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Middlemen without enshittification
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I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me next in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!
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Enshittification describes how platforms go bad, which is also how the internet goes bad, because the internet is made of platforms, which is weird, because platforms are intermediaries and we were promised that the internet would disintermediate the world:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel
The internet did disintermediate a hell of a lot of intermediaries – that is, "middlemen" – but then it created a bunch more of these middlemen, who coalesced into a handful of gatekeepers, or as the EU calls them "VLOPs" (Very Large Online Platforms, the most EU acronym ever).
Which raises two questions: first, why did so many of us end up flocking to these intermediaries' sites, and how did those sites end up with so much power?
To answer the first question, I want you to consider one of my favorite authors: Crad Kilodney (RIP):
https://archive.org/details/thecradkilodneypapers
When I was growing up, Crad was a fixture on the streets of Toronto. All through the day and late into the evening, winter or summer, Crad would stand on the street with a sign around his neck ("Very famous Canadian author, buy my books, $2" or sometimes just "Margaret Atwood, buy my books, $2"). He wrote these deeply weird, often very funny short stories, which he edited, typeset, printed, bound and sold himself, one at a time, to people who approached him on the street.
I had a lot of conversations with Crad – as an aspiring writer, I was endlessly fascinated by him and his books. He was funny, acerbic – and sneaky. Crad wore a wire: he kept a hidden tape recorder rolling in his coat and he secretly recorded conversations with people like me, and then released a series of home-duplicated tapes of the weirdest and funniest ones:
https://archive.org/details/on-the-street-crad-kilodney-vol-1
I love Crad. He deserves more recognition. There's an on-again/off-again documentary about his life and work that I hope gets made some day:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#putrid-scum
But – and this is the crucial part – there are writers out there I want to hear from who couldn't do what Crad did. Maybe they can write books, but not edit them. Or edit them, but not typeset them. Or typeset, but not print. Or print, but not spend the rest of their lives standing on a street-corner with a "PUTRID SCUM" sign around their neck.
Which is fine. That's why we have intermediaries. I like booksellers (I was one!). I like publishers. I like distributors. I like their salesforce, who go forth and convince the booksellers of the world to stock books like mine. I have ten million things I want to do before I die, and I'm already 52, and being a sales-rep for a publisher isn't on my bucket list. I am so thankful that someone else wants to do this for me.
That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a very few – like Crad – can do it all, but most of us need some help, somewhere along the way. In the excellent 2022 book Direct, Kathryn Judge lays out a clear case for all the good that middlemen can do:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/
So why were we all so anxious for disintermediation back in the late 1990s? Here's a hint: it wasn't because we hated intermediaries – it was because we hated powerful intermediaries.
The point of an intermediary is to serve as a conduit between producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, audiences and creators. When an intermediary gains power over the audience – say, by locking them inside a walled garden – and then uses that lock-in to screw producers and appropriate an ever larger share of the value going between them, that's when intermediaries become a problem.
The problem isn't that someone will handle ticketing for your gig. The problem is that Ticketmaster has locked down all the ticketing, and the venues, and the promotions, and it uses that power to gouge fans and rip off artists:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/
The problem isn't that there's a well-made website that lets you shop for goods sold by many small merchants and producers. It's that Amazon has cornered this market, takes $0.51 out of every dollar you spend there, and clones and destroys any small merchant who succeeds on the platform:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos
The problem isn't that there's a website where you can stream most of the music ever recorded. It's that Spotify colludes with the Big Three labels to rip off artists and sneaks crap you don't want to hear into your stream in order to collect payola:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing
The problem isn't that there's a website where you can buy any audiobook you want. It's that Amazon's Audible locks every book to its platform forever and steals hundreds of millions of dollars from creators:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff
The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power. The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power. Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture their regulators and commit rampant labor, privacy and consumer violations with impunity. That capture also lets them harness governments to punish smaller players that want to free workers, creators, audiences and customers from walled gardens. It also hands them a whip-hand over their workers, so that any worker who refuses to aid in these nefarious plans can be easily fired:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel
A world with intermediaries is a better world. As much as I love Crad Kilodney's books, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only books on my shelves came from people prepared to stand on a street-corner wearing a "FOUL PUS FROM DEAD DOGS" sign.
