Apple is a true business innovator: For more than a decade, they have been steadily perfecting an obscure anticompetitive tactic, turning a petty grift invented by console games companies into a global, cross-industry mechanism for extracting rents and centralizing control.
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I'm speaking of App Stores, of course, and not just any app store, but one that's illegal to compete with or switch away from. This started with console companies, who used technical tricks to ensure that they could skim a rake from every program you bought for your system.
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Consoles used proprietary hardware or media formats to ensure that software vendors couldn't sell directly to you, that every sale would be forced through their storefronts or licensing systems.
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On May 7, the @GburgBookFest is featuring me in an interview conducted by John @scalzi; we pre-recorded the event but I'll be in the live chat for the premiere.
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XKCD's scientific microfiction meme: "Types of scientific paper."
@About_Medicine Think of a loan. You ask me for a $10,000 loan to buy a car, and you offer the car as collateral. You pay some upfront processing fees, a downpayment, and a monthly fee. If you default, I can repo the car. That's a normal loan.
@About_Medicine But now I turn around and sell someone else the right to collect your payments from the loan. Say you're paying $200/month, and with interest, you will spend 8 years paying it back. If you miss a payment, you'll get hit with penalties.
@About_Medicine If you default on the loan - miss three payments in a row, say - the car gets repoed. The repo man wants paying, and the car has depreciated, so there's a chance that whoever buys that loan won't see the full amount.
The annual Locus Awards finalists have been announced and I am thrilled to pieces to see my novel ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone book in the Little Brother universe for adults, in the final ten for Best SF Novel!
* The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
* The Last Emperox by @scalzi
* Network Effect by @MarthaWells1
* Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe
(also excited to see @torbooks, my publisher, next to so many of those names!)
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