#Adanis

[todayscroll]

‘Please nikaldo… meri shaadi ho rahi hai’: Jeet Adani’s request leaves Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal in splits

On a day billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani’s younger son Jeet is all set to marry his fiance Diva Shah in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad, a recent exchange of the soon-to-be-married with Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal has caught the internet’s attention. Days ahead of the wedding, during an interaction with Mittal on Shark Tank’s ‘Beyond The Tank’ segment, Jeet had an unexpected but funny request —…

[fyblackwomenart]

Mika Adani

[bypatia]

The bjp government introduced the ucc bill in Uttarakhand which has made it mandatory for live in couples to register with the government and a copy of the registration will be sent to respective families. It also added the father as a first class legal heir for inheritance of property, encroaching upon the the right of the mother, wife, daughter (the actual victims of patriarchy, who most likely did not have any social right to gain access to financial independence or inheritance from other family members) to accommodate the father, who more than likely than not already has financial freedom and ownership rights over land property. Moving on, they removed the Muslim personal law, which guaranteed the rights of the daughter in a fixed inheritance percentage. Not to mention the whole act is modelled after hindu personal laws and demanding other religions to bend according to it is inherently regressive no matter how progressive the law on paper looks to be. So should I just bang my head against the wall right now and be done with it or watch as the bjp government slowly sets fire to all our lives?

[comicwaren]

From Phoenix #008

Art by Alessandro Miracolo and David Curiel

Written by Stephanie Phillips

[foxglovedforest]

PICTURE ABHI BAAKI HAI RE BHAILOG

[indizombie]

Parvathy is struggling to establish her own identity and existence since the death of her husband. She has been strong-armed out of her family home so a new block of high-rise apartments can be constructed on the land where she currently lives. With all paperwork in her deceased husband’s name, Parvathy has no legal way to prove that the house she’s currently living in actually belongs to her, and is on the verge of becoming homeless. “Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged,” boasts the tagline of the builders ready to demolish Parvathy’s home. Kapadia articulates an uncomfortable truth: that the economic success story of Modi’s India—with industrialists Adani and Ambani as its self-proclaimed poster boys—is built upon the displacement and disenfranchisement of thousands of underprivileged, routinely exploited undocumented migrant workers like Parvathy.

Virat Nehru, ‘Review: ‘All We Imagine as Light’ is a Stunning Tale of Intimacy as Dissent’, Rough Cut

[guldaastan]

hundreds of students from kozhikode, kerala, rallied against the ongoing genocide in gaza. they protested against the complicity of the indian government in the genocide as indian made weapons are being used against palestinians.

pc

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The long bezzle

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

When it comes to the modern world of enshittified, terrible businesses, no addition to your vocabulary is more essential than "bezzle," JK Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

The bezzle is contained by two forces.

First, Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop."

Second, Keynes's: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

On the one hand, extremely badly run businesses that strip all the value out of the firm, making things progressively worse for its suppliers, workers and customers will eventually fail (Stein's Law).

On the other hand, as the private equity sector has repeatedly demonstrated, there are all kinds of accounting tricks, subsidies and frauds that can animate a decaying, zombie firm long after its best-before date (Keynes's irrational markets):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

One company that has done an admirable job of balancing on a knife edge between Stein and Keynes is Verizon, a monopoly telecoms firm that has proven that a business can remain large, its products relied upon by millions, its stock actively traded and its market cap buoyant, despite manifest, repeated incompetence and waste on an unimaginable scale.

This week, Verizon shut down Bluejeans, an also-ran videoconferencing service the company bought for $400 million in 2020 as a panic-buy to keep up with Zoom. As they lit that $400 mil on fire, Verizon praised its own vision, calling Bluejeans "an award-winning product that connects our customers around the world, but we have made this decision due to the changing market landscape":

https://9to5google.com/2023/08/08/verizon-bluejeans-shutting-down/

Writing for Techdirt, Karl Bode runs down a partial list of all the unbelievably terrible business decisions Verizon has made without losing investor confidence or going under, in a kind of tribute to Keynes's maxim:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/10/verizon-fails-again-shutters-attempted-zoom-alternative-bluejeans-after-paying-400-million-for-it/

Remember Go90, the "dud" streaming service launched in 2015 and shuttered in 2018? You probably don't, and neither (apparently) do Verizon's shareholders, who lost $1.2 billion on this folly:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/07/02/verizons-sad-attempt-to-woo-millennials-falls-flat-face/

Then there was Verizon's bid to rescue Redbox with a new joint-venture streaming service, Redbox Instant, launched 2012, killed in 2014, $450,000,000 later:

https://variety.com/2014/digital/news/verizon-redbox-to-pull-plug-on-video-streaming-service-1201321484/

Then there was Sugarstring, a tech "news" website where journalists were prohibited from saying nice things about Net Neutrality or surveillance – born 2014, died 2014:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/2/7324063/verizon-kills-off-sugarstring

An app store, started in 2010, killed in 2012:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/5/3605618/verizon-apps-store-closing-january-2013

