#27/03/2022

[mft-toyama]

オランダのグラフィックデザイナー、カレル・マルテンス（Karel Martens）が2019年から2020年にかけて制作した41点のモノプリントコレクション『Tokyo Papers』。東京の露天市で見つけられた使用済みのたばこ買受票に印刷された作品。 https://t.co/JCpWGPxfXA https://t.co/picLpwNSty

— North East (@north_east_co) Dec 27, 2022

[rkntg]

[skrubu]

A red winged thing #pauliinaturakkapurhonen #kiasma #museokortti #helsinki #finland https://instagr.am/p/Cld0hdANtUB/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

There’s no such thing as “shareholder supremacy”

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Here's a cheap trick: claim that your opponents' goals are so squishy and qualitative that no one will ever be able to say whether they've been succeeded or failed, and then declare that your goals can be evaluated using crisp, objective criteria.

This is the whole project of "economism," the idea that politics, with its emphasis on "fairness" and other intangibles, should be replaced with a mathematical form of economics, where every policy question can be reduced to an equation…and then "solved":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Before the rise of economism, it was common to speak of its subjects as "political economy" or even "moral philosophy" (Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, considered himself a "moral philosopher"). "Political economy" implicitly recognizes that every policy has squishy, subjective, qualitative dimensions that don't readily boil down to math.

For example, if you're asking about whether people should have the "freedom" to enter into contracts, it might be useful to ask yourself how desperate your "free" subject might be, and whether the entity on the other side of that contract is very powerful. Otherwise you'll get "free contracts" like "I'll sell you my kidneys if you promise to evacuate my kid from the path of this wildfire."

The problem is that power is hard to represent faithfully in quantitative models. This may seem like a good reason to you to be skeptical of modeling, but for economism, it's a reason to pretend that the qualitative doesn't exist. The method is to incinerate those qualitative factors to produce a dubious quantitative residue and do math on that:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Hence the famous Ely Devons quote: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

The neoliberal revolution was a triumph for economism. Neoliberal theorists like Milton Friedman replaced "political economy" with "law and economics," the idea that we should turn every one of our complicated, nuanced, contingent qualitative goals into a crispy defined "objective" criteria. Friedman and his merry band of Chicago School economists replaced traditional antitrust (which sought to curtail the corrupting power of large corporations) with a theory called "consumer welfare" that used mathematics to decide which monopolies were "efficient" and therefore good (spoiler: monopolists who paid Friedman's pals to do this mathematical analysis always turned out to be running "efficient" monopolies):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

One of Friedman's signal achievements was the theory of "shareholder supremacy." In 1970, the New York Times published Friedman's editorial "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits":

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

In it, Friedman argued that corporate managers had exactly one job: to increase profits for shareholders. All other considerations – improving the community, making workers' lives better, donating to worthy causes or sponsoring a little league team – were out of bounds. Managers who wanted to improve the world should fund their causes out of their paychecks, not the corporate treasury.

Friedman cloaked his hymn to sociopathic greed in the mantle of objectivism. For capitalism to work, corporations have to solve the "principal-agent" problem, the notoriously thorny dilemma created when one person (the principal) asks another person (the agent) to act on their behalf, given the fact that the agent might find a way to line their own pockets at the principal's expense (for example, a restaurant server might get a bigger tip by offering to discount diners' meals).

Any company that is owned by stockholders and managed by a CEO and other top brass has a huge principal-agent problem, and yet, the limited liability, joint-stock company had produced untold riches, and was considered the ideal organization for "capital formation" by Friedman et al. In true economismist form, Friedman treated all the qualitative questions about the duty of a company as noise and edited them out of the equation, leaving behind a single, elegant formulation: "a manager is doing their job if they are trying to make as much money as possible for their shareholders."

Friedman's formulation was a hit. The business community ran wild with it. Investors mistook an editorial in the New York Times for an SEC rulemaking and sued corporate managers on the theory that they had a "fiduciary duty" to "maximize shareholder value" – and what's more, the courts bought it. Slowly and piecemeal at first, but bit by bit, the idea that rapacious greed was a legal obligation turned into an edifice of legal precedent. Business schools taught it, movies were made about it, and even critics absorbed the message, insisting that we needed to "repeal the law" that said that corporations had to elevate profit over all other consideration (not realizing that no such law existed).

It's easy to see why shareholder supremacy was so attractive for investors and their C-suite Renfields: it created a kind of moral crumple-zone. Whenever people got angry at you for being a greedy asshole, you could shrug and say, "My hands are tied: the law requires me to run the business this way – if you don't believe me, just ask my critics, who insist that we must get rid of this law!"

