The historic seaside town of Lahaina that was once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii has been largely reduced to ash as wildfires continued to rip through the state, with 36 people already confirmed dead. What do you think?
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
The Sacklers woulda gotten away with it if it wasn't for those darned meddling feds (permalink)
The saga of the Sacklers, a multigenerational billionaire crime family of mass-murdering dope-peddlers, is an enraging parable about how the wealthy, the courts, and sadistic high-powered lawyers collude to destroy the lives of millions, profit handsomely, and evade justice.
But there's an unexpected twist to this tale. After the Sacklers procured a sham bankruptcy that denied their victims the right to sue while leaving their fortune largely intact, the Supreme Court – yes, this Supreme Court – saw through the scam and froze the process, pending a full hearing:
The Sacklers basically invented modern, legal dope peddling. Arthur Sackler, the family's original crime-boss, revived the practice of direct-to-consumer drug marketing, dormant since the death of the medicine show, to peddle Valium. An aggressive and shrewd lobbyist, Arthur built the family fortune and, more importantly, its connections:
A generation later, the family's business company created Oxycontin, and procured misleading and false research about the drug's safety kickstarting the opioid epidemic, whose American body-count is closing in on a million dead. Armed with inflated claims about opioid safety, the Sacklers' pharma reps bribed, cajoled and tricked doctors into writing millions of prescriptions for oxy.
This scam had a natural best-before date. As ODs flooded America's ERs and bodies piled up in America's morgues, it became increasingly clear that something was rotten. The Sacklers pursued a multipronged campaign to keep the truth from coming to light, and to keep the billions flowing.
On the one hand, they hired McKinsey to find novel ways to encourage doctors to keep writing prescriptions and to convince pharmacists to turn a blind eye to abuse. McKinsey had all kinds of great ideas here, including paying pharma distributors cash bonuses for every overdose death in their territory:
When the issue of these deaths came up in public, the Sacklers blamed "criminal addicts" for their own misery, stigmatizing both people who desperately needed pain relief and the people who'd been deliberately hooked on the Sacklers' products. The legacy of this smear campaign is still with us, both in the contempt for people struggling with addiction and in the cruel barriers placed between people in unbearable agony and medical relief.
But mostly, the Sacklers kept their names out of it. They laundered their reputations by donating a homeopathic fraction of their vast drug fortune to art galleries and museums in a bid to make their names synonymous with good deeds.
The Sacklers didn't invent this trick. Think of the way that history's great monsters – Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Ford – are remembered today for the foundations and charities that bear their names, not for the untold misery they inflicted on their workers, their crimes against their customers, and the corruption of governments.
But the Sacklers made those Gilded Age barons seem like amateurs. They invented a modern elite philanthropy playbook that Anand Giridharadas documents in his must-read Winners Take All, about the charity-industrial complex that washes away an ocean of blood with a trickle of money:
As part of this PR exercise, the individual Sacklers kept their names and images out of the public eye. For years, there were virtually no news-service photos of individual Sacklers. When journalists dared to criticize the family, they used vicious attack-lawyers to intimidate them into retractions and silence (I was threatened by the Sacklers' lawyers).
They also worked their media mogul pals, like Mike Bloomberg, who added their names to the "Friends of Mike" list that Bloomberg reporters were required to consult before writing negative coverage:
But Stein's Law says that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As lawsuits mounted, the Sacklers found themselves increasingly synonymous with death, not charitable works. But like any canny criminal, the Sacklers had a getaway plan.
First, they extracted vast sums from Purdue and shifted it into offshore financial secrecy havens:
Even as this money was disappearing into legal black holes, the Sacklers demanded – and received – extraordinary protection from the courts, who aggressively sealed testimony and materials presented through discovery:
When this gambit finally failed, the Sacklers insisted that were down to their last $4 billion, and, with trillions in claims pending against them, they declared bankruptcy.
When a normal person declares bankruptcy, they are required to divest themselves of nearly everything of value they possess, and then still find themselves hounded by cruel arm-breakers who deluge them with threatening calls and letters:
But for the richest people in America, bankruptcy is merely a way to cleanse one's balance sheet of liabilities for any atrocity you may have committed on the way, without giving up your fortune.
