Notice how business journalism went from ignoring signs of the Great Resignation, lying upfront about job growth, to “Yeah it is happening but we can probably just guilt people into coming back lol”
Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.
Customers will receive refunds.
This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.
When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.
People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.
If you’ve got an ereader and want to actually own your books, I heartily recommend using cailbre to scrape the DRM off and so you can backup the files.
I know this is old news but the point is still valid. As an e-book author, please, remove the DRM after you buy my shit. Once you pay for a copy, that copy is yours and Amazon shouldn’t have the power to snatch it away.
(After is the operative word here, since if you pirate a book without buying, that hurts the author a lot more than the megacorporation.)
Get physical copies of books if you can. With large chunks of the world getting trigger-happy with their censorship, this is especially important if you want to keep your LGBTQ stories.
Since Citizen’s United made corporations legally people, I think, like people, they should be jailed (separated from society, unable to do jack shit) instead of fined when they commit heinous acts and I think we should impose a “natural lifespan” on them where if a corporation reaches a 100 years old they just die.
And I’m not kidding.
Think about what happens if work knowingly and purposefully shorts you $100 on your paycheck versus what happens if you pocket $100 from the register.
Think about what happens for on-the-job negligent deaths versus the maximum sentence for manslaughter by an individual
Think about what happens if you defraud the federal government versus if banks do it
If they get human rights they deserve human culpability
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “Against Cozy Catastrophies: Cowering in a luxury bunker is a lousy retirement plan.” It’s a column about the failure of a market-based, individual based approach to the collective problem of retirement savings.
One of the major contributors to the national wealth of the world’s “advanced economies” after World War II was the advent of universal retirement programs. Some of this came from the private sector: employer-provided defined-benefits pensions (guaranteeing a proportion of your final salary from retirement until death). Some of it was public: Social Security programs.
The revolutionary idea was to treat retirement as a social problem, not a personal one. It acknowledged that people with low wages will struggle to put away enough for retirement, forcing them to stay in the workforce (making harder for their kids’ generation to get jobs), or to rely on their families for support (hamstringing their kids’ generation as they launched their careers).
In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s IRS created a new kind of pension: the 401(k), a tax-sheltered, personally directed “market pension.” In other words, it was a way for the government to encourage workers to gamble in the stock market.
At first, this seemed like an attractive proposition: employers made generous matching payments to their workers’ 401(k) contributions and the IRS gave generous benefits to workers who used their savings to gamble on stocks.
As Tom Fraser writes for Jacobin, the shift from employer-based, defined-benefits pensions to market-based, speculative pensions was key to neutralizing union demands for good employer pensions, and labor demands for good Social Security benefits:
This was a catastrophe. Today, most young workers have little or no pension savings (indeed, most American households have less than $400 in savings overall). Workers who are forced into retirement by layoffs or exhaustion have to liquidate their family homes and/or burden their children.
These workers — who will soon be forced into an impoverished, precarious retirement — weren’t reckless spenders whose lack of foresight led to their inadequate savings. Rather, 40 years of wage stagnation and spiraling housing and education costs left many workers with no discretionary income to put into market pensions.
Even for workers who did manage to save, disasters like the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 forced many to liquidate their pension savings (selling into a weak market and incurring huge penalties). All this highlights how lucky those of us with savings really are.
In my column, I describe one of the classic cons: you get a phone-call from a stranger who predicts that a certain team will win tonight’s sport’s match. The prediction comes true, and you get another call from the same tipster, with another tip. That one comes true, too. Then another, and another. Finally, the tipster calls and says, “Now that you’ve seen how good I am at this, I’m not going to give you any more tips for free. The next one costs $100,000.”
This is pretty convincing, from the mark’s point of view — but once you know how the scam works, it’s obvious that the con artist has no special insight. Rather, he starts off by making 32 phone-calls and predicts a win for one team with 16 of them, and a loss with the other 16. After the first match, he discards the 16 marks he gave bad advice to, and splits the remaining 16 in two groups. Eight of them get calls with a win prediction, and 8 with a loss. After that match, he does it again, discarding the 8 bad prediction marks and splitting the remaining 8 into two groups of 4. Then again. Finally, there’s just two marks, and each of them gets the $100,000 demand. The con artist nets $200k from 62 brief phone-calls.
