#20yrsago Canadian copyright minister caught lining pockets https://web.archive.org/web/20061115062027/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1529/135/

#20yrsago Universal Music CEO: iPod owners are thieves https://web.archive.org/web/20061201014046/https://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003380831

#15yrsago OccupyLondon members evicted from St Paul’s memorial services https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/nov/13/occupy-london-asked-leave-st-pauls-services

#15yrsago Berlusconi to neo-fascists: “I’ll be back.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/13/berlusconi-hints-return-italy-government

#15yrsago Balancing 3,118 coins on a dime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmLjO0Wu3ug

#10yrsago People who voted for Trump knew their shot at the elites was fired through the guts of their neighbors https://web.archive.org/web/20210916183118/https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/2016/11/on-the-election-of-donald-j-trump-2

#10yrsago Ontario judge dishonours his court and disgraces himself by presiding in a MAKE AMERICA GREAT hat https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/osgoode-hall-professor-ontario-judge-hamilton-trump-hat-1.3848913

#10yrsago 300 million Adultfriendfinder accounts breached https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/13/13615750/412-million-adultfriendfinder-accounts-exposed-breach

#5yrsago How to be safe(r) online https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/13/opsec-soup-to-nuts/#secured

#1yrago For-profit healthcare is the problem, not (just) private equity https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/13/patients-not-customers/#medicine-vs-markets

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/2026/11/13/outlookpocalypse/#bright-line-test

Here’s the one weird trick that made it possible for monopolies to conquer the world: the antitrust bar changed the rules so that it was impossible to prove whether a company had formed an illegal monopoly, and then these rules meant that monopolies were almost never challenged, and what challenges did arise were usually unsuccessful, and even the successful challenges resulted in meaningless “penalties” that left monopolists unscathed.

Every policy has three important dimensions: substance, scope and administrability:

• “Substance” is what the policy actually says. For example, the basic substance of copyright law is, “You can’t display, transmit or reproduce a copyrighted work without permission.”
• “Scope” is when the policy gets applied. When copyright law was formulated, the key activities it regulated all required a bunch of expensive industrial equipment. Every book implied a printing press, every record implied a record-pressing plant, every film implied a film duplication lab. That meant that, by default, pretty much the only people who had to care about what copyright law said were industrial actors — firms who might reasonably be expected to also have access to a lawyer. That matters a lot to administrability.
• “Administrability” is what it takes to actually administer the policy. Can you detect potential violations, and when you do, how hard is it to figure out whether the rule was actually broken? Again, in the pre-digital era, it was pretty easy to spot copyright violations: pirate books, records and movies are tangible, physical objects, and distributing them requires advertisement, delivery and payment.

After detecting an infringement, copyright enforcers must resolve a further question: whether a display, transmission or copy fall under “fair use.” Fair use is a “fact intensive” rule, one that requires a lot of evidence and argument to adjudicate. It’s almost impossible to categorically rule in or rule out a specific use as “fair”:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Despite the complexity and expense of determining fair use, pre-digital copyright was still relatively administrable, because fair use questions themselves were relatively rare. Most fair uses (for example, photocopying part of a book for classroom use) were below the threshold for detection by rightsholders, so these questions almost never found their way into court. The fair use questions that did get to court were big, splashy affairs, like whether it’s okay to rewrite a famous pro-slavery novel from the enslaved characters’ perspective (it is!):

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

There are a lot of legal questions that require nuance, fact-finding and argumentation to resolve, and that’s not necessarily a problem. It’s fine to apply these complicated, lengthy processes to things that only happen every once in a while. Take probate: most of us will die one or fewer times, so it’s not the worst thing in the world that figuring out what happens to our stuff when that happens can involve some legal complexity.

But as media went digital, copyright’s scope expanded dramatically. “Making or handling copies of copyrighted work” stopped being an industrial activity that implied a complex business and access to legal expertise. The only thing a digital computer does is make and handle copies, so every time any ordinary person clicks their mouse, dozens of potentially thorny copyright questions arise. What’s more, those questions involve the public internet, which raises the number of potential infringements that a rightsholder can detect (and potentially seek legal redress for) from dozens to millions.

Nearly all of these potential infringements fall under fair use, but fair use is a fact-intensive doctrine suited to resolving occasional disputes between large firms. Fair use is monumentally unsuited to resolving questions that arise hundreds of times every day for nearly every person alive, including small children and other people who almost certainly can’t get legal advice:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-new-deal-for-copyright/

This is how copyright broke: new technology (digital computers) radically expanded its scope, conscripting everyone into using copyright’s framework for everyday activities that had nothing to do with the media industry’s supply-chain. That framework was developed for industrial actors with access to lawyers, and its most important aspect (fair use) is a fact-intensive doctrine that takes serious work to resolve, but now had to be navigated many times every day by every person. So copyright became unadministrable: you can’t apply a fact-intensive doctrine to everyday activities undertaken by everyday people. If you try, you will make criminals of everyone. It would be literally impossible to train enough copyright lawyers to advise every person every time they use a computer to do something that might violate copyright law.

Back to antitrust: when the pro-monopoly partisans of the “law and economy” movement set out to neuter antitrust, they deliberately introduced a set of hurdles that were designed to make it impossible to administer competition law.

First, they introduced an “intent” standard: it was no longer enough for a company to have a monopoly, the company must have intended to secure and maintain that monopoly. If you want to be sure a law doesn’t get enforced, this is a fantastic standard to apply. After all, how can anyone know what anyone else intended? Ask any anthropologist and they’ll tell you: the only way to find out what someone intends by their actions is to ask them, and even that only works if you can trust them to answer honestly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description#Clifford_Geertz

If antitrust law can only be enforced by mind-readers and advanced philosophers who have solved the intersubjectivity problem, then antitrust law can’t be enforced at all:

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

But that wasn’t all! Antitrust’s enemies insisted on another fact-intensive question: “market definition.” They made the (seemingly commonsense) point that if a company is said to have a monopoly, we must first determine which thing the company has monopolized. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s actually a way to introduce unresolvable, show-stopper arguments into any antitrust enforcement action.