In a long feature for The American Prospect, Adam M Lowenstein tells the story of how shareholder supremacy eventually came into such wide disrepute that the business lobby felt that it had to do something about it:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-09-17-ponzi-scheme-of-promises/

It starts in 2018, when Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett decried the short-term, quarterly thinking in corporate management as bad for business's long-term health. When Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein wrote a column agreeing with them and arguing that even moreso, businesses should think about equities other than shareholder returns, Jamie Dimon lost his shit and called Pearlstein to call it "the stupidest fucking column I’ve ever read":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/07/will-ending-quarterly-earnings-guidance-free-ceos-to-think-long-term/

But the dam had broken. In the months and years that followed, the Business Roundtable would adopt a series of statements that repudiated shareholder supremacy, though of course they didn't admit it. Rather, they insisted that they were clarifying that they'd always thought that sometimes not being a greedy asshole could be good for business, too. Though these statements were nonbinding, and though the CEOs who signed them did so in their personal capacity and not on behalf of their companies, capitalism's most rabid stans treated this as an existential crisis.

Lowenstein identifies this as the forerunner to today's panic over "woke corporations" and "DEI," and – just as with "woke capitalism" – the whole thing amounted to a a PR exercise. Lowenstein links to several studies that found that the CEOs who signed onto statements endorsing "stakeholder capitalism" were "more likely to lay off employees during COVID-19, were less inclined to contribute to pandemic relief efforts, had 'higher rates of environmental and labor-related compliance violations,”' emitted more carbon into the atmosphere, and spent more money on dividends and buybacks."

One researcher concluded that "signing this statement had zero positive effect":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/companies-stand-solidarity-are-licensing-themselves-discriminate/614947

So shareholder supremacy isn't a legal obligation, and statements repudiating shareholder supremacy don't make companies act any better.

But there's an even more fundamental flaw in the argument for the shareholder supremacy rule: it's impossible to know if the rule has been broken.

The shareholder supremacy rule is an unfalsifiable proposition. A CEO can cut wages and lay off workers and claim that it's good for profits because the retained earnings can be paid as a dividend. A CEO can raise wages and hire more people and claim it's good for profits because it will stop important employees from defecting and attract the talent needed to win market share and spin up new products.

A CEO can spend less on marketing and claim it's a cost-savings. A CEO can spend more on marketing and claim it's an investment. A CEO can eliminate products and call it a savings. A CEO can add products and claim they're expansions into new segments. A CEO can settle a lawsuit and claim they're saving money on court fees. A CEO can fight a lawsuit through to the final appeal and claim that they're doing it to scare vexatious litigants away by demonstrating their mettle.

CEOs can use cheaper, inferior materials and claim it's a savings. They can use premium materials and claim it's a competitive advantage that will produce new profits. Everything a company does can be colorably claimed as an attempt to save or make money, from sponsoring the local little league softball team to treating effluent to handing ownership of corporate landholdings to perpetual trusts that designate them as wildlife sanctuaries.

Bribes, campaign contributions, onshoring, offshoring, criminal conspiracies and conference sponsorships – there's a business case for all of these being in line with shareholder supremacy.

Take Boeing: when the company smashed its unions and relocated key production to scab plants in red states, when it forced out whistleblowers and senior engineers who cared about quality, when it outsourced design and production to shops around the world, it realized a savings. Today, between strikes, fines, lawsuits, and a mountain of self-inflicted reputational harm, the company is on the brink of ruin. Was Boeing good to its shareholders? Well, sure – the shareholders who cashed out before all the shit hit the fan made out well. Shareholders with a buy-and-hold posture (like the index funds that can't sell their Boeing holdings so long as the company is in the S&P500) got screwed.

Right wing economists criticize the left for caring too much about "how big a slice of the pie they're getting" rather than focusing on "growing the pie." But that's exactly what Boeing management did – while claiming to be slaves to Friedman's shareholder supremacy. They focused on getting a bigger slice of the pie, screwing their workers, suppliers and customers in the process, and, in so doing, they made the pie so much smaller that it's in danger of disappearing altogether.

Here's the principal-agent problem in action: Boeing management earned bonuses by engaging in corporate autophagia, devouring the company from within. Now, long-term shareholders are paying the price. Far from solving the principal-agent problem with a clean, bright-line rule about how managers should behave, shareholder supremacy is a charter for doing whatever the fuck a CEO feels like doing. It's the squishiest rule imaginable: if someone calls you cruel, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. If someone calls you feckless, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. It's an excuse for every season.

