I Hate That This Came From Tictocky, But No Better Advertisement For Physics And Older People’s Experiences.practical

Rights without responsibilities (used and accepted by both parties) is tyranny.

“I have the right”

TO SHUT THE FUCK UP. Nobody wants to hear your nonsensical, marginally sentient, Constitutionally misinterpreted, drivel about how you get to, for all intent and purposes, fuck all of your fellow citizens in the ass with a claw hammer because you have “rights”

Until you want to add “I have responsibilities” to the conversation, I don’t want to here a fucking word emanate from your yap.

Just getting started here again. Hang the hell onto your judgements already

You cannot imagine how much I wish this!!!!!

I started with computers, hacking a Commodore 64, building my own board for new chips,

When there were no mice to click. ! You had to type everything. And write your code to make it work.

When I got a power Mac and access to real processing chips, I thought I was in heaven.

Now there are so many barriers to doing any of that, and they tell me this makes it better for me !

NO, IT DOESN’T. !

When I actually buy something I get to do whatever the fuck I want with it, because I bought it. !

I take complete responsibility for doing risky things. That’s all on me.

Medium

Enshitternet

The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet

I miss the old, good internet, but I don’t want to bring it back.

I want a new, good internet. One where users can’t be locked in because we make it legal to:

• reverse-engineer products and services, so you can leave a social media platform but still send and receive messages from the people you leave behind;

• jailbreak your devices so you can remove antifeatures like surveillance, ink-locking or repair-blocking; • move your media and files out of the silo whence they originated and into any player you want.

I want a new, good internet where we constrain the conduct of tech companies, banning unfair labor practices, deceptive marketing, corporate hostage-taking and other forms of rent-extraction.

I want a new, good internet where it’s both illegal to impose bossware on your employees, and where those employees can legally hack the bossware their bosses shove down their throats.

I want a new, good internet where creative workers and their audiences can reliably connect with one another, where news reporting isn’t held hostage to extractive processes.

I want a new, good internet where we seize the means of computation so that the digital infrastructure that connects our romantic, personal, political, civic, economic, educational and family and social lives is operated by and for the people who use it.

-Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet

Getting back a little late. At least they left the light on. 💡

That is the actual FUNCTION of government. Independent policy for the good of and by the people. Just because you disagree is not a reason to destroy it. Get YOURSELF involved in it. Do not allow insane ideas of self centered “politicals” who don’t even know how the government actually functions or what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in fact has written into the documents.

When the mace

Doesn’t smash your face

That’s amoreè

Stop attacking libraries !

This is absolutely catastrophic.

I go into the woods and trails and DO NOT ! ! ! Want to hear your music. The woods and trails have their own voices. That’s what I want to hear.

I will find you if you are disturbing the trees, critters (fur or feathers) or ME. I will first ask politely for you to stop the noise you are producing. The next steps are to be determined, but that noise should stop.

It’s very difficult, when you begin to look at the basis of why you believe, of what it is that you believe, when you have believed that for a long or very committed period of time.

Where does “ the truth ” of a matter lie ?

In the unshakable belief of just “knowing” it’s “right” or “knowing” it’s based on confirmed irrefutable “science” that may be adjusted by other irrefutable “science” ?

What’s the Philosophy of this madness ?

Academic economists get big payouts when they help monopolists beat antitrust

After 40 years of rampant corporate crime, there's a new sheriff in town: Jonathan Kanter was appointed by Biden to run the DOJ Antitrust Divisoon, and he's overseen 170 "significant antitrust actions" in the past 2.5 years, culminating in a court case where Google was ruled to be an illegal monopolist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Kanter's work is both extraordinary and par for the course. As Kanter said in a recent keynote for the Fordham Law Competition Law Institute’s 51st Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, we're witnessing an epochal, global resurgence of antitrust:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-fordham-competition-law-0

Kanter's incredible enforcement track record isn't just part of a national trend – his colleagues in the FTC, CFPB and other agencies have also been pursuing an antitrust agenda not seen in generations – but also a worldwide trend. Antitrust enforcers in Canada, the UK, the EU, South Korea, Australia, Japan and even China are all taking aim at smashing corporate monopolies. Not only are they racking up impressive victories against these giant corporations, they're stealing the companies' swagger. After all, the point of enforcement isn't just to punish wrongdoing, but also to deter wrongdoing by others.

Until recently, companies hurled themselves into illegal schemes (mergers, predatory pricing, tying, refusals to deal, etc) without fear or hesitation. Now, many of these habitual offenders are breaking the habit, giving up before they've even tried. Take Wiz, a startup that turned down Google's record-shattering $23b buyout offer, understanding that the attempt would draw more antitrust scrutiny than it was worth:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wiz-turns-down-23-billion-022926296.html

As welcome as this antitrust renaissance is, it prompts an important question: why didn't we enforce antitrust law for the 40 years between Reagan and Biden?

That's what Kanter addresses the majority of his remarks to. The short answer is: crooked academic economists took bribes from monopolists and would-be monopolists to falsify their research on the impacts of monopolists, and made millions (literally – one guy made over $100m at this) testifying that monopolies were good and efficient.

After all, governments aren't just there to enforce rules – they have to make the rules first, and do to that, they need to understand how the world works, so they can understand how to fix the places where it's broken. That's where experts come in, filling regulators' dockets and juries' ears with truthful, factual testimony about their research. Experts can still be wrong, of course, but when the system works well, they're only wrong by accident.