Take Amazon: the company’s ecommerce monopoly is obvious to anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past 15 years. But when Amazon gets investigated for this monopoly, they will insist that they don’t participate in the “ecommerce” economy, but rather in “the buying and selling of things in general.” Then they point out that people still go to the corner store for a pint of milk, still buy a pack of gum from the kiosk at the train-station, and still buy some hair-gel from the barber after a trim, and therefore Amazon can’t possibly have a monopoly.

“Market definition” is a playground for bad-faith semanticians. Luckily for the world’s monopolists, the very existence of this legal doctrine has conjured up an army of bad-faith semanticians, most of them with expensive Ivy League economics degrees, who make millions coming up with bizarre market definition arguments that can draw out any legal proceeding for years, often to the point where there is a change in government and the federal prosecutors just walk away from the case.

Taken together, these impossible fact-intensive questions would be enough to bury antitrust, but then came the final blow: frequency. Once capital had won the battle to mire antitrust cases in questions that take years and millions to resolve, they embarked on a frenzy of monopolistic mergers. This meant that the kind of antitrust questions that originally arose every few years were suddenly coming up several times per month. This was the killer combo: making antitrust a plodding ball-ache of thorny philosophical and technical questions, and then rigging the system so that these questions arise in a nonstop flurry guaranteed that antitrust would fail.

That’s what happened with Microsoft. The company had a 95% desktop OS market-share when Clinton’s trustbusters dragged them into court. Nevertheless, the company played all kinds of “market definition” games that dragged the case out for years. They also insisted that they never intended to form a monopoly, despite smoking-gun memos about “sucking up all the market oxygen”:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190717023522/https://www.justice.gov/atr/department-justice-7

This dragged on so long that even after Microsoft lost its case, the appeal carried on until after GW Bush stole the presidency, and then his DoJ walked away from the case, letting Microsoft continue to enjoy (and increase) its monopoly:

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/07/business/us-vs-microsoft-overview-us-abandoning-its-effort-break-apart-microsoft-saying.html

What happened next should not come as a surprise to anyone. Microsoft got convicted of deliberately setting out to create a monopoly, and then paid no penalty. After an all-too-brief period of post-traumatic good behavior, Microsoft returned to its monopolistic ways. Along the way, Microsoft sucked up to a succession of presidential administrations, culminating in the company’s emergence as a de facto wing of the Trump regime. Microsoft’s CEO paid $1m to sit on the inaugural dais, and then directed the company to donate millions to the Epstein Ballroom, and then provided the IT services for ICE’s ethnic cleansing pogroms:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/us-ice-triples-use-of-microsoft-cloud-in-six-months/#:~:text=ICE%20has%20been,first%20presidential%20term.

Microsoft isn’t merely the in-house IT shop for Trump’s domestic agenda: they’ve also weaponized foreign reliance on Microsoft’s cloud apps and they punish foreign officials who thwart Trump abroad:

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/02/18/microsoft-throws-spox-under-the-bus-in-icc-email-flap/

When forced, Microsoft candidly admits that no matter where in the world your Microsoft data is stored, when it comes to foreign firms and governments, the company will give warrantless, secret access to their data to Trump’s cronies:

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/07/25/microsoft-exec-admits-it-cannot-guarantee-data-sovereignty/458553

All of this raises an urgent digital sovereignty question: what if Microsoft (a monopolist that is entirely dependent on Trump’s favor to keep it free of existential legal problems) cuts off your country’s Office 365 access? This is the question I raised late last year in my CCC talk about the “Post-American Internet”:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

(Coming soon in expanded form to a bookstore near you:)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374623845/thepostamericaninternet/

And now, Microsoft has given the whole world a preview of how this might play out, because their servers have collapsed, shutting the world off from Outlook email, Azure cloud, Copilot, Teams, and other key offerings:

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cq5y10ge3dp3t

The outage lasted for about two days, and around the world, government agencies and businesses large and small ground to a halt. Without Office 365, Outlook and Teams, many organizations could not even convene a meeting or formulate a plan to deal with the outage.

All of this raises an important question: is Microsoft guilty of negligence, and, if so, what should be done about this? Here’s my answer: yes, Microsoft is presumptively guilty of negligence, and any response to this must include antitrust breakups of the company.

Here’s why I think that. Microsoft has demonstrably underinvested in its IT stability. Any IT plan that results in a global, multi-day outage is, by definition, inadequate. Whether the problem could have been solved by buying more servers, or hiring more people, or changing the management of key divisions is immaterial. Every one of these measures — every single measure that could have prevented this — costs money. By not spending that money, Microsoft definitively underinvested in its products.

But Microsoft doesn’t lack for funds! Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and it has the margins to prove it. In 2025–2026, the company pissed away more than $30b in stock buybacks, a once-illegal (and still sleazy) form of stock manipulation. Over that same period, Microsoft lost nearly $200b on AI ventures that it now admits will not pay off:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/24/microsoft-reiterates-plan-to-invest-80-billion-in-ai-.html

Then there’s the layoffs. 2026 saw Microsoft’s first-ever voluntary retirement buyout, which served as the overture to a year that saw a 25% headcount cut — 60,000 employees slated for destruction:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/26/microsoft-buyout-offers-ai-cuts

Ever had a boss who caught you catching your breath and shoved a broom in your hand, barking, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean?” That goes quintuple for convicted monopolists who bring the global economy to a halt due to a multi-day outage. If you can’t manage to keep your servers online, you have no business incinerating tens of billions on stock buybacks, much less hundreds of billions to feed the AI money-furnace. Did Microsoft need the tens of thousands of workers it threw away? Demonstrably so: when they were on the payroll, Microsoft’s servers were up. Now they’re gone, and so are the servers. It doesn’t matter how those workers related to this specific outage: if you can’t keep your servers online, you either don’t have enough site reliability engineers, or you don’t have enough managers to deploy them effectively, or you don’t have enough managers to hire the managers and SREs you need.

Q.E.D.

This is all characteristic of the monopolist’s pathology. The problem with monopolists is that they have pricing power and market power: the power to foist inferior products on their customers and degraded working conditions on their employees and unfair terms on their suppliers. Microsoft’s hundreds of billions in wastage and tens of thousands of layoffs are a massive transfer of value from customers, workers and suppliers to investors. The fact that the company judged (correctly, it seems) that they could make us all eat shit and we’d ask for second helpings is a nice, clean proof of monopoly power.