The Sacklers are a case-study in how a corrupt bankruptcy can be conducted.
Purdue Pharma presents a maddening case-study in the corrupt benefits of bankruptcy. When it was announced in March, many were outraged to learn that the Sacklers were going to walk away with billions, while their victims got stiffed.
First, they converted their victims' right to compensation into "property" that the Sacklers themselves owned. This transferred jurisdiction over these claims from the regular court system to the bankruptcy court. A bankruptcy judge – not a jury – would decide how much each of these claims was worth, and then what how much of that worth these victims (now recast as creditors) would be entitled to through the bankruptcy.
Thus tens of thousands of claims were nonconsensually settled without a trial, by an administrative judge with no criminal jurisdiction, not a federal judge who'd undergone Senate confirmation:
These "coercive restructuring techniques" are not available to everyday people who are drowning in student debt or credit-card bills – these are the exclusive purview of the wealthiest Americans, who enjoy a completely different bankruptcy system that is rigged in their favor.
Three judges – David Jones and Marvin Isgur of Houston and Bob Drain of New York – hear 96% of the country's large corporate bankruptcies:
These judges are unbelievably horny for corporations, embracing a legal theory "that casts the invention of the limited liability corporation alongside that of the steam engine as a paradigmatic development in the pursuit of prosperity":
Now there are more than three bankruptcy judges in America, so how do the nation's biggest companies get their cases heard by these three enthusiastic Renfields for corporate vampirism?
They cheat.
For example: when GM was facing bankruptcy, it argued that it was a New York company on the basis that it owned a single Chevy dealership in Harlem, and got in front of Judge Drain.
The Sacklers were – characteristically – even more brazen. They really wanted to get their case in front of Judge Drain, the nation's most enthusiastic supporter of "third party releases," through which bankrupt billionaires can wipe the slate clean, securing dismissals of all claims by the people they wronged.
Drain is also uniquely hostile to independent examiners, "an independent third-party appointed by the court to investigate 'fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, or irregularity…by current or former management of the debtor."
If you're the Sacklers, hoping to keep two thirds of your billions and extinguish all claims by your victims, there is no better helpmeet than Judge Robert Drain of the Southern District of New York.
So, 192 days before filing for bankruptcy, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, New York (a company may claim jurisdiction in a specific court once they've operated a business there for 180 days).
Then they filed a bankruptcy in which they altered the metadata on their casefile, inserting the code for a Westchester county hearing into the machine-readable, human-invisible parts of the documents they uploaded to the federal Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system (they also captioned the case with "RDD, for "Robert D Drain").
They chose their judge, and the judge obliged. UCLA Law's Lynn LoPucki is one of the leading scholars of these bankruptcy "megacases," and has written extensively on why these three judges are so deferential to corporate criminals seeking to flense themselves of culpability. She sees judges like Drain motivated by "personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase – very appealing to certain personalities."
Thus, these judges are "willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…"
This kind of judge-shopping goes beyond the Sacklers; the cases that Drain and co preside over make a mockery of the idea of America as a land of equal justice. "Prepack" and "drive-through" bankruptcies are reliable get-out-of-jail-free cards for capitalism's worst monsters: private equity firms.
Whether PE murdered your grandmother by buying her care-home and putting each worker in charge of 30 seniors:
30% of America's bankruptcies are private equity companies using the bankruptcy system to wipe away claims for their misdeeds, while keeping a fortune, thanks to the shield of limited liability.
Take Millennium Health, James Slattery's fake drug-testing company, which promised to help nursing homes figure out whether seniors were abusing (or selling) their meds by testing their piss for angel dust and other drugs. Slattery defrauded Medicare and Medicaid for millions, borrowed $1.8 billion (Slattery got $1.3 billion of that). He eventually walked away from this fraud after paying a mere $256m to settle all claims, and kept a fortune in assets, including the 40 vintage planes his private company ("Pissed Away LLC" – I am not making this up) owned:
For the wealthy, bankruptcy is the sport of kings, a way to skip out on consequences. For the poor, bankruptcy is an anchor – or a noose. This is by design: judges who preside over elite bankruptcies speak of their protagonists as heroic "risk takers" and tiptoe around any consequences, lest these titans be chained to a mortal's fate, costing us all the benefits of their entrepreneurial genius.
