#Eat predators
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I’m glad Quiet on Set is bringing peoples attention to the issues with Nickelodeon but what is very as is this isn’t completely new News. The documentary is successful in preventing the abusers and enablers from hiding and does allow for more stories and information to come out but this is after years of allegations and child stars stories being ignored. Many responsible parties have just been hoping the general public would fail to hear what has been said but there’s no hiding now.
Jennette McCurdy’s book spoke of a ‘creator’ who is allegedly Dan Schneider. And this is a photo of Alexa Nikolas protesting Nickelodeon in 2022 after Jennette’s book:
(Taken from TMZ so that’s the watermark you can see)
There are many stories of Nick stars being coerced to drink under age and people have been pointing out the inappropriate nature of certain scenes.
The documentary is amazing for getting the message out there but we need to acknowledge that since 2022 and prior to that Nickelodeon and other responsible parties filed to take action. People knew about Dan’s behaviour, some of the stories told were already public knowledge or speculated, they just didn’t do anything about it. They let him get away with it and made child stars suffer in silence
(This is just a quick post and if my point isn’t clear sorry I just hate that people speak like this is brand new info and not a long running issue that has been played down for a while now)
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FUCK ALEXA NIKOLAS HOW DARE YOU PRETEND TO CARE ABOUT VICTIMS OR RETRUAMATIZING PEOPLE AND THEN OUTING A VICTIM CUS YOU WERE ANGRY AT REPORTER FOR DOING HER DUE DILIGENCE
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youtube
two more hours diving deep into the failings of Eat Predators
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can someone fill me in on the alexa drama? wtf is going on?
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Look at what’s being searched on YouTube. Stop posting your kids.
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Obsessed with tumblrs take on the crucifixion of drake
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Follow up with the vampire Armand about diet and exercise.
#iwtv#iwtvedit#interview with the vampire#iwtv spoilers#armand#a monstrous evil predator! playing with his food.#this set makes sense in my brain at least#armand smiling at humans getting eaten or thinking about eating humans.
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And you know what else bothers me? The sanitisation of characters and setting in Veilguard is so complete that not even Assan escapes it. I'm currently rereading Last Flight for fic reasons and it really hits how differently griffons are portrayed in the novel compared to Assan, who has basically taken on the role of a Disney animal sidekick. In the book, griffons are proud, territorial, and fierce. They demand absolute devotion from their riders, they have to be fed separately to avoid fights breaking out, they can outmanoeuvre an archdemon and punch darkspawn hard enough with their talons to break necks.
And yes, Assan is still growing, it's possible the fierce territoriality won't hit until he reaches adulthood and his easy affection could be either his immaturity or his individual personality, but he's still an apex hypercarnivore whose two constituent parts are also apex hypercarnivores. Taking him into Arlathan should result in a massive decline in the local nug population as he practices his hunting skills, and Davrin should be learning how to manage his flying weight the way falconers do with their birds, because apex predators don't exert themselves when their bellies are full. That halla should have been put out of its misery. At full growth he'll be eating a goat a day at least. He should not be being fed yams or carrots.
#assan#assan dragon age#datv critical#dragon age meta#lucanis is the only one feeding him properly#it gives the same vibes as people insisting their cats can eat vegan food#let the apex predator hunt ffs#yes this is a rant
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No, Uber's (still) not profitable
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
Bezzle (n): 1. "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" (JK Gabraith) 2. Uber.
Uber was, is, and always will be a bezzle. There are just intrinsic limitations to the profits available to operating a taxi fleet, even if you can misclassify your employees as contractors and steal their wages, even as you force them to bear the cost of buying and maintaining your taxis.
The magic of early Uber – when taxi rides were incredibly cheap, and there were always cars available, and drivers made generous livings behind the wheel – wasn't magic at all. It was just predatory pricing.
Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in, lighting $33b of its investors' cash on fire. Most of that money came from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, who brought you such bezzles as WeWork – a boring real-estate company masquerading as a high-growth tech company, just as Uber was a boring taxi company masquerading as a tech company.
Predatory pricing used to be illegal, but Chicago School economists convinced judges to stop enforcing the law on the grounds that predatory pricing was impossible because no rational actor would choose to lose money. They (willfully) ignored the obvious possibility that a VC fund could invest in a money-losing business and use predatory pricing to convince retail investors that a pile of shit of sufficient size must have a pony under it somewhere.