Here, I think, is a nice, bright-line, administrable test for monopoly power. If your company has a dominant position and if it allocates its surplus capital to its investors and if that precedes a significant degradation of your products, then you have an illegal monopoly and you should be broken up. We don’t need to inquire as to whether you have a wicked heart that intentionally set about to create a monopoly, nor do we have to argue endlessly about how many angels can dance on the head of your market definition. If you think you are so powerful that you can fuck up your products and not suffer as a result then you are too big to care, and that is simply too big.

This isn’t the only fix we need to antitrust law, but it is a fix that would specifically let us target Big Tech. Microsoft is a living, breathing (limping, gasping) repudiation of the thesis that monopolies are efficient and if we only let them amass endless market share and profits, they will use their “economies of scale” to deliver superior products. It’s not that economies of scale don’t exist, but for companies to take advantage of these economies of scale, they have to be motivated to expend their capital to do so. The more powerful a company is, the less inclined it will be to apportion capital to workers, suppliers and consumers, and the more it will cheat us all to enrich its shareholders.

We can’t afford to let this crisis go to waste. Google was convicted of creating and maintaining a monopoly three times over the past couple years and every single time the judge decided the company should not face any real punishment for that monopoly, on the basis that the monopoly is what lets Google deliver such excellence for us.

Does anyone still think Google is excellent? How about Apple? Google pays Apple an annual bribe of more than $20b to stay out of the search market. Judge Amit Mehta decided to let Google continue paying this bribe to Apple so that Apple would have the capital it needed to deliver excellent products. Apple promptly went on to have a string of catastrophically bad product launches — while throwing away $170b manipulating its share-price with stock buybacks:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-dodged-a-20-billion-hit-thanks-to-google-antitrust-ruling-163056806.html

Both companies are demonstrably underinvesting in quality in order to divert R&D and product maintenance capital to their shareholders. They are too big to care. In this age of nonstop mergers and acquisitions, we can’t afford to make merger approval turn on fact-intensive questions, but we can sure as hell create this administrable, bright-line test for whether a merger should be unwound after the fact. Did your company buy another company and then enshittify both products? Great, now we’re breaking you up, and your investors are getting fucked. Maybe next time they’ll fire the board when they announce another stupid, anti-competitive merger.

Microsoft is too big in every way. Too big to fail, too big to jail and too big to care. Too big to trust. Too big to rely upon. Too big to foster a corporate culture that cares about reliability, a decent workplace, or product quality. There’s a straight line from GW Bush’s decision to let Microsoft skate in 2001 and the situation a quarter century later, where Microsoft is a load-bearing piece of the world’s most important firms and government agencies, and where this means that Microsoft knows that it can throw away tens of thousands of workers and hundreds of billions of dollars, crash the planet, and wake up tomorrow unscathed, ready to do it all over again.

#25yrsago Folky Song Funny Note https://craphound.com/misc/Folky_Song_Funny_Note.mp3

#10yrsago Rules for surviving an autocracy https://web.archive.org/web/20161111205036/https://www.nybooks.com/daily/s3/nov/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival.html

#1yrago American corporate criminals in the crosshairs (finally) https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/12/with-a-fountain-pen/#recidivism

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/2026/11/12/starvation-wages/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever

There’s a specific kind of lie that tech bosses tell: the “premature truth.” That’s a lie that they excuse by saying it’ll come true soon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Elon Musk is the world’s most enthusiastic teller of these lies. That’s not surprising: any kind of radical promise about the automotive sector has a 90% chance of being this kind of bullshit. Musk can barely mention the subject of transportation without lying his face off: from “full self-driving” to “hyperloops” to “tunnels” to “flying cars,” Musk is a fountain of extremely untrue “premature truths”:

https://karlbode.com/musks-fake-flying-car-and-ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/

But Musk has plenty of competition when it comes to lies about futuristic cars. Long before Musk switched on his first bullshit factory, Uber was spending billions to spray the world with lies about cars. Uber has always lied about everything, from driver pay to the company’s finances.

Now, lying about driver pay is relatively low-risk for a company like Uber. After all, the company created the app-based worker misclassification playbook, designed to make vulnerable and precarious workers even more vulnerable and precarious. The lies Uber tells about its workforce only have to survive contact with credulous municipal governments so that they keep up a supply of get-out-of-jail-free cards for Uber’s many labor, licensing and consumer rights violations.

But lying about your finances is another matter altogether. When Uber lies about its finances, it is lying to rich people, and (unlike workers), rich people have many ways to punish people who lie to them. Despite this, Uber spent more than a decade lying flagrantly and lavishly about its balance sheet.

The most shameless financial lie Uber told is that it was profitable due to the increased valuation of the many ride-hailing companies around the world that Uber owns large shares in. How did Uber come to own large shares in these companies? It happened after Uber’s competing ride-hailing companies in countries around the world failed.

Uber’s subsidiaries lost billions of dollars, and eventually Uber sold them to its (also money-losing) domestic rivals in all-stock deals that saw Uber acquiring vast amounts of worthless, illiquid shares in the world’s failing ride-hailing companies. Then, for years, Uber would announce that its stake in these companies had appreciated in value. These revaluations were purely vibes-based. Uber’s former rivals were privately held, and while small volumes of shares traded hands in private deals, Uber’s pronouncements that, say, the Chinese company Didi was now worth vastly more than it had been worth a few months before was sheer fantasy dressed up as profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Uber did this over and over (and over and over), relentlessly dogged by Hubert Horan, an aviation analyst who became the world’s foremost close-reader of Uber’s financial statements:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

Despite these lies, Uber eventually found a way for its early investors to cash out, through a very successful IPO that saw the House of Saud made whole (and then some) on the $31b they plowed into the business so that it could lose $0.41 on every dollar it brought in for the preceding 13 years.

