#GURR

[thebat-musicman]

IT HAPPENED AGAIN

[mitochondria-larson]

Suddenly remembered I had this gem saved in my phone

[samsmusicdump]

Gurr is a band from Berlin consisting of Andreya Casablanca and Laura Lee. They met while going to school for their undergrad, and began making music together. They released their first EP after spending a year abroad in the States and immediately started touring with money they'd saved up. In My Head is titled such because the topics of these songs are all thoughts that went through Laura and Andreya's heads. I heard In My Head for the first time in 2020. The first song that I knew from this album was Moby Dick, and because I'm a fiend for clean electric guitar with a basic beat under small-plate-reverbed vocals, I had to give the entire album a listen, and boy, was it worth it. Each song from this 30 minute album is so memorable and I can confidently it's a skipless album.

Moby Dick begins with catchy rhythm guitar, a solid beat, and a simple bass line. It's not much, which works in its favor because this song is just flow-y and distant, so it doesn't need a lot. This song feels like it would play in a movie at a moment where the main character decides they need to get their life back on track after going through an extremely low point and they start working their ass off to achieve that goal. When the lead guitar comes in with a short and sweet solo towards the end, it feels like the song just pushed on the accelerator and is going 20 miles above the speed limit while still managing to not be "too much".

Diamonds resembles a rock song more than most other songs on the album. It also begins with catchy yet simple guitar. The dynamics of the vocals are perfect. They expand exactly where they should (on the third and fourth "never, never, never cry up") and are soft where they should be (on the third "my baby's mad I never, never, never, cry up"). The transition from the verses to the chorus and vice versa is small but effective. The fuzzy guitar plays two steps leading into the chords while the drums play the beat on the two steps. The album title is sang in this song; "In my head, I never cry up". Gurr stated in an interview with New Noise Magazine that they didn't want to have a title track because the title should be applicable to all the songs on the album, so they mention the phrase "in my head" throughout the album. Towards the end of Diamonds, "Don't trust the snake" is whispered. I wonder if the snake is supposed to be your mind.

#1985 is also a bop. This is about the life of an old man who fantasizes about living the stereotypical "rockstar" life, according to Gurr. You understand from the song that the guy's name is Carlos. I absolutely adore the lyric "Underage drinking, fucking around, I had to turn thirty before I could be so cool". I like the effect that the really subtle bass line has on the chorus. It makes the chorus pop out just slightly more.

Like I mentioned earlier, all of the songs on this album are memorable. They all combine to form a cohesive album that feels like it was made on a life-changing trip where the artists found a part of themselves and put it into music. This is the soundtrack to a spontaneous road trip you decide to take with your friends in the summer and you drive to a place hundreds of miles away from home and you happen to have a convertible and you keep the hood down. This is In My Head.

[khanidae]

Gurr the Stormbringer

Old artfight revenge for VinRage (dA)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Keir Starmer appoints Jeff Bezos as his “first buddy”

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Turns out Donald Trump isn't the only world leader with a tech billionaire "first buddy" who gets to serve as an unaccountable, self-interested de facto business regulator. UK PM Keir Starmer has just handed the keys to the British economy over to Jeff Bezos.

Oh, not literally. But here's what's happened: the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority, an organisation charged with investigating and punishing tech monopolists (like Amazon) has just been turned over to Doug Gurr, the guy who used to run Amazon UK.

This is – incredibly – even worse than it sounds. Marcus Bokkerink, the outgoing head of the CMA, was amazing, and he had charge over the CMA's Digital Markets Unit, the largest, best-staffed technical body of any competition regulator, anywhere in the world. The DMU uses its investigatory powers to dig deep into complex monopolistic businesses like Amazon, and just last year, the DMU was given new enforcement powers that would let it custom-craft regulations to address tech monopolization (again, like Amazon's).

But it's even worse. The CMA and DMU are the headwaters of a global system of super-effective Big Tech regulation. The CMA's deeply investigated reports on tech monopolists are used as the basis for EU regulations and enforcement actions, and these actions are then re-run by other world governments, like South Korea and Japan:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

The CMA is the global convener and ringleader in tech antitrust, in other words. Smaller and/or poorer countries that lack the resources to investigate and build a case against US Big Tech companies have been able to copy-paste the work of the CMA and hold these companies to account. The CMA invites (or used to invite) all of these competition regulators to its HQ in Canary Wharf for conferences where they plan global strategy against these monopolists:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

Firing the guy who is making all this happening and replacing him with Amazon's UK boss is a breathtaking display of regulatory capture by Starmer, his business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, and his exchequer, Rachel Reeves.

