#aw commission

[razzafrazzle]

my love for foppish fictional men truly knows no bounds

[image description: two drawings focusing on flavio from paper mario: the thousand-year door. the first picture of flavio singing, drawn in a simple, sketchy style. the second drawing is a comic. the first panel shows mario and goombella sitting across from flavio, who has a dreamy expression on his face and is saying, "we shall gather a crew and set off on a journey of romance!". the second panel is of goombella replying by saying "yknow that there are only male sailors in rogueport, right?", with a note below that panel saying "shes a lesbian shes just also homophobic". the third panel is of flavio looking confused, followed by the final panel of flavio in front of a rainbow background as he says "yes? does flavio stutter??". end id]

[devisopod]

sketch commission for @orangephoenix6 !

thanks a bunch!

[whatevahwhatevah]

Sorry for disappearing again, have some more kyman

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon’s financial shell game let it create an “impossible” monopoly

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.

Pro-monopoly economists embody Ely Devons's famous aphorism that "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Rather than using the way the world actually works as their starting point for how to think about it, they build elaborate models out of abstract principles like "rational actors." The resulting mathematical models are so abstractly elegant that it's easy to forget that they're just imaginative exercises, disconnected from reality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

These models predicted that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power. Even if they became a monopoly – in the sense of dominating sales of various kinds of goods – the company still wouldn't get monopoly power.

For example, if Amazon tried to take over a category by selling goods below cost ("predatory pricing"), then rivals could just wait until the company got tired of losing money and put prices back up, and then those rivals could go back to competing. And if Amazon tried to keep the loss-leader going indefinitely by "cross-subsidizing" the losses with high-margin profits from some other part of its business, rivals could sell those high margin goods at a lower margin, which would lure away Amazon customers and cut the supply lines for the price war it was fighting with its discounted products.

That's what the model predicted, but it's not what happened in the real world. In the real world, Amazon was able use its access to the capital markets to embark on scorched-earth predatory pricing campaigns. When diapers.com refused to sell out to Amazon, the company casually committed $100m to selling diapers below cost. Diapers.com went bust, Amazon bought it for pennies on the dollar and shut it down:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18563379/amazon-predatory-pricing-antitrust-law

Investors got the message: don't compete with Amazon. They can remain predatory longer than you can remain solvent.

Now, not everyone shared the antitrust establishment's confidence that Amazon couldn't create a durable monopoly with market power. In 2017, Lina Khan – then a third year law student – published "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," a landmark paper arguing that Amazon had all the tools it needed to amass monopoly power:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Today, Khan is chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that builds on some of the theories from that paper. One outcome of that suit is an unprecedented look at Amazon's internal operations. But, as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Stacy Mitchell describes in a piece for The Atlantic, key pieces of information have been totally redacted in the court exhibits:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/amazon-profits-antitrust-ftc/677580/

The most important missing datum: how much money Amazon makes from each of its lines of business. Amazon's own story is that it basically breaks even on its retail operation, and keeps the whole business afloat with profits from its AWS cloud computing division. This is an important narrative, because if it's true, then Amazon can't be forcing up retail prices, which is the crux of the FTC's case against the company.

Here's what we know for sure about Amazon's retail business. First: merchants can't live without Amazon. The majority of US households have Prime, and 90% of Prime households start their ecommerce searches on Amazon; if they find what they're looking for, they buy it and stop. Thus, merchants who don't sell on Amazon just don't sell. This is called "monopsony power" and it's a lot easier to maintain than monopoly power. For most manufacturers, a 10% overnight drop in sales is a catastrophe, so a retailer that commands even a 10% market-share can extract huge concessions from its suppliers. Amazon's share of most categories of goods is a lot higher than 10%!

What kind of monopsony power does Amazon wield? Well, for one thing, it is able to levy a huge tax on its sellers. Add up all the junk-fees Amazon charges its platform sellers and it comes out to 45-51%:

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

Competitive businesses just don't have 45% margins! No one can afford to kick that much back to Amazon. What is a merchant to do? Sell on Amazon and you lose money on every sale. Don't sell on Amazon and you don't get any business.

The only answer: raise prices on Amazon. After all, Prime customers – the majority of Amazon's retail business – don't shop for competitive prices. If Amazon wants a 45% vig, you can raise your Amazon prices by a third and just about break even.

But Amazon is wise to that: they have a "most favored nation" rule that punishes suppliers who sell goods more cheaply in rival stores, or even on their own site. The punishments vary, from banishing your products to page ten million of search-results to simply kicking you off the platform. With publishers, Amazon reserves the right to lower the prices they set when listing their books, to match the lowest price on the web, and paying publishers less for each sale.

That means that suppliers who sell on Amazon (which is anyone who wants to stay in business) have to dramatically hike their prices on Amazon, and when they do, they also have to hike their prices everywhere else (no wonder Prime customers don't bother to search elsewhere for a better deal!).