The most remarkable thing about Uber’s IPO was the company’s S1, the prospectus that tells normie investors how the company will eventually find its way to profit. That’s where you’ll find Uber’s claim that its “total addressable market” is every journey made by taxi, private car, train and bus, for everyone in the world:

https://stratechery.com/2019/uber-questions/

Despite the wild implausibility of this ambition, the company did achieve actual profitability after its IPO. It got there through the simple expedient of paying drivers less and charging riders more. The company spies on its drivers to calculate the lowest wage they’ll accept, based on their inferred economic desperation, a process that Veena Dubal calls “algorithmic wage discrimination”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

They also use surveillance data about riders to calculate the highest price you’ll pay for a journey. Investors call this “personalized pricing,” while everyone else calls it “surveillance pricing.” It’s a way for Uber to reach into your bank account and reduce the value of your dollars, by charging you more than the next person would pay for the same service:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

This is something AI turns out to be extremely good at. Businesses can program chatbots to automatically segment their customers and employees based on surveillance data and then perform a series of automated experiments to find the highest prices and lowest wages they’ll accept:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/30/pay-for-privacy/#ab2654

When it comes to wage theft and price gouging, Uber leads the pack. They’ve really demonstrated just how much consumer and labor surplus can be diverted to capital with the aid of AI.

Of course, it helps that they’re willing to lie like crazy. Uber routinely claims that it pays its drivers hourly rates that are far in excess of minimum wage, but it helpfully omits that drivers only get paid while they have a passenger in the car, and that the company punishes drivers who turn down too many unprofitable jobs.

Drivers only get paid for a fraction of the time they spend working for Uber, and on top of that, they have to pay for fuel, insurance, depreciation, loan interest, and the cost of getting vomit out of their back seats. Add it all up and Uber drivers make peanuts. In Toronto, Uber pay nets out to something like $2.50/hour:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

$2.50/hour isn’t a living wage anywhere in Canada, but it’s especially terrible in Toronto, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Uber can only be profitable for so long as drivers continue to subsidize its business, and so long as riders are willing to pay more than they ever did under the traditional taxi system (much of which was seen off by Uber’s Saudi-subsidized decade of predatory pricing, which also induced a lost decade in global transit investment).

Inflation (supercharged by AI pricing) has hit all workers, but it’s been especially hard on Uber drivers, who didn’t have any financial cushion to start with. Eventually, drivers were bound to turn their backs on Uber. “Eventually” is now, according to Uber’s Q3 earnings call, where CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told investors that “driver supply [was] not keeping pace with strong consumer demand in several international markets”:

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_earnings/2026/q3/earnings-result/Uber-Q3-26-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf

As The Gig Economy Project writes, the driver shortage is especially sharp in India and Brazil, two gigantic countries where (according to Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy), there is too much consumer “price sensitivity”:

https://thegigeconomyproject.substack.com/p/has-uber-finally-pushed-its-workers

Uber’s also having trouble getting drivers to accept the rock-bottom wages they’re offering for food delivery. Despite this, Krishnamurthy assured investors that the company’s measures to “improve driver availability” wouldn’t affect their bottom line. Instead, Krishnamurthy promised to raise prices on riders elsewhere, something he called “re-balancing incentives”:

That is part of the art that we’ve got and then there is a lot of algorithmic science that goes into, if you have a dollar, what is the maximum predicted return for that dollar and should I invest that dollar in a driver in Brazil or should I invest that dollar in a rider in India, for example. The algorithm can structurally make these choices based on training on billions of trips and allocate these investments in the way that humans just can’t.

The Gig Economy Project goes on to say that “robotaxis will fundamentally alter the unit economics of taxis, but we are still some time away from the point where robotaxis are price competitive with human-driven vehicles.”

Boy is this an understatement. Remember, Uber is already paying drivers sub-minimum, sub-starvation wages, which drivers must spend to cover all the capital, depreciation, maintenance and insurance costs, along with (skyrocketing) fuel costs. I can’t think of any way in which replacing starvation-wage drivers who provide their own cars with $200k robotaxis that the company must operate, maintain and insure will work out better for the company than the current situation.

This is as good as it gets for Uber, in other words. Being able to tap an army of desperate workers who supply 99% of Uber’s business’s capital and variable costs out of their own pockets is vastly superior to operating a fleet of expensive robots that Uber has to purchase and service.

Profitable “driverless” cars have been around the corner for more than 15 years now. Waymo claims to have delivered this through the brute force expedient of using the most expensive sensors and vast amounts of incredibly expensive cloud computing, but their balance sheet remains stubbornly opaque. We don’t know how often a “driverless” Waymo is just a remote control car, being piloted by a low-wage worker in an overseas call center (there’s a reason Indian technologists joke that AI stands for “Absent Indians”):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

We also don’t know how often a Waymo is being overseen by a high-waged engineer. What we do know is that that when GM was forced to reveal this number, it turned out that they’d replaced a single, low-waged cab driver with 1.5 engineers, each of whom earned an order of magnitude more than the cabbie they’d displaced:

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/could-cruise-be-the-theranos-of-ai

Uber’s claims that they were profitable (based on accounting gimmicks) were lies, but they were also premature truths: the company did become profitable (through price-gouging and wage-theft). But there’s a limit to how low you can push your workforce’s wages, and even if the AI crash delivers a fresh cohort of desperate workers who subsidize Uber’s operations for a few more years, they, too, will eventually find that they can’t live on $2.50/hour.

When that day comes, robo-taxis won’t save the business model. Robots may cost less per hour than Uber drivers (though not by much), but owning a robot is always going to be more expensive than getting drivers to supply free cars to Uber. If Uber can’t sustain profitability with that massive subsidy, it is going to hit a wall, and it won’t be pretty.