PE companies helped the Sacklers design their own bankruptcy strategy, and it was a standout, even by the standards of Bob Drain and his kangaroo bankruptcy court. But now, the Supreme Court has pumped the brakes on the whole enterprise.
The judges ruled that the exceptions the Sacklers took advantage of were intended for bankrupts in "financial distress" – not billionaires with vast fortunes hidden overseas. In so doing, the court threatens all manner of corrupt arrangements, from "the Boy Scouts, wildfires and allegations of sexual abuse in the church diocese — where third parties get a benefit from a bankruptcy they themselves aren’t going through.”
The case was brought by the DoJ's US Trustee Program, which lost in the Second Circuit when it tried to halt the Purdue bankruptcy and argued that the Sacklers themselves had to declare bankruptcy to discharge the claims against them.
Now the Supremes have hit pause on the bankruptcy the Second Circuit approved, and will hear the case themselves. It's only one step on a long road, but it's an unprecedented one. Some of the country's filthiest fortunes are riding on the outcome.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
EGYPT – In the midst of a grand tour to see all the wonders of the world, Canadian Jacob Pleasance was surprised that, unlike Niagara Falls, not all the Wonders Of The World are accompanied by a bunch of haunted houses and broken down rides. “I just saw the Great Pyramids and it was amazing. […]
NEW YORK—Hailing recent milestones as a new golden age of medicine, experts confirmed this week that healthcare breakthroughs over the past decade provide hope that baby boomers might never have to leave their positions of power. “Thanks to rapid advancements in gene therapy, machine learning, and precision medicine,…
SEATTLE—Touting the device’s state-of-the-art video and audio capabilities, Amazon unveiled its new giant camera Friday that tells users what to do. “This floor-to-ceiling camera is the first auto-commanding device of its kind that blares accurate, up-to-the-minute instructions to the user on exactly what they should…
CHICAGO—Saying he was ready to start a new chapter in his post-presidency, Barack Obama spoke with reporters Friday about his latest project, opening an electronics store on the South Side of Chicago. “Back during the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home, I taught myself how to do simple laptop repairs, fix a…
You may have noticed that we’ve slowed down a bit on posting, approving comments, and, well, pretty much our whole end of the deal. We’d like to say we’re just too busy and important, but…we’re not.
Behind the scenes, we’ve been actively downsizing and “sunsetting” this little dog and pony show we call Awful Library Books. We started this blog in 2009, and after 14 years we’ve realized that we did it! We’ve saved all the library collections and our work is done.
Ok, that’s a stretch. But seriously – the joke has been made and our point about ongoing and continuous collection management, including regular weeding, has been delivered. We’re stepping away and letting ALB stand as an archive of our best posts. We may add content occasionally (very occasionally, real talk), but we’re not going to be adding regular content. We’re spending this weekend making some final theme updates and downsizing our hosting service and whatnot, but the good stuff will still be available.
We’ve so appreciated your submissions and your comments over the years! You all made ALB what it is today. We’ll be around, so it’s not goodbye, it’s see ya later.
Todd Interests, which plans to turn the former park into a high-end subdivision, has a week left to respond to the state’s final offer for the property.
Thank you for publishing your thoughtful answer to my question – I have an update to share.
After a week of hemorrhaging volunteers from the program and generally being taken to task by those who were leaving, the tone of subsequent emails from the president became much less inflamatory and she even apologized for not being able to control her anger and frustration. She sent an email to the volunteer group yesterday that confirmed the program is now undergoing a reset and explained the changes, including that the program will be shut down for the time being, but when it reopens, it will be managed by occupational and hippo-therapists. She listed several opportunities for volunteers to help in the interim and stressed that safety for everyone will be a priority.
