Ashton Applewhite: We talk too much about generations. People who happen to have been born at around the same time don’t have much in common. Let’s Climb Out of the Generation Trap..
I read her book “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism” last year, and loved it.
The Passover origin story of matzoh. It’s not supposed to taste good.
📺 We watched the final two episodes of "Succession." I have thoughts. SPOILERS
ChatGPT and other LLM tools have already replaced some marketing and social media writers as many companies decide cutting costs is worth the drop in quality. ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they’re dog walkers and HVAC techs.
The only way to rebel is to be human and aware, Rushkoff said. “Be social, get your feet on the ground, make eye contact, have sex, meet people, breathe the air. The more real-life ballast you have, the less this brittle, ideological, abstracted, social media-mediated universe bears upon your daily existence.”
Cory Doctorow: The long lineage of private equity’s looting
Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”
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For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:
https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/
Same goes for Toys R Us: it wasn’t Amazon that killed the iconic toy retailer – it was the PE bosses who extracted $200m from the chain, then walked away, hands in pockets and whistling, while the businesses collapsed and the workers got zero severance:
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It’s a good racket – for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audactious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.
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PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind,
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Today, the PE sector loves a rollup, which is when they buy several related businesses and merge them into one firm. The nominal business-case for a rollup is that the new, bigger firm is more “efficient.” In reality, a rollup’s strength is in eliminating competition. When all the pet groomers, or funeral homes, or urgent care clinics for ten miles share the same owner, they can raise prices, lower wages, and fuck over suppliers.
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PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns' worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect
Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals.
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As bad as PE is for healthcare, it’s worse for long-term care. PE-owned nursing homes are charnel houses, and there’s a particularly nasty PE scam where elderly patients are tricked into signing up for palliative care, which is never delivered (and isn’t needed, because the patients aren’t dying!). These fake “hospices” get huge payouts from medicare – and the patient is made permanently ineligible for future medicare, because they are recorded being in their final decline:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS
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Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights
As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.
You know all those exploding trains filled with dangerous chemicals that poison entire towns? Private equity bust outs:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons
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PetSmart – looted for $30 billion by RaymondSvider and his PE fund BC Partners – is a slaughterhouse for animals. The company systematically neglects animals – failing to pay workers to come in and feed them, say, or refusing to provide backup power to run during power outages, letting animals freeze or roast to death. Though PetSmart has its own vet clinics, the company doesn’t want to pay its vets to nurse the animals it damages, so it denies them care. But the company is also too cheap to euthanize those animals, so it lets them starve to death. PetSmart is also too cheap to cremate the animals, so its traumatized staff are ordered to smuggle the dead, rotting animals into random dumpsters.
All this happened while PetSmart’s sales increased by 60%, matched by growth in the company’s gross margins. All that money went to the bust out.
When you think you have a full cup of coffee left in the carafe, but it’s only this much.
Idea for a Star Trek spinoff series: “These are the voyages of the starship Dunning-Krueger…. "
Governor Newsom Desperately Begs NetChoice To Drop Its Lawsuit Over Unconstitutional AADC Bill.
Mike Masnick on Techdirt:
… nothing in this law actually protects children. Instead, it puts them at much greater risk of having information exposed, as we’ve noted. It will also make it next to impossible for children to research important information regarding mental health, or to find out the information they need to help them deal with things like eating disorders, since it will drive basically all of that content offline
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… we have Newsom lying about the law, lying about the filings from NetChoice, and now lying about the Surgeon General’s report. I know it’s a post-truth political world we live in, but I expect better from California’s governor.
For my LGBTQ+ and/or accordion-playing friends: June is both Pride Month AND National Accordion Awareness Month!.
For social media and other Internet companies, the IPO announcement is when the enshittification process accelerates. The IPO announcement is the moment when the service reaches the peak of the enshittification rollercoaster and begins plunging downward. We’re seeing this play out now with Reddit.
Today I learned that it is perfectly fine to say to someone, “I’m sorry, could you speak a little slower–I’m having difficulty understanding your accent.”
Previously I thought it was rude and maybe xenophobic to point out to someone that they spoke with an accent.
I do not want to admit how long I have struggled with this delusion and failed to arrive at the simple solution.
Meanwhile, on the Bluesky social network
Reddit’s new API charges would cost the developer of Apollo $20 million per year. Apollo is one of my favorite iPhone and iPad apps. I’d hate for it to go away.
Furries Now Have Serious Beef With Ron DeSantis: A furry fandom con in Florida just announced it would ban minors based on the governor’s ridiculous laws
Many parents whose children are involved with the subculture credit it with helping them overcome bullying, or gain self-esteem. At conventions, [a furry convention organizer] says, “there will be parents crying in a corner because they don’t see their kids so happy every day. We had a mom break down because she’s never seen her kid feel so comfortable just sitting at a table and interacting with other kids.” She says it is “heartbreaking” to think of young furries not having a space to connect.
The furry fandom has been a target of the far-right for years, with numerous politicians baselessly claiming that schools are placing litter boxes in bathrooms to appease students who identify as furries. A number of school boards across the country have attempted to prohibit children from wearing animal ears to school, with Florida’s Brevard Public Schools most recently attempting to adopt a dress code banning clothing “which emulates non-human characteristics.” (A spokesperson for Brevard Public Schools denied that children dressing up as furries was a “widespread issue.”)
Glad to hear that poverty, violence, Covid, cancer, climate change, and rising healthcare costs are now solved problems, so we can go after furries.
The threat of human extinction by AI is only scary for billionaires and centimillionaires
Today I learned: A canary trap is a technique to identify an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to several suspects and observing which version gets leaked.
I was familiar with the technique, but I’d never heard the name before, and I was ignorant of the technique’s history.
This Wikipedia article gives 40 years of history. I expect the canary trap is much older than that–thousands and thousands of years.