But it gets even worse, because Amazon isn't just any tech monopolist. Amazon is a many-tentacled kraken built around an e-commerce empire. Antitrust regulators elsewhere have laid bare how Amazon uses that retail monopoly to take control over whole economies, while raising prices and crushing small businesses.

To understand Amazon's market power, first you have to understand "monopsonies" – markets dominated by buyers (monopolies are markets dominated by sellers – Amazon is both a monopolist and a monopsonist). Monopsonies are far more dangerous than monopolies, because they are easier to establish and easier to defend against competitors. Say a single retailer accounts for 30% of your sales: there isn't a business in the world that can survive an overnight 30% drop in sales, so that 30% market share might as well be 100%. Once your order is big enough that canceling it would bankrupt your supplier, you have near-total control over that supplier.

Amazon boasts about this. They call it "the flywheel": Amazon locks in shoppers (by getting them to prepay for a year's worth of shipping in advance, via Prime). The fact that a business can't sell to a large proportion of households if it's not on Amazon gives Amazon near-total power over that business. Amazon uses that power to demand discounts and charge junk fees to the businesses that rely on it. This allows it to lower prices, which brings in more customers, which means that even more businesses have to do business with Amazon to stay afloat:

https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

That's Amazon's version, anyway. In reality, it's a lot scuzzier. Amazon doesn't just demand deep discounts from its suppliers – it demand unsustainable discounts from them. For example, Amazon targeted small publishers with a program called the "Gazelle Project." Jeff Bezos told his negotiators to bring down these publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/a-new-book-portrays-amazon-as-bully/

The idea was to get a bunch of cheap books for the Kindle to help it achieve critical mass, at the expense of driving these publishers out of business. They were a kind of disposable rocket stage for Amazon.

Deep discounts aren't the only way that Amazon feeds off its suppliers: it also lards junk-fee atop junk-fee. For every pound Amazon makes from its customers, it rakes in 45-51p in fees:

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

Now, just like there's no business that can survive losing 30% of its sales overnight, there's also no business that can afford to hand 45-51% of its gross margin to a retailer. For businesses to survive at all on Amazon, they have to jack their prices up – way up. However, Amazon has an anticompetitive deal called "most favoured nation status" that forces suppliers to sell their goods on Amazon at the same price as they sell them elsewhere (even from their own stores). So when companies raise their prices in order to pay ransom to Amazon, they have to raise their prices everywhere. Far from being a force for low prices, Amazon makes prices go up everywhere, from the big Tesco's to the corner shop:

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

Amazon makes so much money off of this scam that it doesn't have to pay anything to ship its own goods – the profits from overcharging merchants for "fulfillment by Amazon" pay for all the shipping, on everything Amazon sells:

https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/AmazonMonopolyTollbooth-2023.pdf

Amazon competes with its own sellers, but unlike those sellers, it doesn't have to pay a 45-51% rake – and it can make its competitor-customers cover the full cost of its own shipping! On top of that, Amazon maintains the pretense that its headquarters are in Luxembourg, the tax- and crime-haven, and pays a fraction of the taxes that British businesses pay to HMRC (and that's not counting the 45-51% tax they pay to Jeff Bezos's monoposony).

That's not the only way that Amazon unfairly competes with British businesses, though: Amazon uses its position as a middleman between buyers and sellers to identify the most successful products sold by its own customers. Then it copies those products and sells them below the original inventor's costs (because it gets free shipping, pays no tax, and doesn't have to pay its own junk fees), and drives those businesses into the ground. Even Jeff "Project Gazelle" Bezos seems to understand that this is a bad look, which is why he perjured himself to the American Congress when he was questioned under oath about it:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58961836

Amazon then places its knockoff products above the original goods on its search results page. Amazon makes $38b selling off placement on these search pages, and the top results for an Amazon search aren't the best matches for your query – they're the ones that pay the most. On average, Amazon's top result for a search is 29% more expensive than the best match on the site. On average, the top row of results is 25% more expensive than the best match on the site. On average, Amazon buries the best result for your search 17 places down the results page:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Amazon, in other words, acts like the business regulator for the economies it dominates. It decides what can be sold, and at what prices. It decides whose products come up when you search, and thus which businesses deserve to live and which ones deserve to die. An economy dominated by Amazon isn't a market economy – it's a planned economy, run by Party Secretary Bezos for the benefit of Amazon's shareholders.

