#importance of financial report

[theinnovativeindianaccountant]

The Indian Accountant. is an accounting company headquartered in Kolkata, India, with operations globally. Our experienced staff of professionals includes Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), Enrolled Agents (EAs), Chartered Accountants (CA-India), and other professional staff in various stages of certification

[vimesbootstheory]

"I have completed the initial review of your business plan and cash flow and overall, you've done a great job putting everything together! Often we have recommendations and changes to help strengthen one's application, however, I don't see any significant gaps in what you've presented."

this is great. I'm going to get a good grade in applying for a business loan, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve.

[ilonajosiane]

The Importance Of Regular Financial Reporting By Accounting Companies

Regular financial reporting is a cornerstone of effective business management. Accounting companies play a crucial role in generating and interpreting these reports, offering businesses the insights needed to maintain financial stability, comply with regulations, and plan for growth. Here’s why regular financial reporting is vital for businesses of all sizes.

1. Facilitating Informed Decision-Making

Financial reports provide a clear and comprehensive picture of a business’s financial health. Statements such as the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement help decision-makers assess performance, identify trends, and determine the best course of action. With up-to-date information, businesses can confidently make decisions about investments, expansion, or cost management.

2. Ensuring Regulatory Compliance

Businesses must comply with various tax laws, financial regulations, and industry standards. Regular financial reporting ensures that companies meet these obligations by providing accurate and timely data for tax filings and audits. Accounting companies stay updated on regulatory changes, helping businesses avoid penalties, audits, and legal complications.

3. Tracking Cash Flow and Liquidity

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business, and financial reports are essential for tracking it. Accounting companies generate regular cash flow statements that show where money is coming from and how it is being spent. This information helps businesses maintain liquidity, avoid cash shortages, and plan for future expenses.

4. Enhancing Financial Transparency

Transparency builds trust among stakeholders, including investors, lenders, and employees. Regular financial reports demonstrate accountability and provide stakeholders with the assurance that the business is managed responsibly. For publicly traded companies, this transparency is legally required and critical for maintaining investor confidence.

5. Monitoring Performance Against Goals

Regular reporting allows businesses to compare actual performance against budgets and forecasts. Accounting companies help track key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling businesses to identify areas where they are overperforming or underperforming. This helps management adjust strategies to stay aligned with financial goals.

6. Identifying Risks and Opportunities

Financial reports serve as a diagnostic tool, highlighting potential risks such as declining revenue, rising costs, or unprofitable ventures. They also reveal growth opportunities, like untapped markets or underutilized resources. Accounting companies provide actionable insights based on these findings, enabling businesses to respond proactively.

7. Supporting Strategic Planning

Long-term success requires strategic planning and regular financial reports are essential for this process. These reports help businesses forecast future revenue, assess funding needs, and prioritize investments. Accounting companies provide scenario analysis and projections to guide strategic decision-making and ensure sustainability.

8. Improving Efficiency and Cost Management

Detailed financial reports reveal inefficiencies and areas where costs can be reduced. Accounting companies analyze expense patterns and recommend ways to optimize spending, such as renegotiating supplier contracts or automating processes. This helps businesses improve their bottom line.

Conclusion

Regular financial reporting by accounting companies is essential for maintaining a healthy and sustainable business. It provides critical insights for decision-making, ensures compliance, enhances transparency, and supports strategic growth. By partnering with an accounting company in Fort Worth, TX, businesses gain access to expert analysis and tools that empower them to thrive in today’s competitive environment.

[ipasantosh]

Diploma in Taxation 

[cyber-soul-smartz]

Mastering Financial Literacy: A Complete Guide

Unlock your path to financial freedom! Dive into our comprehensive guide on financial literacy, budgeting, saving, investing, and retirement planning. Share your thoughts, ask questions, and join the conversation to take control of your financial future.

The Concept of Financial Literacy Financial Literacy Concept                Did you know that one in five American adults would rather spend more time planning their vacations than managing their finances? A survey by MyBankTracker  (n.d.) revealed that nearly 20.1 percent of American adults spend more time researching travel details than handling their money matters, yet 34 percent use an…

[boreal-sea]

Who is Kamala Harris?

