#legal price gouging

[aniseandspearmint]

with the news about GROCERY STORES planning to implement 'surge pricing', I have to wonder, exactly what is the difference between stores planning to sell water at a higher price when it's hot, and stores raising prices during things like hurricanes and other disasters?

Seems like the same damn thing to ME.

[medicinemane]

Not to take an extreme stance, but I will once again point out that often fines for companies are less a punishment and more just the cost of doing business

If a fine isn't higher than the cost of doing things right, then it becomes a fee you pay to get to cut corners

I'm sorry, but I feel like at a certain point the only way to get companies to stop violating the law may be prison time for upper management (no scapegoats allowed). Obviously only for more severe violations, but still... we see that fines don't deter companies from bad behavior... maybe repeat offenders need to face more than monetary consequences

[f1]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @brianmerchant@mastodon.social explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

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

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Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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

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Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

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

[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]

[phoenixx-news]

Australia's Major Supermarket Chains Accused of Misleading Discount Claims

Australia's two largest supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, are being sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for allegedly deceiving consumers with false price reduction claims. The ACCC asserts that both companies violated consumer law by temporarily increasing prices before dropping them to levels that were often equal to or even higher than the original price, while claiming the discounts were permanent.

Coles has vowed to defend itself in court, while Woolworths is reviewing the allegations. Combined, the two chains control roughly two-thirds of the Australian grocery market. Over the past year, both retailers have faced heightened scrutiny amid accusations of price gouging and anti-competitive behavior.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese weighed in on the matter, calling the alleged actions "completely unacceptable" if proven true. He emphasized that such behavior undermines trust and is not in line with Australian values. "Customers deserve to be treated fairly, not as fools," Albanese said at a press conference where he also introduced draft legislation for a supermarket "code of conduct."

ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb explained that Coles and Woolworths have long used marketing campaigns like 'Prices Dropped' and 'Down Down' to suggest permanent reductions in prices. However, the watchdog's investigation revealed that many of these discounts were misleading, affecting hundreds of products over a span of several months. Woolworths allegedly misled customers about 266 products over 20 months, while Coles did so for 245 products over 15 months.

The products involved in the allegations span a wide range, including pet food, Band-Aid bandages, mouthwash, and iconic Australian favorites like Arnott's Tim Tam biscuits, Bega Cheese, and Kellogg's cereal. According to the ACCC, the two supermarkets sold millions of these items, generating substantial revenue through the deceptive pricing practices.

Ms. Cass-Gottlieb emphasized the importance of accurate pricing during times of economic pressure, noting that many Australians depend on discounts to manage their grocery bills. "It’s vital that consumers can trust that discounts are real, especially with the rising cost of living," she said.

The ACCC is asking the Federal Court of Australia to impose substantial fines on Coles and Woolworths, as well as an order that they expand their charitable meal delivery programs.

In a statement, Coles acknowledged that rising costs have impacted product prices, but stressed that the company aims to balance those increases with providing value to customers. Coles also underscored its commitment to consumer law and building trust with all stakeholders. Woolworths echoed similar sentiments, stating that it is willing to engage with the ACCC and that it remains focused on delivering meaningful value to shoppers.

In response to the growing concerns, the Australian government has launched a review of the country's Food and Grocery Code of Conduct. The review recommended strengthening the code and giving the ACCC greater powers to enforce compliance. The proposed new code aims to protect suppliers and consumers alike, with harsh penalties for companies that breach its standards.

As the legal battle unfolds, the case highlights the increasing pressure on Australia’s supermarket sector to operate transparently and fairly in an era of rising living costs.

[the-path-to-redemption]

Just reread your post about Banesaw and had a Thought: what if Banesaw hides what kind of Faunus he is because he actually isn't a Faunus? What if he's a runaway indentured servant like Clark Kent in the JL crossover comic and wants to take down the Schnees but couldn't find a human group doing anything about the injustices, so he went to the White Fang? It'd be easy to assume he's a type that's human passing like Ilia, so he rides on that while being one of the best Fangs they've ever seen. I think the reveal of him being human would be ~juicy~

(Other thought was he's a Faunus type that has goofy teeth, like a rat or beaver, so he wears the full mask to hide it, but that's less interesting to me lol)

See, I understand where you're coming from, but unfortunately the narrative of a human passing as a Faunus participating in a civil rights group like the White Fang, especially with how they're written in canon, brings up very negative connotations and messages about the storyline as a whole.

Long Post Ahead

The whole "human faking to be Faunus" narrative has always grind on my gears, because it originated from racist ass FNDM stans to further villainize Adam (he was the first instance of this that I've known of) and play down on his oppression as a child slave, so I will always give this theory on any Faunus character a NASTY stink eye. Not to mention that RT is adamant on making the WF a terrorist organization and forgo any of its nuances (like, holy shit, even the most extreme civil rights group irl still participate in community service, yet we do not see the WF doing any of that), so having a human passing as a Faunus joining up with an organization that aims to bring destruction in the name of racial liberation is,,,,yeah.

Even if Banesaw was an indentured servant like Cinder and Clark Kent in the crossover.... why isn't there another movement against that? Why isn't there protests about literal slavery against humans and exploitation of children under the hands of a legal guardian? This separate issue and the Faunus liberation movements are related issues, not something that should be completely put into one unless it's already a shared issue, which should be anti-slavery.

But no, the Faunus liberation movement compasses Faunus issues; Faunus slavery, anti-Faunus discrimination, segregation, forced relocation, red-lining, unfair wage distribution, sabotaging Faunus businesses, racial violence, medical discrimination based on biological differences, price gouging on predominantly-Faunus neighborhoods, lack of recreational areas, lack of basic resources, lack of proper education, etc. All of these issues are for the Faunus, and while indenture servitude is a related social disease that isn't exclusive to Faunus, it shouldn't be handled solely by Faunus groups such as the WF. Realistically, there should be other civil rights groups handling such problems and collaborate with groups like the WF for protests, much like how the real life Black Panther Party collaborated with the Women's Rights movement as well as the Gay Rights movement while still being a Black civil rights movement.

The goals and purposes of these groups are integrated, but they are not interchangeable.

Back to Banesaw, I would keep him Faunus. Like I've mentioned in my initial post about him, it's much more interesting for Bane as a character and for the world building of Remnant that his Faunus trait is unknown. A part of his identity, depending on who's looking at him, either means so much or means nothing. Is he strong because of his trait, or his trait means nothing as long as he is strong? The narrative of finding his place in the world fits well with Adam's, Ilia's, and all Faunus because it's who they are, it's their given rights to exist, and how they approach a society that refuse to give them that right based on their race. So I do not think making him a human disguising as a Faunus to gain his goal is a better path for his story, rather than making him be a part of the narrative where more "dangerous" looking Faunus are treated differently in comparison to their "cuter" counterparts.

This is not a rip on your perspective, don't get me wrong. But it's much more complex than that, and blurring the line when canon doesn't even want to acknowledge the nuances of the Faunus plots creates more problem than expand on the world of Remnant in my opinion. Sorry if this response isn't very articulated, but this is an issue that I'm approaching with all the caution I can muster up.

P.S. to me, Bane has both a noticeable trait that others use against him and a very obvious facial scar, leading him to have a specialized mask that isn't the same as the others . Design coming someday, along with others.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A slurry of lies in the wake of Helene and the path of Milton are making matters worse. [Benjamin Slyngstad]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 11, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 12, 2024

A report from the Labor Department yesterday showed that inflation has dropped again, falling back to 2.4%, the same rate as it was just before the coronavirus pandemic. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 400 points to a record high, while the S&P 500 closed above 5,800 for the first time. 

