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#competition
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Meatspace twiddling
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me next weekend (Mar 30/31) in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON, then in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12), and beyond!
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"Enshittification" isn't just a way of describing the symptoms of platform decay: it's also a theory of the mechanism of decay – the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.
I call that mechanism "twiddling": this is the ability of digital services to alter their business-logic – the prices they charge, the payouts they offer, the particulars of the deal – from instant to instant, for each user, continuously:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Contrary to Big Tech's own boasting about its operations, the tricks that tech firms play to siphon value away from business customers and end-users aren't very sophisticated. They're crude gimmicks, like offering a higher per-hour wage to Uber drivers whom the algorithm judges to be picky about which rides they'll clock in for, and then lowering the wage by small increments as a way of lulling the driver into gradually accepting a permanent lower rate:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
This is a simple trick. The difference is that tech platforms like Uber can play it over and over, and very quickly. There's plenty of wage-stealing scumbag bosses who'd have loved to have shaved pennies off their workers' paychecks, then added a few cents back in if a worker cried foul, then started shaving the pennies again. The thing that stopped those bosses was the bottleneck of payroll clerks, who couldn't make the changes fast enough.
Uber plays crude tricks – like claiming that a driver isn't an employee because the control is mediated through an app – and then piles more crude tricks on top – this algorithmic wage discrimination gambit.
Have you ever watched a shell-game performed very slowly?
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-do-penn-tellers-famous-cups-and-balls-trick-in-12-steps
It's a series of very simple gimmicks, performed very quickly and smoothly. Computers are very quick and very smooth. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye: do crude tricks with superhuman speed and they'll seem sophisticated.
The one bright spot in the Great Enshittening that we're living through is that many firms are not sufficiently digitized to to these crude tricks very quickly. Take grocery stores: they can get up to a lot of the same tricks as Amazon – for example, they can charge suppliers for placement on the most prominent, easiest-to-reach shelves, reorganizing your shopping based on which companies pay the biggest bribes, rather than offering the best products and prices.
But Amazon takes this to a whole different level – beyond simply organizing their product pages based on payola, they do this for search. You ask Amazon, "What's your cheapest batteries?" and it lies to you. If you click the first link in a search-results page, you'll pay 29% more than you would if you got the best product – a product that is, on average, 17 places down on the results page. Amazon makes $38b/year taking bribes to lie to you:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens
Amazon can do more than that. Thanks to its digital nature, it can continuously reprice its offerings – indeed, it can simply make up each price displayed on every product at the instant you look at it – based on its surveillance data about you, estimating your willingness to pay. For sellers, Amazon can continuously re-weight the likelihood that a given product will be shown to a customer based on the seller's willingness to discount their products, even to the point where they go out of business:
https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10
Twiddling, in other words, lets digital services honeycomb their servers with sneaky wormholes that let them siphon value away from one kind of platform user and give it to another (as when Apple silently began spying on Iphone owners to create profiles for advertisers), or to themselves.
But hard-goods businesses struggle to do this kind of twiddling. Not for lack of desire – but for lack of capacity. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon Fresh – an online grocery store – can change prices and layout millions of times per day, at effectively zero cost. Jeff Bezos, owner of Whole Foods – a brick-and-mortar grocer – needs a army of teenagers on rollerskates with pricing guns to achieve a fraction of this agility.
So hard-goods businesses are somewhat enshittification-resistant. It's not that their owners are more interested in the welfare of their customers, workers and suppliers – they merely lack the capacity to continuously rejigger the way their business runs.
Well, about that.
Grocers have been experimenting with "electronic shelf labels" in order to do "dynamic pricing" – that means that prices change quickly, in response to circumstances:
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-grocery-supermarkets
This doesn't have to be bad! As @planetmoney points out, it's a little weird that grocers don't discount milk whose sell-by date is drawing near. That milk is worth less to shoppers, because they have to use it more quickly lest it expire. Instead of marking down the price of perishable goods – day-old lettuce, yesterday's bread, etc – grocers put them on the shelves next to fresher, more valuable products, leading to billions of dollars' worth of food-waste and and unimaginable quantities of methane-producing, planet-cooking landfill.