The problem isn't intermediaries – it's powerful intermediaries. That's why the world's surging antitrust movement is so exciting: by reinstating competition law, we can keep intermediaries small and comparatively weak, so that creators and audiences, drivers and riders, sellers and buyers, and other groups seeking to connect will not find themselves made subservient to middlemen.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation
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Monopsony and the Publishing Industry
Monopsony and the Publishing Industry
In a break from my usual focus on contracts and intellectual property law, I’ve decided to delve into a little antitrust law for this month’s column. Many authors have been watching with interest the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) attempt to prevent Penguin Random House (PRH) from acquiring Simon & Schuster (S&S) on antitrust grounds. Some helpful background to the case can be found here and here…
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fsbofl · 2 months
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z34l0t · 1 year
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comicsispeople · 1 year
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"But Amazon and Spotify aren’t selling books and music that they’ve created themselves. Instead, as marketplaces, their power lies in their strength as buyers. Their leverage comes not from monopoly but from 'monopsony,' the term for a market in which 'buyers have power over sellers,' as Giblin and Doctorow describe it. As an author (or a publisher), if you don’t sell your books on Amazon—and accept whatever terms Amazon dictates for you to do so—much of your potential audience won’t even know your books exist. What’s more, 'Monopsony power … can arise at much lower concentrations than monopoly does,' they write. A buyer responsible 'for just 10 or 20 percent of a producer’s sales can have substantial power.'"
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trusswork · 1 year
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on monopsony and Amazon (via Franklin Foer)
Franklin Foer's raising of the criteria of monopsony in Amazon antitrust debates (Atlantic, November 2022) -- monopsony, whereby a monopoly squeezes not (or not just) consumers, but producers and suppliers who enable the firm's business -- highlights an interesting feature of this antitrust threshold, in that monopsony would seem only to apply to companies that do not “natively” produce what they sell -- that is, companies which largely sell on what others produce, middlemen resellers of whom Amazon is the most pure specimen yet, the ultimate successor to the "branded goods" firms of the postwar era. 
Standard Oil, Alcoa, Kodak, Swift & Co. -- these companies were classically pursued as monopolies because their market share isolated buyers from the wider market. These firms prima facie produced what they sold (extracted oil and aluminum, film and photography equipment, butchered and packed meat). Amazon produces virtually (...) nothing in this sense. 
Nevertheless, these examples raise the interesting point that few companies can be said, in a business-model context, truly and wholly to create their products from the raw environment -- oil and aluminum come closest, but these companies too require supplies of specialized industrial equipment and chemicals for use in extraction. Moving further in this direction, Swift & Co. did not farm the animals it slaughtered and preserved, and Kodak surely relied on many suppliers for parts, chemicals, etc. In this sense, most firms have "front end" room in their business models for potential monopsony. When a firm grows so large, costs can be cut with as much impunity as prices can be raised.
AT&T must have been an interesting case in that, while it famously showed a capacity to overcharge customers for telephone service in traditional monopolistic style, it must have also exercised considerable leverage over the many suppliers, contractors and partners that allowed the company to maintain the system of local Bells.
Microsoft is perhaps the most interesting case in the "monopsonous" sense: it is not clear that Microsoft ever used its practices to squeeze consumers directly -- indeed, Windows-based machines famously remained cheaper than their Apple Mac competitor, and the "free"-to-consumers status of its operating system was part of its sales strategy. Nor was it clear that Microsoft really had any suppliers to squeeze -- it made its own software, and the pressure seemed to be applied mainly to the hardware providers on whom it depended for its personal computer business; a sort of lateral pressure on business partners, as well as a decisive and too-successful pressure on competitors. The pressure on consumers to use only Windows software was achieved only at the far end, and it was not clear that Microsoft was prepared to monetize this at the time. (Now, of course, monetizing dominant free software it is the name of the game.)
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innocentmurmurs · 1 year
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I love when fascist men rail against sex workers (not the same as being against prostitution - they think sex work is a moral failing on the part of the women and use all sort of derogatory insults against them, some even think johns are lonely victims being exploited for their money) and then turn around and promote women marrying + being financially dependent on men. Onlyfans but your only customer is your husband who holds you hostage by threatening to withdraw food, shelter and income if you don't provide sex. Soooo the options are...sex work or...sex work?
