Notices by Steve Randy Waldman (interfluidity@zirk.us), page 2

trying desperately to undo what he has done to himself, Trump will soon announce he supports abortions until age three.

“Generally speaking, firms with more market power can price gouge, so [price gouging] laws are sometimes known as ‘antitrust as last resort.’” @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-price-gouging-vs

cc @ryanlcooper ht @ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ https://theconversation.com/no-government-in-half-a-century-has-built-300-000-homes-every-year-but-thats-what-labour-wants-to-do-now-236442

It begins.

(The Supreme Court’s sabotage of the regulatory state begins to take effect.)

ht @davidho @Brad_Rosenheim

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/12/air-force-epa-water-pfas-tucson

"High-powered lobbyists like Tony Podesta and others came up with a new playbook to brush back regulatory oversight by paying outside researchers to launder industry talking points through the guise of neutral 'expertise.'" #LukeGoldstein https://prospect.org/justice/2024-08-09-will-googles-monopoly-be-vanquished/

Once crypto was wrapped behind ETFs, I thought it'd trade just like any other contract on NASDAQ.

I gave it a try today. (Given the political decision to entrench rather than crush crypto, I think a small allocation in a portfolio towards proof-of-stake crypto may be reasonable.)

Interestingly, my broker requires I apply for special trading permissions.

A Kamala/Walz ticket is one I can get fully behind, not just as a bulwark against fascism but as a vehicle for social-democratic change.

(I was already very Kamala-amped, but the Walz choice helped ease my fears that she might be too close to Obama-esque, neolib-lite "moderates".)

I've made a new donation, and signed up to volunteer. https://web.kamalaharris.com/forms/take-action-for-kamala-harris/

from #RobHorning https://robhorning.substack.com/p/companionship-without-companions

"It matters that the average American associates the great software giants with the feeling of lost agency." #TannerGreer https://scholars-stage.org/uber-is-a-poor-replacement-for-utopia/

sociopaths are easy to deal with if you keep in mind one, simple rule: the less sociopathic behavior pays off, the less sociopaths will behave sociopathically.

I think this article is unpersuasive, because it worries about what intelligence agencies will do with commercially available data and asks we restrain them, without discussing what private actors might do with the same data, and how we restrain them.

I certainly want the US intelligence community to be able to do anything Elon Musk is able to do. I distrust both, but I distrust Musk and his fellow plutocrats more. ht @Geoffberner https://newsie.social/@freedomofpress/112808439487349216

Elon Musk has promised to donate $45 million per month to a pro-Trump super-PAC. He is also working to have the Supreme Coup declare the NLRB unconstitutional. https://onlabor.org/tracking-attacks-on-the-nlrb-spacex-tries-its-luck-again/

Meanwhile, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien gives a barnburner of a speech at the Republican National Convention, extolling in sometimes very personal terms the necessity and value of labor unions, skewering tech firms including Amazon, Uber, and Lyft. (But no Musk firm was directly named.)

Weird times.

“In Detroit, Biden pitches his 100-day plan for 2025: Restore Roe v. Wade. Pass the John Lewis voting rights bill and Freedom To Vote Act. Eliminate medical debt. Raise minimum wage. Pass the PRO Act. Ban assault weapons. ‘Keep leading the world’ on climate change & clean energy.” #SahilKapur https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1811912368944799946

I haven’t read the Bellingcat piece yet, but this kind of behavior by Musk I take as an endorsement, so I am passing the link along. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/07/09/russian-missile-identified-in-kyiv-childrens-hospital-attack/

"there has been much discussion about ensuring that a President 'is not above the law.' But…the President’s immunity from prosecution for his official acts *is* the law."

— Justice Clarence Thomas
United States Supreme Court
concurring in Trump v. US

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

from Tressie McMillan Cottom https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/opinion/biden-debate-scotus-immunity.html

for a minute there i worried whether we could still sit on the more Athenian side of the big "democracy vs autocracy" global geopolitical struggle.

but then i remembered where Saudi Arabia sits, so it's probably cool if we just hang with them.

"This is the American story of the past 4 decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between 'too rotten to stand' and 'too big to care'" @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

"The lurch back towards that early web is a deep hunger for the personal web. The web that made you feel like you were part of this crazy but exciting endeavor that suddenly connected you with some other person across the world… We want something that feels more…real. Something authentic, not performative… We don’t want a content treadmill, we want online presences that are idiosyncratic and intimate, peculiar and distinctive." @rscottjones https://rscottjones.com/its-not-about-nostalgia-its-about-human-connection/

maybe musk wouldn't pay himself so much if he faced a 94% marginal tax rate.

just spitballin' here!