55 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. While this partnership made it easier to implement and manage theiTSCi closed supply chain, the sale of minerals to a single entity likeMMR/CDMC created a monopsony situation to the detriment of theminers (Matthysen and Montejano, 2013; Johnson, 2013). Thus, thebargaining capacity of artisanal diggers over mineral price setting wasdramatically reduced. As a result, diggers often violently opposed theMMR/CDMC’s price-setting policies (Wakenge, 2017).

      monopsony - low prices

    1. Today, the ITSCI programme largely dominates the DRC mining sites at such a level that it benefits froma monopsony situation, in which, miners can only sell 3T minerals to ITSCI if they want to enter in thelegal supply chain. More options would accelerate and facilitate the access to a legal supply chain, butalso give more power to artisanal miners to negotiate the value of their production, the selling pricehaving a demonstrated important influence on their revenue.

      itsci dominance - less bargaining power to sell minerals at better prices

    1. First, iTSCi, which remains the only legal way of sourcing 3 T minerals fromeastern DRC by 2015, created a transnational monopsony through the bot-tleneck position of smelters, effectively de-linking local pricing from worldmarket prices. This increases transaction costs for upstream stakeholders:while transnational businesses manage to buy at artificially lowered prices(iTSCi charges its operational cost on members), miners, cooperatives, andmiddlemen bear the brunt. With the imposition of prices, the economic turn-over of artisanal miners eventually declines. In addition, without comple-mentary livelihood projects that make up for the loss of informal solidarityand pre-financing arrangements (that used to provide a basis for economicactivity in the “informal” scheme), formalisation inevitably reduces livelihoodoptions,

      transational monopsony

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    1. towards formalization of theartisanal mining sector in eastern DRC has been the emergence of buying monopolies atthe local level. Only comptoirs meeting the standards of the Itsci traceability schemehave been able to get their minerals sold to Western end-users in the 3T industry, andthis has given them the power to unilaterally impose certain conditions on theirsuppliers.

      local monopoly - less bargaining power on suppliers

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  2. Feb 2024
    1. The FTC, of which Khan is now chair, contends that Amazon has found a way to push up prices after all, without losing shoppers. It does this, the FTC argues, by imposing ever-higher fees on third-party sellers, who have no choice but to pass these costs on to shoppers by raising their prices. If those businesses try to sell more cheaply elsewhere, Amazon throttles their sales on its platform—which, thanks to the central place in e-commerce that Amazon has built up over the years, can be a death sentence for these businesses. So, according to the FTC, sellers generally absorb the high fees by inflating their prices not just on Amazon but across the web—precluding the price competition that could loosen Amazon’s grip on e-commerce.

      This sounds like the "favoured nation status" from Cory's book

  3. Nov 2023
    1. Mobile network operators, often government sanctioned monopolies granted via spectrum licenses, are in increasing competition with an explosion of “open spectrum” technologies and new operating models for wireless networks.
  4. Sep 2022
    1. Right now without your help, without support from loyal readers, we will not be able to continue publishing. Since Google has decided to dominate online advertising and destroyed small ad agencies, ad rates for independent sites have diminished to a trickle. Please ask yourself: Have we helped you choose movies that are appropriate for your family? Then make sure we continue publishing by becoming a sustaining member for as little as $1 a month -- that's the price of a small coffee, only once a month. It's up to you.
  5. Aug 2022
    1. Magie's game was becoming increasingly popular around the Northeastern United States. College students attending Harvard, Columbia, and University of Pennsylvania, left-leaning middle class families, and Quakers were all playing her board game. Three decades after The Landlord's Game was invented in 1904, Parker Brothers published a modified version, known as Monopoly. Charles Darrow claimed the idea as his own, stating that he invented the game in his basement. Magie spoke out against them and reported that she had made a mere $500 from her invention and received none of the credit for Monopoly.[7] In January 1936, an interview with Magie appeared in a Washington, D.C. newspaper, in which she was critical of Parker Brothers. Magie spoke to reporters about the similarities between Monopoly and The Landlord's Game. The article published spoke to the fact that Magie spent more money making her game than she received in earnings, especially with the lack of credit she received after Monopoly was created. After the interviews, Parker Brothers agreed to publish two more of her games but continued to give Darrow the credit for inventing the game itself.[11] Darrow was known as the inventor of Monopoly until Ralph Anspach discovered Magie's patents and her relation to the Monopoly game while fighting a legal battle with the Parker Brothers because of his Anti-Monopoly game. Subsequently, her invention of The Landlord's Game has been given more attention and research. Despite the fact that Darrow and the Parker Brothers capitalized on and were credited with her idea, she posthumously received credit for one of the most popular board games.[3]