It appears there is cause for optimism about the new direction of the program, notwithstanding the general dysfunction that seems to surround anything horse related that several comments mentioned. It was genuinely hard for me to determine whether the prior situation was typical and I was seeing it through a warped lens. However, there is another theraptic riding center about 20 miles from where I live, so I’m investigating that program, and particularly how it’s being managed.
I greatly appreciate Alison and the AAM family, and all of your comments! Thank you especially for your good wishes concerning my injury recovery – all seems well now.
I wrote in a few months ago to ask for advice when my former boss misclassified me as an independent contractor. Thank you for assuaging my fears, and thank you to the commenters who told me to get it together! To clarify, when I started working there my boss told me that the company was too small and that’s why I wouldn’t get a W-2. She paid me with paper checks and kept saying “soon” every time I asked for payroll, which was often. She seemed to always be at the end of her rope and very touchy about being perceived as doing anything wrong. When I left, her cat was dying and her husband had recently been diagnosed with cancer, which caused my hesitation. But she made the choice to hurt me and was clearly having cash flow issues way before any of that happened.
I finished law school in 2018 and was struggling to find a new job in my niche practice area (immigration, as one commenter correctly guessed), so when this opportunity fell into my lap in late 2021 I was so happy that I didn’t question much—obviously I’ve never done tax law! The legal field is bad enough, especially at small firms, but immigration seems to be a special level of trauma bonding. This wasn’t even the first shit show firm I worked for. I was embarrassed to be taken advantage of and also devastated to lose a job that I thought defined me. I was really too emotional to be thinking clearly, so I appreciated having all of the outside perspectives.
I told my former boss how she could file to fix it to avoid penalties and in return got a long essay about how difficult it was to run the firm on her own. But I spent a year and a half being sympathetic to her struggles, even when it cost me and the firm a lot. So I filed the appropriate federal and state tax forms, which saved me about $5,000, and blasted Vigilante Shit by Taylor Swift on my way home from my accountant (“someone told [her] white collar crimes to the [IRS]”). I don’t feel guilty about it at all and I’m glad that I stood up for myself.
Luckily, I found a new job immediately. It’s not in immigration, but it came with a 401k, health insurance, and a significant pay raise, which is appropriately taxed! It’s also a chance to set up appropriate boundaries—my job doesn’t define me, and my employer is not my friend. Thank you for giving me that push to stand up for myself and start this transition!
I’m the burlesque performer who emailed 5 years ago! In a mini update, I’m still at the same job, and some folks know and some don’t. You find your people and share, or don’t. Everyone who has learned over the years has been very cool about it and thankfully no one has asked to see a show, but there are a few who I would welcome if they were curious. That being said, I live in NYC, so I perhaps wouldn’t suggest that to someone in more conservative places!
The most amusing part was seeing a burly regular friend who was like, I KNOW THIS IS ONE OF YOU.
Thanks for responding to my letter and thanks to readers for commenting. Yes, I am aware that it is ridiculous the nepotism policy isn’t better worded. Unfortunately changing that policy is not within my power although we did pass along feedback to those who do have that power. Here’s an update, as things didn’t go exactly as I’d planned…
This employee is not a reasonable one, which is why we were hesitant to be so direct—we didn’t really want drama. Drama was what we got. The hiring committee ended up telling him they would not be considering his application because of the lack of educational requirement and because if hired he’d be in a position to supervise his aunt. They acknowledged that their relationship wasn’t clearly defined in the nepotism policy but would be a major sticking point nonetheless as our org needed to maintain appearances of being fair. We sent this email and then never once heard back from him, no acknowledgment or even a basic “thanks for the consideration.” I know he got it though because his aunt made a few offhand remarks and because I started to hear grumbling from other community members and employees about how it was a ridiculous reason to not hire someone. I truly felt like I was living in the Twilight Zone that so many people didn’t see nepotism and waiving a rather big education requirement as an issue for hiring! (And for an excellent employee who goes above and beyond, okay, maybe we’d consider it. But this guy isn’t that.)