Washington Post economics columnist Heather Long noted that “[b]y just about every measure, the U.S. economy is in good shape.” Inflation is back down, growth remains strong at 3%, unemployment is low at 4.1% with the U.S. having created almost 7 million more jobs than it had before the pandemic. The stock market is hitting all-time highs. Long adds that “many Americans are getting sizable pay raises, and middle-class wealth has surged to record levels.” The Federal Reserve has begun to cut interest rates, and foreign leaders are talking about the U.S. economy with envy. 

Democratic presidential nominee and sitting vice president Kamala Harris has promised to continue the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration and focus on cutting costs for families. She has called for a federal law against price gouging on groceries during times of crisis, cutting taxes for families, and enabling Medicare to pay for home health aides. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term. 

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which focuses on the direct effect of policies on the federal debt, estimated that Harris’s plans would add $3.5 trillion to the debt.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and to impose a 10% to 20% tariff across the board on imported goods and a 60% tariff on goods from China. Tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers, and economists predict such tariffs would cost an average family more than $2,600 a year. Overall, the effect of these policies would be to shift the weight of taxation even further toward middle-class and lower-class Americans and away from the wealthy. 

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that these plans would add $7.5 trillion to the debt.

But there is more: Trump has also made deporting undocumented immigrants central to his promises, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, has claimed the right to determine which government policies he considers legal, threatening to expand deportation to include legal migrants, as well. 

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted on October 8 that in March, the Peterson Institute for International Economics pointed out that the immigrants Trump is targeting are vital to a number of U.S. businesses. Their loss will cause dramatic cutbacks in those sectors. Taken together, the study concluded, Trump’s deportations, tariffs, and vow to take control of the Federal Reserve could make the country’s gross domestic product as much as 9.7% lower than it would be without those policies, employment could fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4%. 

And yet, in a New York Times/Siena Poll of likely voters released on October 8, 75% of respondents said the economy was fair or poor. Further, although a study by The Guardian showed that Harris’s specific economic policies were more popular than Trump’s in a blind test, 54% of respondents to a Gallup poll released on October 9, thought that Trump would manage the economy better than Harris would. 

Part of Americans’ sour mood about the economy stems from the poor coverage all the good economic news has received. Part of it is that rising prices are more immediately obvious than the wage gains that have outpaced them. But a large part of it is the historic habit of thinking that Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats do. 

That myth began immediately after the Civil War when Democrats demanded the government renege on the generous terms under which it had floated bonds during the war. When the Treasury put those bonds on the market, they were a risky proposition, but with the United States secure after the war, calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.

Republicans were horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred. They added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” When that amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868, the Democrats’ fiscal rebellion seemed to be quelled.

But as Republicans increasingly insisted that protecting big business with a high tariff wall was crucial to the American economy, Democrats called for lowering tariffs to give the consumers who paid them a break. In response, Republicans said that those suffering in industrial America were lazy or spendthrifts and warned that Democrats were socialists. When Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress and put Grover Cleveland in the White House in 1892 with a promise to lower tariffs, Republicans insisted that the economy would collapse. But, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “The working classes of the country need such a lesson…. The Republicans will be passive spectators… It will not be their funeral.” 

Their warnings of an impending collapse prompted investors to take their money home. On February 17, 1893, fifteen days before Cleveland would be sworn into office, the Reading Railroad Company went under, after which, as one reporter wrote, “the bottom seemed to be falling out of everything.” By the time Cleveland took office, a financial panic was in full swing. 

Republican lawmakers and newspapers blamed Democrats for the collapse because everyone knew they would destroy the economy. Republicans urged voters to put them back in charge of Congress, and in 1894, in a landslide, they did. “American manufacturers and merchants and business-men generally will draw a long breath of relief,” the Chicago Tribune commented just days after the Republican victory. Republicans had successfully associated their opponents with economic disaster. 

That association continued in the twentieth century. In 1913, for the first time since Cleveland’s second term, the Democrats captured both Congress and the White House. Immediately, President Woodrow Wilson called for lowered tariff rates and, to make up for lost revenue, an income tax. Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the tariff measure “very radical” and warned that it would destroy all the industries in Massachusetts. As for the income tax, big-business Republicans claimed it was socialism and that it discriminated against the wealthy. 

For the rest of the century, Republicans would center taxes, especially income taxes, as proof Democrats were bad for the economy. As soon as World War I ended, Republicans set out to get rid of the high progressive taxes that had paid for the war. Andrew Mellon, who served as treasury secretary under presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, took office in 1921 and set out to increase productivity by increasing investment in industry. To free up capital, he said, the government must slash its budget and cut taxes. From 1921 to 1929, Mellon returned $3.5 billion to wealthy Americans through refunds, credits, and tax abatements.

The booming economy of the 1920s made it seem that the Republicans had finally figured out how to create a perpetually prosperous economy. When he accepted the 1928 Republican nomination for president, Herbert Hoover said: “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us…. [G]iven a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”

The Great Depression, sparked by the stock market crash of October 1929, revealed the central weakness of an economic vision based in concentrating wealth. While worker productivity had increased by about 43% in the 1920s, wages did not rise. By 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income. When the stock market crash wiped out the purchasing power of this group, the rest of the population did not have enough capital to fuel the economy. 

Mellon predicted that the crisis would “purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” The Hoover administration preached thrift, morality, and individualism and blamed the depression on a wasteful government that had overstaffed public offices. To restore business confidence, Republicans declared, the nation must slash government spending and lay off public workers. 

But most Americans had had enough of Republican economics, especially as the crash revealed deep corruption in the nation’s financial system. In 1932, voters overcame their deep suspicion of Democratic economic policies to embrace what Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt called a “New Deal” for the American people, combating the depression by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and investing in infrastructure. Hoover denounced Roosevelt’s plans as dangerous radicalism that would “enslave” taxpayers and destroy the United States. 

Voters elected FDR with about 58% of the vote. Over the next forty years, Americans of both parties embraced the government’s active approach to promoting economic growth and individual prosperity by protecting all Americans. 

But when President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he promised that returning to a system like that of the 1920s would make the country boom. He called his system “supply-side” economics, for it invested in the supply side—investors—rather than the consumers who made up the demand side. “The whole thing is premised on faith,” Reagan’s budget director David Stockman told a reporter. “On a belief about how the world works.” 

Under Reagan, deficit spending that tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion—more federal debt than in the entire previous history of the country—along with lower interest rates and deregulated savings and loan banks, made the economy boom. Americans watching the economic growth such deficit spending produced believed supply-side economics worked. Tax cuts and spending cuts became the Holy Grail of American politics, and the Democrats who opposed them seemed unable to run an economy. 

But that belief was not based in reality. In April the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that since 1949 the nation’s annual real growth has been 1.2 percentage points higher under Democratic administrations than under Republican administrations (3.79% versus 2.60%), total job growth averages 2.5% annually under Democrats compared to barely over 1% under Republicans, business investment is more than double the pace under Democrats than under Republicans, average rates of inflation are slightly lower under Democrats, and families in the bottom 20% of the economy experience income growth 188% faster under Democrats than under Republicans. 

A recent analysis by former Goldman Sachs managing director H. John Gilbertson expands on those numbers, showing that Democratic administrations reduce the U.S. budget deficit and that stock market returns are 60% higher under Democrats than under Republicans.

Democratic President Joe Biden returned the country to the proven system that worked before 1981, and the economy has boomed. While Trump has vowed to return to the tax cuts and deregulation of supply-side economics, Vice President Harris has promised to retain and fine-tune Biden’s policies. 