The idea that you can reduce complex political questions – like whether workers should get a raise or whether shareholders should get a dividend – to a mathematical rule is a cheap sleight of hand. The trick is an obvious one: the stuff I want to do is empirically justified, while the things you want are based in impossible-to-pin-down appeals to emotion and its handmaiden, ethics. Facts don't care about your feelings, man.

But it's feelings all the way down. Milton Friedman's idol-worshiping cult of shareholder supremacy was never about empiricism and objectivity. It's merely a gimmick to make greed seem scientifically optimal.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

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/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics/a>

[toskarinarchive]

Toskarin Database

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[crevicedwelling]

are there any centipedes with long legs like house centipedes but also long body like other centipedes?

i've been falling down the centipede love pit. theyre so beautiful and sweet😩 and the way they move is so joyous. planning on a centipede tattoo when i have the money for it <3

unrelated but thank you for all the detailed bug photos, fantastic for art reference.

short answer: no

long answer w/ centipede phylogeny: below

there are 5 orders in the class Chilopoda: Scutigeromorpha, Lithobiomorpha, Craterostigmomorpha, Scolopendromorpha, and Geophilomorpha.

tree:

scutigeromorphs are the basalmost centipedes, but have a number of traits that clearly weren’t present in the common ancestor of all centipedes, including the hypersegmented legs and unpaired dorsal spiracles. 15 pairs of legs, anamorphic growth, no maternal care

lithobiomorphs are the next to split off. 15 pairs of legs, anamorphic growth, no maternal care

craterostigmomorphs are fairly similar to look at but the two living species form their own order, which is restricted to Tasmania and NZ and therefore I have no photos of my own to show you! they also have 15 pairs of legs & are anamorphic but start with 12 so only grow more legs in a single molt, maternal care

scolopendromorphs are the big, flashy centipedes of the tropics but also contain some smaller temperate species as well. 21-23 leg pairs depending on species (a few oddballs with duplications), epimorphic growth, maternal care

geophilomorpha are the most speciose centipede group, and are typically very long and thin. leg count varies between species and usually sexes (total range from 27 to 191 pairs), epimorphic growth, maternal care

the closest any epimorphic centipede gets to the hypersegmented condition in scutigeromorphs is Newportia, a genus of scolopocryptopid scolopendromorphs whose terminal legs are highly segmented, probably serving a sensory function but without the prehensile grip of scutigeromorphs.

Cermatobius lithombiomorphs do get very leggy but given that they still have 15 leg pairs they just sort of look like flat scutigeromorphs to me

[thankyouforthememoriesworld]

Thank you for all the Gabby/MJ posts. My timeline is flooded with Paige-Azzi to the point I’m almost sick of them 😂 I love how lowkey Gabby and MJ are, do you have a timeline on their relationship?

You're welcome 😊, I love introducing new people to Willannès. They're the introverted French version of Pazzi (if you know some French athletes then you get what I mean).

That's why you shouldn't follow too many accounts or you'll see the same posts 11 times in a row 🤏🏻

Here we go, the Willannès timeline PART ONE:

▪ July 27, 2016: France faced the USA in preparation for the Olympics with Gabby in the stands (baby Jojo played in it). It was this match that made her want to represent France 🇫🇷.

▪ mid-May 2021: Gabby is selected to play the Euro with France and meets the team for the first time. She hit it off with Jojo, Alexia and Iliana but especially Jojo (a journalist asked her how long they'd known each other, given their complicity, and it was a week lol 😏).

Only 2 weeks after meeting, Jojo asked Gabby if she could tattoo her and she told her 'Sure' (the Pac-Man on her thigh, gay idiots).

▪ June, 2021: Willannès being glued to one another during all the friendly games and the Euro.

▪ July 06 - August 08, 2021: Jojo and Gabby became closer and closer as they prepared for and competed in the Tokyo Olympics. Seeing it written is a little crazy because it made me realize that they somehow spent more than 2 months together (no wonder it changed their dynamic).

Gabby's TikTok recap with a tender-eyed Jojo

▪ November 07 to 14, 2021: EuroBasket - Qualifiers

(waiting for Gabby before going into the bus 🥺)

▪ February 03 to 13, 2022: World Cup qualifiers

▪ Early 2022: Stories and rumors are all pointing to them getting together around this time 🥰.

▪ April 2022: Jojo smirking in her Gabby-branded sweater and Gabby's interview about her tattoos.

▪ June 2022: Gabby signed her contract with Asvel for 2 years to be in the same club as Jojo 💖.

