#5yrsago The first-ever independent audit of whistleblower retaliation in US spy agencies was looking bad for the agencies, so it was shut down thedailybeast.com/us-intelligenc…
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, @beaconPressBks et al) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
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My latest Medium column is "Of Course Mastodon Lost Users"
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Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? You can read my work elsewhere, but it is now a #TwitterCrime to tell you how. Please visit my site, pluralistic.net, for links to find me on less-unhinged places (I can only imagine that my days here are numbered). 21/
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The problem with good news in the real world is that it's *messy*. Neat happy endings are for novels, not the real world, and that goes double for the climate emergency.
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Let's take a sec here and notice something *genuinely great* happening in the US government: the @CFPB's stunning, unbroken streak of *major*, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption.
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Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's *good* that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's *good* that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.
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It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" - we call it "secrets."
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Noted anti-capitalist agitator Adam Smith had it right: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
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Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true.
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Corruption is a system of concentrated gains and diffused costs: cheaters make a lot of money, and their victims each lose a little. The cheater has a much larger pool of money to spend on keeping the scam going, and the victims need to pay *again* to fight the cheater.
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Actually, it's worse. The victim pays once when they are cheated, then, they pay a second time (in time and/or money) when they fight back against the cheater.
But in order to fight back effectively, the victims need to band together.
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