#largest financial market

[anjalirana00]

Invest in the largest financial market in the world.

Simply copy the trades of the best forex traders to profit. All of it is automatic. Another technique to increase your online income.  

[sayruq]

Police in the Turkish city of Adana detained 11 suspects, five Israeli and two Syrian, on allegations of organ trafficking, the Daily Sabah reported on 5 May. The Provincial Directorate of Security's Anti-Smuggling and Border Gates Branch began investigating after examining the passports of seven individuals who arrived in Adana from Israel about a month ago by plane for the purpose of health tourism. The two Syrian nationals, ages 20 and 21, were found to have fake passports. Further investigation revealed that Syrian nationals had each agreed to sell one of their own kidneys to two of the Israeli nationals, ages 68 and 28, for kidney transplants in Adana. During searches at the suspects' residences, $65,000 and numerous fake passports were seized. Israel has long been at the center of what Bloomberg described in 2011 as a “sprawling global black market in organs where brokers use deception, violence, and coercion to buy kidneys from impoverished people, mainly in underdeveloped countries, and then sell them to critically ill patients in more-affluent nations.” The financial newspaper added, “Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.” The organ-trafficking network extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, and beyond, the Bloomberg investigation showed. Accusations of Israeli involvement in organ trafficking also apply to the occupied Palestinian territories. In 2009, Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported testimony that the Israeli army was kidnapping and murdering Palestinians to harvest their organs. The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli army, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs. "'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,' relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied," wrote Donald Bostrom, the author of the report.Bostrom also cites an incident of alleged organ theft during the the first Palestinian intifada in 1992. He says that the Israeli army abducted a young man known for throwing stones at Israeli troops in the Nablus area. The young man was shot in the chest, both legs, and the stomach before being taken to a military helicopter, which transported him to an unknown location. Five nights later, Bostrom said, the young man's body was returned, wrapped in green hospital sheets. Israel’s Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Institute harvested skin, corneas, heart valves, and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians, and foreign workers without permission from relatives. The Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place, but claimed, "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer." Israel’s assault on Gaza since 7 October has provided further opportunities for the theft and harvesting of Palestinians’ organs. On 30 January, WAFA news agency reported that the Israeli army returned the bodies of 100 Palestinian civilians it had stolen from hospitals and cemeteries in various areas in Gaza. According to medical sources, inspection of some of the bodies showed that organs were missing from some of them. On 18 January, the Times of Israel reported that the Israeli army confirmed reports that its soldiers dug up graves in a Gaza cemetery, claiming its soldiers were trying to “confirm that the bodies of hostages were not buried there.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

America's largest hospital chain has an algorithmic death panel

It’s not that conservatives aren’t sometimes right — it’s that even when they’re right, they’re highly selective about it. Take the hoary chestnut that “incentives matter,” trotted out to deny humane benefits to poor people on the grounds that “free money” makes people “workshy.”

There’s a whole body of conservative economic orthodoxy, Public Choice Theory, that concerns itself with the motives of callow, easily corrupted regulators, legislators and civil servants, and how they might be tempted to distort markets.

But the same people who obsess over our fallible public institutions are convinced that private institutions will never yield to temptation, because the fear of competition keeps temptation at bay. It’s this belief that leads the right to embrace monopolies as “efficient”: “A company’s dominance is evidence of its quality. Customers flock to it, and competitors fail to lure them away, therefore monopolies are the public’s best friend.”

But this only makes sense if you don’t understand how monopolies can prevent competitors. Think of Uber, lighting $31b of its investors’ cash on fire, losing 41 cents on every dollar it brought in, in a bid to drive out competitors and make public transit seem like a bad investment.

Or think of Big Tech, locking up whole swathes of your life inside their silos, so that changing mobile OSes means abandoning your iMessage contacts; or changing social media platforms means abandoning your friends, or blocking Google surveillance means losing your email address, or breaking up with Amazon means losing all your ebooks and audiobooks:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Businesspeople understand the risks of competition, which is why they seek to extinguish it. The harder it is for your customers to leave — because of a lack of competitors or because of lock-in — the worse you can treat them without risking their departure. This is the core of enshittification: a company that is neither disciplined by competition nor regulation can abuse its customers and suppliers over long timescales without losing either:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

It’s not that public institutions can’t betray they public interest. It’s just that public institutions can be made democratically accountable, rather than financially accountable. When a company betrays you, you can only punish it by “voting with your wallet.” In that system, the people with the fattest wallets get the most votes.

When public institutions fail you, you can vote with your ballot. Admittedly, that doesn’t always work, but one of the major predictors of whether it will work is how big and concentrated the private sector is. Regulatory capture isn’t automatic: it’s what you get when companies are bigger than governments.

If you want small governments, in other words, you need small companies. Even if you think the only role for the state is in enforcing contracts, the state needs to be more powerful than the companies issuing those contracts. The bigger the companies are, the bigger the government has to be:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

Companies can suborn the government to help them abuse the public, but whether public institutions can resist them is more a matter of how powerful those companies are than how fallible a public servant is. Our plutocratic, monopolized, unequal society is the worst of both worlds. Because companies are so big, they abuse us with impunity — and they are able to suborn the state to help them do it:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

This is the dimension that’s so often missing from the discussion of why Americans pay more for healthcare to get worse outcomes from health-care workers who labor under worse conditions than their cousins abroad. Yes, the government can abet this, as when it lets privatizers into the Medicare system to loot it and maim its patients:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-01-patient-zero-tom-scully/

But the answer to this isn’t more privatization. Remember Sarah Palin’s scare-stories about how government health care would have “death panels” where unaccountable officials decided whether your life was worth saving?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26195604/

The reason “death panels” resounded so thoroughly — and stuck around through the years — is that we all understand, at some deep level, that health care will always be rationed. When you show up at the Emergency Room, they have to triage you. Even if you’re in unbearable agony, you might have to wait, and wait, and wait, because other people (even people who arrive after you do) have it worse.

In America, health care is mostly rationed based on your ability to pay. Emergency room triage is one of the only truly meritocratic institutions in the American health system, where your treatment is based on urgency, not cash. Of course, you can buy your way out of that too, with concierge doctors. And the ER system itself has been infested with Private Equity parasites:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

Wealth-based health-care rationing is bad enough, but when it’s combined with the public purse, a bad system becomes a nightmare. Take hospice care: private equity funds have rolled up huge numbers of hospices across the USA and turned them into rigged — and lethal — games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Medicare will pay a hospice $203-$1,462 to care for a dying person, amounting to $22.4b/year in public funds transfered to the private sector. Incentives matter: the less a hospice does for their patients, the more profits they reap. And the private hospice system is administered with the lightest of touches: at the $203/day level, a private hospice has no mandatory duties to their patients.

You can set up a California hospice for the price of a $3,000 filing fee (which is mostly optional, since it’s never checked). You will have a facility inspection, but don’t worry, there’s no followup to make sure you remediate any failing elements. And no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks complaints.

So PE-owned hospices pressure largely healthy people to go into “hospice care” — from home. Then they do nothing for them, including continuing whatever medical care they were depending on. After the patient generates $32,000 in billings for the PE company, they hit the cap and are “live discharged” and must go through a bureaucratic nightmare to re-establish their Medicare eligibility, because once you go into hospice, Medicare assumes you are dying and halts your care.

PE-owned hospices bribe doctors to refer patients to them. Sometimes, these sham hospices deliberately induce overdoses in their patients in a bid to make it look like they’re actually in the business of caring for the dying. Incentives matter:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

Now, hospice care — and its relative, palliative care — is a crucial part of any humane medical system. In his essential book, Being Mortal, Atul Gawande describes how end-of-life care that centers a dying person’s priorities can make death a dignified and even satisfying process for the patient and their loved ones:

https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/

But that dignity comes from a patient-centered approach, not a profit-centered one. Doctors are required to put their patients’ interests first, and while they sometimes fail at this (everyone is fallible), the professionalization of medicine, through which doctors were held to ethical standards ahead of monetary considerations, proved remarkable durable.

