AI, unskippable ads, 3 more ads, “pay a subscription fee for no more ads”, ads even though you’re literally paying for a service, NFTs, drop shipping, fast fashion, (constantly changing) algorithms, deepfakes, mob mentality, cancel culture, self censoring, the threat of being filmed or photographed by strangers against your consent whenever you leave the house because we live in a constant fucking surveillance state we can never escape
i actually do kinda like delivering groceries on the side because it gives me such a unique cross-section of the community. i never know whose groceries im shopping for until i finish the delivery and see them/their home and it’s like it adds more detail to the picture of who they are. the baby supplies going to the apartment that i know for a fact is one bedroom (they’ll be moving soon - i bet they’re apartment hunting, i hope they find a place). the new cat litter box, bowl, and kitten food going to the house covered in “i <3 my dog” paraphernalia (a kitten definitely showed up on the porch recently and made itself at home). the fairly healthy boring grocery order that includes an incongruous tub of candy-filled ice cream going to the home of an elderly woman with toddler toys in the yard (it’s clearly for her grandkids, whom she sees often).
shopping for someone else’s groceries is a fairly intimate thing. i’ve bought condoms and pregnancy tests, allergy medicine and nyquil, baby benadryl and teething gel, a huge pile of veggies paired with an equally huge pile of junk food, tampons and shampoo and closet organizers and ant traps and deodorizing shoe inserts and a million other little things that tell a million different stories in their endless combinations. one time someone had me buy one single green bean. i messaged them to confirm that’s actually what they wanted, and they said yes - neither of them liked green beans very much, but they had a baby they were introducing to solid foods, and they wanted to let him try one to see if he liked them. another time i had someone request 50 fresh roma tomatoes - not for a restaurant, but for a person in an apartment. the kitchen behind them smelled like basil and garlic when they opened the door. another time i brought groceries to three elderly blind women who share a house. that was one of the few times i have ever broken my rule and gone inside a place i’ve delivered to, because they asked if i could place the grocery bags in a specific location in the kitchen for them to work on unloading and there was no way i was going to refuse helping.
i gripe about the poor tippers, but people can also be incredibly kind. one time i took shelter from a sudden vicious hailstorm inside an older lady’s home in a trailer park, while i was in the middle of delivering her groceries. we both huddled just inside the door, watching in shock as golf-ball-sized hail swept through for about five minutes and then disappeared. she handed me an extra $10 bill on my way out the door.
when covid was at its deadliest, people would leave extra (often lysol-scented) cash tips and thank-you notes for me taped to the door or partially under the mat. i especially loved the clearly kid-drawn thank you notes with marker renderings of blobby people in masks, or trees, or rainbows. in summer of 2020 i delivered to a nice older couple who lived outside of town in the hills, and they insisted i take a huge double handful of extra disposable gloves and masks to wear while shopping - those were hard to find in stores at the time, but they wanted me to have some of their supply and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
anyway. all this to say people are mostly good, or at least trying to be, despite my complaints.
Incredible colorised footage from 1929 of construction workers on the Chrysler Building in New York.
I’m just impressed that it has audio
If you wanted solid, definitive proof that the past did, in fact, happen, here it is.
I’m surprised the structure was able to support the weight of every set of BRASS FUCKING BALLS on all of those construction workers. Pre-safety gear/OCEA was wilding man.
The Chrysler Building had zero fatalities during construction. But the osha violations hurt my soul
TERRIFYING
Many of these men were Mohawk Native Americans! The Mohawk had a reputation as ironworkers and worked on most of the big interwar-era construction projects in NYC, also including the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge.
love reading late 90s/early 2000s scholarship on the potential of the internet. “hey we shouldn’t let venture capitalists get in on this” And Then They Did
There’s a cheat-code in US antitrust law, one that’s been increasingly used since the Reagan administration, when the “consumer welfare” theory (“monopolies are fine, so long as the lower prices”) shoved aside the long-established idea that antitrust law existed to prevent monopolies from forming at all.
The idea that a company can do anything to create or perpetuate a monopoly so long as its prices go down and/or its quality goes up is directly to blame for the rise of Big Tech. These companies burned through their investors’ cash for years, selling goods and services below cost, or even giving stuff away for free. Think of Uber, who lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in for their first 13 years of existence, a move that cost their investors (mostly Saudi royals) $31 billion.
The monopoly cheerleaders in the consumer welfare camp understood that these money-losing orgies could not go on forever, and that the investors who financed them weren’t doing so for charitable purposes. But they dismissed the possibility that would-be monopolists could raise prices after attaining dominance, because these prices hikes would bring new competitors into the market, starting the process over again.
Well, Uber has doubled the price of a ride and halved the wages of its drivers (not that consumer welfare theorists care about workers’ wages – they care about consumer welfare, not worker welfare). And not just Uber: companies that captured whole markets have jacked up prices and lowered quality across the board, a Great Enshittening whose playbook has been dubbed “venture predation”:
Not only was this turn predictable – it was predicted. Back in 2017, Lina Khan – then a law student – published a earthshaking Yale Law Journal paper, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” laying out how monopolists would trap their customers and block new competitors as they raised prices and lowered quality:
Today, Khan is the chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that turns her legal theories into practice, backed by a cheering chorus of Amazon customers, workers, suppliers and competitors who’ve been cheated by the e-commerce giant:
ALT
