#it's the internet economy at work

[etraytin]

Been doing paid surveys lately on Prolific Academic, a site that gathers up respondents mainly for academic studies and business focus testing. It's honestly pretty good money compared to other survey sites I've used, especially if you get into the focus groups, and came across one study looking for anonymously shared Safari browsing data. I passed on it, but imagine what would happen if I hadn't. "All right, and here you'll see one outlier who spends 40,000 hours per week on Archive Of Our Own and should not be counted."

[iirulancorrino]

The Green brothers are doing effective altruism better than maybe 95% of people who identify online as effective altruists.

[runawaymarbles]

at this point i am simply uninterested in any opinion on a hot-button political topic that treats human beings as a mass of meaningless hypotheticals

[raffaellopalandri]

The Paradox of "Free Work"

Daily writing promptWhat job would you do for free?View all responses The question of “Which job would you do for free” is a bit of a trick question from my current perspective. Image taken from Internet Here’s why (please consider that to keep the post at an acceptable length I will just give here the key elements of my reasoning): In a truly ideal world, unburdened by the constraints of…

[carp-from-space]

Irl i heard worst feedback and gods i wish i was allowed to drink alcohol.

[radmystique]

Twitter “activists” are something else, man.

[syekick-powers]

one of my favorite things in fantasy and sci fi is when the setting of the work is in some ways absolutely better than our current setup which makes you go "god i wish i lived in this world" but as the story progresses you realize that the setting is also shittier than our current world in another, highly specific way that then makes you have to go "well maybe i can deal with this if it means not having to work to survive" or something similar

[legionofpotatoes]

hate to I-told-you-so this topic but the moment, the second it was announced I was SURE that stadia would crash and burn. as did onlive before it and any other similar pipe dream. Today's global internet infrastructure paired with the ever-growing fidelity standards from competitors makes cloud gaming such a weirdly obvious dead-on-arrival concept yet still google of all companies puts hundreds of millions into pushing it? I swear it felt stupid even back then. especially with the backroom politicking for acquiring triple A ports and double-especially with the laughable attempts to subsume established studios into exclusivity deals. How was this ever going to work.

I'm sorry, to be clear like I know the theoretical tech exists; I realize there is a way for me to play a game that outputs a 4K 60hz signal that renders halfway across the globe in a server farm that blazes data so fast that I barely notice input lag, I know that's all possible; but how does it take millions of dollars' worth of R&D and countless false starts from a leading tech giant to realize that it is simply not scalable? At all?? Was there ever a version of this that was going to revolutionize and undercut the market, realistically? Was it simply a matter of unlucky business decisions that failed to jam this square peg into a round hole? Did it really technically work well in developing countries with limited bandwidth and booming console sales? Am I missing something?

How was this ever considered mass market feasible??

[stargod]

God, I- DESPERATELY- Need someone to make a 5 hr video essay on the history of people breaking video game economies. I thought about it like 5 seconds ago and now i need it like a drug, its Killing me!

Please!! If someone knows of any videos like this or even if u just wanna tell me/link me one of the tales PLEASE Feeeed meee!!

[zerodaryls]

some people have gotten far too comfortable telling people to kill themselves on the internet. even those of us who don’t stoop to such lows seem to have become numb to it and just let it happen. it should be upsetting every time. i don’t care if someone is a fucking terf, i don’t want to see anyone told to kill themselves, holy shit.

when i was a young, mentally ill conservative christian teen, i don’t know how i would have responded if someone had told me to kill myself when i expressed my (then) anti-choice, obnoxiously evangelistic, love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin views.

the fact that people have developed a reflexive response to problematic behavior by suggesting that those people end their own lives is so disheartening. if someone had told me to kill myself when i was stuck in my bigoted upbringing, i might never have grown into the person i am. i might have ended it before i got the chance to get there. or i might have had my christian-pushed beliefs that the outside world is Scary and Evil validated, and retreated deeper into my religious brainwashing.