Partly that was because doctors generally worked for themselves — or for other doctors. In most states, it is illegal for medical practices to be owned by non-MDs, and historically, only a small fraction of doctors worked for hospitals, subject to administration by businesspeople rather than medical professionals.

But that was radically altered by the entry of private equity into the medical system, with the attending waves of consolidation that saw local hospitals merged into massive national chains, and private practices scooped up and turned into profit-maximizers, not health-maximizers:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-02-qa-corporate-medicine-destroys-doctors/

Today, doctors are being proletarianized, joining the ranks of nurses, physicians’ assistants and other health workers. In 2012, 60% of practices were doctor-owned and only 5.6% of docs worked for hospitals. Today, that’s up by 1,000%, with 52.1% of docs working for hospitals, mostly giant corporate chains:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-04-when-mds-go-union/

The paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring transhuman colony organism that calls itself a Private Equity fund is endlessly inventive in finding ways to increase its profits by harming the rest of us. It’s not just hospices — it’s also palliative care.

Writing for NBC News, Gretchen Morgenson describes how HCA Healthcare — the nation’s largest hospital chain — outsourced its death panels to IBM Watson, whose algorithmic determinations override MDs’ judgment to send patients to palliative care, withdrawing their care and leaving them to die:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-say-hca-hospitals-push-patients-hospice-care-rcna81599

Incentives matter. When HCA hospitals send patients to die somewhere else to die, it jukes their stats, reducing the average length of stay for patients, a key metric used by HCA that has the twin benefits of making the hospital seem like a place where people get well quickly, while freeing up beds for more profitable patients.

Goodhart’s Law holds that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Give an MBA within HCA a metric (“get patients out of bed quicker”) and they will find a way to hit that metric (“send patients off to die somewhere else, even if their doctors think they could recover”):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Incentives matter! Any corporate measure immediately becomes a target. Tell Warners to decrease costs, and they will turn around and declare the writers’ strike to be a $100m “cost savings,” despite the fact that this “savings” comes from ceasing production on the shows that will bring in all of next year’s revenue:

https://deadline.com/2023/08/warner-bros-discovery-david-zaslav-gunnar-wiedenfels-strikes-1235453950/

Incentivize a company to eat its seed-corn and it will chow down.

Only one of HCA’s doctors was willing to go on record about its death panels: Ghasan Tabel of Riverside Community Hospital (motto: “Above all else, we are committed to the care and improvement of human life”). Tabel sued Riverside after the hospital retaliated against him when he refused to follow the algorithm’s orders to send his patients for palliative care.

Tabel is the only doc on record willing to discuss this, but 26 other doctors talked to Morgenson on background about the practice, asking for anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the nation’s largest hospital chain, a “Wall Street darling” with $5.6b in earnings in 2022.

HCA already has a reputation as a slaughterhouse that puts profits before patients, with “severe understaffing”:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/workers-us-hospital-giant-hca-say-puts-profits-patient-care-rcna64122

and rotting, undermaintained facililties:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/roaches-operating-room-hca-hospital-florida-rcna69563

But while cutting staff and leaving hospitals to crumble are inarguable malpractice, the palliative care scam is harder to pin down. By using “AI” to decide when patients are beyond help, HCA can employ empiricism-washing, declaring the matter to be the factual — and unquestionable — conclusion of a mathematical process, not mere profit-seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/ggarbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

But this empirical facewash evaporates when confronted with whistleblower accounts of hospital administrators who have no medical credentials berating doctors for a “missed hospice opportunity” when a physician opts to keep a patient under their care despite the algorithm’s determination.

This is the true “AI Safety” risk. It’s not that a chatbot will become sentient and take over the world — it’s that the original artificial lifeform, the limited liability company, will use “AI” to accelerate its murderous shell-game until we can’t spot the trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/10/in-the-dumps-2/

The risk is real. A 2020 study in the Journal of Healthcare Management concluded that the cash incentives for shipping patients to palliatve care “may induce deceiving changes in mortality reporting in several high-volume hospital diagnoses”:

https://journals.lww.com/jhmonline/Fulltext/2020/04000/The_Association_of_Increasing_Hospice_Use_With.7.aspx

Incentives matter. In a private market, it’s always more profitable to deny care than to provide it, and any metric we bolt onto that system to prevent cheating will immediately become a target. For-profit healthcare is an oxymoron, a prelude to death panels that will kill you for a nickel.

Morgenson is an incisive commentator on for-profit looting. Her recent book These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America (co-written with Joshua Rosner) is a must-read:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

[Image ID: An industrial meat-grinder. A sick man, propped up with pillows, is being carried up its conveyor towards its hopper. Ground meat comes out of the other end. It bears the logo of HCA healthcare. A pool of blood spreads out below it.]

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[stackslip]

wasn't a big fan of jezebel myself but this article is really good

Brands, the marketing giants they hire, and the technology companies that enforce “brand safety” are overwhelmingly conservative about advertising against news content, in a way that has been devastating to ad-supported news sites. The “economic headwinds” for the news industry that media execs love to talk about is in reality the complete and utter collapse of the advertising market for news under the sheer cowardice of many brands and marketing firms. “What’s happened is this perfect storm of marketers becoming increasingly wary of getting caught up in the culture wars and being punished for it, even though there’s virtually no evidence that advertising against news leads to that,” Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer of Adfontes Media, which helps advertisers measure bias among media outlets, told 404 Media. “And so, at the very time when news has become more important to keep the electorate informed, marketers have pulled back from their responsibility.” This means that many brands and the marketing agencies that work for them are scared not just of the important topics that Jezebel covered, but are also scared of having their ads next to news articles about the war in Gaza, coverage of “Free Palestine” protests, coverage of terrorism, extremism, and white nationalism, articles about sex and porn, and so on. (...) It is not an exaggeration to say that the largest companies in the world are colluding to put their thumb on the scales of what types of news is monetized, and which types of news is monetized at lower rates or not monetized at all. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) is listed by the World Economic Forum as one of its “projects” and includes every major marketing agency, as well as brands like Nike, Merck, Nestle, Proctor and Gamble, TikTok, Disney, Walmart, Adidas, BP, Shell, Goldman Sachs, Electronic Arts, McDonalds, and more. It represents 90 percent of all advertising dollars spent in the entire world—$900 billion in spend per year.

[racefortheironthrone]

Why do economists need to shut up about mercantilism, as you alluded to in your post about Louis XIV's chief ministers?

In part due to their supposed intellectual descent from Adam Smith and the other classical economists, contemporary economists are pretty uniformly hostile to mercantilism, seeing it as a wrong-headed political economy that held back human progress until it was replaced by that best of all ideas: capitalism.

As a student of economic history and the history of political economy, I find that economists generally have a pretty poor understanding of what mercantilists actually believed and what economic policies they actually supported. In reality, a lot of the things that economists see as key advances in the creation of capitalism - the invention of the joint-stock company, the creation of financial markets, etc. - were all accomplishments of mercantiism.

Rather than the crude stereotype of mercantilists as a bunch of monetary weirdos who thought the secret to prosperity was the hoarding of precious metals, mercantilists were actually lazer-focused on economic development. The whole business about trying to achieve a positive balance of trade and financial liquidity and restraining wages was all a means to an end of economic development. Trade surpluses could be invested in manufacturing and shipping, gold reserves played an important role in deepening capital pools and thus increasing levels of investment at lower interest rates that could support larger-scale and more capital intensive enterprises, and so forth.