I resolved to ignore the grumbling, thinking they’d settle down and if asked I only provided the details about our policy and job requirement, didn’t get into his application. Two days later, we got a surprise applicant, someone from within our org at a different department. We were surprised by her app because to many this would seem like a step down from what she was doing. We interviewed her and she made a really convincing argument about why she wanted the job (better hours, she’d learn a valuable new skill set, she had the background we were hoping for even if she hadn’t had the exact experience of this job) and she was okay with a slight pay decrease because our fringe benefits were nicer. It was a no brainer and we hired her, thinking we were lucky to get such a qualified candidate.
I sent an email out to my team informing them of the new hire and letting them know about her start date. I kept it really upbeat and positive. I was in a hurry to make a late day meeting so I sent the email, and immediately shut my computer and went on my way. It was hours later and after work hours when I thought to check my email. My employee had responded within minutes to my announcement with an all caps email of his own about how absolutely ludicrous this hiring decision was. Luckily, it wasn’t a reply-all and went just to me.
That was Friday night. I informed my hiring committee of this and my intent to address this response first thing Monday morning. But then Monday came around and he called in sick. And he proceeded to call in sick for the next three days. I don’t actually believe he was sick—I think he was panicking because I never responded to his email on Friday. It was a frustrating week as I felt we needed to speak face to face to address his behavior but he kept avoiding me. That Friday—a full week after the email—I had scheduled a day off to take care of some personal stuff, and my employees were well aware I was taking PTO. Not surprisingly, he didn’t call in sick Friday. I rearranged some things on my end and made a surprise trip to the office and pulled him aside for the Talk. He was quite defiant and defensive at first and tried very hard to give me nebulous reasons as to why our hiring decision was bad, and I think he panicked even more when I told him his behavior was unacceptable and inappropriate. I told him under no circumstances was this tolerated, and he needed to work with the new hire or find other work. He ended up crying and apologizing and I wrote him up for it, and told him as this was his second write up in a year, the next offense would result in immediate termination. He promised he’d do better…and then the following week he resigned.
Honestly, this is all for the best as it means my department is no longer one where employees are related and I suspect things will be much less drama filled here on out! I was glad we stuck to our convictions on the rules, and I hope that this employee has learned some lessons about how to handle professional situations…but I’m so glad he’s not my problem anymore.
Video conferencing software company Zoom has announced a return to in-person work, requiring employees to be in the office at least two days a week. What do you think?
WASHINGTON—In his latest attempt to fulfill his campaign promise of relieving the nearly $1.8 trillion burden on U.S. citizens, President Joe Biden officially wished away student loan debt Thursday by blowing on a dandelion. “Today I closed my eyes, wished for the forgiveness of all tuition-related debt for single…
MENLO PARK – The Beaverton has just confirmed that the body of billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has just been discovered in a pile of thousands of writhing, mating squirrels. The chairman and CEO of Meta Platforms Inc was thirty-nine years old when he died from an overdose of squirrel fucking. According the Beaverton’s sources (who you […]
"the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it" (JK Gabraith)
Uber
Uber was, is, and always will be a bezzle. There are just intrinsic limitations to the profits available to operating a taxi fleet, even if you can misclassify your employees as contractors and steal their wages, even as you force them to bear the cost of buying and maintaining your taxis.
The magic of early Uber – when taxi rides were incredibly cheap, and there were always cars available, and drivers made generous livings behind the wheel – wasn't magic at all. It was just predatory pricing.
Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in, lighting $33b of its investors' cash on fire. Most of that money came from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, who brought you such bezzles as WeWork – a boring real-estate company masquerading as a high-growth tech company, just as Uber was a boring taxi company masquerading as a tech company.
Predatory pricing used to be illegal, but Chicago School economists convinced judges to stop enforcing the law on the grounds that predatory pricing was impossible because no rational actor would choose to lose money. They (willfully) ignored the obvious possibility that a VC fund could invest in a money-losing business and use predatory pricing to convince retail investors that a pile of shit of sufficient size must have a pony under it somewhere.