But Harris has to overcome more than a century of American mythmaking. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Will Weissert and Adriana Gómez Licón at AP, via HuffPost:

MIAMI (AP) — From Pennsylvania to Florida to Texas, areas with high numbers of Hispanics often had little in common on Election Day other than backing Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris for president. Trump, the president-elect, made inroads in heavily Puerto Rican areas of eastern Pennsylvania where the vice president spent the last full day of her campaign. Trump turned South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, a decadeslong Democratic stronghold populated both by newer immigrants and Tejanos who trace their roots in the state for several generations. He also improved his standing with Hispanic voters along Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor linking the Tampa Bay area — home to people of Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Colombian and Puerto Rican origin — with Orlando, where Puerto Ricans make up about 43% of the local Hispanic population. Trump was the first Republican since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County, home to a sizable Cuban population and the country’s metropolitan area with the highest share of immigrants.

It was a realignment that, if it sticks, could change American politics. Texas and Florida are already reliably Republican, but more Hispanics turning away from Democrats in future presidential races could further dent the party’s “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that had helped catapult it to the White House before Trump romped through all three this time. The shift might even make it harder for Democrats to win in the West, in states such as Arizona and Nevada. Harris tried to highlight the ways Trump may have insulted or threatened Latinos. Trump, in his first term, curtailed the use of Temporary Protected Status, which Democratic President Joe Biden extended to thousands of Venezuelans, and tried to terminate the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He also delayed the release of relief aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 until nearly the end of his term, having long blasted the island’s officials as corrupt and inept.

Once he returns to the White House, Trump has pledge to stage the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. That could affect millions of families in mixed-status homes, where people who are in the United States illegally live with American citizens or those with legal residency. But the Democratic warnings did not appear to break through with enough voters for Harris. Now the party must figure out how to win back votes from a critical, fast-growing group. “Trump, he’s a very confounding figure,” said Abel Prado, a Democratic operative and pollster who serves as executive director of the advocacy group Cambio Texas. “We have no idea how to organize against him. We have no idea how to respond. We have no idea how to not take the bait.” Ultimately, concerns about immigration did not resonate as much as pocketbook issues with many Hispanics. About 7 in 10 Hispanic voters were “very concerned” about the cost of food and groceries, slightly more than about two-thirds of voters overall, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic voters said that they were “very concerned” about their housing costs, compared with about half of voters overall.

[...] Harris promised to lower grocery prices by cracking down on corporate price gouging and to increase federal funding for first-time homebuyers. Also, recent violent crime rates have declined in many parts of the country. She also spent many of the final days of the campaign trying to capitalize on remarks by a comic who spoke at a Trump rally in New York and joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” She even leaned on Puerto Rican celebrities — from Bad Bunny to Jennifer Lopez — to decry racism. But Trump nonetheless gained ground in some of the areas with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, the state where Harris spent more time campaigning than any other. He won the counties of Berks, Monroe and Luzerne — and lost Lehigh County by fewer than 5,000 votes against Harris. Biden had carried it by nearly three times that margin in 2020.

The big rightward shift among Latinos-- especially Latino men-- towards Donald Trump, is what got him over the line over Kamala Harris. Trump has long championed anti-Latino/anti-Hispanic bigotry in his campaigns.

Exit polls revealed that Latino men swing gigantically from a modestly Biden 2020 group to a small but sizable Trump group, as Latina women stayed with Harris but with reduced margins from 2020.

[jaythelay]

The way things are going with Xbox, I think Sony might be on top of the console wars. Permanently.

The thing about Microsoft is they suck ass to communicate with, their software is buggy, and they want devs to port games to both Series S and Series X, with the S being as weak as last gen.

This culminated in Black Wukong not coming to Xbox, and thus, Sony got the Chinese market. They bought PS5s in droves. Microsoft failed to get the japanese market and then failed to get the chinese market.

With that in mind, and the fact the Series S sold 2:1 with the Series X, I don't see Microsoft recovering. They're still way down from the Xbone's always online DRM nonsense. And Good. They deserve to lose their entire marketshare for pulling such an absurdly out of anyone's mind, anti-consumer bullshit.

But because of Microsoft, consoles will no longer be present after another generation. There's no way to lower prices apparently, and 700$ for a mildly better PS5 basically doomed consoles into a future niche. Nintendo doesn't compete, they legally attack, and they got nothing on Sony, so they aren't competing that way either.

So. Since Nintendo vs Sega, the victor of the console wars going on nearly 4 decades, was Sony. Playstation. Insane, I honestly thought they were doomed after the PS3 but Microsoft just fucking sucks so god damn much Xbox never stood a chance in the first place.

Anyways. Move to PC folks. Better deals, better hardware, better software, better games, better performance, refunds, reviews, profile customization, server browsers, modding, and you can play on Linux at this point. But if ya choose to stick with consoles, in 10 years, you won't have such a choice. Long-term, Sony is gonna fumble like Microsoft/Xbone eventually, and with no one to take their marketshare, consoles will fade into niche obscurity.

Ya really can't have a console war when there's only one real player. And that's Sony now. And tbh, not one of the 3 remaining console manufacturers inspire any amount of joy within me. No matter who won, we were always going to lose. Sony might be slightly the better of the 3 to win I guess. But trust me when I say, they will price gouge the fuck out of their next and final console. Guaranteed. It's the beginning of the end of Consoles. I'd mourn but I already did when the 360 was nearing it's end and I knew that was the last hurrah.

I expect more rumblings to come as time marches on about this topic. I'm confident Microsoft cannot return to form after Xbone, and Sony is going to flop hard with anti-consumer bullshit eventually. And Nintendo...well we try to pretend they're not apart of the gaming family, what with their inability to not sue someone frivilously for being noticeably far superior to them. Buncha babies with no ability to create IP but regurgitate their 3 decade old IP.

[sagevalleymusings]

Harris is actually a pretty decent candidate and here's why

I have seen a lot of the same talking points that lost us the 2016 election getting repeated - a lot of talking about the very worst parts of the Democratic candidate, mixed with a lot of "vote blue no matter who" nonsense and I just want to say... Harris actually is a pretty decent candidate and it completely kills me that NO ONE is talking about this. Is she perfect? No absolutely not. Are all American politics conservative compared to global politics? Well... they used to be. But lots of people have said that a rise of fascism here in the US have emboldened the right globally , so that's not great. In either case, yes they are conservatives. But their policies aren't completely terrible and in fact I agree with a decent amount of them. So here's the good things about the Harris campaign, and why you shouldn't just vote for her, but vote for her and feel good about it.

Economics

Harris has an 82 page PDF on her website with a plan to re-energize the middle class. It includes a ban on price gouging, a cap on insulin and investment in clean energy, among many other intersectional policies. It includes a bunch of affordable housing policies including banning large investor purchases. It simplifies taxes for small businesses. It would end unnecessary degree requirements on jobs. It's 82 pages densely packed with not just good policy but actionable policy, if I went through all of it, this post would just be nothing but the economic plan. The Harris economic plan is actually pretty good. Is it a socialist pipe dream? No of course not. I think it's better than that. It's progressive policy that benefits everyone in this country, which will make more progressive policies even more popular. This is the kind of economic plan that starts shifting you back to the left.

Race

Harris has made supporting Black men a priority for her campaign. This plan includes LEGALIZING MARIJUANA FEDERALLY in order to overturn unjust tough on crime convictions. Reading Harris' own campaign page for this post TODAY is when I learned Harris wants to legalize weed. The Opportunity Agenda which focuses on supporting Black men and the issues they told her they are facing also includes FEDERAL REGULATIONS ON CRYPTOCURRENCY. It includes 1 million loans for Black entrepreneurs (can't help but notice that one is carefully ungendered, Black women), invest in community violence intervention, launch a health equity initiative, and invest in combating discriminatory housing. Reading this policy on supporting Black men on Harris' own campaign page... this isn't just Democratic policy, this is legitimately left-leaning.