      This is a fascinating bit of trivia, and that should be better known by the general public.

  6. Apr 2022
    1. Hence, to keep things balanced, I think we should constantly oppose the anti-competitive behavior by tech giants and start using Mozilla Firefox (in whatever capacity, even as a secondary browser).

      This is an interesting argument as to what individual users can do to keep Firefox alive. But the biggest dent on anti-competitive behavior should come from well enforced proper anti-trust regulations the way Europe is doing it. How can browser users contribute to this?

  7. Jan 2022
  8. canvas.ucsc.edu canvas.ucsc.edu
    1. The Culture Industry: Mass Deception in Dialectic of Enlightenment

      The culture industry is any industry that is producing cultural products: news, beauty, music, fashion industry has one goal: generate profit. They will produce things that are produced like a factory. They are intended to produce consumerism. In the way that sex sells, rebellion also sells. The industries that are making our culture are feeding us our news so are corporaterized. Adorno and Horkheimer would not be suprised about YouTube. That cultural adversary may be dialectical.

      Academia. You know more about less and less.

      Backdrop context: Shaky ground of liberal democracy in the beginnings of WW2,rise of social movements, rise of nationalism and facism.

      Englightment: Reason & Individual liberty Bacon: a larger system that synthesized knowledge and power as one; a flipping of nature over man and man over nature; but A/H thought that this played out in a human global scale.

      If Enlightenment was supposed to create logic and reason why did we experience WW2, for A/H if we're to take Bacon seriously we have to consider DOMINATION in newer notions of freedom.

      Regression: Enlightenment as Myth. Englightenment becomes totalitarian it ABSTRACTS. Ex. Hitler youth, a difference among others yet they become homogenous sameness among each other.

      The result of the sacrifice continues that is far more reaching that MArx's alienation. --> UNFETTERED ACCEPTANCE

      Adorno/H say that positivism: 1) a system of philiospgy were every assertion can be proved 2) as ideoogy where eveyrthing is true by default and questioning it goes against objective foundations.

      Kant saw a short-sighted view of self-reason

      IDEOLOGY of defintiion #2 the process of Englightenment is brought into analysis of the Culture Industry.

      Context: AMerica is becoming global powerhouse, Soviet underwent their own Industrial Revolution, change was everywhere and revolutionary change with one large outlier thus the immediat question. Despite a global population of workers revolitng around the globe then why didnt the United States or Western Countries embrace similar post-capitalist systems seen across teh globe? And how is Soviet existing as a post-capitalist system alongside the capitalist system?

      Art is being systematized, newer technology is being synthesized into one and the same narrative. The same repackaged story; subject and authority. This mimics the governance of a few over many.

