. It probably can’t be trademarked, because it’s more or less indistinguishable from a lowercase x in an existing font. Many TAFKAT users say that they’re embarrassed by the logo, which makes them feel as if they’re visiting a porn site. My reaction was a bit different. To me, and I’m sure others, the new logo has the vibes of an authoritarian political symbol, like the Z emblem of Russians invading Ukraine — or some other historical symbols I’m sure you can think of.

Modern corporations normally give a lot of thought to choosing brand names and logos. So what was Musk thinking with his renaming of TAFKAT? It’s really hard to see any business rationale for junking a perfectly good brand identity and replacing it with a name and logo almost everyone finds off-putting.

Well, everything we know suggests that he basically wasn’t thinking. For some reason he has always had a thing about the letter X — his rocket company is SpaceX and he tried to get PayPal to rename itself X.com (and was ousted as C.E.O. immediately afterward, perhaps because his colleagues thought it sounded like, yes, a porn site). And that awful logo didn’t go through the usual design process (Twitter’s bird logo evolved over seven years). It was casually outsourced — he asked his followers to suggest symbols and chose one he liked.

But then, Musk’s sudden change of brand name and symbol, without a clear rationale, fits the pattern of everything else he’s done at TAFKAT.

He clearly suffers from a severe case of Tech Bro Syndrome, that weird combination of hubris and conspiracy theorizing so prevalent in his social set. He accused Twitter of censoring conservatives, ignoring the reality that in a MAGA-ridden nation any attempt to limit the spread of dangerous misinformation will hit the right harder than the left. He purchased Twitter in the belief that his personal brilliance could easily make the company profitable, no need for hard thinking about business strategy.

And he’s been flailing wildly ever since.

Will the Xification of Twitter finally be a flail too far? Social networks tend to be especially durable because — like international currencies — they benefit from self-reinforcement: People use them because other people use them. It will take many bad decisions to push TAFKAT to the tipping point where people abandon it for another platform.

But Musk is working on it.