Wut

Plot twist:

Private equity buys your registrar and jacks up the renewal price 5x.

They’re unionised so I doubt they can go too far in this regard. I’m guessing it’s more of useful automation rather than Big Brother tech.

Wow. This is unbelievable.

Also, this is probably going to be a new talking point in the election campaign:

“They came for your guns, they came for your cats, now they’re coming for your trucks!!!”

What you’re talking about happened way before the Ticketmaster-Live Nation monopoly became a thing. Today if you want to make a medium to large concert you have no choice most of the time but to use a Live Nation venue and Ticketmaster for tickets. For example Live Nation owns all large concert venues in Toronto and I recently learned they’ve purchased the well known smaller venues over the last few years. They’re now in a position to extract more value from fans and performers. Similar to how large grocery chains can extract from both customers and suppliers.

You should see the video though. It explains things well.

I was going to say that stopping buying tickets obviously won’t prevent them from going up even if it does temporarily but then you said it yourself in the last paragraph. You can’t take away monopoly power without government action.

Me: Polish my abstract:

“The development of …”

ChatGPT: "Wypoleruj moje streszczenie…”

Screen Actors Guild presidency When Robert Montgomery resigned as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) on March 10, 1947, Reagan was elected to that position in a special election.[51] Reagan’s first tenure saw various labor–management disputes,[52] the Hollywood blacklist,[53] and the Taft–Hartley Act’s implementation.[54] On April 10, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) interviewed Reagan and he provided them with the names of actors whom he believed to be communist sympathizers.[55] During a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing, Reagan testified that some guild members were associated with the Communist Party[56] and that he was well-informed about a “jurisdictional strike”.[57] When asked if he was aware of communist efforts within the Screen Writers Guild, he called information about the efforts “hearsay”.[58] Reagan resigned as SAG president November 10, 1952, but remained on the board;[59] Walter Pidgeon succeeded him as president.[60]

Goddamn.

The Taft–Hartley Act amended the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), adding new restrictions on union actions and designating new union-specific unfair labor practices. Among the practices prohibited by the Taft–Hartley act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The amendments also allowed states to enact right-to-work laws banning union shops. Enacted during the early stages of the Cold War, the law required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government.

Fuck.

They must be proxying the traffic off of a cached copy. I doubt they’d be sending traffic straight to IA.

This is them pretending they just now discovered that China didn’t let them in to make profit but to build factories and import manufacturing processes in order for China to speedrun the last century of technological progress. It’s just a ploy for changing the conditions of the deal.

Miller should get slapped for this. Assuming accuracy.

This is what I came here for.

She did the job she went there to do. This debate generated enough material for her campaign to use.

I think you missed the point. The parent comment explains it well. It’s not that AP specifically is suspect. It’s a comment on the wider discourse where AP is but one participant. Perhaps one of the best ones. AP is generally a good source. The whole discourse on the topic is propagandist in the way that it works in favour of firms, not labor.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion

Case in point for for enforcing the limits - I just heard the head of the corporate landlord association in Canada suggesting that the government buying old buildings instead of them would be Marxist and that would be like East Germany. Keywords strictly outside the acceptable spectrum.

Conservatives suggest Singh is maintaining the deal to secure his MP pension, which he will qualify for in October 2025, when the next federal election is scheduled.

Oh so he’s parroting Bitcoin Milhouse’s ads. Nice.

Purely on the product side, if I decide to buy it, I wouldn’t buy it for myself. I’d buy it for friends and family who are not that tech literate. Either to make my life easier to give them self-hosted services, or ideally for themselves to be able to do so. I want this product to be a non-shitty, open source “Synology,” from a firm I can trist to support it for a very long time. Doesn’t have to have that form factor. And I’m totally fine with an ongoing subscription. I’d like to be able to say - hey friend, buy this from ACME Co-op and sign up for their support plan. Follow the wizard and you’ll have Immich, Nextcloud, etc. A support plan might include external cloud HTTP proxy with authentication and SSL that makes access trivial. Similar to how Home Assistant’s subscription (Nabu Casa) works. It could also include a cloud backup. Perhaps at a different subscription rate.

I don’t know enough to say what the structure should be but this should not be possible:

But it doesn’t protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital

It implies that the founders have more voting power and ownership than the rest of the people in the org. In my mind, everyone should have an equal vote, which should prevent a sale on the whim of the founders or another minority group. If a sale is in the cards, a majority of the people in the org should have to approve for it to proceed. And this shouldn’t be advisory but a legal barrier to pass.

If I were to start a firm today, I’d be looking into this because not only this is the kind of firm I’d like to work in, but I think so would quite a few people in software. And those aren’t the dumb kids.

I can also say that as a customer, the few worker co-ops I’ve able to buy things from give me a much more trustworthy impression than the baseline. They just behave differently. Noticeably more ethically.

I probably would. However it has become increasingly obvious that the flaws with solutions so far have been in the organisation. Not so much the particular hardware or software. If I’m going to buy something I’d like some hope that it’ll be there in 5 or 10 or 20 years. So please if you go serious with this, look into worker-owned organizations because I’m tired of dodging profit-maximizing traps and pretend-non-profit landmines. If the people building and supporting the thing aren’t the ones deciding what to do with the revenue and profit, you’re the only one doing it and you’re going to make mistakes that will hurt them and us. And then you become a landmine to dodge.

Wow, this sounds almost Keynesian. It might actually help the EU get out of the neoliberal rut.

The EU already moved in that direction with Next Generation EU, a several-hundred-billion-euro investment plan that came in the wake of COVID-19 – but the idea has raised fears of subsidising weaker member states, among “frugal” member states such as von der Leyen’s Germany.

Germany should fuck right off and get rid of its self imposed austerity “debt brake” law while at it. They and everyone else needs public investment and lots of it, especially if we’re to deal with climate change on time.