Queer Rights

One of the reasons I was pushed to write this up is that recently someone whose opinion I normally respect said that they didn't like Harris' answer that she would "follow the law" on providing trans care for inmates. A law her administration confirmed when they reissued the transgender offender manual, by the way. As far as I can tell Harris has a long and progressive history on queer rights, even with the nuance that she was legally obligated to defend the CA DoC when they sued over the matter in 2015. Harris treats trans healthcare as something obvious - a normal decision between a person and their doctor which should be protected like anything else while her administration also quietly enshrining access to health care into law. This is part of the problem. Biden has signed at least four separate executive orders about gender since he took office and no one talks about it. i think the conservative pushback on this topic has been so aggressive and widespread that it's been difficult to see what should have been the effects of Biden's progressive policy on LGBT issues.

Environment

Harris is very good on climate. I've already mentioned that it's worked into the economy stuff. She's got policy on reducing emissions, she investigated Exxon Mobil, and as a senator she co-sponsored the Green New Deal. She's waffled on fracking and seems to currently prefer making it economically nonviable as compared to clean energy, which isn't as good as a ban. But most of the policies she's supported aren't just "better than Trump" they're actually good.

Immigration

It would be dishonest of me to write all this up without getting into some of the things I dislike Harris on. I don't like Harris on immigration. No one does - she's either too lax or too strict. She wants to resurrect the bipartisan border security bill, which, although it does call to expedite asylum process, would also increase deportations and in my opinion makes too many concessions in the name of bipartisanship. Her stance has not been very vocal other than to say she supports this bill. But I've noticed that Biden's policies on immigration have often been softer than they appear, including caveats to keep families together and expand the possibility of legal immigration while controlling for illegal immigration. I'm not necessarily against that - a major source of illegal immigration is corporations trafficking workers across the border legally and then not helping them renew their work visas. That is something we need to crack down on at the corporation side in my opinion and I wish we could see a candidate who talked about that part of it as an immigration issues. This is something that I think Harris is too conservative on and I won't hide from that. I also don't think she's being given much of a choice. Conservatives are frothing at the mouth over immigration. It's really really scary. There are way too many people willing to take matters into their own hands on this one. I want something more progressive but I understand taking a stricter stance on this one as a form of harm reduction. If these people think the country is being "overrun," they'll just take the solution into their own hands. We don't want that.

Palestine

Yep, we had to get there. Look, no electable politician in the United States is going to give a good answer to Palestine. We are far too entrenched with Israel and imperialism and war profiteering for a leader to easily take the moral stance here - they would receive too much pushback from their peers. The bar is set really, really low here, and that isn't a good thing. I don't think Harris is going to call what's happening in Palestine a genocide while it's ongoing, and I don't actually think she'll withdraw military aid, though I am hopeful that she'll do what Biden has done before and restrict it. But I do know that Gazans say that Harris would be the better president and I do know that Arab Americans support Harris and I do know that Harris said Palestinians have a right to self-determination. I included this because it's an important issue for many voters and one of the biggest deal breakers for a lot of leftists in the US. I believe Harris will act in ways that make her complicit in genocide if she gets elected. And I believe she will try to limit that harm more than a lot of other politicians would. This is the one where I would say that in comparison the situation under her leadership would be much better than under Trump. Trump supports an Israeli victory, not a ceasefire. He's told Netanyahu to "finish the problem." In fact Trump has already contributed actively to the genocide in Palestine. He dropped the US commitment for a two-state solution in 2017 and declared Jerusalem as Israel's capital in the same year. He cut aid to Palestine and reversed US policy on the Golan Heights and the occupation of the West Bank. One of these candidates disapproves of what's happening, but might not have the backbone to stop it. One of these candidates will actively participate. And that's enough for my conscience to be clear.

In conclusion

Voting is about compromise and accountability. Who do I think will enact at least some policies I agree with, and how can I pressure them to enact even more? Elect Harris and then petition the White House to revoke military support of Israel and there is at least a chance they will listen. Elect Harris and we'll have at least a little longer to breathe clean air while fighting for a solution to all the other problems we have. Elect Harris and she'll LEGALIZE MARIJUANA WHY IS THIS THE FIRST TIME I'M HEARING ABOUT THIS.

[misfitwashere]

Friends,

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling more anxious about the outcome of the upcoming election. I’m still nauseously optimistic, but the nausea is growing. 

I’m as skeptical of polls as any of you, but when all of them show the same thing — that Kamala Harris’s campaign stalled several weeks ago, yet Trump’s continues to surge — it’s important to take the polls seriously. 

Harris will give her closing message to the American people tomorrow at a rally on the National Mall’s Ellipse in Washington. 

Over the last several weeks, she’s focused on Trump’s threats to a woman’s right over her body and to the rights of all Americans to a democracy. 

Tomorrow night, though, she needs to respond forcefully to the one issue that continues to be highest on the minds of most Americans: the economy. 

She must tell Americans simply and clearly why they continue to have such a hard time despite all the official economic indicators to the contrary: It’s because of the power of large corporations and a handful of wealthy individuals to siphon off most economic gains for themselves. 

Most Americans are outraged that they continue to struggle economically at the same time billionaires are pulling in ever more wealth. Most know they’re paying too much for housing, gas, groceries, and the medicines they need. They also know that a major cause is the market power of big corporations.

They want someone who’ll stand up to big corporations and the politicians in Washington who serve them. 

They want a president who’ll be on their side. A president who will crack down on price gouging, who will bust up the monopolies and restore competition, who will fight to cap prescription drug costs, who will get big money out of politics and stop the legalized bribery that rigs the market for the rich, and who will make sure corporations pay their fair share and end tax breaks for billionaire crooks. 

A president who will put working families first — before big corporations and the wealthy. 

Harris needs to say she will be this president. 

Her policy proposals support this. She’s committed to strong antitrust enforcement — cracking down on mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to jack up food and grocery prices, prosecuting price-fixing, and banning price gouging. She needs to remind voters of this. 

She also says she’ll raise taxes on the rich, provide $25,000 in down-payment assistance to help Americans buy their first home, restore the Expanded Child Tax Credit to $3,600 to help more than 100 million working Americans, and introduce a new $6,000 tax cut to help families pay for the high costs of a child’s first year of life. 

All should be parts of her speech tomorrow about why she will be the champion of working people. 

She wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, make stock buybacks more expensive, and expand Medicare to cover home health care — paid for with savings from the expansion of Medicare price negotiations with drug manufacturers.

She needs to frame all of this as a response to the power of big corporations and the wealthy — and say in no uncertain terms that she’s on the side of the people, not the powerful. 

If she fails to do this in her closing argument, Trump’s demagogic response will be the only one the public hears — that average working people are struggling because of undocumented workers and the “enemy within,” including Democrats, socialists, Marxists, and the “deep state.”

Harris should fit her message about democracy inside this economic message. If our democracy weren’t dominated by the rich and big corporations, fewer of the economy’s gains would be siphoned off to them. Average working people would have better pay and more secure jobs and be able to afford to homes, food, fuel, medicine, child care, and eldercare. 

A large portion of the public no longer thinks American democracy is working. According to a new New York Times/Siena College poll, only 45 percent believe our democracy does a good job representing ordinary people. An astounding 62 percent say the government is mostly working to benefit itself and elites rather than the common good.

In her closing argument, Harris should commit herself to reversing this, so government works for the common good. 

Harris started her campaign in July and early August by emphasizing these themes about the economy and democracy. 

