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Saturday, October 11, 2025
Frog Boiling 101: When Should a Frog Jump The Pot?
Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target
When Woodie Guthrie famously wrote on his guitar that “This machine kills fascists” - a sentiment imitated and snowcloned by later generations of musicians and commentators - nobody worried this was a bad thing. Nobody demanded that somebody stop the machine before it killed again.
I’m not trying to normalize fascism, or claim that it isn’t extremely evil (I think it is, see here for more). I’m only saying, again, as a matter of basic logic, that the following things can’t all be true:
1). Many Americans are fascists
2.) Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
3.) Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims.
And I don’t want to abandon 3, because political violence is extremely bad, the norm against it is the only thing restraining us from various forms of smoldering or overt civil war, and we’re still doing pretty well by the standards of most times and places.
So I think the natural conclusion is to abandon 2. Fascists, although evil, aren’t automatically a legitimate target for political violence.
The strongest objection is a slippery slope argument: political violence will always be inconvenient; it will always be tempting to put it off until some further red line is crossed. But if we always give into that impulse, nobody will ever resist dictatorship or start a revolution against an unjust government. Isn’t the tree of liberty naturally “fertilized with the blood of tyrants”?
There’s no simple answer to this concern. Nicholas Decker, who considers this question more thoughtfully than most, concludes that:
Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice.But all of these are their own sorts of slippery slopes. Suppress the speech of their opponents? Should the Republicans have started a civil war when Democrats got social media to do woke content moderation? Ignore the will of Congress? Should Democrats have started a civil war when Trump refused to fund PEPFAR even after Congress allocated the money? Prosecute political opponents? Should the Republicans have started a civil war when New York prosecuted Trump for Stormy Daniels? Should the Democrats start one now that Trump is prosecuting James Comey for perjury? No particular form of any of these things ever feels like the cosmically significant version of these things where assassinations and armed uprisings become acceptable. But would-be dictators are masters of boundary-pushing and frog-boiling; there’s almost never one moment when they say outright “Today I will be cancelling democracy for no reason, sorry”.
I used to think that my bright line was contempt of the Supreme Court - when a leader echoes Andrew Jackson’s boast that “[the Court] has made its decision, now let them enforce it”. But the Trump administration briefly seemed to consider defying a Supreme Court order in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. In the end, they didn’t actually defy the order. And they were being subtle: less Jacksonian swagger, more special pleading about reasons why they thought the ruling didn’t mean what we thought it meant. But if they had actually defied the order - while still doing their best to maintain plausible deniability - would I have resorted to violence, or even felt in an abstract way that “it was time” for violence? I can’t imagine this would have felt convincing at the time.
Is violence justified when we get to FDR-level court packing threats? When we get to Orban? To Chavez? To Xi? To Putin? To Hitler? To Pol Pot? I think I land somewhere between Orban and Hitler, but I can’t say for sure, nor can I operationalize the distinction. And the last person to think about these questions in too much detail got a (mercifully polite) visit from the Secret Service, and even if we disagree with him it’s poor practice to hold a debate where it’s impermissible to assert one side. I will be punting on the deep cosmic question here, at least publicly. (...)
So as a bare minimum, I think people should reject premise (2) above and stop talking about fascists as if it’s okay to kill them. I don’t think this implies support for fascism, any more than saying that you shouldn’t kill communists implies support for communism. They’re both evil ideologies which are bad and which we should work hard to keep out of America - but which don’t, in and of themselves, justify killing the host.
What about going beyond the minimum? If fascist denotatively means “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”, but connotatively “person whom it is okay to kill”, and we personally try not to worsen the connotation but other people still have that association, then should we avoid using it at all? Or is it permissible to still use it for its denotative meaning?
by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: Woody Guthrie/uncredited
[ed. Predictably, staunch do-or-die Second Amendment defenders (with basements full of stockpiled weapons) who've been advocating exactly this kind of violence for years go apoplectic whenever the same rhetoric is used against them. See also: I Stand with Nicholas Decker (US0E):]
***
Attempting to determine when it is appropriate to engage in political violence is, of course, a legitimate, legally protected — in fact, quintessentially American — and worthwhile endeavor. The United States was founded on the principle that if a government becomes tyrannical, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” including through revolutionary violence. As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, following the Shays Rebellion in 1787, Jefferson believed it was essential for citizens to instill the fear of God in government by conducting a violent rebellion at least once every 20 years, and thereby “refreshing [the tree of liberty] from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” (...)Decker’s point is obviously not that the American left (of which he does not consider himself a member) ought to initiate politicide, but that we’re closer to the sort of King George III tyranny that justifies revolution according to the American founding tradition than we’ve been at any point in recent memory. He illustrates this cunningly — evidently too cunningly for his critics — by establishing a parallelism between the conduct of the second Trump regime and the conduct of George III as it’s indicted by the Declaration of Independence. Below is the relevant passage by Jefferson, with lines bolded where Decker draws an analogy to Trump:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.And here’s Decker — an astute reader might catch the similarities!
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.
Evil has come to America. The present administration is engaged in barbarism; it has arbitrarily imprisoned its opponents, revoked the visas of thousands of students, imposed taxes upon us without our consent, and seeks to destroy the institutions which oppose it. Its leader has threatened those who produce unfavorable coverage, and suggested that their licenses be revoked. It has deprived us, in many cases, of trial by jury; it has subjected us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and has transported us beyond seas to be imprisoned for pretended offenses. It has scorned the orders of our courts, and threatens to alter fundamentally our form of government. It has pardoned its thugs, and extorted the lawyers who defended its opponents.This alone doesn’t get you in trouble, of course. Unless you’re a partisan of the MAGA right, there’s nothing that contradicts the current moral fashion about identifying the tyrannical character of the Trump regime, or even comparing Trump to historical figures against whom it is widely accepted that revolutionary violence would have been justified. No more than a decade ago, even the mild-mannered, respectable, moderate conservative author and pop sociologist J.D. Vance was comparing Trump to Hitler!
Decker only gets in trouble when he follows these widely accepted facts and values to their logical conclusion: that it is not unreasonable to believe that at some point in the near future, it will become justifiable to engage in revolutionary (or, more accurately, counter-revolutionary) violence against the principals and agents of the Trump regime, so long as this violence is not conducted glibly or indiscriminately. Admittedly, Decker could have made these qualifications clearer. But the point should not be lost on someone who reads the essay in good faith. (...)
It is nevertheless clear to me, having either been a part of or adjacent to Decker’s intellectual milieu for my entire adult life, based on the homage to the American revolution and the repeated references to the “present administration,” that the class of people being identified as potentially legitimate targets for violence is narrowly limited to regime decisionmakers and the agents who would execute their illegal and revisionary orders. This is also clear in the following paragraph where Decker identifies the conditions he believes would justify a resort to violence:
And when is that time? Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice. We will have to do the right thing. We will have to prepare ourselves to die.Yet his critics all insist he’s calling for the death of anyone on the right “because he lost an election,” even when it’s explained to them why this is false. (...)
A more reasonable explanation is that the people who don’t understand Decker’s article are simply dumb and boring people. Like everyone else, they believe what they’re told — or at least what they want to believe, and then what they’re told to believe in whatever echo chamber they happened to end up in. Unlike Decker and other smart and interesting people, however, they’re pathologically incapable of also thinking for themselves. It’s okay to think you should kill Baby Hitler. It’s okay to admire the American founders and their values. It’s okay to think we need a Second Amendment to deter state tyranny. Hell, for most of these people, it’s okay to think you should murder the vice president if you’re convinced he’s complicit in helping the other side steal an election. [ed. Paging Mike Pence.]
Can you say the same thing about your own side? Of course not!
Why not? It doesn’t matter!
A smart and interesting person is someone who notices these inconsistencies and doesn’t simply paper them over. You don’t have to be precisely right about everything — you just have to make a well-reasoned, good-faith, unconventional argument and be willing to change your mind if someone gives you a good reason to do so. That might not seem like much of a challenge, but most people fail miserably. If telling inconvenient truths was popular, then it wouldn’t be very inconvenient, would it?
[ed. Watch this recent video from Chicago. Who are the ones engaged in political violence?]
Seattle Mariners and Humpy the Salmon Win in Game 5
via:
Image: The Haywain Triptych (detail, flipped), by Hieronymus Bosch, 1516
[ed. Insane, what a nail-biter. See also: Did the Mariners finally win ALDS Game 5 because of Humpy the Salmon?; and, Why there was no way the Mariners were losing historic 15-inning ALDS Game 5 (ST).]
[ed. Insane, what a nail-biter. See also: Did the Mariners finally win ALDS Game 5 because of Humpy the Salmon?; and, Why there was no way the Mariners were losing historic 15-inning ALDS Game 5 (ST).]