These are all from her Wikipedia page. I have picked the top 5 for each of these sections. Maybe you think other things are more important, these are just the things that stood out to me:

Highlights as District Attorney of San Francisco:

was tough on gun crime: created a gun crime unit, set 90-day minimum sentences, raised bail for gun-related crimes, and prosecuted all assault weapon possession cases as felonies.

created a hate crimes unit specifically focused on LGBTQ hate crimes against children and teens in school.

was (and is) against the death penalty; during her time as DA did not cave to pressure in several cases to seek the death penalty.

helped create the San Francisco Reentry Division, aimed at helping prisoners reintegrate after their sentences are through; the program became a national model.

refused to enforce prop 8, which was at the time California's ban on gay marriage.

Highlights as Attorney General of California

introduced the Homeowner Bill of Rights and fought against banks, mortgage companies, and credit card companies.

fought for financial reimbursement for public employee and teacher pensions.

fought for environmental protections and secured settlements and indictments against several oil companies for oil spills.

conducted a review of implicit bias in policing and the use of deadly force and introduced implicit bias training.

declared a law that California law enforcement had to collect and report police violence.

Highlights as a California Senator:

condemned Trump's Muslim ban.

opposed Trump's appointments of Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions, his nomination of Neil Gorsuch, and voted against confirming Kavanaugh.

tried to make lynching a federal hate crime.

urged the Trump administration to investigate the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China.

voted to convict Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Highlights as Vice president:

as President of the Senate, cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate that ensured the passing of the American Rescue Act.

has cast more tie-breaking votes than any other Vice president in US history - she is responsible for many of the achievements of the Biden administration actually passing the Senate.

created task forces on corruption and human trafficking.

created a women's empowerment program.

has criticized Israel's actions during the current conflict in Gaza and called for an immediate ceasefire.

[kamikazeonwings]

esha clinging to his morals like a buoy in the storm

[lbtc]

Active listening is vital in coaching and mentoring, fostering trust and effective communication. It enhances guidance and problem-solving, contributing to overall personal and professional development. Read More - https://www.lbtc.co.uk/leadership-soft-skills-blog/why-is-active-listening-essential-in-coaching-and-mentoring-infographic/

[irisintheafterglow]

do you ever think about university!satoru who keeps checking out new books every week as an excuse to talk to the cute front desk employee?

he makes a bet one day with suguru that he can get a date with you faster than suguru can get a date with the rec center attendant. quantity over quality interactions would win him the bet, so he makes it his mission to simply see you as much as possible. but he can't hold up the line, right? so instead of leaning over the desk and chatting you up with a charming smile, he checks out new books every week just to see you and show his face, snagging little pieces of information about you as time goes on. he searches up corny jokes and puns to make you smile while you're scanning his school id, and he lives for the times he makes you laugh even in the brief interactions he has to plan out in his head (to not waste any time, obviously).

you start to ask him about himself, like if he also worked, if he was taking any difficult classes, and finally his major...to which his response is bioengineering. your eyes widen and you blink a few times, like he'd said something incorrect.

is something wrong?

not at all, you chuckle. i just thought your major would be undeclared considering the variety of stuff you check out.

variety? his eyebrows furrow and you turn the laptop monitor so that he can read what he'd been checking out for the past few weeks. he gapes dumbly at the screen, completely unaware that he'd left such an incriminatingly stupid paper trail. the truth was, he'd just been grabbing a book off a random shelf and checking it out, not bothering to see what it was. so, he could imagine your surprise when he checks out in succession:

a summary of the most important technological advancements during the qing dynasty,

a comprehensive guide to teaching physics (in german, of all things),

a periodical compilation of women's fashion from 1983,

and a bilingual translation of the communist manifesto.

i have...interesting taste? you burst out laughing harder than he'd ever made you laugh before and cover your face with your hands. what's so funny?

nothing, nothing, you insist. it's just, if you wanted my number, you could've just asked, you know?

would you have given it to me?

maybe, if you came in with a good book report the next week. you shrug innocently before handing him his newest loan: the financial workings of central american countries. before he can respond, you wave over the next student and he's shelved until next week.

when he approaches you again, he's holding his item with less bravado than previous weeks. your smile is teasing and he barely says a word, only placing the item gently on the front desk. he sheepishly slides over the book and you notice the post-it with his phone number on it before you notice the title.