[lipshits-continuous]

Explanation Posts

Maths:

I explain my url (continuity in ��) 05/06/2022

Definition of a Ring 07/10/2022

Definition of a Metric Space 16/10/2022

Open and Closes sets in a Metric Space 16/10/2022

Convergence and Continuity in Metric Spaces 22/10/2022

Bounded and Compact sets in a Metric Space 23/10/2022

I show 0.9999...=1 30/11/2022

Linear Maps and Isomorphisms 18/01/2023

Ring homomorphisms, Ideals, Quotients, and the First Isomorphism Theorem 12/03/2023

Mutamorphic Functions (technically not an explanation post but still belongs here) 29/06/2023

Second Countability of ℝⁿ 04/07/2023

The Weierstrass Function 23/08/2023

Unbroken Workbrooks (A post about continuity written in Anglish) 19/09/2023

Countable Sets have 0 Lebesgue Outer Measure 17/10/2023

Introduction to Homotopy 05/02/2024

The Fundamental Group 16/02/2024

Continuity in Terms of Open Sets 16/02/2024

The Set of Finitely Generated Free Groups as a Monoid 01/03/2024

Intro to Topology: Metric Spaces 12/03/2024

Intro to Topology: Topological Spaces and Continuity 19/03/2024

Intro to Topology: Closed Sets and Limit Points 26/03/2024

Intro to Topology: Hausdorffness 26/03/2024

Intro to Topology: Connectedness 27/03/2024

Intro to Topology: Path Connectedness 28/03/2024

Intro to Topology: Compactness 11/04/2024

Intro to Topology: Bases and Second Countability 12/04/2024

Intro to Topology: Product Spaces 23/04/2024

Intro to Topology: The Heine-Borel Theorem 24/04/2024

Intro to Topology: Quotient Spaces 25/04/2024

Intro to Topology: Important Examples 26/04/2024

Intro to Topology: Conclusions and Remaining Questions 26/04/2024

The Dirac Delta Distribution is not an Extended Real Function 03/05/2024

The Fundamental Group of a Topological Group is Abelian 10/06/2024

Proof of the Factor Theorem 30/06/2024

A Short Intro to Category Theory 23/10/2024

Physics:

Lagrangian Mechanics 09/10/2022

Operators as Observables and Ehrenfest's Theorem 09/10/2022

[landoom]

Oscar's teenage crush on Lando - A study in Instagram likes

So... I did a thing... (yep, I miss Landoscar...and I have too much free time apparently).

Since 22/03/2013, Lando has posted 1768 posts on Instagram.

Oscar first likes appeared on the 21/12/2015.

Since then, Lando has poster 1652 posts.

And Oscar has liked 437 of them, which means he has liked 26.45% of Lando posts.

We can identify different eras :

2015-2016 : regular likes

2017-2018 : pure stalking with nearly every posts liked (apart from a period mid-2017)

2019-2022 : alternance between regular likes and droughts

from the end of 2022 : very regular posts

Other trends noted :

At the beginning, Oscar has liked some posts from Lando with other drivers. It has stopped recently.

Oscar mostly likes race related posts with some notable exceptions

Oscar also like the meme and funny posts a few years ago

Notable posts :

The first one :

They didn't know they would be playing together a few years later! :

The first like to a post with both of them!

The first one as future teammates

Conclusions :

We knew Oscar's "celebrity" crush on Lando had started years ago from Twitter! Instagram proves it too!

The period where Oscar was clearly the more obsessed is between 2017-2018 which is strangely just before he met Lily (from what we know)...

Clearly, the crush calmed down during a few years... But ending up being teammate with Lando has probably awoken it!

Annual stats (take it with a pinch of salt because it also depends on the number of posts from Lando) :

2015 : 1 like

2016 : 55 likes

2017 : 117 likes

2018 : 131 likes

2019 : 39 likes

2020 : 27 likes

2021 : 16 likes

2022 : 19 likes

2023 : 32 likes

[halfdent]

◖  𝙷𝙰𝚁𝚅𝙴𝚈  𝙳𝙴𝙽𝚃  &&  "  𝐓𝐖𝐎-𝐅𝐀𝐂𝐄  "  ◗   of   𝙱𝙰𝚃𝙼𝙰𝙽/𝙳𝙲  𝙲𝙾𝙼𝙸𝙲𝚂  bisected  by  𝚂𝙰𝚅𝙱𝙴𝙰𝚁  formerly  @/facesplit  /  2022  /  revamped  03/27/2024  .

indie  /   sel   /  no  minors   /   mutuals  only  /  crossover   friendly   +   oc   friendly  !  headcanon  -  based  with  inspiration  from  multi-verse   _* 

predominantly  comic  situated   +  other  verses  &&  featuring   *  cinematic  in  Reeves  /  Nolan  verse  _  divergent  &  headcanon  -  specific  only  .  &&  Arkham  verse  !  +

𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙳𝚂  .  𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐒  .

[unclewarwick]

i am making this an art blog now, so i thought i should actually start posting my art here. i finished this drawing today and the rest of the art in this post is from newest to oldest. this post is most of my batman-related art since the last time i posted a big amount of batman art (which was december 2022).

i have a heavy preference for drawing batjokes but am trying to draw more and more of the rogues gallery. i have my own vague storyline ideas that include both batman and the joker being trans men, but in my story he is called bruceman/bat wayne.

2024-07-10 -- i do an annual redraw of this meme. this was the fifth version. the first time i drew it (in 2021) was the first time i had tried to properly draw either of them, despite having a deep batman interest for a long long time, and drawing for even longer.

2024-06-28 -- i spent 41 and a half hours on this one. my first big attempt at pixel art. it was from a bad chronic illness week so it was meant as a purposely ugly and simple drawing but it spiralled out of control.

2024-07-05 and 2024-05-11 -- my concept art for the scarecrow.

2024-04-22 and 2024-03-21 and 2024-02-11 -- the joker taunting bat wayne, an argument with alfred, a community meme redraw that i didn't like the end result of but was unwell while drawing so i give myself a break.

2024-02-08 and 2024-02-06 -- the riddler being desperate for attention on social media, my two-face concept art

2024-01-27 -- my take on the oft-parodied the amazing spider-man #601 cover art.

2024-01-18 -- joker thinks he's being sneaky but doesn't know he's with the same person twice.

2024-01-11 and 2024-01-10 -- catwoman being fun and sillie (from before i redesigned her weird mask and goggles that i originally tried to give her)

art from 1 and 8 december of 2023 that i posted on here

both from 2023-09-10 -- a couple of quick low effort drawings from when i was feeling funky

2023-08-06 and 2023-08-13 and 2023-08-18 -- mini comic where you can see the comic formatting skill developing in each part.. just a small story idea i had revolving around a double joke about bat wayne's Identity. and still figuring out how to draw the riddler.

2023-08-02 -- my first depiction of riddler & first drawing of har-lee (my name for harley quinn) out of costume.

2023-06-18 and 2023-06-15 -- my first drawings ever of har-lee; i did not stick with this costume design for her because i fixed it and made it actually look good and make sense at all a whole year later (character design is my weakness), and also just a simple meme.

2023-06-15 -- i don't have an animation program, so making this was a real struggle.

2023-04-28 and 2023-04-23 -- bruceman picking up tampons in the middle of a fight, bruceman and joker "fighting".

2023-04-04 and 2023-03-21 -- Earring Magic J, joker being the autistic, gay, trans dad of autistic, gay, trans pee-wee herman (including muffin the cat from batman: legends of the dark knight #50)

all from 2022-11-14 -- a comic Not about being trans, no, not at all...

2022-11-27 -- a fully rendered version of the last panel.

there's more that's not included here because of the 30 image limitation, but those are mostly further concept drawings of har-lee that i didn't like, and lower quality joke drawings. one bigger thing i've left out are stills from an animatic/animation project i started quite a while back (it's not even my only WIP of that kind) and haven't continued progress on for a while. i would prefer to share that all at once whenever it's finished.

[whatamessofthoughtswithjess]

It truly feels like we’re slowly losing them all. It’s so hard for me to process their deaths at times. Harry Potter has always meant so much to me. It was my escape from life, from reality, from the hardships I endured growing up. I’ll truly never be able to explain how grateful I am for this world that JK Rowling created & so graciously shared with all of us. These characters were truly brought to life by the actors and actresses that played them. I’ll forever be grateful for their love, hard work, and dedication to these roles. May they all rest in eternal paradise. 💔✨

Alan Rickman: 02/21/1946-01/14/2016

Robbie Coltrane: 03/30/1950-10/14/2022

Michael Gambon: 10/19/1940-09/27/2023

Maggie Smith: 12/28/1934-09/27/2024

[rkntg]

[irisbleufic]

Nearly finished; 12 of 13 chapters posted. One random misdirect during Daniel’s encounter with Louis at Polynesian Mary’s, and the entire night’s events change drastically for Daniel and Armand (and the future changes for everyone). Reckless gremlins, everyone involved.