#25yrsago ObL got the name “Al Qaeda” from Asimov’s Foundation;

#20yrsago PATRIOT scares Canadian unis off US servers https://web.archive.org/web/20080204033238/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FRTGAM.20061111.wxuniversities11

#15yrsago Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world’s factory https://web.archive.org/web/20111110113740/http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/china/111109/china-economy-manufacturing-guangdong

#10yrsago EFF in Trump’s America: Protecting Tomorrow https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/protecting-tomorrow

#10yrsago America’s actually had worse presidential races than this one https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/11/worst-presidential-race.html

#10yrsago The internet’s core infrastructure is dangerously unsupported and could crumble (but we can save it!) https://web.archive.org/web/20170222232454/https://fordfoundcontent.blob.core.windows.net/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf

#10yrsago Fact-checking Trump’s plan for the first 100 days https://www.npr.org/2016/11/10/501597652/fact-check-donald-trumps-first-100-days-action-plan

#10yrsago Dennis the Dentist: on the unkillable wrongness of nominative determinism https://timharford.com/2016/11/rich-the-banker-whats-not-in-a-name/

#10yrsago How to fight Trump, starting right now https://medium.com/@anildash/forget-why-its-time-to-get-to-work-c49ac5f0da20#.l0xpc3pps

#10yrsago Anti-burglary advice, from burglars https://web.archive.org/web/20161118141701/https://www.kgw.com/news/investigations/we-asked-86-burglars-how-they-broke-into-homes/344213396

#10yrsago Serbian ultra-nationalists celebrate Trump’s victory https://globalvoices.org/2016/11/10/nationalists-and-populists-in-serbia-and-macedonia-celebrate-trumps-victory/

#10yrsago Leonard Cohen wrote the perfect anthem for our times https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/11/leonard-cohen-wrote-the-perfect-anthem-for-our-times/

#10yrsago “Hitler’s only kidding about the antisemitism” New York Times, 1922 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/02/10/1922-hitler-in-bavaria/?_r=0&smid=tw-share

#1yrago A tale of three customer service chatbots https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to

#20yrsago Toothpick sculptures https://web.archive.org/web/20061107232205/https://landmarksofsf.com/photoindex.html

#20yrsago Computer-human interaction that gives hands their due respect https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

#15yrsago Warner Bros admits it sends takedown notices for files it hasn’t seen and doesn’t own https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/warner-admits-it-issues-takedowns-for-files-it-hasnt-looked-at/

#15yrsago Understanding McDonald’s as a commodities broker with a restaurant sideline: the McRib https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbitrage/

#15yrsago Why we get the future of tech wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUXh-GPa5dI

#15yrsago Fake British WWII passport for Hitler https://web.archive.org/web/20120608185357/https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=46

#15yrsago French court sends EDF execs to jail for hacking, spying on Greenpeace https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15683090

#10yrsago Trump Administration: a climate denier for the EPA, a Goldman-Sachs banker for Treasury https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/who-is-in-president-trump-cabinet-231071

#10yrsago How science fiction can help us survive Trump’s America https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/the_prospect_be/

#10yrsago Clinton’s data-driven “ground game” sucked in exactly the same way “targeted ads” suck, for the same reason https://web.archive.org/web/20161111084125/http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/152963356681/polls-etc

#10yrsago The first transgender suicide hotline: 877–565–8860 https://translifeline.org/

#5yrsago Risk compensation considered harmful https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/10/elfin-safety/#mene-mene-tekel

#1yrago “Flexible labor” is a euphemism for “derisking capital” https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/10/zero-sum-zero-hours/#that-sounds-like-a-you-problem

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/2026/11/10/worst-of-all-worlds/#show-trials

If the EU has a future as a political project, it will have to be as a living, breathing repudiation of Ronald Reagan’s maxim that “The nine most terrifying words are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

In other words, the EU’s future depends on its ability to publicly perform competence and capacity. The EU is a technocratic project, and the one trait technocrats must show is undeniable technical competence. This is the secret of Zohran Mamdani’s administration: being seen in public, constantly fixing things that are broken, and making things that work even better:

https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/

This is a goal that is largely incompatible with charismatic megaprojects, and unfortunately, that’s the EU’s favorite kind of project: something big and splashy and worthy of the extreme effort required to squeeze anything through the Byzantine EU approvals process:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-planning-system-system

Even more unfortunate is that the EU isn’t just a technocratic project, it’s a neoliberal technocratic project, so when it does embark on one of these megaprojects, it almost always does so as a “public-private partnership” that sees vast sums transferred to private firms to carry out public works. Since megaprojects are always over-budget and behind schedule, this creates the perfect conditions for absolute banditry, in which private companies overcharge and underdeliver, and before you know it, you’re billions poorer and back in Reagan’s “most terrifying words” territory.

Here’s a perfect example: Schengen is a region of (mostly) EU countries who have opened their borders to one another. Once you’ve crossed into any of the 29 Schengen countries, you can generally stroll into any of the other Schengen countries without showing a passport or having your bags searched:

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

This is an awfully convenient system…once you’re inside of Schengen. But the Schengen agreement means that each of the member states is trusting the other states to manage a common border, a task that is made all the more urgent by the fascist international, whose far right parties have whipped millions of otherwise sensible people into a xenophobic frenzy over migration. This has led to a kind of bureaucracy-shifting exercise that removed all the complexity from inter-Schengen borders and concentrated it at the borders between each Schengen country and the rest of the world.

Under this system, every Schengen country must accurately log the passage of every non-Schengen person into and out of the region. If you fly into Rome and out of Helsinki, then both the Italian and Finnish border guards must be cognizant of that fact and correctly log it. To make matters even more complex, visa-free access to Schengen is restricted to 90 days in the entire region out of any given 180-day period. For example, last month I was stranded in Frankfurt overnight thanks to a canceled flight. If I had totaled 90 days out of the previous 180 in Schengen, I would not have been allowed out of the airport’s secure area until midnight, when the day ticked over and now my total would be 89 days out of 180 (thankfully, I was able to leave the airport and stay in a crummy airport hotel instead of sleeping on the floor of the airport).

To manage this system, the EU commissioned several giant IT companies to build a networked, biometric border-crossing system. Under the spec, the system would track those 90-day windows for everyone who passed in and out of Schengen, using fast fingerprint/facial scans to move people swiftly through any border crossing in the 29 Schengen countries.