"flirting for dummies."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

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. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

[theinnovativeindianaccountant]

The Indian Accountant. is an accounting company headquartered in Kolkata, India, with operations globally. Our experienced staff of professionals includes Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), Enrolled Agents (EAs), Chartered Accountants (CA-India), and other professional staff in various stages of certification

[feminist-space]

"To help prevent errors, debt collection agencies must follow specific state and federal laws when contacting you about debt or reporting negative information about your borrowing habits to the three major credit bureaus. This is why debt validation letters are so important. If you’ve been contacted by a collection agency but never received a debt validation letter from them, you should request proof that the debt is both legitimate and accurate. To help you, this guide covers everything you need to know about debt validation.

A debt validation letter is written communication in which you demand to confirm you have an outstanding debt. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) gives everyone the right to request verification of the debt from the collection agencies before attempting to collect it or making a derogatory report about it on someone’s credit report. If you’ve been contacted by a collection agency, you can expect them to send you one of these letters within five business days.

A debt validation letter reports the specifics of your debt from a collection agency. The letter reports what you owe, who you need to pay and when you must pay.

The letter needs to include very specific information:

-The company or person you owe money to

-The date you entered into a financial agreement with the creditor

-How much money you currently owe on the debt

-When you’re required to pay the debt before the agency escalates the case

Debt collectors may attempt to collect a debt from you without sending a debt validation letter. If this happens, you have the right to request the agency provide you with proof you owe the money before they can report the debt to the credit bureaus. Debt collectors must provide written evidence of how much you owe via a debt validation letter. Without this documentation, a collection agency will have a hard time proving you owe a specific amount.

There are several reasons debt validation is important."

Read the full piece here:

[psychotrenny]

I think one of Imperialism's most evil strategies is the national scale torture you'll see inflicted on countries that dare to dream of freedom. Like it's not just about overthrowing the anti-imperialist regime itself, but utterly breaking the very social, economic and in turn psychological foundations it's built upon. Prolonged periods of destruction that are as systematic as they are sadistic with the aim of making life unlivable until the government either collapses or gives in, accepting whatever concessions are forced upon them as the nation is remoulded into an dependent and obedient little neocolony.

Sometimes an imperialist power will act directly to achieve this (just take the gratuitous and deliberate destruction of civil infrastructure during the bombings of Yugoslavia and Iraq), but the preferred strategy is to employ local proxies. Groups like RENAMO in Mozambique or the Contras of Nicaragua. Bands of reactionaries, traitors and general desperadoes are gathered up, trained, armed and transported over the border at the expense of the Imperialists and their local collaborators. These armed groups have no interest in build mass support, of representing an alternative way of life. Their only purpose is destruction; killing, torturing, looting, burning whatever they can in order to bring their country to its knees. Frequently targeting important nodes in the networks that sustain the nation and the people's faith in it (bridges, rail depots, factories, hospitals and schools) but ultimately happy to attack whatever they can; every house burned or person tortured contributes to the climate of terror and corrosion of government credibility. Because when they kill these groups don't like to do it cleanly; their attacks generate countless reports immolation, disembowelment, victims hacked to pieces and left to bleed. But when possible they prefer to leave their victims alive and capable of further spreading their terror, inflicting the most vicious sorts of rape and mutilation on a mass scale

