One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.

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After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

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Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

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But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

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Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

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Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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Though "bean counters" are employed by firms, they are notionally bound by a professional code of ethics every bit as serious as the Hippocratic Oath: "count things honestly." Without an accurate accounting of quantities, you can't make good decisions on quality.

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Though accountancy concerns itself with counting things, it is inextricably bound up with the realm of ideas, and accounting conventions (how you account for things) are philosophical matters, not empirical ones.

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It's no coincidence that #ModernMonetaryTheory owes more to accountancy than it does to economics. Economic accounts of the economy have an unfortunate tendency to proceed from first principles, creating models based on pure reason, without checking in on the actual world.

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For example, neoclassical econ's "homo economicus," the rational value-maximizing actor who populated so many models; or economists' insistence on targeting inflation with interest rates; or treating national "debts" like they were household debts.

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When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

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We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

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Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

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One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

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Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

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Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

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For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

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I have read through the grooming report from the Home Office.

Here, in this thread, I will take you through the mathematical hoops they have jumped through in this deeply flawed analysis.

Thread 👇

It is, quite literally, a whitewash. It uses all the standard statistical tricks to avoid concluding a stark and glaring conclusion, which is otherwise plain to see. That there was a sustained, targeted and focussed attack by Pakistani men on white working class and Sikh girls.

**Choose limited data points**

One way to force a conclusion is to only range over a small and carefully chosen set of data points. In this case, the report used a limited number of use cases which largely ignored the high profile grooming gangs of Pakistani origin.

Only Rotherham was considered in earnest, as it could hardly be ignored as the start of it all.

A typical data trick is to only use one troublesome dataset - generally the most high profile one. This gives plausible denial on accusations of manipulation of source data.

_This is what we call “the domain trick”_

‼️𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗠/𝗙𝗥𝗔𝗨𝗗/𝗖𝗢𝗡
So there is a self proclaimed successful business woman that started her business ventures at 15 y/o with $5 (=8000Tsh🤡) as per 2013 exchnange rate, now in 2020 she is 22 y/o and allegedly revenues millions of dollars from her many businesses

She claims to have had 25 businesses, yes 25 businesses but now only has 7 that are running successfully 24/7 earning her millions of dollars in revenue.

I have no doubt that she has been hustling with a lot but that does not legitimise any of those hustles as most were shady.

Call me a hater/jealous/poor/broke or whatever but I know a scammy business when I see one and my concern is not a personal matter against her but rather people who fall for the rags to riches story and therefore pay her for business mentoring/wealth management

The following are just few among many red flags about this person's businesses, I welcome any others to contribute in this thread however they want but just keep it respectful.

🚩 Stealing photos from the Internet and editing her name on them for her Ad campaigns, branding them as if they were her actual products and projects while they're not. You source most of her posts just by a Google image search . And they have nothing to do with her.

@Lol_0fficial @HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead Oh my goodness. Economic interests -absolutely- tie into this. You need to think about 1) that there are different factions involved & 2) people see economic interest more broadly than just govt spending. On the first point, evangelicals have been part of the Republican base B1/X

@HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead since the party became identical with movement conservatism, but movement conservatism only became significant as an ideology because of coalition building. Movement conservatism brought together the hawks, laissez faire economics, and cultural conservatives. B2/X

@HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead Evangelicals have always been the best organized element of the cultural conservative faction. Trump's coalition is a new one and it includes cultural conservatives, but that is the only element that is unchanged - and really even it is somewhat different.
B3/X

@HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead A minor difference is accepting Obergefell (which has made it possible for openly gay people to be highly visible members of the new coalition), but the main difference is that social conservatives no longer make a priority of the politician as an individual
B4/X

@HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead as opposed to focusing on politicians merely as conduits through which government is affected. The foreign policy contingent changed completely. The hawks are just gone from Trump's coalition. Instead there's a deep skepticism of interventionism, but without the desire B5/x

I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.