Friday, October 10, 2025
Golf Carts Have Taken Over Suburbia. Cue the Resistance.
A slow-rolling cavalry is conquering America’s public roads.
Golf carts are becoming street legal in one community after another as families ditch their minivans and SUVs when they want to run a quick errand or ramble around town.
“It’s fun to get out,” Pearson said. “People tend to talk to people in a small little cart as opposed to a big car or truck.”
But with the boom has come a backlash. Some residents of cart-friendly towns say slow drivers are clogging the streets and reckless ones are making them unsafe. They grumble about cart drivers, including tweens and young teens, speeding, swerving and treating the road like their own private parade route.
East Dundee Village President Dan Pearson was one of the first in town to get a registration sticker for his golf cart. He thought the open six-seater would be a good way to meet voters.
“We all hate you,” a Florida motorist snapped on TikTok when slow-moving carts on a coastal road clogged traffic in both directions. “Get off your golf cart and drive a regular car.” (...)
“One thing you could do in Covid was get outside,” he said. “I think that really spurred on the popularity of the golf cart lifestyle.”
Many of today’s carts have little in common with old-school fairway ramblers. Street-ready versions usually come with seat belts, headlights and turn signals, and can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than $25,000. Manufacturers typically cap their speed at 20 or 25 miles an hour, though some owners say that can be boosted with a little tinkering. 
Johnny Horn bought a four-seater this year that looks like a cruise ship crossed with a UFO.
It has a turquoise frame, white seats and orange rims, along with four-wheel drive for the rare occasions when it snows in his hometown of Gaffney, S.C. The dashboard has a built-in refrigerator. The sound system has 24 speakers, all of which can light up and pulse to the rhythm of the music.
“It’s like a parade,” said Horn, a Realtor who sometimes drives it to showings.
South Carolina law allows golf carts to travel on public roads with a speed limit of 35 mph or less and within 4 miles of the driver’s home. The vehicles don’t need a license plate but must have a permit.
Golf carts are becoming street legal in one community after another as families ditch their minivans and SUVs when they want to run a quick errand or ramble around town.
Dan Pearson bought a six-seat cart this summer after the village board he leads in the Chicago suburb of East Dundee, Ill., approved the vehicles. As he drove through downtown on a recent afternoon, pedestrians gawked and diners waved. “Dude, I love it,” a man called out as Pearson cruised past.
“It’s fun to get out,” Pearson said. “People tend to talk to people in a small little cart as opposed to a big car or truck.”
East Dundee Village President Dan Pearson was one of the first in town to get a registration sticker for his golf cart. He thought the open six-seater would be a good way to meet voters.
“We all hate you,” a Florida motorist snapped on TikTok when slow-moving carts on a coastal road clogged traffic in both directions. “Get off your golf cart and drive a regular car.” (...)
The momentum, however, belongs to the carts. Golf carts designed for the road have been around since the early 2000s, but demand has soared in the past five years. Mark Rickell, a sales executive at cart maker Club Car, estimated the total U.S. market for the vehicles at $5 billion, up from $1 billion before the pandemic.
“One thing you could do in Covid was get outside,” he said. “I think that really spurred on the popularity of the golf cart lifestyle.”
Many of today’s carts have little in common with old-school fairway ramblers. Street-ready versions usually come with seat belts, headlights and turn signals, and can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than $25,000. Manufacturers typically cap their speed at 20 or 25 miles an hour, though some owners say that can be boosted with a little tinkering.
It has a turquoise frame, white seats and orange rims, along with four-wheel drive for the rare occasions when it snows in his hometown of Gaffney, S.C. The dashboard has a built-in refrigerator. The sound system has 24 speakers, all of which can light up and pulse to the rhythm of the music.
“It’s like a parade,” said Horn, a Realtor who sometimes drives it to showings.
South Carolina law allows golf carts to travel on public roads with a speed limit of 35 mph or less and within 4 miles of the driver’s home. The vehicles don’t need a license plate but must have a permit.
by John Keilman, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Images: uncredited
[ed. All for it.]
A Slow Moving and Viral Civil War
The Trump occupation arrived in Chicago and Portland in full force this weekend. And with prominent Republicans like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller salivating on X about civil war, it seems likely that what we’re seeing in these two cities will soon be deployed to more blue states across the country. In fact, you could argue that a new kind of slow moving and very viral civil war has already started.
The plan was to federalize National Guard members already in Portland, but that was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge. So the Trump administration decided to get around the block by sending troops from other states to the city. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Trump administration is sending 400 Texas National Guard members and 300 California National Guard members to Portland and Chicago. “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Pritzker wrote on X. “America is on the brink of martial law,” Newsom wrote.
For those of you scratching your heads as to why sleepy Portland, Oregon, was chosen for the next stop on President Donald Trump’s occupation tour, it seems almost undeniable that it was picked for any reason other than it was a hotbed for Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Trumpism punishes anyone or anything that can steal its viral spotlight. And the White House has now activated every part of the MAGA ecosystem to make sure they control the attention economy as they storm Democratic cities.
And, right on cue, right-wing influencer Nick Sortor quickly made himself into the main character of the Portland occupation. On Friday, Sortor was arrested for disorderly conduct while making content at a protest in front of a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Now the Department of Justice says they’re investigating the arrest, and there was some chatter among right-wing influencers on X that there was even a briefly considered plan for ICE officers to personally yank Sortor out of jail.
As for what Sortor is actually filming, it’s exactly what you would expect. It’s the same kind of content-based aggression made popular by Charlie Kirk. Videos of left-wing protests chasing Sortor down the street while he screeches about how unhinged they are. And he has, obviously, made the rounds on Fox News.
A very dark lesson that right-wing influencers like Sortor have seemingly learned from Kirk’s death is that the more violent the situation they provoke, the harder the White House will respond. “Hey Antifa — just FYI: the more times you assauIt me, the higher the chances you have active duty Marines deployed to the streets of Portland by the end of the week,” Sortor wrote on X, offering himself up to the MAGA meat grinder. Anything to get those views, I guess!
The more malicious parts of the MAGA movement also know that these clashes, between citizens and the military, filmed by influencers, are a perfect venue for more explicitly violent intervention...
The Trump administration is not just occupying cities with soldiers and ICE officers, but creating flashpoints for propaganda. Every eventual showdown on the streets of a Democratic city is first teased by hysterical X posts from Trump administration members, Trump supporters and militias face off against local protesters, and then the chaos is livestreamed and clipped by right-wing influencers that just so happen to have the budgets to fly from city to city following the circus. And, of course, Fox News scoops up the best bits and packages them for viewers at home. Finally, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security does a victory lap, collecting the best footage for a stupid music video about how they’re keeping us all safe. It’s the exact same playbook that was used for Trump’s endless rallies during his first term. The Trump hurricane comes to town and viral content and political violence follows in its wake. The key innovation of his second term is figuring out how to both scale the localized MAGA frenzy beyond just him and, also, most importantly, figure out a way to force it on blue states.
by Ryan Broderick, 404 Media | Read more:
Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.
Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.
“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action...
“BREAKING,” Bo Loudon, a 19-year-old influencer and friend of Mr. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, wrote on social media. Ms. Noem “just stared down violently Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” he wrote.
The video attached showed Ms. Noem on the roof of the building looking down at a small clutch of protesters far away, one of them in a chicken suit.
The man in the chicken suit, Jack Dickinson, 26, who had been coming to the ICE building to protest federal immigration policies for months, said he was struck by the disconnect. Mr. Dickinson said he watched one of the pro-Trump influencers, Nick Sortor, film outside the ICE building, then heard the narration.
“He was talking about this looking like a third-world country,” Mr. Dickinson said as he surveyed a riverfront neighborhood of apartment buildings, coffee shops and an Italian restaurant popular for holiday meals and graduation parties. “It’s just clearly not.” (...)
Mr. Sortor was initially charged with second-degree disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor in Oregon, after he took a burning American flag from a left-wing demonstrator and a fight ensued. The response from Washington, D.C., was intense and immediate. Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Mr. Sortor had been “ambushed by antifa.”
For his efforts, Mr. Sortor found himself at the White House on Wednesday, as the president praised the actions of right-wing activists and pledged to dismantle antifa, a loose-knit group of anarchists whose presence in Portland has long angered Mr. Trump.
Mr. Sortor had been “assaulted in Portland by a flag-burning mob,” the president declared.
Mr. Sortor responded, “The Portland politicians literally are willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these antifa terrorists.”
The plan was to federalize National Guard members already in Portland, but that was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge. So the Trump administration decided to get around the block by sending troops from other states to the city. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Trump administration is sending 400 Texas National Guard members and 300 California National Guard members to Portland and Chicago. “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Pritzker wrote on X. “America is on the brink of martial law,” Newsom wrote.
