The writer and digital rights activist coined the term ‘enshittifcation’ to describe the deterioration of the internet and it caught on. I wrote about it a couple of times (see here and here). He now has a book with that title that I will get and read soon.
In this interview with Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show Doctorow explains succinctly how enshittification comes about and what can be done about it. It is an excellent informative interview.
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani upset the political establishment by winning the mayoralty of New York City but now comes along another upset, this time in the city of Miami in deep-red Florida.
Miami’s new mayor, Eileen Higgins, hailed it as “a new day” for the city after the Democrat ended three decades of Republican rule on Tuesday night in a stunning election triumph.
In reality, the result is more of a seismic shifting of sands given the magnitude of her victory over the Donald Trump-backed Republican candidate, Emilio González, in the most populous city in Miami-Dade county, which the president won in 2024 by 12%.
Higgins won the run-off with almost 60% of the vote, according to preliminary results reported Wednesday by the Miami Herald. More than just further evidence of a growing national backlash against Trump’s policies on the national stage, particularly immigration, her win has reset Miami’s political landscape in a manner not seen in some ways in 28 years, and in others not at all.
Higgins is the first woman to hold the office; the first Democrat to win it in 28 years; and the first non-Hispanic candidate since the 1990s. As if to bookend neatly the passing back of the Republican torch, the outgoing incumbent, Francis Suarez, is the son of the most recent Democratic Miami mayor, Xavier Suarez, who was elected in 1997.
…The swing back towards Democrats was notable given that Hispanic voters contributed to the red wave that last year saw Trump become the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade county since 1988.
Commenter Dunc pointed me to a long but fascinating article by Edward Zitron titled The Era Of The Business Idiot where he brutally analyzes how US businesses seem to have been taken over by owners and a managerial class that he calls Business Idiots who have become alienated from the actual manufacturing process of whatever their company produces, and make decisions that tend to work against actual productivity and quality in favor of things that advance their own careers and income. (The thrust of the article is similar to Cory Doctorow’s evisceration of the internet that he calls enshittification and the extension of that idea more broadly to American power.)
The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.
They’re building products for other people that don’t interact with the real world. We are no longer their customers, and so, we’re worth even less than before — which, as is the case in a world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much.
They do not exist to make us better — the Business Idiot doesn’t really care about the real world, or what you do, or who you are, or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the Musks and Altmans of the world, because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, someone above work, and thinking, and knowledge.
One of the messages of doom that were widely broadcast about what might happen should Zohran Mamdani win the mayoral election in New York City was that wealthy people might leave the city in droves because of the higher taxes he was promising to levy on them in order to fund some of the social programs that would benefit ordinary people. Such scare tactics to keep the wealthy happy are not uncommon. Some might view the departure of these people as not a bad thing, since wealthy people who begrudge paying more in taxes (which they can well afford) to benefit others are pests whom we would be better off without. Cristobal Young, a sociologist at Cornell University, and others have looked into this claim and find that this threat to move lacks evidence in support.
I research whether high earners actually move when their taxes go up. My colleagues and I have analyzed millionaire taxes in New Jersey and California, the migration of Forbes billionaires globally and decades of IRS data tracing where Americans with million-dollar incomes live.
Top earners are often thought of as “mobile millionaires” who are ever searching for lower-tax places to live. In reality, they’re often reluctant to leave the places where they built their careers and raised their families.
…The first fact is simple: Millionaires have low migration rates.
Mobility in America is highest among people who are still searching for their economic place in life. Workers who earn the lowest wages move across state lines at relatively high rates, about 4.5% per year, often in search of more affordable housing. People making $1 million-plus a year move only half as often: Just 2.4% of them pack up each year.
When millionaires do move, it rarely appears to be for tax reasons.
…Overall, only about 15% of millionaires who move end up with a lower tax bill. That shows the rich are willing and able to move for tax reasons. But because only about 2.4% of millionaires move each year – and only a fraction of those moves reduce their taxes – overall tax migration ends up being a small fraction of a small fraction. Not never, but not often.
Trump and Republicans have no qualms about using false numbers about everything including the economy and the effects of tariffs to justify their action. But sometimes those numbers are so obviously false that one wonders how they could say them with a straight face.
Take for example, Trump claiming that he has reduced prices. He throws around random large numbers for the size of the reductions , saying that they are 500%, 1000%, 5000%, and so on, adding that “No one has seen numbers like that”. There is a good reason that no one has seen numbers like that since anyone who is even barely numerate would know that you cannot reduce the price of anything by more than 100% since a reduction of 100% would make it free.
