Thanks. I have most alerts turned off, but that piece got me to turn off two more of them. 
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It’s really nice to stay on top of your friends’ lives without feeling low-grade resentment for how they interrupted your creative fog with a ganked Tiktok video of a zoomer making fun of a boomer for getting mad at a millennial for quoting Osama bin Laden.
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Whaddya mean “we”! I’m one of those people that remembers having rotary phones, this is a relatively recent change, and it’s not like there was a vote on it. It absolutely wasn’t rude, “out of the blue” was literally the only way of getting in touch with someone.
It’s quaint to remember my wife and I saying how we enjoyed drop-bys, someone just showing up at the house for a social call (within obvious limits). That used to be a thing!
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I’m sure Doctorow knows that. The problem now that he’s addressing is that we get so many other kinds of similar interruptions. Most of are also far busier, for more hours per day, than was the norm back in the day.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/
The real action is in ad-tech, a sector dominated by two giant companies, Meta and Google. These companies claim that they are better than the unregulated data-broker cowboys at the bottom of the food-chain. They say they’re responsible wielders of unregulated monopoly surveillance power. Reader, they are not.
HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls HP adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls • The Register (h/t Peter Sayer)
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I want to know who thought this was a good idea?!?
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Some MBA or other.
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No kidding… everyone knows what you’re supposed to do is fire support staff until there’s an actual 15-minute minimum wait.
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FTA:
Every page in the enshittification playbook was printed in farcically expensive HP ink, and if you try to run a copy off for yourself, the printer will stop five times and force you to print a “calibration page” that is solid color from top to bottom, consuming about $10 worth of ink. Don’t like it? Die mad.
Which is why our brief experiment with HP ended with one still-working-like-new printer.
Brother makes good printers. So far
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That’s exactly what we just did, just picked up a Brother colour laser, couldn’t be happier. With how little we print even the starter toner cartridges will probably last years!
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/24/surfa/#mark-ellis
if your local power company is privately owned, you’ve seen energy rate hikes at 49% above inflation over the last three years.
Sure sound a lot like PG&E!
Also:
Anat Shenker-Osorio’s actual plan to beat fascism Anat Shenker-Osorio's *actual* plan to beat fascism
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/25/sneak-and-peek/#pavel-chekov
As Pavel Chekov famously wrote: “a phaser on the bridge in act one will always go off by act three.” Apple set itself up with the power to override its customers’ decisions about the devices it sells them, and then that power was abused in a hundred ways, large and small
Also:
The Coup Has Failed The Coup Has Failed - The American Prospect
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I fucking hope the American prospect is correct.
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FTA:
This doesn’t mean that the subsequent three years and eleven months will be a garden of earthly delights.
Probably a good thing. Traffic management is tricky at best in any Hieronymus Bosch scene.
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From a few days ago…
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We’re going to this:
https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels
On Tuesday in DC. Will report back!
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh
It’s time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech’s margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it’ll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn’t have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.
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