For those of you scratching your heads as to why sleepy Portland, Oregon, was chosen for the next stop on President Donald Trump’s occupation tour, it seems almost undeniable that it was picked for any reason other than it was a hotbed for Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Trumpism punishes anyone or anything that can steal its viral spotlight. And the White House has now activated every part of the MAGA ecosystem to make sure they control the attention economy as they storm Democratic cities.
And, right on cue, right-wing influencer Nick Sortor quickly made himself into the main character of the Portland occupation. On Friday, Sortor was arrested for disorderly conduct while making content at a protest in front of a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Now the Department of Justice says they’re investigating the arrest, and there was some chatter among right-wing influencers on X that there was even a briefly considered plan for ICE officers to personally yank Sortor out of jail.
As for what Sortor is actually filming, it’s exactly what you would expect. It’s the same kind of content-based aggression made popular by Charlie Kirk. Videos of left-wing protests chasing Sortor down the street while he screeches about how unhinged they are. And he has, obviously, made the rounds on Fox News.
A very dark lesson that right-wing influencers like Sortor have seemingly learned from Kirk’s death is that the more violent the situation they provoke, the harder the White House will respond. “Hey Antifa — just FYI: the more times you assauIt me, the higher the chances you have active duty Marines deployed to the streets of Portland by the end of the week,” Sortor wrote on X, offering himself up to the MAGA meat grinder. Anything to get those views, I guess!
The more malicious parts of the MAGA movement also know that these clashes, between citizens and the military, filmed by influencers, are a perfect venue for more explicitly violent intervention...
The Trump administration is not just occupying cities with soldiers and ICE officers, but creating flashpoints for propaganda. Every eventual showdown on the streets of a Democratic city is first teased by hysterical X posts from Trump administration members, Trump supporters and militias face off against local protesters, and then the chaos is livestreamed and clipped by right-wing influencers that just so happen to have the budgets to fly from city to city following the circus. And, of course, Fox News scoops up the best bits and packages them for viewers at home. Finally, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security does a victory lap, collecting the best footage for a stupid music video about how they’re keeping us all safe. It’s the exact same playbook that was used for Trump’s endless rallies during his first term. The Trump hurricane comes to town and viral content and political violence follows in its wake. The key innovation of his second term is figuring out how to both scale the localized MAGA frenzy beyond just him and, also, most importantly, figure out a way to force it on blue states.
by Ryan Broderick, 404 Media | Read more:
Image: X
[ed. An ecosystem of disinformation. See also: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland (NYT):]***
To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. (...)Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.
Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.
“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action...
“BREAKING,” Bo Loudon, a 19-year-old influencer and friend of Mr. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, wrote on social media. Ms. Noem “just stared down violently Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” he wrote.
The video attached showed Ms. Noem on the roof of the building looking down at a small clutch of protesters far away, one of them in a chicken suit.
The man in the chicken suit, Jack Dickinson, 26, who had been coming to the ICE building to protest federal immigration policies for months, said he was struck by the disconnect. Mr. Dickinson said he watched one of the pro-Trump influencers, Nick Sortor, film outside the ICE building, then heard the narration.
“He was talking about this looking like a third-world country,” Mr. Dickinson said as he surveyed a riverfront neighborhood of apartment buildings, coffee shops and an Italian restaurant popular for holiday meals and graduation parties. “It’s just clearly not.” (...)
Mr. Sortor was initially charged with second-degree disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor in Oregon, after he took a burning American flag from a left-wing demonstrator and a fight ensued. The response from Washington, D.C., was intense and immediate. Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Mr. Sortor had been “ambushed by antifa.”
For his efforts, Mr. Sortor found himself at the White House on Wednesday, as the president praised the actions of right-wing activists and pledged to dismantle antifa, a loose-knit group of anarchists whose presence in Portland has long angered Mr. Trump.
Mr. Sortor had been “assaulted in Portland by a flag-burning mob,” the president declared.
Mr. Sortor responded, “The Portland politicians literally are willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these antifa terrorists.”
The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World
How much do we have to fear from A.I., really? It’s a question I’ve been asking experts since the debut of ChatGPT in late 2022.
The A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, is the most-cited researcher alive, in any discipline. When I spoke with him in 2024, Dr. Bengio told me that he had trouble sleeping while thinking of the future. Specifically, he was worried that an A.I. would engineer a lethal pathogen — some sort of super-coronavirus — to eliminate humanity. “I don’t think there’s anything close in terms of the scale of danger,” he said.
Contrast Dr. Bengio’s view with that of his frequent collaborator Yann LeCun, who heads A.I. research at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Like Dr. Bengio, Dr. LeCun is one of the world’s most-cited scientists. He thinks that A.I. will usher in a new era of prosperity and that discussions of existential risk are ridiculous. “You can think of A.I. as an amplifier of human intelligence,” he said in 2023.
When nuclear fission was discovered in the late 1930s, physicists concluded within months that it could be used to build a bomb. Epidemiologists agree on the potential for a pandemic, and astrophysicists agree on the risk of an asteroid strike. But no such consensus exists regarding the dangers of A.I., even after a decade of vigorous debate. How do we react when half the field can’t agree on what risks are real?
One answer is to look at the data. After the launch of GPT-5 in August, some thought that A.I. had hit a plateau. Expert analysis suggests this isn’t true. GPT-5 can do things no other A.I. can do. It can hack into a web server. It can design novel forms of life. It can even build its own A.I. (albeit a much simpler one) from scratch.
For a decade, the debate over A.I. risk has been mired in theoreticals. Pessimistic literature like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s best-selling book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” relies on philosophy and sensationalist fables to make its points. But we don’t need fables; today there is a vanguard of professionals who research what A.I. is actually capable of. Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, these evaluators have produced a large body of evidence. Unfortunately, this evidence is as scary as anything in the doomerist imagination. (...)
In the course of quantifying the risks of A.I., I was hoping that I would realize my fears were ridiculous. Instead, the opposite happened: The more I moved from apocalyptic hypotheticals to concrete real-world findings, the more concerned I became. All of the elements of Dr. Bengio’s doomsday scenario were coming into existence. A.I. was getting smarter and more capable. It was learning how to tell its overseers what they wanted to hear. It was getting good at lying. And it was getting exponentially better at complex tasks. (...)
I’ve heard many arguments about what A.I. may or may not be able to do, but the data has outpaced the debate, and it shows the following facts clearly: A.I. is highly capable. Its capabilities are accelerating. And the risks those capabilities present are real. Biological life on this planet is, in fact, vulnerable to these systems. On this threat, even OpenAI seems to agree.
In this sense, we have passed the threshold that nuclear fission passed in 1939. The point of disagreement is no longer whether A.I. could wipe us out. It could... A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility. The question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.
by Stephen Witt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Martin Naumann
The A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, is the most-cited researcher alive, in any discipline. When I spoke with him in 2024, Dr. Bengio told me that he had trouble sleeping while thinking of the future. Specifically, he was worried that an A.I. would engineer a lethal pathogen — some sort of super-coronavirus — to eliminate humanity. “I don’t think there’s anything close in terms of the scale of danger,” he said.
When nuclear fission was discovered in the late 1930s, physicists concluded within months that it could be used to build a bomb. Epidemiologists agree on the potential for a pandemic, and astrophysicists agree on the risk of an asteroid strike. But no such consensus exists regarding the dangers of A.I., even after a decade of vigorous debate. How do we react when half the field can’t agree on what risks are real?
One answer is to look at the data. After the launch of GPT-5 in August, some thought that A.I. had hit a plateau. Expert analysis suggests this isn’t true. GPT-5 can do things no other A.I. can do. It can hack into a web server. It can design novel forms of life. It can even build its own A.I. (albeit a much simpler one) from scratch.
For a decade, the debate over A.I. risk has been mired in theoreticals. Pessimistic literature like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s best-selling book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” relies on philosophy and sensationalist fables to make its points. But we don’t need fables; today there is a vanguard of professionals who research what A.I. is actually capable of. Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, these evaluators have produced a large body of evidence. Unfortunately, this evidence is as scary as anything in the doomerist imagination. (...)
In the course of quantifying the risks of A.I., I was hoping that I would realize my fears were ridiculous. Instead, the opposite happened: The more I moved from apocalyptic hypotheticals to concrete real-world findings, the more concerned I became. All of the elements of Dr. Bengio’s doomsday scenario were coming into existence. A.I. was getting smarter and more capable. It was learning how to tell its overseers what they wanted to hear. It was getting good at lying. And it was getting exponentially better at complex tasks. (...)