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ciceroballtorture · 1 year
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its so sad that im actively interested in antitrust law bc the us is obviously at the forefront of the ~newest controversies. i do think the cases ive personally studied have been very interesting. even if u are not into gaming, the reasoning for emulators being a tool against monopolies are very fascinating to me
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coffeeteaitsallfine · 2 years
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Anyone else following the anti trust lawsuit against penguin random house for trying to merge with another one of the big five houses? This would be all around bad for the industry especially authors. From what I understand, the more competition the bigger the advances would be (and not just for the Steven Kings of the industry). But Penguin is like no but our imprints would still be bidding against each other! Take our word for it we prommy….
Also word of the day is monopsony. Not monopoly, monopsony.
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Rural towns and poor urban neighborhoods are being devoured by dollar stores
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Across America, rural communities and big cities alike are passing ordinances limiting the expansion of dollar stores, which use a mix of illegal predatory tactics, labor abuse, and monopoly consolidation to destroy the few community grocery stores that survived the Walmart plague and turn poor places into food deserts.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes
"The Dollar Store Invasion," is a new Institute For Local Self Reliance (ILSR) report by Stacy Mitchell, Kennedy Smith and Susan Holmberg. It paints a detailed, infuriating portrait of the dollar store playback, and sets out a roadmap of tactics that work and have been proven in dozens of places, rural and urban:
https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ILSR-Report-The-Dollar-Store-Invasion-2023.pdf
The impact of dollar stores is plainly stated in the introduction: "dollar stores drive grocery stores and other retailers out of business, leave more people without access to fresh food, extract wealth from local economies, sow crime and violence, and further erode the prospects of the communities they target."
This new report builds on ILSR's longstanding and excellent case-studies, augmenting them with the work of academic geographers who are just starting to literally map out the dollar store playbook, identifying the way that a dollar stores will target, say, the last grocery store in a Black neighborhood and literally surround it, like hyenas cornering weakened prey. This tactic is repeated whenever a new grocer opens in the neighborhood: dollar stores "carpet bomb" the surrounding blocks, ensuring that the new store closes as quickly as it opens.
One important observation is the relationship between these precarious neighborhood grocers and Walmart and its other big-box competitors. Deregulation allowed Walmart to ring cities with giant stores that relied on "predatory buying" (wholesale terms that allowed Walmart to sell goods more cheaply than its competitors bought them, and also rendered its suppliers brittle and sickly, and forced down the wages of those suppliers' workers). This was the high cost of low prices: neighborhoods lost their local grocers, and community dollars ceased to circulate in the community, flowing to Walmart and its billionaire owners, who spent it on union busting and political campaigns for far-right causes, including the defunding of public schools.
This is the landscape where the dollar stores took root: a nation already sickened by an apex predator, which left a productive niche for jackals to pick off the weakened survivors. Wall Street loved the look of this: the Private equity giant KKR took over Dollar General in 2007 and went on a acquisition and expansion bonanza. Even after KKR formally divested itself of Dollar General, the company's hit-man Michael M Calbert stayed on the board, rising to chairman.
The dollar store market is a duopoly. Dollar General's rival is Dollar Tree, another gelatinous cube of a company that grew by absorbing many of its competitors, using Wall Street's money. These acquisitions are now notorious for the weaknesses they exposed in antitrust practice. For example, when Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar, growing to 14,000 stores, the FTC waved the merger through on condition that the new business sell off 330 of them. These ineffectual and pointless merger conditions are emblematic of the inadequacy of antitrust as it was practiced from the Reagan administration until the sea-change under Biden, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar is the poster child for more muscular enforcement.
The duopoly has only grown since then. Today, Dollar General and Dollar Tree have more than 34,000 US outlets - more than Starbucks, #Walmart, McDonalds and Target - combined.
Destroying a community's grocery store rips out its heart. Neighborhoods without decent access to groceries impose a tax on their already-struggling residents, forcing them to spend hours traveling to more affluent places, or living off the highly processed, deceptively priced (more on this later) goods for sale on the dollar store shelves.
