#Monopoly Capitalism

[stillnaomi]

some people will be like "capitalism has created monopolies and they aren't serving society well," and their solution is to legally constrain monopolies, not actually solve the underlying problem: capitalism

the problem with monopolies isn't that planning and distribution of the economy is being centralised, it's that the centralisation is created to serve the private interest of the business owners, instead of society's interests

[sataniccapitalist]

Failure to block the insurance giant’s market consolidation, including by a judge with a potential conflict of interest, has led to worse care, higher prices, and a mounting human toll.

[emptyanddark]

weekly reading list

(some of these are not very recent, but i have a lot of other things to read. this is a short list of interesting or things i found relevant to understand current events)

America Doesn’t Wage War. Government Institutions Do - very USA-centric but provides insights re: the prolific paramilitary organizations aided by US government, and the de-democratization that's been happening in the US.

Trapped by Empire - Guam is one of the colonies still under US-empire rule. the island is put in difficult position with no easy solution on all fronts - security, environmentally, economically etc.

“A Closed, Burnt Huwara”: How Israeli Settlers Launched A Pogrom - the harrowing happenings in last month's pogrom by Israelis against a Palestinian village.

The PA’s Revenue Structure and Israel’s Containment Strategy - how Israel restricts the PA's economic independence, worsening conditions to Palestinians who are entirely at the (non)mercy of their occupiers.

You Are Not a Parrot - the prolific linguist Emily M. Bender dispels the mystical brainrot around "AI" and Large Language Models (ChatGPT etc). Interesting and insightful. she is also one of the writers of the important article, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots"

World Development under Monopoly Capitalism - reviews the question 'did globalization actually make things better'?, today's global capitalism and monopoly capitalism

The Rot Economy & Mass tech worker layoffs and the soft landing - both discuss the similar topics, about the bizarre realities of the tech sector, as put in the latter by Doctorow: "The equation is simple: the more companies invest in maintenance, research, development, moderation, anti-fraud, customer service and all the other essential functions of the business, the less money there is to remit to people who do nothing and own everything."

Silicon Valley elites are afraid. History says they should be - people around the world were exposed by the media to the recent stupidity of US tech executives & investors, resulting in collapsing their bank. here's a rational take about it, with history about the more militant opposition against Silicon Valley.

The New Irrationalism - explores contemporary irrationalist trends, the history of irrationalism and its philosophy. i found it thought-provoking.

[once-in-a-blue-moon2021]

INDIA WOUNDED: A BIRD’S EYE VIEW

Compiled By Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay Posted on 12/02/2021 Updated on 01/11/2023 (GMT 15:45 hrs) “If thou cannot save me, why unfurl such deafening arrangements then?” Do you know what is Matsya Nyaya? The Sanskrit word Matsya Nyaya (Sanskrit: मत्स्यन्याय; mātsyanyāya) refers to the principle of the Law of Fish. It is the fundamental law of nature in which the big fish devours the smaller…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"COAL FIRM MANAGER QUIZZED ON LETTERS," Toronto Globe. October 17, 1933. Page 5. ---- "Promise" Not to Import German Product Subject of Questioning ---- QUEBEC TRIAL CONTINUES --- (Canadian Press Despatch.) Quebec. Oct. 16. The question of whether the Hartt & Adair Coal Company had any obligation not to import German coal occupied the attention of the Court of King's Bench today as the prosecution continued of six coal companies on charges of forming a price combine.

Andrew Flemming, Vice-President and General Manager of the Hartt & Adair Company, was in the witness box throughout today's session. Louis St. Laurent, acting as prosecuting counsel for the Quebec Attorney-General, produced a letter from Mr. Flemming which spoke of "our promise not to import any Germany buck- wheat."

Welsh Coal Preferred. Questioned as to the significance significance of of "promise," Mr. Flemming replied company did not want to handle any German coal as long as there was Welsh coal in abundance.

"Can you remember any reason for using 'promise' in your letter, and the word 'obligated in a cable?" Mr. St. Laurent asked.

"No, except, as I said before, I didn't want German anthracite."