I’ve heard many arguments about what A.I. may or may not be able to do, but the data has outpaced the debate, and it shows the following facts clearly: A.I. is highly capable. Its capabilities are accelerating. And the risks those capabilities present are real. Biological life on this planet is, in fact, vulnerable to these systems. On this threat, even OpenAI seems to agree.
In this sense, we have passed the threshold that nuclear fission passed in 1939. The point of disagreement is no longer whether A.I. could wipe us out. It could... A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility. The question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.
by Stephen Witt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Martin Naumann
Thursday, October 9, 2025
Flying Private
AltoVolo’s hybrid EVTOL “Sigma”
via:
For use in emergency situations such as pilot incapacitation, the Collier Award-winning system will assume control of the in-flight aircraft at the touch of a button, transmit emergency alerts to air traffic control, navigate to the nearest suitable airport, and land autonomously, all the while issuing instructions and status updates to passengers via the aircraft’s cockpit data screens. The system will then bring the aircraft to a stop on the runway center line, shut down the engine, and instruct occupants when it is safe to exit.
In instances where the pilot is the lone occupant, Safe Return will passively monitor their flight patterns, and if it detects an erratic or dangerous operation, it will first query the pilot before assuming control and landing the airplane. If a pilot regains the ability to safely aviate, they can disengage the system at any point.
via:
[ed. See also: Cirrus's new SR series G7+, the first piston-single aircraft to be equipped with Garmin’s Safe Return Emergency Autoland system. (more here)
For use in emergency situations such as pilot incapacitation, the Collier Award-winning system will assume control of the in-flight aircraft at the touch of a button, transmit emergency alerts to air traffic control, navigate to the nearest suitable airport, and land autonomously, all the while issuing instructions and status updates to passengers via the aircraft’s cockpit data screens. The system will then bring the aircraft to a stop on the runway center line, shut down the engine, and instruct occupants when it is safe to exit.
In instances where the pilot is the lone occupant, Safe Return will passively monitor their flight patterns, and if it detects an erratic or dangerous operation, it will first query the pilot before assuming control and landing the airplane. If a pilot regains the ability to safely aviate, they can disengage the system at any point.
Plastic-Eating Fungus
A fungus from the Amazon rainforest can break down polyurethane plastic without oxygen. It's the first organism discovered with this capability, and it can survive using plastic as its only food source.
Most plastic waste ends up deep in landfills where oxygen doesn't reach, precisely where this fungus thrives. Polyurethane persists for centuries in these environments. It's everywhere: mattresses, insulation foam, shoe soles, adhesives, car parts. Annual global plastic production exceeds 400 million tons. Less than 10% gets recycled.
Pestalotiopsis microspora was discovered in 2011 in Ecuador's Yasunà National Forest, isolated from plant stems. The endophytic fungus lives inside plant tissues without harming its host. Laboratory testing revealed its remarkable ability: it degrades plastic equally well with or without oxygen present.
The fungus secretes an enzyme that breaks apart the chemical bonds holding polyurethane together. In laboratory tests, concentrated enzyme extracts can completely break down polyurethane polymer in under an hour. The fungus also produces a second enzyme that degrades PET plastic, splitting it into simpler compounds the fungus then consumes as food.
What makes this significant? Other plastic-degrading organisms need oxygen to function. When tested without oxygen, fungi like Lasiodiplodia and Pleosporales slowed down or stopped working. P. microspora maintained the same performance. This ability to work without oxygen directly addresses the actual problem—plastic buried in oxygen-depleted landfill depths.
The enzyme production is adaptive. When the fungus grows in a basic environment with only plastic available, it ramps up enzyme output. These enzymes spread through the surrounding material, breaking down plastic well beyond where the fungus itself is growing. The enzyme breakdown converts long-lasting polymer into simple compounds the fungus uses as food.
This fungus offers a biological solution that works precisely where the problem exists, in oxygen-depleted landfills where an ever-increasing amount our plastic waste collects.
by Sam Knowlton, The Confluence | Read more:[ed. Always a good reason to preserve natural habitats - who knows what other plants have undiscovered special properties? See also: A fungus that eats polyurethane (Yale Magazine).]
Pestalotiopsis microspora can degrade plastic in a matter of weeks to months, with experiments showing significant degradation in as little as two weeks and over 60% breakdown in six weeks under ideal conditions. The specific timeframe varies, with some sources noting a few months for complete digestion in certain projects.
Most plastic waste ends up deep in landfills where oxygen doesn't reach, precisely where this fungus thrives. Polyurethane persists for centuries in these environments. It's everywhere: mattresses, insulation foam, shoe soles, adhesives, car parts. Annual global plastic production exceeds 400 million tons. Less than 10% gets recycled.
The fungus secretes an enzyme that breaks apart the chemical bonds holding polyurethane together. In laboratory tests, concentrated enzyme extracts can completely break down polyurethane polymer in under an hour. The fungus also produces a second enzyme that degrades PET plastic, splitting it into simpler compounds the fungus then consumes as food.
What makes this significant? Other plastic-degrading organisms need oxygen to function. When tested without oxygen, fungi like Lasiodiplodia and Pleosporales slowed down or stopped working. P. microspora maintained the same performance. This ability to work without oxygen directly addresses the actual problem—plastic buried in oxygen-depleted landfill depths.
The enzyme production is adaptive. When the fungus grows in a basic environment with only plastic available, it ramps up enzyme output. These enzymes spread through the surrounding material, breaking down plastic well beyond where the fungus itself is growing. The enzyme breakdown converts long-lasting polymer into simple compounds the fungus uses as food.
This fungus offers a biological solution that works precisely where the problem exists, in oxygen-depleted landfills where an ever-increasing amount our plastic waste collects.
by Sam Knowlton, The Confluence | Read more:
Image: uncredited
***
AI Overview:Q. How long does it take Pestalotiopsis microspora to eat plastic?
Pestalotiopsis microspora can degrade plastic in a matter of weeks to months, with experiments showing significant degradation in as little as two weeks and over 60% breakdown in six weeks under ideal conditions. The specific timeframe varies, with some sources noting a few months for complete digestion in certain projects.
Looking For Jobs at ICE
[ed. Every time we see another ICE atrocity in the news, I wonder: where do they find these masked, flak-jacketed meat heads? They're seemingly everywhere in policing these days, especially in aggressive immigration enforcement and high profile security situations. See also: Stupidology. The outsourcing of judgment (N+1).]
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Ask Not Why You Would Work in Biology, But Rather: Why Wouldn't You?
There’s a lot of essays that are implicitly centered around convincing people to work in biology. One consistent theme amongst them is that they all focus on how irresistibly interesting the whole subject is. Isn’t it fascinating that our mitochondria are potentially an endosymbiotic phenomenon that occurred millions of years ago? Isn’t it fascinating that the regulation of your genome can change throughout your life? Isn’t it fascinating that slime molds can solve mazes without neurons? Come and learn more about this strange and curious field! (...)
But I’d like to offer a different take on the matter. Yes, biology is very interesting, yes, biology is very hard to do well. Yet, it remains the only field that could do something of the utmost importance: prevent a urinary catheter from being shunted inside you in the upcoming future.
Being catheterized is not a big deal. It happens to literally tens of millions of people every single year [ed. Really? Just checked and it's true, at least for millions.]. There is nothing even mildly unique about the whole experience. And, you know, it may be some matter of privilege that you ever feel a catheter inside of you; the financially marginalized will simply soil themselves or die a very painful death from sepsis.
But when you are catheterized for the first time—since, make no mistake, there is a very high chance you will be if you hope to die of old age—you’ll almost certainly feel a sense of intense wrongness that it happens at all. The whole procedure is a few moments of blunt violence, invasiveness, that feels completely out of place in an age where we can edit genomes and send probes beyond the solar system. There may be times where you’ll be able to protect yourself from the vile mixture of pain and discomfort via general anesthesia, but a fairly high number of people undergo (repeated!) catheterization awake and aware, often gathering a slew of infections along the way. This is made far worse by the fact that the most likely time you are catheterized will be during your twilight years, when your brain has turned to soup and you’ve forgotten who your parents are and who you are and what this painful tube is doing in your urethra. If you aren’t aware of how urinary catheters work, there is a deflated balloon at the end of it, blown up once the tube is inside you. This balloon keeps the whole system uncomfortably stuck inside your bladder. So, you can fill in the details on how much violence a brain-damaged person can do to themselves in a position like this by simply yanking out the foreign material.
Optimizing for not having a urinary catheter being placed into you is quite a lofty goal. Are there any alternatives on the table? Not practical ones. Diapers don’t work if the entire bladder itself is dysfunctional, suprapubic tubes require making a hole into the bladder (and can also be torn out), and nerve stimulation devices require expensive, invasive surgery. And none of them will be relied upon for routine cases, where catheterization is the fastest, most reliable solution that exists. You won’t get the gentle alternatives because you won’t be in a position to ask for them. You’ll be post-operative, or delirious, or comatose, or simply too old and confused to advocate for something better.