Take Cleveland, once served by a small family chain called Dave's Market that had served its communities since the 1920s. Dave's store in the Collinwood neighborhood was targeted by Family Dollar and Dollar General, which opened seven stores within two miles of the Dave's outlet. The dollar stores targeted the only profitable part of Dave's business - the packaged goods (fresh produce is a money-loser, subsidized by packaged good).
The dollar stores used a mix of predatory buying and "cheater sizes" (packaged goods that are 10-20% smaller than those sold in regular outlets, which are not available to other retailers) to sell goods at prices that Dave's couldn't match, driving Dave's out of business.
Typical dollar stores stock no fresh produce or meat. If your only grocer is a dollar store, your only groceries are highly processed, packaged foods, often sold in deceptive single-serving sizes that actually cost more per ounce than the products that the defunct neighborhood grocer once sold.
Dollar stores don't just target existing food deserts - they create them. Dollar stores preferentially target Black and brown neighborhoods with just a single grocer and then they use predatory pricing (subsidizing the cost of goods and selling them at a loss) and predatory buying to force that grocery store under and tip the neighborhood into food desert status.
Dollar stores don't just target Black and brown urban centers; they also go after rural communities. The commonality here is that both places are likely to be served by independent grocers, not chains, and these indies can't afford a pricing war with the Wall Street-backed dollar store duopoly.
As mentioned, the "predatory buying" of dollar stores is illegal - it was outlawed in 1936 under the Robinson-Patman Act, which required wholesalers to offer goods to all merchants on the same terms. 40 years ago, we stopped enforcing those laws, leading the rise and rise of big box stores and the destruction of the American Main Street.
The lawmakers who passed Robinson-Patman knew what they were doing. They were aware of what contemporary economists call "the waterbed effect," where wholesalers cover the losses from their massive discounts to major retailers by hiking prices on smaller stores, making them even less competitive and driving more market consolidation.
When dollar stores invade your town or neighborhood, they don't just destroy the food choices, they also come for neighborhood jobs. Where a community grocer typically employs 12 or more people, Dollar General employs about 8 per store. Those workers are paid less, too: 92% of Dollar General's workers earn less than $15/h, making Dollar General the worst employer of the 66 large service-sector firms.
Dollar stores also lean heavily into the tactic of turning nearly every role at its store into a "management" job, because managers aren't entitled to overtime pay. That's how you can be the "manger" of a dollar store and take home $40,000 a year while working more than 40 hours every single week.
Understaffing stores turns them into crime magnets. Shootings at dollar stores are routine. Between 2014-21, 485 people were shot at dollar stores - 156 of them died. Understaffed warehouses are vermin magnets. In the Eastern District of Arkansas, Family Dollar was subpoenaed after a rat infestation at its distribution centers that contaminated the food, medicines and cosmetics at 400 stores.
The ILSR doesn't just document the collapse of American communities - it fights back, so this report ends with a lengthy section on proven tactics and future directions for repelling the dollar store invasion. Since 2019, 75 communities have blocked proposals for new dollar stores - more than 50 of those cases happened in 2021/22.
54 towns, from Birmingham, AB to Fort Worth, TX to  Kansas City, KS, have passed laws to "sharply restrict new dollar stores, typically by barring them from opening within one to two miles of an existing dollar store."
To build on this momentum, the authors call for a "reinvigoration of antitrust laws," especially the Robinson-Patman Act. Banning predatory buying would go far to creating a level playing field for independent grocers hoping to fight off a dollar store infestation.
Further, we need the FTC and Department of Justice Antitrust Divition to block mergers between dollar-store chains and unwind the anticompetitve mergers that were negligently waved through under previous administrations (thankfully, top enforcers like Jonathan Kantor and Lina Khan are on top of this!).
We need to free up capital for community banks that will back community grocers. That means rolling back the bank deregulation of the 1980s/90s that allowed for bank consolidation and preferential treatment for large corporations, while reducing lending to small businesses and destroying regional banks. Congress should cap the market share any bank can hold, break up the biggest banks, and require banks to preference loans for community businesses. We also need to end private equity and Wall Street's rollup bonanza.