But in more recent weeks, she’s focused mostly on Trump’s particular threat to democracy. Her campaign seems to have decided that she can draw additional voters from moderate Republican suburban women upset by Trump’s role in fomenting the attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

That’s why she’s been campaigning with Liz Cheney and gathering Republican officials as supporters. And why she has chosen to give her closing message on the Ellipse — where Trump summoned his followers to march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

Yet when she shifted gears from the economy to Trump’s attacks on democracy, Harris’s campaign stalled. I think that���s because Americans continue to focus on the economy and want an answer to why they are still struggling economically. 

If Trump gives them an answer — although baseless and demagogic — but Harris does not, he may sail to victory on November 5. 

Hence in her closing message she must talk clearly and frankly about the misallocation of economic power in America — lodged with big corporations and the wealthy instead of average Americans — and her commitment to rectify this.

[thelastomnitect]

I HAVE A FANCOMIC CONUNDRUM

Hey, Voyagers!

I'm Omni, your favorite Robot-American, TTRPG Creator & Artist buddy... aaaand Im in a bind.

So, for those of you in the know, Ive been really enjoying making fancomic works lately, and its been very rewarding (Check out my Helldivers 2 Fancomic "Gentry Dolaan Aint No Fascist" if youre interested in what I've been cooking!). So much so, that I am also working on a Space Marine Fancomic/Webcomic (working title: "BROTHERS: a Tale of Treachery and Doom"), and I'm really excited about it. Ive been doing tons of art and planning for it behind the scenes, and it's a story I think will be really fun to tell and read! I've been a huge fan of the Warhammer setting since I was young, and Narrative campaigns like The Taros Campaign, Siege of Vraks & The Badab War sit on my bookshelves next to my copies of some Horus Heresy books & my Gaunt's Ghosts Omnibus. Its definitely a loveletter to this hobby and setting I've loved for so long...

...BUT...

Games Workshop (the owners of the "WARHAMMER 40,000" IP and the creators of the Tabletop Miniature game) is a terrible company. For a very abbreviated list of their bullshit... - Games Workshop can be overly litigious towards fan creators (a few years back, they went on an absolute spree of issuing cease-and-desist/takedown notices on tons of fanworks in preparation of the launch of their WARHMMER+ streaming service, primarily to prevent competition to their in house animations. It's either directly destroyed or had a crazy chilling effect on many amazing fan projects, such as Bruva Alfabusa's amazing "If The Emperor Had a Text-To-Speech Device" which has been discontinued, or gorgeous animations like THE EXODITE or ASTARTES, both of which were bought up, taken off of youtube and forced onto their premium Warhammer + service behind a paywall. The creator of ASTARTES has already suffered a great deal at the hands of hackers stealing their youtube channel, and since their purchase by GW and move to Warhammer plus has been dead silent, and the EXODITE suffered immensely during its production. And with a new Warhammer TV series in development, and the success of SPACE MARINE 2, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that kind of aggressive legal gatekeeping behavior again soon...) - They abusively price & market their products (they have the single highest priced miniatures in the entire wargaming hobby, frequently rely on FOMO events and bundling [even for rules and important items the community HAS to buy], relentlessly overprice in several regions across the world, and intentionally price gouge their books and rules, all while taking down any free access to any of those rules at the first given opportunity. There is no reason a single, unassembled and unpainted, mono-pose 32mm miniature should be priced at $45 dollars. That's insane.) - They have done so much damage to the Wargaming Hobby Community in their time (They are basically the EA of the Wargaming hobby. They drive medium sized wargames out of the market under walls of money, advertisement and litigation, create walled content gardens that discourage players from leaving them, have set terrible standards in the larger hobby like a lack of free-to-download rules & denial of third-party miniatures at their tournaments, and have gone so far as to literally not even call their hobby wargaming but the "WARHAMMER Hobby", so players dont accidentally stumble across the rest of the industry. Its BAND-AID bandage levels of market crushing brand power, and they abuse it constantly to the detriment of the entire hobby. Again, its basically the same level of industry damage as Activision or EA have done to the videogaming world). ... so yeah, again, I LOVE the setting & the world, and I've had a long standing relationship with the wargame property itself, but GW has a deathgrip on the franchise. Truth is, I dont want to steer more people towards them, or lose all the work I put into this webcomic project because GW's legal team is feeling a little overly litigious in advance of some new Netflix show or videogame or edition release.

HOWEVER, I have other options. Games Workshop doesn't corner the market on Space Marines with big pauldrons and dramatic flair. I COULD just set "Brothers" in a more creator friendly IP... like ONE PAGE RULES's GRIMDARK FUTURE setting, and without too much effort. While there would be some differences, it would still be the same tale of stoic battle brothers contending with isolation, dogma, and struggling with the concessions needed to survive in a hostile place. Hell, their super-human gene-sculpted super soldiers are literally called BROTHERS, so it's... kinda serendipitous, to be real with you. The folks at OPR are much smaller company and have infinitely better business practices. They market their products in a much more responsible and ethical manner, sell both 3d-printable miniature files and pre-printed miniatures themselves, their games are all miniature agnostic and well designed, and frankly, they actually give a damn about their fan creators. They even run Fan Creator Competitions (I just joined a Writing Jam they hosted a few months back! It was a blast), and give free miniatures and huge discounts to the winners. Generally speaking, they are the kind of tiny company I actually could see myself patronizing and supporting, amybe even working with at some point, and they are far closer to the way I'd prefer to see the wargaming industry develop in the future (I am NOT sponsored by OPR, by the way. Just wanted to make that clear. I wouldn't turn it down, not gonna lie, but as of time of this post, I've no support from either GW or OPR) And I know Im not the only one who's been making these calculations when working on their fan works. Bruva Alfabusa has moved on to working with friendly IPs, like their awesome World of Darkness series "Hunter: the Parenting" series, while the Exodite's creator has completely pivoted into working on their own grimdark IP, "PROJECT MORNINGSTAR", which is well worth a look, btw. The issue I face is that while I vastly prefer supporting OPR's GRIMDARK FUTURE and them as a company, I originally started this project as a 40K fanwork. And I know that, for all its many flaws, Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 brand name carries a lot of recognition and fandom power, and it's setting has a lot of personal meaning to me. OPR is growing and it's got a really passionate fandom, but its only a fraction the size of GW's juggernaut, and while I'm not creatively tied to either setting atm, I'd be a liar to not at least acknowledge and respect the sheer fandom gravity of the Warhammer 40,000 IP. And fancomics can live and die on the size and relative energy of their fanbases.

So that's my Conundrum.

Do I continue along the path I was already on and make this fancomic a WARHAMMER 40,000 story, facing the fact I'd basically be advertising for a company I hate and risking that if I ever managed to garner a big enough fanbase the GW legal might just pop in and shut me down, all in exchange for brand recognition? Or do I take a chance on my personal principles, set it in OPR's GRIMDARK FUTURE, tell the same story I was already excited to tell and support a company and a game that I actually think is worth talking about, but risk the smaller community and less passionate fanbase not being enough to get the fancomic off the launchpad in the first place?

I'm genuinely soul searching here, Voyagers. And I want your opinion.

The truth is, I know which way I want to go, but what do you think? If youre a creator / fan / artist / player / hobbyist of WARHAMMER 40,000, WARHAMMER, ONE PAGE RULES GAMES, GRIMDARK FUTURE, WARGAMING, FANCOMICS, FANWORKS, SCIENCE FICTION, or even just read your way through all of this and wanted to give me your opinion (thank you, by the way, that's incredibly kind of you) what do you think? PLEASE, tell me your thoughts and feedback in the comments. And, for anybody who got this far, thank you for reading this. Seriously, I appreciate you. See you out there, Voyagers~

-The Last Omnitect

[nv-alexander]

Every time someone says kamala was a "harm reduction" choice it becomes painfully clear they didn't listen to her speak or read her policies. Dude she was going to give us what we've been asking for for years. Stop it with this harm reduction/mitigation bullshit.