This is an uncomfortable subject to discuss. But I think it’s worth level-setting with one another. Urinary catheterization is but one of the dozens of little procedures that both contributes to the nauseating amount of ambient human suffering that repeats over and over and over again across the entire medical system and is reasonably common enough that it will likely be inflicted upon you one day. And if catheterization doesn’t seem so bad, there are a range of other awful things that, statistically speaking, a reader has a decent chance of undergoing at some point: feeding tubes, pap smears, mechanical ventilation, and repeated colonoscopies are all candidates.
Moreover, keep in mind that all these are simply the solutions to help prevent something far more grotesque and painful from occurring! Worse things exist—cancer, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s—but those have been talked about to death and feel a great deal more abstract than the relatively routine, but barbaric, medical procedures that occur millions of times per year.
How could this not be your life goal to work on? To reduce how awful maladies, and the awful solutions to those maladies, are? What else is there really? Better prediction markets? What are we talking about?
To be fair, most people go through their first few decades of life not completely cognizant how terrible modern medicine can be. But at some point you surely have to understand that you have been, thus far, lucky enough to have spent your entire life on the good side of medicine. In a very nice room, one in which every disease, condition, or malady had a very smart clinician on staff to immediately administer the cure. But one day, you’ll one day be shown glimpses of a far worse room, the bad side of medicine, ushered into an area of healthcare where nobody actually understands what is going on. (...)
I appreciate that many fields also demand this level of obedience to the ‘cause’, the same installation of ‘this is the only thing that matters!’. The energy, climate change, and artificial-intelligence sectors have similar do-or-die mission statements. But you know the main difference between those fields and biology?
In every other game, you can at least pretend the losers are going to be someone else, somewhere else in the world, happening to some poor schmuck who didn’t have your money or your foresight or your connections to do the Obviously Correct Thing. Instead, people hope to be a winner. A robot in my house to do my laundry, a plane that gets me from San Francisco to New York City in only an hour, an infinite movie generator so I can turn all my inner thoughts into reality. Wow! Capital-A Abundance beyond my wildest dreams! This is all well and good, but the unfortunate reality of the situation is that you will be a loser, an explicit loser, guaranteed to be a loser, in one specific game: biology. You will not escape being the butt of the joke here, because it will be you that betrays you, not the you who is reading this essay, but you, the you that cannot think, the you that has been shoddily shaped by the last several eons of evolution. Yes, others will also have their time underneath this harsh spotlight, but you will see your day in it too. (...)
Yes, things outside of biology are important too. Optimized supply chains matter, good marketing matters, and accurate securities risk assessments matter. Industries work together in weird ways. The people working on better short-form video and payroll startups and FAANGs are part of an economic engine that generates the immense taxable wealth required to fund the NIH grants. I know that the world runs on invisible glue.
Still, I can’t help but think that people’s priorities are enormously out of touch with what will actually matter most to their future selves. It feels as if people seem to have this mental model where medical progress simply happens. Like there’s some natural law of the universe that says “treatments improve by X% per year” and we’re all just passengers with a dumb grin on this predetermined trajectory. They see headlines about better FDA guidelines or CRISPR or immunotherapy or AI-accelerated protein folding and think, “Great, the authorities got it covered. By the time I need it, they’ll have figured it out.”. But that’s not how any of this works! Nobody has it covered! Medical progress happens because specific people chose to work on specific problems instead of doing something else with their finite time on Earth.
by Abhishaike Mahajan, Owl Posting | Read more:
But I’d like to offer a different take on the matter. Yes, biology is very interesting, yes, biology is very hard to do well. Yet, it remains the only field that could do something of the utmost importance: prevent a urinary catheter from being shunted inside you in the upcoming future.
But when you are catheterized for the first time—since, make no mistake, there is a very high chance you will be if you hope to die of old age—you’ll almost certainly feel a sense of intense wrongness that it happens at all. The whole procedure is a few moments of blunt violence, invasiveness, that feels completely out of place in an age where we can edit genomes and send probes beyond the solar system. There may be times where you’ll be able to protect yourself from the vile mixture of pain and discomfort via general anesthesia, but a fairly high number of people undergo (repeated!) catheterization awake and aware, often gathering a slew of infections along the way. This is made far worse by the fact that the most likely time you are catheterized will be during your twilight years, when your brain has turned to soup and you’ve forgotten who your parents are and who you are and what this painful tube is doing in your urethra. If you aren’t aware of how urinary catheters work, there is a deflated balloon at the end of it, blown up once the tube is inside you. This balloon keeps the whole system uncomfortably stuck inside your bladder. So, you can fill in the details on how much violence a brain-damaged person can do to themselves in a position like this by simply yanking out the foreign material.
Optimizing for not having a urinary catheter being placed into you is quite a lofty goal. Are there any alternatives on the table? Not practical ones. Diapers don’t work if the entire bladder itself is dysfunctional, suprapubic tubes require making a hole into the bladder (and can also be torn out), and nerve stimulation devices require expensive, invasive surgery. And none of them will be relied upon for routine cases, where catheterization is the fastest, most reliable solution that exists. You won’t get the gentle alternatives because you won’t be in a position to ask for them. You’ll be post-operative, or delirious, or comatose, or simply too old and confused to advocate for something better.
This is an uncomfortable subject to discuss. But I think it’s worth level-setting with one another. Urinary catheterization is but one of the dozens of little procedures that both contributes to the nauseating amount of ambient human suffering that repeats over and over and over again across the entire medical system and is reasonably common enough that it will likely be inflicted upon you one day. And if catheterization doesn’t seem so bad, there are a range of other awful things that, statistically speaking, a reader has a decent chance of undergoing at some point: feeding tubes, pap smears, mechanical ventilation, and repeated colonoscopies are all candidates.
Moreover, keep in mind that all these are simply the solutions to help prevent something far more grotesque and painful from occurring! Worse things exist—cancer, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s—but those have been talked about to death and feel a great deal more abstract than the relatively routine, but barbaric, medical procedures that occur millions of times per year.
How could this not be your life goal to work on? To reduce how awful maladies, and the awful solutions to those maladies, are? What else is there really? Better prediction markets? What are we talking about?
To be fair, most people go through their first few decades of life not completely cognizant how terrible modern medicine can be. But at some point you surely have to understand that you have been, thus far, lucky enough to have spent your entire life on the good side of medicine. In a very nice room, one in which every disease, condition, or malady had a very smart clinician on staff to immediately administer the cure. But one day, you’ll one day be shown glimpses of a far worse room, the bad side of medicine, ushered into an area of healthcare where nobody actually understands what is going on. (...)
I appreciate that many fields also demand this level of obedience to the ‘cause’, the same installation of ‘this is the only thing that matters!’. The energy, climate change, and artificial-intelligence sectors have similar do-or-die mission statements. But you know the main difference between those fields and biology?
In every other game, you can at least pretend the losers are going to be someone else, somewhere else in the world, happening to some poor schmuck who didn’t have your money or your foresight or your connections to do the Obviously Correct Thing. Instead, people hope to be a winner. A robot in my house to do my laundry, a plane that gets me from San Francisco to New York City in only an hour, an infinite movie generator so I can turn all my inner thoughts into reality. Wow! Capital-A Abundance beyond my wildest dreams! This is all well and good, but the unfortunate reality of the situation is that you will be a loser, an explicit loser, guaranteed to be a loser, in one specific game: biology. You will not escape being the butt of the joke here, because it will be you that betrays you, not the you who is reading this essay, but you, the you that cannot think, the you that has been shoddily shaped by the last several eons of evolution. Yes, others will also have their time underneath this harsh spotlight, but you will see your day in it too. (...)
Yes, things outside of biology are important too. Optimized supply chains matter, good marketing matters, and accurate securities risk assessments matter. Industries work together in weird ways. The people working on better short-form video and payroll startups and FAANGs are part of an economic engine that generates the immense taxable wealth required to fund the NIH grants. I know that the world runs on invisible glue.
Still, I can’t help but think that people’s priorities are enormously out of touch with what will actually matter most to their future selves. It feels as if people seem to have this mental model where medical progress simply happens. Like there’s some natural law of the universe that says “treatments improve by X% per year” and we’re all just passengers with a dumb grin on this predetermined trajectory. They see headlines about better FDA guidelines or CRISPR or immunotherapy or AI-accelerated protein folding and think, “Great, the authorities got it covered. By the time I need it, they’ll have figured it out.”. But that’s not how any of this works! Nobody has it covered! Medical progress happens because specific people chose to work on specific problems instead of doing something else with their finite time on Earth.
by Abhishaike Mahajan, Owl Posting | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Just can't comprehend the thinking recently for cutting essential NIH and NSF research funding (and others like NOAA). We used to lead the world.]