In Norway, ESLs are pretty well established and – at least according to Planet Money's reporting – they are used exclusively to offer discounts in order to reduce waste. They make everyone better off.
But towards the end of the story, they note that Norway's grocery sector – which alters prices up to 2,000 times per day – has been accused of using ESLs to rig prices, hiking them and blaming them on pandemic supply-chain problems and loose monetary policy. Greedflation, in other words.
Greedflation is rampant in the grocery sector, all around the world. Remember when the price of eggs doubled and they blamed in on bird-flu, even as the CEO of the one company that owns every egg brand you've ever heard of boasted about how he could hike prices and suckers would just pay it?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on
In Canada, grocers rigged the price of bread, the most Les-Mis-ass form of corporate crime you can imagine (do you want guillotines, Galen Weston? Because this is how you get guillotines):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
EU grocers – another highly concentrated industry – also collude to rig prices:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/
Which is all to say that while these companies don't have to use the twiddling capabilities that come with ESLs to enshittify their stores, we'd be pretty fucking naive to assume that they won't.
And here's the bad news: US grocers like Whole Foods (owned by Amazon, the company that wrote the enshittification playbook) are already experimenting with ESLs. So is Alberstons/Safeway, the massive, inbred conglomerate that has already demonstrated its passion for using twiddling to fuck over their workers:
https://knock-la.com/vons-fires-delivery-drivers-prop-22-e899ee24ffd0/
Economists love "price discrimination" – where prices change based on circumstance, trying to match the perfect price with the perfect customer. On paper, that sounds plausible: if I need a quart of milk for a recipe I'm making tonight and I get a 50% discount on some about-to-expire 2%, then everyone's better off. I get a discount and the grocer gets some money for milk they'd have to throw away at the end of the day.
But these elegant, self-licking ice-cream cones only emerge if the corporation offering the deal is constrained. Perhaps they're constrained by competition – the fear that you'll go elsewhere. Or perhaps they're constrained by regulation – the fear that they'll be punished if they use twiddling-tech to cheat you.
The grocery sector, dominated by a cartel of massive companies that routinely collude to rip us off, is not constrained by competition. And for years, regulators let them get away with ripping us off (though finally that might be changing):
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/politics/grocery-prices-pandemic-ftc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ek0.t2Pr.g4n2usbxEcoa
For neoclassical economists, the answer to all this is "caveat emptor" – let the buyer beware. If you want to make sure that ESLs are only used to offer you discounts and not to gouge prices, all you need to do is note the price of everything you buy, every time you buy it, and triple-check it every time you go back to the grocery store. Just be eternally vigilant!
Thing is, the one thing computers are much better at than humans is vigilance. With ESLs and other twiddling mechanisms, you're a fish on a hook, and the seller is tireless in giving you a little more slack, then a little less, until you finally drop your guard.
Economists desperately want these elegant models to work, but "efficient market hypothesis" is a brain-worm that always turns into apologetics for fraud. Dynamic markets sound like a good idea, but they are catnip for cheaters. "Just be eternally vigilant" is miserable advice, and no way to live your life:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
In his brilliant novel Spook Country, @GreatDismal describes augmented reality as "cyberspace everting" – that is, turning inside-out:
https://memex.craphound.com/2007/07/31/william-gibsons-spook-country/
The extrusion of twiddling technology from digital platforms into the physical world isn't cyberspace everting so much as it is cyberspace prolapsing.
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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/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags
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one-time-i-dreamt · 2 months
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There’s a thing called “competitive legal poetry”, which is just like any other legal battle except the lawyers are required to speak in rhyming couplets.
