#Meta#Metaverse#BigTech#Facebook#TechnoFeudalism: "Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.
The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.
The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.
Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.
Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins."
Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:
"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (#SteinsLaw)
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)
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I'm not the best at #introduction (s) but here goes nothin :002blush:
hoi, I'm mana, also known as momo. I'm an FC leader in #ffxiv and I play on Primal DC. I'm shy, but one of those people who won't shut up once you get to know me. I have a tendency to be introspective/keep to myself when I'm really depressed. I have #cptsd and am #neurodivergent. Also, I'm disabled from #rheumatoidarthritis and #ehlersdanlossyndrome and #fibromyalgia. Most days are good days, but the bad ones are pretty bad :blobcat_notlikethiscry:
I like modding/coding games so I've been learning #blender and #json to facilitate that. idk what else to say butt hi everyone, thanks for reading this if you did! let's be friends?:sbahri_question:
Last Nov, publishing got excellent news: the planned merger of #PenguinRandomHouse (the largest publisher in the history of human civilization) with its immediate competitor #SimonAndSchuster would not be permitted, thanks to the #FTC's deftly argued case against the deal:
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KKR took one of the nation's largest healthcare providers, #Envision, hostage to surprise billing, making it dependent on these fraudulent payments. When Congress finally acted to end this scam, KKR was able to take to the nation's editorial pages and damn Congress for recklessly endangering all the patients who relied on it:
Paramount has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to private equity firm KKR for $1.6 billion in cash, after more than three years of trying to offload the book publishing powerhouse.
Let's review a little of KKR's track record, shall we? Most spectacularly, they are known for buying and destroying Toys R Us in a deal that saw them extract $200m from the company, leaving it bankrupt, with lifetime employees getting $0 in severance even as its executives paid themselves tens of millions in "performance bonuses":
The pillaging of Toys R Us isn't the worst thing KKR did, but it was the most brazen. KKR lit a beloved national chain on fire and then walked away, hands in pockets, whistling. They didn't even bother to clear their former employees' sensitive personnel records out of the unlocked filing cabinets before they scarpered:
But as flashy as the Toys R Us caper was, it wasn't the worst. Private equity funds specialize in buying up businesses, loading them with debts, paying themselves, and then leaving them to collapse. They're sometimes called vulture capitalists, but they're really vampire capitalists:
Given a choice, PE companies don't want to prey on sick businesses – they preferentially drain off value from thriving ones, preferably ones that we must use, which is why PE – and KKR in particular – loves to buy health care companies.
Heard of the "surprise billing epidemic"? That's where you go to a hospital that's covered by your insurer, only to discover – after the fact – that the emergency room is operated by a separate, PE-backed company that charges you thousands for junk fees. KKR and Blackstone invented this scam, then funneled millions into fighting the No Surprises Act, which more-or-less killed it:
KKR took one of the nation's largest healthcare providers, Envision, hostage to surprise billing, making it dependent on these fraudulent payments. When Congress finally acted to end this scam, KKR was able to take to the nation's editorial pages and damn Congress for recklessly endangering all the patients who relied on it:
Remember "#DeathPanels"? #SarahPalin promised us that #UniversalHealthcare was a prelude to a Stalinist nightmare in which unaccountable bureaucrats decided who lived or died based on a cost-benefit analysis of what it would cost to keep you alive versus how much your life was worth.
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These aren't the usual economies of scale. Rather the PE strategy is to buy and merge all the similar businesses in a region, so customers, suppliers and workers have nowhere else to turn.
That's bad enough when it's aimed at funeral homes, pet groomers or any of the other sectors that have been bigfooted by PE:
Ito Kanako - Hacking to the Gate w/ Lyrics ~ Steins;Gate OP (www.youtube.com)
Paramount to sell Simon & Schuster to KKR for $1.6 Billion Cash (www.cnn.com)
Paramount has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to private equity firm KKR for $1.6 billion in cash, after more than three years of trying to offload the book publishing powerhouse.