Dump Here!
‘Dump Here’ fan who caught Cal Raleigh’s HR ball ‘in shock’ over lucky grab.
You better believe the party traveled to Detroit.
After a 2-hour, 53-minute rain delay, the Mariners moshed all over the Tigers Tuesday. They rained eight hits and three homers in an 8-4 win, and Logan Gilbert spun six one-run innings. They drained the decibels from 41,525 deflated, rain-drenched fans. ~ Mariners’ make a statement in ALDS Game 3 win (ST)
DETROIT — Everything bounced just right for the Mariners on Tuesday night.
For their luckiest fan, too.
Jameson Turner, decked out in a custom-designed teal T-shirt, the only Mariners fan amid a sea of Tigers fans in the front row of the left-field stands, leaned over the fence, extended his glove and, after one bounce, caught Cal Raleigh’s home-run ball in the ninth inning of Seattle’s 8-4 victory in Game 3 of the American League Division Series.
It was the 61st home run Raleigh has hit during his record-breaking year and — my, oh, my — he hit it right to the Mariners fan wearing a shirt with DUMP 61 HERE in glittery block letters on the front.
Dart throwers couldn’t dream of hitting a more perfect bull’s eye.
“What are the odds?” Raleigh, the Big Dumper, said later.
Mariners team officials introduced themselves to Turner and invited him to meet Raleigh after the game. (...)
“This is just overwhelming,” Turner said.
Turner has lived in Las Vegas for the last 25 years, but he was born in Longview and attended Auburn High School and (obviously) is a die-hard M’s fan.
He made the “61” shirt last week and attended the Mariners’ final regular-season home game, sitting in right field and hoping to catch Raleigh’s 61st.
No such luck.
He didn’t give up.
“I decided to fly out (to Detroit) to see if I could give it one more shot, and it’s unbelievable,” he said.
He said he made a prediction to the woman next to him in the left-field stands.
“I told the lady next to me: ‘OK, this is my shot. He’s going to hit me a home run right now,’” he said. “And it landed in the bullpen and bounced right up to me. I’m still in shock.”
He said he had waved to Raleigh before the ninth-inning at-bat.
“Maybe he saw me,” he said with a laugh. “(That’s) Babe Ruth over there.”
Mariners relief pitchers in the bullpen reacted just as excitedly for Turner’s catch as they did Raleigh’s home run.
“That was so freaking cool,” bullpen catcher Justin Novak said. “One of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.”
For their luckiest fan, too.
It was the 61st home run Raleigh has hit during his record-breaking year and — my, oh, my — he hit it right to the Mariners fan wearing a shirt with DUMP 61 HERE in glittery block letters on the front.
Dart throwers couldn’t dream of hitting a more perfect bull’s eye.
“What are the odds?” Raleigh, the Big Dumper, said later.
Mariners team officials introduced themselves to Turner and invited him to meet Raleigh after the game. (...)
“This is just overwhelming,” Turner said.
Turner has lived in Las Vegas for the last 25 years, but he was born in Longview and attended Auburn High School and (obviously) is a die-hard M’s fan.
He made the “61” shirt last week and attended the Mariners’ final regular-season home game, sitting in right field and hoping to catch Raleigh’s 61st.
No such luck.
He didn’t give up.
“I decided to fly out (to Detroit) to see if I could give it one more shot, and it’s unbelievable,” he said.
He said he made a prediction to the woman next to him in the left-field stands.
“I told the lady next to me: ‘OK, this is my shot. He’s going to hit me a home run right now,’” he said. “And it landed in the bullpen and bounced right up to me. I’m still in shock.”
He said he had waved to Raleigh before the ninth-inning at-bat.
“Maybe he saw me,” he said with a laugh. “(That’s) Babe Ruth over there.”
“That was so freaking cool,” bullpen catcher Justin Novak said. “One of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.”
Mariners general manager Justin Hollander, exiting the clubhouse just after Turner’s interview session wrapped, spotted the Mariners’ newest most famous fan and immediately got his attention.
“I have to get a picture with our MVP of the night,” Hollander said.
Soon after, Raleigh emerged from the clubhouse. He posed with Turner for pictures and presented Turner with one of his custom bats.
“Jameson, Thanks for cheering us on & catching 61!” Raleigh wrote on the bat.
Late Tuesday, Turner changed his flight schedule and secured a ticket from Mariners officials for Wednesday’s Game 4.
He already has a new shirt ready to go: DUMP 62 HERE.
“I have to get a picture with our MVP of the night,” Hollander said.
Soon after, Raleigh emerged from the clubhouse. He posed with Turner for pictures and presented Turner with one of his custom bats.
“Jameson, Thanks for cheering us on & catching 61!” Raleigh wrote on the bat.
Late Tuesday, Turner changed his flight schedule and secured a ticket from Mariners officials for Wednesday’s Game 4.
He already has a new shirt ready to go: DUMP 62 HERE.
by Adam Jude, Seattle Times | Read more (with video):
Image: Mike Vorel/Seattle Mariners/X
[ed. Sometimes life works out. Really well. Go Ms!:]
Fourteen hours later, that energy extended to gate C9 at Sea-Tac Airport, before a direct flight to Detroit. A DJ spun records while the Mariner Moose took selfies with teal-clad travelers. There were sugar cookies featuring the team’s logo, tiny plastic tridents and big, blue balloons. There was Julio RodrÃguez’s father, Julio Sr., dancing with his family, a Mariner merengue.
***
At 8 p.m. Sunday, Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” played while fans paraded out of T-Mobile Park. After the Mariners’ first home playoff win since 2001, the party spilled onto Royal Brougham Way, where strangers high-fived and held each other, a mosh of happy maniacs dancing around a drummer. One scaled a streetlight to document a concert some swore would never come.Fourteen hours later, that energy extended to gate C9 at Sea-Tac Airport, before a direct flight to Detroit. A DJ spun records while the Mariner Moose took selfies with teal-clad travelers. There were sugar cookies featuring the team’s logo, tiny plastic tridents and big, blue balloons. There was Julio RodrÃguez’s father, Julio Sr., dancing with his family, a Mariner merengue.
You better believe the party traveled to Detroit.
After a 2-hour, 53-minute rain delay, the Mariners moshed all over the Tigers Tuesday. They rained eight hits and three homers in an 8-4 win, and Logan Gilbert spun six one-run innings. They drained the decibels from 41,525 deflated, rain-drenched fans. ~ Mariners’ make a statement in ALDS Game 3 win (ST)
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Do Coconuts Go With Oysters? For Saving the Delaware Shore, Yes.
For the past 50 years, Gary Berti has watched as a stretch of Delaware’s coastline slowly disappeared. Rising tides stripped the shoreline, leaving behind mud and a few tree stumps.
“Year after year, it gradually went from wild to deteriorated,” said Mr. Berti, whose parents moved to Angola by the Bay, a private community in Lewes, Del., in 1977, where he now lives with his wife, Debbie.
But in 2023, an extensive restoration effort converted a half-mile of shoreline from barren to verdant. A perimeter of logs and rolls of coconut husk held new sand in place. Lush beds of spartina, commonly known as cordgrass, grew, inviting wading birds and blue crabs.
Together, these elements have created a living shoreline, a nature-based way of stabilizing the coast, to absorb energy from the waves and protect the land from washing away.
Mr. Berti had never seen the waterfront like this before. “The change has just been spectacular,” he said.
The practice of using natural materials to prevent erosion has been around for decades. But as sea levels rise and ever-intensifying storms pound coastlines, more places are building them.
The U.S. government counts at least 150 living shorelines nationwide, with East Coast states like Maryland, South Carolina and Florida remediating thousands of feet of tidal areas. Thanks to the efforts of the Delaware Living Shorelines Committee, a state-supported working group, Delaware has led the charge for years. (...)
The natural materials, she said, provide a permeable buffer. As waves pass through, they leave the mud and sand they were carrying on the side of the barrier closer to the shore. This sediment builds up over time, creating a stable surface for plants. As the plants grow, their roots reinforce the barrier by holding everything in place. The goal is not necessarily return the land to how it was before, but to create new, stronger habitat.
More traditional rigid structures, like concrete sea walls, steel bulkheads and piles of stone known as riprap, can provide instant protection but inevitably get weaker over time. Bulkheads can also backfire by eroding at the base or trapping floodwaters from storms. And because hardened structures are designed to deflect energy, not absorb it, they can actually worsen erosion in nearby areas.