This venture predation let investors – like Prince Bone Saw – cash out to suckers, leaving behind a money-losing business that had to invent ever-sweatier accounting tricks and implausible narratives to keep the suckers on the line while they blew town. A bezzle, in other words:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy
Uber is a true bezzle innovator, coming up with all kinds of fairy tales and sci-fi gimmicks to explain how they would convert their money-loser into a profitable business. They spent $2.5b on self-driving cars, producing a vehicle whose mean distance between fatal crashes was half a mile. Then they paid another company $400 million to take this self-licking ice-cream cone off their hands:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
Amazingly, self-driving cars were among the more plausible of Uber's plans. They pissed away hundreds of millions on California's Proposition 22 to institutionalize worker misclassification, only to have the rule struck down because they couldn't be bothered to draft it properly. Then they did it again in Massachusetts:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/15/simple-as-abc/#a-big-ask
Remember when Uber was going to plug the holes in its balance sheet with flying cars? Flying cars! Maybe they were just trying to soften us up for their IPO, where they advised investors that the only way they'd ever be profitable is if they could replace every train, bus and tram ride in the world:
https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/
Honestly, the only way that seems remotely plausible is when it's put next to flying cars for comparison. I guess we can be grateful that they never promised us jetpacks, or, you know, teleportation. Just imagine the market opportunity they could have ascribed to astral projection!
Narrative capitalism has its limits. Once Uber went public, it had to produce financial disclosures that showed the line going up, lest the bezzle come to an end. These balance-sheet tricks were as varied as they were transparent, but the financial press kept falling for them, serving as dutiful stenographers for a string of triumphant press-releases announcing Uber's long-delayed entry into the league of companies that don't lose more money every single day.
One person Uber has never fooled is Hubert Horan, a transportation analyst with decades of experience who's had Uber's number since the very start, and who has done yeoman service puncturing every one of these financial "disclosures," methodically sifting through the pile of shit to prove that there is no pony hiding in it.
In 2021, Horan showed how Uber had burned through nearly all of its cash reserves, signaling an end to its subsidy for drivers and rides, which would also inevitably end the bezzle:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more
In mid, 2022, Horan showed how the "profit" Uber trumpeted came from selling off failed companies it had acquired to other dying rideshare companies, which paid in their own grossly inflated stock:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk
At the end of 2022, Horan showed how Uber invented a made-up, nonstandard metric, called "EBITDA profitability," which allowed them to lose billions and still declare themselves to be profitable, a lie that would have been obvious if they'd reported their earnings using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft
Like clockwork, Uber has just announced – once again – that it is profitable, and once again, the press has credulously repeated the claim. So once again, Horan has published one of his magisterial debunkings on Naked Capitalism:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-three-uber-isnt-really-profitable-yet-but-is-getting-closer-the-antitrust-case-against-uber.html
Uber's $394m gains this quarter come from paper gains to untradable shares in its loss-making rivals – Didi, Grab, Aurora – who swapped stock with Uber in exchange for Uber's own loss-making overseas divisions. Yes, it's that stupid: Uber holds shares in dying companies that no one wants to buy. It declared those shares to have gained value, and on that basis, reported a profit.
Truly, any big number multiplied by an imaginary number can be turned into an even bigger number.
Now, Uber also reported "margin improvements" – that is, it says that it loses less on every journey. But it didn't explain how it made those improvements. But we know how the company did it: they made rides more expensive and cut the pay to their drivers. A 2.9m ride in Manhattan is now $50 – if you get a bargain! The base price is more like $70:
https://www.wired.com/story/uber-ceo-will-always-say-his-company-sucks/
The number of Uber drivers on the road has a direct relationship to the pay Uber offers those drivers. But that pay has been steeply declining, and with it, the availability of Ubers. A couple weeks ago, I found myself at the Burbank train station unable to get an Uber at all, with the app timing out repeatedly and announcing "no drivers available."
Normally, you can get a yellow taxi at the station, but years of Uber's predatory pricing has caused a drawdown of the local taxi-fleet, so there were no taxis available at the cab-rank or by dispatch. It took me an hour to get a cab home. Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.
Uber won't say why its margins are improving, but it can't be coming from scale. Before the pandemic, Uber had far more rides, and worse margins. Uber has diseconomies of scale: when you lose money on every ride, adding more rides increases your losses, not your profits.