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keepingitneutral · 30 days
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House in the woods
Courtesy: Lana Al Khabbaz
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nasa · 6 months
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HBCU Students Make Moves with NASA Tech
In September 2023, students at HBCUs participated in a hackathon at the National HBCU Week Conference, where they used NASA’s technologies to create solutions to problems that affect Black communities. The winning team, Team Airtek, proposed a nano-sensor array for medical diagnoses that would give students on HBCU campuses a non-invasive, non-intensive way to test themselves for precursors for diseases and illnesses like diabetes and COVID.
The hackathon they participated in is a modified version of the full NASA Minority University Research and Education Project Innovation and Tech Transfer Idea Competition (MITTIC) that takes place each fall and spring semester at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
No matter what you’re studying, you can join the MITTIC competition and come up with new and innovative tech to help your community and the world.
MITTIC could be the beginning of your career pathway: Teams can go on exclusive NASA tours and network with industry experts. Show off your entrepreneurial skills and your team could earn money—and bragging rights.
Don’t wait too long to apply or to share with someone who should apply! The deadline for proposals is Oct. 16, 2023. Apply here: https://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov/nasamittic.
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ri-afan · 8 months
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I love this
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rhey-007 · 5 months
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The mystery of Love
Fernando Alonso family fluff
|| P3 of Fernando x goth mommy!reader
• | socialmedia au
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Summary: After only 2 appearances on the paddock, little Benny already has all the drivers wrapped around his finger. But which one along with his team will steal the child's heart?
Warnings/Tags: fluff, family fluff, female reader
A/N: WHY IS IT SO HARD TO FIND SUITABLE PICS WITH TODDLER BOYS JXHHZNDNNFNFXEH I had to use Jack Wolff for some🧍‍♀️Anywaaaay this is a longer one just so y'know :)) Enjoy!
(If you'd like to be added to the tag list lemme know!)
Masterlist
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"Competition is the best form of motivation"
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INSTAGRAM
Silverstone Circuit
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liked by maxverstappen1, fernandoalo_oficial and 257,368 others
tagged: y/n._.l/n
•danielricciardo: a little road trip before training! 💪😎
•y/n._.l/n: •fernandoalo_oficial •kl.au_s why is my kid having playdates with literally EVERYONE on the paddock? 🧍‍♀️
→ •kl.au_s: you know well we can't say no to him 👉👈🤭
→ •fernandoalo_oficial: exactly.
→ •y/n._.l/n: I left you for 2 days!
→ •user1: •user2 and tell me they're not together 🧍‍♀️
→ •user2: they already act like a family lol
→ •user3: not Benny adopting the whole grid 😭
•yukitsunoda0511: don't forget about your chauffeur! >:(
→ •user4: of course Yuki had to drive them around 😂
INSTAGRAM
Silverstone Circuit
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liked by fernandoalo_oficial, y/n._.l/n and 430,578 others
tagged: silverstonecircuit, y/n._.l/n
•lewishamilton: great race weekend spent in even better company! Thank you Britian!
•fernandoalo_oficial: YOU DID NOT
→ •lewishamilton: yes. I. did. 🤭😎
•user5: not lewis stealing Fernando's kid
→ •user6: not only him, check out Daniel's ig
→ •user7: and Lando's!
→ •user8: basically everyone's lol
•susie_wolff: can't wait to see little bunny again! ❤
→ •user9: the boy got himself a 2nd mother
→ •user10: and whole lotta uncles!
•user11: they even got him a small suit like Jack's I can't 😭✋
→ •user12: they can match!!! 💞
→ •user13: they would slay SO hard 😍
INSTAGRAM
Silverstone Circuit
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liked by the_crochet_girl, y/n._.l/n and 50,238 others
tagged: y/n._.l/n
•hulkhulkenberg: ping-pong session before the training with my boy Chiquito and a quick store break to buy mommy some flowers :)
•user14: isn't it weird that every driver posts pictures with Fernando's kid recently?
