Look, everyone knows that the climate is fucked. It would take a big all in push to fix it. We haven't even started. And, having just tried to get our act together to drive a new emerging disease into extinction, something that should have been relatively easy, we failed and devolved into such fractious infighting over that simple thing that no one even wants to outright acknowledge how fucked we are.
So, yeah. You could say there's a bit of an unshakable gloom, if that's what you're into.
Let's call out the particular global investment vampire in this story, KKR - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, because it's the Count Dracula of hedge funds, and also the company that killed Toys 'R' Us:
This whole thing smelled like enshittification to me, so I kept digging, this time into OverDrive itself. Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR.
With that sentence, my audience just divided into two types of people
the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction,
and
the ones like my friend who happens to be a business journalist at the New York Times, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream.
The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong.
Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile.
KKR was the subject of the famous 1989 book (and subsequent movie) Barbarians at the Gate, in which a pair of investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal detail what one Times reviewer called the “avarice, malice, and egomania” of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco with “all the suspense of a first-rate thriller”. The ultimate result: KKR’s private equity barons raked in the cash, while thousands of employees were axed and consumer prices of RJR Nabisco products soared.
More recently, KKR teamed up with two other private equity firms to execute a leveraged buyout of Toys ‘R’ Us. They deliberately weighted down the company with a crushing level of debt in order to begin feeding on its profits; they sucked out half a billion dollars as the company staggered along for another dozen years. When Toys ‘R’ Us finally collapsed and died in 2018, the vultures flapped off, unconcerned, leaving 33,000 desperate workers unemployed and without severance.
Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.
They’re definitely among the worst of the worst. It’s always surprised me how comparatively sterile their wiki page is. Feels like they’ve got someone cleaning it up.
I wouldn't be surprised - they have plenty of money to pay someone to keep that page clean.
I also found out after this post that they're in the active process of acquiring Simon and Schuster. Cory Doctorow (aka @pluralistic) has a great writeup on them here.
Economists, the priests of the state religion of Capitalism, cannot understand why the laypersons aren't rejoicing over record profits for the Eternal and Unaging Corporations.
But but but the folks from lemmygrad told me voting cant do anything against fascists and I shouldn’t waste my time and should organize a revolution instead.
Fuck the republicans, but if you’re only voting that’s not going to help you when these shitheads get to the point of dragging people out of their houses and disappearing them. All my girlfriends are getting strapped and organizing self-defense.
Hell yeah, love to hear it, i just wish my mental health was sound enough to let me stay strapped. Sold all my firearms after my father took his life. If you or your girlfriends ever have ideations, please leave your arms with a trusted comrade.
Some of the biggest hurdles are having to interact with the police to even get a license to carry. Plus it’s expensive. Plenty of people opt to just learn to shoot, borrowing from friends.
They lost every local campaign. Every school board race had some skinwalker cloaked as parental rights and my fairly progressive city saw right through them.
This. I am in a solidly blue district. 4 out of the 7 school board candidates, ALL of the non-incumbents, were running on some sort of "family values" or "parents' rights" platform. But their statements to media were highly scrubbed because they know to tread carefully and avoid the dog whistles. One of them unseated an incumbent (and the only POC in the group) yesterday. I'm glad the trend is going in the right direction nationally. But I wouldn't call for a victory lap just yet.
It wasn’t a condition of his initial investment, but rather of a lawsuit settlement five years later, in 2009 (six years after Eberhard and Tarpenning actually founded it).
Yeah, if he spent the money on laying fibre instead of using satilites that need to be replaced every at most 18 months and as little as 2 months, everyone would have been better off.
Gotta love when rich people convince our politicians that they can do the job better than the Govt and then we loose everything. Like when Brian M sold off CN Rail now Bill Gates is making billions from it.
Each satellite is worth 250k @ 5,500 units currently (and its still garbage unless its your only option). And this is just the cost of satilites
Worse case scenario for laying fibre is $80,000 for 1 mile
You do the shit maths and that is 17,187.5 miles (not km) of fibre for what is currently in LEO and excluding the price of launching these POS into the nights sky. So for best case senario every 18 months that is how much fibre lines Elon could be laying.
From Presque Isles, Maine to Sandiego, California is 3,305 miles
I’m 30 and don’t feel like a have a future in the way that other generations before me had. Can’t even imagine how those younger than me must be feeling. I at least got to fuck around a bit in my early youth as you could still afford to then. I grew up knowing climate change was coming, but it wasn’t until my mid 20s when I started to lose hope in our ability to address it. Still got a good 25 years of feeling hopeful though. Kids these days get none of that.
I went from making $17 (around $34k per year I think) to about $60k in a low cost of living area, and it was completely life changing. I could just… afford things. Definitley see how it helps mental health.
Maybe I have been lucky but I have not had much issue installing linux and having it just work. the "After delving into a few resources, I managed to get the system up and running." in the article makes me wary of the distro. I expect them to just work at this point.
Looks like the enshittification of op-eds/essays is in full swing here.
The author continually undermines her own points (via parenthesis! Because it’s so quirky!) and repeatedly uses a buzzword that does not apply to the scenario she’s describing.
This isn’t the same process of enshittification that happened to Amazon et al, this is just corporate takeover of our public services, which goes back way further than a few websites. It’s straight-up capitalist cronyism. But I guess that wouldn’t get as many clicks from edgy teenagers who think Cory Doctorow is a literal prophet.
I feel like I’m not reading the same article as you are. Can you share an example of where they undermine their own argument? This seems like a pretty well researched and thought out article.
They clearly state their interpretation of enshitification and it seems to me like a valid generalisation and to be applied correctly.
That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. (I looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.)
We’re reading the same article. you’re allowed to like it, but that doesn’t make it well-researched or even good. i like lots of crap too.
Also what is everybody’s obsession with YoU nEeD tO PrOvIdE eXaMpLeS any time somebody gives their thoughts on an article? It’s fucking childish and entitled behavior.
I’m sorry if I upset you, I was just trying to understand your position better. Personally I don’t feel like this example undermines the whole argument, its an acknowledgment of a limitation of the writers perspective. It also looks to have been updated.
“That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. (I looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.1 Best I could do: as of December 2019, OverDrive controlled digital lending for “more than 95% of public libraries in the US and Canada”.2)”
@NoisemakerGeneral@some_guy "Red, White & Royal Blue" by Casey McQuiston is a romantic novel. Find out how two friends were forced to fake a friendship for political reasons, but their feelings deepened into a secret romance that challenges their lives and the world's perception. https://bit.ly/445UfVI
I worked for SNAP, it is on purpose. People in power rather it be a bunch of hoops for the smallest amount of help possible. They can wave the requirements in my state for emergencies, makes it so much easier than making people follow up and waste time trying to reach people on phone lines to make sure things are updated and they met requirements. It doesn’t help anyone, and most people are still broke while working a jobs.
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