Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr), page 4

Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband: Your internet sucks because telco monopolists kept Gigi Sohn off the FCC

https://doctorow.medium.com/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband-4ce1ffb16dc5

#DowChemical plastered #Singapore with ads for its sneaker #recycling program, promising to turn old shoes into playground tracks. But the shoes it collected in its "recycling" bins were illegally dumped in #Indonesia. This isn't an aberration: it's how nearly *all* plastic recycling has *always* worked.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/#fool-me-twice-three-times-four-times-a-hundred-times

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/10/my-time/#like-water-down-the-drain

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Doubtless you've heard that "we all get the same 24 hours in the day." Of course it's not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own - not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.

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In the #enshittification cycle, a #platform lures users with a good deal at first, then it lures business customers (advertisers, sellers, performers) by shifting surplus from users to them; finally, it takes all the surplus for itself, turning the whole thing into a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein

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#Moderna is quadrupling the cost of #covid #vaccines, from $26/dose to $110-130. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel calls the price hike "consistent with the value" of the #MRNA vaccines. Moderna's manufacturing costs are $2.85/dose, for a 4,460% markup on every dose:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/moderna-may-match-pfizers-400-price-hike-on-covid-vaccines-report-says/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/nationalize-moderna/#herd-immunity

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Last week, Gizmodo's Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop - a leaked report of #Hasbro's plan to revoke the decades-old #OpenGamingLicense, which subsidiary #WizardsOfTheCoast promulgated as an allegedly #open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve #DungeonsAndDragons:

https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634

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Yesterday, Congress finally passed the must-pass, end-of-year budget bill. As has become routine, this bill was stalled right until the final moment, so that Congressjerks could cram the 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion package with special favors for their donors, at the expense of the rest of the country.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/22/must-pass/#buried-in-the-bill

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This year's budget package included a couple of especially egregious doozies, which were reported out for *The American Prospect* by Lee Harris (who covered a grotesque retirement giveaway for the ultra-rich) and Doraj Facundo (who covered a safety giveaway to Boeing and its lethal fleet of #737Max airplanes).

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Let's start with the retirement scam. The budget bill includes Rep Richie Neal's [DINO-MA] #SECUREAct 2.0, which gives savers with retirement funds until age 75 to cash out their retirement savings - netting an extra three years of tax-free growth for the lucky, tiny minority with substantial retirement savings. This follows on Neal's SECURE Act 1.0 of 2019, when the age was raised from 70.5 to 72.

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The tax-exempt retirement savings account is a Carter-era bargain that replaced real pensions - ones that guaranteed that you wouldn't starve or freeze to death when you retired - with accounts that let people gamble on the stock market, to be the suckers at Wall Street's poker table:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

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The market-based gambler's pension is a catastrophic failure. Half of Americans have *no* retirement savings. Of the half that have any savings, the vast majority have almost nothing saved:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Retirement_Accounts;demographic:all;population:all;units:have

All in all, America has a *$7 trillion* retirement savings shortfall:

https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/IB_19-16.pdf

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But for a tiny minority of the ultra-rich, tax-free savings accounts like #ROTH #IRAs are a means of avoiding even the paltry capital gains tax that you have to pay if you own things for a living, rather than doing things for a living. Propublica's #IRSFiles revealed how ghouls like #PeterThiel avoided tax on billions in "passive income" by abusing tax-free savings accounts that were supposed to benefit the "middle class":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

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Meanwhile, #SocialSecurity is crumbling, thanks to a sustained attack on it by the business lobby and its friends in both parties. Progressive Dems had sought to amend SECURE Act 2.0 by inserting some clauses to shore up Social Security, and *none* of these were included in the final bill.

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The $2k savings cap means that you have to be substantially below the poverty level to receive $585/month in #SSI assistance - this being the only source of income for the majority of SSI recipients. Means-testing is a self-immolating fetish for corporate Dems and in retrospect, this betrayal seems inevitable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

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One of the fixes that died was the #SavingsPenaltyEliminationAct, introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown [D-OH] and Rob Portman [R-OH]. This act would have tweaked the means-testing for #SupplementalSecurityIncome, which supports 8m low-income disabled adults and kids. Right now, you can't collect SSI if you have $2k in the bank, a limit that hasn't been adjusted for inflation since the 1980s (adjusted for inflation, $2k in 1980 is $7226.00 in 2022).

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In the end, Neal rug-pulled them. Of course he did! This is Richie Fucking Neal, the best friend the Trump tax giveaway ever had:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/13/youre-still-the-product/#richie-neal

As with everything Neal touches, this screws poor people in multiple ways. First, it leaves the SSI cap intact. But it also creates a giant unfunded liability in the federal budget. Technically, there's no reason this should lead to cuts.

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(Notice how no one proposes means-testing billionaires when they get PPP loans or hundreds of millions in IRS "refunds" - like Trump, who paid substantially less tax than you did:)

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/trump-income-tax-returns-detailed-in-new-report-.html

And it *was* a betrayal: progressive Dems bargained with Neal and co not to publicly condemn SECURE Act 2.0 if they could get some concessions for the 8 million poorest disabled people in America.

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The US Treasury can't run out of dollars, and giveaways to the rich are only mildly inflationary, since rich people put their money in the bank and mostly spend it on buying politicians, not goods.

But because of the delusion that currency *producers* like the US Treasury have the same constraints as currency *users* like you and me, Congress will need to come up with #PayFors in future budgets to "make up for" the money they're giving to rich people with SECURE Act 2.0.

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Dollars to toenail clippings, they'll do that by hacking away at the tattered remains of the US social safety net.

Fear not, you don't need to be a desperately poor disabled person or child to get fucked over by late additions to a 4,000 page must-pass bill! If you can afford to get on an airplane, Congress has something for you, too!

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