→ •user15: yeah and all of them only give attention to Benny, what about Klaus????
•y/n._.l/n: thanks for the flowers! Benny already can't wait for another play date with Noemi and Laura! ❤
→ •kevinmagnussen: they can't wait too! ❤
→ •user16: WHY HAVEN'T WE SEEN THE KIDS PLAYING TOGETHER SDHYCYUESNXIEU
→ •user17: we got ROBBED >:(
INSTAGRAM
Silverstone Circuit
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liked by pierregasly, fernandoalo_oficial and 728, 956 others
tagged: silverstonecircuit, y/n._.l/n
•charles_leclerc: thanks for the best boy out there, little bunny, for helping the best team! 💪💞
•user18: you know you ain't the best
•maxverstappen1: who said you were the best? 🤨
→ •carlossainz55: Benny ofc 💅
→ •fernandoalo_oficial: no way he said that
→ •pierregasly: I belive he said that about all the teams 😆
•user19: are the drivers fighting over which team is the best in a random kid's eyes???
→ •user20: that's so cute and stupid xD 💞
INSTAGRAM
Silverstone Circuit
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liked by y/n._.l/n, valtteribottas and 269, 034 others
tagged: silverstonecircuit, y/n._.l/n, valtteribottas
•zhouguanyu24: thank you Benny and Klaus for supporting us in Britain! Love you! ❤
•user2137: why is everyone posting about Chiquito?
→ •user22: it's clearly a competition for the best team
•user23: Zhou looks so cute playing with Benny I can't TwT 💞
→ •user24: all of them look sooo cute with Chiquito!
•kl.au_s: finally someone mentioned me, thank you
→ •fernandoalo_oficial: and you said you don't care about the sport nor the people 🤨
→ •kl.au_s: shhh 🤫
- see responses (15)
•user25: love how Fernando and the other kid argue in the comments xD
→ •user26: they literally radiate father and son energy!!!
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Silverstone Circuit
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liked by oscarpiastri, carlossainz55 and 825, 093 others
tagged: silverstonecircuit, oscarpiastri, y/n._.l/n
•landonorris: a small ride around the track in new fav tshirt from the best uncles on the grid 🏎💨😎👏
•danielricciardo: *2nd and 3rd best
→ •lewishamilton: *4th and 5th best
- see responses (10)
→ •y/n._.l/n: shut up you're all best uncles 🙄
→ •user27: I think mommy has enough already 😂
→ •user28: I love how y/n is finally active in the f1 world! hope to see them more often on the races!
•user29: the tshirt I can't 😭💞
→ •user30: he looks so cute in it 7fyxitxufxjccjv
INSTAGRAM
Silverstone Circuit
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liked by redbullracing, christianhorner and 618, 110 others
tagged: silverstonecircuit, y/n._.l/n, redbullracing
•maxverstappen1: •redbullracing I've got you a future driver 💪🦬
•charles_leclerc: you wish -_-
→ •georgerussell63: you both wish, we all know Chiquito will choose mercedes 😏👉👉
•user31: not another racing suit 😭✋💞
→ •user32: I'm gonna melt... 💞
•user33: other teams should have tried better tbh :/
→ •user34: mercedes and redbull are defo in top 2
→ •user35: aston is definitely number 1 it's obvious 💁‍♀️
INSTAGRAM
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liked by fernandoalo_oficial, y/n._.l/n and 182,137 others
tagged: fernandoalo_oficial, y/n._.l/n, kl.au_s
•logansargeant: 🪱🐟🌊
•user36: love how all the drivers show Chiquito around the teams garages and do stuff related to formula while Logan randomly took all 4 of them fishing 😂
→ •user37: it must have been the time of little bunny's life! 💞
•user38: why is it so cute TwT
•fernandoalo_oficial: thanks for a great time!
•user39: why do I feel like he has NO idea about the competition?
