I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Amazon’s best selling wholesales have long accused the company of mining
their sales data to discover which products are most profitable; then
Amazon clones the product and offers it for sale at a lower price than
the wholesales can afford (because Amazon doesn’t have to worry about a
wholesale-retail markup when it’s both wholesaler and retailer at once)
and tweaks its search and recommendation system to drive sales to its private-label versions of its partners’ products.
This is the kind of thing that US antitrust regulators have turned a blind eye to for 40+ years, since University of Chicago economists dripped poison in Ronald Reagan’s ear,
shifting antitrust enforcement to the “public harm” standard, in which
companies are only punished for monopolistic activities that raise
prices, not those that limit competition.
But the EU is emerging from this “public harm” standard to a more robust
antitrust framework, driven by the crusading trustbuster Margrethe Vestager, who has capitalized on the EU’s delight at a covert trade war with the US to visit stonking great fines upon US Big Tech.
Now the European Commission has announced that it will subject Amazon’s
predatory private-label practices (say that six times fast!) to
antitrust investigations, relying in part on insider/whistleblower
confirmation that the Amazon’s suppliers’ theories are correct.
Given the multibillion-dollar fines the Commission has smacked other US
companies with, this is a pretty significant announcement.
This antitrust announcement pairs very well with Stacy Mitchell’s analysis of how Amazon’s #HQ2 search process
resulted in the company amassing mountains of useful market
intelligence on the plans cities have made for their futures, which the
company can use to outmaneuver its competitors, even in cities where it isn’t going to build a new headquarters.
George writes, “AntiPolygraph.org has released the 5th edition of its free ebook, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, which provides a thorough debunking of the pseudoscience of polygraphy and explains how to pass or beat a polygraph test.”
Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has followed up his scorching condemnation of US poverty
with an even more damning report on poverty in the UK, which he calls a
“political choice” brought on by a decade of austerity at the hands of
the Conservative Party.
Alston characterised the findings from his two-week fact-finding tour as
“a disgrace…a social calamity and an economic disaster.” He described
the country’s policies as so bad for women that “if you got a group of
misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men
and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that
are not already in place.”
He predicted further declines in the lives of middle class people, who
will “find themselves living in an increasingly hostile and unwelcoming
society because community roots are being broken.”
He condemned homelessness, child poverty, the rise of food banks, the
sell-off of public assets, the closure of youth centres, the rise of
sex-work and gang affiliation among the most vulnerable people, and said
that the sole bright spot – communities pitching in to help their
neighbours – “resembled the sort of activity you might expect for a
natural disaster or health epidemic.”
Conservative politicians insisted that Alston didn’t understand how
austerity worked and that everyone was much better off due to a decade
of cuts.
Activists from the group Extinction Rebellion, which protests climate
change, blocked the private jet terminal at Geneva airport on Saturday.
The group says they want to draw attention to private jets as an absurd
form of transport for the rich that causes massive harm to the
environment.
Geneva is a major private jet hub. The world’s 0.001% head to
Switzerland to enjoy skiing in the Alps, plus privacy-minded banking,
auction houses, hospitals and United Nations offices.
An Italian council was flooded immediately after rejecting new
measures to address the climate crisis that threatens to sink the city,
and wreak havoc throughout the world.
The regional council of Veneto is situated on Venice’s Grand Canal.
On Tuesday night, the office flooded for the first time in its history,
right after rejecting measures to fight climate change.
