#Billion! 11 of them!

[topnotchquark]

Behind F1's Velvet Curtain

This article by Kate Wagner on her INEOS sponsored trip to the Austin GP at COTA last year was commissioned by Road and Track magazine and then taken down. Presumably because Kate has was pretty staunch in her opinions about what was essentially a paid trip.

It is exactly the kind of thing I have wanted to read about the felt experience of the money business of F1. It doesn't get into technicalities and does not produce any spreadsheets for reference. It's just, her experience of the presence of wealth in the sport.

She starts off by talking about how she has been covering cycling and NASCAR for a while now and both of those, in comparison, are scrappier sports with smaller sponsors and cheaper tickets.

What I also especially loved was how fascinated she was with the cars themselves, and how they seem like a true marvel of human engineering. She almost described the cars like these alien beasts that came into this dimension out of nowhere and were being constantly monitored and dueled with to furnish wins and glory (and shareholder value for sponsors).

I think I always had an understanding of the weird myth making surrounding F1 and the kind of media attention it attracts, but someone like Kate (who I have loved reading for a while now) putting it into perspective really made it click for me. This sport thrives off of the kind of cocoon it has built around it and understands exactly the certain exclusiveness it needs to maintain to keep the story alive.

Anyway, give it a read, especially because Road and Track is trying to bury it to not piss off sponsors.

#I think matt oxley was talking about how motogp has been struggling with money and hence dorna is trying to woo the American market #and the american tech sponsors #but bikes don't require as much data driven performance engineering as f1 cars do #Ducati is probably leading the operation in this regard because they have audi behind them #anyway I knew motogp does not produce the same level of wealth but I still decided to check numbers #Marc's net worth is $25Mn and he is arguably the best driver of his generation with enough sponsors behind him #Max's net worth in comparison is $165Mn easily over 6 times that of Marc #Vale's net worth is $200Mn but he is still somewhat of an outlier because his popularity far outweighs that of motogp itself #Lewis is still around $300Mn and he hasn't even retired yet #Schumacher was around $800Mn #I know net worth is a very stupid number to consider but driver net worth is an easy way to translate impact ig #the current Max to Mercedes rumours caused Merc valuation to rise by $11Bn #Billion! 11 of them! #honestly I frequently get desensitized to money just purely as a number because I am exposed to businesses with large valuations but #I still wanted a moment to reconsider how much money rides on this sport #and how that ties to how rich people function #just made me remember that Ocon is the last driver from a working class background #Fernando and Lewis are the only other with working class beginnings and both of them are over 35 and ridiculously talented #its not a sport for regular people to break into #Vale also started with karts and had to shift to bikes #anyway I love Kate Wagner please read this #and talk to me about money and F1 #Kate wagner #f1 #formula 1 #road and track magazine #lewis hamiton #mercedes amg petronas f1 team #Mercedes #INEOS

[taxi-boi]

#undertale #sans undertale #alphys #transgender #amalgamates #btw the fact that this comic has exactly 11 images gave me fucking hell #because when i tried to put it into tumblr i got the error message ''mobile tumblr allows only a maximum of 10 images'' or w/ever #so i went to my browser app and opened tumblr on desk top mode and couldnt find the make post button for 7 billion years #because the only place you can find it is in the. when you click on a tag and go to the tag page #theres a lil blue button that lets you make a post with that tag in it #so i had to play word association with the tags #jumping through them like wikipedia pages just to find something applicable to this post #which in hindsight i could have just looked up undertale in the tag search #or selected the first tag i saw and removed it from the final post #but i have never claimed to be a wise man #so then i could finally insert the 11 plus images. #but the formatting was shit and i couldnt rearrange it from the browser #because i was trying to click and drag on desktop mode on a mobile device #so my screen just scrolled around aimlessly and nothing was happening #so i saved the post as a draft and then went back into the tumblr app to arrange them correctly #and it might still break because of the eleven image thinh #who knowws #sans #utdr #myart

[thewayhavenchronicle]

uh oh uh oh ava is so pretty (so is ruth)

#ignore the funny little house i built them fjkdls I thought I liked it but I dont #i need to finish the apartment i was making them so they can be with the 11 other sims households I have jfkdls #kiana plays the sims #im gonna take 5 billion screenshots of ava I can feel it #and yes that is as buff as the game will let me make her jfkdls

[ghost-of-you]