It's not just just evil for the sake of evil mind you. The cruelty has a point; human destruction to accompany the physical. Every person killed is someone who can no longer contribute to the development of the nation, while even living yet physically and psychologically broken victim places further strain on their country's increasingly fragile support systems. Meanwhile the terror of these actions spreads the impact beyond their immediate victims. The murder and torture of peasants makes the survivors too scared to go back into their fields, slowly starving the nation as the rural economy grind to a halt. The gruesome deaths of traders and travelers leaves the survivors too terrified to continue their business, shutting down the distributive networks that make national development and often life itself possible. The terror unleashed on foreign professionals can prompt the survivors to flee and discourage newcomers from arriving, depriving the underdeveloped economic and education systems of the skilled workers they need to improve or even function. And every broken body, ever broken mind, is proof of the government's weakness and ineptitude; a humiliating failure to protect their own people that demoralises supporters and empowers dissenters. The motivated sadism of these terrorist attacks is a microcosm of the motivated sadism displayed by their Imperialist backers

But why go to all this trouble? Why not just send in the paratroopers or organise a coup to end those troublesome regimes quickly? Sometimes it's a matter of possibility. As great as they are, the powers of Imperialist nations are not unlimited. All manner of constraints (domestic unrest, international condemnation which advantages dangerous rivals, the simple financial and human costs of such operations) limit what actions are viable or desirable. This is especially significant when the targets are motivated and disciplined anti-imperialists with a base of deep-rooted popular support, the sort of regime that won't go down to a simple commando raid or bribe to the right general. But sometimes, it's not enough to merely cut down a dissenting government; you have to salt the earth and make sure nothing similar ever grows back. I'll finish with the words of an anonymous Jesuit priest, talking about Nicaragua yet in terms widely relevant enough to be published in John Saul's conclusion to A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique (1985):

In Chile the Americans made a mistake. They cut off the revolution too abruptly. They killed the revolution but, as we can see from recent developments there, they didn't kill the dream. In Nicaragua, they're trying to kill the dream

[circeyoru]

The Only Reason _ Part 3

[Yandere!Sung Jinwoo x Worker!Reader - Mana Chaos AU]

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 (here) — Part 4

“Sung Jinwoo is an S-Rank Hunter…”

“Another one…”

“It’s been 2 years since Cha Hae-In too.”

Nowadays, the emergence of an S-Rank Hunter and some A-Rank Hunters was like a demon had crawled out of hell and into the human world to cause destruction. Strong Hunters were seen and painted as a double-edged sword. On one hand, they could bring about peace to normal—non-awakened—individuals by closing gates and raiding dungeons. On the other hand, they could bring about destruction in their wake due to <Outrage> and the innocence would be harmed. 

Protocols like an awakened Hunter must report to the EMI instead of the Hunter Association because they have to keep track of stronger Hunters. Hunters must continuously measure their mana levels in case of a reawakening into a higher rank. It was unavoidable, no matter which country, because they prioritized ordinary people more. 

Perhaps the only place where EMI regulations can’t touch is America. After what Thomas Andre had done, he singlehandedly protected his fellow Hunters and announced to the EMI that they couldn’t have their way with people who worked to protect them from the dangers known as gates and dungeons. There were some Hunters that escaped to America to join Thomas and his stance, there were also some that were unluckily caught by the EMI, and some that didn’t do anything. Such is the sway of a National Level Hunter. 

Unlike Thomas, who had no weaknesses to use against, Jinwoo was different. His family, his mother and younger sister, were dependent on the society and their system. So, against his better judgement, Jinwoo bowed to the whims of the EMI and was taken in as SM-10. 

In the facility, he underwent several tests to draw a profile for him since he was fundamentally different from his E-Rank file. Anyone could see at a glance. Jinwoo kept his cards hidden because the more capable he was, the greater the danger his loved ones would be in. He was doing everything for his family. Upon capture, he was promised that his family would receive financial support so long as he behaved himself. 

A cowardly but effective threat and compromise that he agreed. 

Still, he hated the people who worked in this accursed building. All those labourers who hid behind a mask and voice changer donned uniforms that displayed their station. Throughout his days, he observed a few groups of workers. 

First was the type that he frequently came into contact with: Guard. As their station name, they guarded things, from equipment to rooms and even Hunter cells. They were the ones that handled conflict and violence, even the heavy lifting, if any. Those who were higher ranked were called Warden; however, he only saw them during his testing sessions when they were making his profile. They all wear black masks—Warden’s mask is black with a white scratch mark over the right eyehole—and black soldier uniforms.