You would expect that Mehmet Oz, who used to be a heart surgeon (and reputedly a good one) before he went on to become a TV personality peddling all manner of dubious health advice, would know better. But this newly minted Trump fanboy tried to explain away Trump’s absurd numbers using absurd arguments.
[Read more…]
Today is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly report giving the number os jobs gained or lost in the previous month plus any revisions to the numbers for the two preceding months. The last two jobs reports were awful, with job growth essentially stalled since May, indicating that the growth in economy has slowed dramatically, possibly indicating a recession. Trump fired the commissioner of the BLS in early August following the dismal job numbers for July (claiming that she had dishonestly manipulated the numbers to make him look bad) but things got even worse when the August numbers were released.
However the BLS did not release any numbers today and the official reason is that it is due to the shutdown. But that seems likely (what a surprise!) to be a lie.
The data for the release have already been collected, according to two former heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But the Trump administration has so far defied calls to publish the report.
…Earlier this week William Beach, who led the BLS for four years under Trump and Joe Biden, also said the jobs data for September “have been completely collected and processed” by the BLS. “The jobs report is likely written in final draft,” he wrote.
Europe’s richest man is whining about a proposed wealth tax for France. But of course, he is not complaining that it would hurt him personally, which would be very selfish, but that it would hurt the entire economy, which makes him a noble crusader and protector of the economic health of the country.
Europe’s richest man, the luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, has said that a wealth tax that could cost him more than €1bn (£817m) would be deadly for France’s economy.
The French founder of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton said in a statement to the Sunday Times that calls for a 2% wealth tax on all assets “aims to destroy the liberal economy, the only one that works for the good of all”.
The idea of a wealth tax has steadily gained ground in France because of a political crisis, with the government trying to push through unpopular budget cuts. The idea of a 2% wealth tax on fortunes worth more than €100m has been proposed by Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor who has become a household name in France.
…Zucman is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the École normale supérieure, and last year wrote a prominent study on the wealth tax for the G20. In June, Zucman wrote in the Guardian: “Unprecedented wealth concentration – and the unbridled power that comes with such wealth – has distorted our democracy and is driving societal and economic tensions.”
But Arnault insists that his motives are pure and that those who are pursuing this tax are doing so because, for some reason, they want to destroy the economy.
“This is clearly not a technical or economic debate, but rather a clearly stated desire to destroy the French economy,” Arnault’s statement said. “I cannot believe that the French political forces that govern or have governed the country in the past could lend any credibility to this offensive, which is deadly for our economy.”
Really? They ‘clearly stated’ that their desire is to destroy the economy? Where and when did they say this?
People like Arnault should continue to speak out like this so that people will increasingly see that what greedy, selfish jerks they are.
The US Federal Reserve has two missions: keep inflation under control and have full employment.
What should be the desired rate of inflation? If it gets too low, that might be due to the economy stagnating and heading towards recession. Too high and people and businesses start hurting and indulging in more short-term spending as a hedge against future price rises. The magic number that the Fed and the economic pundits have settled on seems to be around 2%.
In its Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy (PDF), the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) judges that inflation of 2 percent over the longer run, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent with the Federal Reserve’s mandate for maximum employment and price stability. When households and businesses can reasonably expect inflation to remain low and stable, they are able to make sound decisions regarding saving, borrowing, and investment, which contribute to a well-functioning economy and the well-being of all Americans.
The BLS has released the August job numbers and they continue the dismal trend that started in May where the numbers were well below the required number needed to keep up with population growth. The revised numbers for June even showed a decline in jobs for that month.
You can read the BLS press release here that has a more complete breakdown of the data.
Elon Musk boasted about how much money would be saved by DOGE’s actions but a new analysis finds that it achieved just a tiny fraction of the claimed savings.
Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.
Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.
…POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.
Even so, President Donald Trump claimed hundreds of billions of dollars had already been used to reduce the federal deficit. The former head of DOGE, Elon Musk, initially promised the organization would reduce the deficit by $2 trillion. Many in Trump’s Cabinet have also celebrated DOGE’s efforts, including his secretaries of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture.
DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.
Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.
“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.”
Lies, smoke, and mirrors. That is what the Trump gang is all about. When the next numbers for the deficit come out without any significant change, expect Trump to fire those who put out the report and put in some stooges who will give him the numbers that he wants, like he is trying to do with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But you can deny reality only for so long. It keeps requiring more and bigger lies to continue. What we are witnessing is a natural experiment to see how long a government built on lies and deception can function.