Though living shorelines need initial care while they start to grow, scientists have found they can outperform rigid structures in storms and can repair themselves naturally. And as sea levels rise, living shorelines naturally inch inland with the coastline, providing continuous protection, whereas sea walls have to be rebuilt.
When the engineers leave after creating a gray rigid structure, like a sea wall, “that’s the strongest that structure is ever going to be, and at some point, it will fail,” said David Burdick, an associate professor of coastal ecology at the University of New Hampshire. “When we install living shorelines, it’s the weakest it’s going to be. And it will get stronger over time.”
Sometimes, an area’s waves and wind are too powerful for a living shoreline to survive on its own, Mr. Janiec said. In these situations, a hybrid approach that combines hard structures can create a protected zone for plants and oysters to grow. And these don’t need to be traditional sea walls or riprap. Scientists can also use concrete reef structures and oyster castles to break up waves while allowing wildlife to thrive.
Gregg Moore, an associate professor of coastal restoration at the University of New Hampshire, said homeowners often choose rigid structures because they don’t act on erosion until the situation is urgent. When it comes to a person’s home, “you can’t blame somebody for wanting to put whatever they think is the fastest, most permanent solution possible,” he said. (...)
by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, NY Times | Read more:
“Year after year, it gradually went from wild to deteriorated,” said Mr. Berti, whose parents moved to Angola by the Bay, a private community in Lewes, Del., in 1977, where he now lives with his wife, Debbie.
But in 2023, an extensive restoration effort converted a half-mile of shoreline from barren to verdant. A perimeter of logs and rolls of coconut husk held new sand in place. Lush beds of spartina, commonly known as cordgrass, grew, inviting wading birds and blue crabs.
Together, these elements have created a living shoreline, a nature-based way of stabilizing the coast, to absorb energy from the waves and protect the land from washing away.
Mr. Berti had never seen the waterfront like this before. “The change has just been spectacular,” he said.
Before
After
The U.S. government counts at least 150 living shorelines nationwide, with East Coast states like Maryland, South Carolina and Florida remediating thousands of feet of tidal areas. Thanks to the efforts of the Delaware Living Shorelines Committee, a state-supported working group, Delaware has led the charge for years. (...)
“The living component is key,” said Alison Rogerson, an environmental scientist for the state’s natural resources department and chair of the living shoreline committee.
The natural materials, she said, provide a permeable buffer. As waves pass through, they leave the mud and sand they were carrying on the side of the barrier closer to the shore. This sediment builds up over time, creating a stable surface for plants. As the plants grow, their roots reinforce the barrier by holding everything in place. The goal is not necessarily return the land to how it was before, but to create new, stronger habitat.
More traditional rigid structures, like concrete sea walls, steel bulkheads and piles of stone known as riprap, can provide instant protection but inevitably get weaker over time. Bulkheads can also backfire by eroding at the base or trapping floodwaters from storms. And because hardened structures are designed to deflect energy, not absorb it, they can actually worsen erosion in nearby areas.
Though living shorelines need initial care while they start to grow, scientists have found they can outperform rigid structures in storms and can repair themselves naturally. And as sea levels rise, living shorelines naturally inch inland with the coastline, providing continuous protection, whereas sea walls have to be rebuilt.
When the engineers leave after creating a gray rigid structure, like a sea wall, “that’s the strongest that structure is ever going to be, and at some point, it will fail,” said David Burdick, an associate professor of coastal ecology at the University of New Hampshire. “When we install living shorelines, it’s the weakest it’s going to be. And it will get stronger over time.”
And just as coastal areas come in all shapes and sizes, so do living shorelines. In other places that the committee has supported projects, like Angola by the Bay and the Delaware Botanical Garden, brackish water meant that oysters wouldn’t grow. Instead, the private community opted for large timber logs while the botanical garden built a unique crisscross fence from dead tree branches found on site. (...)
Sometimes, an area’s waves and wind are too powerful for a living shoreline to survive on its own, Mr. Janiec said. In these situations, a hybrid approach that combines hard structures can create a protected zone for plants and oysters to grow. And these don’t need to be traditional sea walls or riprap. Scientists can also use concrete reef structures and oyster castles to break up waves while allowing wildlife to thrive.
Gregg Moore, an associate professor of coastal restoration at the University of New Hampshire, said homeowners often choose rigid structures because they don’t act on erosion until the situation is urgent. When it comes to a person’s home, “you can’t blame somebody for wanting to put whatever they think is the fastest, most permanent solution possible,” he said. (...)
“Living shorelines are easier than people think, but they take a little time,” Mrs. Allread said. “You have to trust the process. Nature can do its own thing if you let it.”
by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Erin Schaff
[ed. Streambank and coastal restoration/rehabilitation using bioengineering techniques has been standard practice in Alaska for decades (in fact, my former gf wrote the book on it - literally). I myself received a grant to rehabilitate 12 state park public use sites on the Kenai River (see here and here) that were heavily damaged and eroding from constant foot traffic and boat wakes. Won a National Coastal America Award for innovation. As noted here, most people want a quick fix, but this is a better, long-term solution.]
Monday, October 6, 2025
Way Past Its Prime
Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? It's not just you.
It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with. This is infuriating. Frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, terrifying.
In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It isn’t just a way to say something got worse. It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.
This moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen, their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease. This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease’s progress: what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order?
Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves – and become a giant pile of shit.
This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too. Take Amazon, a company that started out by making it possible to have any book shipped to your door and then became the only game in town for everything else, even as it dodged taxes and filled up with self-immolating crapgadgets and other junk.
In Jeff Bezos’s original business plan for Amazon, the company was called Relentless. Critics say that this is a reference to Bezos’s cutthroat competitive instincts, but Bezos always insisted that it was a reference to his company’s relentless commitment to customer service.
How did Amazon go from a logistics company that got packages to you quickly and efficiently to a behemoth of digital content defined by the Prime experience (which has much less to do with free shipping now and more with everything else)?
Stage 1: good to users
Amazon started with a large surplus of cash that it was able to allocate to its customers, and allocate it did. The company raised a fortune from early investors, then a larger fortune by listing on the stock market. Then it used that fortune to subsidise many goods, selling them below cost. It also subsidised shipping and offered a no-questions-asked, postage-paid returns policy.
This offer tempted millions of users to pile on to the platform. Once they were there, Prime membership went a long way to locking them in. Paying for shipping a year in advance is a powerful incentive to do your shopping on Amazon. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Prime subscribers begin their e-commerce searches on Amazon and, if they find what they’re looking for, don’t shop around for a better deal.
You can think of Prime as a form of soft lock-in, Amazon binding you to its platform with a silken ribbon. But Amazon’s also got some iron chains in its toolbox. All the audiobooks and movies, and most of the ebooks and emagazines, you buy from Amazon are permanently locked to its platform.
They are sold with digital rights management (DRM), a form of encryption designed to force you to view or listen using apps that Amazon controls. Break up with Amazon and delete your apps, and you will lose all the media you’ve ever bought from the platform. For a certain kind of reader, listener or movie buff, this is a very high switching cost indeed.
Amazon has one more trick up its sleeve: after years of selling goods below cost, it has completed the work that big box stores started, eliminating swaths of small, independent, brick-and-mortar businesses. Its online predatory pricing tactics have done the same for much of the e-commerce world.
That means shopping anywhere other than Amazon has become substantially more inconvenient. These tactics – Prime, DRM and predatory pricing – make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too.
Stage 2: abusing users, good to businesses
Amazon was initially very good to those business customers. It paid full price for their goods, then sold them below cost to its customers. It subsidised returns and customer service, too. It ran a clean search engine, which put the best matches for shoppers’ queries at the top of the page, creating a path to glory merchants could walk merely by selling quality goods at fair prices.
Then, once those merchants were locked in, Amazon put the screws on them. Amazon brags about this technique, which it calls “the flywheel”. It brings in users with low prices and a large selection. This attracts merchants who are eager to sell to those users. The merchants’ dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts – and around and around the flywheel spins.
Let’s take a step back. This flywheel is the direct product of a radical legal theory that has had the world in its grip since the late 1970s. From the 1890s until the Jimmy Carter administration, US corporations’ power was blunted by antitrust law, which treated large companies as threats simply because they were large. Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care. Antitrust law was designed to fight that apathy and force companies to care.
A rival – and frankly terrible – theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the consumer welfare standard theory and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their offerings. Any time you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store, selling the very best goods. It would be perverse (goes the theory) for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them.
It was under this theory that Jimmy Carter started to remove a few of the Jenga blocks from the antitrust system. Then Ronald Reagan came along and tore them out by the fistful. (Most of the rightwing policies for which we remember Reagan started under Carter, who was hoping to woo conservative voters. He failed.) Every president since – Republican or Democrat – has followed Reagan’s example, up to (but not including) Joe Biden.
