Linkage

For decades, the most ruthless form of American capitalism centered on cost-cutting. […] The results can be seen in ruined industrial ghost towns across the Midwest, and businesses strip-mined by leveraged buyouts. But there is a tipping point to all this cost-cutting. There’s only so much fat to cut before you hit bone. The strategy eventually had diminishing returns, and without a new strategy, profits would hit a plateau. That wouldn’t cut it on Wall Street.

Enter the age of recoupment. Instead of cutting costs, the new mantra is raising prices.

Price hikes are old as dirt. But today’s companies have reinvented them. They’re using a dizzying array of sophisticated and deceitful tricks to do something pretty darn simple: rip you off.

The new tricks have fancy new names. Charging you more for less is a corporate practice known as “shrinkflation.” Revealing part of the total price up front, only to tack on all manner of ridiculous-sounding fees and service charges: Industry insiders call that one “drip pricing.” Stealing your online shopping data to predict the maximum price you would be willing to pay for your next e-commerce purchase: That’s personalized pricing. Using software to coordinate pricing with other companies to make sure they don’t undercut each other: That’s algorithmic price-fixing (or plain old-fashioned collusion). And charging you more for an item when supply is limited: That’s Jay Powell’s favorite, dynamic pricing.

[…]

With prices rising everywhere they turned, nobody could discern which were justified by companies’ own rising costs, and which were truly excessive. Highly engineered “dark patterns,” where people are tricked into signing up or paying more, were chalked up to the way things are now, rather than something more insidious. If a price surges, if a fee is tacked onto the bill, the culprit is the economy, not the company shoving their hands into your wallet.

CEOs hardly contain their delight on calls with investors. From the CFO of the international conglomerate 3M patting their team on the back for doing a “marvelous job in driving price,” to the CFO of the largest beer importer in the United States, Constellation Brands, who promised investors the company would “make sure we’re not leaving any pricing on the table” and “take as much as we can,” to the tech CEO who copped to “praying for inflation” and doing his “inflation dance,” these corporate executives were clear on one thing: Inflation was very good for business.

When a heat dome shattered temperature records across the Western U.S. and Canada in June 2021, the resulting fatalities exposed a pattern. In Portland, Oregon, and surrounding Multnomah County, 56 of the 72 people who died were age 60 and up. In British Columbia, people 60 or older accounted for 555 of the 619 fatalities.

Just over a year later, a sizzling June, July and August in England caused roughly 2,800 excess deaths among people 65 and older. More than 1,000 of them occurred over four days in late July.

Intense heat waves in recent years offer a stark warning of what’s at stake for humanity. The planet just endured its 12 hottest consecutive months on record, and this summer threatens to be hotter than ever. But those stakes are not experienced equally across age groups. Older adults are more at risk of experiencing dangerous health impacts during periods of intense heat.

In 2015, when I first started learning about the health and well-being of trans people, I knew very little. I went on a journey of discovery, and what I discovered wasn’t good. I was shocked, appalled, and disgusted by what I was reading, hearing, and later, experiencing. Trans people – including youth – in the UK were being harassed, bullied, victimised, shunned, picked on, and discriminated against. That was by people working in my profession – healthcare workers, nurses, doctors, and psychologists – who had formed an unhealthy relationship with these patients and this significant patient group.

In 2016, the Women and Equalities Commission found, and I quote, “The NHS is letting down trans people, with too much evidence of an approach that can be said to be discriminatory and in breach of the Equality Act.”

Back then, it was so bad I assumed that once we recognised the real issues that were present that things could and would start to get better. But they haven’t.

[…] 

It’s confounding to see individuals who have historically fought for equal rights, including people of colour, individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and women, now participating in denying trans people their rights to recognition, acceptance, and healthcare.

But the final blow came when the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the Minister for Health, acting jointly, made an emergency order to start on June 3, 2024 to restrict the prescribing and supply of puberty blockers to under 18s. The order was made to “avoid serious danger to health”.

So, while experts across the world publish evidence-based guidelines to make puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones more accessible to trans youth, the UK government ignores medics and imposes bans. This will not avoid serious danger to health, it will cause serious danger to health, and it will cause death.

“Moderate” has become a key word in San Francisco politics as a movement funded by wealthy tech interests campaigns to undermine progressive power at City Hall. But there’s a big problem with words like "moderate" and "centrist": They mean different things to different people. As such, they lack any real definition or meaning.

[…]

San Francisco has serious challenges, but regressive Republican policies are not the answer. Neither are they moderate in any sense of the word. To do something “in moderation” is to avoid extremes on either side. But it’s quite extreme to push failed right-wing policies designed to treat poverty and illness with more pain.

In 2024, we should reject meaningless frames like centrist and moderate. Instead, examine the moral views underlying each candidate and proposal.

Are they rooted in a morality of Republican strictness or Democratic empathy?

Does the evidence suggest their policy approaches are effective or ineffective?

What are the moral politics of the people funding the campaign? Are they progressive or regressive?

Then vote your values.

