Medium – Page 12 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Expectations management (Part V)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

A giant nighttime crowd at the foot of Disneyland’s Main St, USA, looking toward the castle. Image: Mike Saechang https://www.flickr.com/photos/saechang/29066900230/ CC BY-ND: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/ — *Image:* *Mike Saechang*/*CC BY-ND 2.0*

This is Part V in this series. In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney. In Part II, I explored Disneyland’s changing business-model and the pressures that shifted it from selling ticket-books to selling all-you-can-eat passes, and the resulting queuing problems. In Part III, I described how every fix for long lines just made the problem worse, creating complexity that frustrated first-time visitors and turning annual passholders into entitled “passholes.” In Part IV, I look at the legal and economic dimension of different pricing models for managing aggregate demand.

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Managing aggregate demand (Part IV)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

This is Part IV in this series. In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney. In Part II, I explored Disneyland’s changing business-model and the pressures that shifted it from selling ticket-books to selling all-you-can-eat passes, and the resulting queuing problems. In Part III, I described how every fix for long lines just made the problem worse, creating complexity that frustrated first-time visitors and turning annual passholders into entitled “passholes.”

Continue reading "Managing aggregate demand (Part IV)"

Now you’ve got two problems (Part III)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

This is Part III in this series. In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney. In Part II, I explored Disneyland’s changing business-model and the pressures that shifted it from selling ticket-books to selling all-you-can-eat passes, and the resulting queuing problems.

Continue reading "Now you’ve got two problems (Part III)"

Boredom and its discontents (Part II)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

Queue for Walt Disney World’s ‘it’s a small world.’ Image by Michael Gray: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kathika/2601484170. CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ — *Michael Gray*, *CC BY-SA 2.0*

In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney.

Continue reading "Boredom and its discontents (Part II)"

Are we having fun yet?

Amusement parks, crowd control, and load-balancing

Group photo in front of the castle at Disneyland’s goth day, “Bat’s Day in the Fun Park,” August 2006.

Pay for play

The news that Disneyland Paris is now selling Fast Passes — a skip-the-line ticket — for about $10 per person per ride has theme park watchers debating whether this is the destiny of all Disney parks and, if so, what it means for the future of theme parks.

You may not care about this, but the creation, maintenance, and operation of immersive built environments is an old art form with enormous cultural significance and few practitioners. The curious pleasures of an immersive built environment go back at least as far as the Sun King’s palace at Versailles and the winding path of built environments from elite follies to mass entertainment runs in parallel to the changing currents in populism, commodification, and participation.

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Self-publishing

The hard problem of politics, religion, advertising and literature

Vintage Benson Barrett ad, “How to MAKE MONEY WRITING..short paragraphs! promising “No tedious study. Learn how to write to sell, right away.”

Publishing is doing great

Publishing is doing great. Despite panic at the start of the lockdown, book sales were actually up during lockdown, as people turned to books to pass the time, joining online bookclubs and finding ways to support their local indie booksellers.

But authorship? Not so great.

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The Doctrine of Moral Hazard

When it comes to self-preferencing, right wing economists are right: incentives matter.

A referee in a striped jersey extends his arm to make a call; perched upon his arm is a vintage newspaper political cartoon of Roosevelt as a trustbuster, swinging a club.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee spent 23 hours debating a historically unprecedented package of tech competition bills, surprising observers by passing all six of the legislative proposals under consideration, with bipartisan support.

Each of the six bills is interesting in its own ways — for example, the ACCESS Act (HR 6487) uses interoperability and standards to reduce the costs we bear when we leave monopoly platforms behind, by letting us stay in touch with the friends who stay.

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The EU, Tech Trustbusting, and Trade Wars

There’s a difference between protectionism and political will

The EU flag superimposed over a Matrix “code waterfall” effect; in the center of the ring of stars is a vintage newspaper caricature of Roosevelt as a trustbuster, swinging his “big stick.”

Competition regulators in the EU, the UK and the US are all looking hard at concentration in the tech sector, and well they should: an industry that was once hailed for its dynamism — for being a sector where yesterday’s world-spanning titans are sold for parts to companies that were mere napkin doodles a year or two before — has calcified into “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”

The reasons for tech concentration are pretty straightforward. Despite a lot of fatalistic tech exceptionalism about “network effects” leading to inevitable monopolization, the actual means by which tech companies consolidated is actually easy to see in the historical record.

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A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness

Competent monopolists aren’t good monopolists

Ida Tarbell’s uses her writing to kindle a fire on a tree labelled “Standard Oil Traditional Policy of Silence.” A panicked John D Rockefeller peers out of a squirrel-hole, screaming in alarm.

If you do much reading about antitrust, you’re sure to come across Ida Tarbell, the campaigning investigative journalist whose masterful 1904 book, The History of the Standard Oil Company (free ebook, free audiobook), brought down John D. Rockefeller and his monopolistic Standard Oil Company, which was broken up in 1911. It split into seven companies, many of which are still with us—or were, until recent mergers (think: Exxon, Mobil, Esso, Chevron, Texaco, and Amoco).

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The Rent’s Too Damned High

A human right, commodified and rendered zero-sum.

The pandemic housing bubble has multiple, complex causes. Among them:

A housing shortage resulting from a decade of anemic construction following the Great Financial Crisis and a wave of homebuilder bankruptcies;
Supply-chain shocks created by the pandemic, which was especially hard on “efficient” industries, where financialization and monopolization drained vital industries of their cash and inventory reserves and turned them over to the richest people in America;
The trillions that the Trump stimulus pumped into the financial markets, which are now being used to buy up every single-family dwelling that hits the market, for cash-above-the-asking-price, in order to convert it to a subprime rental whose predatory rents, savage evictions and dangerous neglect are the basis for a boom in bonds that financialize the rent they generate.

Generations of Americans have dreamed of owning a home, both to insulate themselves from the whims of their landlords and to create intergenerational wealth. Home ownership was a key driver of social mobility, allowing working class people to enter the middle class. A horrible “natural experiment” shows just how important property acquisition is to economic stability: redlining and restrictive covenants froze Black people out of the home-purchasing boom of the New Deal and the GI Bill, exacerbating and accelerating the racial wealth gap.

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