In the same line of questioning, Mr. St. Laurent produced a letter from R. L. Piercey of T. T. Pascoe Limited, Swansea, to Mr. Flemming, which brought a smile from Mr. Justice Wilfrid Laliberte, Judge hearing the case, and a laugh from Senator Lorne C. Webster.

"I told the people at the dinner," the letter said, "that Webster was not the only one who had been working in Canada for the Welsh coal trade. Dr. Camsell had. been greatly interested in it since 1922, and the only difference was that Webster got a dollar a ton for his interest and Dr. Camsell nothing he is a civil servant."

(Dr. Charles Camsell is Deputy Minister of Mines at Ottawa.)

Another letter from Flemming Flemming was produced, as follows: "Signatory has seen Mr. Aird on one or two occasions, but no suggestion has been made as to what the price will be. It has been indicated that we are prepared to co-operate."

The reply from Piercey was then filed: "We are glad to note you have seen Mr. Aird - we sincerely hope you will be able to agree on prices, and, now you have 100 per cent. of the Welsh coal business in your hands, you should be able to get the utmost price out of Welsh coal."

"Utmost Price." "Did you get the utmost price?" Mr. St. Laurent asked. "That was the expression of Mr. Piercey, who was in Wales," Flemming replied. "Yes, but I am curious to know if the hope from Wales was possible in Canada?"

"I should like to know what is the utmost price," Flemming said. "It was a fair price, but not an utmost price."

Further correspondence dealt with the unsuccessful efforts of Lane & Robitaille of Quebec to buy a cargo of coal through two English firms. A letter from Pascoe's, put in evidence by the prosecution, read in part: "After the two firms had carefully combed the market they came to the conclusion they were up against a dead end, having also approached the Amalgamated with the same."

Amalgamated are working with us in this respect, and it is in their interest as well as ours to keep down the importers to a minimum." Subsequently they bought some coal from Bevans, and Pascoe's letter was put in: "We did our utmost to tie Bevans up with the monopoly, but failed in view of the fact that they had just released themselves from a monopoly with Amalgamated in which they were badly let down. This will no doubt cure small dealers of trying to get coal from other than the regular importers."

"Do you know if the cure was effective?" asked Mr. St. Laurent.

"I don't know," answered Mr. Flemming.

[sunshinestate323]

This didn't just happen and regular people didn't make this happen. The microplastics cancer on this planet has a rogues gallery of perps: the "energy" industry, the plastics industry, the fake water "industry," and every plastic-pushing transnational that bumped its quarterlies by unleashing ever-"cheaper" toxic petroleum-derived plastics on us, the unsuspecting public, and then blamed the victim (as in: "We who profit from plastics aren't to blame for your puny sperm count - it's YOU... for not recycling properly!" (IOW, a repeat of the evergreen classic: "Climate change is your fault for driving a car, not our fault for spending billions on regulatory engineering to ensure we can deplete and consume every "resource" till exhaustion and/or collapse without compunction or consequence.")

That blame-shifting continues to fuel the "energy" industry's peerless and profoundly effective mass conditioning campaign, throwing just enough doubt on their obvious crisis to ensure they can continue to wreck the world and all life with impunity.

[politijohn]

Source

Source

[blatentmisinformation]

There is nothing that could possibly go wrong with a single company having control over an incredible amount of infrastructure and capable of automatically pushing changes en masse that must be manually reverted even in critical software for emergency services.

[transit-fag]

Guys, guys guys, oh my god, It's finally here!!!

Google is getting sued in an Anti Trust Suit!!!!

Let's goooooo!!

[jayeltontoro]

I know my experience counts as 'anecdotal' (bc I haven't made a formal study of it) but I have experienced the arc from before PC's to now. As I was the youngest at the office when PC's were introduced everybody shoved their Computer problems onto me to solve. This was pre-IT departments and their ineffable logic was 'youngsters just know about this stuff'. Of course I had no more idea than anyone else - but I can read a manual. So I wound up very familiar with IT and making it work.

When Google search came along it was a fantastic tool. And it's difficult now to remember just how good it was. Researching obscure stuff was tremendous using the 'search within results' tool. So easy to drill down to specifically relevant data.