Now, there is a role for a business regulator, because some businesses really don't deserve to live (because they sell harmful products, engage in deceptive practices, etc). The UK has a regulator that's in charge of this stuff: the Competition and Markets Authority, which is now going to be run by Jeff Bezos's hand-picked UK Amazon boss. That means that Amazon is now both the official and the unofficial central planner of the UK economy, with a free hand to raise prices, lower quality, and destroy British businesses, while hiding its profits in Luxemourg and starving the exchequer of taxes.

The "first buddy" role that Keir Starmer just handed over to Jeff Bezos is, in every way, more generous than the first buddy deal Trump gave Elon Musk.

Starmer's government claims they're doing this for "growth" but Amazon isn't a force for growth, it's force for extraction. It is a notorious underpayer of its labour force, a notorious tax-cheat, and a world-beating destroyer of local economies, local jobs, and local tax bases. Contrary to Amazon's own self-mythologizing, it doesn't deliver lower prices – it raises prices throughout the economy. It doesn't improve quality – this is a company whose algorithmic recommendation system failed to recognize that an "energy drink" was actually its own drivers' bottled piss, which it then promoted until it was the best-selling energy drink on the platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

There's a reason that the UK, the EU, Japan and South Korea found it so easy to collaborate on antitrust cases against American companies: these are all countries whose competition law was rewritten by American technocrats during the Marshall Plan, modeled on the US's own laws. The bedrock of US competition law is 1890's Sherman Act, whose author, Senator John Sherman, declared that:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

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

Jeff Bezos is the autocrat of trade that John Sherman warned us about, 135 years ago. And Keir Starmer just abdicated in his favour.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

Image: UK Parliament/Maria Unger (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keir_Starmer_2024.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh.jpg

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

[thephaby]

hi phaby! big phan. how do you keep your hair like that in the womb? are dnps genes so strong it helps avoid splinges or do you have a daily routine in there?

phil drinks hairspray to maintain my fringe

[cassierobinsons]

i checked out of this whole discourse when someone compared dean calling ruby a skank to him theoretically calling a demon in a black vessel the n-word. those are two drastically different things, you wretched snow roach.

[transformers-the-hunted]

Updated version of my hun-gurr design

[cybertron-smash-or-pass]

G1 Hun-Gurr

[real-reulbbr-band]

Gillian Lynne had a very brief amount of time with us. In the time we had with her, she attempted to cram 35 years of feline essence into less than 15 minutes of rehearsal. She did it. With some words but, mainly, with one gesture. “Now—I don’t want to disparage American performers, but Americans on the stage are usually saying, ‘LOOK AT ME!!!,’” she said, and her body did an odd little ghost of a George-M.-Cohan-meets-Al-Jolson-meets-Liza-Minnelli-meets-Liberace gesture. “But cats…” Her eyes lit up and narrowed at the same time, “…cats say—” And, in a flash, she shot up, one foot off the ground, and spun every line of her 89-year-old body up-up-up in a plume of arms and hands and eyes and—“‘Look at me!’” It was a one-second move. It said everything you’d ever need to know about Cats.

-Christopher Gurr, (Asparagus (Gus)/Bustopher Jones) from the CATS, Broadway revival. Jezebel 'Is the Stage Cast of Cats Embarrassed? An Inquiry' (x)

[fivedayriot]

Please comfort me i did horrible in splatoon today post insert here + some cute comfort after the fail that was Ivys awful last shift. They are everything to me okay. if you read this i love you tell me how ur day went in the tags or something. hi.

bonus flyfish pilot smallfry reaction image....

[indragonsaur]

Transformers: Cybertron chronicles: Hun-gurrr

[robot-rarepairs-dotcom]

I don’t know about baseline Hun-gurr and Scattershot, but thinking about the Technobots and the Terrorcons in shattered glass has me thinking that the two leaders of those groups in that universe would be pretty cute together. Like Scattershot goes to the Terrorcon to get like. Professional mental help for him and his team, and him and Hur-gurr end up bonding from there.

I love this fandom because I was today years old when I heard of this

[nofatclips]

Flashing Black by Images In Vogue from the collection album Incipience 1: Studio Tracks 1981-1982, part of the Incipience 1981-1983 box-set (The title on BandCamp is wrong!)

[99tech99]

the matterhorn was imagineered by someone who taught himself trigonometry, bc the math was too advanced for him to have learned it it high school

[onekisstotakewithme]

tagged by the lovely @boasamishipper to do this (i'm stealing the love letter earrings 💌 thanks)

tagging whoever is interested <3