      A/H utilize Kant's idea of schemtaism (being how the midn communicates with objects and other structures aorund us, how to reason and cogantate; synthesize and bring Froyd into the mix, how we suppress ourselves and our desires to how we fit into society. We cognitively pick up how the world is presented to us. Viewership creates the bounds within which we can do art. A psychological realism that is difficult to break for a person who works a 9-5pm; to break it in a capitalist system is used to labor and build wealth. Art becomes the same even when it tries to stand out. There is a unifornm aethetic if you wnat to be different, the sameness and constant

      Art is now abstracted a fulfilmmnet of mere numbers rather than aesthetic work and utility. Regarding art in newer creation, A/H bring up autombiles as an example, a film must have a romatic sequence that the industry now demands. This is part of Mechanical reproduction. Art will become tailored to your class relation as well. But it's not only class and poleconomy but it's not just corporate art is entirely based oof profit but rather there is a cyclcial ideology that reinforces this ideology. see

      The focus isn't on marvel movies (for their thrist for profit) or to tell consumers to not consume this art but its the industry itself that reproduces the

      "Thirst" is not conscious it is a result of the structure that is capitalism the culture industry modling of our desires in the first place.

      It's not good enough to tell individuals to not consume said tailored art. Example anti-semitism is a result of essentialist notions of race. Largest incubators of anti-semitism stem from the bourigeoise themselves but a ruling class of people attempting to hide a ruling class domination. Here the bouregoise know the struggles of individuals and pins this to Jewish individuals.

      Thus its not really just pushing Jewish people out of certain borders this marks the downfall of bouregoise property.

      Look up: > Cultural education became....

      The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry...

      Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used. For this reason it merges with the adver­tisement. The more meaningless the latter appears under monopoly, the more omnipotent culture becomes. (pg 131).

      Unending sameness also governs the relationship to the past. What is new in the phase of mass culture compared to that of late liberalism is the exclusion of the new.

  9. Dec 2021
    1. The anarchist inspiration is clear than ever here: social complexity without “monopoly of legitimate violence” has been possible before, and can be possible again.

      In which contexts has this worked? And if so, how were those societies structured? How might we evolve back to that particular state space or adjacent spaces?

  10. Nov 2021
    1. I created a social justice metaphor library to help explain concepts like why you can't just create a "level playing field" without acknowledging the economic impacts of history (see, even saying it like that is complicated).

      I love that Dave has started a list of these useful social justice metaphors.

      I got side tracked by the idea this morning and submitted a handful I could think of off the top of my head.

      • Baseball fence
      • Parable of the Polygons
      • Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

      I'm curious if there are any useful ones in the neurodiversity space? I feel like I need more of these myself.

  11. Oct 2021
    1. When gold was discovered in the Yukon, 100,000 people desperately tried to make it to a small patch of land in one of the most remote environments on the continent. Few made it all the way. The Klondike Gold Rush was many things: a media conspiracy, a ponzi scheme, a land grab. But above all, it was a humanitarian disaster that stretched over much of the Pacific Northwest.

      “The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of the Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.”

      “That land was stolen by the Canadian state and that gold was whisked away by private interests. The Federal Government only signed land claims with Indigenous peoples in the Yukon in the 1990s, but by that point, almost all the gold had been mined out of the ground.”

      “The Klondike gold rush was a rolling disaster that captured tens of thousands of people. When the first European explorers came to the Americas, they came here looking for gold. In the 1890s, that lust for precious metals eventually led men to the farthest reaches of this continent.”

      “Today, instead of 100,000 people descending on a small patch of land, you have large corporations digging treasures out of the ground. But the legacies these mining operations leave behind are just like what happened in the Klondike: workers with broken bodies, environmental destruction, the dispossession of Indigenous land, sexual violence. The gold rushes never stopped. They just morphed into something different.”

      Canada is Fake

      “Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

    1. This pattern lies at the heart of the shell corporation we call “Canada,” and forms the logic of both domestic and international policy. The mining industry is the most egregious example. Over 75 percent of the world’s mining companies are based in Canada.

      Canada is Fake

      Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.

      Extraction Empire

    2. Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.

      Extraction Empire

      Globally, more than 75% of prospecting and mining companies on the planet are based in Canada. Seemingly impossible to conceive, the scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada’s historical legacy as state, nation, and now, as global resource empire.

      Canada’s Indian Reserve System served, officially, as a strategy of Indigenous apartheid (preceding South African apartheid) and unofficially, as a policy of Indigenous genocide (preceding the Nazi concentration camps of World War II).