also?? my life didn’t suddenly gain value when i matured and came out as a queer, trans, non-christian leftist?? and neither does anyone else’s?? that’s literally not how it works??

people don’t suddenly become Worthy Of The Air They Breathe when they adopt The Most Morally Correct Beliefs. i’ve got younger siblings who are still uber-religious conservatives, and even if they never break free from that worldview i’d never tell them to fucking kill themselves, holy shit.

i get that bigotry is scary and for many of us our rights and wellbeing are at stake, and it’s a common human psychological response to lash out when we’re scared, but if someone’s fear is causing them to boldly encourage suicide, maybe they have bigger problems than the ones outside of themselves.

[aeide-thea]

At the Delphinbrunnen, Volkspark Friedrichshain, Berlin Photo by Thomas Lautenschlag, 2011

[apricops]

So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

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

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

[cleoselene]

In economics we divide the population into income quintiles -- top 20%, bottom 20%, etc

The Biden Economy has been very, very good to the bottom 20% -- I know because I am in that quintile and under the Biden Presidency I have seen multiple SNAP increases, the best COLA adjustments for Social Security in four decades, Medicare now pays my utilities, and because I'm part of the Affordable Connectivity Program, they can now never turn off my internet even if I can't afford to pay the bill.

The problem with the poorest people being the one who benefits the most? Is that it doesn't resonate as a media story. The media is not catering to that bottom quintile -- we don't have the expendable income their advertisers are seeking.

But if you want to elect a POTUS who is honestly helping the people who need it the most, you should be an enthusiastic Biden supporter. It won't make splashy news headlines, you're not even going to find MSNBC going GUESS WHAT THE POORS ARE DOING BETTER all the time because it's really not a sexy story. But it's a real story. A true story.

I'm just really sick of the pseudo-leftist takes that characterize Biden and the Democrats as 'conservative' or assertions that they don't have policy platforms except 'we're not the Republicans.' Such commentary sounds intelligent but only in the way Libertarian commentary sounds intelligent: you have to not think critically at all to some to such absurd conclusions. Democrats are working within a broken system and doing the best they can. You wanna fix the system? Great, I'm onboard, but smearing the only people trying to help is not going to get you anywhere.

[photomatt]

Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022

For those who don’t know or remember, Tumblr used to have a policy around porn that was literally “Go nuts, show nuts. Whatever.” That was memorable and hilarious, and for many people, Tumblr both hosted and helped with the discovery of a unique type of adult content.

In 2018, when Tumblr was owned by Verizon, they swung in the other direction and instituted an adult content ban that took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists – including a ban on what must have been fun for a lawyer to write, female presenting nipples. This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense, and the community labels launch is a first step toward that.

That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible. Here’s why:

Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.

App stores, particularly Apple’s, are anti-porn. Tumblr started in 2007, the same year the iPhone was released. Originally, the iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the speed of connectivity and quality of the screen meant that people didn’t use their smartphone very much and mostly interacted with Tumblr on the web, using desktop and laptop computers (really). Today 40% of our signups and 85% of our page views come from people on mobile apps, not on the web. Apple has its own rules for what’s allowed in their App Store, and the interpretation of those rules can vary depending on who is reviewing your app on any given day. Previous decisions on what’s allowed can be reversed any time you submit an app update, which we do several times a month. If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down. If you want apps to allow more adult content, please lobby Apple. No one in the App Store has any effective power, even multi-hundred-billion companies like Facebook/Meta can be devastated when Apple changes its policies. Aside: Why do Twitter and Reddit get away with tons of super hardcore content? Ask Apple, because I don’t know. My guess is that Twitter and Reddit are too big for Apple to block so they decided to make an example out of Tumblr, which has “only” 102 million monthly visitors. Maybe Twitter gets blocked by Apple sometimes too but can’t talk about it because they’re a public company and it would scare investors.

There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.