Indeed, the arch-sin of mercantilism in the eyes of classical and contemporary economists, their interference in free trade through tariffs, monopolies, and other interventions, was all directed at the overriding economic goal of climbing the value-added ladder.

Thus, England (and later Britain) put a tariff on foreign textiles and an export tax on raw wool and forbade the emigration of skilled workers (while supporting the immigration of skilled workers to England) and other mercantilist policies to move up from being exporters of raw wool (which meant that most of the profits from the higher value-added part of the industry went to Burgundy) to being exporters of cheap wool cloth to being exporters of more advanced textiles. Hell, even Adam Smith saw the logic of the Navigation Acts!

And this is what brings me to the most devastating critique of the standard economist narrative about mercantilism: the majority of the countries that successfully industrialized did so using mercantilist principles rather than laissez-faire principles:

When England became the first industrial economy, it did so under strict protectionist policies and only converted to free trade once it had gained enough of a technological and economic advantage over its competitors that it didn't need protectionism any more.

When the United States industrialized in the 19th century and transformed itself into the largest economy in the world, it did so from behind high tariff walls.

When Germany made itself the leading industrial power on the Continent, it did so by rejecting English free trade economics and having the state invest heavily in coal, steel, and railroads. Free trade was only for within the Zollverein, not with the outside world.

And as Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, and others have pointed out, you see the same thing with Japan, South Korea, China...everywhere you look, you see protectionism as the means of achieving economic development, and then free trade only working for already-developed economies.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Supreme Court poised to appoint federal judges to run the US economy.

January 18, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

JAN 17, 2024

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on two cases that provide the Court with the opportunity to overturn the “Chevron deference doctrine.” Based on comments from the Justices, it seems likely that the justices will overturn judicial precedent that has been settled for forty years. If they do, their decision will reshape the balance of power between the three branches of government by appointing federal judges as regulators of the world’s largest economy, supplanting the expertise of federal agencies (a.k.a. the “administrative state”).

Although the Chevron doctrine seems like an arcane area of the law, it strikes at the heart of the US economy. If the Court were to invalidate the doctrine, it would do so in service of the conservative billionaires who have bought and paid for four of the justices on the Court. The losers would be the American people, who rely on the expertise of federal regulators to protect their water, food, working conditions, financial systems, public markets, transportation, product safety, health care services, and more.

The potential overruling of the Chevron doctrine is a proxy for a broader effort by the reactionary majority to pare the power of the executive branch and Congress while empowering the courts. Let’s take a moment to examine the context of that effort.

But I will not bury the lead (or the lede): The reactionary majority on the Court is out of control. In disregarding precedent that conflicts with the conservative legal agenda of its Federalist Society overlords, the Court is acting in a lawless manner. It is squandering hard-earned legitimacy. It is time to expand the Court—the only solution that requires a simple majority in two chambers of Congress and the signature of the president.

The “administrative state” sounds bad. Is it?

No. The administrative state is good. It refers to the collective body of federal employees, regulators, and experts who help maintain an orderly US economy. Conservatives use the term “administrative state” to denigrate federal regulation and expertise. They want corporations to operate free of all federal restraint—free to pollute, free to defraud, free to impose dangerous and unfair working conditions, free to release dangerous products into the marketplace, and free to engage in deceptive practices in public markets.

The US economy is the largest, most robust economy in the world because federal regulators impose standards for safety, honesty, transparency, and accountability. Not only is the US economy the largest in the world (as measured by nominal GDP), but its GDP per capita ($76,398) overshadows that of the second largest economy, China ($12,270). The US dollar is the reserve currency for the world and its markets are a haven for foreign investment and capital formation. See The Top 25 Economies in the World (investopedia.com)

US consumers, banks, investment firms, and foreign investors are attracted to the US economy because it is regulated. US corporations want all the benefits of regulations—until regulations get in the way of making more money. It is at that point that the “administrative state” is seen as “the enemy” by conservatives who value profit maximization above human health, safety, and solvency.

It is difficult to comprehend how big the US economy is. To paraphrase Douglas Adams’s quote about space, “It’s big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.” Suffice to say, the US economy is so big it cannot be regulated by several hundred federal judges with dockets filled with criminal cases and major business disputes.

Nor can Congress pass enough legislation to keep pace with ever changing technological and financial developments. Congress can’t pass a budget on time; the notion that it would be able to keep up with regulations necessary to regulate Bitcoin trading in public markets is risible.

What is the Chevron deference doctrine?

Managing the US economy requires hundreds of thousands of subject matter experts—a.k.a. “regulators”—who bring order, transparency, and honesty to the US economy. Those experts must make millions of judgments each year in creating, implementing and applying federal regulations.

And this is where the “Chevron deference doctrine” comes in. When federal experts and regulators interpret federal regulations in esoteric areas such as maintaining healthy fisheries, their decisions should be entitled to a certain amount of deference. And they have received such deference since 1984, when the US Supreme Court created a rule of judicial deference to decisions by federal regulators in the case of Chevron v. NRDC.

What happened at oral argument?

In a pair of cases, the US Supreme Court heard argument on Tuesday as to whether the Chevron deference doctrine should continue—or whether the Court should overturn the doctrine and effectively throw out 17,000 federal court decisions applying the doctrine. According to Court observers, including Mark Joseph Stern of Slate, the answer is “Yes, the Court is poised to appoint federal judges as regulators of the US economy.” See Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, The Supreme Court is seizing more power from Democratic presidents. (slate.com)

I recommend Stern’s article for a description of the grim atmosphere at the oral argument—kind of “pre-demise” wake for the Chevron deference doctrine. Stern does a superb job of explaining the effects of overruling Chevron:

Here’s the bottom line: Without Chevron deference, it’ll be open season on each and every regulation, with underinformed courts playing pretend scientist, economist, and policymaker all at once. Securities fraud, banking secrecy, mercury pollution, asylum applications, health care funding, plus all manner of civil rights laws: They are ultravulnerable to judicial attack in Chevron’s absence. That’s why the medical establishment has lined up in support of Chevron, explaining that its demise would mark a “tremendous disruption” for patients and providers; just rinse and repeat for every other area of law to see the convulsive disruptions on the horizon.

The Kochs and the Federalist Society have bought and paid for this sad outcome. The chaos that will follow will hurt consumers, travelers, investors, patients and—ultimately—American businesses, who will no longer be able to rely on federal regulators for guidance as to the meaning of federal regulations. Instead, businesses will get an answer to their questions after lengthy, expensive litigation before overworked and ill-prepared judges implement a political agenda.