First of all, harm reduction is a practice in addictions about making using substances as safe as possible, including clean use sites, free and sterile supplies, testing kits, and for a lot of people pushing to make substances legal. It is the idea that people should have a choice with what to do with their bodies and access to do it safely.

Which, actually, in that definition, yeah, kamala was a harm reduction candidate because she supported bodily autonomy and access to healthcare.

But she also was running on access to education, green energy, cutting taxes for the working and middle class, enforcing restrictions on corporate practices like price gouging, helping people access housing, and codifying civil rights. Things we have been asking for.

She made the trans panic defense illegal in California BY THE WAY

Do not call her a mitigation candidate or the better of 2 evils. She has a long public record of supporting the exact things she still supports. She ran on an incredible platform. She ran a damn near flawless campaign.

Just admit you didn't listen.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

It's been 21 years since Bill Willingham launched Fables, his 110-issue, wide-ranging, delightful and brilliantly crafted author-owned comic series that imagines that the folkloric figures of the world's fairytales are real people, who live in a secret society whose internal struggles and intersections with the mundane world are the source of endless drama.

Fables is a DC Comics title; DC is division of the massive entertainment conglomerate Warners, which is, in turn, part of the Warner/Discovery empire, a rapacious corporate behemoth whose screenwriters have been on strike for 137 days (and counting). DC is part of a comics duopoly; its rival, Marvel, is a division of the Disney/Fox juggernaut, whose writers are also on strike.

The DC that Willingham bargained with at the turn of the century isn't the DC that he bargains with now. Back then, DC was still subject to a modicum of discipline from competition; its corporate owner's shareholders had not yet acquired today's appetite for meteoric returns on investment of the sort that can only be achieved through wage-theft and price-gouging.

In the years since, DC – like so many other corporations – participated in an orgy of mergers as its sector devoured itself. The collapse of comics into a duopoly owned by studios from an oligopoly had profound implications for the entire sector, from comic shops to comic cons. Monopoly breeds monopoly, and the capture of the entire comics distribution system by a single company – Diamond – was attended by the capture of the entire digital comics market by a single company, Amazon, who enshittified its Comixology division, driving creators and publishers into Kindle Direct Publishing, a gig-work platform that replicates the company's notoriously exploitative labor practices for creative workers. Today, Comixology is a ghost-town, its former employees axed in a mass layoff earlier this year:

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-layoffs-comixology-1850007216

When giant corporations effect these mergers, they do so with a kind of procedural kabuki, insisting that they are dotting every i and crossing every t, creating a new legal entity whose fictional backstory is a perfect, airtight bubble, a canon with not a single continuity bug. This performance of seriousness is belied by the behind-the-scenes chaos that these corporate shifts entail – think of the way that the banks that bought and sold our mortgages in the run-up to the 2008 crisis eventually lost the deeds to our houses, and then just pretended they were legally entitled to collect money from us every month – and steal our houses if we refused to pay:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-58325420110720

Or think of the debt collection industry, which maintains a pretense of careful record-keeping as the basis for hounding and threatening people, but which is, in reality, a barely coherent trade in spreadsheets whose claims to our money are matters of faith:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

For usury, the chaos is a feature, not a bug. Their corporate strategists take the position that any ambiguity should be automatically resolved in their favor, with the burden of proof on accused debtors, not the debt collectors. The scumbags who lost your deed and stole your house say that it's up to you to prove that you own it. And since you've just been rendered homeless, you don't even have a house to secure a loan you might use to pay a lawyer to go to court.

It's not solely that the usurers want to cheat you – it's that they can make more money if they don't pay for meticulous record-keeping, and if that means that they sometimes cheat us, that's our problem, not theirs.

While this is very obvious in the usury sector, it's also true of other kinds of massive mergers that create unfathomnably vast conglomerates. The "curse of bigness" is real, but who gets cursed is a matter of power, and big companies have a lot more power.

The chaos, in other words, is a feature and not a bug. It provides cover for contract-violating conduct, up to and including wage-theft. Remember when Disney/Marvel stole money from beloved science fiction giant Alan Dean Foster, whose original Star Wars novelization was hugely influential on George Lucas, who changed the movie to match Foster's ideas?

Disney claimed that when it acquired Lucasfilm, it only acquired its assets, but not its liabilities. That meant that while it continued to hold Foster's license to publish his novel, they were not bound by an obligation to pay Foster for this license, since that liability was retained by the (now defunct) original company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/30/disney-still-must-pay/#pay-the-writer

For Disney, this wage-theft (and many others like it, affecting writers with less fame and clout than Foster) was greatly assisted by the chaos of scale. The chimera of Lucas/Disney had no definitive responsible party who could be dragged into a discussion. The endless corporate shuffling that is normal in giant companies meant that anyone who might credibly called to account for the theft could be transfered or laid off overnight, with no obvious successor. The actual paperwork itself was hard for anyone to lay hands on, since the relevant records had been physically transported and re-stored subsequent to the merger. And, of course, the company itself was so big and powerful that it was hard for Foster and his agent to raise a credible threat.

I've experienced versions of this myself: every book contract I've ever signed stipulated that my ebooks could not be published with DRM. But one of my publishers – a boutique press that published my collection Overclocked – collapsed along with most of its competitors, the same week my book was published (its distributor, Publishers Group West, went bankrupt after its parent company, Advanced Marketing Services, imploded in a shower of fraud and criminality).

The publisher was merged with several others, and then several more, and then several more – until it ended up a division of the Big Five publisher Hachette, who repeatedly, "accidentally" pushed my book into retail channels with DRM. I don't think Hachette deliberately set out to screw me over, but the fact that Hachette is (by far) the most doctrinaire proponent of DRM meant that when the chaos of its agglomerated state resulted in my being cheated, it was a happy accident.

(The Hachette story has a happy ending; I took the book back from them and sold it to Blackstone Publishing, who brought out a new expanded edition to accompany a DRM-free audiobook and ebook):

https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/overclocked-bvej.html

Willingham, too, has been affected by the curse of bigness. The DC he bargained with at the outset of Fables made a raft of binding promises to him: he would have approval over artists and covers and formats for new collections, and he would own the "IP" for the series, meaning the copyrights vested in the scripts, storylines, characters (he might also have retained rights to some trademarks).

But as DC grew, it made mistakes. Willingham's hard-fought, unique deal with the publisher was atypical. A giant publisher realizes its efficiencies through standardized processes. Willingham's books didn't fit into that standard process, and so, repeatedly, the publisher broke its promises to him.

At first, Willingham's contacts at the publisher were contrite when he caught them at this. In his press-release on the matter, Willingham calls them "honest men and women of integrity [who] interpreted the details of that agreement fairly and above-board":

https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/willingham-sends-fables-into-the

But as the company grew larger, these counterparties were replaced by corporate cogs who were ever-more-distant from his original, creator-friendly deal. What's more, DC's treatment of its other creators grew shabbier at each turn (a dear friend who has written for DC for decades is still getting the same page-rate as they got in the early 2000s), so Willingham's deal grew more exceptional as time went by. That meant that when Willingham got the "default" treatment, it was progressively farther from what his contract entitled him to.

The company repeatedly – and conveniently – forgot that Willingham had the final say over the destiny of his books. They illegally sublicensed a game adapted from his books, and then, when he objected, tried to make renegotiating his deal a condition of being properly compensated for this theft. Even after he won that fight, the company tried to cheat him and then cover it up by binding him to a nondisclosure agreement.