The system doesn't work well. Back in the 1950s, the tobacco industry was threatened by the growing scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. Industry scientists confirmed this finding. In response, the industry paid statisticians, doctors and scientists to produce deceptive research reports and testimony about the tobacco/cancer link.

The point of this work wasn't to make necessarily to convince people that tobacco was safe – rather, it was to create the sense that the safety of tobacco was a fundamentally unanswerable question. "Experts disagree," and you're not qualified to figure out who's right and who's wrong, so just stop trying to figure it out and light up.

In other words, Big Tobacco's cancer denial playbook wasn't so much an attack on "the truth" as it was an attack on epistemology – the system by which we figure out what is true and what isn't. The tactic was devastatingly effective. Not only did it allow the tobacco giants to kill millions of people with impunity, it allowed them to reap billions of dollars by doing so.

Since then, epistemology has been under sustained assault. By the 1970s, Big Oil knew that its products would render the Earth unfit for human habitation, and they hired the same companies that had abetted Big Tobacco's mass murder to provide cover for their own slow-motion, planetary scale killing spree.

Time and again, big business has used assaults on epistemology to provide cover for unthinkable crimes. This has given rise to today's epistemological crisis, in which we don't merely disagree about what is true, but (far more importantly) disagree about how the truth can be known:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

Ask a conspiratorialist why they believe in Qanon or Hatians in Springfield eating pets, and you'll get an extremely vibes-based answer – fundamentally, they believe it because it feels true. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason their way into.

This assault on reason itself is at the core of Kanter's critique. He starts off by listing three cases in which academic economists allowed themselves to be corrupted by the monopolies they studied:

George Mason University tricked an international antitrust enforcer into attending a training seminar that they believed to be affiliated with the US government. It was actually sponsored by the very companies that enforcer was scrutnizing, and featured a parade of "experts" who asserted that these companies were great, actually.

An academic from GMU – which receives substantial tech industry funding – signed an amicus brief opposing an enforcement action against their funders. The academic also presented a defense of these funders to the OECD, all while posing as a neutral academic and not disclosing their funding sources.

An ex-GMU economist, Joshua Wright, submitted a study defending Qualcomm against the FTC, without disclosing that he'd been paid to do so. Wright has elevated undisclosed conflicts of interest to an art form:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/google-lawyer-secret-weapon-joshua-wright-c98d5a31

Kanter is at pains to point out that these three examples aren't exceptional. The economics profession – whose core tenet is "incentive matter" – has made it standard practice for individual researchers and their academic institutions to take massive sums from giant corporations. Incredibly, they insist that this has nothing to do with their support of monopolies as "efficient."

Academic centers often serve as money-laundries for monopolist funders; researchers can evade disclosure requirements when they publish in journals or testify in court, saying only that they work for some esteemed university, without noting that the university is utterly dependent on money from the companies they're defending.

Now, Kanter is a lawyer, not an academic, and that means that his job is to advocate for positions, and he's at pains to say that he's got nothing but respect for ideological advocacy. What he's objecting to is partisan advocacy dressed up as impartial expertise.

For Kanter, mixing advocacy with expertise doesn't create expert advocacy – it obliterates expertise, as least when it comes to making good policy. This mixing has created a "crisis of expertise…a pervasive breakdown in the distinction between expertise and advocacy in competition policy."

The point of an independent academia, enshrined in the American Association of University Professors' charter, is to "advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators." We need an independent academy, because "to be of use to the legislator or the administrator, [an academic] must enjoy their complete confidence in the disinterestedness of [his or her] conclusions."

It's hard to overstate just how much money economists can make by defending monopolies. Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner gives the rate at $1,000/hour. Monopoly's top defenders make unimaginable sums, like U Chicago's Dennis Carlton, who's brought in over $100m in consulting fees:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-09-24-economists-as-apologists/

The hidden cost of all of this is epistemological consensus. As Tim Harford writes in his 2021 book The Data Detective, the truth can be known through research and peer-review:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

But when experts deliberately seek to undermine the idea of expertise, they cast laypeople into an epistemological void. We know these questions are important, but we can't trust our corrupted expert institutions. That leaves us with urgent questions – and no answers. That's a terrifying state to be in, and it makes you easy pickings for authoritarian grifters and conspiratorial swindlers.

Seen in this light, Kanter's antitrust work is even more important. In attacking corporate power itself, he is going after the machine that funds this nihilism-inducing corruption machine.

This week, Tor Books published SPILL, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/25/epistemological-chaos/#incentives-matter

Image: Ron Cogswell (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George.Mason.University.Arlington.Campus.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

So you want to know why I’m disgusted with the U.S…..

I’m over 60 years old. I’ve formally had five jobs in my 42 + year professional year professional life. One by popular election, two by my own selection. Those three required that I take an oath to uphold the Constitution of this country. I took it personally and seriously. That conduct repulses me on so many different levels that I am without further words …..

AP News

Trump chief of staff Meadows says actions laid out in Georgia indictment were part of his job

Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff, has testified that actions detailed in a sweeping indictment accusing him of participating

I’m no legal expert, but if attempting to overturn a federal election conducted and certified as valid under the Constitutions of the United States and the state of Georgia, and in accordance with state and federal law, is now “part of the job” then people, all people, really ought to get to the range and practice. Because if the President’s Chief of Staff can pull that card to subvert an election, then our Republic truly is under mortal threat.