Vcast, 2005-2012, yet another failed streaming service (pray that someday you find someone who loves you as much as Verizon's C-suite loves doomed streaming services):

https://venturebeat.com/media/verizon-vcast-shutting-down/

And the granddaddy of them all, Oath, Verizon's 2017, $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo/AOL, whose name refers to the fact that the company's mismanagement provoked involuntary, protracted swearing from all who witnessed the $4.6 billion write-down the company took a year later:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/12/if-youre-surprised-verizons-aol-yahoo-face-plant-you-dont-know-verizon/

Verizon isn't just bad at being a phone company that does non-phone-company things – it's incredibly bad at being a phone company, too. As Bode points out, Verizon's only real competency is in capturing its regulators at the FCC:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/05/02/new-verizon-video-blatantly-lies-about-whats-happening-to-net-neutrality/

And sucking up massive public subsidies from rubes in the state houses of New York:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/03/14/new-york-city-sues-verizon-fiber-optic-bait-switch/

New Jersey:

https://www.techdirt.com/2014/04/25/verizon-knows-youre-sucker-takes-taxpayer-subsidies-broadband-doesnt-deliver-lobbies-to-drop-requirements/

and Pennsylvania:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/06/15/verizon-gets-wrist-slap-years-neglecting-broadband-networks-new-jersey-pennsylvania/

Despite all this, and vast unfunded liabilities – like remediating the population-destroying lead in their cables – they remain solvent:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/verizon-sued-by-investors-over-lead-cables-environmental-statements-2023-08-02/

Verizon has remained irrational longer than any short seller could remain solvent.

Short-sellers – who bet against companies and get paid when their stock prices go down – get a bad rap: billionaire shorts were the villains of the Gamestop squeeze, accused of running negative PR campaigns against beloved businesses to drive them under and pay their bets off:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#stockstonks

But shorts can do the lord's work. Writing for Bloomberg, Kathy Burton tells the story of Nate Anderson, whose Hindenburg Research has cost some of the world's wealthiest people over $99 billion by publishing investigative reports on their balance-sheet shell-games just this year:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-06/how-much-did-hindenburg-make-from-shorting-adani-dorsey-icahn

Anderson started off trying to earn a living as a SEC whistleblower, identifying financial shenanigans and collecting the bounties on offer, but that didn't pan out. So he turned his forensic research skills to preparing mediagenic, viral reports on the scams underpinning the financial boasts of giant companies…after taking a short position in them.

This year, Anderson's targets have included Carl Icahn, whose company lost $17b in market cap after Anderson accused it of overvaluing its assets. He went after the world's fourth-richest man, Gautam Adani, accusing him of "accounting fraud and stock manipulation," wiping out 34% of his net worth. He took on Jack Dorsey, whose payment processor Square renamed itself Block and went all in on the cryptocurrency bezzle, lopping 16% off its share price.

Burton points out that Anderson's upside for these massive bloodletting was comparatively modest. A perfectly timed exit from the $17b Icahn report would have netted $56m. What's more, Anderson faces legal threats and worse – one short seller was attacked by a man wearing brass-knuckles, an attack attributed to her short activism.

Shorts are lauded as one of capitalism's self-correcting mechanisms, and Hindenberg certainly has taken some big, successful swings at some of the great bezzles of our time. But as Verizon shows, shorts alone can't discipline a market where profits and investor confidence are totally decoupled from competence or providing a decent product or service.

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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/2023/08/10/smartest-guys-in-the-room/#can-you-hear-me-now

[carmixstar]

Hello people, I want to show everyone this person, her name is Alondra Peña Ortiz she stole the figure of a famous video game character and created a female version of her to be successful and harass people, this person is very dangerous be careful!🙏https://youtube.com/@AdaniPearce?si=wPWfW4h5DsLtH2Ay

[goddess-of-chai]

Netanyahu and Adani arrest warrants on the same day? Hell yeah!

[todayscroll]

Gautam Adani's son Jeet pledges ₹10 lakh for 500 Divyang brides every year, Adani Group chairman says...

Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani’s son Jeet Adani and his fiancee Diva Jaimin Shah on Wednesday pledged to donate ₹10 lakh each to 500 differently-abled (Divyang) brides every year. Jeet is set to tie the knot with Diva Jaimin Shah in an intimate ceremony in Ahmedabad on February 7. Adani Sr confirmed the development in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Calling it a matter of immense joy, the…

[comicwaren]

From Phoenix #007

Art by Marco Renna and David Curiel

Written by Stephanie Phillips

[luvsimtingz]

They could never make me hate you 😩

Von Bon at a club opening being bad and showing ass!!

Her Instagram

[artcinemas]

i wanna say something about how sanghi bumfucks and their rooted communalism bs has impacted badly like very badly for our society but today is not the day it seems

[ffverr]

Just done reading Phoenix #1 by Stephanie Philips and it is SO insanely good of a start I feel like I'm in a dream!!!!! So here are some favorite moments without me writing an essay: (PS, PLEASE buy the issue! I have bought two because the variants are gorgeous and I encourage everyone to do so !! Sales are important!)

[foxglovedforest]

I HAVE SOME MEMES DROM INSTAGRAM. PLEAZE CHECK THEM OUT ITS SO FUNNY.