I can't explain the way this made me feel so I'm sharing. I'm just -_-

#excuse me MADE ONE UP???? #THE ONLY BAND IN HISTORY TO HAVE THEIR FIRST 3 ALBUMS DEBUT NUMBER ONE BEING MADE UP??? #11 YEARS AS A BAND BEING MADE UP?? #5 FUCKING ALBUM??? #A SONG WITH ONE AND A HALF BILLION STREAM #AND YOU CALL THEM MADE UP??? #WHAT ????? #i'm rambling #AND ALSO BOYBAND???? #excuse me

[sonic-compass]

The Eleventh Doctor having such a young face and being the Doctor to live possibly the longest. The one who abandoned his companion more or less because he chose a bigger (in number of beings) duty of care. The Doctor who often acts the youngest and yet is the most frightening. The Doctor who, at least to me, marked such a difference in the character.

The youngest-looking, most underestimated because of that, the one who sacrificed his memories to save a moon without a moment's hesitation, the one who lost his parents-in-law (who were his best friends), the one who saw his grave, the one who found the impossible girl and did his best to keep her safe just as he kept him safe...

The one who experienced the highest high and the lowest low of his whole life. The one who lost and won and lost again. The one who waited and withered and aged and practiced patience as best he could because one could say he gave up on saving himself.

The Eleventh Doctor.

#doctor who #the eleventh doctor #normally i dont feel a lot about him but i just saw a gifset of s5 where he says not to put him in a trap #just. yeah. #he was the oldest yanno and also the youngest looking for so long #the idk dichotomy of youthful face and oldest soul shit or whatever #i feel like 10 gets to act his actor's age but matt smith dude. wowie. #all of them can say 'dont fuck with me' but 11 is the one i would fear the most if he said it to me. #eek #anywho #i know 12 technically maybe lived longer? i cant remember #he doesnt call himself billions of years old tho just the 2k years old #ugh. idk. lots of thoughts. #i know 12 lived a long time!!! just. i think 11 lived the longest in terms of being at one place for the longest time #anywho......

[graff-aganda]

fantastic news jargyle nation, the first rough draft of the comic is a go

#awful news jargyle nation its 11 pages currently and im not sure if i have the strength. LMAO #anyway dont rb lol #thinking ill work on this casually between comms (which are still open :flushed:) and maybe try to take it as an exercise in- #not over-worrying about lines and spending eight billion years cleaning them up #i DO have to go through and change quite a few poses and perspectives and stuff and properly add the bgs and whatnot etc etc #so this wont be done any time soon but :) will slowly chip away #grafftalk

[wheucto]

fun fact! assuming the hotel cost 200,000 dollars, it would take about 11 years for OJ to have his million dollars run out due to food expenses alone

#wheucto #wheucto speaks #is food expenses even a real phrase? whatever #the number 200k is based on the number ii fandom wiki gives of a little under 190k #the food costs is from balancedeverything.com/average-food-cost-per-month - i chose the lowest (2400) then multiplied it by 30 #since there's like 34 contestants from ii (counting yinyang as two)_ so minus two for the ghost_ two for apple and marshmallow_ one bc - #- yinyang only has one mouth_ and adding one for mephone_ who'd also be there #actually i should've minus'd one for box since i don't think he eats but. whatever #and knowing how hotel oj runs - with the parties and casinos - i wouldn't doubt oj would try something new (and probably stupid) #also there's fixing the hotel_ furniture_ paint supplies_ there probably has to be a doctor #or maybe they just kill them who knows #so. it would take less than that #also a million seconds is 11 days. another fun fact! a billion is 31 years #honestly i find it a little ? uh. not exactly accurate (i guess) when people call him rich when he's not THAT rich #he only won a million dollars. and since the hotel probably cost 200k he's probably not even a millionaire at all #definitely not poor yknow. just. not very rich #and a decade isn't even that long. that would definitely be in the residents' lifetimes. #oj probably would have to find another source of income. somehow. #so many tags... how am i even going to swim today.

[totopopopo]

I am off work a half hour early god mother fuckin bless !!!!!

#had a great day of work actually :) #even though half days suck for the kids bc they’re here for 7 hours straight while all their peers get to go home at 11:30 #so it’s been rough for them and us but today was good bc it was so gorgeous out and we spent a lot of time outside and the kids were having #the best time making leaf piles to jump in and it was so fun to watch #i have some AMAZING pictures that. I can’t post obviously but they’re gorgeous #anyways. yaaaay #this job is so hard but it’s also ten billion times more pleasant than my retail job #somehow five year olds who hit and bite each other and pee themselves are more tolerable than my average customer

[reasonsforhope]

"The Biden Administration last week [early December, 2023] announced it would be seizing patents for drugs and drug manufacturing procedures developed using government money.