It is a gross understatement to call this system behind schedule and overbudget. The Entry Exit System (EES) was supposed to roll out in 2022, but it didn’t go live until October 2025 — whereupon it completely, catastrophically failed, despite having doubled its budget:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2025/09/25/eu-to-register-fingerprints-faces-for-short-stay-visitors/1141501

It’s been more than a year since EES went live and it is still an absolute disaster. Travelers arriving or leaving Schengen are frequently hit with multi-hour delays. Numerous flights have been canceled, and airlines who fly without waiting for passengers in the immobile, snaking lines must rebook those passengers and endure their wrath. At major airports, it’s routine for border guards to simply suspend their use of the EES system, waving through passengers without registering them in the system:

https://eesqueue.com/

EES is a disaster for aviation operations and border crossings. Any true reckoning with its costs wouldn’t stop at the hundreds of millions of euros paid to private sector partners, but also the hundreds of millions more in costs borne by travelers and airlines, to say nothing of the opportunity costs paid by travelers who made it through the checkpoints through the brute-force expedient of leaving hours of extra time for a broken border formality.

Which means that the disaster isn’t merely a logistics crisis, it’s also a credibility and legitimacy crisis. A year (and counting) of headlines about this dismal failure of an IT system have further eroded public confidence in the EU’s technical capabilities. How can the EU claim to be a sound technocratic steward of the vast administrative challenges facing a 27-state transnational entity when it can’t make the computers work, and when those failures produce the very visible phenomenon of gigantic queues of fuming passengers?

(Not just fuming, either: when I was stuck in Frankfurt last month, there were at least half a dozen travelers who were loudly sobbing as they realized they were going to miss their flights home.)

The contractors for this nonfunctional, grossly overbudget, years-late project (IBM, Atos, and Leonardo) are now being sued, but — incredibly — the EU kept the lawsuit a secret. The only reason we know that IBM, Atos, and Leonardo are facing the EU in court is that the FT spotted an inconspicuous note in the annual financial statements for eu-LISA (the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice):

https://www.eulisa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/fy2025_eu-lisa_faa.pdf

The secrecy of this lawsuit is another mark against the EU’s technical competence. Any administrative system that relies on private-sector outsourcing to carry out its essential projects must have a core competency in overseeing those private partners, which includes loudly and mercilessly punishing those partners when they fail.

By keeping the suit secret, the eu-LISA telegraphs that the fault lies with the EU, not with IBM, Atos, and Leonardo, who racked up hundreds of millions in fees and delivered a very broken, very late system that ruined the days (and voyages) of millions of travelers:

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/11/10/eus-212m-border-it-project-lands-ibm-and-atos-in-legal-water/5308669

Anyone who’s ever watched a large IT consultancy firm run one of these large projects knows that this kind of bungling and gouging is par for the course. The old adage that “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” does not mean that IBM can deliver a functional IT system; it means that when IBM fucks up your project, you can escape any blame because they’re the gold standard for fucking up.

Every time the EU lets these companies off the hook without a big, splashy public reckoning, they reinforce Reagan’s “most terrifying words” maxim. As Voltaire wrote, “Sometimes you must execute an admiral to encourage the others.” The EU should be dragging these IT bandits in public, every day, naming the top executives who oversaw the project.

They should do this every time there’s a problem with a private contractor, but EES is especially ripe for this kind of treatment. That’s because EES whacked a ton of rich, powerful people. Those are the sort of people who might otherwise run cover for giant, bungling, wildly profitable IT consulting firms, but who are also the most reliably pissy, vindictive dickheads about anything that affects them personally. These are the sorts of people you definitely want inside your tent, pissing out — but in hiding its lawsuit under a bushel, the EU has invited them to stand outside its tent and piss in.

#25yrsago Open wifi saves traveler from hotel dial-up gouging https://memex.craphound.com/2001/11/09/i-just-wanna-say-that/

#25yrsago Why Cryptosystems Fail https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/wcf.html

#20yrsago Why Zune shouldn’t pay blood money to Universal https://cdm.link/universal-microsoft-screw-over-artists-set-absurd-and-dangerous-precedent-with-zune/#more-1719

#15yrsago New Fed warrantless GPS trackers discovered in the wild https://web.archive.org/web/20111110191030/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all/1

#15yrsago Occupy Atlanta encamps on lawn of house under foreclosure threat https://web.archive.org/web/20111109225513/https://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/08/363692/occupy-atlanta-encamps-in-neighborhood-to-save-police-officers-home-from-foreclosure/

#15yrsago Ben from Ben and Jerry’s serves ice-cream to Occupiers https://www.fastcompany.com/1678825/the-ice-cream-man-of-zuccotti-park-ben-cohen-on-his-work-with-occupy-wall-street

#15yrsago Identity theft marketplace sells mothers’ maiden names, dates of birth, etc https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/how-much-is-your-identity-worth/

#15yrsago Policy-by-nudging unsupported by evidence, and undemocratic https://web.archive.org/web/20111112154542/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228376.500-nudge-policies-are-another-name-for-coercion.html

#10yrsago A history of Chinese science fiction, from 475 BC to Cixin Liu https://web.archive.org/web/20161105172922/http://mithilareview.com/wang_11_16/

#10yrsago How Audi cheated emissions tests: if (steering) then (pollute) https://www.jalopnik.com/america-figured-out-a-new-way-audi-cheated-on-emissions-1788630969/

#10yrsago Senate investigates Wells Fargo retaliations against whistleblowers https://web.archive.org/web/20161108210544/http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/2016-11-03_Wells_Fargo_FINRA_Violations_Letter_Final.pdf

#10yrsago A madman has been given the keys to the surveillance state https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/09/a-madman-has-been-given-the-keys-to-the-surveillance-state/

#5yrsago Stockholm’s war on interoperability https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/09/skrota-skolplattformen/#privacy-without-monopoly

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/2026/11/09/brunch-is-canceled-forever/#woke-3-is-gonna-be-wild

True Carneyism has never been tried. When Canadian PM Mark Carney traveled to Davos to declare a “rupture” in the old order (and admit that this old order was never that great to begin with) he told us that there was no going back from Trumpism. The only way out of Trumpism was through:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

This is easy to say, but hard to do. If the old order is over, then we will never again be able to trust America to serve as the world’s cop, banker, ISP, IT department and consumer of first resort.

