#they gouge the government

[the-gamling-dog]

The real affirmative action is the scores of comparatively useless legacies and donor-spawn who clog up the Ivy League, Oxbridge, etc. If they were forced to live & die by their own merits, the (many) fewer BIPOC applicants given the benefit of the doubt would be a drop in the ocean.

It sounds like literally thousands of many straight A+ students with perfect scores and after school activities apply to these colleges every year. Most don’t get in.

Honestly, unless, you are a star athlete, a legacy or have a parent with the means to donate millions and millions (looking at you, Jared Kushner), it is incredibly tough and competitive.

The real problem is legacies and wealthy donors. But since no one wants to go after rich people, let’s just blame black people.

[politijohn]

Source

Did you read this story? Then read it again?

[thebiscuiteternal]

Could you explain more about the WIC shrinkflation issue? I was advised to apply for the program and now I'm worried about the complications.

Sure thing.

For starters, while WIC is a national program, states can and do implement certain aspects of it differently, so disclaimer that this is coming from a Tennessee viewpoint.

Okay, so.

WIC (Women Infants Children) vouchers are designed to help make sure that babies and toddlers are getting enough nutrition during early development. It usually runs alongside food stamps, but sometimes someone might be eligible for food stamps, but not WIC, or vise versa.

For infants -> pre-solid-food toddlers, it covers formula and baby food, and for pregnant mothers and/or toddlers eating solid foods, it usually covers fruits, vegetables, and certain staple foods.

WIC vouchers are very specific about what you can get with them, especially when it comes to baby food. They will label

Brands (Usually Gerber, Beech Nut, or other approved affiliate brands)

Formula varieties (usually high-vitamin)

Food type (Typically no mixed flavors, i.e. you can get jars of spinach and jars of turkey, but not a jar of blended spinach and turkey. This also trips up a lot of first-timers.)

Age (Baby foods typically come in development stages, so the vouchers will usually say whether you can have Stage 1, stage 2, etc)

Packaging (Whether it has to be glass jars or you can substitute with the mini plastic tubs. Usually pouch foods are not allowed)

Number (i.e. 12 jars of pureed meats or what have you)

Weight (boxes of baby cereals like oatmeal or rice, the size of the formula cans, or the size of the jars)

Some foods will specify whether or not it has to be organic

(Note: The local WIC offices used to send a pamphlet with the vouchers that included pictures of particular packaging to help ESL recipients, but with companies changing the look of their packaging too frequently, this has stopped in a lot of places.)

So, already a lot to look out for, yeah? And weight is usually where things get fucked. As I said in the previous post, companies (especially Gerber) have a really irritating habit where they will up and change the actual weight of the product without informing the WIC office of the change in time for the next round of vouchers (if they bother to inform them at all, instead of the WIC office having to contact them due to complaints). But of course the store knows about the change due to their inventory programs.

As a result, you'll either get:

A: The parent who has already been through this shit and now tries to verify the labels and is upset because they can't find the box with the correct ounce amount anymore (because it no longer exists).

B: The parent who hasn't been through this shit yet and grabbed the same box they got the month previously and is unaware it's now the wrong box until the register refuses to apply it to their monthly voucher.

C: The cashier who has to deal with this day in and day out and is just as frustrated as the parents, especially if they don't have enough experience to know this is the companies' fault, not the parents'.

I should also note that this has been a problem for a long time. It was already happening back when I was still working. But at least back then, you could count on at least 8 months (or even a couple of years) between sizing incidents, whereas Post-Covid, it's accelerated to practically a fuckup (or more) a month. If this month, it's the cereal, next month, it's the formula, etc. A neverending carousel of corporate bullshit. And the companies don't care, because they've already gotten their government subsidy for participating in the program at all, and if the parents have to pay out of pocket for the things the vouchers no longer cover that month, that's just more profit for the company.

[nando161mando]

Surveillance "Personalized Pricing" To Gouge Customers All of Their Money.

[scp-230]

[butchlifeguard]

i would love to do a really long essay about food conspiracies and fatphobia

[flowersandbirdsflyingfree]

Additionally, for video editing use DaVinci Resolve

Adobe is going to spy on your projects. This is insane.

[daisjohnsons]

i feel like I’m watching a horror movie unfold seeing so many people say they have been physically unable to evacuate for milton. it makes me feel ill every time i come across a video

[teachanarchy]

We Put 7 Uber Drivers in One Room. What We Found Will Shock You.

[katkats-world]

rant!!

the american economy is single handily killing everyone middle/lower class. i turned 18 literally a month ago but im considering opening a credit card because i simply can’t afford to pay for things. i still live at home too, imagine if i didn’t. i wouldn’t be able to provide housing for myself or basic medical care (all the things my mom currently pays for.) that’s the sad reality of living here and homelessness is extremely normalized to where most people don’t even pay attention anymore. prices for anything even in low cost of living states are outrageous. i live in a small southern town and a pack of tictacs is $5!! mcdonald’s is $10 for one meal and that’s the CHEAPEST fast food here. ever since this country was built companies have just been taking more and more from their employees and continue to add on to the CEO’s salary. the media tells us it’s inflation but the reality is it’s just price gouging and greed. people here can’t afford necessities while our “leader” sends money overseas to fund genocide. we also can’t forget the TRILLIONS of dollars our government just “can’t find.” our government keeps us reliant on them and keeps it impossible for every citizen to be cared for. the united states COULD have free healthcare/university, lower prices, have a higher minimum wage, fix the teacher shortage, but they won’t. they keep us afraid and want us to feel trapped by our lives in this country. people are noticing now and their support will eventually run out to where we all go french revolution style and i DO NOT want to be here when that happens. thanks for reading, this whole situation scares me and i’d love to hear what y’all think because it’s all just so frustrating:(

