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Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes
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Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.
Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:
https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html
That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin
The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html
And sued:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html
Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition
Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.
Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.
As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to
Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.
Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur
The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust
While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:
https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d
The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:
https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826
A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.
All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.
This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080
Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @[email protected] explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination
The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I
Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.
What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”
https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/
Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.
Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”
That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”
Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make
Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.
In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”
Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.
In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.
Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.
Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”
Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”
That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.
As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.
This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.
The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.
But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.
The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”
Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.
These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:
https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california
But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.
Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.
Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”
Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”
In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:
https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing
Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes
I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.
In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.
Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.
Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.
Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”
https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/
There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.
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[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]
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orionhong · 9 months
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— the love was there. (it didn't change everything, but it changed me)
x. // erin slaughter // state of grace - taylor swift // x. // architecture - maisie peters // white ferrari - frank ocean // begin again - emma lord // x. // lunar years - maisie peters // king lear // hope ur ok - olivia rodrigo // cheryl strayed // 19 - xana // begin again - emma lord // the only exception - paramore // anne sexton // there it goes - maisie peters // road to hell (reprise) - hadestown // the things they carried - tim o'brien // in case you don't live forever - ben platt // molly templeton // for good - wicked // jeanette winterson
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rotnik-tmblr · 2 months
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Remember saying "normal people scare me" in middle/high school to show off how goth or emo or edgy you were and nowadays normal people are genuinely scary because they will get you arrested or killed if they don't like you
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massivets · 2 months
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PARARİX - PRO+
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Para Kazanma ve Yatırım Dünyasının Anahtarını Keşfedin!
Pararix.com, finansal başarıya ulaşma ve para yönetimi konularında kullanıcılarına rehberlik eden kapsamlı bir online platformdur. İş ilanlarından yatırım stratejilerine, para biriktirme yöntemlerinden güncel altın yorumları seçeneklerine kadar birçok konuda bilgi sahibi olabileceğiniz güvenilir bir kaynaktır.
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Pararix.com, güncel altın yorumları ve Koç Holding hisse analizleri ile yatırımcılara değerli bilgiler sunar. Finansal piyasalardaki gelişmeleri takip ederek, bilinçli yatırım kararları almanıza yardımcı olur.
Pararix.com, finansal konularda güvenilir ve bilgi dolu bir kaynak olarak kullanıcılarına rehberlik eder. İş dünyasında güncel kalmanın, kariyerinizi ilerletmenin ve finansal başarıya ulaşmanın anahtarını Pararix.com ile keşfedin. Pararix.com adresini ziyaret ederek daha fazla bilgiye ulaşabilirsiniz.
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paraluvs · 1 month
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Can we normalize collecting identities like badges? Like ofc I wanna have a shit ton of labels to the point where not even I can remember all of them, why? Just bc, they are fun and they are little badges to my identity and I think that's cool
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xxonceuponafuckxx · 2 months
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@mythandmajesty:
They'd been out hunting when they were attacked. Which, if Arthur thought about it, did seem to attract trouble a disproportionate amount of time. Though right now he was too busy to think about that. He was taking on the attackers two at a time when he saw Merlin fall out of the corner of his eye. "Merlin!" His manservant's name ripped free before he could stop it. But he had no time to check on him. He redoubled his efforts, soon taking out the rest of the attackers before dropping down to his knees next to Merlin, trying to check for injuries.
Merlin heard Arthur, but it was fuzzy and hard to focus on. He whined as he felt Arthur's hands on him, barely managing to make it into consciousness. "Arthur?" He felt weak, like he was barely able to tether to whatever was happening. But, he was trying. "Leave me... Run." Merlin's vision was blurry, but it went completely black as Merlin fully passed out. His body slumped, no longer tensing as he tried to focus on staying awake. His head hurt and it didn't feel like he could stay awake any longer, even with him trying to force it.
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scorchedhearth · 1 year
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He loves like an angry dog.
The Book of Promethea - Hélène Cixous / Red Hood and the Outlaws (2016) #28 / Who - Sylvia Plat / Red Hood: Lost Days / Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein - Margaret Atwood / Batman Annual #25, Daedalus and Icarus / Água Viva - Clarice Spector / Batman (1940) #650, All they do is watch us kill / textpost by @/prettyhatemachinegf / Tomaž Šalamun / Witch - Rebecca Tamás / Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente / A Brief Biography of My Name - Yalie Kamara / The Angriest Dog In The World - David Lynch
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artwithteggy · 3 months
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Today was gluing day and I wish I could say it was a nice clean fit but not everything goes to plan. He had a bulge appeared where I glued the belly so the glue has a reaction with the PLA which shouldn't of happened but I changed the glue and sanded some spots and now he's all together. Tomorrow I will need to patch some gapes then he's ready for painting! Do you have any paint schemes or suggestions for this guy? Let me know.
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ilmiyyat1453 · 5 months
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Hayber kalelerine sığınan Yahudiler yiyecek ve içecek stokları ile Peygamber Efendimizin gitmesini bekliyordu.
Hayber kaleleri sağlam, yüksek bir yerdeydi. Ok atsan sana geri dönüyordu. Taş atsan yetişmiyordu. Bağırsan sesin yetişmezdi. Hayber yıkılmıyordu. Hayber fethedilmiyordu.
Günlerce bekledi İslâm ordusu. Ama Yahudiler kalelerden çıkmıyordu. Müslümanların stoğu tükenmek üzere, moralleri bitmek üzereydi. Günlerce beklediler. Ama nafile!
Bu uzun bekleyişten sonra Peygamber Efendimiz bir strateji geliştirdi. Hurma ağaçları kesilecekti. Hayber Yahudilerinin ekonomisi birer birer kesilecekti. Servetleri devrilecekti. Gelecekleri köklerinden kazınacaktı. Zira Yahudi için para, servet, zenginlik herşeydi.
Ağaçlar kesildikçe Yahudiler kahroluyordu. Ağaçlar kesildikten sonra burada kalmanın da bir anlamı kalmayacaktı.
Anlaşma yoluna gittiler ve taşıyabilecekleri kadar yükle Yahudilerin başkenti Hayberi terk edeceklerdi.
Sen de Hayber savaşına katılmak istiyorsan bir ağaç da sen kes! Sen de bugün sövsen sesin yahudiye ulaşmaz! Taş atsan İsraile ulaşmaz! Ok atsan Tel Aviv'e yetişmez.
Ama sen de Peygamber Efendimizin stratejisini yapabilirsin! Al eline baltayı kes Yahudilerin ağaçlarını! Nasıl mı?
Evine giren her Yahudi malı bir ağaçtır. Kullandığın her Yahudi malı deterjan bir ağaçtır. İçtiğin her kola bir ağaçtır. İçtiğin her Yahudi malı suları bir ağaçtır.
Kolalar, pepsiler, fantalar, damlalar, hacı şakirler, ariel matikler, Algidalar, Max, Danoneler birer ağaçtır.
Hayber savaşına katılmak istiyor musun? Öyleyse al eline boykot baltasını kes Yahudilerin ağaçlarını!
Kim zerre kadar bir iyilik yaparsa mutlaka karşılığını bulur, diyor Rabbimiz!
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gokbukecollective · 1 month
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Mad liberation without paraphiles is not mad liberation
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locketdream · 16 days
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Maladaptive Daydreaming things
making AMVs of with your paracosms
losing sleep to daydreaming
lying in bed daydreaming
acting out daydreaming
having multiple paracosms you switch from
daydreaming in everyday life, getting lost in daydreaming when you're supposed to be doing things
daydreaming mid conversation
listening to music to get you in a daydreaming mood
starting to daydream after getting triggered
not being able to talk about your paracosms cause theres so much of it and its very complex
daydreaming irl scenarios to see all the options that could happen
maladaptive daydreaming instead of other coping mechanisms like cutting
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Tech workers and gig workers need each other
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Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.
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We're living in the enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
How did we arrive at this juncture? Is it the end of the zero rate interest policy? Was it that the companies that formerly made useful things that we valued underwent a change in leadership that drove them to make things worse? Is Mercury in retrograde?