Now, Amazon says this is all wrong. That 45-51% vig they claim from business customers is barely enough to break even. The company's profits – they insist – come from selling AWS cloud service. The retail operation is just a public service they provide to us with cross-subsidy from those fat AWS margins.

This is a hell of a claim. Last year, Amazon raked in $130 billion in seller fees. In other words: they booked more revenue from junk fees than Bank of America made through its whole operation. Amazon's junk fees add up to more than all of Meta's revenues:

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/AMZN-Q4-2023-Earnings-Release.pdf

Amazon claims that none of this is profit – it's just covering their operating expenses. According to Amazon, its non-AWS units combined have a one percent profit margin.

Now, this is an eye-popping claim indeed. Amazon is a public company, which means that it has to make thorough quarterly and annual financial disclosures breaking down its profit and loss. You'd think that somewhere in those disclosures, we'd find some details.

You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. Amazon's disclosures do not break out profits and losses by segment. SEC rules actually require the company to make these per-segment disclosures:

https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3524&context=lawreview#:~:text=If%20a%20company%20has%20more,income%20taxes%20and%20extraordinary%20items.

That rule was enacted in 1966, out of concern that companies could use cross-subsidies to fund predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices. But over the years, the SEC just…stopped enforcing the rule. Companies have "near total managerial discretion" to lump business units together and group their profits and losses in bloated, undifferentiated balance-sheet items:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2021/dec/crouching-tiger-hidden-dragons

As Mitchell points you, it's not just Amazon that flouts this rule. We don't know how much money Google makes on Youtube, or how much Apple makes from the App Store (Apple told a federal judge that this number doesn't exist). Warren Buffett – with significant interest in hundreds of companies across dozens of markets – only breaks out seven segments of profit-and-loss for Berkshire Hathaway.

Recall that there is one category of data from the FTC's antitrust case against Amazon that has been completely redacted. One guess which category that is! Yup, the profit-and-loss for its retail operation and other lines of business.

These redactions are the judge's fault, but the real fault lies with the SEC. Amazon is a public company. In exchange for access to the capital markets, it owes the public certain disclosures, which are set out in the SEC's rulebook. The SEC lets Amazon – and other gigantic companies – get away with a degree of secrecy that should disqualify it from offering stock to the public. As Mitchell says, SEC chairman Gary Gensler should adopt "new rules that more concretely define what qualifies as a segment and remove the discretion given to executives."

Amazon is the poster-child for monopoly run amok. As Yanis Varoufakis writes in Technofeudalism, Amazon has actually become a post-capitalist enterprise. Amazon doesn't make profits (money derived from selling goods); it makes rents (money charged to people who are seeking to make a profit):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profits are the defining characteristic of a capitalist economy; rents are the defining characteristic of feudalism. Amazon looks like a bazaar where thousands of merchants offer goods for sale to the public, but look harder and you discover that all those stallholders are totally controlled by Amazon. Amazon decides what goods they can sell, how much they cost, and whether a customer ever sees them. And then Amazon takes $0.45-51 out of every dollar. Amazon's "marketplace" isn't like a flea market, it's more like the interconnected shops on Disneyland's Main Street, USA: the sign over the door might say "20th Century Music Company" or "Emporium," but they're all just one store, run by one company.

And because Amazon has so much control over its sellers, it is able to exercise power over its buyers. Amazon's search results push down the best deals on the platform and promote results from more expensive, lower-quality items whose sellers have paid a fortune for an "ad" (not really an ad, but rather the top spot in search listings):

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

This is "Amazon's pricing paradox." Amazon can claim that it offers low-priced, high-quality goods on the platform, but it makes $38b/year pushing those good deals way, way down in its search results. The top result for your Amazon search averages 29% more expensive than the best deal Amazon offers. Buy something from those first four spots and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average, you need to pick the seventeenth item on the search results page to get the best deal:

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645/

For 40 years, pro-monopoly economists claimed that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power over buyers and sellers. Today, Amazon exercises that power so thoroughly that its junk-fee revenues alone exceed the total revenues of Bank of America. Amazon's story – that these fees barely stretch to covering its costs – assumes a nearly inconceivable level of credulity in its audience. Regrettably – for the human race – there is a cohort of senior, highly respected economists who possess this degree of credulity and more.

Of course, there's an easy way to settle the argument: Amazon could just comply with SEC regs and break out its P&L for its e-commerce operation. I assure you, they're not hiding this data because they think you'll be pleasantly surprised when they do and they don't want to spoil the moment.