[politijohn]

Source

Source

[makingcontact]

Pandemic and Profit (Encore)

Homemade masks made by the Auntie Sewing Squad. (Photo by Mai-Linh Hong) On today’s show, we’ll revisit the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic by looking at two alternative supply chains for masks during the fallout from the Trump administration’s failure to prepare. We’ll be speaking with the ProPublica reporter David McSwane about his book Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves…

[dyrdeer]

stores increased their prices after the pandemic using the excuse of inflation to artificially make things even more expensive than they should be. Now theyre claiming this was a mistake and totally wasnt the organized effort of all retailers to gouge the working class of more resources. They took years of our wages, gave us less in exchange, and our governments let them. Even if prices do fall, please don't forget this. They will take everything you have and only let up when it starts to cost them. We all must have solidarity with each other and plan to prevent the further exploitation of the working class.

[theconcealedweapon]

Rich People: "I want to price gouge and plan obsolescence without having to worry about competition. Government, enforce my patents."

Rich People: "I want firepower to uphold my enormous wealth. Government, hire police officers with taxpayer money to protect my property from thieves and trespassers."

Rich People: "I want a source of cheap labor. Government, enforce laws against victimless actions in order to put people in prison so I can exploit them as slaves, then brand them with criminal records so they'll take any low wage job that's offered to them in the future."

Rich People: "There are homeless people existing who are not generating profit for me. Government, hire police officers with taxpayer money to arrest them for loitering, and use taxpayer money to build hostile architecture."

Rich People: "Homeless people are eating food that my business discarded, which doesn't generate profit for me. Government, hire police officers with taxpayer money to guard the dumpster."

Rich People: "Marijuana is competition for me as a pharmaceutical CEO. Government, ban marijuana."

Rich People: "I build weapons. Government, create wars and buy my weapons with taxpayer money."

Poor People: "I can't afford what I need to live. Government, financially assist me, require my employer to pay me more, or limit rich people's ability to increase prices."

Rich People: "Stop relying on government for everything and taking people's freedom!"

[awkward-teabag]

Things listed that they spent the money on:

Rent/Housing

Durable Goods

Furniture

Food

Transit

Used Car

Clothing

It was a small study and they selected away from people who may have used the money on "temptation goods" (e.g. drugs and alcohol), but it goes to show that homeless people aren't a monolith who, as a whole, are just going to spend that money on booze and blow thus should never have access to cash because "they're too irresponsible".

Unless you talk to people, you have no idea why they're homeless. And with the cost of living crisis in Vancouver, where this was done, this is all the truer. Supports are far between, there's few mental health services (unless you can pay for it), and people working two jobs can still be priced out of the housing market.

Not that people with addictions shouldn't also have the dignity of housing, clean clothes, and a full belly, but the idea that homeless people are on the street "because they're junkies and didn't bootstrap hard enough to get off the street" is pervasive in BC and used an excuse for there to be no government support and to feel appalled someone dared ask them for change.

The participants who were given cash were compared with 65 homeless people who did not get the payment. Those who got the payment did not spend more money on "temptation goods," spent 99 fewer days homeless, increased their savings and spent less time in shelters which "saved society" $777 per person, according to a news release from UBC.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.

Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.

Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.

Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.

But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.

I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.

We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html

What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.

Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.

Those microeconomic wrestling-matches are where we find enshittification's heroes and villains – the people who fight for the user or stand up for a fair deal, versus the people who want to cheat and wreck to make things better for the company and win bonuses and promotions for themselves:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

These microeconomic struggles are usually obscure, because companies are secretive institutions and our glimpses into their deliberations are normally limited to the odd leaked memo, whistleblower tell-all, or spectacular worker revolt. But when a company gets dragged into court, a new window opens into the company's internal operations. That's especially true when the plaintiff is the US government.

Which brings me back to Google, the poster-child for enshittification, a company that revolutionized the internet a quarter of a century ago with a search-engine that was so good that it felt like magic, which has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90% of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.

Google is being sued by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and that means we are getting a very deep look into the company, as its internal emails and memos come to light:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Google is a tech company, and tech companies have literary cultures – they run on email and other forms of written communication, even for casual speech, which is more likely to take place in a chat program than at a water-cooler. This means that tech companies have giant databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Large pieces of Google's database-of-crimes are now on display – so much, in fact, that it's hard for anyone to parse through it all and understand what it means. But some people are trying, and coming up with gold. One of those successful prospectors is Ed Zitron, who has produced a staggering account of the precise moment at which Google search tipped over into enshittification, which names the executives at the very heart of the rot:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

It a picture of a company that isn't just too big to fail – it's (as FTC Chair Lina Khan put it on The Daily Show) too big to care:

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

Zitron's done excellent sleuthing through the court exhibits here, and his writeup is incandescently brilliant. But there's one point I quibble with him on. Zitron writes that "It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it."

I think that gets it backwards. I think that there were always enshittifiers in the C-suites of these companies. When Page and Brin brought in the war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he surely started every day with a ritual, ferocious tug at that enshittification lever. The difference wasn't who was in the C-suite – the difference was how freely the lever moved.

On Saturday, I wrote:

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

Someone on Hacker News called that "silly," adding that "tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339

That's not quite right, though. The business-model of the startup is to yank on the enshittification lever every day. Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers – they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.

In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

When future scholars study the enshittocene, they will look to accounts like Zitron's to mark the turning points from the old, good internet to the enshitternet. Let's hope those future scholars have a new, good internet on which to publish their findings.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan