It's easy to take the Supreme Court's flurry of judicial atrocities as a modern travesty but back in '93, a SCOTUS historical fantasy took a terrible toll on the America its political legitimacy. Long before *Citizens United*, there was *Brooke v. Brown* 1/
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In '93, decades of antitrust work to prevent the accumulation of power into a few companies' hands was being upended by a radical, far-right doctrine called "consumer welfare." 3/
Autonomous vehicles were always nonsense. I wrote about them a year ago, when Uber declared massive losses. Uber's profitability story was always, "Sure, we're losing big *now*, but once we create AVs, we can fire our drivers and make a bundle."
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But Uber never came *close* to building an AV. After blowing $2.5b, the company invented a car whose mean-distance-to-fatal-crash was *half a mile*. Uber had to *pay* another company - *$400 million!* - to take the self-driving unit off its hands. 3/