A draft of the new law, seen by Reuters, said that the government will consider various factors including whether a medical situation is leading to increased prices of the drug at any given time, or whether only a small section of Americans can afford it.

The new executive order is the first exercise in what is called “march-in-rights” which allows relevant government agencies to redistribute patents if they were generated under government funding. The NIH has long maintained march-in-rights, but previous directors have been unwilling to use them, fearing consequences.

“We’ll make it clear that when drug companies won’t sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House adviser Lael Brainard said on a press call.

But just how much taxpayer money is going toward funding drugs? A research paper from the Insitute for New Economic Thought showed that “NIH funding contributed to research associated with every new drug approved from 2010-2019, totaling $230 billion.”

The authors of the paper continue, writing “NIH funding also produced 22 thousand patents, which provided marketing exclusivity for 27 (8.6%) of the drugs approved [between] 2010-2019.”

How we do drug discovery and production in America has a number of fundamental flaws that have created problems in the health service industry.

It costs billions of dollars and sometimes as many as 5 to 10 years to bring a drug to market in the US, which means that only companies with massive financial muscle can do so with any regularity, and that smaller, more innovative companies can’t compete with these pharma giants.

This also means that if a company can’t recoup that loss, a single failed drug can result in massive disruptions to business. To protect themselves, pharmaceutical companies establish piles of patents on drugs and drug manufacturing procedures. Especially if the drug in question treats a rare or obscure disease, these patents essentially ensure the company has monoselective pricing regimes.

However, if a company can convince the NIH that a particular drug should be considered a public health priority, they can be almost entirely funded by the government, as the research paper showed.

Some market participants, in this case the famous billionaire investor Mark Cuban, have attempted to remedy the issue of drug costs in America by manufacturing generic versions of patented drugs sold for common diseases."

-via Good News Network, December 11, 2023

#united states #us politics #biden administration #executive order #prescription drugs #medical news #healthcare #healthcare access #biden #big pharma #drug prices #public health #nih #national institutes of health #good news #hope

[agaritas]

correction: israel has killed 15 palestinians in rafah in the evening of february 11. they’ve killed many more in rafah since february started. the death toll is around 400, with 76 killed today, monday feb 12. the iof destroyed khan yunis, the place where gazan refugees from the north were fleeing, and now the iof is attacking and murdering civilians in the last southern city.

do not look away from what the israeli colonizers have done to khan yunis and what they will do to rafah as long as world leaders across the globe twiddle their thumb and america continues to sink billions into this genocide.

just two days ago, the iof snipers killed a doctor in the middle of a surgery in a khan yunis hospital. there is a horrifying video of an old man, shot and crawling into the reception of said hospital, and no one is able to drag him away from the windows where snipers keep shooting at them. this is what our tax money is funding. this is what our leaders are encouraging. the entire world should be dying of shame and disgust, most especially the west, giddily supporting and paying for the nth genocide of brown indigenous people, and the greedy, soulless monsters of the uae and saudi arabia.

#palestine #free palestine #all sourced from middle eastern news programs including al jazeera which can be accessed as articles online

[fairuzfan]

USPCR is hosting a phone zap tomorrow!

Join USCPR on Wednesday, Feb. 7 to mobilize our masses and tell our elected officials: STOP ARMING ISRAEL!

This week we will be mobilizing to stop “THE DEADLY DEAL,” a $118 bilion spending package coming to Congress that includes $14 billion in weapons to Israel for arming genocide, $20 billion for militarizing the border and jailing immigrants, and the elimination of all humanitarian funding to the UNRWA aid agency for Palestinian refugees, permanently.

At 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT, we'll flood Congress’s phone lines together to let them know we're watching as the U.S. government continues to back Israel's horrific massacres and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Demand that your elected officials call for a PERMANENT CEASEFIRE NOW and stop arming Israel!

We’ll also discuss recent divestment wins, and how you can pressure your city council or college campus to divest from the genocide machine. Join us this Wednesday, Feb. 7 at 2 PM ET. You can also register for the next three Phone Zaps, as we mobilize together every week this month.