Expand the Court. Disband the reactionary majority by relegating it to an irrelevant minority. If we win control of both chambers of Congress in 2024 and reelect Joe Biden, expanding the Court should be the first order of business.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[earlymornings]

regarding sumeru...

hi friends! this is my quick take on what's happening with hoyoverse, the general design of sumeru, and the stream of racism allegations that have resurged recently. i think it's worth trying to analyze why hoyoverse designed sumeru the way it looks like so far (and because i want to add my two cents to the discourse lol).

here are some context:

hoyoverse is a chinese game dev company

sumeru is inspired by the people, religions, architecture, and cultures of south asian countries (india, nepal, pakistan, etc.) and countries in SWANA* (egypt, iran, the UAE, turkey, etc.)

we are only getting a portion of sumeru and 3 new characters in the 3.0 update

here are some of the main problems players have with the current status of sumeru:

the combination of the different countries and their cultures and religions

the lack of diversity

the general lack of effort put into sumeru's design, given the release of the fatui harbingers and the outstanding quality demonstrated in the interlude teaser

in order to address these concerns, i think it's important to think about hoyoverse and the stances its employees have on this issue. this does not mean i am playing devil's advocate or excusing the company's ignorance, but i think it's critical to understand the potential root causes.

because hoyoverse is based in china, their standard of diversity is much, much lower compared to that of other countries, such as the US and canada, which experience decades worth of immigration and are known as melting pots. coupled with east asia's internalized colorism and xenophobia, mainland folks simply do not get much exposure to POC. this means two things. first, they might not understand why global players are so adamant about POC representation and diversity – the developers may not even know how to go about bringing diversity because what they think is diverse is different from our understanding. second, hoyoverse will prioritize its east asian, particularly its chinese, fanbases, and let's be real, any character that's not flour-pale will not be as popular with the latter.**

the lack of popularity then becomes a financial issue for hoyoverse. hoyoverse generates a large portion of its money from the wishing system. it's thriving because so many people whale for 5-star characters and C6-ing them. if hoyoverse's largest community stops pulling for characters, they won't be able to keep up and maintain high quality with future productions (both for genshin and other games).

i promise y'all that there are at least a few designers and staff members in hoyoverse who want diversity in the same way that we do, who want unique characters with intricate lore, and who are willing to put in the effort. but at the end of the day, they are just designers and many of them will be forced to revise darker-skinned character drafts.

besides literal money, another currency that hoyoverse is limited to is time. one thing that i think hoyoverse hasn't disappointed fans in is the consistency of the game. there is always new content, and even during its hiatus in response to the shanghai mass quarantine in may, they provided mini events and extended the banners to make it more accessible for F2P players. while having constant releases is wonderful and retains interest, that means quality will be compromised in other aspects.

in this case, it means the design and intention put into sumeru. to elaborate, by design, i don't just mean character designs (though this is debatable because the community has a pretty bad habit of hating new characters, especially 5-stars, but then growing to love them) but also the geography, architecture, and personality of sumeru.

as sumeru is marketed right now, its concept is that it is a collage of all the aforementioned countries and their respective cultures. unless sumeru is separated into geographical sections to represent the distinct cultural influences, to mish-mash these countries' religions, peoples, and traditions together is disrespectful and reinforces harmful monolithic stereotypes.***

sumeru will be a literal game-changing region because it has so much information to bring: in-depth lore, the dendro element and everything that entails, etc. this is a pivoting point, so that's why it's frankly saddening and anticlimactic for hoyoverse to not put in the effort. i understand that in update 3.0, we will only be getting a taste of sumeru, so while it's hard to judge the production of the region with the limited information we have right now, it's important to push for diversity and representation while we still can and also give hoyoverse time to make the necessary changes correctly.

to summarize: i don't think hoyoverse is being intentionally or actively racist. i think it comes from a place of ignorance, so i personally think it's better to approach this problem with constructive criticism than to send hate messages to hoyoverse staff members who work so hard regardless. if we don't tell them why and what they're doing is wrong, then the game developers won't know how to resolve the concerns. furthermore, sumeru hasn't officially come out yet, and what we have seen in the teasers will be more refined and polished in the released product. i don't think we need to panic or retaliate, i just think we should remind hoyoverse so that they don't put representation on the back burner.

as for solutions, sending messages through different media platforms, emails, etc. has worked in the past (e.g. during genshin's 1st anniversary).**** but it doesn't stop there. just like every other region released so far, sumeru isn't just limited to the 3.0 patch; we will continue getting content for it for the rest of the game, so unless we see results, we have to be consistent with the feedback. that looks like continuing to send messages until we see tangible, permanent change, not being complacent in the lack of POC representation, and more.

i probably missed a lot of great points out there, but this is all my last brain cell can come up with. please repost and add your own thoughts because the more ideas, the better! (if you want to repost this onto other platforms, just make sure you credit me!!)

hope everyone gets their kazuhas, heizous, and yoimiyas in 2.8!!!

--

*i recognize that the name "the middle east" has colonial roots, but because the region is so popularly known as such, i'm using it so that no one gets confused. edit: thanks to @najmaviper for pointing this out, but a decolonized term that is often used is SWANA. you can find more information at the initiative's website: https://swanaalliance.com/about#:~:text=S.W.A.N.A.%20is%20a%20decolonial%20word,contain%20and%20dehumanize%20our%20people.

**this is not to say that all individuals from south asian or SWANA are darker-skinned, but it's crucial to push for change to help gamers who are tan, brown, and black. this is especially important to do with games as popular as genshin impact because it can cause ripple effects.

***here's a tweet that states this argument eloquently: https://twitter.com/timelysumeru/status/1546500639970435072

****i know another method that has worked has been leaving a bunch of bad reviews in app stores, but i don't think it's applicable right now since we know so little about sumeru. if the problem persists, sure, but i think sending bad reviews right now just antagonizes the situation even further.

[thecrazygamingzombie]

Helluva Boss/Hazbin Hotel corporate AU:

Wrote this AU with some friends last night and it was too good not to share publically:

Hell is replaced with a massive afterlife based corporation called 'Hell Inc' that handles the production, distribution, and management of all the various types of evil in the world; while also acting as the largest employeer of damned souls in existence and a direct competitor to Heaven LLC.

The company is headed by it's Chief Pride Officer and founder, Lucifer Morningstar, beneath him is the company's Vice President Charlie Morningstar after the former VP retired and disappeared under odd circumstances. Charlie has been trying (and failing) to get the company in some semblance of order and addressing the horrible working conditions that arose as a result of her father's near endless apathy and depression stemming from a millennia of accumulated burnout.

Below them are the six members of Hell inc's board of directors who run the various company departments:

Mammon, Chief Greed Officer (CGRO) and head of the greed department. Which manages the company finances as well as several financial institutions on earth like Banks and Casinos

Beelzebub, Chief Gluttony Officer (CGLO) and head of the gluttony department. They run Hell Inc's marketing campaigns and manages several fast food chains in the human world such as Bee Burger

Asmodeus, Chief Lust Officer (CLO) and head of the lust department. They run Hell inc's production lines in the underworld and various media conglomerates on earth.

Satan, Chief Wrath Officer (CWO) and head of the wrath department. Which handles all security related matters along with war and conflict in the human world, primarily arms manufacturers

Leviathan, Chief Envy Officer (CEO) and head of the Envy department. Which runs Hell Inc's research and development and various construction ventures on earth

And Belphagor, Chief Sloth Officer (CSO) and head of the Sloth department. Which is in charge of all health related company matters along with various hospitals and insurance companies on earth.

Each has their own unique management problems and while they once worked in tandem, which has resulted in a slough of issues from a lack of individual oversight. Such as Greed's severe budget cuts, Envy's ridiculously long working hours coupled with high standards, and employees in Wrath that spend more time arguing than getting things done.

Beneath them are the middle managers, the Ars Goetia, but they're among some of the most useless members of the company. Holding nothing more than figurehead positions to create the illusion of a centralized hierarchy when in reality they just pass their work onto the various supervisors within each department. Recent hire Stella is particularly bad in this way as the only reason she has the position at all was due to the nepotism provided by her brother Andrephelus who works alongside her in the Envy department.

(the only exception is Lust's middle manager Stolas)

Then we have the supervisors, the actual managers of the department divisions who occupy the role of authority figure that the Ars Goetia fail to fill themselves. Notable supervisors include:

Crimson Knolastname: Greed department supervisor overseeing most organized crime with a focus on blackmail activities

Wally Wackford: Greed department supervisor in charge of scams and white collar crimes.

