pluralistic.net

if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?

Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic.

I use RSS (it’s why most of my posts are sharing engadget links.) It really does make for a MUCH more pleasant reading experience. Feel free to share some websites with RSS that you like! Discovery can be hard sometimes; I’d love to hear more.

The salacious details of the Epstein Files have obscured the fact that they are also basically The Panama Papers II, revealing the sleazy economic machinations of the Epstein/Trump “unaccountable class”.

So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: “Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you.” This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

“The only plausible path from US Big Tech to the Eurostack runs straight through anticircumvention. The EU needs to repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, a law it passed at the behest of the US Trade Representative, to protect the rent-extraction tactics of American tech companies.”

Will this effect Graphene? Too bad that Linux phones don’t seem to be going anywhere…

Noncompetes epitomize MLK’s “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.” They’re a way for employers to operate in a command economy where the power of the state can be mobilized against uppity workers who dare to seek a better deal, and leave workers to sell their labor in a buyer’s where the bidders have all the power.

geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/14735326

Like the two Naomis [Wolf and Klein], conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

It’s damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn’t have to fear competitors.

“All those people might want to leave, too, but it’s really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else. Economists call this the ‘collective action problem.’ This problem creates ‘switching costs’ – a lot of stuff you’ll have to live without if you switch from legacy platforms to new ones.”

Cory Doctorow explaining why he endorses the “Free Our Feeds” initiative (Lemmy discussion)

Sometimes, these companies” (big tech) “really are looking out for your interests. They have armies of moderators and security experts who block innumerable threats to your data, your identity, and your physical safety. But those companies will never block you from their own leadership: when your interests conflict with their plans, the fortress walls that keep bad guys out become prison walls that lock you in.

The CALEA system, designed in the U.S. for mass surveillance, has become a global threat. Telecom equipment with “back doors” isn’t just an American issue—it’s a worldwide risk. Trusting the “good guys” is naive; any end with “back doors” can be a target. Encryption is our defense, and we must be careful about what we buy. #security #technology

Broadly speaking, the role of an establishment economist is to come up with new ways of saying, “actually, your boss is right.”

Excerpts from very detailed article:

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn’t just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Looking forward to reading the book someday.

cross-postowane z: https://szmer.info/post/1520883

And here’s the other side, a view against subscriptions or rather any monetisation of features, specifically in cars but can easily be applied to lots of other industries.

But this empirical facewash evaporates when confronted with whistleblower accounts of hospital administrators who have no medical credentials berating doctors for a “missed hospice opportunity” when a physician opts to keep a patient under their care despite the algorithm’s determination.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/08/the-last-federated-platform/#postal-inspectors