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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

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Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

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

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

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/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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

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robertreich · 2 years

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youtube

How the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began

The corporate takeover of American politics started with a man and a memo you've probably never heard of.

In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.

Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.

In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.

But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.

The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them that Big Business could dominate American politics in ways not seen since the Gilded Age.

It worked.

The Chamber’s call for a business crusade birthed a new corporate-political industry practically overnight. Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists and political operatives descended on Washington and state capitals across the country.

I should know — I saw it happen with my own eyes.

In 1976, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.

Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when we began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the agency altogether, shutting it down for weeks.

I was dumbfounded. What had happened?

In three words, The Powell Memo.

Lobbyists and their allies in Congress, and eventually the Reagan administration, worked to defang agencies like the FTC — and to staff them with officials who would overlook corporate misbehavior.

Their influence led the FTC to stop seriously enforcing antitrust laws — among other things — allowing massive corporations to merge and concentrate their power even further.

Washington was transformed from a sleepy government town into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, and five-star hotels.

Meanwhile, Justice Lewis Powell used the Court to chip away at restrictions on corporate power in politics. His opinions in the 1970s and 80s laid the foundation for corporations to claim free speech rights in the form of financial contributions to political campaigns.

Put another way — without Lewis Powell, there would probably be no Citizens United — the case that threw out limits on corporate campaign spending as a violation of the “free speech” of corporations.

These actions have transformed our political system. Corporate money supports platoons of lawyers, often outgunning any state or federal attorneys who dare to stand in their way. Lobbying has become a $3.7 billion dollar industry.

Corporations regularly outspend labor unions and public interest groups during election years. And too many politicians in Washington represent the interests of corporations — not their constituents. As a result, corporate taxes have been cut, loopholes widened, and regulations gutted.

Corporate consolidation has also given companies unprecedented market power, allowing them to raise prices on everything from baby formula to gasoline. Their profits have jumped into the stratosphere — the highest in 70 years.

But despite the success of the Powell Memo, Big Business has not yet won. The people are beginning to fight back.

First, antitrust is making a comeback. Both at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department we’re seeing a new willingness to take on corporate power.

Second, working people are standing up. Across the country workers are unionizing at a faster rate than we’ve seen in decades — including at some of the biggest corporations in the world — and they’re winning.

Third, campaign finance reform is within reach. Millions of Americans are intent on limiting corporate money in politics – and politicians are starting to listen.

All of these tell me that now is our best opportunity in decades to take on corporate power — at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in Washington.

Let’s get it done.

#youtube #videos #video #powell memo #corporations #wall street #finance #corruption #politics #lobbying #government

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tailschannel · 2 years

Text

Yuji Naka, former Sonic the Hedgehog programmer and leader, arrested due to claims of insider trading

Yuji Naka, former Sonic the Hedgehog programmer and Sonic Team leader, has been arrested by the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, under claims of insider trading between his former employer, Square Enix, and a studio that developed a title for the popular series "Dragon Quest."

According to the special investigation unit, Naka was an employee of the game company Square Enix, which was in a partnership with a online game production company named Aiming around January 2020. FNN reports that he got his hands into confidential information of the latest mobile Dragon Quest game, "Dragon Quest Tact".

The suspect is said to have bought about 10,000 shares of "Aiming" for about 2.8 million yen before the information was officially announced. Naka was arrested for these claims under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act of Japan.

The sources that relayed this confidential information to Naka, Taisuke Sasaki, a former employee of Square Enix, and Fumiaki Suzuki, an acquaintance, were also arrested on suspicion of insider trading. It is believed that the two purchased about 162,000 shares of Aiming for about 47.2 million yen.

All three of them are believed to have bought shares in Aiming, believing that when the reveal of "Dragon Quest Tact" arrived, the share price of Aiming would rise, generating revenue in their pockets.

The full statement from Square Enix is as follows:

Today, some media outlets reported that the former employees of Square Enix Co., Ltd. (hereafter "the Company") were under investigation for suspected insider trading. We have been fully cooperating with requests from the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission.

As the investigation by the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office is underway, we will continue to fully cooperate with their investigation.

We deeply regret the great concern this has caused to all concerned. We have dealt with this incident strictly, including internal disciplinary actions taken against the suspected employees.

We have established the proper management system for confidential information and have also set up a system to prevent insider trading, such as the obligation of prior notification when trading the Company's stock and prohibiting the stock trading of the Company and listed companies that have the business relationship with the Company before important non-public information is disclosed. We have also worked to ensure thorough awareness of the regulations through employee training. Taking the recent incident sincerely, however, we will take further actions as preventive measures throughout the Company by further tightening internal regulations and conducting more thorough employee education programs.

#Yuji Naka #Dragon Quest #Square Enix #Aiming

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writingescapades · 7 months

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The Third Adventure

A/N: Just reader being a badass again. Also me dealing with my perception on romance and relationships. You can read this as a stand alone or read the other Ayato fics for some context.

