Once someone gets rich enough, they acquire impunity. They become too big to fail. They become too big to jail. They become too big to care. They buy presidents. They become president

🤢

En termes de positions publiques, Elon Musk alterne provocations, désinformation et pratiques à la limite de la légalité pour promouvoir la candidature républicaine. Lui qui avait par le passé soutenu des candidats démocrates a opéré un virage politique net à la faveur de la pandémie de Covid, puis du rachat de Twitter, qu’il a transformé en X et en bastion de la parole d’extrême-droite.

Le fondateur du site de gauche "Frustration Magazine", Nicolas Framont, a promu son livre contre le monde du travail dans une interview-vidéo de "Welcome To The Jungle", le média préféré des jeunes start-uppers frustrés des entreprises à la papa. Qui n'a laissé la vidéo en ligne que deux jours, avant de la supprimer en arguant d'une évolution de sa ligne éditoriale. Aurait-il touché les limites de ce que peut être un "média de marque" ?

No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren't really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.

There's very little you can do as a consumer. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism.

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.
It's RSS.

Today, just as 200 years ago, bosses—whether a shipping magnate or a CEO of an AI company—won’t hand over the gains from a new technology to their workers willingly3.

Hier matin, j’ai dû payer 50 € d’amende (au passage, le montant est énorme !!!) pour ticket non validé. En bonus, une discussion vraiment déplaisante avec deux contrôleur⋅se⋅s (qui ne faisaient que leur travail), du stress, du temps de perdu entre deux correspondances. Et un sentiment d’injustice immense.

I still think the commercial generative AI boom has probably started to peak, that consumer enthusiasm for generative AI is plateauing, and that we can expect OpenAI and other AI firms to ink as many deals and enterprise contracts as they can in coming months while they’re still considered prime movers and relatively impervious to the careful considerations of sound financial logic.1

One of Friedman's signal achievements was the theory of "shareholder supremacy." In 1970, the New York Times published Friedman's editorial "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits":

In it, Friedman argued that corporate managers had exactly one job: to increase profits for shareholders. All other considerations – improving the community, making workers' lives better, donating to worthy causes or sponsoring a little league team – were out of bounds. Managers who wanted to improve the world should fund their causes out of their paychecks, not the corporate treasury.

La Haye est devenue la première ville au monde à interdire la publicité dans son paysage urbain pour les combustibles fossiles et les services et produits à forte intensité de carbone, tels que les voyages en avion et les croisières. Les réclames pour les billets d’avion, mais aussi pour les voitures hybrides, par exemple, y seront proscrites à partir du 1er janvier 2025, ont confirmé les autorités de la ville néerlandaise vendredi.

Bon, on préférerait l'interdiction totale de la publicité dans l'espace public, mais c'est déjà ça.

Excellente démonstration ! 🥸

In a saner society, a rich guy with Musk's well-known and unapologetically expounded views would sooner find himself under a guillotine than atop a space agency with the power to dragoon the world's resources into his k-hole John Galt cosplay. The certainty that he will never make another planet habitable is no comfort to the rest of us, when in the act of trying he may do the opposite to this one. The doomsday scenario is coming from inside the house. I hope he dies on Mars.

Une bonne illustration d’un projet qui nous fait hausser les sourcil dans un wtf de bon aloi, mais qui nous semblera être juste le nouveau normal d’ici quelques années si on ne fait rien.

Beyond that, we should be thinking about proactive moves too—the time has never been better to advocate for a 4-day workweek, for instance. We’re just taking the AI companies, who say they’re in the process of ushering in a sublime productivity revolution, at their word! What better way to ensure all workers, not just CEOs, share the benefits of this presumably enhanced efficiency? While we’re at it, the same case might be made to agitate for universal healthcare again, too. The case should be obvious: In a world of hyperabundance, everyone gets access to free healthcare. It should be the very first thing. Anything else is immoral. Otherwise you get Elysium.

+1

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News.

high-income countries, Nestlé brand baby foods have no added sugars them, in line with recommendations from major health organizations around the world and consumer pressure. But in low- and middle-income countries, Nestlé adds sugar to those same baby products, sometimes at high levels, which could lead children to prefer sugary diets and unhealthy eating habits […]

Surprise ! (Non)

‘The exploitation economy is just as unhealthy and dehumanising for the customers as it is for the workers,’ Andrew Callaway, a San Francisco gig-worker, wrote in 2016. ‘You never even have to see the person who is cleaning your house or your clothes. Plenty of people requested that I drop off their food at the door. Customers grow to love apps that make the worker anonymous.’ In this system, the invisible hand of the market can actually bring you a burrito.