Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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âThe rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterdayâââbut never jam to-day.â
-The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll)
The new, surging antitrust movement has given hope to many who yearn to throw off the yoke of Big Tech. After all, the tech giantsâ dominance was attained through solidly illegal conduct, such as anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, predatory pricing, and price-fixing. This produced conditions in which the companies were able to engage in more flagrant illegal conduct, including unambiguous, multi-billion-dollar acts of fraud.
Capitalismâs Shell Game: From Robert Bork to John Deere.
John Deereâs workers are done with their employerâs bullshit.
When the 10,000 workers who keep the worldâs largest agribusiness monopoly humming walked off the job last month, it was historic. As one John Deere worker put it, âEverything John Deere did to increase its stock price is now a liability.â Deereâs workforce loyalty had been eroded by decades of reduced pay, reduced benefits and increased hours, all amid skyrocketing profits, stock prices, and executive compensation,.
As the day of the strike vote drew nearer, the company put on a charm offensive, painting its workers as greedy and lazy, unhappy with $60,000 a year.
I am recuperating from hip-replacement surgery and while that often means I canât concentrate enough to work, it also means I have long, uninterrupted periods to carry on correspondence, such as the paragraphs below, from my overdue reply to a left-wing economist with whom Iâve been discussing the case for interoperability. In our previous round, my correspondent had suggested that interop wasnât necessarily good, and that even profitable interop could be bad for all of usâââdo we really need 50 nearly identical inks on Amazon that can all work with our printer? How can anyone make a âgoodâ choice in that environment? My response is below.
Continue reading "Everything is Always Broken, and Thatâs Okay"