None of the above. There have been many junctures in which investors demanded higher returns from firms but were not able to force them to dramatically worsen their products. Moreover, the leaders now presiding over the rapid unscheduled disassembly of once-useful products are the same people who oversaw their golden age. As to Mercury? Well, I'm a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don't believe in astrology.
The Great Enshittening isn't precipitated by a change in how greedy and callous corporate leaders are. Rather, the change is in what those greedy, callous corporate leaders can get away with.
Capitalists hate capitalism. For a corporate executive, the fact that you have to make good things, please your customers, pay your workers, and beat the competition are all bugs, not features. The best business is one in which people simply pay you money without your having to do anything or worry that someday they'll stop. UBI for the investor class, in other words.
Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta." Don't sell things, provide a platform where people sell things. Don't provide a platform, invest in the platform. Don't invest in the platform, buy options on the platform. Don't buy options, buy derivatives of options.
A more precise analysis comes from economist Yanis Varoufakis, who calls this technofeudalism. Varoufakis draws our attention to the distinction between profits and rents. Profit is the income a capitalist receives from mobilizing workers to do something productive and then skimming off the surplus created by their labor.
By contrast, rent is income a feudalist derives from simply owning something that a capitalist or a worker needs in order to be productive. The entrepreneur who opens a coffee shop earns profits by creaming off the surplus value created by the baristas. The rentier who owns the building the coffee shop rents gets money simply for owning the building.
The coffee shop owner can never rest. At any moment, another coffee shop can open down the street and lure away their customers and their baristas. When that happens, the coffee shop goes bust and the owner is ruined. But not the landlord! After the coffee shop goes bust, the landlord's asset is more valuable – an empty storefront just down the street from the hottest coffee shop in town.
Capitalists hate capitalism. Faced with a choice of retaining their workers by paying them a fair wage and treating them well, or by saddling them with noncompetes that make it impossible to work for anyone else in the same field, and obligations to repay tens of thousands of dollars for "training" if they quit, bosses will take the latter every time. Go meta, baby.
Same for competition. Faced with the choice of competing to win the most customers with the best products, or merging so that customers have nowhere else to go, even the bitterest of rivals find it remarkably easy to intermarry until our corporations landscape is so interbred the dominant firms all have Habsburg jaws. Think: Facebook-Instagram. Disney-Fox. Microsoft-Activision:
https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/
Enshittification has complex underlying dynamics and a reliable procession of stages, but the effect is quite straightforward: things are enshittified when they become worse for the people who use them and the suppliers who makes them, but nevertheless, the users keep using and the suppliers keep supplying.
There are four forces that stand in the way of enshittification, and as each of these forces grows weaker, enshittification proliferates.
The first and most important of these constraints is competition. Capitalists claim to love competition because it keeps firms sharp: they must constantly find ways to improve products and cut costs or be swept away by a superior alternative. There's a degree of truth here, but that's not the whole story.
For one thing, competition can "improve" things that we would rather see abolished. Critics of the GDPR, the EU's landmark privacy law, often point to the devastation that enforcing privacy law had on the European ad-tech industry, driving small firms out of business. But these firms were the most egregious privacy offenders, because they had the least to lose, lacking the dominant position of US-based Big Tech surveillance companies.
Having the least to lose, they were the most reckless with their privacy invasions – but they were also the least equipped to pay expensive enablers from giant corporate law firms to hold off European enforcers, and so they were obliterated. The resulting lack of competition is fine, as far as privacy goes: we don't want competition in the field of "who is most efficient at violating our human rights":
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/fighting-floc-and-fighting-monopoly-are-fully-compatible
But there's another benefit to competition: disorganization. A sector with hundreds of medium-sized, competing companies is a squabbling mob, incapable of agreeing on the site for an annual meeting. An industry dominated by a handful of firms is a cartel, handily capable of presenting a unified front to policy makers, and their commercial coziness provides them with vast war-chests they can use to suborn governments and capture their regulators:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
Competition is the first constraint. When there's competition, corporate managers fear that you will respond to enshittification by defecting to a rival, costing them money. They don't care about your satisfaction, but they do care about your money, and competition hitches their ability to satisfy you to their ability to get paid by you.