Verosika Mayday: Lust department supervisor and PR manager for the department

Fizzarolli: originally an intern in greed, he was later transferred over to Lust and supervises the roleplay and costume divisions of the lust department

Vortex: the primary event coordinator for the Gluttony department along with new employee orientation

Striker: Wrath department supervisor, handling any and all matters relating to mercenary work and assassinations

Joe and Lin: Wrath department supervisors, the former managing the hand to hand combat division while the latter runs the in house medical center and trains all Wrath Department employees in battlefield aid.

And last but not least are all the rank and file employees that makeup Hell inc's primary workforce. They're usually sorted by species: Baphomets work for the Sloth Department, Imps work for the Wrath department, Succubi and Incubi work for the Lust department, etc. However this is only for their initial probational period, if their skills prove to be more suitable elsewhere in the company then can be transferred into another department.

With one exception: Pride. The department in charge of processing all damned souls at the time of death and general evil relations in the human world

The Pride department is the largest and most chaotic of all of Hell Inc's departments, it's facing an ever increasing workload that it struggles to manage and even with the steady flow of Sinners rolling in to fill vacancies the department is constantly short staffed. So not only are sinners forbidden from being transferred to other departments, but any hellborn that get transferred in Never. Ever. Leave. Getting assigned to the Pride Department is basically a life sentence and it doesn't help that the department itself has basically gained a reputation as a dumping ground for misfit employees that can't properly function in any other department.

To make matters worse, while the other departments have some level of rules and standards when it comes to employee conduct. The Pride Department is left in almost total disarray thanks to every supervisor in the department being blood thirsty corporate climbers who are constantly screwing one another over to gain more recognition in the overall company. The supervisors affectionately nicknamed the Vees: Velvette (social media manager), Vox (IT supervisor), and Valentino (employee recruitment manager) are the absolute worst when it comes to this backstabbing.

However, the biggest problem facing the Pride department is none other than the man eaters in the Demon Resources division. Ran by two supervisors known as Rosie and Alastor, the former handling employee disputes while the later is in charge of terminating employee contracts...and employees. If you get called into Alastor's office, that's usually the last anyone hears of you. The rest of HR isn't much better either as they all tend to be of a similar temperament to their supervisors.

But for all it's mess, VP Charlie genuinely believes she can clean up the company one department at a time; starting with the Pride Department. With the backing of both her father and the HR rep Alastor, she's assembled a solid team of employees willing to help her with the task.

And by that I mean employees that were voluntold to help her:

Husk, former supervisor in charge of managing Hell inc's gambling holdings that had been partially outsourced from Greed's own workers. Alastor had personally handled his demotion after it was found the cat demon had been skimming off the top.

Vaggie, the head of the security division of the Pride Department and Charlie's girlfriend. The rumors of her rise to power via nepotism are matched only by the rumors that she transferred in from Hell inc's rival company, Heaven LLC

Angel, a rank and file employee of pride with no particular specialization who's working directly under Val. He claims he's only on board with Charlie's plan in hopes of getting a promotion, but it's rather obvious he really just wants to get away from his current boss by any means necessary

Sir Pentious, part of the R&D team and widely considered to be one of the worst researchers in the entire company due to the numerous cases of collateral damage he's caused. Charlie's project is not only his last chance to avoid getting a pink slip for both his job and his life, but also to get the professional recognition he so desperately craves

Niffty, once a member of the janitorial team. Nobody knows where she came from or how long she's been working her, only that she's some what of an oddity even by Hell inc standards. The only thing that's certain about her is that she's an employee you should give a wide berth to if you value your personal safety

Meanwhile in the Pride department, a small little clique has formed of low level demons that have transferred in from other departments and work in the revenge division:

Blitzo, the supervisor of the division who's quite skilled at falling upwards. He is completely and utterly incompetent at his job, choosing instead to slack off with the toy ponies he spends his salary on or flirt/sexually harass his coworkers rather than actually performing any administrative duties. The only reason he still has his job is likely due to a 'friend' he has in middle management that keeps covering for him.

Moxxie, an accounting intern that transferred in from greed after a disastrous project with now ex-employee Chaz that resulted in massive losses for the greed department, causing Mammon to dump the 'useless' imp into the Pride department. Usually the one doing Blitzo's job for him, very begrudgingly I might add, and frequently grumbles about his station but secretly enjoys the group he's found. Especially his wife...

Millie, a security guard transferred from Wrath after several complaints in regards to 'excessive force' were leveled against her. Luckily she's adjusted quite well to her new position in the Pride Department even if she tends to drift under the radar more often than not, but she remains optimistic that she'll get a worthwhile promotion someday. In the meantime, she makes use of her spare time tending to her weapon collection or having sexual encounters with her husband around the office; away from most prying eyes

Loona, one of Hell inc's newest hires. Originally slated to be an intern in the Gluttony department, her attitude problems forced Beelzebub to personally see to it that the hound was relocated to a position in the Pride Department for both her own safety and that of her coworkers. Takes after her supervisors slacker tendencies in an apathetic way, spending practically every waking moment glued to her phone, much to Moxxie's frustration.

And that's the lot of the company! We hope you enjoy your stay at Hell Inc! Remember: Today is the first day of your eternal life....

(P.S. you didn't hear this from me, but rumor has it that Heaven LLC has been experiencing plenty of problems of it's own. Such as poor leadership, communication issues, and nepotism even worse than anything seen at Hell Inc. And there's even a few sources that claim that former VP Lilith was seen on their board of directors, but you know how people like to talk.)

[tailschannel]

Significant cuts hits IDW's parent company in a self-described "reset"

IDW Media Holdings, the parent of IDW Publishing (the company behind the Sonic the Hedgehog comics), announced major cuts in an effort to unlock financial stability.

The company terminated their New York Stock Exchange listing, shook up senior management, and slashed entire promotional and editorial departments - around 39% of its workforce.

The newly-appointed CEO characterized the axe drop a "reset."

Background

There's no other way to describe it, the cuts at IDW are significant.

The axe drop was in direct response to a poor balance sheet in a tough economic environment. IDW suffered greatly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and non-publishing segments (like direct-to-consumer games) continued to illustrate repeated quarterly losses.

It's no secret that IDW experienced cash flow issues and various others financial challenges, even though the comic books in particular (like IDW Sonic and TMNT) are significant revenue generators.

The company hopes that these cost-cutting measures will provide $4.4 million USD in estimated annual savings.

The impacted

Marketing, public relations, and editorial at IDW were impacted by today's announced cuts.

Comicsbeat reported that the entire marketing and PR departments, and half of the editorial team, got the axe, with more specific details yet to come. That's 39% of the total workforce.

At press time, @idwsonicnews told us that Shawn Lee, a "designer and letterer on many IDW titles", were among the laid off. He tweeted, "whelp, I'm officially a freelancer now."

---

Meanwhile, senior management got a shakeup. Former chairman Davidi Jonas replaced Allan Grafman as Chief Economic Officer. Chief Financial Officer Brooke Feinstein was ousted, and Amber Huerta was promoted to Chief Operating Officer.

IDW also voluntarily delisted their Class B common stock from the New York Stock Exchange, the largest trading venue in the world; and suspended their reporting status to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company hoped that this will "reduce pressure on limited resources and the Company’s current inability to realize many of the benefits."

Okay, what about IDW Sonic?

Deep breaths.

At press time, there's nothing we know that flags an immediate concern for the IDW Sonic comics. However, as this is a developing situation, and the long-term outlook is uncertain, the forecast can change.

Even though it, and other comic book franchises (TMNT, etc.) continues to generate significant revenue to the publishing unit, IDW will have to enact more critical decisions to remain financially sound.

IDW Sonic editors David Mariotte and Riley Farmer have yet to officially acknowledge the parent company's announcement, but both "retweeted posts related to the layoffs," @idwsonicnews told us.

We have reached out to IDW Publishing for further comment.