As the mark, it’s easy to think you’re watching a dazzling demonstration of skill. As the scammer, you know that it’s just dumb luck. Those of us with pension savings lucked out. We had a job that produced discretionary income surpluses we could invest. We made bets that didn’t sink our savings. We avoided forced liquidations during the 2000 and 2012 and 2020 crises.
But even though we’re lucky, we are by no means guaranteed a comfy retirement. J Paul Getty said, “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” The corollary is that when one person lacks retirement savings, that’s their problem; when most people lack retirement savings, that’s everyone’s problem.
If tens of millions of people who worked all their lives are forced out of the labor market and into precarity and poverty, burdening their children or being forced to choose between food, heat and rent, they won’t take that lying down. They won’t dig holes, climb meekly inside, and pull the dirt in on top of themselves.
Your retirement savings won’t buy you a ticket to a comfortable dotage — it’ll buy you a front-row seat to a cozy catastrophe. “Cozy catastrophes” are Brian Aldiss’s term for post-WWII English sf novels in which middle class people weather disaster from behind the walls of fortified country farms, while gangs of proles maraud through the land (think Day of the Triffids).
The only thing worse than retreating to your walled retirement compound and trying not to hear the cries of your former co-workers who are clawing at the gates is to be those retired co-workers. That’s why I have a retirement savings account — for the same reason I have private health insurance. The only thing worse than having it is not having it.
But I don’t kid myself that because I’ve “solved” this as an individual, I’ve actually solved anything. Like public health, retirement is a social problem, not a personal one. Your first class berth on the Titanic may guarantee you a seat in one of the half-empty lifeboats, from which you can listen to the pleas of the steerage passengers as they run out of energy and drown. But no one with an iota of compassion can say that this is a good outcome.
[Image ID: A lush lawn and garden hedge wall; through the gate and over the hedge, we see a smouldering, apocalyptic landscape. Desperate hands reach over the wall. In the foreground is a No Trespassing sign.]
Okay, I’ve seen a lot of people claiming that Biden is somehow responsible for the baby formula shortage. You’re looking at the wrong president.
I’ve attached a picture of the man responsible below.
It’s a fun picture of Trump with some other suits surrounded by piles of paper cutting a ribbon with a gold pair of scissors. This was to represent cutting regulations. This was the point where everyone who’s ever worked in a lab started screaming.
See, those regulations weren’t there because OSHA agents were bored and wanted to slap fines on people. They’re there because people got hurt.
These were laws that said don’t put workers around radioactive materials without hazmat suits–caused by the Radium Girls ingesting radium daily and daily. Don’t leave meat out for hours on end and don’t just pick maggots off–Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is about the meat packing industry and how unsanitary it was. Workers have to wear helmets where falling is a risky–helmets reduced death and paralysis. Use vents and fume hoods to move gases away from workers–look at all the people with different cancer from breathing in Lord knows what. Provide a fire escape and don’t lock workers in–146 people died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Don’t dump waste into the waterway–the Cuyahoga River literally caught fire. Don’t produce medical equipment in unsterilized factories with unsterilized equipment–the Dalkon Shield caused millions of infections because it was made in a repurposed Chapstick factory with no sterilization (among other things).
These laws are written in blood.
Every single regulation that is part of the EPA, OSHA, the FDA, and the DOJ is there because people were grievously injuried or died. They’re not there for fun. You might say that this is all common sense stuff but right now Amazon is tallying work place injuries faster than a textile factory at the start of the industrial revolution. Tesla refused to paint orange lines around machines, delineating where it was safe to stand. History tells us that capitalists will put profits first, worker safety be damned.
Now I haven’t read the very, very long list of all the regulations that Mr. Trump decided was worth getting rid of. I don’t think he read that list. But I’m guessing that there was a law about sterilizing equipment for food, maintenance for equipment, and/or consistent inspections that suddenly Abbott Laboratories no longer had to follow. And just like so many other big companies, they decided to put the profit over babies’ lives.
