BC ECONOMY

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow 5 years, 7 months ago 1727 views

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One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.

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It turns out that there are DISeconomies of scale, what Brandeis called "the curse of bigness" and really, the Universal-NBC-Comcast octopus is a poster child for that curse.

https://t.co/1pLFcUjhV7

2/

Comcast has just informed its subscribers that they are at risk of losing access to "Bravo, CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Olympic Channel, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo, Universal Kids, NBC Universo, USA Network and NBC Sports Network."

https://t.co/UU9un9Lm1t

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That is, Comcast has warned its customers that Comcast might not license its channels to Comcast anymore.

This is a "carriage dispute" - a dispute over how much the cable operator will pay the broadcaster. It's a common dispute to have.

4/

But in this case, Comcast's dispute is over the accounting fiction of how much one division of a vertical monopolist will nominally charge another to access its products.

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Comcast's notice was triggered by a statutory duty to inform subscribers when a deal is set to expire with no new deal in place, and obviously Comcast can strike that deal with itself at the stroke of a pen.

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But it's not clear why it hasn't done so already, sparing the company the baffling humiliation of sending out these notices. Perhaps it's because the contours of the deal may affect its licensing rates to rivals like ATT-Time Warner.

7/

In other words, permitting Universal to buy both a cable operator and a zillion cable channels has put it in the position where to benefit one division, it may have to do serious harm to another.

Tell me again how monopolies are efficient?

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

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Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

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Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

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These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

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These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

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The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

4/

PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

20 years on, #BushVGore is back in our discourse - an election stolen by mobs at the polling places, a media blitz, and a Supreme Court at its most antidemocratic and antimajoritarian.

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We remember this as an election that the plutes stole, but it's also an election that the Dems gave to them. That's why we're talk about it now. There will be an attempt to steal next month's election. Will we surrender again?

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The last surrender led to a war being fought today by the children of the soldiers who were sent into battle on day one. It led to climate inaction, monopolistic concentration, erosions to our right to vote and to our right to protest.

3/

Thanks to that surrender, voter suppression was expanded and reinforced, leading to the election of a fumbling liar who got to appoint more SCOTUS judges in 3.5 years than all Democratic presidents did in the previous quarter

If Amy Barrett is confirmed, Donald Trump alone will have appointed the same number of SCOTUS judges in 3-and-a-half years as Democratic presidents have appointed in the last 26 years.

So please -- stop being afraid to talk about court expansion. https://t.co/dZU97YhFWg
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) October 13, 2020

You may be wondering how the Dems surrendered in 2020. For a detailed account of what surrender looks like, read @rsgexp's @jacobin memoir of her time as an @AFLCIO organizer sent to Florida during the

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

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Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

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Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

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For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs; Strength in numbers; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/esjoT3u5Gr

#Pluralistic

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On Feb 22, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."

https://t.co/Z84xicXhGg

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Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs: Ink-stained wretches of the world, unite!

https://t.co/k5ASdVUrC2

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Back in November, I published an article for @EFF about @HP's latest printer-ink ripoff: after offering its customers a free-ink-for-life plan, it unilaterally switched them all to a $1/month-for-life plan.https://t.co/bsc73xPSuo

1/ pic.twitter.com/tagduPupA5
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 18, 2021

Strength in numbers: The crisis in accounting.

https://t.co/DjfAfHWpNN

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Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

1/ pic.twitter.com/FaNQc66gQN
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 18, 2021

#15yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://t.co/Rn9E5R1gtV

#10yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for https://t.co/Jz28qHVhrV? https://t.co/dN1e4MxU4r

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🚨🇬🇧🇪🇺💄👠👗💅🏻🕺💃🇪🇺🇬🇧🚨
UK’s £35bn fashion industry warns of “decimation” from #brexit - big names sign open letter to @BorisJohnson urging action. Many of 50,000 SMEs on the rack due to VAT, customs and work permit issues. Stay with me/1

You can read the full text of the letter here, co-ordinated by Fashion Round Table @FashionRoundTab, but tl;dr it says that #Brexit has left a "gaping hole" in an industry that relies of free movement of professionals. It's a familiar cry /2

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THREAD on how economically Muslims maybe poorer (the state is overall also not as rich) in #Bengal but have relatively got socio-political empowerment (part of Threads I am writing for the understanding of Bengal politics in the context of upcoming assembly election):

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The socio-economic status of Muslims in the state is far behind other communities as the Sachar Committee Report (2006) and Pratichi-SNAP’s “Living Reality of Muslims in West Bengal” (2016) attest.

