Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)

@whknott @GhostOnTheHalfShell @pluralistic are Americans going all Road Warrior over titanium dioxide?

“ Canadians are very reliant on American imports of finished goods. That's another legacy of NAFTA: it crashed Canada's manufacturing sector. Canadian manufacturing companies treated the US as a "nearshore" source of non-union labor and weak environmental and safety rules, and shipped Canadian union jobs to American scabs. Canada's economy is supposedly now all about "services" but what we really export is stuff we tear out of the Earth”

:o @pluralistic
🧵
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/

@pluralistic

An economy all about services… that’s what happened to US manufacturing.

America is Canada’s China… 😶 💀

*Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:

http://martinhench.com

eof/

You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!

Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/17/holy-batfu-its-an-apple/

--

If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "📭". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!

--

You can also get a fulltext RSS feed, licensed CC BY 4.0:

https://pluralistic.net/feed/

17/

Recent appearances:

* Right to Repair with Karen Sandler (Software Freedom Conservancy):
https://videos.trom.tf/w/q1AAL629GYMFtN6nCy15WE

* Just Say It's Capitalism (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1014?autostart=false

* Lost Dollar Business Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuLGgMQfFCk

16/

Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Teardown 2025 (PDX), Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

* DeepSouthCon63 (New Orleans), Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

15/

Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Picks and Shovels with John Hodgman (NYC), Feb 26
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-john-hodgman-picks-and-shovels-tickets-1131132841779

* Picks and Shovels at the Doylestown Bookshop (Doylestown, PA), Mar 1
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419

* Picks and Shovels at Dark Delicacies (Burbank), Mar 13
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

* Cloudfest (Europa Park), Mar 17-20
https://cloudfest.link/

* Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast (Remote), Mar 24
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189

14/

Upcoming appearances:

* Picks and Shovels with Ken Liu (Boston), Feb 14
https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

* Picks and Shovels with Charlie Jane Anders (Menlo Park), Feb 17
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow

* Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton (Los Angeles), Feb 18
https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing

* Picks and Shovels with Dan Savage (Seattle), Feb 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989

13/

My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."

https://craphound.com/shop/

12/

My last nationally bestselling novel was "The Bezzle," an ice-cold revenge story of high-tech finance crime starring the forensic accountant Martin Hench.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Signed copies from Chevalier's Books:

https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/product-page/the-bezzle

--

My latest nonfiction book is "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" from Verso Books:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Signed copies available from Book Soup:

https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245

Both are national bestsellers!

11/

Wednesday's threads: Canada shouldn't retaliate with US tariffs; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 6 - CONCLUSION); and more!

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/113833781291041081

10/

#5yrsago Inventive students detach IoT car-immobilizers, use their SIMs to power free wifi hotspots https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/comments/e541r4/new_type_of_parking_enforcement_on_my_campus/

#1yrago The super-rich got that way through monopolies https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

#1yrago Demon-haunted computers are back, baby https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

9/

#5yrsago Manhattan: a city of empty luxury condos and overflowing homeless shelters https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-housing-has-gone-insane/605005/

#5yrsago Imagining a “smart city” that treats you as a sensor, not a thing to be sensed https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/17/the-case-for-cities-where-youre-the-sensor-not-the-thing-being-sensed

#5yrsago Ars Technica’s dunk on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix series is the best dunk of all https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/goops-netflix-series-its-so-much-worse-than-i-expected-and-i-cant-unsee-it/

#5yrsago Fast-tracked South Dakota bill will felonize doctors who offer gender-confirmation therapy to trans kids https://web.archive.org/web/20200501000000*/https://thegailygrind.com/2020/01/16/republicans-introduce-bill-to-make-it-illegal-for-doctors-to-treat-transgender-children-in-north-dakota/

8/

#15yrsago Britain’s Business Secretary wants to turn the nation’s back on basic science https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/17/lasers-government-funding-peter-mandelson

#10yrsago Eric Holder: no more civil forfeiture without warrant/charges https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/holder-ends-seized-asset-sharing-process-that-split-billions-with-local-state-police/2015/01/16/0e7ca058-99d4-11e4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html

#10yrsago Ecstatic NSA spooks delight in spying on spies who are spying on spies https://web.archive.org/web/20150117184537/https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/new-snowden-docs-indicate-scope-of-nsa-preparations-for-cyber-battle-a-1013409.html

#5yrsago Brazilian authoritarian Bolsonaro fires his culture minister for giving a speech plagiarized from Joseph Goebbels https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bolsonaro-under-fire-dismisses-his-culture-minister-for-giving-a-nazi-speech-but-it-is-still-representative-of-brazils-governing-ethos/

7/

#15yrsago CBS uncovers rare Jack Benny treasures, puts them back and tosses out the key https://themoderatevoice.com/killing-comedic-heritage-cbs-reportedly-seals-some-classic-jack-benny-show-comedy-masters/

#15yrsago Disney’s Looking at Paintings: An Introduction to Fine Art for Young People https://memex.craphound.com/2010/01/18/disneys-looking-at-paintings-an-introduction-to-fine-art-for-young-people/

#15yrsago Cracking ice-sheets sound like Star Wars blasters https://silentlistening.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/dispersion-of-sound-waves-in-ice-sheets/

#15yrsago When getting the bombsquad called to school was a badge of honor https://jalopnik.com/how-my-youthful-junkyard-scrounging-habit-got-my-high-s-5450096

6/

#20yrsago Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers’ friends? https://craphound.com/aadossierletter.txt

#15yrsago Mass “overdose” planned in protest of Boots pharmacy sale of “homeopathic remedies” https://web.archive.org/web/20100120080932/http://www.1023.org.uk/the-1023-overdose-event.php

#15yrsago HOWTO Read science-fiction https://reactormag.com/sf-reading-protocols/

#15yrsago Leaked document: How the EU planned to force changes in Canada’s copyright https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/01/eu-ceta-leak/

5/

Hey look at this

* Zuckerberg Proves Meta Is Too Big https://prospect.org/power/2025-01-15-zuckerberg-proves-meta-is-too-big/

* FTC Report Shows Big Pharma Middlemen Jack Up Prices by Up to 7,736% https://www.commondreams.org/news/pharmacy-benefit-managers-profiteering (h/t /r/LateStageCapitalism)

* Taking Leave https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/01/15/taking-leave/

4/

Fu-Schnickens: Some upbeat earworms for a not-so-great week.

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/113844392830335435

2/

*Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:

http://martinhench.com

2/