Competition has been circling the drain for 40 years, as the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust, hatched by Reagan's court sorcerers at the University of Chicago School of Economics, took hold. This theory insists that monopolies are evidence of "efficiency" – if everyone shops at one store, that's evidence that it's the best store, not evidence that they're cheating.
For 40 years, we've allowed companies to violate antitrust law by merging with major competitors, acquiring fledgling rivals, and using investor cash to sell below cost so that no one else can enter the market. This has produced the inbred industrial hulks of today, with five or fewer firms dominating everything from eyeglasses to banking, sea freight to professional wrestling:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
The endless and continuous weakening of competition has emboldened corporate enshittifiers, who operate on the logic of Lily Tomlin in her role as an AT&T spokeswoman: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":
https://vimeo.com/355556831
But the drawdown of competition has also enabled regulatory capture, by converting cutthroat adversaries to kissing cousins. These companies have convinced their regulators not to enforce privacy, consumer protection or labor laws, provided that the gross violations of these laws are accomplished via apps.
This is where tech exceptionalism is warranted: while the bosses that run these companies aren't any nobler – or more wicked – than the Robber Barons of yore, they are equipped with a digital back-end for their businesses that let them change the rules of the game from moment to moment.
Think of labor law: as Veena Dubal writes, gig-work companies practice algorithmic wage discrimination, turning your paycheck into a slot machine that pays out more when you are more selective about which jobs you take, and which then docks your pay by tiny increments as you become less discriminating about answering the app's call:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
This is a plain violation of labor law, but the fiction that gig workers are contractors, combined with the opacity and speed of the wage discrimination back-end, lets the companies get away with it.
But the monsters who hatched this scam are no worse than their forebears, nor are they any smarter. Any black-hearted coal-boss memorialized in a Tennessee Ernie Ford song would have gladly practiced algorithmic wage discrimination – but there just weren't enough green-eyeshade accountants in the back office to change the payout from second to second.
I call this "twiddling" – turning the knobs on the back end to continuously adjust the business logic that the firm operates on:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Twiddling is everywhere, and it is only possible because "it's not a crime if we use an app" has been accepted by (captured) regulators. Think of Amazon's "pricing paradox," where deceptive search results – which Amazon makes $38b/year on – allow the company to offer lower prices, but charge higher ones:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens
The first constraint on enshittification is competition – the fear that you'll lose money when a disgusted customer take their business elsewhere. The second constraint is regulation – the fear that a regulator's punishment will eat up all the expected gains from an enshittificatory move, or even exceed those gains, leading to a net loss.
But the less competition there is in a sector, the easier it is for the remaining companies to capture their regulators. Say goodbye to that second constraint.
But there's another constraint – another one that's unique to technology, and genuinely exceptional. That's self-help. Digital technology is infinitely flexible, which is why managers can twiddle the business logic and change the rules on a dime.
But it's a double-edged sword. Users can twiddle back. The universal nature of digital products means it's always technically possible to disenshittify the enshittified products in your world. Mercedes wants to charge you rent on your accelerator pedal via a monthly subscription? Just mod the car by toggling the "subscription paid" bit and get the accelerator for free:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
HP tricks you into installing a "security update" that sneakily disables your printer's ability to recognize and use third-party ink? Just roll back the operating system and you won't be forced to spend $10,000/gallon to print out your boarding passes and shopping lists:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Self-help – AKA "adversarial interoperability" – isn't just a way to override the greedy choices of corporate sadists. It's a way to hold those sadists in check. It's a constraint.
Imagine a boardroom where someone says, "I calculate that if we make our ads 25% more invasive and obnoxious, we can eke out 2% more in ad-revenue." If you think of a business as a transhuman colony organism that exists to maximize shareholder value, this is a no-brainer.
But now consider the rejoinder: "If we make our ads 25% more obnoxious, then 50% of our users will be motivated to type, 'how do I block ads?' into a search engine. When that happens, we don't merely lose out on the expected 2% of additional revenue – our income from those users falls to zero, forever."