[ID: A poster reading "USCPR Phone Zap: February 7 at 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT. Stop the deadly deal. RSVP USPCR.org/phonezap. US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. End ID]

#palestine #gaza #free palestine #no id #free gaza #palestina

[headspace-hotel]

i am reading this paper about all the bombs and missiles and other weapons the USA govt gives to Israel, because I am trying to understand why we are doing this, and it makes me sick at heart—all this money and advanced technology, all poured into blowing human beings up. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"—how could billions and billions of dollars worth of the tools of violence NOT result in violence?

I don't feel any closer to understanding what is happening in terms of how it connects to concrete reasons in people's heads. The connection between giving a government billions of dollars in weapons and that government solving all of its problems with extreme violence seems very clear though.

USA policies toward the rest of the world keep being like "Yeah, we want to promote peace, but, like, this group of people is SO uniquely threatening and unreceptive to normal propositions of peace that we HAVE to wage endless war against them and commit atrocities." First it was "Japan will never surrender so we HAVE to nuke civilians," then it was Communists, then it was Terrorists, but it's the same thing.

I don't remember the world before 9/11, but I can look at and listen to art and music from before 9/11, and it seems like something terrible happened in USA culture, where once there was a strong "anti-war" sentiment and understanding of what war does to people, but within my lifetime, it's like no one has the audacity to imagine a world where endless war isn't "necessary." In high school my class mates were talking about seeing videos online of ISIS sawing peoples heads off and that was basically all I knew about "what was happening in the Middle East."

Does anybody even think about why peace signs are part of the 60's "aesthetic?"

I don't have any conclusion here. Have we lost the power to imagine anything different?

#usa politics #palestine #israel #usa foreign policy #history #no conclusions just. AAAAAAAAAA

[maniacwatchestheworld]

DPxDC prompt idea thing #11

Danny had always admired and looked up to the Green Lantern Corps. He grew up hearing and reading about the adventures of the original Green Lantern, and was always eager to see John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and all of the other Green Lanterns tasked with protecting their sector on the news, no matter how scary the threat they were tasked to go against.

As a little kid, Danny wanted to grow up to be a Green Lantern, just like his heroes! But as he got older and learned more about the job, he thought that he should set his sights a little lower. There were, what? 8 billion people on Earth, and through some freak coincidence, how many Green Lanterns were chosen here from here? Danny highly doubted that the Guardians of the Universe were looking to recruit any more humans from Earth to the Corps. But that was fine. He may not be able to be in the Green Lantern Corps, but he COULD still strive to be an astronaut and to explore space, traveling through the perils of the final frontier to help the Earth learn more about this universe they lived in and shared! And with the Watchtower in orbit, while Danny highly doubted that he would ever be a hero like the Green Lanterns, he might be able to work alongside them!

So imagine Danny's surprise when, as the result of one small accident, he now had superpowers where his eyes shone green and where he could shoot beams of green light from his hands. Sure, he was no Green Lantern. He probably would never be one given his luck and willpower. But he was damn close!

#dp x dc prompt #dp x dc #dp x dc crossover #dpxdc #dc x dp #dp x dc au #dc x dp crossover #dc x dp prompt #green lantern #green lanter corps #danny phantom #danny fenton

[afeelgoodblog]

Best News of Last Week - December 11

1. Biden administration to forgive $4.8 billion in student loan debt for 80,300 borrowers

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it would forgive an additional $4.8 billion in student loan debt, for 80,300 borrowers.

The relief is a result of the U.S. Department of Education’s fixes to its income-driven repayment plans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

2. Detroit on pace to have lowest homicide rate in 60 years this year

A partnership to reduce Detroit crime is being praised with the City on pace for the fewest homicides in 60 years.

"This is the day we’ve been waiting for, for a long time," said Mayor Mike Duggan. The coalition which includes city and county leaders that Detroit Police Chief James White formed in late 2021 to return the criminal justice system in Detroit and Wayne County to pre-Covid operations.

3. Dog that killed 8 coyotes to protect sheep running for Farm Dog of the Year

Over a year ago, Casper was stacked up against a pack of 11 coyotes, and he overcame them all to protect the livestock at his Decatur home. Now he needs your help.

Casper, the Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog, needs the public to vote for him to become the American Farm Bureau's "Farm Dog of the Year: People's Choice Pup" contest.

4. Shimmering golden mole thought extinct photographed and filmed over 80 years after last sighting

De Winton's golden mole, last sighted in 1937, has been found alive swimming through sand dunes in South Africa after an extensive search for the elusive species.

5. About 40% of the world's power generation is now renewable

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have released their first joint report to strengthen understanding of renewable energy resources and their intricate relationship with climate variability and change.

