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#poliecon

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Continued thread

The US post- " ":

"As and took over our economy, most government regulators were neutered and captured."

"This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law's criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons."

-- @pluralistic

pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap

pluralistic.netPluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital (20 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Continued thread

"When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they'll drive your users to competing platforms. That's why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they... defected to Instagram."
-- @pluralistic

pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap

moved to Silicon Valley in 1997. For the last three decades, she's been following tech. She wrote a memoir about this experience: the .

This afternoon, I watch this interview:

Kara Swisher — Burn Book: A Tech Love Story - with Laurene Powell Jobs

youtu.be/ZrSy8XJgjjE?si=7yGLKr

The convo was pretty entertaining and very insightful. IMO, the western world is run by a handful of oligarchs. Her book gives a lot of insight into the tech oligarchs

Continued thread

"The Collusion Tax

"There are plenty of studies showing massive government waste, but it’s not in the Federal workforce. It’s in procurement, the place where the government buys from the private sector, everything from pencils to software to nuclear submarines. The government spends about $750 billion a year on contracts. How much of this money is wasted?

It turns out, the answer is a lot."
--

"So here’s the simple way to slice through the bloat we see all around us. It’s not easy, because it would require a genuine commitment to taking on the enormously powerful people who benefit from the status quo."

"But it is simple to understand, and in explaining it, I hope it will also explain what Americans really want done by their new leaders.'" __

thebignewsletter.com/p/cutting

Excellent topic, @pluralistic --

"Before the rise of economism, it was common to speak of its subjects as "political economy" or even "moral philosophy" ( , the godfather of capitalism, considered himself a "moral philosopher"). "Political economy" implicitly recognizes that every policy has squishy, subjective, qualitative dimensions that don't readily boil down to math."

pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/fal

Love graphic - high preist
@ Economism's altar

@pluralistic , thanks for highlighting the Biden admin's important initiatives reinvigorating US competition enforcement.

72 items!

In 2021, the Biden admin published an "executive order on competition, laying out a 72-point program for using existing powers vested in the administrative agencies to break up corporate power and get the monopolist's boot off Americans' necks:"

"The Competition EO is basically a checklist...

pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the

Another excellent blog post, @pluralistic .

"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. The trustbusting era was defined by this idea: if we let the number of companies in a sector get too small, or if we let one or a few companies get too big, they'll eventually start to rig prices."

-- Cory Doctorow

From: pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/you

So about that invisible hand...

"The problem for the West... China’s industrial dominance is underpinned by decades of experience using... all the levers of government & banking, while encouraging frenetic competition among private companies."

“In 2022, Beijing accounted for 85% of all clean-energy manufacturing investment in the world”

How China Pulled So Far Ahead on Industrial Policy - Gift link:
nytimes.com/2024/05/27/busines

cc: @jgkoomey