https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/28/cheaters-ever-prosper/#caveat-america
This is the kind of scammer inception that threatens to create a black hole of superdense Scammium-138 that sucks the whole country into the scam singularity. But scammers don’t care – the Art of the Scam is to race across the river on the backs of alligators without losing a leg. These people aren’t long-termists, they’ve always got one foot out the door.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/30/gone-fission/#seattle-portland-london-manchester
I’m about to take a two-ish week sabbatical so I can (once again!) rewrite the Trump chapter of my Enshittification book (October 2025), and so that I can get my (thankfully very treatable) cancer irradiated
Oh, Doctorow is taking a sabbatical, not you.
fixed
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-breach-by-design#bringing-home-the-beacon
firms stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson. They would love it if they could “safely” sell the data they suck up from our everyday activities, so they declare that they can safely do so, and sell giant data-sets, and then bam, the next thing you know, a federal judge’s porn-browsing habits are published for all the world to see
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/20/the-doctor-will-gouge-you-now/#states-rights
Working people cannot rely on Trump’s federal government and the Republican Congress to protect us from these vampires. But this is America: when the feds fail, that creates an opportunity for state legislators to step in and act. And that’s just what’s happened in Oregon, where the state legislature has passed sweeping, bipartisan legislation that bans corporations from owning or operating a medical practice in the state
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/1060-west-addison#the-new-oldsmobiles-are-in-early-this-year
"It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it!”
Yeah, very much this. All I was expecting was a funny film, and then suddenly there was all of this fantastic music. Which has been with me ever since.
I watched it a lot as a kid but didn’t notice that Frank Oz played that prison clerk until I was an adult who had grown to appreciate the cast of the Muppets.
I liked Oz in After Hours. also, the file clerk at the end of the Blues Brothers is Steven Spielberg.
I went to Pluralistic today and briefly got a screen verifying my connection like a Cloudflare thing except it wasn’t Cloudflare. then Firefox told me it wasn’t going to connect me. trying again just went straight to the FF thing.
is this verification new to Pluralistic or did my ad blockers update or what? everyone else or just me?
I just tried and had no problem.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/23/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat
So here we are, trapped in the new oligarchy. It’s too late to rely on income taxes, not if we’re going to euthanize enough rentiers to free out politics from their toxic influence and save the human race any of several foreseeable mass-extinction events. Making the ultra-rich poor again is going to require new tactics.
ETA:
it connected me today. just some hiccup I guess.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#
Personalized pricing (that is, “surveillance pricing”) is part of the “pricing revolution” that is underway in the US and the world today. Another major element of this revolution are the “price clearinghouses” that charge firms within a sector to submit their prices to them, then “offer advice” on the optimum pricing. This advice – given to all the suppliers of a good or service – inevitably boils down to “everyone should raise their prices in unison.” So long as everyone follows that advice, we poor suckers have nowhere else to go to get a better deal.
The pricing revolution is a kind of mirror-world Marxism, grounded in “From each according to their ability to pay; to each according to their economic desperation”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp
A “public internet” isn’t an internet that’s run by the government: it’s a system of publicly subsidized, publicly managed public goods that are designed to allow everyone to participate in both using and providing internet services. The Eurostack is a brilliant idea whose time arrived a decade ago. Digital sovereignty projects are among the most important responses to Trumpism, a necessary step to build an independent digital nervous system the rest of the world can use to treat the USA as damage and route around it. We can’t afford to have “digital soveriegnty” be “national firewalls 2.0” – we need a public internet, not 200+ national internets.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois
American politics have been growing ever more unstable since the 1970s, when oil crisis gave way to the Reagan revolution and its raft of pro-oligarch, anti-human policies. Since then, we’ve seen an unbroken trend to wage stagnation and widening inequality. As a new American oligarch class emerged, they gained near-total control over the levers of power. In a now-famous 2014 paper, political scientists reviewed 1,779 policy fights and found that the only time these cashed out in a way that reflected popular will is when elites favored them, too. When elites objected to something, it literally didn’t matter how popular it was with everyone else, it just didn’t happen
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gimmicks/#artificial-income
Tech companies don’t need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a “growth” sector and not a “mature” sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.
That’s why AI is being crammed into absofuckingloutely everything.