Capitalism is the monster here, and this wouldn’t have happened if one company didn’t have a monopoly on making baby formula. But regulations were a muzzle on that monster and they kept rampant capitalism somewhat in check. With that gone, this is what happens. It’s only a matter of time before we lose another important commodity because regulations were erased.
I remember the day this picture came out, and having worked in the food industry my whole life I knew it was going to lead to disaster…
“Even if the outward and visible manifestations of class were not as conspicuous as they do in fact remain, it would still be quite unwarranted to interpret this as evidence of the erosion, let alone the dissolution, of class divisions which are firmly rooted in the system of ownership of advanced capitalist societies. To achieve their dissolution or even their serious erosion would take rather more than working-class access to refrigerators, television sets, cars… and more even than death taxes, progressive taxation, and a host of other measures denounced and deplored by the rich as ruinous and crippling, yet which have had no radical impact upon economic inequality–not very surprisingly since this system of ownership operates on the principle that ‘to him who hath shall be given,’ and provides ample opportunities for wealth to beget more wealth.”
If we divided the wealth of this one man and distributed it equally to all Americans, that would be $300 each; enough for every man woman and child to have their own Nintendo switch.
The false equivalence in Musk is so strong, as if people anywhere should be exploited way past safe, mental and physical limitations. There are reasons for limiting work and why there are regulations about age, overtime, and compensation. Technology is already a problem where work easily bleeds into uncompensated time and leave.
This isn’t complimentary to anyone’s work ethic and falls square into the model minority myth. Many of us remember the horror of hearing about people committing suicide over work conditions or overworking themselves to death at Foxconn factories, and the reaction was to install nets and hire a PR firm. Things are outsourced to China and other “developing” countries for exploitative reasons, not because people are unwilling to do them and the safeguards against reckless profiteering in one place do not extend to corporations internationally.
This is a colonialist attitude, as if Chinese and other ethnic minorities have not been historically exploited as migrant labour–underpaid, undervalued, and put in harm’s way even as citizens of industrialized nations. People still feel the need to count how many generations their families have lived and toiled because we’re constantly reminded we are seen as foreign, discriminated against, and always a hair from being blamed for our own victimization.
Elon and his ilk can take their backhanded praise and choke on it.
Bezos has pledged to donate $1 billion to his charity. Although this might seem good at face value, “billionaire philanthropy” itself is created by the problems it purports to solve.
There has been an unprecedented transfer of wealth to billionaires during the pandemic - their fortunes grew to a record high of $10.2 trillion while millions of workers sunk into poverty.
These two phenomena – surging wealth inequality alongside the increased social role of “charitable” handouts from the super-rich – are closely intertwined. Without extreme levels of social inequality, it wouldn’t be necessary to rely on the alms of billionaires “donating” the funds back to society just to meet critical social needs.
Now, some of these billionaires have decided to donate a small fraction of the wealth they gained during the past two years. It’s important to note the sources of this increase in wealth:
The fact that the pandemic has accelerated the process of monopolisation and concentration of capital.
Trillion-dollar corporate bailouts like the CARES Act, which placed vast financial resources at the disposal of the ultra-rich (conversely, the debt this incurred will largely have to be paid off by the working class)
Capitalists refusing to halt non-essential production, sacrificing workers’ health and lives in the pursuit of profits.
It is from this sort of immoral shit that billionaires have accumulated the fortunes from which they now dispense their “moral” donations.
To top it all off: Billionaire philanthropy allows the ultra-rich to exert great influence over non-profit organisations and public policy discussions. Often, so-called philanthropic organisations function as little more than vehicles to promote the interests of their wealthy donors. In any case, they will never challenge their interests. Bezos’s foundation calls for “market-based” solutions to climate change and will fund lobbyists to promote “market reforms” rather than government regulation. Convenient.