The Amazon flywheel is designed to fit neatly into the consumer welfare framework. It proclaims itself to be an enemy to merchants on behalf of consumers. The flywheel is all about lowering prices, and the consumer welfare standard theory prizes low prices above all else.
Stage 3: a giant pile of shit
Amazon has a myriad of tactics at its disposal for shifting value from business customers to itself, some of which also involve shifting value away from end users, no matter what the cute flywheel pitch says.
It uses its overview of merchants’ sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants’ contracting factories, to cream off its merchants’ bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results.
Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist.
Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a “service” in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.
All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods. [ed. emphasis]
Here’s where Amazon’s attacks on its merchants’ bottom lines turn into higher prices for its customers. A merchant that pays Amazon through the nose needs to make up the money somewhere. Hypothetically, merchants could eat Amazon’s fees themselves – in other words, if Amazon wants a 10% fee on an item with a 20% profit margin, the seller could split the difference, and settle for a 10% profit.
But Amazon’s fee isn’t 10%. Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the “Amazon tax” on your behalf, it couldn’t. Merchants just don’t make 51% margins.
So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot. Now, you may have noticed that Amazon’s prices aren’t any higher than the prices that you pay elsewhere. There’s a good reason for that: when merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it’s key to the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.
Let the implications of most-favoured nation settle in. If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you’re paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop – even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. [ed. emphasis]
It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you’ll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match – which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.
Why does this happen? Because Amazon makes more than $50bn every year charging merchants for search placement. When you search for a product on Amazon, the top results aren’t the best matches: they’re the matches that pay the highest fees to Amazon to be top of the list.
Researchers Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal call this “Amazon’s pricing paradox”. Amazon gets to insist that it has the lowest prices in the business, but no one can find those prices. Instead, we all pay a massive Amazon tax every time we shop there, and the merchants we buy from are paying an Amazon tax, too.
That means that, on average, the stuff at the top of an Amazon search results page is bad. It’s low-quality, high-priced junk. Even when you’re buying a known quantity, such as a specific brand of AA batteries, the top item will usually be more expensive than the items lower down on the page – the ones without the splashy banners advertising “Best Seller” or “Amazon’s Choice”. The Amazon smile logo gets a lot more sinister when it appears next to a top search result that costs 29% more than the best match for your query, thanks to Amazon’s $50bn-a-year paid search placement.
It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with. This is infuriating. Frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, terrifying.
This moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen, their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease. This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease’s progress: what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order?
Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves – and become a giant pile of shit.
This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too. Take Amazon, a company that started out by making it possible to have any book shipped to your door and then became the only game in town for everything else, even as it dodged taxes and filled up with self-immolating crapgadgets and other junk.
In Jeff Bezos’s original business plan for Amazon, the company was called Relentless. Critics say that this is a reference to Bezos’s cutthroat competitive instincts, but Bezos always insisted that it was a reference to his company’s relentless commitment to customer service.
How did Amazon go from a logistics company that got packages to you quickly and efficiently to a behemoth of digital content defined by the Prime experience (which has much less to do with free shipping now and more with everything else)?
Stage 1: good to users
Amazon started with a large surplus of cash that it was able to allocate to its customers, and allocate it did. The company raised a fortune from early investors, then a larger fortune by listing on the stock market. Then it used that fortune to subsidise many goods, selling them below cost. It also subsidised shipping and offered a no-questions-asked, postage-paid returns policy.
This offer tempted millions of users to pile on to the platform. Once they were there, Prime membership went a long way to locking them in. Paying for shipping a year in advance is a powerful incentive to do your shopping on Amazon. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Prime subscribers begin their e-commerce searches on Amazon and, if they find what they’re looking for, don’t shop around for a better deal.
You can think of Prime as a form of soft lock-in, Amazon binding you to its platform with a silken ribbon. But Amazon’s also got some iron chains in its toolbox. All the audiobooks and movies, and most of the ebooks and emagazines, you buy from Amazon are permanently locked to its platform.
They are sold with digital rights management (DRM), a form of encryption designed to force you to view or listen using apps that Amazon controls. Break up with Amazon and delete your apps, and you will lose all the media you’ve ever bought from the platform. For a certain kind of reader, listener or movie buff, this is a very high switching cost indeed.
Amazon has one more trick up its sleeve: after years of selling goods below cost, it has completed the work that big box stores started, eliminating swaths of small, independent, brick-and-mortar businesses. Its online predatory pricing tactics have done the same for much of the e-commerce world.
That means shopping anywhere other than Amazon has become substantially more inconvenient. These tactics – Prime, DRM and predatory pricing – make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too.
Stage 2: abusing users, good to businesses
Amazon was initially very good to those business customers. It paid full price for their goods, then sold them below cost to its customers. It subsidised returns and customer service, too. It ran a clean search engine, which put the best matches for shoppers’ queries at the top of the page, creating a path to glory merchants could walk merely by selling quality goods at fair prices.
Then, once those merchants were locked in, Amazon put the screws on them. Amazon brags about this technique, which it calls “the flywheel”. It brings in users with low prices and a large selection. This attracts merchants who are eager to sell to those users. The merchants’ dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts – and around and around the flywheel spins.
Let’s take a step back. This flywheel is the direct product of a radical legal theory that has had the world in its grip since the late 1970s. From the 1890s until the Jimmy Carter administration, US corporations’ power was blunted by antitrust law, which treated large companies as threats simply because they were large. Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care. Antitrust law was designed to fight that apathy and force companies to care.
A rival – and frankly terrible – theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the consumer welfare standard theory and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their offerings. Any time you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store, selling the very best goods. It would be perverse (goes the theory) for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them.
It was under this theory that Jimmy Carter started to remove a few of the Jenga blocks from the antitrust system. Then Ronald Reagan came along and tore them out by the fistful. (Most of the rightwing policies for which we remember Reagan started under Carter, who was hoping to woo conservative voters. He failed.) Every president since – Republican or Democrat – has followed Reagan’s example, up to (but not including) Joe Biden.
The Amazon flywheel is designed to fit neatly into the consumer welfare framework. It proclaims itself to be an enemy to merchants on behalf of consumers. The flywheel is all about lowering prices, and the consumer welfare standard theory prizes low prices above all else.
Stage 3: a giant pile of shit
Amazon has a myriad of tactics at its disposal for shifting value from business customers to itself, some of which also involve shifting value away from end users, no matter what the cute flywheel pitch says.
It uses its overview of merchants’ sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants’ contracting factories, to cream off its merchants’ bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results.
Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist.
Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a “service” in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.
All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods. [ed. emphasis]
Here’s where Amazon’s attacks on its merchants’ bottom lines turn into higher prices for its customers. A merchant that pays Amazon through the nose needs to make up the money somewhere. Hypothetically, merchants could eat Amazon’s fees themselves – in other words, if Amazon wants a 10% fee on an item with a 20% profit margin, the seller could split the difference, and settle for a 10% profit.
But Amazon’s fee isn’t 10%. Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the “Amazon tax” on your behalf, it couldn’t. Merchants just don’t make 51% margins.
So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot. Now, you may have noticed that Amazon’s prices aren’t any higher than the prices that you pay elsewhere. There’s a good reason for that: when merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it’s key to the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.
Let the implications of most-favoured nation settle in. If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you’re paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop – even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. [ed. emphasis]
It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you’ll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match – which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.
Why does this happen? Because Amazon makes more than $50bn every year charging merchants for search placement. When you search for a product on Amazon, the top results aren’t the best matches: they’re the matches that pay the highest fees to Amazon to be top of the list.
Researchers Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal call this “Amazon’s pricing paradox”. Amazon gets to insist that it has the lowest prices in the business, but no one can find those prices. Instead, we all pay a massive Amazon tax every time we shop there, and the merchants we buy from are paying an Amazon tax, too.
That means that, on average, the stuff at the top of an Amazon search results page is bad. It’s low-quality, high-priced junk. Even when you’re buying a known quantity, such as a specific brand of AA batteries, the top item will usually be more expensive than the items lower down on the page – the ones without the splashy banners advertising “Best Seller” or “Amazon’s Choice”. The Amazon smile logo gets a lot more sinister when it appears next to a top search result that costs 29% more than the best match for your query, thanks to Amazon’s $50bn-a-year paid search placement.
by Cory Doctorow, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Noma Bar
[ed. I dropped Prime, and it's fine. The few things I order still have free (or miminal) shipping charges, and the movies (usually with additional rental fees) aren't missed at all.]
[ed. I dropped Prime, and it's fine. The few things I order still have free (or miminal) shipping charges, and the movies (usually with additional rental fees) aren't missed at all.]
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