This venture predation let investors – like Prince Bone Saw – cash out to suckers, leaving behind a money-losing business that had to invent ever-sweatier accounting tricks and implausible narratives to keep the suckers on the line while they blew town. A bezzle, in other words:
Uber is a true bezzle innovator, coming up with all kinds of fairy tales and sci-fi gimmicks to explain how they would convert their money-loser into a profitable business. They spent $2.5b on self-driving cars, producing a vehicle whose mean distance between fatal crashes was half a mile. Then they paid another company $400 million to take this self-licking ice-cream cone off their hands:
Amazingly, self-driving cars were among the more plausible of Uber's plans. They pissed away hundreds of millions on California's Proposition 22 to institutionalize worker misclassification, only to have the rule struck down because they couldn't be bothered to draft it properly. Then they did it again in Massachusetts:
Remember when Uber was going to plug the holes in its balance sheet with flying cars? Flying cars! Maybe they were just trying to soften us up for their IPO, where they advised investors that the only way they'd ever be profitable is if they could replace every train, bus and tram ride in the world:
Honestly, the only way that seems remotely plausible is when it's put next to flying cars for comparison. I guess we can be grateful that they never promised us jetpacks, or, you know, teleportation. Just imagine the market opportunity they could have ascribed to astral projection!
Narrative capitalism has its limits. Once Uber went public, it had to produce financial disclosures that showed the line going up, lest the bezzle come to an end. These balance-sheet tricks were as varied as they were transparent, but the financial press kept falling for them, serving as dutiful stenographers for a string of triumphant press-releases announcing Uber's long-delayed entry into the league of companies that don't lose more money every single day.
One person Uber has never fooled is Hubert Horan, a transportation analyst with decades of experience who's had Uber's number since the very start, and who has done yeoman service puncturing every one of these financial "disclosures," methodically sifting through the pile of shit to prove that there is no pony hiding in it.
In 2021, Horan showed how Uber had burned through nearly all of its cash reserves, signaling an end to its subsidy for drivers and rides, which would also inevitably end the bezzle:
In mid, 2022, Horan showed how the "profit" Uber trumpeted came from selling off failed companies it had acquired to other dying rideshare companies, which paid in their own grossly inflated stock:
At the end of 2022, Horan showed how Uber invented a made-up, nonstandard metric, called "EBITDA profitability," which allowed them to lose billions and still declare themselves to be profitable, a lie that would have been obvious if they'd reported their earnings using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP):
Like clockwork, Uber has just announced – once again – that it is profitable, and once again, the press has credulously repeated the claim. So once again, Horan has published one of his magisterial debunkings on Naked Capitalism:
Uber's $394m gains this quarter come from paper gains to untradable shares in its loss-making rivals – Didi, Grab, Aurora – who swapped stock with Uber in exchange for Uber's own loss-making overseas divisions. Yes, it's that stupid: Uber holds shares in dying companies that no one wants to buy. It declared those shares to have gained value, and on that basis, reported a profit.
Truly, any big number multiplied by an imaginary number can be turned into an even bigger number.
Now, Uber also reported "margin improvements" – that is, it says that it loses less on every journey. It didn't explain how it made those improvements. But we know how the company did it: they made rides more expensive and cut the pay to their drivers. A 2.9m ride in Manhattan is now $50 – if you get a bargain! The base price is more like $70:
The number of Uber drivers on the road has a direct relationship to the pay Uber offers those drivers. But that pay has been steeply declining, and with it, the availability of Ubers. A couple weeks ago, I found myself at the Burbank train station unable to get an Uber at all, with the app timing out repeatedly and announcing "no drivers available."
Normally, you can get a yellow taxi at the station, but years of Uber's predatory pricing has caused a drawdown of the local taxi-fleet, so there were no taxis available at the cab-rank or by dispatch. It took me an hour to get a cab home. Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.
Uber won't say why its margins are improving, but it can't be coming from scale. Before the pandemic, Uber had far more rides, and worse margins. Uber has diseconomies of scale: when you lose money on every ride, adding more rides increases your losses, not your profits.