Tl;dr In order to combat climate change, fight infectious disease and cure other societal ills, we cannot rely on the scraps donated by the ultra-rich, to be used as the ultra-rich dictate according to their own individual whims and interests. Particularly when this money was obtained by contributing to these problems in the first place + will not be used to challenge such problems on any fundamental level, but instead be used to sustain the status quo that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place.
the thing that bugs me the most about the censoring of the internet to please advertisers is like… tv shows aren’t having less sex and violence in them. movies aren’t having less sex and violence in them. HBO can do eight seasons of graphic murder and nudity and it’s the cultural phenomenon of the decade, but I can’t show a nipple on tumblr or talk about death on tiktok. it’s not that the internet is becoming “safer,” it’s just making these topics a privilege only for very rich people, and putting it behind a paywall for everyone else.
employers, i mean big corporations, and i include any big box store, gas stations, chain restaurants, etc, don’t want to give you holidays. i don’t mean vacation. i mean statutory holidays where if you are full time and working on that day you have to be paid double time or depending on the area time and a half because you are working on a holiday. and you get paid for that day anyway because it is a statuory holiday.
so when other holidays for other cultures are like, hey can’t we also get a government holiday you will get a lot of propaganda about culture wars etc because every private corporation doesn’t want to pay workers for time off and if they want their store open they have to pay their employees more. and like ppl buy into this because oh well we shouldn’t have every holiday and i am like, WHY CAN’T WE? like we already work in a dystopia
like srsly, we work way too much. and weekends are spent trying to catch up on everything you couldn’t do when you were working, that includes laundry, cooking, spending time with family, cleaning and just every chore.
so why can’t jewish holidays be statutory? or muslim holidays? we would all be winners, i used to volunteer to work on canada day because i would get more money and i didn’t have plans. it would incentivize workers who wanted extra cash but also let workers have paid time off to spend important days with their loved ones
People assume that AI is inherently an outgrowth of computer technology, but the whole point of the “programmable general purpose Von Neumann machine” is that its principles are technology-independent.
We have had AI for a at least a century.
Modern corporations are paperclip-maximizing AIs running in human wetware on an operating system of contracts, regulations, and other social constructs, and capable of self-programming by modifying that underlying operating system. They have partially migrated to a digital platform, which has allowed an increase in the speed with which they can assimilate environmental feedback and manipulate their surroundings (vis. high-speed trading).
Mickey Mouse when I ask him why he’s increasing my house rent by $100 dollars every month (he’s my landlord)
The underpaid disney employees on their way to evict me and my family
disney literally tried to do this ages ago. please watch defunctland explain it. im losing my mind. why
I would like to let people know that is a reality for many of the underpaid Disney employees as they can’t afford housing on their salaries
So Disney has apartment buildings it buys to rent cheaply to their employees
And I’m sure you can imagine the level of control Disney has over you when they control your employment and your housing
Originally it was just for the college program employees (like me) but got expanded to being available to all employees
Now I don’t know how it is with the full time employees, but if you were a college employee and you got “termed?” (Disney loves alternative language to control their employees, see being a ‘cast member on stage’ vs an employee at work). After being termed you had 24 hours to move out
Now, guess how well that worked for 19 year olds from Ohio who have nowhere to sleep and no way to get home
I knew a guy who had two “strikes” against him (calling out of work gets points against you, 3 points get you a strike) that had been waved as he had good reasons to miss those days. He then made a comment his supervisor didn’t like so she reversed the strikes being waved and gave him the third one for his comment. He then had to call his parents at 2 am to tell them he was now homeless in Orlando. Imagine if your boss could evict you for talking back
Now imagine you’re one of the many semi retired employees trying to stay afloat through their 70s, or the many employees who are recent immigrants, or who are parents of kids, or anyone else without a lot of work or housing options
Think of the shit they’d be able to do to you if losing your job meant immediately losing housing because your boss owns your home
Think of how much leverage that gives against the unions when your workers aren’t even secure from their employer in their home, where union dues paying for you to not work can’t save you from eviction because your boss decides if you get to live there
Any fucked up thing Disney does is almost always worse for their employees, and likely tested on them first