Meanwhile, Lyft – Uber's also-ran competitor – saw its margins worsen over the same period. Lyft has always been worse at lying about it finances than Uber, but it is in essentially the exact same business (right down to the drivers and cars – many drivers have both apps on their phones). So Lyft's financials offer a good peek at Uber's true earnings picture.
Lyft is actually slightly better off than Uber overall. It spent less money on expensive props for its long con – flying cars, robotaxis, scooters, overseas clones – and abandoned them before Uber did. Lyft also fired 24% of its staff at the end of 2022, which should have improved its margins by cutting its costs.
Uber pays its drivers less. Like Lyft, Uber practices algorithmic wage discrimination, Veena Dubal's term describing the illegal practice of offering workers different payouts for the same work. Uber's algorithm seeks out "pickers" who are choosy about which rides they take, and converts them to "ants" (who take every ride offered) by paying them more for the same job, until they drop all their other gigs, whereupon the algorithm cuts their pay back to the rates paid to ants:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
All told, wage theft and wage cuts by Uber transferred $1b/quarter from labor to Uber's shareholders. Historically, Uber linked fares to driver pay – think of surge pricing, where Uber charged riders more for peak times and passed some of that premium onto drivers. But now Uber trumpets a custom pricing algorithm that is the inverse of its driver payment system, calculating riders' willingness to pay and repricing every ride based on how desperate they think you are.
This pricing is a per se antitrust violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, America's original antitrust law. That's important because Sherman 2 is one of the few antitrust laws that we never stopped enforcing, unlike the laws banning predator pricing:
https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/sites/ilr.law.uiowa.edu/files/2023-02/Woodcock.pdf
Uber claims an 11% margin improvement. 6-7% of that comes from algorithmic price discrimination and service cutbacks, letting it take 29% of every dollar the driver earns (up from 22%). Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi himself says that this is as high as the take can get – over 30%, and drivers will delete the app.
Uber's food delivery service – a baling wire-and-spit Frankenstein's monster of several food apps it bought and glued together – is a loser even by the standards of the sector, which is unprofitable as a whole and experiencing an unbroken slide of declining demand.
Put it all together and you get a picture of the kind of taxi company Uber really is: one that charges more than traditional cabs, pays drivers less, and has fewer cars on the road at times of peak demand, especially in the neighborhoods that traditional taxis had always underserved. In other words, Uber has broken every one of its promises.
We replaced the "evil taxi cartel" with an "evil taxi monopolist." And it's still losing money.
Even if Lyft goes under – as seems inevitable – Uber can't attain real profitability by scooping up its passengers and drivers. When you're losing money on every ride, you just can't make it up in volume.
Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
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/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter
Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#bezzles#hubert horan#uber#rideshare#accounting tricks#financial engineering#late-stage capitalism#narrative capitalism#lyft#transit#uber eats#venture predation#algorithmic wage discrimination
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you are umasou
#I watched it today it was so good#im not big on dinosaur stuff but i like how it was used to approach the predator/prey conversation especially when both sides are sentient#instead of just defaulting to well since predators are meat eaters their actions are automatically immoral so their role in the story#has to match. and then when your characters /are/ meat eaters you just step around that whole topic#heart knows he has to kill and eat so there’s no avoiding it but even he knows he has agency over that#hell he even decided to hunt by himself so umasou doesn’t have to see him kill and eat another dinosaur a day after meeting him#and maybe its because it’s a kids movie but it also doesn’t make a big show over the act of hunting and eating. it doesn’t dwell on it#like yes you can clearly see them ripping into guts minus the graphic details but it doesnt go out of its way to censor it either#its played straight just like hearts mom having more kids like nobody asks who the father is or when that happened cuz it doesn’t matter#what matters is she still loves heart and encourages her kids to greet their big brother and they do!!! it’s sweet#Beckon was also an interesting touch bc they make it clear the only reason he doesnt eat umasou is bc he cant and not that he wouldn’t#but he’s still a funny and interesting character and that doesn’t get in the way of how we see him too much#same for baku he was pretty polite with heart esp from the start when he asks him if hes abandoned implying he would be prepared to#look out for him from the start. and at the end when he decides to spare him. I dont hate him at all hes just intimidating#you are umasou#doodles#I wanted to draw smth more detailed but I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go with the cartoony art style#or smth closer to realistic?? so this is like. some sort of compromise I guess
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follow up question. if it’s ok to eat figs bc the wasp was already digested by the plant exactly /how/ digested to things have to be for their consumer to be considered vegan
#also someone said the wasps die of their own free will and. kinda.#it’s a male flower the wasp goes in and lays her eggs and leaves#but if it’s a female she can’t lay eggs and dies in there#and that is all fig fruits. that’s how they get pollinated#the wasp and the fig are both using eachother.#the wasp does not want to die in a fruit without laying her egg#so ok. stretch it. is eating carnivorous plants ok.#is eating something that can only grow and exist#because it is predating off an animal#even though it is not itself an animal#ok.#listen this is not discourse about like. vegan ethics and shit.#this is just. where is the line. and why.#because i think it’s interesting
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Every toy y/n rescued and giving them a new home, they'd likely show affection overtime, at least this mini huggy does! (Hope you don't mind if I continue drawing more of your au, you got me hooked)
:) nice drawing. if y/n had more space in their house, they'd have been able to potentially save a few more toys, like this guy.