All of that sounds like a tall order - and it is! But the good news is that it's not just groceries at stake here. Every kind of community business, from pet groomers to hairdressers to funeral homes, falls into the antitrust "Twilight Zone," of acquisitions under $101m. With 60% of Boomer-owned businesses expected to sell in the coming decade, 2.9m businesses employing 32m American workers are slated to be gobbled up by private equity:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
Whether you're burying a loved one, getting dialysis, getting your cat fixed or having your dog's nails trimmed, you are already likely to be patronizing a business that has been captured by private equity, where the service is worse, the prices are higher and the workers earn less for harder jobs. Everyone has a stake in financial regulation. We are all in this fight, except for the eminently guillotineable PE barons, and you know, fuck those guys
At the state level, the authors propose new muscular enforcement regimes and new laws to protect small businesses from unfair competition. They also call on states to increase the power of local governments to reject new dollar store applications, amending land use guidelines to require "cultivating net economic growth, ensuring that everyone has access to healthy food, and protecting environmental resources.
If all of this has you as fired up as it got me this morning, check out ILSR's "How to Stop Dollar Stores in Your Community" resources:
http://ilsr.org/dollar-stores
I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.
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Image: Mike McBey (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/158652122@N02/38893547595/
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
[Image ID: A ghost town; it is towered over by a haunted castle with a Dollar General sign on it, with the shadow of Count Orlock cast over its tower. One of its turrets is being struck by lightning.]
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naturalrights-retard · 2 months
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a basic dictum of microeconomics is that competition drives the price of a good or service down to the marginal cost of the marginal producer. many seem to disbelieve this because they see profit from many producers, but this is generally always because they have some form of pricing power or cost advantage that the marginal producer does not. under assumptions of “perfect competition” as laid out in econ 101, such advantages do not exist. but, obviously, these “perfect” conditions rarely exist in full form. in essence there are 5 requirements:
many sellers (no monopoly/oligopoly)
many buyers (no monopsony)
homogeneous goods
perfect information (about production capability and market participants)
free and costless entry and exit to markets
any market that even modestly approaches this will see a remorseless pushing of profits down to the marginal cost required to produce the good or service. prices will plummet and quality and variety will skyrocket as competition breeds competence in accordance with the implacable demands of consumer sovereignty.
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odinsblog · 15 hours
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I’m sorry, but the fact that the U.S. government is treating Android users like they’re being discriminated against bECAUSE OF A GREEN FUCKING BUBBLE is objectively one of thee stupidest things and most colossal wastes of government regulatory authority I’ve seen in a good fucking minute
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We can and should have meaningful discussions about Apple and whether or not it’s a monopoly (it’s not), or a monopsony (possibly), but the fact that the whole “green bubble discrimination” framing even made it into the lawsuit is somewhere between funny and bizarre
I am convinced that that specific part of the lawsuit is something that Android loving tech bros (Linus Sebastian, Nilay Patel, Elon Musk, etc. etc. etc.) kinda talked up into being a serious thing ™
Listen, my father’s parents had 7 boys and 7 girls, and my mother’s parents also had 7 boys and 7 girls (yes they got married and had children; no, they didn’t all marry each other) — so my point is, I have a shit ton of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. We could probably start our own political party. We’re spread out all around the country, and we talk + text + FaceTime with each other ALL the fucking time. Literally never has anyone complained about being a fucking green bubble, and yes, many of my extended family are Android users and so are some of my siblings. It’s a non-fucking issue, a manufactured controversy
If we ever have problems with interoperability (rare) then someone just switches phones (because many people have both Apple and android devices), or we text, or we just talk (not every convo requires FaceTime or pictures), or everyone just switches over to Zoom. JFC, before Zoom, we all connected on something called ooVoo and stayed on that for hours the night that Obama was elected for the first time. This is not difficult people
Use whatever phone you prefer, honestly Idgaf
But I’m actually getting kinda mad the more I think about that foolishness being one of the things that the government is wasting time arguing about. There are multiple genocides happening around the world, American owned businesses are data mining and vacuuming up every scrap of our personal data, Black people + women + refugees + trans people are being REALLY being discriminated against, and the Apple lawsuit has the audacity to use language that implies harmful social discrimination is happening? Because “poor” old android???