→ •logansargeant: what competition? 👁👄👁
→ •user40: exactly! 😂
INSTAGRAM
Silverstone Circuit
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liked by kl.au_s, y/n._.l/n and 389, 136 others
tagged: fernandoalo_oficial, kl.au_s, y/n._.l/n
•pierregasly: dinner time with the new grid fam! 🥘🥗🍕
•fernandoalo_oficial: thanks for inviting us for a FREE dinner! 😍
•user41: the guys are spoiling Benny SOO MUCH
→ •user42: he got 2 free meals (1 that he had to fish himself) 2 f1 suits, a little kart, some plushies and probably waaay more things that we have no idea about
→ •user43: all in a spawn of 3 DAYS!
→ •user44: I wish I was Benny 😭
→ •user45: yes. especially that he has such cool hot parents 😍
•charles_leclerc: why was I not invited 🧍‍♀️
→ •y/n._.l/n: want me to adopt you?
→ •charles_leclerc: yes please 😩🙏 I want free food
→ •user6: charles wtf XD
→ •danielricciardo: I want to be adopted too ✋🤓
- see replies (17)
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Tag list: @morgan-getty @lichterfee @ashy-kit
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zelphin124 · 7 months
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SeasonTale Creative Challenge
PLEASE REBLOG SO EVERYONE CAN SEE THIS!
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Art and Design by PrinceTal
Greetings, Artists, Voice Actors, and Writers! It is I, Zelphin, and I am hosting an (annual?) competition! Introducing the first year of the SeasonTale Creative Challenge! 
This is a competition to express your creative talents by contributing to SeasonTale for a cash prize! There are three ways to participate: Art, Voice Acting, and Writing! Contribute some time to use one of the three involving SeasonTale to enter the challenge for the prize!
DEADLINE IS NOV 15th, 2023, 12:00 AM (GMT-6)
my birthday hehe~
Winners will be announced on December 1st!
Updates are in #scc info
Scroll down for details!
Rules
It must be a SeasonTale Sans. (I might do other characters from SeasonTale another year)
You MUST tag #SeasonTale Challenge and @zelphin124 in the post so I can see it! Or DM me on Discord!
You CAN do more than one submission (one per Sans for VA, two for writing)
You CAN do the Season Sanses interacting with OCs or popular Sanses, get creative!
DIFFERENT/SIMPLER OUTFITS ARE ALLOWED! I know they are a pain to draw...
You CANNOT steal/copy from other creators!
Please keep all content PG-13
Payments will be made via PayPal (unless negotiated otherwise)
Specific rules within the Google doc!
Prizes
All prizes are in USD currency!
Artists
First place: $55
Second place: $35
Third place: $20
VAs and Writers
First place: $40 
Second place: $30
Third place: $20
Prompts
Summer flirting with literally anyone
Particularly a feisty character
Spring cooking with Swap/Horror
Spring loves cooking Japanese Ramen
Autumn being a gremlin, as usual
Usually being feisty while training or hissing at a cat (he’s scared of cats)
Winter meeting your OC/you in the snowy mountains of SeasonTale
The Four Sanses in a training session
The four Sanses exploring a new AU
Spring comforting someone
Summer flirting with someone
Autumn getting frustrated at someone being annoying and telling them to go away
Winter is an awkward teddy bear trying to organize something
Ft. Iro!Sans for a female character/female voice actors!
Make something up! Be creative! Have fun!
Need more details? Here's the Google Doc:
References
Art and Design PrinceTal
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Oh and Iro!Sans
HAVE FUN! I'm so excited to see what you all come up with!
Been dying to do this for a long time~
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theancientwayoflife · 1 month
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~ "Freydal": Tournament book of Emperor Maximilian I.
Culture: South German
Date: A.D. 1512-1515
Medium: 255 gouaches heightened with gold and silver in leather strap: paper; leather.
• From the source: The "Freydal" describes the tournaments during Maximilian's knightly love journey.
