“Before the term ‘spam’ entered general use it wasn’t necessarily clear to everyone that unwanted marketing messages were a bad way to behave. I’m hoping ‘slop’ has the same impact – it can make it clear to people that generating and publishing unreviewed AI-generated content is bad behaviour.”
@skykiss I about killed a stranger the other day when one of those things went driving by and I muttered aloud "gee dude, sorry about the small penis." for all I know that stranger is still standing there in the parking lot laughing hysterically.
@metin I'll give it a try. Prices are reasonable and shipping is surprisingly cheap. I'll let you know how it goes 🙂
I forgot to mention: I can see why shops like Society6 are being careful about copyright. It's an heated topic. Although I agree that this is obviously satire and I don't even think it would violate any copyrights (except maybe the font). But I'm not that familiar with copyright laws 🙈
@pluralistic -- "Companies have 'near total managerial discretion' to lump business units together and group their profits and losses in bloated, undifferentiated balance-sheet items ... The SEC lets Amazon – and other gigantic companies – get away with a degree of secrecy that should disqualify it from offering stock to the public."
One set of rules, enforced for the little guy, ignored for the behemoth. As George Carlin said, "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."
"As Mitchell points you, it's not just Amazon that flouts this rule. We don't know how much money Google makes on Youtube, or how much Apple makes from the App Store (Apple told a federal judge that this number doesn't exist). Warren Buffett – with significant in hundreds of companies across dozens of markets – only breaks out seven segments of profit-and-loss for Berkshire Hathaway." Interesting reading on @pluralistic article on Amazon https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees
@pluralistic "Of course, there's an easy way to settle the argument: Amazon could just comply with SEC regs and break out its P&L for its e-commerce operation. I assure you, they're not hiding this data because they think you'll be pleasantly surprised when they do and they don't want to spoil the moment." Is anyone in the EU or UK ( stifles a giggle) looking into this?
@peterainbow@pluralistic Reminds me of the moment in the Microsoft antitrust trial when a Microsoft executive testified that the company’s profits weren’t kept in a spreadsheet. They were “recorded by hand, on a sheet of paper.” The judge was openly incredulous.
For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Rather than using the way the world actually works as their starting point for how to think about it, they build elaborate models out of abstract principles like "rational actors." The resulting mathematical models are so abstractly elegant that it's easy to forget that they're just imaginative exercises, disconnected from reality:
@pluralistic From the post - an incredible insight:
Amazon is the poster-child for monopoly run amok. As Yanis Varoufakis writes in Technofeudalism, Amazon has actually become a post-capitalist enterprise. Amazon doesn't make profits (money derived from selling goods); it makes rents (money charged to people who are seeking to make a profit)
BTW - personally I have not purchased anything from amazon in years. I stopped my once in a random blue moon shopping at #WholeFoods, and absolutely refuse to become a #prime member.
A little-known and utterly wonderful thing in Reykjavík is the Recycled House, to the north east of the main city centre. It's a home and a public art exhibition of scrap wood and metal transformed into buildings with mythological themes and elements of witchcraft and tribalism. Eerie, but excellent.
I wrote about our chance encounter here on our website:
Found this doll in a crate full of similar items in a garage in Bernay. Doing the alt text for this was challenging, but seeing it for the first time was worse