What’s next, will android users become a legally protected class?
Please be serious for 2 seconds
It’s a fucking insult to people who are REALLY experiencing true discrimination based on personal characteristics that we cannot change
This reeks of white people bullshit
Please GTFOHWTBS
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maklodes · 19 hours
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One result I remember seeing is that in small towns with one big employer, the big employer is generally able to get away with paying workers less, because it's effectively a labor monopsony.
I wonder whether car-centric urban infrastructure has a similar effect on the lower (less likely to have a car) tiers of the labor market. If people without cars are effectively stuck nearby for day-to-day stuff, then employers might be able to get away with paying them less given absence of competition. Being in an local commute zone with 5,000 people and one significant employer is different than being in a local commute zone with 500,000 people and 100 significant employers.
That's speculative, though. I don't know whether there's actual evidence of car-oriented urban planning/infrastructure producing similar labor market monopsony effects to company towns.
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lunarmansions · 8 months
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There's so much fearmongering about AI and robots and the inevitable technological future closing off all human work but I think it is far more likely only a small subset of computerized work is going to remain in twenty to forty years. Part of this is my experience on the ~ i n s i d e ~ as a former minor tech executive, part of it is the experience of my extended family in Japan after their crash in the 90s. Do people realize that so much of the AI/robot/digitization stuff is subsidized market front running? Basically a group of wealthy companies get together, decide a market they want to corner, define the budget and timeline, and get to work annhilating the existing market so they can swoop in with their replacement (ideally as a monopsony provider a la google or amazon). If an 'industry' is big enough, like very fast chips, governments will even get involved to block competitor countries' products to secure their national champions.
The biggest problem with all of this (it has been going on longer than I've been alive, like forty five years now) is that it has chewed up so much personal livelihood everywhere that enacted these policies that only like 15% or less of the people in those countries can buy the products produced. Because most people don't have the disposable cash any longer to buy the expensive computerized crap except under duress, like when they have to get a new car or new computer. I enjoy playing and making video games too, but I know why so many are in the industry: it is one of the few remaining options to be an independent producer because it requires minimal tools and can be bootstrapped solo by not paying for your own labor.
So I think what is actually going to happen is a big shift back to hyper-local production, of everything, and there will be an emphasis on employing as many people as possible (so taxes can be collected) instead of 'efficiency' and 'productivity'. It will take a lot longer than the dummies in charge think because decades of neoliberal looting will take decades to repair. And this is going to collide with wild weather changes and power outages (another reason why the data centers and robot future aren't going to be widespread). But it will be cool because there will be a return of actual diversity of stuff that is created instead of the same four companies churning out copies of the same stuff. I like to imagine things like regionally-specific mp3 player styles in the same way we describe old pottery. There will be an assumption that the AI and mass scale tools are just there for plagiarism and theft so you'll have to actually go in person to do coolhunting, and it will be impossible to scale up or influence off it because all the platform middlemen will be gone.
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kingfakey · 9 months
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(guy that wanted to write for television when he was a little girl) do you know what a monopsony is?
#:3
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lilithsaintcrow · 1 year
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“Because HarperCollins is the only union shop among the Big Five, the stakes here are high. It is pushed by necessity to set the labor standards for the rest of the industry: when it raises its wages, Penguin Random House raises its wages too. The hope among supporters both in and out of the union was that the new agreement would spark similar structural changes at the other Big Five houses, and maybe even inspire other houses to unionize.”
There’s going to be a backlash, of course—the rest of the Big Five will do what they can to punish the union shop. I don’t see any real change occurring until Amazon is dealt with and there’s a resurgence of mid-size and large publishers; the former probably won’t happen for nearly a decade and the latter will require the industry tanking first.
By “Amazon being dealt with” I mean the monopsony aspects; I don’t think the government subsidizing of Amazon and other megabillion corporations will be halted until there’s another Great Depression and concomitant social unrest.
We’re in the fucking Gilded Age, we know how that played out, and those in power are willfully ignoring any lessons learned in favor of keeping their grasp on said power.
In other words, I’m not an optimist, even though the end to the HC strike is very good news. I wish it was enough.
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