#Eat predators

[what-thisiscrazzzy]

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)

[januscorner]

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

[ophiedokes]

two more hours diving deep into the failings of Eat Predators

[that0nebird]

Alexa Nikolas trying to make a comeback after doxxing drake bells victim is so beyond foul I physically can’t

[baddiephilosopher]

Look at what’s being searched on YouTube. Stop posting your kids.

[tiredf-o-u-r]

Obsessed with tumblrs take on the crucifixion of drake

[platoapproved]

Follow up with the vampire Armand about diet and exercise.

[cute-sweet-corgo]

Mmm desliishs anywaaay

[laurelsofhighever]

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.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

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

[melljam]

gitae sinisterly devouring food

evidently very evil !

[puppppppppy]

you are umasou

[the-faultofdaedalus]

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

[semisolidmind]

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.

[vvitchllng]

Imogen Temult you will live in my brain forever what if You were born to parents who loved you but not enough and you grew up in a town that held you at arms length for the power you were cursed born with so you clutched at that power instead but it never filled you just made you ache with the emptiness they left you with.

And then you meet a woman just like you who’s been so lonely and empty and cold for so so long and you hold her hand and think maybe you’re enough for each other maybe this is what you’ve been searching for all along and then there’s a whole group of people who you grow to love and who love you but at the same time there’s still that storm inside you, a howling raging emptiness that only seems to grow as you get stronger and it’s calling you. It holds your mother in its grasp as bait and you know it’s a trap but you’ve been starving for her love all your life so you go to her over and over again, can’t help yourself from trying to gorge on the crumbs of affection she gives despite the warnings from your friends.

It works and you save her but now you’re confronted with that starving entity that lives inside you birthed you cursed you is you and it’s threatening your friends while still calling to you like it’s home so you take it into you. And at first its hunger is so much stronger than yours and you’re consumed instead but then. Well. You’re alone in a void with the remnants of a god and your friends are in danger and you’re powerless but maybe you don’t have to be. You’re a predator too as you consume the remnants of a god and tilt your head at the next one. You’re a predator too you think as you stare up at the gargantuan form of the hunger that raised you and claim it for your own, take it into you like maybe this will finally satisfy you.

Now you’re stumbling out from the battles that nearly killed you coming face to face with the people who are supposed to be on your side (you’re supposed to be One Of Them why can they never See That ) and they’re afraid of you. They look at you and see something Wrong in you but this time you’re strong enough. This time they have to listen to you because this time you’re finally full of enough power to make them understand.

[noirscript]

Descent Into Madness

warning/s: YANDERE. implied noncon. unwilling darling. failed escape attempt.

You should’ve known better.

You should’ve listened to your instinct the moment your met his crazed gaze. The way he acted after seeing your shaking figure while standing behind his mother was anything but normal.

You should’ve ignored your friend’s plea as they begged for your help. You weren’t their only friend, and you rarely even spoke to each other before. You should’ve known that something was odd.

“I must say, you’re getting better at hiding now.” You could hear the snapping of branches along with the horrifying sound of the detector he was holding.

You should’ve tried to run a couple of meters more instead of cowering in fear while hiding under an enormous tree root. But nobody, not even yourself, can blame you for doing so.

For the last six months, your job as personal assistant has been forgotten by your employer's son—Nicholas.

At first, he was docile. He acted as if he wouldn’t hurt any living being on Earth; not even a bug. He barely even paid attention to you and you can do your tasks smoothly.

However, as time went by, his health improved.

He no longer stares outside his window while sitting on his cushioned wooden chair for hours. He started to spend more time sitting in the living room while watching the television.

Perhaps that was when it all began.

You’ve felt his prickling gaze behind your back whenever he's in the living room. But the head maid dismissed your claims and even scolded you for getting ideas in your head.

They kept on repeating the same lines on and on until they decided to move him in a more isolated area.

You were the only person assigned to look after him. Not even a maid, nor a driver who could offer you a ride to the nearest village was assigned to help you out.

“Yoo~hoo~ Y/N!”

You were immediately dragged back in reality when you heard his voice.

Your body began to tremble as soon as you hear the rustling of dried leaves and snapping of the branches nearby.

“I'm not sure whether I should reward you for doing so well in hide and seek or punish you for making me look so hard for you.”

The beeping sound began to speed up as he gets closer to your position. That thing was the bane of your existence.

“Y/N!” he yelled, the tone of his voice sounded more agitated than it was earlier. “I swear to every fucking god, I will teach you a lesson.”

Tears began to roll down your cheeks. You tried to keep yourself from sobbing, but it was already too late.

You could already see his soiled boots few feet away from where you were. The agonizing sound of sharp and rapid beeping echoed your head.

It was only a matter of time before he would lean towards your position.

He pointed a flashlight close to your face, almost blinding you in the process. Followed by a horrifying cackle.

“Found you.”

tbc.