Second was the type that constantly changes to the point he doesn’t even keep track of: Supervisor. Contrary to their high-standing title, they do the smallest and most insignificant tasks, like delivering supplies, checking Hunter cells, and being an owl so passing messages. They were low-ranking workers that most wouldn’t bat an eye to if gone. Perhaps that’s why they have a grey uniform and a grey mask. Their code went as high as the hundreds, going to the thousands. 

Third was the type that he hated most: Investigator or Researcher. They were the ones who administered the tests and punishments to the Hunters, and they monitored them inside their cell. Under their glances, a Hunter is reduced to a mere lab rat. They were individuals connected to the EMI but needed to be more important to make a—any—difference in the building. However, they were respected in some sense because some did aim for the betterment of the Hunters staying in the building. They wear a white mask with a mocking grin and a white uniform, complete with a lab coat.

Last was the type that intrigued him the most: Personnel. Though their code suggests they have people in the hundreds, there was actually only a handful of them in the building. The highest number he saw was 12. They were the ones with the most authority and well-respected individuals among the other groups, their work and station varied from individual to individual. They were the ones that stayed in the building the longest, and a new Personnel would only join their ranks if they carried confidential information about the EMI. 

One would notice there doesn’t seem to be a highest position or individual, but the Personnel were the ones who acted as the say of the facility. None had absolute power to keep each other in check, and in case a threat was targeted, if one fell, the other would continue in the other’s place. The smaller the number, the bigger their authority, it seems. 

Personnel 001 was once his observer during the tests, when he could let loose. After all the observation and boredom, Jinwoo accidentally killed them and was quickly restrained. He paid close attention to what happened. Would another observe him? Would there be a new Personnel in their ranks? What would happen?

Turns out, you happened.

Personnel’s clothing is ever-changing. They have free reign over what they want to wear; needless to say, they have no uniform. They only have to wear a lab coat over their usual outfits, and that’s it. One could mistake them for Investigators, but the distinct code would be shown on their coat at the area over their heart. They have a white mask with reflective black glasses covering their eyeholes. 

Yet when you came in, you were void of that mask that hides one’s expression and face. Still, your poker face was impressive. You appeared expressionless and reminded him of a doll. You neither introduced yourself nor showcased your station, different from Personnel 001, who was practically shouting at him that they were the ones in power in this facility. At first glance, he knew you were different from all the rest. 

“You’re hiding your cards. SM-10.” Your words held knowledge and confidence, stating a fact rather than questioning him. Your arm hugged a black clipboard with a small stack of papers clipped while your other hand held a pen. If you weren’t wearing a lab coat, you’d appear like a strict teacher or lab researcher.

He couldn’t help but let a smile spread over his lips, “What makes you think that?”

“You’re holding back.” You turned to the Guards stationed within the cell to leave you alone. Yes, a Personnel has the authority to be alone with a Hunter, but if it were a Supervisor, they must be with at least two to three Guards. “You killed Personnel 001, why? Be honest.”

There was a shine in your eyes that he noticed. He couldn’t tell what it was, though he wanted to be coy. “You’re not the only ones observing. Why not make it mutual?”

That was his first meeting with you. 

With his Shadows, he watched you and your daily activities. You were practically glued to your work; you came to work early but left late. You have a good relationship with the other coworkers, and most respect you, evident by the nodding heads you receive in the hallways. You also seem to care for Hunters in their cells, inspecting the cell quality and making things more bearable for Hunters like him. 

Thanks to him, more and better changes happened after Personnel 001 was removed. By then, he figured out that whether it was a company setting or a guild setting, 001 was the guild master, and you were the vice master. Once 001 was gone, you had more authority and implemented changes, of course, with the agreement of your other Personnel co-workers. 

In that case, that makes you a lot more interesting. You realized his strength and power, you wanted an improved and more sophisticated place for Hunter, different from how the facility was supposed to be, and you have been treating everyone human. 