This was the culmination of a string of wage-thefts in which the company misreported his royalties and had to be dragged into paying him his due. When the company "practically dared" Willingham to sue ("knowing it would be a long and debilitating process") he snapped.

Rather than fight Warner, Willingham has embarked on what JWZ calls an act of "absolute table-flip badassery" – he has announced that Fables will hereafter be in the public domain, available for anyone to adapt commercially, in works that compete with whatever DC might be offering.

Now, this is huge, and it's also shrewd. It's the kind of thing that will bring lots of attention on Warner's fraudulent dealings with its creative workforce, at a moment where the company is losing a public relations battle to the workers picketing in front of its gates. It constitutes a poison pill that is eminently satisfying to contemplate. It's delicious.

But it's also muddy. Willingham has since clarified that his public domain dedication means that the public can't reproduce the existing comics. That's not surprising; while Willingham doesn't say so, it's vanishingly unlikely that he owns the copyrights to the artwork created by other artists (Willingham is also a talented illustrator, but collaborated with a who's-who of comics greats for Fables). He may or may not have control over trademarks, from the Fables wordmark to any trademark interests in the character designs. He certainly doesn't have control over the trademarked logos for Warner and DC that adorn the books.

When Willingham says he is releasing the "IP" to his comic, he is using the phrase in its commercial sense, not its legal sense. When business people speak of "owning IP," they mean that they believe they have the legal right to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The problem is that this doesn't correspond to the legal concept of IP, because IP isn't actually a legal concept. While there are plenty of "IP lawyers" and even "IP law firms," there is no "IP law." There are many laws that are lumped together under "IP," including the big three (trademark, copyright and patent), but also a bestiary of obscure cousins and subspecies – trade dress, trade secrecy, service marks, noncompetes, nondisclosues, anticirumvention rights, sui generis "neighboring rights" and so on.

The job of an "IP lawyer" is to pluck individual doctrines from this incoherent scrapheap of laws and regulations and weave them together into a spider's web of tripwires that customers and critics and competitors can't avoid, and which confer upon the lawyer's client the right to sue for anything that displeases them.

When Willingham says he's releasing Fables into the public domain, it's not clear what he's releasing – and what is his to release. In the colloquial, business sense of "IP," saying you're "releasing the IP" means something like, "Feel free to create adaptations from this." But these adaptations probably can't draw too closely on the artwork, or the logos. You can probably make novelizations of the comics. Maybe you can make new comics that use the same scripts but different art. You can probably make sequels to, or spinoffs of, the existing comics, provided you come up with your own character designs.

But it's murky. Very murky. Remember, this all started because Willingham didn't have the resources or patience to tangle with the rabid attack-lawyers Warners keeps kenneled on its Burbank lot. Warners can (and may) release those same lawyers on you, even if you are likely to prevail in court, betting that you – like Willingham – won't have the resources to defend yourself.

The strange reality of "IP" rights is that they can be secured without any affirmative step on your part. Copyrights are conjured into existence the instant that a new creative work is fixed in a tangible medium and endure until the creator's has been dead for 70 years. Common-law trademarks gradually come into definition like an image appearing on photo-paper in a chemical soup, growing in definition every time they are used, even if the mark's creator never files a form with the USPTO.

These IP tripwires proliferate in the shadows, wherever doodles are sketched on napkins, wherever kindergartners apply finger-paint to construction-paper. But for all that they are continuously springing into existence, and enduring for a century or more, they are absurdly hard to give away.

This was the key insight behind the Creative Commons project: that while the internet was full of people saying "no copyright" (or just assuming the things they posted were free for others to use), the law was a universe away from their commonsense assumptions. Creative Commons licenses were painstakingly crafted by an army of international IP lawyers who set out to turn the normal IP task on its head – to create a legal document that assured critics, customers and competitors that the licensor had no means to control their conduct.

20 years on, these licenses are pretty robust. The flaws in earlier versions have been discovered and repaired in subsequent revisions. They have been adapted to multiple countries' legal systems, allowing CC users to mix-and-match works from many territories – animating Polish sprites to tell a story by a Canadian, set to music from the UK.

Willingham could clarify his "public domain" dedication by applying a Creative Commons license to Fables, but which license? That's a thorny question. What Willingham really wants here is a sampling license – a license that allows licensees to take some of the elements of his work, combine them with other parts, and make something new.

But no CC license fits that description. Every CC license applies to whole works. If you want to license the bass-line from your song but not the melody, you have to release the bass-line separately and put a CC license on that. You can't just put a CC license on the song with an asterisked footnote that reads "just the bass, though."

CC had a sampling license: the "Sampling Plus 1.0" license. It was a mess. Licensees couldn't figure out what parts of works they were allowed to use, and licensors couldn't figure out how to coney that. It's been "retired."

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/

So maybe Willingham should create his own bespoke license for Fables. That may be what he has to do, in fact. But boy is that a fraught business. Remember the army of top-notch lawyers who created the CC licenses? They missed a crucial bug in the first three versions of the license, and billions of works have been licensed under those earlier versions. This has enabled a mob of crooked copyleft trolls (like Pixsy) to prey on the unwary, raking in a fortune:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299

Making a bug-free license is hard. A failure on Willingham's part to correctly enumerate or convey the limitations of such a license – to list which parts of Fables DC might sue you for using – could result in downstream users having their hard work censored out of existence by legal threats. Indeed, that's the best case scenario – defects in a license could result in downstream users, their collaborators, investors, and distributors being sued for millions of dollars, costing them everything they have, up to and including their homes.

Which isn't to say that this is dead on arrival – far from it! Just that there is work to be done. I can't speak for Creative Commons (it's been more than 20 years since I was their EU Director), but I'm positive that there are copyfighting lawyers out there who'd love to work on a project like this.

I think Willingham is onto something here. After all, Fables is built on the public domain. As Willingham writes in his release: "The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want."

Willingham describes how his participation in the entertainment industry has made him more skeptical of IP, not less. He proposes capping copyright at 20 years, with a single, 10-year extension for works that are sold onto third parties. This would be pretty good industrial policy – almost no works are commercially viable after just 14 years:

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf

But there are massive structural barriers to realizing such a policy, the biggest being that the US had tied its own hands by insisting that long copyright terms be required in the trade deals it imposed on other countries, thereby binding itself to these farcically long copyright terms.

But there is another policy lever American creators can and should yank on to partially resolve this: Termination. The 1976 Copyright Act established the right for any creator to "terminate" the "transfer" of any copyrighted work after 30 years, by filing papers with the Copyright Office. This process is unduly onerous, and the Authors Alliance (where I'm a volunteer advisor) has created a tool to simplify it:

https://www.authorsalliance.org/resources/rights-reversion-portal/

Termination is deliberately obscure, but it's incredibly powerful. The copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin has studied this extensively, helping to produce the most complete report on how termination has been used by creators of all types:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#reverted

Writers, musicians and other artists have used termination to unilaterally cancel the crummy deals they had crammed down their throats 30 years ago and either re-sell their works on better terms or make them available directly to the public. Every George Clinton song, every Sweet Valley High novel, and the early works of Steven King have all be terminated and returned to their creators.

Copyright termination should and could be improved. Giblin and I wrote a whole-ass book about this and related subjects, Chokepoint Capitalism, which not only details the scams that writers like Willingham are subject to, but also devotes fully half its length to presenting detailed, technical, shovel-ready proposals for making life better for creators:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

Willingham is doing something important here. Larger and larger entertainment firms offer shabbier and shabbier treatment to creative workers, as striking members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA can attest. Over the past year, I've seen a sharp increase in the presence of absolutely unconscionable clauses in the contracts I'm offered by publishers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-agree

I'm six months into negotiating a contract for a 300 word piece I wrote for a magazine I started contributing to in 1992. At issue is that they insist that I assign film rights and patent rights from my work as a condition of publication. Needless to say, there are no patentable inventions nor film ideas in this article, but they refuse to vary the contract, to the obvious chagrin of the editor who commissioned me.

