#evil empires

WELL I never got any email about the restored access and when I tried logging in again, it says the account has been deleted for violating their terms, and cannot be restored.

Trope Talk: Evil Empires

I was rewatching this OSP video the other days, and Red’s talk about how a lot of fantasy/science fiction stories tend to get around the whole “well, we’ve destablisd an entire government, good thing the story’s ending before we have to deal with what happens with the regular people living there!“ thing by either having a “legitimate heir“ to take up the throne as the new (good) ruler or the plot just stops before we have to deal with the consequences.

Interestingly the Avatar franchise actually has it both ways, by both having a legitimate (ie non-fascist) leader taking over the antagonistic country (Zuko) within the show itself but using the sequel comics to underline that a Star Wars-ish ending doesn’t really work in reality.

In the comics, for example, Zuko has to deal with counter-revolutionaries of Ozai loyalists who see Zuko as a dishonored usurper who overthrew the rightful leader after he was metaphysically maimed by the Avatar (100 years of indoctrination is hard to shake off, particularly among those who profited from Ozai’s rule like Mai’s dad), in addition to the issue of what to do with the people living in the former Fire Nation colonies (they were made independant, becoming what later became known as Republic City, as a century of cultural blending made it hard to unravel the new culture that had formed there).

It also got me thinking of the non-Discworld Pratchett novel the Carpet People, the original version being the first story he ever wrote (as a teenager) with the eventually published version being one he’d rejigged a bit using the things he’d learned about writing in the years that followed.

The Carpet People is interesting because it’s kind of his riff on Lord of the Rings, with various characters being sort of stand-ins for various LotR characters (there’s a stand-in for Aragon, there’s one for Gimli etc.).

However, the deviation is that while LotR is very much a pseudo-monarchist piece (with Aragon ascending to the throne after the non-royal stewards give up the throne/die), the fact that tCP’s setting is more akin to the later Roman Empire leads to the Aragon character instead electing to re-establish a republic, instead of becoming the new emperor himself like everyone assumes he would (he’s a former general who quit to go live in the borderlands due to his disillusionment with the whole imperialism business).

The idea being that the Empire USED to be a Republic, but eventually became an Empire when the ancestors of the current Emperor made a powergrab, with the last emperor being a decadent man-child who barely knows what’s going on and isn’t anywhere near the Big Good some of the protagonists think he must be.

(I have tried using the Goog's "Help" feature. I was angry enough to answer the little "Did this answer your question?" box.)

It isn't anything LIKE a proper email reading-and-filing system and it should stop pretending it's fucking superior to those that ARE.

This article. This article makes me so angry I am literally having trouble seeing straight. I can’t even choose which bits to excerpt, but it’s all just so wretched.

In brief: fuckers realize that so much use of Roundup (which they produce and profit from) has created lots of Roundup-resistant weeds, so farmers need another herbicide - and, of course, another bunch of herbicide-resistant seeds, which, of course, Monsanto/Bayer (who are now one big happy fucker of an evil company, because why not) are also more than happy to sell.

So now they are selling dicamba to kill the Roundup-resistant weeds, and dicamba-resistant soybeans and, I forget, something else, read the article.

ANYWAY. The fuckers KNEW that dicamba drifts! Onto other fields! Where it will kill or damage anything not resistant to it, which is . . . a lot.

So they know they can profit by selling dicamba-resistant soy-and-stuff to farmers who don’t need or want dicamba, but DO need to avoid their crop being fucked because some nearby farm IS spraying that shit all over! Oh, what a joyous day to be a purveyor of both an herbicide AND a crop resistant to it!

...In one BASF 2016 strategy update, the company noted “defensive planting” as a “potential market opportunity”. Monsanto also saw “new users” in farmers who suffered drift damage.

In one November 2016 email exchange, a Monsanto distributor noted that “all the dicamba drift damage complaints” were spiking demand for Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant seed...

But not all plants have been genetically engineered by these fuckers to be resistant to their newest money-maker, so people with, like, orchards, or who want to grow organic crops, are just fucked. Bonus fuckery with the EPA:

Because of farmer concerns that dicamba drift would contaminate fruits and vegetable plots, the internal documents show that Monsanto and BASF devised a plan to ask the EPA to allow certain amounts of dicamba residues to be considered legal in crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, grapes and other foods expected to be accidentally exposed to dicamba spray.

This is an incredible, unrelenting article.

Uber’s investors, however, never expected that their returns would come from superior efficiency in competitive markets. Uber pursued a “growth at all costs” strategy financed by a staggering $20 billion in investor funding. This funding subsidized fares and service levels that could not be matched by incumbents who had to cover costs out of actual passenger fares. Uber’s massive subsidies were explicitly anticompetitive—and are ultimately unsustainable—but they made the company enormously popular with passengers who enjoyed not having to pay the full cost of their service.

The resulting rapid growth was also intended to make Uber highly attractive to those segments of the investment world that believed explosive top-line growth was the only important determinant of how start-up companies should be valued. Investors focused narrow­ly on Uber’s revenue growth and only rarely considered whether the company could ever produce the profits that might someday repay the multibillion dollar subsidies.

Most public criticisms of Uber have focused on narrow behavioral and cultural issues, including deceptive advertising and pricing, algorithmic manipulation, driver exploitation, deep-seated misogyny among executives, and disregard of laws and business norms. Such criticisms are valid, but these problems are not fixable aberrations. They were the inevitable result of pursuing “growth at all costs” without having any ability to fund that growth out of positive cash flow. And while Uber has taken steps to reduce negative publicity, it has not done—and cannot do—anything that could suddenly pro­duce a sustainable, profitable business model.

Uber’s longer-term goal was to eliminate all meaningful competition and then profit from this quasi-monopoly power...

...

These beliefs about Uber’s corporate value were created entirely out of thin air. This is not a case of a company with a reasonably sound operating business that has managed to inflate stock market expectations a bit. This is a case of a massive valuation that has no relationship to any economic fundamentals. Uber has no competitive efficiency advantages, operates in an industry with few barriers to entry, and has lost more than $14 billion in the previous four years. But its narratives convinced most people in the media, invest­ment, and tech worlds that it is the most valuable transportation company on the planet and the second most valuable start-up IPO in U.S. history (after Facebook).

Uber is the breakthrough case where the public perception of a large new company was entirely created using the types of manufactured narratives typically employed in partisan political campaigns. Narrative construction is perhaps Uber’s greatest competitive strength. The company used these techniques to completely divert attention away from the massive subsidies that were the actual drivers of its popularity and growth. It successfully framed the entire public discussion around an emotive, “us-versus-them” battle between heroic innovators and corrupt regulators who were falsely blamed for all of the industry’s historic service problems. Uber’s desired framing—that it was fighting a moral battle on behalf of technological progress and economic freedom—was uncritically ac­cepted by the mainstream business and tech industry press, who then never bothered to analyze the firm’s actual economics or its anticompetitive behavior.