2/20

But it has not witnessed the rule of the BJP yet although the founder of the predecessor of the saffron party, Bharatiya Jan-Sangh, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee was himself a Bengali.

3/20

During both the Congress and the Left Front rule earlier, and now under TMC Muslims did get some leverage although political marginalization even at block level had continued.

4/20

Across India, the last two general elections, and even the recent Bihar assembly elections, have resulted in the further marginalization of Muslims.

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tadzio_mueller
@MuellerTadzio

Until 2050 we'll likely see "a #supercycle in investments in 'clean' energy infrastructure, 'clean' transportation & everything that's required for the '#green' transition."

There's so much bullshit in here, I'll unpack some of it in a

2/x

1st (cf. @MGSchmelzer): there is no reason to assume that a massive productivity- & hence production-boom will lead to reduced emissions, because it will increase production&growth, & it is those two variables that global greenhouse emissions track most closely. #Degrowth.

3/x

Every time capitalism has made massive productivity gains (e.g. w/ the #steamengine; the taylorist #assemblyline; computers), that has led to a *radicalisation* of capitalism as a mass production system (as opposed to earlier versions, where luxury goods were for elites),...

4/x

So there's no reason believe that a new round of capitalist accumulation (#accumulationbydispossession / #primitiveaccumulation) - in this case: some kind of "#greencapitalism - will in any way positively impact emissions rates, but every reason to believe the opposite...

5/x

I would like to look into this, as it speaks to an often-overlooked issue: the relationship between different phases of capitalist development, such as imperialism, fordism, & post-fordism, connected to energy regimes (coal-based, oil-based, renewables-based capitalism)?

The Recount
@therecount

Last month, Texas resident Royce Peirce paid $387.70 to heat his two-story house. This month, he owes $8,162.73 — and counting.

Amid freezing temperatures and another looming winter storm, Texans are facing a second crisis: astronomical power

Why are these energy bills so high? You can thank Texas’s power grid for that.

The U.S. is divided into three grids: one covers the eastern states, another the western states, and then there’s the Texas grid, ERCOT, which covers nearly the entire state.

Now you might be wondering: Why does Texas have its own power grid?

If you’re familiar with the state’s history and public policy, you probably already know the answer. In short, Texas has its own grid to avoid dealing with the federal

What we’re witnessing now is a collapse of the state’s power grid.

Amid freezing temperatures, the imbalance between Texas’s staggering electricity demand and its limited supply caused prices to skyrocket from $20 per megawatt hour to $9,000 per megawatt hour — a 450% increase.

One wholesale power supplier, Griddy, made a surprising decision.

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Ricardo Reis
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** MMT is the new supply-side economics
Forty years ago, some economists started from an uncontroversial (but important) result: a lower tax rate raises the tax base, so revenues won't fall as much. But then they ran with it, predicting tax rate cuts could raise revenues.

1/13

The 80s supply-siders went to the limit and came up with a motto: lower taxes will lower deficits as a norm, not an exception. Many economists shouted this was backwards. It was an implausible limit case. Textbooks called them "charlatans and cranks" or "silly".
2/13

In 80s debates, supply-siders would often fall back to "you don't understand me", repeating "Laffer curve!" endlessly, or stating vacuous accounting identities about how the government collect taxes. Their extreme prediction was repeatedly proven wrong by theory and data.
3/13

But they had popular hero figures (Laffer, Moore), and an eager political audience that would use any argument to cut taxes. Eventually, they inspired new good research, and helped in swinging the pendulum of policy debates to include some valid supply considerations.
4/13

Yet, supply-side economic ideas also contributed to a massive rise in US public debt in the last 40 years. Right-wing governments became as prone to have large public deficits as left-wing governments, in the pursuit of cuts in taxes.
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RISHI PINGALA:THE ANCIENT INDIAN SAGE DISCREDITED FOR HIS MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO MATHEMATICS & PHI

Have you ever heard about,"The Golden Ratio"?
The Golden Ratio or Phi(Greek) is a mathematical ratio of nature. Mother Nature is the most exquisite artist in herself.

&Its this Phi she uses to create all the beauty in World.
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E.g. 3/2=1.5, 5/3=1.666, 8/5=1.6, 34/21=1.61904 and so on. Did you notice something? The ratio is coming almost same every time. This ratio is called 'Phi 'which is numerically represented as 1:1.618. This Golden Spiral is made in exact proportion of 1:1.618.

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