    1. “Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

      Canada is fake

      “Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

      https://twitter.com/bauhouse/status/1449737672407150595

      “Eventually they spread their land grab all the way to the Pacific Ocean and the northern coastlines in pursuit of gold, silver, iron, copper, nickel, and diamond reserves.… ‘Canada’ came about in the late 1800s for nakedly economic reasons…”

    1. accountability, reparations, and radical social change

      The mechanisms of our compliance with the dominant system are designed into the system:

      • Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
      • Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
    1. Neurons, synapses, electrochemical receptors, and a compromised immune system.

      I use the metaphor of a compromised immune system to describe the effects of propaganda, the polluted information ecology in which we are swimming.

      Ultimately, the cognitive distortions are the disease of modern life, where we can no longer understand ourselves or our world, because the disinformation campaigns have impaired our ability to think rationally when we are in a constant state of stress, anxiety, and fear. We become stuck in the lizard brain, the limbic system, where we make emotional decisions and subsequently justify our actions with rationalizations.

  12. Sep 2021
    1. I have always rooted for Mozilla in preventing Google from obtaining unequivocal control of what has become the most critical software platform in the modern era, one that holds relevance in nearly everyone's life: the web.
  13. Jun 2021
    1. After working on the problem for a while, we boiled it down to a 4-turn (2 per player), 9 roll (including doubles) game. Detail on each move given below. If executed quickly enough, this theoretical game can be played in 21 seconds (see video below).

      The shortest possible 2-player Monopoly game in 4 turns (2 per player). See the details below this annotation

  14. May 2021
    1. “Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximised their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back . . . There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right,” Ubben told the Financial Times.

      Pretty amazing statement! Elizabeth Warren is right!

  15. Mar 2021
    1. Occasionally, like with search engines, #2 occurs because the incumbents gain massive economies of scale (classic Microeconomics), where by virtue of their being large, the cost to produce each incremental good or service at scale becomes much lower.
    2. The slightly more dangerous scenario where the market has a winner-take-all effect, where one firm or organization ends up controlling over 70% of the market.
  16. Feb 2021
    1. Most important, though, is restoring an appreciation for the importance of interoperability in preventing monopolies and promoting technological self-determination for communities and individuals.
  17. Jan 2021
    1. There is very little academic and statistical study of Wal-Mart’s impact on the health of its suppliers and virtually nothing in the last decade, when Wal-Mart’s size has increased by a factor of five. This while the retail industry has become much more concentrated. In large part, that’s because it’s nearly impossible to get meaningful data that would allow researchers to track the influence of Wal-Mart’s business on companies over time. You’d need cooperation from the vendor companies or Wal-Mart or both–and neither Wal-Mart nor its suppliers are interested in sharing such intimate detail.
      • Difficult to study Wal-Mart because suppliers and partners won't talk.
      • Difficult to track predatory practices because of these tight-lipped partners.
  18. Apr 2020
    1. This victory for Hush-A-Phone was widely considered a watershed moment in the development of a secondary market for terminal equipment, in addition to contributing to the breakup of the Bell System.
    1. So how then has it become so widely popular to call a patent a monopoly when that is simply incorrect?
    2. Therefore, when there is no market there can never be a monopoly because you cannot be in exclusive control of a non-existent market, and you cannot manipulate prices when no one is willing to buy what you are offering.
    1. Customers were prohibited from connecting equipment not made or sold by Bell to the network.
  19. Mar 2020
  20. Feb 2020
    1. Spotify is directly mimicking Google and Facebook, and attempting to roll up power over digital audio markets the way Google and Facebook did over the internet. It has already done so in music. Here’s Rolling Stone, reporting on Spotify’s exploitation of its public utility platform of music distribution to organizes payola-style extortion against artists.
  21. Jan 2020
    1. and hand control to Big Ag

      How the fuck did big agrobusinesses get so big? Don't these GMO skeptics want to talk about that? About monopolies and anti-trust laws in general? and regulatory capture in other fields as well? Aren't these related issues whereby preventing either of these would have averted the big ag crisis we see today?