We can’t trust Americans to buy the things we make:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

We can’t trust them not to interfere with the interconnections between fiber lines that slither out of the oceans and onto the US landmass:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

We can’t trust them not to weaponize the US dollar to undermine sovereign nations’ legitimate activities:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

And we absolutely can’t trust them not to spy on, steal from, and shut down governments, firms and households around the world by cutting off access to US software and cloud services, and by bricking the world’s devices, from tractors to smartphones:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Despite Carney’s assertion that this rupture represents a welcome (if too cruel, sudden and painful) departure of the old (never very good) system, no one (not even Carney) is acting like the world has truly changed. Take Carney’s answer to the Trump tariffs: retaliatory tariffs. Tariffs have a place in sheltering a nascent domestic industry from better-developed, deeper-pocketed foreign competitors, so a tariff wall between Canada and the US could make sense, if it was paired with the massive domestic investment we’d need to rebuild the manufacturing industry that Brian Mulroney sold out with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (and later NAFTA).

But Carney is no Carneyist. When it comes to massive domestic spending, Carney is a bog-standard, austerity-addled Reaganomics guy; a central banker and technocrat whose idea of “industrial policy” is firing tens of thousands of skilled civil servants who thwart his agenda and replacing them with defective (but obedient) chatbots running on US hardware:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

Carney’s retaliatory tariffs aren’t what you’d do if the old order had “ruptured.” They’re what you’d do if you hoped that your American cousins would come to their senses, evict their mad king from the White House, tear down the Epstein Memorial Ballroom, and roll back the clock to 2016. Like a lot of liberals, Carney just wants to go back to brunch.

But as any true Carneyist knows, brunch is canceled forever. Brunch ruptured. There’s no going back to the old America, and there’s no going back to the old American order that had dominated the world since the end of WWII. As November Kelly says, “Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor, but he flipped the table over anyway because he resented having to pretend to play.”

This is something we’re all struggling with, including Americans. The Republicans’ midterm wipeout has corporate Democrats hoping that after a few years’ tinkering, they can elect a Newsomdroid or give Harris a do-over and win back the trust and reliance of the world and the American people. Even for a true Carneyist who never liked the old order very much (like me), this is a comforting prospect. No one knows what the next world will look like, and no matter how screwed up the old world was, I knew how it worked and how to make it work for me (more or less).

But there is no going back. Trump I didn’t have a plan, it only had Trump, whose One Big Idea was issuing Executive Orders. Many of these were meaningless bloviating. Some were illegal and were swiftly suspended or never went into effect. Biden overturned nearly all the remaining EOs (that were both substantive and not totally illegal).

But Trump II had Project 2025. The point of Project 2025 and the ambition of the wreckers who wrote it was to push America through a series of one-way transformations that cannot be undone, and that’s what’s happened, over two short years. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s much easier to destroy than to build, so Project 2025 hasn’t led to the creation of permanent, load-bearing fascist institutions that cannot be shuttered without bringing down large parts of the USA.

Start with values. Trumpism is a denial of democracy and the rule of law. Tens of millions of Americans have been marinated in a belief system that says that the way to win power is to claim all the elections you lose are rigged and that these “stolen elections” are best addressed by staging a coup. These people are in a cult that embraces its leader’s naked corruption. They’re in a cult whose doctrine treats political triumph of as divine direction to embark on looting sprees. It’s a cult whose members mutilate their faces so that they can’t ever leave, and the reward for this permanent disfigurement is endless influence-peddling:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6136101-ambassador-guilfoyle-wire-request/

Even without ritual scarification to mark them out forever, millions of these people will never come back from this cult indoctrination. They will forever be democracy’s enemies, treating the idea of laws, rules and honest service as shucks for the rubes. What’s more, these people’s neighbors, family members and co-workers will never be able to fully trust them.

Unfortunately, those values aren’t just diffused through the population: they are concentrated in the organs of state. DOGE and Federalist Society judicial appointments have created a stay-behind cadre of life-tenured fascists who now dominate America’s federal judiciary and permanent civil service, including and especially the nation’s law enforcement and national security agencies, from the FBI to the FDA, the NSA to the Bureau of Prisons.

Worse: DOGE also chased away hundreds of thousands of skilled, principled public servants. Those people have retired, retrained, emigrated or exited the workforce. They can’t simply be re-hired and restored to their old roles. From finance regulation to the national education system, America has lobotomized itself, swapping people who understand how things work and use that understanding to enforce the laws and safeguard the American people for end-times fascists, caliper-wielding eugenicists, and Ayn Rand LARPers.

Much of the work DOGE’s victims did is also gone forever. When DOGE’s muskrats killed long-running NIH research projects, they pulled the plug on studies, some of which had run for decades. Many of these experiments are unsalvageable. DOGE didn’t just throw away the contributions that cancer patients, people with genetic disorders and other volunteer research subjects gave to science: in halting these research projects, DOGE shredded this selfless sacrifice. Why not? When one NIH official begged his DOGE invaders not to kill long-running, valuable cancer research, the DOGE child laughed and said it didn’t matter, because AI was going to cure cancer.

Then there’s the NIH’s research partners: the elite institutions who buckled so quickly in the face of Trump’s antisemitism/DEI witch-hunts. These universities now face the same crisis as the DOGE-gutted civil service, with their best and brightest gone, grad students chased back to their home countries, and the trust of their students and faculty permanently squandered.

It’s not just grad students who got chased out of America. Immigrants — documented and undocumented alike — have been terrorized for two years and many of them have fled. ICE got what it wanted: they robbed aging, stagnant America of the dynamism, aspiration and youthful vigor of the most ambitious people from every corner of the globe, people who proved their resourcefulness and bravery by making dangerous crossings. Then they navigated the US immigration system’s impenetrable bureaucracy, often working without legal representation, in a language they were just learning, and still managing to clear every bureaucratic hurdle. This alone is a breathtaking demonstration of intelligence, resourcefulness and diligence. Those brilliant, hardworking people aren’t coming back: some other country will get the benefit of their life’s work and care. Their children will become citizens of other nations.

Now think of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been transferred from ordinary working people who are still here, to America’s oligarchs. Trump’s tax cuts, corrupt policy subsidies and no-bid pork contracts have supercharged the wealth (and thus the power) of America’s most corrupt elite. It will be the work of a generation to tax away their stolen loot, and much of it may never be recovered. These people will spend that time working to transform their wealth into permanent power, buying and installing politicians at every level of office.