Why won't they grant a variance? Why, they are so large – the magazine is part of a global conglomerate – that it would be impractical for them to track exceptions to this completely fucking batshit clause. In other words: we can't strike this batshit clause because we decided that from now on, all out contracts will have batshit clauses.

The performance of administrative competence – and the tactical deployment of administrative chaos – among giant entertainment companies is grotesque, but every now and again, it backfires.

That's what's happening at Marvel right now. The estates of Marvel founder Stan Lee and its seminal creator Steve Ditko are suing Marvel to terminate the transfer of both creators' characters to Marvel. If they succeed, Marvel will lose most of its most profitable characters, including Iron Man:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/marvel-artists-estate-ask-pre-trial-wins-superhero-copyright-fight-2023-05-22/

They're following in the trail of the Jack Kirby estate, whom Marvel paid millions to rather than taking their chances with the Supreme Court.

Marvel was always an administrative mess, repeatedly going bankrupt. Its deals with its creators were indifferently papered over, and then Marvel lost a lot of the paperwork. I'd bet anything that many of the key documents Disney (Marvel's owner) needs to prevail over Lee and Ditko are either unlocatable or destroyed – or never existed in the first place.

A more muscular termination right – say, one that kicks in after 20 years, and is automatic – would turn circuses like Marvel-Lee/Ditko into real class struggles. Rather than having the heirs of creators reaping the benefit of termination, we could make termination into a system for getting creators themselves paid.

In the meantime, there's Willingham's "absolute table-flip badassery."

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/2023/09/15/fairy-use-tales/#sampling-license

Image: Tom Mrazek (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Open_Field_%2827220830251%29.jpg

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

--

Penguin Random House (modified) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/707161/fables-20th-anniversary-box-set-by-bill-willingham/

Fair use https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property

[bioethicists]

Your post about how the clinical process surrounding mental illness and addiction was really interesting!

I wonder what your thoughts are about Housing First models and Common Grounds models? Because I feel like they speak directly to your points and provide the needs but also a structure that can be relied on if one wishes to change oneself.

my job as a research assistant is actually doing an evaluation of the benefits of a massive housing first project in boston! i am a fan of housing first particularly because i think everyone should be housed + the possibilities for life shrink dramatically the second somebody is unhoused, regardless of their substance use status. unhoused ppl are treated as less than human (sometimes less than animal tbh) in many spaces. i also have a personal investment because my brother overdosed in part because of the fact that he had been kicked out of his living situation for using + was forced to use with a depressed tolerance in a remote location. if he had been in a housing situation which was not contingent on sobriety, where others may have been present to narcan him or he would not have had the immense stress + trigger of dogshit menial labor jobs needed to pay the ridiculous, price gouging rents at sober living- i mean, i can't speculate, but it's something i do think about.

i think my hesitation with how it can be implemented is, again, the assumption that the end goal for everyone is recovery. my position is not "well some people can't recover" or "well some people can't recover until xyz is met" but "nobody is obligated to recover, ever, and recovery is a subjective concept which can be put to extremely reactionary uses. i want to reduce people's suffering and increase their possibilities for life."

i do think, based on my work, that it's really important for people who are using substances to have access to resources which facilitate their safety and happiness + a lot of them would probably choose either sobriety, MAT, or safer drug use habits if that was something which was easy for them to do. they often express genuinely felt desires to "get better" (in whatever way that means to them or whatever way they hope it means to me) but similar, competing desires to continue experiencing the benefits of their drug use, as well as avoiding the negatives of sobriety. while i chafe at the idea that all people's "true selves" want to recover (in the specific way that recovery is constructed by substance use treatment providers), i do think that most people want to suffer less. things like methadone/suboxone (or safe, legal, surveillance free supply!!!), medications provided on site, easily accessible, non judgemental medical treatment, etc can save lives.

it's important for ppl to be very skeptical of who is allocating/managing the resources for these interventions + their motivations. to be frank, i get scared about the future of the (admittedly imperfect) housing projects i work with because they are funded by the state of MA with the primary goal being to get ppl off the street, because housed members of the community were complaining about the encampments. the state very clearly wants to see that these projects 1) reduce the prevalence of visible homelessness and 2) reduce the rate of drug use among participants. my job is very explicitly to collect and produce data that indicates this + the questions i ask when i collect data are quite explicitly centered around figuring out if being housed makes ppl use less drugs. the point here is that the state absolutely can + will revoke the massive amounts of money it has allocated towards these programs if they don't see them as making people Stop Doing Drugs or Stop Wandering the Streets. this is why i think harm reduction responses should be grassroots responses originating within + for communities, as described in some of the chapters of Saving Our Own Lives. unfortunately, these communities rarely have the infrastructure or the resources to implement these projects, so they must rely on the state + all of its messy biopolitical motives

[vintageseawitch]

happy Labor Day! just a reminder that it was leftists who got us the weekend. it's leftists who give us unions & keep them strong.

the federal minimum wage hasn't risen from $7.25 in well over a decade. the main culprit? Republicans of course, & too many people that are in a union are Republican.

Republicans HATE unions nowadays. rich people are so far up their asses they've become living meat puppets for them. rich people don't care about a happy population; they want to get rich at our expense. people blame the president for the high cost of living, such as groceries, when this is actually a global issue & companies have openly stated they were the ones who were price gouging.

it's rich people behind the scenes & they're a massive reason why Project 2025 is a real threat. they want to take away 40 hour work weeks & turn them into 160 hours work months. they will take away the right to get paid for working overtime (page 592). they want to ban unions for public service workers (page 82), make it easier for private companies to decertify unions (page 603), & allow states to opt out of federal labor laws (page 605).

a SCOTUS justice (Thomas) has expressed they he thinks OSHA needs to go. some states like Arkansas have allowed child labor with limited safety & legal measures. they want to take away so many workers' rights that have been so hard fought for & earned. OSHA became a thing because of so much bloodshed. people are going to die from these but it's okay because these rich people who do so much for us will be getting paid more while not being required to even pretend we are human beings.

are you gonna be like the rednecks of old? who gave such a shit for their fellow workers that they literally fought to protect them all? do you really believe rich people are good for us? they don't care at all. they need us more then we need them. even with their power, they're scared in the back of their pathetic little greedy minds. they exhaust us on purpose. Project 2025 is going to make so many aspects of our lives hell & they will not only do nothing about the conditions now to improve our way of life but they fully intend to make it WORSE.

they will force people to stay married & make babies they can't afford while offering no help whatsoever. they want working conditions to be lethal again. they want us to be wage slaves. how can anyone want this? you think it's horrible now? why risk this??

please don't stop talking about Project 2025 or Agenda 47. they're the same plan & the reason why trump doesn't talk about policy is because Project 2025 IS his policy. he's only in this to stay out of prison. he doesn't give a shit what kind of evil, insane people will be doing in the background to fuck us all over. the rest of the world is watching us nervously, hoping he won't be president again. it won't ve good on a domestic OR international level. this is a dangerous time.

please check your registration status often & vote early if you can. encourage friends & family. make a day of it! don't wait until three last minute but be careful out there, too. if it's not voting issues they'll cause people might get violent. ladies, if you're with a Republican partner but you're scared to vote for Harris... please know that your vote is private & you can pretend you're doing something else in order to get it done. stay registered Republican just to be safe. we got this 💙