(Updated Friday 11:00 pm ET)

[anjalirana00]

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[vecnawrites]

Patreon Reward: Be Careful What They Wish For

Yang, after finding a lamp in the flea market in Vale, brings it back to the school to see what to make of it, only to find a special surprise...

Yang hummed to herself as she took her find out of her bag, looking over the dusty and dirty surface with interested lilac eyes. She had found the lamp (at least that’s what she assumed it was) in the market area of Vale, in a flea market. It had called out to her, pretty much screaming ‘buy me!’, even though old fashioned looking stuff like this wasn’t usually her style.

Eh, if she didn’t like the look when she finished cleaning it, she could probably gift it to Weiss. She seemed the type to like old fashioned stuff like this, after all. She was all fancy like that.

Gathering a soft cloth and some soapy water, Yang hummed a soft tune as she began to wipe the lamp off, years and years of filth being cleaned away and a golden luster with teal accents being revealed underneath.

Despite herself, Yang found herself liking the look of the lamp as more and more of it was revealed, the colors catching her eye and that odd feeling that she had earlier when she saw the lamp halfway hidden in the stuffed flea market shelving.

More and more gunk was washed off, the basin water having to go through two changes before the lamp was finally in pristine condition, practically shining in the overhead light in the room.

Taking a dry cloth, she wiped it dry and smiled at how it looked after the fact. “Huh…it cleans up nicely, that’s for sure…” she murmured to herself as she buffed the metal. Maybe she would actually keep it…

Her eyes widened as she saw the blue accents light up in a bright glow, making the blonde drop the lamp onto the desk and shield her eyes to block them from the sting that radiated through them, missing the dark teal mists that rose up from the lamp, coalescing into a large, female form, golden bracelets and necklace, long dark blue hair falling down her back and covering her bare breasts.

“What is thy wish, my master?” blinking rapidly, Yang yanked her hands away, mouth dropping open and eyes roaming over the form of the large woman who had emerged from the lamp she had bought.

~

Yang, after making sure that she wasn’t hallucinating, immediately began to interrogate her about what she was and what she meant.

She learned that Jinn (the name of the genie that lived in this lamp) was made to grant three wishes to each owner she had, before finding a new owner.

Which left Yang at a quandary. She had three wishes, with certain caveats that immediately tossed out some of her wishes (Jinn couldn’t revive the dead, so no bringing back Summer, and she couldn’t make anyone fall in love with her, which only made sense, she would want someone to want her honestly, and she couldn’t wish for more wishes, which while understandable would make her wishes somewhat harder to make), and was deep in thought about what she wanted.

But then, there wasn’t much she honestly wanted outside of Summer back…though as she pondered over the idea, she remembered hearing a conversation that made her huff in anger.

She had overheard someone saying that her tits were the fourth largest in Beacon’s…that just wouldn’t do!

Yeah, that was it…if her wishes had to be for herself only and she couldn’t wish for extra wishes or for Summer back, she was going to make her body the envy of everyone!

Grinning, she looked up at Jinn. “I’m ready to make my first wish!”

~

Over the milennia that she had existed, Jinn the Genie had seen just about everything. Civilizations rise and fall. Allies and enemies made. She had seen all kinds of wishes as well, ranging from freedom from financial burdens, either through money or just forgiveness from their debts, to becoming ruler of a kingdom of their own.

This young blonde girl had been the first to summon her in over three hundred years, and she wondered what the girl would want in life, as even with her three restrictions, there was a lot that one could wish for-

“I want the biggest tits and ass in Beacon!”

…what.

Of all the…nigh infinite power she had at her command, and the girl wanted cosmetic changes? The girl wasn’t even deformed in any way!

Disgust filled her, but she was bound by the laws of the her kind. If someone wished for it, they would have to give it to them…though thankfully, loopholes existed. And with how loosely her wish was worded…

…well, she not often got to make sure people learned the meaning of the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’, but this seemed like the perfect time for the girl to learn this lesson.

She wanted to have the biggest tits and ass in this school? She’d get them. Calling upon her powers, she allowed them to creep into the girl’s body, and begin changing it.

~

Yang watched as golden teal energy flowed out of the genie’s body and into her own, feeling it sink in and worm around, making her way towards her chest and rear end, filling them with a tingly warmth, the sudden sensation making her nipples swell up.

Yang looked down, watching with wide eyes as her breasts began to swell in her top, her nipples bulging against the front of her top as it stretched due to her bust increases more and more and more, her tube top getting tighter and tighter around her chest, her shorts doing the same around her waist until-

RRRRIIIIIIPPPPPP!!!

Yang watched in awe as her shirt and shorts exploded off of her body, her boobs becoming almost, well forget almost, outright cartoonish on her frame, looking like she had shoved beach balls underneath her skin, jiggling and bouncing with every slight movement that she made. Same with her ass, the normally taut flesh moving like it was filled with jello. Bouncing on the balls of her feet, she felt her body jiggle and shake.

Her body was outrageous. It was perfect.

Grinning up, she cried out her next wish, “I wish to have the biggest dick in Beacon!” she could see the genies face twist in some emotion, but another wave of energy was sent her way, smacking into and sinking into her crotch, making her shudder and hunch over, collapsing to her knees as her body changed.

~

Jinn felt even more disgust fill her as she watched the massive thing form on the girl’s body, a solid foot of flesh and a heavy pouch holding apple sized orbs in it. She couldn’t believe how her powers were being used. How disgusting…

~

Staring down between her legs with a grin, Yang reached down and gripped her newest limb, shuddering as she felt it getting hard in her hand, growing to an incredible monolith of flesh between her thighs.

She continued to stroke her shaft, biting her lower lip and moaning low in her chest, completely missing the outright disgusted look the genie was giving her.

“...your third wish, Mistress?”

Moaning as precum started to spurt from her tip, Yang managed to moan, “I wish Ruby, Weiss, and Blake all could feel as good as I do~!” trailing off with an ecstatic cry as she came, cum flying from the tip of her cock and through her even more disgusted genie.

“...your wish has been granted.”

~

Around the school, Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, and Blake Belladonna all screamed in shock as their bodies changed, their tits and asses exploding out of their clothes, cocks and balls forming, growing hard, and cum spraying all over as they tumbled into an intense orgasm.

~

Her job done, Jinn returned to her lamp, the object vanishing from the chronically masturbating girl’s bed, to travel somewhere else, to be found and used by someone else. Despite the fact that she had been found for the first time in three centuries, Jinn desperately hoped that she would either not be found for a further three centuries, or at the very least…

…the next person who found and used her powers to alter reality had some self respecting wishes that she wouldn’t feel ill granting.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Insurance companies are making climate risk worse

Tomorrow (November 29), I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Conservatives may deride the "reality-based community" as a drag on progress and commercial expansion, but even the most noxious pump-and-dump capitalism is supposed to remain tethered to reality by two unbreakable fetters: auditing and insurance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

No matter how much you value profit over ethics or human thriving, you still need honest books – even if you never show those books to the taxman or the marks. Even an outright scammer needs to know what's coming in and what's going out so they don't get caught in a liquidity trap (that is, "broke"), or overleveraged ("broke," again) exposed to market changes (you guessed it: "broke").

Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is on its deathbed. The market is sewn up by the wildly corrupt and conflicted Big Four accounting firms that are the very definition of too big to fail/too big to jail. They keep cooking books on behalf of management to the detriment of investors. These double-entry fabrications conceal rot in giant, structurally important firms until they implode spectacularly and suddenly, leaving workers, suppliers, customers and investors in a state of utter higgeldy-piggeldy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

In helping corporations defraud institutional investors, auditors are facilitating mass scale millionaire-on-billionaire violence, and while that may seem like the kind of fight where you're happy to see either party lose, there are inevitably a lot of noncombatants in the blast radius. Since the Enron collapse, the entire accounting sector has turned to quicksand, which is a big deal, given that it's what industrial capitalism's foundations are anchored to. There's a reason my last novel was a thriller about forensic accounting and Big Tech:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

But accounting isn't the only bedrock that's been reduced to slurry here in capitalism's end-times. The insurance sector is meant to be an unshakably rational enterprise, imposing discipline on the rest of the economy. Sure, your company can do something stupid and reckless, but the insurance bill will be stonking, sufficient to consume the expected additional profits.

But the crash of 2008 made it clear that the largest insurance companies in the world were capable of the same wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and short-termism that they were supposed to prevent in every other business. Without AIG – one of the largest insurers in the world – there would have been no Great Financial Crisis. The company knowingly underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in junk bonds dressed up as AAA debt, and required a $180b bailout.

Still, many of us have nursed an ember of hope that the insurance sector would spur Big Finance and its pocket governments into taking the climate emergency seriously. When rising seas and wildfires and zoonotic plagues and famines and rolling refugee crises make cities, businesses, and homes uninsurable risks, then insurers will stop writing policies and the doom will become undeniable. Money talks, bullshit walks.

But while insurers have begun to withdraw from the most climate-endangered places (or crank up premiums), the net effect is to decrease climate resilience and increase risk, creating a "climate risk doom loop" that Advait Arun lays out brilliantly for Phenomenal World:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-doom-loop/

Part of the problem is political: as people move into high-risk areas (flood-prone coastal cities, fire-threatened urban-wildlife interfaces), politicians are pulling out all the stops to keep insurers from disinvesting in these high-risk zones. They're loosening insurance regs, subsidizing policies, and imposing "disaster risk fees" on everyone in the region.

But the insurance companies themselves are simply not responding aggressively enough to the rising risk. Climate risk is correlated, after all: when everyone in a region is at flood risk, then everyone will be making a claim on the insurance company when the waters come. The insurance trick of spreading risk only works if the risks to everyone in that spread aren't correlated.

Perversely, insurance companies are heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, these being reliable money-spinners where an insurer can park and grow your premiums, on the assumption that most of the people in the risk pool won't file claims at the same time. But those same fossil-fuel assets produce the very correlated risk that could bring down the whole system.

The system is in trouble. US claims from "natural disasters" are topping $100b/year – up from $4.6b in 2000. Home insurance premiums are up (21%!), but it's not enough, especially in drowning Florida and Texas (which is also both roasting and freezing):

https://grist.org/economics/as-climate-risks-mount-the-insurance-safety-net-is-collapsing/

Insurers who put premiums up to cover this new risk run into a paradox: the higher premiums get, the more risk-tolerant customers get. When flood insurance is cheap, lots of homeowners will stump up for it and create a big, uncorrelated risk-pool. When premiums skyrocket, the only people who buy flood policies are homeowners who are dead certain their house is gonna get flooded out and soon. Now you have a risk pool consisting solely of highly correlated, high risk homes. The technical term for this in the insurance trade is: "bad."

But it gets worse: people who decide not to buy policies as prices go up may be doing their own "motivated reasoning" and "mispricing their risk." That is, they may decide, "If I can't afford to move, and I can't afford to sell my house because it's in a flood-zone, and I can't afford insurance, I guess that means I'm going to live here and be uninsured and hope for the best."

This is also bad. The amount of uninsured losses from US climate disaster "dwarfs" insured losses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hurricanes-floods-bring-120-billion-insurance-losses-2022-2023-01-09/

Here's the doom-loop in a nutshell:

As carbon emissions continue to accumulate, more people are put at risk of climate disaster, while the damages from those disasters intensifies. Vulnerability will drive disinvestment, which in turn exacerbates vulnerability.

Also: the browner and poorer you are, the worse you have it: you are impacted "first and worst":

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/frontline-fenceline-communities

As Arun writes, "Tinkering with insurance markets will not solve their real issues—we must patch the gaping holes in the financial system itself." We have to end the loop that sees the poorest places least insured, and the loss of insurance leading to abandonment by people with money and agency, which zeroes out the budget for climate remediation and resiliency where it is most needed.

The insurance sector is part of the finance industry, and it is disinvesting in climate-endagered places and instead doubling down on its bets on fossil fuels. We can't rely on the insurance sector to discipline other industries by generating "price signals" about the true underlying climate risk. And insurance doesn't just invest in fossil fuels – they're also a major buyer of municipal and state bonds, which means they're part of the "bond vigilante" investors whose decisions constrain the ability of cities to raise and spend money for climate remediation.

When American cities, territories and regions can't float bonds, they historically get taken over and handed to an unelected "control board" who represents distant creditors, not citizens. This is especially true when the people who live in those places are Black or brown – think Puerto Rico or Detroit or Flint. These control board administrators make creditors whole by tearing the people apart.

This is the real doom loop: insurers pull out of poor places threatened by climate disasters. They invest in the fossil fuels that worsen those disasters. They join with bond vigilantes to force disinvestment from infrastructure maintenance and resiliency in those places. Then, the next climate disaster creates more uninsured losses. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finance and insurance are betting heavily on climate risk modeling – not to avert this crisis, but to ensure that their finances remain intact though it. What's more, it won't work. As climate effects get bigger, they get less predictable – and harder to avoid. The point of insurance is spreading risk, not reducing it. We shouldn't and can't rely on insurance creating price-signals to reduce our climate risk.

But the climate doom-loop can be put in reverse – not by market spending, but by public spending. As Arun writes, we need to create "a global investment architecture that is safe for spending":

https://tanjasail.wordpress.com/2023/10/06/a-world-safe-for-spending/

Public investment in emissions reduction and resiliency can offset climate risk, by reducing future global warming and by making places better prepared to endure the weather and other events that are locked in by past emissions. A just transition will "loosen liquidity constraints on investment in communities made vulnerable by the financial system."

Austerity is a bad investment strategy. Failure to maintain and improve infrastructure doesn't just shift costs into the future, it increases those costs far in excess of any rational discount based on the time value of money. Public institutions should discipline markets, not the other way around. Don't give Wall Street a veto over our climate spending. A National Investment Authority could subordinate markets to human thriving:

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/industrial-policy-requires-public-not-just-private-equity/

Insurance need not be pitted against human survival. Saving the cities and regions whose bonds are held by insurance companies is good for those companies: "Breaking the climate risk doom loop is the best disaster insurance policy money can buy."

I found Arun's work to be especially bracing because of the book I'm touring now, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk novel set in a world in which vast public investment is being made to address the climate emergency that is everywhere and all at once:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

There is something profoundly hopeful about the belief that we can do something about these foreseeable disasters – rather than remaining frozen in place until the disaster is upon us and it's too late. As Rebecca Solnit says, inhabiting this place in your imagination is "Completely delightful. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it portrays life in SoCal in a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/28/re-re-reinsurance/#useless-price-signals

[showmey0urfangs]

do you really think loustat will be given much focus in s2? cause the trailers looked more loumand-heavy to me? i know they've favored sam & jacob for the promo interviews, but I assumed that's bc they're currently the show's more recognizable faces, and casual viewers barely know armand yet. guess we'll have to wait and see, but i thought s2 would be loumand-centric with just occasional hints of loustat. that'd make more sense anyways, but idk!

Hi Anon! It's not only the complete absence of Jassad promo content that makes me think that—although it is very telling, it's also the overall way AMC is choosing to market this season.

To give you a quick rundown, you can always learn a lot about a project from its marketing. It tells you what the focus of the story will be, and/or what the network/studio thinks will garner the most viewership and therefore make them the most money. That's what they'll put front and center.

