Tag: capitalism

Clinging on to sanity

“The implications of all this are profound.

First, our understanding of political risk has to change. We are no longer dealing with actors who are constrained by norms, expectations, or even basic human decency.

Second, the institutional safeguards that we assumed would provide protection look increasingly fragile. If those in power are willing to ignore them, their effectiveness is limited. They have, quite literally, thrown the international rules-based order aside. So far, there is nothing to replace it.

Third, the psychological impact is real. Living with the possibility of extreme events, including those we once thought impossible, alters how people think, act, and relate to one another.

And fourth, inequality and exploitation are likely to deepen. When crises are used as opportunities for enrichment, the costs are borne by the many, while the gains accrue to the few.”

Relieved that genocide had not happened in Iran, @richardjmurphy@mas.to regards opposition to the promotion of fear and hate as the only means by which we can hold on to our sanity and prevent political failure.

www.taxresearch.org.uk

The Iran economic shock is coming. How to protect yourself

The Iran economic shock is coming. How to protect yourself

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“Here’s me in the UK, which is probably the least prepared country in the world for an energy price crisis, right? Massively dependent on imported energy, hasn’t built up its own energy storage, doesn’t have an enormous amount of reserves of energy like other countries like Japan or Korea have, which it probably should have done, and yet when there is an energy price crisis, what happens to me? I make hundreds of thousands of pounds because I own the energy. If you are watching from America and you are paying more for energy, despite the fact that there is a fuck-ton of oil in your country, that’s because you don’t own your oil, I do. And the point I’m trying to make here is when I come out here every fucking week and tell you guys ‘You need to care about wealth distribution’, it’s not because I am some fucking communist tree-hugging hippie. It is because if you do not own your resources, then when the price of the resources go up, you are fucked.”

Gary Stevenson

Delta’s AI-based price-gouging

“It’s a scam. AI agents aren’t going to replace human labor. The only way we’ll replace human labor with software agents is by redesigning all these heterogeneous, competing systems owned by people who benefit from the status quo and have every motivation to obstruct this project. Good luck with that.”

Cory Doctorow reviews the ways in which companies such as Delta Air Lines, British Airways, Uber, McDonald’s and many others around the world are using nonconsensually harvested personal data and AI to further increase your costs.

pluralistic.net

When we get komooted

“Digital enclosure is the continuation of the physical enclosure of land. This sophisticated form of digital extraction is so common that it’s almost unremarkable. But there’s a wrenching contradiction here between Komoot’s stated mission of ‘enabling access’ to public land while privatizing and exclusively profiting from those very movements. They take our most meaningful encounters with nature and ourselves and sell them back to us for a quick buck.”

Using Komoot as an example, Joshua Meissner illustrates why today’s digital communities require better tools based on federation and interoperability.

bikepacking.com

Boomerang


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“The Boomerang is hitting Britain hard, especially right now. Empire wasn’t just something that happened to the Colonies, it’s something that happened to Britain. It created some of Britain’s most well-loved institutions, from the NHS to its greatest talents. But it also created the unequal Britain we see today.”

Kojo Koram

How legacies of empire are breaking Britain’s economy: Q&A with Owen Jones, Kojo Koram and Dalia Gebrial

The secrets of surveillance capitalism

“The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life—your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” According to Shoshana Zuboff, we need to revoke the collective agreement with practices that result in dispossession of behavior.

www.faz.net

Nimm, was du kriegen kannst!

“Der Westen, der so stolz auf seine Werte ist, verschließt seine Grenzen für verängstige Menschen auf der Suche nach einem besseren Leben. Aber er öffnet sie für schmutziges Geld auf der Suche nach einer besseren Anlage.” Jakob Augstein identifiziert nicht die Flüchtlinge als unser Problem—sondern die Steuerflüchtlinge.

www.spiegel.de

Forget Panama: it’s easier to hide your money in the US than almost anywhere.

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