and i am fond of the idea that maybe some of their adopted toys don't automatically warm up to them like their original family does. some need a bit of convincing, a bit of love and care to believe that they're no longer in danger.
#very good#so sweet that hes not trying to eat them#amazing what a steady source of food and lack of predators will do to a guy
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oscar carlando shipper thinking he's third wheeling them but lando is like i want you and it's like watching a cat stare down a baby bird
"A cat staring down a baby bird" is crazy but so accurate lmao
↑ Baby bird Oscar innocently minding his lil business, content with being a Lando fanboy and Carlando shipper, meanwhile Lando is slightly going crazy over how much he wants that guy
#lando norris#oscar piastri#landoscar#ask#anon#jen's rambling#imma be honest i do enjoy a good predator/prey kink once in a while#cat lando staring down baby bird oscar wondering which sauce he's going to eat him with
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Apex predator, my ass. I’m going to pet the dog 🐻🐻❄️🐼
perhaps now is a good time for some responsible bear programming to remind everyone that as cute and cuddly as they may seem, bears are lethal apex predators and should absolutely be treated accordingly if ever encountered.
DO
NOT
PET
#Responsible Bear Programming#^^ that's our tag for bears doing what they naturally do#if you do not like seeing bears behave as they naturally do -- as apex predators -- then please filter this tag accordingly friends#we are actually not accepting any complaints or suggestions about our tagging system or the content we post at the present moment#or at any point in the foreseeable future#so please don't try to comment or suggest otherwise#informative rant over now commencing educational rant#DO NOT try to pet the lethal beasts#you will be mauled and or killed#and then the bear will be killed for attacking a person#if you like bears the best thing you can do is ensure that they are not habituated to humans and do not view us as a source of food#either through your trash or through your flesh#keep yourself your neighbors and the bears safe by keeping human-bear interactions as minimal as possible#okay the team's done ranting now#(we're having A Day)#(it has a lot to do with the squirrels breaking into the floor of HQ and eating through our electrical wiring)#ask
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why does this little mouse keep getting paired with his natural predators someone save her
#tgaa#asoryuu#mdryuu#nyasogi#chuunosuke#tgaa2 spoilers#nyasked apprentice#LOOK I KNOW HE'S A CAT BUT YOU CANNOT DENY THE OWL VIBES#i only had to slightly alter md's mascot and boom. owl.🦉#AND THEN MY BUDDY UMA SAID ASOGI IS ALSO ASSOCIATED WITH SNAKES SO ADD THAT TO THE LIST#its just funnier to think every ver of kzm is a different natural predator to mice poor ryuu#steamship kzm is *looks up animals that eat mice* uhm. a..ferret?#yams art
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gitae sinisterly devouring food
evidently very evil !
#☆#lookism#lookism spoilers#lookism 534#he’s so unhinged i love him#the way he gives an evil grin both times while eating#i think he just likes food a lot!!! totally not just a morally bankrupt bastard#bastard is The correct term for him btw gap did Not want his illegitimate ass#does he eat Like That naturally or does he do it to strike fear into people#like a predator tearing prey apart#just imagine james staring at gitae absolutely desecrating a taco in mild disgust#gitae kim#my gluttonous king
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