Jinwoo concluded that he wanted to stay and get closer to you. With you in charge, his family was practically safe as well. He’ll stay and protect your spot at the top. Yet why were you pushing him away? It infuriated him. Still, he was thankful for the other Personnels’ fear over setting an S-Rank loose in public that he could prove to you how wrong you were to fight for his release.

While showing his point, he reduced the Personnel to perhaps 6 remaining—that already includes you. From 12 to 6, he cut off 4, and then there was 001 as well, so one Personnel died through other means. Either way, he made his point.

You were the only Personnel he liked and could resolve his <Outrage>.

That already bound you to him, and none would harm you unless they wanted the country to fall to ruins. 

The two of you share secrets, and slowly, he got you to open up, showing only him a side of you that you hide behind an invisible mask. You’re the only one for him, he’ll make it so that he’s the only one for you. 

He realized that his emotions and feelings for you turned a bit twisted over time. That Guard 149 that stared at you a little too long? Their leg was somehow caught between the double doors, so they can’t work here anymore, right? That Investigator 083 that was standing so close to you that your arms were touching? An experiment backfired and their arms were amputated. Another Guard that is coded 761 was asking you out? They got into a car accident and died. 

Jinwoo was careful. You never pointed fingers at him nor suspected it was him at all. You were very naive and innocent; he loves that about you. You care for your workers, yet at the same time, you also don’t. He got his answer when he finally communicated with the other S-Rank Hunters during the end of the Jeju Raid.

“Personnel 002? Oh, I’d say that person cares about Hunters more.”

“Haha, Personnel 002 has been very accommodating, unlike the other ones.”

“You can’t compare Personnel 002 with the others, it’s not a fair comparison.”

“I always enjoy my time with Personnel 002.”

“You’re lucky SM-10, I wish I could have Personnel 002 come to my place often.”

The other S-Rank Hunters only had good things to say about you. As expected, you were biased against Hunters and silently helped them more. Though, he was more enraptured to hear you giving him special care and attention. In private, his smile grew wide as he chuckled to himself. “Ah… You’ll be the death of me… Personnel 002.”

Note: Ta da! Part 3's out and this is Jinwoo's side of the story, if it wasn't obvious to you!! A bit of boring history, but it's what it is~ Hope you guys liked this one!

Circe Y.

My Works: MASTERLIST

Taglist:

@stupendouspizzacomputer @xiannars @skylar896 @forbidden-sunlight @waka-babe @soft-dots @iamapotatoe @hvnweeps @amayakurusu13

[maplebellsmods]

Join a Country Club Mod

Hello! Unfortunately, Rock Ridge Country Club has closed down due to financial mismanagement and embezzlement. However, your sims now can join an even better club: Cedar Creek Country Club!

I’m excited to announce that I’ve completely reworked the Country Club mod from scratch. This mod holds a special place in my heart as it was the first one I ever made, and I’m thrilled to present it with improved quality and new features.

If you’ve used my previous Country Club mod, you’ll notice both differences and similarities. So, how does the new mod work? Your sim can apply to become a member of Cedar Creek Country Club. This time, the process is more challenging, with the possibility of rejection, requiring more effort both financially and mentally.

However, the application process is streamlined for a smoother experience. Steps to become a member:

Pay Application Fee: This is a 5000 simoleon nonrefundable fee.

Fill out Application Form

Schedule Interview: Choose between two time slots and attend within 24 hours.

Write Letter of Interest

Submit Reference Letters: Cedar Creek requires two reference letters from current members. Your sim can ask a member directly or post on the Cedar Creek community forums. If a member is interested, they may call and offer to write a reference letter. This method is more challenging.

Attend Information Session (Optional): If you have questions about the club or application process, attend an information session available on weekdays.

• Household Funds

• Fame Level

• Reputation

• Job Type and Level

• Charisma

• Interview Outcome

These elements can greatly increase your chances of getting accepted into the country club.​

Once they become a member and pay the $10,000 initiation fee, your entire household will also gain Cedar Creek membership.