Then in the early 00's (might have been very end of 90's) this tool was removed. The Google line at the time was that 'search within search had never actually been a thing, it was just a way of showing concatenated keywords' so actually nothing had changed. Yep. Sure. Now I could not drill down though and there were lots of unrelated results that were for products regardless of search.

I switched to dassault's SE for research as it still did what Google no longer did.

Since then, every update of Google has got shitter. I don't use it if I can avoid it, but it's got tendrils and default-ins in so many ways that it's hard to avoid. Clearly where the money is spent. In making sure it's almost unavoidable. And it's useless. Pages and pages of crap products and middle-men 'listing services' that are just clickbait.

Can't wait for an anti-trust to break them up as they are strangling everything that's useful about search. Google is a mall front full of touts not a search engine.

And as for microfuckingsoft and crapple... Don't let me get started.

Sorry I'm rambling

Point is Cory (OP) is absolutely on the money and enshittification is the word I've been looking for all this time

Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766

But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren't hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They're the SEO equivalent of script kiddies, and they're running circles around Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Google insists that this isn't true, and if it is true, it's not their fault because the bad guys out there are so numerous, dedicated and inventive that Google can't help but be overwhelmed by them:

https://searchengineland.com/is-google-search-getting-worse-389658

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Google has long maintained that its scale is the only thing that keeps us safe from the scammers and spammers who would otherwise overwhelm any lesser-resourced defender. That's why it was so imperative that they pursue such aggressive growth, buying up hundreds of companies and integrating their products with search so that every mobile device, every ad, every video, every website, had one of Google's tendrils in it.

This is the argument that Google's defenders have put forward in their messaging on the long-overdue antitrust case against Google, where we learned that Google is spending $26b/year to make sure you never try another search engine:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-27/google-paid-26-3-billion-to-be-default-search-engine-in-2021

Google, we were told, had achieved such intense scale that the normal laws of commercial and technological physics no longer applied. Take security: it's an iron law that "there is no security in obscurity." A system that is only secure when its adversaries don't understand how it works is not a secure system. As Bruce Schneier says, "anyone can design a security system that they themselves can't break. That doesn't mean it works – just that it works for people stupider than them."

And yet, Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

A viral post by Housefresh – who review air purifiers – describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference. For example, when Google instituted a policy that reviewers should "discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research," sites that had previously regurgitated the same lists of the same top ten Amazon bestsellers "peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look."

But these grandiose claims – like the 67 air purifiers supposedly tested in Better Homes and Gardens's Des Moines lab – result in zero in-depth reviews and no published data. Moreover, these claims to rigorous testing materialized within a few days of Google changing its search ranking and said that high rankings would be reserved for sites that did testing.

Most damning of all is how the Better Homes and Gardens top air purifiers perform in comparison to the – extensively documented – tests performed by Housefresh: "plagued by high-priced and underperforming units, Amazon bestsellers with dubious origins (that also underperform), and even subpar devices from companies that market their products with phrases like ‘the Tesla of air purifiers.’"

One of the top ranked items on BH&G comes from Molekule, a company that filed for bankruptcy after being sued for false advertising. The model BH&G chose was ranked "the worst air purifier tested" by Wirecutter and "not living up to the hype" by Consumer Reports. Either BH&G's rigorous testing process is a fiction that they infused their site with in response to a Google policy change, or BH&G absolutely sucks at rigorous testing.

BH&G's competitors commit the same sins – literally, the exact same sins. Real Simple's reviews list the same photographer and the photos seem to have been taken in the same place. They also list the same person as their "expert." Real Simple has the same corporate parent as BH&G: Dotdash Meredith. As Housefresh shows, there's a lot of Dotdash Meredith review photos that seem to have been taken in the same place, by the same person.

But the competitors of these magazines are no better. Buzzfeed lists 22 air purifiers, including that crapgadget from Molekule. Their "methodology" is to include screenshots of Amazon reviews.

A lot of the top ranked sites for air purifiers are once-great magazines that have been bought and enshittified by private equity giants, like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait. As Housefresh points out, the marketing team that runs PopSci makes a lot of hay out of the 150 years of trust that went into the magazine, but the actual reviews are thin anaecdotes, unbacked by even the pretense of empiricism (oh, and they loooove Molekule).

