The original 'The Gerrymander' editorial cartoon, which depicts a sinister salamander wrapped around a curiously shaped void. The salamander and the void are labeled with the names of areas that had been crammed into different electoral districts. The image has been modified: the salamander and the void have been colorized with desaturated yellow-green tones. An image of a portly millionaire in a suit with a money-bag for a head pokes out from behind the salamander. The background is a marbled endpaper from an antique book, desaturated and recolored. The image is labelled 'THE GERRYMANDER' in block caps.
Monopoly is capitalism's gerrymander (permalink)

You don't have to accept the arguments of capitalism's defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated the profit motive to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Smith – like Marx and Engels in Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto – saw competition as a catalyst that could convert selfishness to the public good: a rich person who craves more riches still will treat their customers, suppliers and workers well, not out of the goodness of their heart, but out of fear of their defection to a rival:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

This starting point is imperfect, but it's not wrong. The pre-enshittified internet was run by the same people who later came to enshittify it. They didn't have a change of heart that caused them to wreck the thing they'd worked so hard to build: rather, as they became isolated from the consequences of their enshittificatory impulses, it was easier to yield to them.

Once Google captured its market, its regulators and its workforce, it no longer had to worry about being a good search-engine – it could sacrifice quality for profits, without consequence:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

It could focus on shifting value from its suppliers, its customers and its users to its shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:

https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai'i:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Wear Sunscreen or the Sunscreen Speech are the common names of an essay actually called "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997.

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Residents of 21 cities in Utah have access to some of the fastest, most competitively priced broadband in the country, at speeds up to 10gb/s and prices as low as $75/month. It's uncapped, and the connections are symmetrical: perfect for uploading and downloading. And it's all thanks to the government.

This broadband service is, of course, delivered via fiber optic cable. Of course it is. Fiber is vastly superior to all other forms of broadband delivery, including satellites, but also cable and DSL. Fiber caps out at 100tb/s, while cable cans out at 50gb/s – that is, fiber is 1,000 times faster:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g

Despite the obvious superiority of fiber, America has been very slow to adopt it. Our monopolistic carriers act as though pulling fiber to our homes is an impossible challenge. All those wires that currently go to your house, from power-lines to copper phone-lines, are relics of a mysterious, fallen civilization and its long-lost arts. Apparently we could no more get a new wire to your house than we could build the pyramids using only hand-tools.

In a sense, the people who say we can't pull wires anymore are right: these are relics of a lost civilization. Specifically, electrification and later, universal telephone service was accomplished through massive federal grants under the New Deal – grants that were typically made to either local governments or non-profit co-operatives who got everyone in town connected to these essential modern utilities.

Shameful fact: the plight of U.S. retirees is a global exception. In their pursuit of lower taxes, America’s wealthiest individuals support policies that make it extremely difficult for seniors to manage the increasing costs of healthcare, housing, and basic necessities. Not so in other rich countries like Germany, France, and Canada, where robust public pensions and healthcare systems offer retirees stability and dignity. After a lifetime of hard work, older citizens in the U.S. find their reward is merely scraping by, as savings diminish under the weight of soaring medical costs in the most expensive healthcare system in the developed world.

The solution from America’s elites? Suck it up and work longer.

An example of this mindset appeared in a New York Times op-ed by C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and Glenn Kramon, a Stanford Business School lecturer. The two accused older folks of robbing economic resources from the young through Social Security and Medicare—never mind that workers fund these programs with their own lifelong payroll contributions. They paint a picture of 65-year-old Americans jauntily playing “pickleball daily” and jet-setting “far and wide,” proposing to increase the age to collect Social Security and Medicare benefits, essentially forcing future retirees to work longer. (Curiously, they overlook how this move robs young people—too young to vote—of future retirement years. This echoes 1983, when the Reagan administration and Congress pushed the Social Security age from 65 to 67, impacting Gen X before they could even vote on it).

Steuerle and Kramon prop up their plan with studies that extol the health and wellbeing perks of working into old age, adding that “each generation lives longer” and therefore, it’s a patriotic duty for the elderly to stay on the job.

Are we all really living longer? Let’s first point out that Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, noted for their research in health and economics, recently showed that many Americans are not, in fact, enjoying extended lives. As they stated in their own New York Times op-ed, those without college degrees are “scarred by death and a staggeringly shorter life span.” According to their investigation, the expected lifespan for this group has been falling since 2010. By 2021, people without college degrees were expected to live to about 75, nearly 8.5 years shorter than their college-educated counterparts.

Nobody likes Big Oil, a monopolistic and heavily polluting industry with a legendary history of abusing its excessive power that can be traced back over the past hundred years.

But Donald Trump has promised to be the oil industry's best friend — if its bosses give him a billion dollars.

In the latest instance of the former president's mind-blowing corruption, he is reported to have entertained a group of two dozen top U.S. oil company executives at Mar-a-Lago. Over dinner at his Palm Beach sanctum, Trump is quoted as telling the chiefs of Chevron, Exxon, and Occidental Petroleum and their colleagues that if they collectively coughed up $1 billion to ensure his reelection, he would take very good care of their corporate needs.

According to The Washington Post, he promised to toss out all of President Joe Biden's efforts to mitigate climate changes, including new rules aimed at reducing automotive exhaust and promoting electric vehicles. For that measly billion bucks, he vowed to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, where we have already seen catastrophic well blowouts, rescind restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, pull down the windmills that he hates, and cancel the recent White House decision to pause new natural gas export permits.

"You'll get it on the first day," said Trump, according to someone who was present and blabbed to the Post. Speaking as crudely as any gangster, he informed the oilmen that they and their companies can easily raise that kind of money, and that paying him off would be "a deal" because of the high return on their investment.

We Texans are long-accustomed to enduring stormy outbursts of corruption among our top state legislators. The spectacle of lawmakers taking corporate bribes to provide legislative favors, tax breaks, government contracts and such is as common as spring tornadoes — and even more destructive to the public good.

The state's prevailing ethical standard was articulated several years ago when a powerful legislator (nicknamed "Bull of Brazos&quot was caught personally profiting from a bill he was pushing: "I'd just make a little bit of money," he explained dismissively. "I wouldn't make a whole lot."

Before rolling your eyes at Crazy Texas, though, consider the sneak attack that corporate America is now making to legalize the wholesale bribery of every public official in America. Their ploy is a cynical effort to redefine bribery. Paying officials to do corporate favors, they insist, should only be considered a bribe if the payoff is arranged before the favor is done. Yes, with a straight face, these finaglers claim that if the payment comes after an official delivers the goods, it's not a bribe but simply a "gratuity." Like tipping a waiter for good service.

Every religion prioritizes care for the needy. Christianity's Benedictine Rule, for example, puts care of the sick atop the moral order, "above and before every other duty."

Really — even above the holy Wall Street mandate that medical and insurance conglomerates must squeeze every last penny of profits out of America's corporate-care system? Well, gosh, they say, let's not go crazy with this religious stuff! There's morality ... and then there's business.

Consider how today's monopolized and financialized hospital networks treat nurses — the high-touch frontline people who do the most to put care in "health care." Paid a pittance, thousands of nurses across America are now organizing and unionizing against the inequities of this system. The nurses' core grievance, however, is not their pay, but the gross understaffing imposed on them and their patients by profiteering hospital chains.

In a national survey, more than half of nurses feel "used up" and "emotionally drained." Why? Primarily because executives keep goosing up profits by eliminating care providers, making it impossible for the remaining, stretched-out staff to meet their own high moral standard of care. That's demoralizing for nurses ... and deadly for patients.