Meanwhile, Lyft – Uber's also-ran competitor – saw its margins worsen over the same period. Lyft has always been worse at lying about its finances than Uber, but it is in essentially the exact same business (right down to the drivers and cars – many drivers have both apps on their phones). So Lyft's financials offer a good peek at Uber's true earnings picture.
Lyft is actually slightly better off than Uber overall. It spent less money on expensive props for its long con – flying cars, robotaxis, scooters, overseas clones – and abandoned them before Uber did. Lyft also fired 24% of its staff at the end of 2022, which should have improved its margins by cutting its costs.
Uber pays its drivers less. Like Lyft, Uber practices algorithmic wage discrimination, Veena Dubal's term describing the illegal practice of offering workers different payouts for the same work. Uber's algorithm seeks out "pickers" who are choosy about which rides they take, and converts them to "ants" (who take every ride offered) by paying them more for the same job, until they drop all their other gigs, whereupon the algorithm cuts their pay back to the rates paid to ants:
All told, wage theft and wage cuts by Uber transferred $1b/quarter from labor to Uber's shareholders. Historically, Uber linked fares to driver pay – think of surge pricing, where Uber charged riders more for peak times and passed some of that premium onto drivers. But now Uber trumpets a custom pricing algorithm that is the inverse of its driver payment system, calculating riders' willingness to pay and repricing every ride based on how desperate they think you are.
This pricing is a per se antitrust violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, America's original antitrust law. That's important because Sherman 2 is one of the few antitrust laws that we never stopped enforcing, unlike the laws banning predatory pricing:
Uber claims an 11% margin improvement. 6-7% of that comes from algorithmic price discrimination and service cutbacks, letting it take 29% of every dollar the driver earns (up from 22%). Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi himself says that this is as high as the take can get – over 30%, and drivers will delete the app.
Uber's food delivery service – a baling wire-and-spit Frankenstein's monster of several food apps it bought and glued together – is a loser even by the standards of the sector, which is unprofitable as a whole and experiencing an unbroken slide of declining demand.
Put it all together and you get a picture of the kind of taxi company Uber really is: one that charges more than traditional cabs, pays drivers less, and has fewer cars on the road at times of peak demand, especially in the neighborhoods that traditional taxis had always underserved. In other words, Uber has broken every one of its promises.
We replaced the "evil taxi cartel" with an "evil taxi monopolist." And it's still losing money.
Even if Lyft goes under – as seems inevitable – Uber can't attain real profitability by scooping up its passengers and drivers. When you're losing money on every ride, you just can't make it up in volume.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
ARLINGTON, VA—Nervously pacing the office after the Asian leader finally responded to their repeated provocations, Pentagon officials were reportedly panicking Wednesday after Chinese president Xi Jinping showed up to fight them in the parking lot. “Oh shit, oh shit—Jinping’s out there, and he looks super pissed,”…
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The Chicago native, born Willie Perry Jr., wrote the song as an exercise track for his nephew in the late 1990s before it exploded in popularity and became a worldwide hit.
There is some sporadic tropical wave activity out there in the Atlantic right now, but nothing worth getting too worked up about—but next week, maybe?
Happening now: Not a whole lot
This morning’s satellite snapshot of the Main Development Region for tropical systems, between Africa and the Caribbean Sea, shows some waves dinking and dunking along. But there’s just not much that’s too impressive out there. And anything that gets too frisky is likely to get sliced up like sushi due to fairly high wind shear levels across much of the basin.
The tropical wave train looks fairly anemic for early August. (NOAA)
I would expect this pattern to persist for the rest of this week.
The medium range (days 6 to 10): Some tropical-ish near Cuba?
The medium-term is a little bit more interesting. Various ensemble members of the European model, in particular, seem to latch on to a low pressure system in the northwestern Caribbean Sea this weekend, and drag a weak low pressure system into the Gulf of Mexico next week. I’m not bullish on development, but if anything does it probably would be driven westward into Mexico due to the persistent high pressure over Texas.