Porn requires different service providers up and down the stack. In addition to a company primarily serving adult content not having access to normal financial services and being blocked by app stores, they also need specialized service providers – for example, for their bandwidth and network connections. Most traditional investors won’t fund primarily adult businesses, and may not even be allowed to by their LP agreements. (When Starbucks started selling alcohol at select stores, some investors were forced to sell their stock.)

If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs. 

I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don’t know about it. They’ll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that’s a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don’t attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist.

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #19

May 17-24 2024

President Biden wiped out the student loan debt of 160,000 more Americans. This debt cancellation of 7.7 billion dollars brings the total student loan debt relieved by the Biden Administration to $167 billion. The Administration has canceled student loan debt for 4.75 million Americans so far. The 160,000 borrowers forgiven this week owned an average of $35,000 each and are now debt free. The Administration announced plans last month to bring debt forgiveness to 30 million Americans with student loans coming this fall.

The Department of Justice announced it is suing Ticketmaster for being a monopoly. DoJ is suing Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation for monopolistic practices. Ticketmaster controls 70% of the live show ticket market leading to skyrocketing prices, hidden fees and last minute cancellation. The Justice Department is seeking to break up Live Nation and help bring competition back into the market. This is one of a number of monopoly law suits brought by the Biden administration against Apple in March and Amazon in September 2023.

The EPA announced $225 million in new funding to improve drinking and wastewater for tribal communities. The money will go to tribes in the mainland US as well as Alaska Native Villages. It'll help with testing for forever chemicals, and replacing of lead pipes as well as sustainability projects.

The EPA announced $300 million in grants to clean up former industrial sites. Known as "Brownfield" sites these former industrial sites are to be cleaned and redeveloped into community assets. The money will fund 200 projects across 178 communities. One such project will transform a former oil station in Philadelphia’s Kingsessing neighborhood, currently polluted with lead and other toxins into a waterfront bike trail.

The Department of Agriculture announced a historic expansion of its program to feed low income kids over the summer holidays. Since the 1960s the SUN Meals have served in person meals at schools and community centers during the summer holidays to low income children. This Year the Biden administration is rolling out SUN Bucks, a $120 per child grocery benefit. This benefit has been rejected by many Republican governors but in the states that will take part 21 million kids will benefit. Last year the Biden administration introduced SUN Meals To-Go, offering pick-up and delivery options expanding SUN's reach into rural communities. These expansions are part of the Biden administration's plan to end hunger and reduce diet-related disease by 2030.

Vice-President Harris builds on her work in Africa to announce a plan to give 80% of Africa internet access by 2030, up from just 40% today. This push builds off efforts Harris has spearheaded since her trip to Africa in 2023, including $7 billion in climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation, and $1 billion to empower women. The public-private partnership between the African Development Bank Group and Mastercard plans to bring internet access to 3 million farmers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria, before expanding to Uganda, Ethiopia, and Ghana, and then the rest of the continent, bring internet to 100 million people and businesses over the next 10 years. This is together with the work of Partnership for Digital Access in Africa which is hoping to bring internet access to 80% of Africans by 2030, up from 40% now, and just 30% of women on the continent. The Vice-President also announced $1 billion for the Women in the Digital Economy Fund to assure women in Africa have meaningful access to the internet and its economic opportunities.

The Senate approved Seth Aframe to be a Judge on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, it also approved Krissa Lanham, and Angela Martinez to district Judgeships in Arizona, as well as Dena Coggins to a district court seat in California. Bring the total number of judges appointed by President Biden to 201. Biden's Judges have been historically diverse. 64% of them are women and 62% of them are people of color. President Biden has appointed more black women to federal judgeships, more Hispanic judges and more Asian American judges and more LGBT judges than any other President, including Obama's full 8 years in office. President Biden has also focused on backgrounds appointing a record breaking number of former public defenders to judgeships, as well as labor and civil rights lawyers.