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best-sharks-bracket · 11 months
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alright so this is how this is gonna work
we have 512 species of shark in the world
which is a power of 2 therefore I can make a giant bracket for it :)
im going to try to set up this giant bracket soon and uh then voting will start
may the best shark win
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hey. competitions? getting too specific. "middle sibling competition" "most unhinged knife weilding bisexual with abandonment issues competition" "biggest left tit competition" ridiculous, all of you. pure cowardice. if your characters are so good they should win against all. they should climb the ever increasing mountain of corpses free of constraints. so, i give you:
the most character of all time competition
no limits. no categories. simply characters fighting to the fucking death in one single glorious showdown, the ULTIMATE battle, as they should have been all along. if your characters are truely strong they will prevail. they will fight as long as they need to. or do you doubt them?
SUBMISSION RULES:
must be a character
must be from something
must be willing to fight for as long as it takes
send them
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itscolossal · 9 months
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The 2023 Audubon Photography Awards Zeros In on Threats to Avian Life Amid the Climate Emergency
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An Epic antitrust loss for Google
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A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html
The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app.
This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
Now, in theory, Epic doesn't have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple's iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google's actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of "Project Hug" (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google's own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called "Wirefraud"), Big Tech keeps losing in court:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/
Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it's objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes.
What's more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can't be a hoax, because there's no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech's conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs:
https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators
This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case
On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law.
This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men
It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.
The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android":
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers
Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times's expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies.
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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/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger
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one-time-i-dreamt · 1 month
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Hozier visited my college and held a competition which I won, the prize was that I got to play Wii Sports Resort while he critiqued me.
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escuerzoresucitado · 7 months
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yeesiine · 3 months
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Let’s normalise telling people “You inspired me” instead of copying them and acting like they’re your competition.
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*Submissions are closed, here is where you can find the lists of all characters who made it in*
I now have a ko-fi
I love the idea of polls for characters that wouldn’t win otherwise because they’re too obscure, so I want to know what character people have the most strong opinions about, specifically who can split a room between negative or positive opinions the best.
For example: i haven’t heavily interacted with fandom since steven universe days so I’ll use Rose Quartz as an example. People either think she’s a soft uwu mom victim of the diamonds or an evil irredeemable space despot. I have never met a steven universe fan with a neutral opinion about her.
So that’s how your blorbo can win this poll: by being divisive. They don’t have to be popular or from a popular media, they just need the people who know them to have a strong opinion about them. In this poll, the character with the MOST EVEN balance of votes wins. I’ll post an example poll to show what I mean, but basically you’re encouraged to submit a blorbo if you love them or hate them! Either one helps them in this poll!
Here is where you can find the list of all characters with 2 or more submissions who made it in! Those with one submission who made it in will be added to this list in phases so I can check them.
Form has been removed from under the cut due to being closed but the rules remain up for reference:
- fictional characters only, no real people or characters based on real people, such as a minecraft youtuber’s self-named oc, or fictionalized versions of historical figures (ie no hamilton characters, but clone high or fate is fine)
- as stated above, only submit each character once, although you can submit as many DIFFERENT characters as you want. Sending this post to friends who hate your fave or vice versa is also fair game, as long as they only submit their true opinions!
- Although to add to the hopeful anti-bullying safeguard, and to publicly answer a question I was asked privately, you can also submit characters who are ocs from smaller or fan works, but only if you get explicit permission from the creator. I don’t want to make any smaller creators feel uncomfortable about their character being widely hated even if they are also widely loved
- you can love or hate the character for any reason as long as you have strong feelings about them! They’ll have a better chance of making it in and winning if they are a controversial character, but you don’t necessarily have to submit only characters you know are controversial. I’m also allowing particularly good reasoning/propaganda to sway me, although I’m planning to probably include 512 characters so that as many as possible can get in!
Inspired by @who-do-i-know-this-man @obscurewebcomictournament @obscurecharactershowdown @bestfictionaldivorce and others!
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