Self-help is the third constraint on enshittification. But when competition fails, and regulatory capture ensues, companies don't just gain the ability to flout the law – they get to wield the law, too.
Tech firms have cultivated a thicket of laws, rules and regulations that make self-help measures very illegal. This thicket is better known as "IP," a term that is best understood as meaning "any policy that lets me control the conduct of my competitors, my customers and my critics":
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
To put an ad-blocker in an app, you have to reverse-engineer it. To do that, you'll have to decrypt and decompile it. That step is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Beyond that, ad-blocking an app would give rise to liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (a law inspired by the movie Wargames!), under "tortious interference" claims, under trademark, copyright and patent.
More than 50% of web users have installed an ad-blocker:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don't exist, because you'd go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.
This is why self-help, the third constraint, no longer applies. When a corporate sadist says, "let's make ads 25% more obnoxious to get 2% more revenue," no one says, "if we do that, our users will all install blockers." Instead, the response is, "let's make ads 100% more obnoxious and get an 8% revenue boost!"
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763227/uber-video-advertising-ads-taxi-food-delivery-apps
Which brings me to the final constraint: workers.
Tech workers have historically enjoyed enormous bargaining power, thanks to a dire shortage of qualified personnel. While this allowed tech workers to command high salaries and cushy benefits, it also led many workers to conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs-in-waiting and not workers at all.
This made tech workers very exploitable: their bosses could sell them on the idea that they were doing something heroic, which warranted "extremely hardcore" expectations – working 16 hour days, sleeping under your desk, sacrificing your health, your family and your personal life to meet deadlines and ship products ("Real artists ship" – S. Jobs).
But the flip side of this appeal to heroism is that it only worked to the extent that it convinced workers to genuinely care about the things they made. When you miss you mother's funeral and pass on having kids in order to meet deadline and ship a product, the prospect of making that product worse is unthinkable.
Confronted by the moral injury of enshittifying a product you care about, and harming the users you see yourself as representing, many tech workers balked at the prospect. Because tech workers were scarce – and because there were plenty of employment prospects for workers who quit – they could actually prevent their bosses from making their products worse:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
But those days are behind us, too. Mass tech worker layoffs have gutted tech workers' confidence. When Google lays off 12,000 tech workers just months after a stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, they deliver two benefits to their shareholders. It's not just the short-term gains from the financial engineering – there's the long-term gain of gutting worker power and stripping away the final impediment to enshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
No matter how strong an individual tech worker's bargaining power was, it was always brittle. Long before googlers were being laid off in five-digit cohorts, they were working in an environment where harassment and predation were just part of the job. The 20,000+ googlers who walked off the job in 2018 were an important step towards replacing the system where each tech worker's power was limited to their moment-to-moment importance to their bosses' plans with a new system based on a collective identity.
Only through collective action and solidarity – unions – could tech workers hope to truly resist all the moral injuries of their bosses enshittification imperatives. No surprise then, that tech unions are on the rise:
https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union
But what is a little surprising – and very heartening! – is what happens when techies start to self-identify as workers: they come to understand that they share common cause with the other workers at the bottom of the tech stack. Think of Amazon's tech workers walking out in solidarity with Amazon's warehouse workers:
https://gizmodo.com/tech-workers-speak-out-in-support-of-amazon-warehouse-s-1842839301
Superficially, the bottom rank of the tech industry is as different from the tech workers at the top as you can imagine. Tech workers are formally employed, with stock options, health care and theme-park "campuses" with gyms and gourmet cafeterias.