Trumpland is a coalition of wreckers of every kind. Think of how MAHA undermined the nation’s herd immunity to a host of communicable diseases, many of which can result in permanent disability. Long after MAHA is forgotten even as a punchline, the people whose health they destroyed forever will still be struggling. After a century of painstaking work to corral measles and other killer diseases, MAHA immunocompromised America itself, in just two short years. Any attempt to bring back evidence-based preventative medicine must now overcome the deep mistrust of medical science that an army of supplement-peddling quacks has sunk deep into Americans’ psyche.

Speaking of mistrust: Americans must now and forever live with the knowledge that tens of thousands of their neighbors joined ICE, an armed, masked kidnapping squad that occupied US cities, murdering US citizens and noncitizens alike in the streets with impunity. Even if we try and imprison every one of those war criminals, it will take years and will shatter families and communities.

ICE proved that America is awash in small arms, but it’s a different story when it comes to significant warfighting materiel. Trump’s Iranian disaster used up the largest part of Pax Americana’s arsenal of missiles and anti-missile interceptors. Putin doesn’t need to convince Trump to cut off Ukraine’s access to America’s long-range arsenal. Trump shot his wad, and re-arming America is the work of decades, and it will cost billions, and it will require access to things America no longer knows how to make. Worse: the places where they do know how to make those things are no longer America’s allies.

Can they be America’s allies again? Well, sure, but only in a limited, Carneyist, “minilateral” way, in which countries form temporary alliances to accomplish specific goals. Biden spoke of “friendshoring” production of key goods and services. Friendshoring implies a reliable form of friendship, the sort that is built on decades of trust and interdependence. Friendshoring only works if the friends you friendshore to can be relied upon to stay your friends. Do we really think that if Venezuela deposes the puppet regime Trump installed after kidnapping the country’s leader that it will remain America’s “friend?”

That’s the problem with weaponized interdependence: it only works for so long as the country America is screwing remains dependent on America, and now every country in the world is moving heaven and earth to break their dependencies on America, its institutions and products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

As Nate Bethea says on this week’s Trashfuture podcast, airports outside of the USA are now filled with large, splashy ads urging businesses to move their IT out of America’s cloud and off of American apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

After Microsoft obliged the Trump regime by taking away the online accounts of foreign officials who made Trump angry, will any other country ever voluntarily trust them with their industrial capacity, let alone their government?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

I’m not saying America is a write-off: I’m saying that it has been sabotaged down to the foundation slab and structural members by a psychotic cadre of skilled arsonists, who were abetted by mad bombers who drove themselves even crazier by racking up life-altering debts in rigged “prediction markets” that serve as a vehicle for bankrupting yourself by wishcasting away your life’s savings by betting on every aspect of a Permanent Chud Reich, as corrupt officials make out like bandits by trading on insider information.

When America comes back (if America comes back), it will not be as the organizing platform for the world’s finance, military, technology and commerce. In years or perhaps decades, America may find a new stable place in the international community. But in the meantime, it cannot be relied upon to serve as the world’s hyperpower. Trump forever disqualified America from enjoying that privileged place — and just to be sure, he destroyed its capacity to even try.

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling on Pokemon https://web.archive.org/web/20050908070521/https://www.wired.com/news/audio/interviews/sterling_11.mp3

#20yrsago Fred von Lohmann’s talk at USC https://web.archive.org/web/20061110090032/https://centeronpublicdiplomacy.com/podcasts/061107_von_lohmann.mp3

#20yrsago Secret WIPO memo: rich countries to kill Broadcast Treaty, Development Agenda https://www.ip-watch.org/2006/11/07/developed-country-strategy-on-wipo-development-agenda-governance-revealed/?res=1024_ff&print=0

#20yrsago Canadian copyright czar forced to turn away industry bribes https://web.archive.org/web/20101018194506/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1521&Itemid=125

#20yrsago Copyright explained through a wild west metaphor http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/

#15yrsago Wired.com photo policy: all staff-produced photos will now be Creative Commons licensed https://web.archive.org/web/20111111051330/https://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/creative-commons/?pid=1365&pageid=6275

#15yrsago “Piracy-stricken” Viacom CEO tops pay-raise charts https://www.techdirt.com/2011/11/07/viacom-decimated-piracy-its-ceo-got-biggest-raise-any-exec-anywhere/

#15yrsago Boyett’s Mortality Bridge: Rock n’ roll Dante meets Orpheus https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/08/boyetts-mortality-bridge-rock-n-roll-dante-meets-orpheus/

#10yrsago FAA okays use of semi-autonomous drones for Disneyland and Disney World fireworks displays https://web.archive.org/web/20161110065859/http://thedisneyblog.com/2016/11/07/disney-drones/

#10yrsago Glenn Beck’s “decency” doesn’t extend to answering questions about why he was such an asshole https://wnyc.org/story/beck-changed-man

#10yrsago CBC threatens podcast app makers, argues that RSS readers violate copyright https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/5bmzuj/cbc_are_blocking_podcast_apps/

#10yrsago Winter Denial of Service attack knocks out heating in Finnish homes https://web.archive.org/web/20161109214609/https://metropolitan.fi/entry/ddos-attack-halts-heating-in-finland-amidst-winter

#10yrsago Women are flocking to Susan B Anthony’s grave to cover it with “I Voted” stickers https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/susan-b-anthonys-grave-will-be-open-until-the-polls-close.html

#10yrsago Edward Snowden to Trump campaign: “old laptops” could vet 800,000 emails in “minutes-to-hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20161107235120/https://www.yahoo.com/news/edward-snowden-crushes-conspiracy-theory-053349259.html

#10yrsago My neighborhood realtor is determined to turn a buck on electoral eschatology https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/08/my-neighborhood-realtor-is-determined-to-turn-a-buck-on-electoral-eschatology/

#5yrsago Right-Clicker-Mentality https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#spoilsports-r-us

#5yrsago Charlie Jane Anders’ Victories Greater Than Death https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#the-chosen-ones

#5yrsago Imagining the end of capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass

#1yrago Facebook’s fraud files https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/#too-big-to-care