Open Your Mouth (2024-10-25)

Test the Theory (2024-10-26)

Twist the Blade (2024-10-27)

Pretend It's Me (2024-10-28)

Trust Without Limits (2024-10-30)

Ask Me Anything (2024-11-01)

Follow Your Dreams (2024-11-02)

Spend Your Silver (2024-11-03)

Come With Me (2024-11-04)

That's the Test (2024-11-05)

So Much Light (2024-11-06)

Show You Off (NEW, 2024-11-07)

TEASER:

“Finish it,” Armand says abruptly, reaching out to touch the bottom of the glass. He tilts it up to Daniel’s lips, the words an imperious command.

Daniel barely opens his mouth in time. He chokes on what’s left of the watery crème de menthe and crème de cacao, but Armand doesn’t lower the glass until he’s finished every last drop. His head swims, partly because he’s tipsy and partly because of the brain freeze.

Armand withdraws the empty glass, sets it aside, and grabs a napkin off the bar. He dabs Daniel’s lips with it, brushing the bare pad of his thumb across Daniel’s chin. His skin is warm and smooth, slightly clammy with condensation borrowed from the glass.

Oh my God, Daniel thinks. Don’t lick him don’t lick him don’t lick—

Clearing his throat, Armand sets the napkin aside. “You’re a journalist?”

“Yeah,” Daniel replies hastily, looking away. “You were listening in?”

“I caught part of your chat with Louis. You were going to interview him?

“Was being the operative word. I’m not sure that would’ve worked out.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon’s financial shell game let it create an “impossible” monopoly

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.

Pro-monopoly economists embody Ely Devons's famous aphorism that "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Rather than using the way the world actually works as their starting point for how to think about it, they build elaborate models out of abstract principles like "rational actors." The resulting mathematical models are so abstractly elegant that it's easy to forget that they're just imaginative exercises, disconnected from reality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

These models predicted that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power. Even if they became a monopoly – in the sense of dominating sales of various kinds of goods – the company still wouldn't get monopoly power.

For example, if Amazon tried to take over a category by selling goods below cost ("predatory pricing"), then rivals could just wait until the company got tired of losing money and put prices back up, and then those rivals could go back to competing. And if Amazon tried to keep the loss-leader going indefinitely by "cross-subsidizing" the losses with high-margin profits from some other part of its business, rivals could sell those high margin goods at a lower margin, which would lure away Amazon customers and cut the supply lines for the price war it was fighting with its discounted products.

That's what the model predicted, but it's not what happened in the real world. In the real world, Amazon was able use its access to the capital markets to embark on scorched-earth predatory pricing campaigns. When diapers.com refused to sell out to Amazon, the company casually committed $100m to selling diapers below cost. Diapers.com went bust, Amazon bought it for pennies on the dollar and shut it down:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18563379/amazon-predatory-pricing-antitrust-law

Investors got the message: don't compete with Amazon. They can remain predatory longer than you can remain solvent.

Now, not everyone shared the antitrust establishment's confidence that Amazon couldn't create a durable monopoly with market power. In 2017, Lina Khan – then a third year law student – published "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," a landmark paper arguing that Amazon had all the tools it needed to amass monopoly power:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Today, Khan is chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that builds on some of the theories from that paper. One outcome of that suit is an unprecedented look at Amazon's internal operations. But, as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Stacy Mitchell describes in a piece for The Atlantic, key pieces of information have been totally redacted in the court exhibits:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/amazon-profits-antitrust-ftc/677580/

The most important missing datum: how much money Amazon makes from each of its lines of business. Amazon's own story is that it basically breaks even on its retail operation, and keeps the whole business afloat with profits from its AWS cloud computing division. This is an important narrative, because if it's true, then Amazon can't be forcing up retail prices, which is the crux of the FTC's case against the company.

Here's what we know for sure about Amazon's retail business. First: merchants can't live without Amazon. The majority of US households have Prime, and 90% of Prime households start their ecommerce searches on Amazon; if they find what they're looking for, they buy it and stop. Thus, merchants who don't sell on Amazon just don't sell. This is called "monopsony power" and it's a lot easier to maintain than monopoly power. For most manufacturers, a 10% overnight drop in sales is a catastrophe, so a retailer that commands even a 10% market-share can extract huge concessions from its suppliers. Amazon's share of most categories of goods is a lot higher than 10%!

What kind of monopsony power does Amazon wield? Well, for one thing, it is able to levy a huge tax on its sellers. Add up all the junk-fees Amazon charges its platform sellers and it comes out to 45-51%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Competitive businesses just don't have 45% margins! No one can afford to kick that much back to Amazon. What is a merchant to do? Sell on Amazon and you lose money on every sale. Don't sell on Amazon and you don't get any business.