It has been clear for some time that this general election, when it came, would see Conservative politicians attempt to whip up a storm around sex and gender. Targeting poorly understood minorities is standard play for the party when it’s in trouble, and lately it has been drawing heavily on the tactics of the US evangelical right, which has found transphobia a useful tool through which to start radicalising people. Kemi Badenoch’s latest move, however, isn’t just transphobic – it’s unworkable.

Of course, the right has always hankered after the days when ‘men were real men and women were real women’. It’s not for nothing that Rishi Sunak chooses to pose on the exercise machines he rarely uses while Liz Truss prefers to sit beneath a tree in a walled garden wearing a dress that makes her look like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. Faced with fictive claims about schools teaching there are 72 genders, and other such nonsense, one can understand why the average person might feel a bit confused and might long for the simplicity of the past. But sex was never simple. It just looks that way through a veil of ignorance – and when laws are based on ignorance, they don’t work.

But it's okay, because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.

Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. Investment account balances would reflect last week’s figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible.

[…]

In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been “extremely frustrating and disappointing”.

They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

Despite its genuine decentralisation, Mastodon has also implemented a server covenant that does a pretty good job of excluding the far-right extremists by a purely social process — if you keep horrible arseholes on your server, you’re liable to be shunned. 

This has led to a “dark” Fediverse of sites that don’t go along with the covenant but still talk to each other. Gab is such a site, for example.

If you want untrammelled free speech social networks, they’re right there, right now!

For some reason, neither Pirate Wires nor Dorsey are interested in these existing real-world examples.

This is because these guys only care about their assumed right to force people who aren’t interested to listen. “Free speech” is when they can say awful stuff and you can’t answer back. When Dorsey calls Twitter — Twitter! — “freedom technology,” that’s the freedom he means. They can’t live without unwilling ears to bash.

Moreno introduced the idea at the 2015 Paris climate conference and soon started advising Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who made the 15-minute city concept a pillar of her campaign for a second term. Hidalgo has pushed for fewer cars to reduce both the city’s carbon footprint and unhealthy air pollution. But the changes aren’t just about making it easier to bike or walk—it’s equally important that people have more options nearby, Moreno says. Proximity is a key part of sustainable transportation. And it’s also just a better way to live.

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The city is encouraging the redevelopment of buildings that were used only part of the time, like offices, into multiuse spaces. One former administrative building now contains a covered market, housing, offices, a community preschool, a hotel and youth hostel, restaurants, bars, an art gallery, a gym, and urban farming on the rooftop. Little-used parking garages and former industrial sites are becoming housing. A former maternity hospital is now a school with a library and playground that the public can access outside of school hours for open-air film screenings, shows, and book fairs. The city is also pushing to make sure that each neighborhood has access to more significant services, such as healthcare and coworking spaces.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government says the move is needed to shore up domestic energy supply while supporting a transition to net zero.

But critics argue the move is a rejection of science, pointing to the International Energy Agency (IEA) call for "huge declines in the use of coal, oil and gas" to reach climate targets.

Australia - one of the world's largest exporters of liquefied natural gas - has also said the policy is based on "its commitment to being a reliable trading partner".

Released on Thursday, the strategy outlines the government's plans to work with industry and state leaders to increase both the production and exploration of the fossil fuel.

The government will also continue to support the expansion of the country's existing gas projects, the largest of which are run by Chevron and Woodside Energy Group in Western Australia. 

And you try telling the kids of today that…

That first version only had 14 commands. They included: PRINT, IF and THEN, and, the soon-to-be infamous GOTO. Thanks to GOTO, the famous Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra said, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

With GOTO, it was all too easy for would-be programmers to write what would become known as spaghetti code -- a tangled mess of source code that was almost impossible to understand or debug. Yes, BASIC was easy to write simple programs in, but it was awful for writing anything complex.

Still, the keyword was "easy." So, early developers kept using BASIC and porting it to one computer after another. 

Then, as the years rolled by, another paradigm for computing power emerged: The PC. In 1975, instead of sharing computers, you could have one of your very own with all the power of a 2MHz Intel 8080 processor.

Two young men, Paul Allen, and Bill Gates, proposed to the maker of the first PC, Ed Roberts' Altair 8800, that they port BASIC to his computer. He agreed, and shortly thereafter, they founded Micro-Soft. You know it better as Microsoft.

Yes, that's right. Without BASIC, you're not running Windows today. At about the same time, Steve Wozniak was working on porting BASIC to the first Apple computer, the Apple I. BASIC was essential for Apple's early growth as well.

BASIC also became a staple in home computers like the Atari 400, Commodore 64, and TRS-80. It was featured prominently in early computer magazines, where readers could find and then type in BASIC code all by themselves. Or, you could pay real money and get a cassette tape with such popular games as Lunar Lander.

Then, when IBM came out with its first PC, Gates and Allen were ready to take advantage of this new platform. As IBM President of Entry Systems, Don Estridge, said, "Microsoft BASIC had hundreds of thousands of users around the world. How are you going to argue with that?"