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/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Image: Doc Searls (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/4863121221/

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

[wotterotter]

I fucking HATE this guy I want to shake him around until I give him fucking BRAIN DAMAGE (proceeds to draw him with a perspective i hate and the chunkiest half tone affect that made the canvas 52 MBS and I had to screenshot it just to send it to people over discord)

[rosekasa]

sketch commission for amalgamworkz31 's incredible redesign of purple tigress!!!

ko-fi sketch commissions

[sketchy-tour]

✨DANDY COMMISSION APPRECIATION POST✨

Of course, being commissions I bought, none of these lovely beautiful pieces are by me. Credits (in order) @frillsand @weevmo @lanlishiba @parrotparfait @kandavers

I am!! GONNA attempt to gush about all these pieces without devolving into keysmashes or screams but like. A. AA. AAA. I was gonna say "yall have no idea how annoying I am about Dandy" but honestly you do. You all do because I shake my silly puppet oc around CONSTANTLY.

ANYWAY I JUST!!! AUGH! ALL OF THEM MAKE ME SO HAPPY!!! The fact I get to see Dandy in art styles I love and adore around the fandom fills me with a joy I cannot even DESCRIBE to you!! OOH I JUST!!! I love them. I love these pieces. I stare at them all the time and now I'm rattling them all around at you guys!!!!! LOOK!!! LOOK AT THESE LOVELY LOVELY PIECES RN AND CHECK OUT THE ARTISTS!!!!!

[girlwiththeglow]

Pinned - a commission by @luxmoogle

'cuz if you're gonna pin your love down, do it with style!

I cannot get over how beautifully this artist has captured these two and their personalities with her incredible art style (and she hasn't even seen the show!) my eyes were blessed with this gorgeous piece and I knew I had to sing her praises. Please support this artist and send love her way for she deserves it!!! Thank you so much again for bringing my idea to life!

[marzipanladyart]

Hythades Halloween commission for @dawntrailmix, thank you!

[delilah-briarwood]

FUNDRAISING

Recently, we lost my brother to brain cancer after a hard fought(and stubborn) battle, leaving behind a widow and three kids. Rob was a larger than life figure that will never be replaced and will be impossible to forget.

But I want to do anything I can to help. The post linked leads to my commissions post. Any money I make from it between now and December will go to his widow and their kids. Any support is appreciated. 💜

Please at least check this out

[maudiemoods]

COMMISSIONS! YAY!

Check bio for availability!

Full body with full color and shading/lighting: $45

Full body flat colors: $35

Full body no/base color! (Having color doesn't change the price): $ 25

Partial/half body!

Sketch: $15

Flat colors: $20

Full color with lighting and shading $25

Sorry this is the only example I have!

Headshots!

Sketch: $10

Flat colors: $15

Full color with shading/lighting: $20

Doodle pages/reference page!

Price depends on how many drawings there are and how complete they are! You can mix and match stuff! For the examples, both would be $52! I take the full price of the most expensive one then add 50% the price of all the other drawings!

It's +70% for an extra character with a three character limit!

Will draw!

Ocs, fan characters, ship art, lightly suggestive stuff, tv characters, furries, pets, light gore!

Won't draw!

NSFW, real people, hate art, anything illegal, fetish art, heavy gore, anything that makes me uncomfortable!

Terms and conditions!

My commissions are for personal use only. You cannot sell anything with my art on it. It's not for branding. To clarify, you can make a sticker or tshirt with it but you cannot sell these items.

Commissions usually take up to two weeks! I may ask for extra time! If a month has passed and you don't have your commission, I will give a full refund plus whatever I was able to get done.

I will send you the sketch before I begin to clean it up for the line art. After you have approved it, I will begin to clean everything up! After I begin this next step, I will not make any changes to the line art. Please keep that in mind and tell me when you don't like something in the sketch! I have no problem changing it to what you want!

After the sketch has been approved, I will not issue a refund unless it's ABSOLUTELY needed.

I can refuse to draw anything that makes me uncomfortable. If you're unsure, ask! I'm reasonable and will gently let you down!

Thanks for reading!

[mcsiggy]

if im honest, im trying very hard to not publicly be upset about how the internet censorship has ruined so much for me and every other adult creator's income out there where i feel like the moment i cant post nsfw on patreon, i feel like that's it for me. i don't have anything else outside of what i do now and i'm just, tired.

[space-blue]

Com'ed art for Five is an Awful Number

I have recently updated Five is an Awful Number with this art! It was commissioned from Svitor ages ago and was meant to go with future chapters.

Avatar brainrot left me in the wake of pretty bad fandom experiences, and I've struggled a lot to feel inversted again, despite really enjoying the character designs and opportunities for creative outlet. I hope I'll one day recover the appropriate brainrot to continue Aitya's story, but in the meantime please enjoy this art.

[osatokun]

Made a proper price list x_X whew..

[bbygirl-aemond]

baela saying rhaenys died "with honor, in dragon fire, the way my mother chose" i see what you're setting up here 👀

[screwpinecaprice]

Commisison for @e350tb of a Sadie cut out Big Donut advertisment! Thank you so much for commissioning! 😁

For someone who's bummed off with her job, she really still is nice with the costumers from what we saw. I can see why they would choose to make her a face of their ad.