      We need discussions around these connected points and not in isolation

  22. Nov 2019
  23. Feb 2019
    1. It’s not just logging off of Facebook; it’s logging off the countless websites that use Facebook to log in. It’s not just using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search; it’s abandoning my email, switching browsers, giving up a smartphone, and living life without mapping apps. It’s not just refusing to buy toilet paper on Amazon.com; it’s being blocked from reading giant swaths of the internet that are hosted on Amazon servers, giving up websites and apps that I didn’t previously know were connected to the biggest internet giant of them all.

      Few of us understand the reach of these companies and how ubiquitous they are. It's not just the original companies themselves but how many other companies they've bought to gain control of data. These are the robber barons of the 21 century, controlling a vast monopoly of personal information in a consumer economy.

  24. Jun 2018
    1. LinkedIn not only connects you with other professionals but also with companies and recruiters. The company has uniquely positioned itself as the only platform worthy of professional networking.
  25. Jan 2018
  26. doc-0s-c0-docs.googleusercontent.com doc-0s-c0-docs.googleusercontent.com
    1. The concern of net neutrality supporters is not that major media outlets will find a new way to slug it out with each other for market share, but that everyone else—bloggers, niche news sources and small websites generally—will be priced out of the market for priority service and consigned to a much poorer internet experience

      The internet will not be openly available to those who make a living off of it due to the equal price that will be more out of the price range of some people.

  27. doc-0o-c0-docs.googleusercontent.com doc-0o-c0-docs.googleusercontent.com
    1. It wasn’t all that long ago (well, at least, when you’re my age) that one network—AT&T—ran the whole show.

      Beginning of historical example of AT&T's monopoly.

    2. In spite of all the monopolist’s alarm bells that this decision meant the end of network qualityand the end of reliable service as we knew it, just the opposite came to pass. The idea of having a network that couldn’t discriminate against innovators who wanted to improve it finallybegan to break the choke-hold that the gatekeeper had on the system.

      Conclusion to the history of AT&T example of monopoly of an industry.

    3. previous telecommunications and media technologies, also conceived in openness, eventually fell victim to consolidated control bya few powerful interests, speculative mania by investors, and mistaken government policies which assumed that wise public policywas no public policy.

      General reference to history of monopoly of telecommunications when no gov. policies are in place.

    4. Allowing gigantic corporations—in manycases, monopolyor duopoly broadband Internet access service providers—to exercise unfettered control over Americans’ access to the Internet not only creates risks to technological innovation and economic growth, but it poses a real threat to freedom of speech and the future of our democracy.

      Potential risks of no net neutrality.

    5. turning point in the struggle to ensure the continued openness of the Internet against powerful gatekeeper control.

      Net Neutrality established to keep internet open and safe from monopoly.

  28. Jan 2017
  29. Dec 2016
    1. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, according to Brian Nowak, an analyst with Morgan Stanley.

      This is stunning.

  30. Jun 2016
    1. Captains of Industry or Robber Barons. The choice is yours to decide. The first image shows the American people entrance to the senate was closed while the monopolist not only were allowed to enter but overlooked the senate. The second photo shows how the two headed monster monopoly had immigrants, farmers, banks and pretty much any organization in its industry become crashed and manipulated under the chief robber barons of that time. "IN THE 50 years between the end of the American civil war in 1865 and the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, a group of entrepreneurs spearheaded America’s transformation from an agricultural into an industrial society, built gigantic business empires and amassed huge fortunes. In 1848 John J. Astor, a merchant trader, was America’s richest man with $20m (now $545m). By the time the United States entered the first world war, John D. Rockefeller had become its first billionaire."(econ) This was the reason the Sherman AntiTrust Act was put into place. To regulate business and ensure that no one has too much power

      http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21637338-todays-tech-billionaires-have-lot-common-previous-generation-capitalist