The only answer: raise prices on Amazon. After all, Prime customers – the majority of Amazon's retail business – don't shop for competitive prices. If Amazon wants a 45% vig, you can raise your Amazon prices by a third and just about break even.

But Amazon is wise to that: they have a "most favored nation" rule that punishes suppliers who sell goods more cheaply in rival stores, or even on their own site. The punishments vary, from banishing your products to page ten million of search-results to simply kicking you off the platform. With publishers, Amazon reserves the right to lower the prices they set when listing their books, to match the lowest price on the web, and paying publishers less for each sale.

That means that suppliers who sell on Amazon (which is anyone who wants to stay in business) have to dramatically hike their prices on Amazon, and when they do, they also have to hike their prices everywhere else (no wonder Prime customers don't bother to search elsewhere for a better deal!).

Now, Amazon says this is all wrong. That 45-51% vig they claim from business customers is barely enough to break even. The company's profits – they insist – come from selling AWS cloud service. The retail operation is just a public service they provide to us with cross-subsidy from those fat AWS margins.

This is a hell of a claim. Last year, Amazon raked in $130 billion in seller fees. In other words: they booked more revenue from junk fees than Bank of America made through its whole operation. Amazon's junk fees add up to more than all of Meta's revenues:

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/AMZN-Q4-2023-Earnings-Release.pdf

Amazon claims that none of this is profit – it's just covering their operating expenses. According to Amazon, its non-AWS units combined have a one percent profit margin.

Now, this is an eye-popping claim indeed. Amazon is a public company, which means that it has to make thorough quarterly and annual financial disclosures breaking down its profit and loss. You'd think that somewhere in those disclosures, we'd find some details.

You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. Amazon's disclosures do not break out profits and losses by segment. SEC rules actually require the company to make these per-segment disclosures:

https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3524&context=lawreview#:~:text=If%20a%20company%20has%20more,income%20taxes%20and%20extraordinary%20items.

That rule was enacted in 1966, out of concern that companies could use cross-subsidies to fund predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices. But over the years, the SEC just…stopped enforcing the rule. Companies have "near total managerial discretion" to lump business units together and group their profits and losses in bloated, undifferentiated balance-sheet items:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2021/dec/crouching-tiger-hidden-dragons

As Mitchell points you, it's not just Amazon that flouts this rule. We don't know how much money Google makes on Youtube, or how much Apple makes from the App Store (Apple told a federal judge that this number doesn't exist). Warren Buffett – with significant interest in hundreds of companies across dozens of markets – only breaks out seven segments of profit-and-loss for Berkshire Hathaway.

Recall that there is one category of data from the FTC's antitrust case against Amazon that has been completely redacted. One guess which category that is! Yup, the profit-and-loss for its retail operation and other lines of business.

These redactions are the judge's fault, but the real fault lies with the SEC. Amazon is a public company. In exchange for access to the capital markets, it owes the public certain disclosures, which are set out in the SEC's rulebook. The SEC lets Amazon – and other gigantic companies – get away with a degree of secrecy that should disqualify it from offering stock to the public. As Mitchell says, SEC chairman Gary Gensler should adopt "new rules that more concretely define what qualifies as a segment and remove the discretion given to executives."

Amazon is the poster-child for monopoly run amok. As Yanis Varoufakis writes in Technofeudalism, Amazon has actually become a post-capitalist enterprise. Amazon doesn't make profits (money derived from selling goods); it makes rents (money charged to people who are seeking to make a profit):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profits are the defining characteristic of a capitalist economy; rents are the defining characteristic of feudalism. Amazon looks like a bazaar where thousands of merchants offer goods for sale to the public, but look harder and you discover that all those stallholders are totally controlled by Amazon. Amazon decides what goods they can sell, how much they cost, and whether a customer ever sees them. And then Amazon takes $0.45-51 out of every dollar. Amazon's "marketplace" isn't like a flea market, it's more like the interconnected shops on Disneyland's Main Street, USA: the sign over the door might say "20th Century Music Company" or "Emporium," but they're all just one store, run by one company.