Highlighting a couple of areas to watch over the next 10 days.
The models are also latching onto a tropical wave that will probably emerge off the coast of Africa this weekend, and suggesting it may have some chance of developing in a week to 10 days over the open Atlantic Ocean. That’s certainly possible, and something we’ll perhaps be discussing in the coming days. We shall see. For now, there’s not much more to say.
Fantasyland (beyond day 10): All eyes on the Main Development Region
The main take-away is that, overall, we’re in a good position heading into mid-August. There are no signs of the tropical Atlantic imminently lighting up like a Christmas tree. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but there are no signs that it will. Which is great.
The other thing to say is that our focus, increasingly, is going to be on the Main Development Region, and new tropical waves emerging off of Africa. This wave train typically becomes much more prominent during the final weeks of August and, of course, throughout September.
As corporations become more comfortable expressing political positions, conservatives have resorted to boycotts in an effort to protect their most valued beliefs. Here are the top “woke” brands that right-leaning patriots should never purchase.
Editors note:We’re thrilled to release the latest and greatest version of our app today. As always it’s free, and we can offer this because of your generous contributions to our annual fundraiser in November. I want to thank Dwight Silverman for shepherding these changes, and Hussain Abbasi for his fine programming work. Here’s Dwight with more information.
When we first introduced the Space City Weather mobile app for iOS and Android devices two years ago, we sought to make it useful, simple and Houston-focused. The design was clean, the information clear, and the approach non-intrusive. There were no ads, and unlike most mobile apps, it did not track you.
We gave it some tweaks last year, adding more area cities, rain percentage chances, a live National Weather Service radar page, a Fahrenheit/Celsius toggle and more. Most of these new features were by request—we really consider y’all to be partners in our development of the app, and we thank you for your continued input.
But there were two high-demand features that we had yet to add—dark mode and tablet view. Well, you asked—and asked and asked and asked again—and this year, we have delivered.
The new Space City Weather app features both a tablet orientation and dark mode – and you can even have both at the same time!
Version 2.0 of the Space City Weather app is now live in both Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store. As always, it’s free—and still ad-free and tracker-free.
Here’s what’s new:
Dark mode. We know that fans of a dark display are passionate about it, so we took our time to do it right, complete with ADA-compliant colors. For now, it’s triggered based on your system settings. When your device is set to dark mode, the SCW app goes dark as well. At the moment there’s no manual toggle, but that’s coming in a future update.
Tablet mode. When you install the SCW app on an iPad or Android tablet, it expands to fit the space, with a different layout for horizontal and vertical orientations. If you have a newer Mac with an Apple Silicon processor in it, you can install and run the iOS version of the app in tablet mode. You can click and hold on the lower right corner of the window and drag it to adjust the orientation. It also is designed to display as a tablet on horizontally folding phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold family. You can launch it in traditional smartphone view from the narrow, external cover screen, and when you open the phone, the app appears in tablet mode. Nifty!
Design. Our stellar developer Hussain Abbasi has done a fantastic job polishing up the visuals. The layout for stories now puts the photo to the right of the headline on the main page, making it easier to read at a glance, and the current story now has a heavier typeface. A gradation line has been added between hourly temps and rain changes, to visually indicate how quickly temperatures are changing. The whole app has gotten many visual improvements, and we think it looks great.
If your device is set to automatically download updates, you will have version 2.0 soon, or you may already have. If not, head to your respective app store and grab it.
The traditional smartphone view also gets some design tweaks, including new cards for current conditions and readability improvements.
We’re particularly excited about this release, because we feel we’ve now got a mature, truly useful app that will help Houstonians keep up with local weather in style, and on whatever platform they choose. We think you’ll love it, too.
Of course, because it’s a big update, there are going to be bugs. If something doesn’t seem to work right, please let us know by sending an email to bugs@spacecityweather.com. Please include as many details as you can, including what device you’re using and the version of its operating system.
Again, thanks for your ideas, and please keep them coming. We appreciate your support!
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