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Cory Doctorow #BLM

18 Feb, 8 tweets, 3 min read

@EFF

Back in November, I published an article for @EFF about @HP's latest printer-ink ripoff: after offering its customers a free-ink-for-life plan, it unilaterally switched them all to a $1/month-for-life plan.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

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I advocate on a lot of issues related to tech policy and 99% of the time, I'm trying to get people to care about complex technical issues before they become crises - but people can't see the danger until it's too late.

Printer ink is the exception.

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Everybody knows that printers are a ripoff: a monopolized, abusive industry that has devoted itself to the dirtiest, most deceptive, immoral tactics, and then handwaved them away with insulting, butter-wouldn't-melt, disingenuous excuses about doing it for our own good.

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@NPR

That article inspired a FANTASTIC segment on the history of printer-ink shenanigans from @NPR's @planetmoney, "Why Printers Are The Worst."

npr.org/2021/02/17/968…

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The Planet Money team did a characteristically excellent job of explaining just how depraved the ink scam is - it's not just about screwing us all over, it's also about jettisoning every scrap of decency and consideration in service to unbridled greed.

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This - after all - is the industry that pioneered sending out fake "security updates" that actually downgrade your device so that it no longer accepts third-party ink, thereby discouraging millions of people from running critical updates.

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The printer companies - led by HP - are repeat offenders. They do something inexcusable, get caught, issue a nonpology, and then...do it again, only worse. The latest Planet Money segment does an outstanding job of laying out just how rotten the business of printing is.

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You can subscribe to the Planet Money podcast RSS here:

feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast…

And here's a direct link to the MP3 for this episode:

play.podtrac.com/npr-510289/edg…

eof/

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More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

19 Feb

Today's threads (a thread).

Inside: My talks with Snowden and William Gibson; Complicity, incompetence and Capitol Police; How Republicans froze Texas solid; Uber loses court battle, steals wages, censors whistleblower

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/tex…

#Pluralistic

1/

On Feb 22, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."

nisoplus21.sched.com/event/fMlc/key…

2/

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1362788987472015365

My talks with Edward Snowden and William Gibson: Two wonderful books for your TBR.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1362788987472015365

Read 20 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

19 Feb

Uber is a money-hemmorhaging bezzle ("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"). It's $6.8b losses in 2020 are not an aberration.

pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/rin…

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Uber will never be profitable.

Like all scams, Uber depends on fresh suckers coming in and buying out the last round of suckers. To do this, the company has to keep running, even as it loses money.

2/

In fact, the longer Uber stays in business while losing money, the more suckers flock to it. The thinking goes, "All these investors who piled into a money-losing company must know something I don't about how it will become profitable someday."

3/

Read 16 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

19 Feb

@deconstruct_pod

The collapse of Texas's power grid during a lethal cold snap has put Texas politics under a spotlight. There's no better place to start than @deconstruct_pod, where @ryangrim delivers a historically informed, timely series of interviews.

theintercept.com/2021/02/19/dec…

1/

Grim reminds us that the roots of Texas's woes are in the 2002 midterms, when the GOP took the Texas House for the first time in a generation, then engaged in brutal gerrymandering to keep it, and embarked on a string of ideology-driven deregulation adventures.

2/

The GOP ideology holds that businesses are "efficient" because every penny they squeeze out of their costs is converted to profit. There's a kernel of truth to this - indeed, the most prominent early theorist of this was Karl Marx!

3/

Read 28 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

19 Feb

In the aftermath of the Jan 6 Trumpist putsch at the Capitol, the world reeled - not just at the spectacle of the Capitol building overrun by deranged armed insurrectionists, but also at the manifest incompetence of the Capitol Police.

pluralistic.net/2021/01/07/rev…

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The Capitol Police command $460m/year, 10% of Congress's total budget. They had ample warning that murderous, anti-democratic revolutionaries were converging on the Capitol. They had a long track-record of over-responding to protests with overwhelming shows of force.

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Given the track-record, the budget and the warnings, could we truly attribute the failure to contain the insurrectionists to incompetence? Did the shots of police officers taking selfies with members of a lynch mob mean that the force was complicit with the traitors?

3/

Read 11 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

19 Feb

@GreatDismal

Earlier this month, I hosted two extraordinary book-launch events: one for the paperback edition of @GreatDismal's novel AGENCY, the other for the young readers' edition of Ed @Snowden's memoir, PERMANENT RECORD.

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Both events were incredibly exciting. Gibson spoke at length about the relationship of politics to the way he creates futuristic parables (Agency was delayed for a rewrite after the 2016 election) and Snowden, about the way that young people relate to surveillance tech.

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@Copperfields

Now, both are online, courtesy of the booksellers that hosted them. @Copperfields posted the Snowden video yesterday:

And here's my review of the Young Readers' Edition of Permanent Record:

pluralistic.net/2021/02/09/per…

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Read 4 tweets