As a Cedar Creek member, there are ongoing fees to pay. You can choose to pay annually (over four weeks) or quarterly (over one week). It’s important to stay on top of these payments to maintain your membership. There are many activities your sim can partake in with family and friends. You can find these options on the computer in the Country Club pie menu.​

Your sim can try to appeal to the country club if they have been rejected, kicked out, or blacklisted. The chances of getting another shot are very low, but high charisma can significantly help.

If they get lucky and are invited to meet with the admissions committee, they have a few hours to attend the meeting and must commit immediately. If they were previously kicked out, they will still need to pay the initiation fee again.

Lot Trait

I have also added a Country Club lot trait with the mod. So as a Cedar Creek member if you don't feel like going to rabbit hole activities you use the country club lot trait and use it on any lot.

I wanted the Country Club lot trait to be customizable, so random members won’t show up automatically; you need to assign members to make it exclusive.

You can assign members by left-shift clicking on the computer and finding the option under the country club pie menu. There are a few social interactions available for different sims at the country club, depending on their roles.

The lot trait is straightforward, but the key is to assign members. You can also remove members using the same method.

Does this mod require any DLC?

No, it does not.

What else do I need for the mod?

Lumpinou's Mood Pack Mod, so it is required for the mod to work properly.

You can get the mod here.

If you already have it great! But make sure it's up to date. Otherwise, it will break the UI

XML injector

I'm experiencing some weird bugs!

Let me know, please.

Report it here: Mod Bug Report

How to install the mod?

Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Mods <--- Unzip the file and make sure it's placed in this path.

Public Jun 23

Download Here

[famoussheepfox]

Call on Musk: to launch an in-depth investigation into more "financial aid" departments #USAID #MARA#USA Colorful Warrior

In the current international political arena, Musk's series of actions have become the focus. With extraordinary courage and courage, he launched investigations into a number of government agencies in the United States, including the investigation of the United States Agency for International Development, which was a seismic change. The United States Agency for International Development, with an annual budget of $50 billion and more than 10,000 employees worldwide, has long been involved in the "dirty work" of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. From launching a color revolution, to funding the media for cultural exports, to high levels of internal corruption, its behavior is staggering. Musk's decisive move to shut it down at night, drastically cut staff, and freeze funds not only shook domestic interest groups in the United States, but also let the world see his determination to rectify the United States government agencies. However, USAID is only the tip of the iceberg. There are also many departments, such as the Global Contact Center, the US Global Media Agency, and the US Military Information Operations Center, which may also have serious "financial aid" black curtain, which needs Musk's attention and investigation. Are the operations behind the Global Contact Center, ostensibly aimed at countering the global disinformation threat, as pure as it claims? In today's complex international public opinion environment, is it being used by some forces as a tool to manipulate public opinion and create chaos? Is the flow of money clear and transparent? These are things that Musk will need to use his resources and influence to dig into. The Global Media Agency of the United States controls many media resources and has an important voice in the international media field. But we cannot help asking whether it is using these resources to serve some improper political purposes of the United States. Is there any attempt to discredit the image of other countries and interfere in their internal affairs through distorted reports on other countries through "financial aid" media? Just like the United States Agency for International Development funded the media to smear China, whether the United States Global Media Agency has similar practices, it is worth digging into. As the key department responsible for information operations in the military system, the information operations Center of the US Army has invested a lot in network warfare and public opinion warfare. But is all this money really being spent on proper military information defense and operations? Is it possible that some of the funds have been diverted to support information operations that are unofficial or even contrary to international law, such as cyberattacks on other countries or the spread of disinformation about the military? This also requires Musk to lead the team to find out. Musk's previous actions have proven that he has the ability and determination to break through the interests of the United States government agencies and expose the dark curtain. Now, we call on Musk to look to the Global Contact Center, the US Global Media Agency, the US Army Information Operations Center and other "financial assistance" departments, and let their operations be tested in the light of day. Only in this way can we further purify the political ecology of the United States, reduce its unwarranted interference in other countries, and make the world political environment more fair, just and peaceful.