A good hint is to look at the posters and the size that each character takes up on them. This is something actors often negotiate in their contracts, that's how important it is.

On the season 1 poster, Louis is slightly bigger in size, and he's positioned in the foreground, with Lestat behind and half-hidden. This says; here's our main character, and we think Jacob Anderson's very handsome and recognizable face is what will get more people to tune in.

But if you look at the season 2 posters we've gotten so far, Lestat is always the largest one, with the other characters positioned either to the side or underneath him. He's also at eye level and looking directly into camera, meaning that he's the first thing you notice when you look at the posters.

This also aligns with the choice to include Lestat in more of the story than he is in the book. For reminder, in the second half of IWTV he shows up in Paris to testify in the trial, and he's pretty much absent for the rest of it. On the show, he will be appearing as ghoststat in every other scene, and the bit of 'Armand's backstory' also looks like it will focus on him and his early years at the TdV. If you ask me, that's a whole lotta Lestat in a story where he's normally barely present. 😂

So the marketing is not a coinkydink. It's AMC saying, we think this is what will get our target demo to tune in and get us more of those sweet sweet advertising dollars.

That's another thing to keep in mind too, AMC still gets the vast majority of their revenue from their cable service i.e. from advertisers. (you can check out their 2023 financial report if you love numbers like I do). Their streaming service only makes up 13% of their total revenue vs companies like Netflix who rely solely on subscriptions. That heavily impacts the type of content they choose to make and how they market it. (It also explains why they keep pushing garbage like MW as much as they do)

What AMC's overall strategy with season 2 tells us is that either upon further reflection, they've decided that Lestat makes for a better selling point and/or they're already positioning Sam as the next lead and preparing the audience for the proverbial passing of the torch.

So to answer your question; no, I don't think this will be Loumand's season. Heck, I don't even think it will be Louis's tbh. It will be Lestat's season and all the subsequent ones after that too most likely.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Over the past decade, deregulation and the growing dominance of streaming video have laid the groundwork for a media landscape where just three companies—Disney, Amazon, and Netflix—are poised to be the new gatekeepers. This report from the WGAW details how these three companies have amassed power through anticompetitive practices and abusing their dominance to further disadvantage competitors, raise prices for consumers, and push down wages for the creative workforce. Pay and working conditions for writers have become so dire, and media conglomerates so unresponsive, that 11,500 writers went on strike in May 2023. Without intervention from antitrust agencies and lawmakers, consolidation will continue to snowball, leaving the future of media in peril. These new gatekeepers have amassed market power through mergers and other anti-competitive practices, offering an alarming window into the future of media. Disney has grown through a series of multibillion-dollar acquisitions, using its power to reduce film output, shut down competing studios, foreclose independent content from its distribution networks, expand control of the labor market, and force creators to give up financial participation in future licensing revenue. Amazon has gained a sizeable footprint in media in a short time by utilizing the well-documented playbook critical to its ascendance as a tech company. Though anticompetitive behavior and vertical integration, Amazon has harmed competitors, privileged its related business, and abused employer leverage to underpay writers. Netflix was once an innovative competitor, but is now using its position as the largest streaming service in the world to abuse its leverage as an employer, decrease innovative content spending and raise prices for consumers. The company has cut out independent producers and severely underpaid writers in multiple areas, and a series of recent acquisitions signal its intent to further increase dominance and market power in order to reduce innovative content investment.

[gatheringbones]

[“Our institutions have socialized us to scarcity, creating artificial resource shortages and then normalizing them. For example, because the residents of affluent neighborhoods have been so successful at blocking the construction of new housing in their communities, developers have turned their sights on down-market neighborhoods, where they also meet resistance, often from struggling renters fretting about gentrification.

As this dynamic has repeated itself in cities across America, the debate about addressing the affordable housing crisis and fostering inclusive communities has turned into a debate about gentrification, one pitting low-income families who have stable housing against low-income families who need it. But notice how contrived and weird this is, how our full range of action has been limited by rich homeowners essentially redlining their blocks. Or consider how a scarcity mindset frames so much of our politics, crippling our imaginations and stunting our moral ambitions. How many times have we all heard legislators and academics and pundits begin their remarks with the phrase “In a world of scarce resources…,” as if that state of affairs were self-evident, obvious, as unassailable as natural law, instead of something we’ve fashioned?

The United States lags far behind other advanced countries when it comes to funding public services. In 2019, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and several other Western democracies each raised tax revenues equal to at least 38 percent of their GDPs, while the United States’ total revenues languished at 25 percent. Instead of catching up to our peer nations, we have lavished government benefits on affluent families and refused to prosecute tax dodgers. And then we cry poor when someone proposes a way to spur economic mobility or end hunger? Significantly expanding our collective investment in fighting poverty will cost something. How much it will cost is not a trivial affair. But I would have more patience for concerns about the cost of ending family homelessness if we weren’t spending billions of dollars each year on homeowner tax subsidies, just as I could better stomach concerns over the purported financial burden of establishing a living wage if our largest corporations weren’t pocketing billions each year through tax avoidance. The scarcity mindset shrinks and contorts poverty abolitionism, forcing it to operate within fictitious fiscal constraints. It also pits economic justice against climate justice. When lawmakers have tried to curb pollution and traffic gridlock through congestion pricing, for instance, charging vehicles a fee if they enter busy urban neighborhoods during peak hours, critics have shot down the proposal by claiming it would hit low-income workers in transit deserts the hardest. In many cases, this is true. But it doesn’t have to be. We allow millions to live paycheck to paycheck, then leverage their predicament to justify inaction on other social and environmental issues. Politicians and pundits inform us, using their grown-up voice, that unfortunately we can’t tax gas-guzzling vehicles or transition to green energy or increase the cost of beef because it would harm poor and working-class families. My point isn’t that these tradeoffs aren’t pertinent but that they aren’t inescapable. They are by-products of fabricated scarcity.”]

matthew desmond, from poverty: by america, 2023

[lyralit]

ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ ʀᴇꜱᴏᴜʀᴄᴇꜱ - ʟɪɴᴋꜱ

word count + tracking progress - nanowrimo -> "Writing a novel alone can be difficult, even for seasoned writers. NaNoWriMo helps you track your progress, set milestones, connect with other writers in a vast community, and participate in events that are designed to make sure you finish your novel. Oh, and best of all, it’s free!"

every name on this planet - fantasy name generators -> "There are over 1400 name generators, as well as many description generators, guides and various tools you might find helpful. "

simplify your writing - Hemingway editor -> The app highlights complex sentences and offers helpful suggestions (sorry, Grammarly).

understanding words - vocabulary -> "Whether you’re looking up a specific word or just browsing, you’ll find a universe of friendly explanations and fun activities designed to educate and entertain."

focus / pomodoro timer - pomofocus -> "The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks."

focus writing - zenpen -> "A minimalist writing zone, where you can block out all distractions and get to what's important. The writing!"

writing prompts / feedback / contest - reedsy prompts -> "Join (probably?) the world's largest writing contest. Flex those creative muscles with weekly writing prompts."

write 3 pages / day - 750 words -> Learn to habit-write, and get results + information on your writing consistency, speed, distractions, etc. The goal is 750 words—three pages.

black market information - havocscope -> "Havocscope provides information and threat intelligence on the global black market. Due to the ability of transnational threats to cause financial losses and social harms, key statistics and data about the illegal economy is provided to help mitigate this risk. The information about the black market has been collected from government agencies, academic studies, media reports, and reported data from our sources."

baby character names - nameberry -> "Baby names by the experts at Nameberry, including popular names and unique names, baby girl names and baby boy names and gender neutral names too. We've got baby name lists, news and a revolutionary name generator. It's more than a name, it's an identity."