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal.

Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right.

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/welcome-to-the-cnet-smart-home/

Google downranks sites that spend money and time on reviews like Housefresh and GearLab, and crams botshittened content mills like BH&G into our eyeballs instead.

In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined (ahem) Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good." When counterfeit money circulates in the economy, anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can, because the longer you hold it, the greater the likelihood that someone will detect the fraud and the coin will become worthless. Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money.

An internet run by Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good. It's not just that BH&G can "test" products at a fraction of the cost of Housefresh – through the simple expedient of doing inadequate tests or no tests at all – so they can put a lot more content up that Housefresh. But that alone wouldn't let them drive Housefresh off the front page of Google's search results. For that, BH&G has to mobilize some of their savings from the no test/bad test lab to do real rigorous science: science in defeating Google's security-through-obscurity system, which lets them command the front page despite publishing worse-than-useless nonsense.

Google has lost the spam wars. In response to the plague of botshit clogging Google search results, the company has invested in…making more botshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees.

That wasn't the deal. The deal was that Google would get a monopoly, and they would spend their monopoly rents to be so good that you could just click "I'm feeling lucky" and be teleported to the very best response to your query. A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.

When Google admits that it's losing the war to these kack-handed spam-farmers, that's frustrating. When they light $26b/year on fire making sure you don't ever get to try anything else, that's very frustrating. When they vaporize seventy billion dollars on financial engineering and shoot one in ten engineers, that's outrageous.

Google's scale has transcended the laws of business physics: they can sell an ever-degrading product and command an ever-greater share of our economy, even as their incompetence dooms any decent, honest venture to obscurity while providing fertile ground – and endless temptation – for scammers.

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/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[datamined]

UH OH Google just lost an antitrust case!

“A federal U.S. judge ruled Monday that Google has illegally held a monopoly in two market areas: search and text advertising.

The landmark case from the government, filed in 2020, alleged that Google has kept its share of the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. The court found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies.

The ruling marks the first anti-monopoly decision against a tech company in decades.”

Article by Rohan Goswami and Jennifer Elias

[crippledgiraff]

[nando161mando]

Why are things expensive?

4 companies control 55% to 85% of the meat market.

4 airlines control 80% of air travel.

3 companies control 92% of the soda market.

3 companies control 73% of the cereal market.

Why don't I hear about it?

6 companies control 90% of the news.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"SHOW CHANGE NEEDED BY TOBACCO EVIDENCE," Toronto Star. May 15, 1934. Page 2. --- Rouses People to Inequality and Injustice of System, Says Teskey ---- Interrupting the meeting with questions involving international finance, when the speakers continued to discuss national and local questions, a heckler was finally ejected by force at a C.C.F. meeting in Veterans' hall, Mount Dennis, last night. Two ushers hurried from the rear of the hall, grabbed the heckler and rushed him through the swinging doors, and deposited him on the curb.

With rebellion as a drastic alternative, the C.C.F. is Canada's only hope for a governmental system based upon human needs and Christianity truly applied, declared Dr. Luke Teskey, C.C.F. candidate for South York.

"In less than 100 years there have been two rebellions in Canada. We are now face to face with a crisis of the greatest magnitude in the history of Canada," continued Dr. Teskey. "The Canadian people will spring about a change in our social construction and it will either come by evolution or revolution.

"The evidence as given at Ottawa recently by Waller M. Stewart, wealthy tobacco manufacturer, that 'excise favors and been exchanged for campaign contributions to party friends of the present government,'" is well known.

"These facts are of inestimable value in rousing Canadian people to the gross inequalities and injustices of a capitalistic state of society," he declared.

"If the report in the press yesterday of the Saturday night clash at Earlscourt park between C.C.F. speakers and the police wherein the police state that I ordered the driver of the truck we were using as a platform to leave it standing on one of the athletic fields,' is true, then the police are bearing false witness against me," Dr. Teskey charged.

Other speakers included Councillor Arthur Williams of East York and J. W. Buckley, C.C.F. candidate in West York.

[bootleg-nessie]

Name a more iconic duo than anti-capitalist media and inevitably being co-opted by capitalists for profit