In 2022 alone, 83% of new capacity was renewable, with solar and wind accounting for most additions. Today, some 40% of power generation globally is renewable, due to rapid deployment in the past decade, according to the report.

6. Jonathan the Tortoise: World’s oldest living land animal celebrates 191st birthday

The world’s oldest living land animal - a Seychelles giant tortoise named Jonathan - has just celebrated his 191st birthday. Jonathan’s estimated 1832 birth year predates the invention of the postal stamp, the telephone, and the photograph.

The iconic creature lived through the US civil war, most of the reign of Queen Victoria, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and two world wars.

7. New enzyme allows CRISPR technologies to accurately target almost all human genes

A team of engineers at Duke University have developed a method to broaden the reach of CRISPR technologies. While the original CRISPR system could only target 12.5% of the human genome, the new method expands access to nearly every gene to potentially target and treat a broader range of diseases through genome engineering.

---

That's it for this week :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation here:

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Also don’t forget to reblog this post with your friends.

#best news of last week

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Too big to care

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…

I tried it. It was magic.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.

That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.

The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:

https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.

One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own

But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."

What a phrase!

Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.

Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.

Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board

Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.

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/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

#pluralistic #john stewart #the daily show #apple #monopoly #lina khan #ftc #too big to fail #too big to jail #monopolism #trustbusting #antitrust #search #enshittification #kagi #google

[nudityandnerdery]

[Image Description: A series of sixteen tweets by John Rogers @jonrog1 that say:

1) A moment at the Teamsters/UPS rally this morning clarified our current struggle with the studio CEO's (among other bosses). Teamsters got a lot of wins, but one of the main sticking points is the pay for the 65% of local UPS workers who are part-time …

2) If you read the SAG-AFTRA demands, a truly STUNNING amount of their points involve protecting background actors, and trying to improve conditions for the 87% of their union who makes less than $26,000 a year.

3) As WGA members know, this is not a strike for the showrunners. We're trying to fix the fact the the current younger generation of writers can't even afford housing and their pathway to advancement has been cut off.

4) Like … folks, I'm fine. There are maybe two proposals in there that affect me. I'm walking in 90% weather and losing over 50% of my income for the year because I want the younger writers to get what I got at this stage of their careers.

5) Our unions and the CEO's and various negotiators have a fundamental cognitive disconnect. Because CEO's types only succeed by FUCKING THEIR PEERS.

6) Zaslav, Iger , those types of execs, etc have never gone without so a fellow exec or a junior exec could thrive. A fellow exec failing is the moment to use your own leverage to advance past them, if not destroy them.

7) Part of it is the money but part of this, I think, is a genuine inability to grasp even the concepts of any labor action. Because it is always other-directed.

8) So many people treat capitalism as part of nature red in tooth and claw, but it's not. It's a human construct. There are different rules you can play by -- but not if you want to win.

9) The greatest gift capitalism ever granted was the ability to validate selfish behavior as a virtue because that's "just what's necessary, I don't make the rules!" (Look ma, it's reification!)

10) This is where I usually point out that Adam Smith wrote that you have to overpay workers to keep your labor force up, and you need to take into account the psychic damage of capitalism to the workers, and that admiring the rich is the greatest source of moral corruption …

11) But I'll stave off that diversion to just land with … this is a discontinuity of attitudes which I think was once breached by the fact that management USED to come from people who loved building their company or their trade, even if they eventually did management shit.

12) Now, even that thin thread of SYMPATHY (Adam Smith joke, get it? People?) is gone. The CEO's are working off a different scorecard, practically and morally. We're not just playing by wildly divergent rules, our lives and careers are DEFINED by those wildly divergent rules.

13) To them, we are IN FACT being "unreasonable", as our behavior does not make sense in their moral framework. They don't think they're being evil, they think they're playing by the actual rules, and we're nuts.

14) There's not great conclusion to this, other than to note that the bit about making writers homeless was described as "cruel but necessary" because they genuinely don't understand the meaning of cruel, because they are always on the other side of the power dynamic.

15) And if they're ever NOT on the top of the power dynamic, they're not suffering, they're dead. They are un-people in their own eyes.

16) These men are not irrational, but they are deranged. This isn't about money, it's about identity. And in a fight about identity … they will set billions on fire.

Because they can always get more money. But they'll never shed the stink of losing to their lessers."

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#strike #sag aftra #wga strike #ups strike #john rogers #sag strike