And because Amazon has so much control over its sellers, it is able to exercise power over its buyers. Amazon's search results push down the best deals on the platform and promote results from more expensive, lower-quality items whose sellers have paid a fortune for an "ad" (not really an ad, but rather the top spot in search listings):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

This is "Amazon's pricing paradox." Amazon can claim that it offers low-priced, high-quality goods on the platform, but it makes $38b/year pushing those good deals way, way down in its search results. The top result for your Amazon search averages 29% more expensive than the best deal Amazon offers. Buy something from those first four spots and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average, you need to pick the seventeenth item on the search results page to get the best deal:

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645/

For 40 years, pro-monopoly economists claimed that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power over buyers and sellers. Today, Amazon exercises that power so thoroughly that its junk-fee revenues alone exceed the total revenues of Bank of America. Amazon's story – that these fees barely stretch to covering its costs – assumes a nearly inconceivable level of credulity in its audience. Regrettably – for the human race – there is a cohort of senior, highly respected economists who possess this degree of credulity and more.

Of course, there's an easy way to settle the argument: Amazon could just comply with SEC regs and break out its P&L for its e-commerce operation. I assure you, they're not hiding this data because they think you'll be pleasantly surprised when they do and they don't want to spoil the moment.

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/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Image: Doc Searls (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/4863121221/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[eventuallyaugust]

bound by the rules masterlist smau

pairing/s: lesserafim huh yunjin x txt's sixth member! gp! oc x aespa yoo jimin

summary: txt's oldest member, oh hyunseol just want a peaceful life after pandemic with her members, but it seems like fate wants to shake things up.

tags... crack, fluff; angst; hurt(?); suggestive/smut (not all time); kinda slow burn (not the do i like her slow burn, but those longer than a min touches and longing gazes kind of slow burn); no beta we die like men; love at first sight; friends to lovers

warning/s... love triangle; angst; too many things going on; an ungodly amount of time skips; suggestive/smut themes; dark jokes; toxic staffs and management; scandals; dark themes & graphic content: strong language, bullying (affectionately); multiple mentions of alcohol and its consumption; many more to be added

setting... story will start in 2022

featuring... txt, lesserafim, aespa, itzy (mostly ryujin), ive (mostly annyeongz), choi yena, skz bangchan, nct jaehyun, g-idle yuqi, enhypen heeseung, some bts members, and many more that often pops up in just one of the chapters.

status... DISCONTINUED

————

profiles. bighit's baby giants, too pretty to be ais, not-so-fearless with bugs, the seven avengers

chapters (number of chapters & some titles still unidentified)

⭐ - fav chap

01 | happy birthday to you⭐

02 | new bestie unlocked

03 | birth month twinnie (half written)

04 | pretty elevator girl (kinda half written)

05 | tagged along

06 | birthday money

07 | meeting for what?! (mostly written)

08 | MEETING?? HER?? WHAT??

09 | minjeong's research

10 | lee fcking soo-man (written) ⭐

11 | give me your bets

12 | field day (pt.1)⭐

13 | the claw machine⭐

14 | party party yeah

15 | alexa, play drama by txt (written)⭐

16 | she is like dramama ramama

17 | #prayforheeseung

18 | gay panic-ese⭐

19 | txt's first 2022 vlive (written)⭐

20 | lord me when⭐

21 | be careful what you wish for (written) ⭐

22 | something bad just happened ⭐

23 | perfect friends ⭐

24 | matchz? it's a matchz! ⭐

bonus... matchmaker episodes

25 | 0 7 . 3 0

26 | seol & umji?? seolji?

27 | haters gonna hate

28 | wee-woo 🚨🚨

29 | a house of cards (written)

30 | us against the world

31 | through the cracks

32 | without the foundation

extra/s:

bbtr plot timeline

2022

2023

2024

----

taglist: @curly-fr13s , @neuftaeng , @myothegreat , @yoontoonwhs , @nasyu-kookies , @awkwardtoafault , @osakis-gf , @dream-chasers-things , @woonie57 , @juhyunsthirdwife , @sewiouslyz , @yerevies , @kimsgayness , @jeindall777 , @notodayeli , @mah4u

°°°°

misc hyunseol - kprofile | articles | spotify playlist | youtube compilations | fem idols crushing on her | matchz playlist | oddz playlist

a/n: seol can be interpreted as the reader or whole other person. it was supposed to be y/n, not seol but i find it hard to imagine if i pair yunjin and karina to someone i can't imagine, so that's where seol is born.

disclaimer all images and pictures used in this story are not all mine. they belong to their rightful owners and i therefore give credits to their edits. since this is a smau, all of the happenings and events within are made up and the product of my imagination. any similarity to real-life occurrences or individuals, whether alive or deceased, is entirely coincidental. SEPARATE FICTION FROM REALITY.

@ eventuallyaugust 2024 | navi