The gig workers who pack, drive, deliver and support tech products aren't even employees – they're misclassified as contractors. They don't get free massages – they get AI bosses that monitor their eyeballs and dock their paychecks for peeing:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no
Gig workers desperately need unions, but they also derive extraordinary benefits from self-help measures. When an app is your boss, another app can make all the difference to your working conditions. Take Para, an app that fights algorithmic wage discrimination by allowing gig workers to collectively and automatically refuse any job where the pay is below a certain threshold, forcing the algorithm to pay everyone more:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition
Para is fighting a grim legal and technical battle against companies like Doordash, whose margins depend on atomized workers with atomized apps, prohibited from countertwiddling. This is a surprisingly effective tactic: in Indonesia, gig workers co-ops create suites of "tuyul" apps that modify the behavior of their bosses' apps', unilaterally securing concessions that they lack the bargaining power to secure by other means:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
Tuyul apps and other forms of countertwiddling aren't a substitute for unionization, they're an adjunct to it. The union negotiator whose rank-and-file are able to modify the apps that monitor and control their working conditions operates from a position of strength. "Please give my members more bathroom breaks" is a lot weaker than, "If you want my members to stop hacking their apps so they can piss when they need to, you're going to have to give them official bathroom breaks."
This is where solidarity between the high-paid tech workers at the keyboard and low-paid tech workers on the delivery bikes comes in. Together, they can wring more concessions from their bosses, sure. But unionized coders can give their unionized delivery riders the apps they need to countertwiddle and increase the bargaining leverage of all the workers in the union. And when unionized coders' bosses force them to put enshittifying anti-features in the apps they care about, unionized front-line workers can run counter-apps that disenshittify them.
Other sectors are already working through versions of this. The ouster of the old corrupt leadership of the Teamsters ushered in a new, radical era that produced historic wage and working condition gains for drivers and the abolition of the two-tier contract system that eventually destroys any union that tries it.
That change in leadership was possible because the Teamsters organized the Harvard Grad Students, and those Harvard kids memorized the union rulebook. At the historic conference where the old guard was abolished, it was teamwork between the union rank-and-file and the rules-lawyers from Harvard that turned the proceedings around:
https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/
We are deep into the enshittocene and it is terribly demoralizing. But by understanding the constraints that kept enshittification at bay, we can rebuild them, and shore them up. Labor organizing among all kinds of tech workers isn't just a way to get a better deal for those workers – it's key to the disenshittification of all our lives.
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I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
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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/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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rotnik-tmblr · 4 months
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However you feel about someone's kinks or fetishes has the same moral weight as how you feel about their favorite flavor of ice cream.
Getting angry or violent about someone's personal enjoyments is morally equal to having a tantrum because you saw someone eating a food you don't like.
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hobiessmashedguitar · 17 days
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if you use the term harmful para please educate yourself or think before you speak. calling paras harmful is just leading to the stigmatization of them. if you're using the term for your stance on contact where you are anti/complex contact on some paras instead use the phrase ''if they would cause harm if acted on'' or a similar version. calling paras harmful is making safe spaces feel unsafe
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uni-unrestrained · 3 months
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Radqueer is punk
TransID is punk
Para is punk
MUDs are punk
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xxonceuponafuckxx · 3 months
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@morethanweseem:
Merlin scowled at Arthur's pompous declaration and maybe he lost his head a bit. Maybe a stray wind tilted the prince's dice off course. Subtly of course. He smiled to himself at Arthur's groan and took the dice into his own hands before pushing his pile of meager earnings into the center of the table. Ducking his head, he shook the dice around in his fingers before flicking them, another small -- almost nothing, he assured himself -- a bit of magic gave him the upper hand and the twin sixes smiled up at the room. "You're quite right, Arthur. Nothing at all wrong with a servant losing to his master." He teased Arthur with his own words and the knights jeered, drunk and happy. "Why don't you take some of my winnings and go buy our friends another round, boy?" He tossed some of the coins towards Arthur, beaming.
Arthur glared at Merlin as he twisted his words against him, but begrudgingly nodded as he collected the coins. If looks could kill, he was sure that look would have been just as deadly as Arthur's hands. But, he was the one to call Merlin's bluff. He normally won, so Arthur was rather cocky that he'd continue to win. Arthur hadn't expected to feel so thrown off, but he couldn't really help it. It was fine, he'd let Merlin enjoy his win.
He went over to the bar, ordering another round of beer and bringing it back to the table. "Having fun over here, MERlin?" Arthur was being a bit of a prat, but he was irritated with Merlin calling him 'boy'.
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