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Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

27 Apr

Today's threads (a thread).

Inside: Robot Artists & Black Swans; Klobuchar on trustbusting; Pharma's anti-generic-vaccine lobbying blitz; Unpack the court with judicial overrides; Lexmark's toxic printer-ink; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bru…

#Pluralistic

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Next Thursday, I'm helping Bruce Sterling launch "Robot Artists & Black Swans," a book of sf short stories in the Italian "fantascienza" mode, at Austin's Book People!

bookpeople.com/event/virtual-…

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1386821005222445056

Robot Artists & Black Swans: The fantascienza of "Bruno Argento" (AKA Bruce Sterling).

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1386821005222445056

Read 19 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

27 Apr

"Every pirate wants to be an admiral." That is a truism of industrial policy: the scrappy upstarts that push the rules to achieve success then turn into law-and-order types who insist that anyone who does unto them as they did unto others is a lawless cur in need of whipping.

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This is true all over, but there's an especial deliciousness to see it applied to printers and printer ink, always a trailblazer in extractive, deceptive and monopolistic practices of breathtaking, shameless sleaze.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

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@lexmark

Pierre Beyssac, a director of Internet Europe, recounts his campaigns in the Printer Wars, which start when he ordered a non-wifi-enabled @lexmark printer but got shipped the wifi version.

https://twitter.com/pbeyssac/status/1386988213923983362

Read 23 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

27 Apr

One of the GOP's tells is that it accuses Democrats of its own sins. Take "packing the court," a process we watched unfold with Trump's appointments of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett.

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A Supreme Court filled with Federalist Society sociopaths chosen by Donald Trump is scary, for two reasons: first, they are apt to take up extreme Constitutional interpretations, and second, because they will distort Congress's intent to serve the wealthy.

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There's not much we can do about the former, but the latter is fully addressable through lawmaking. Take SCOTUS's recent ruling that the FTC doesn't have the authority to extract cash penalties from predatory lenders to compensate their victims.

scotusblog.com/2021/04/unanim…

3/

Read 12 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

27 Apr

2.5 billion people in the Earth's 125 poorest countries have received zero vaccine doses. The 85 poorest countries are projecting full vaccination in 2023 or 2024. This isn't just a form of racist mass-killing, it's also a civilizational and species-wide risk.

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Every infected person, after all, makes billions and billions of copies of the virus, and these copies are imperfect, producing mutations. Eventually, there will probably be a mutation so contagious that it bypasses vaccine-based defenses.

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Worse still, if the virus circulates widely enough for enough time, the likelihood that a mutant strain will emerge that is both more infectious AND more deadly goes up and up.

A half-vaccinated world is like a swimming pool where only one end has a "no pissing" rule.

3/

Read 18 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

27 Apr

@amyklobuchar

When @amyklobuchar introduced her Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), I called it a "big fucking deal," because it would do away with Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" standard for antitrust action.

pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/cal…

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Prior to the Reagan years, US courts and prosecutors went after monopolies because monopolies were considered harmful on their own - they gathered too much power into too few hands, to the detriment of workers, suppliers, the environment, policy, and consumer pricing.

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But Robert Bork - a Nixonite criminal whose actions were so odious the Senate refused to confirm him for the Supreme Court - promoted a bizarre Qanon-like theory that if you looked hard enough at the laws, that's not what they said at all.

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Read 18 tweets