You waited inside Lady Kiku’s house, eyeing the wealth that exuded from every object. Lady Kiku belonged to a distinguished family within the Yashiro commission, and their dedication to the Kamisato family had clearly repaid tenfold. Ayato had introduced the lady to you as a possible client for your trades business. Lady Kiku specialized in elegant cloths that could be made into any type of clothes the wearer preferred. Certainly, her objects would be more pricey, but you knew there were many people who would pay triple for such finery.

Lady Kiku was an eminent lady and her dedication to her art clearly announced her as skilled weaver. However, her dedication consumed most of her focus. Sheltered since birth, she was unaware of what lengths her family, and now her husband, went to to support the Yashiro commission. You however, noticed immediately. In the five days you spent at the Kamisato house, you discovered that the house was armed to the core. Every object was a weapon disguised as decoration. The more objects a house had, the more weapons it hid. It was easy to notice, mainly because your family once did the same thing. Though you could not wield a sword like Ayato and Ayaka, that didn’t mean you had no means to protect yourself. You knew the plates Lady Kiku served dinner on were heavy enough to cause concussion, and you saw how many plants hid a small handle.

Had it not been for the actions of the Yashiro commission a few days ago, you would have placed your observations in a far corner of your mind. Ayato planned a raid on a local gang that was harassing merchants, scaring them into refusing to set up their stalls at the upcoming festival. Although Ayato spearheaded the attack, the mastermind of this plot was Lady Kiku’s husband. When Ayato returned to the Kamisato estate, you noticed the increased security and how you were almost always accompanied by someone, even within the house. Now you were at Lady Kiku’s house, alone. The anxiety of anticipating an attack did not leave your system, even as you smiled at Lady Kiku and discussed business with her. Your precaution did not go unrewarded.

As you discussed your terms with Lady Kiku, a sudden noise banged against the estate door. Lady Kiku slowly rose, but you shot out and peeked around the corner. Five armed thugs stood at the door, each figuring out a way to break the lock. You turned and looked at Lady Kiku. You saw the face of a woman who only knew how to make the world beautiful, and you understood that under no circumstances was this woman to sacrifice her life for a commission.

“What’s the fastest way to get into contact with your husband?” you asked.

“He, he informed me to put a specific lantern in the outer room. He said he would be able to see that light from a good distance,” Lady Kiku trailed off.

She ran to where she knew the lantern was and hurriedly ignited it. In all her life, she never had to use it once. The realization shook her. While she did that, you ran to the one spot Ayato cautioned you about. He told you that if you ever needed to hide, every family in the Yashiro commission had a bookshelf that led to a hide out. You had to move the books into a certain order to unlock the door, but the room inside was secure enough to keep you in until someone from the commission could get you out. Unlocking the door now, you grabbed Lady Kiku’s arm and tugged her towards the hideout. To your surprise, the Lady was resistant to the idea. Her adrenaline wore off and fear set in. She exclaimed that she had no idea what was happening, who these people were, or what her husband had gotten his family into. Curses of why she had to pay the price clamoured against the thuds of the men outside. You could tell that they had gotten inside and it was only a matter of seconds now. As you slammed the door shut, Lady Kiku yelped,

“My daughter is sleeping in our room”.

The room was in the back of the estate, and you two were in the front. You smiled reassuringly, said, “Nothing will happen to her,” then shut the door.

A shout came from your left and you ducked as you just made out a short blade coming for your head. You quickly reached for the nearest object, a vase, and smashed it against your attacker. The man fell. You yanked his short blade out and rammed it into the heart of the next attacker. As you made your way to the entrance, you saw a few men near the estate door and one coming straight for you on your right. You braced yourself and kicked the man back. As he stumbled back, you reached grabbed his hand, inverted his dagger, and pulled the attacker onto his own weapon. As he took in the shock, you grabbed his head and twisted, only letting go once you heard the confirming cracks.

The men now hesitated. They were armed and in plenty, but you had just killed three of them. Taking advantage of the situation, you lifted a western style chair and noticed the small blades jutting out from the chair legs. You ran towards the men and rammed the chair, digging the blades into the nearest attackers and pushing the rest back. Near the entrance, you saw more men arriving. Quickly dropping the chair, you ran back to a plant and pulled out a dagger. You flung it right into the eye of the closest attacker. As he dropped, a woman ran towards you with a long sword. You grabbed the first thing you saw, a standing lantern. Using the base as an extended shield, you charged at the woman allowing the lantern to bear the brunt of the woman’s attack. As she stumbled back a few steps, you flipped the lantern and rammed the candle into her face. Suddenly a flash came to your right and you dropped the lantern. Hot, burning sensations scorched up your right arm and you yelped in pain. You could make out blood. Before you could do anything, you were thrown against a wall and crumpled to the floor. The impact caused objects to shatter near or on top of you. You could hear footsteps and found yourself being yanked up by your hair. The fool. Suddenly the attacker loosened his hold on you, his eyes bugged out as you slowly rose, pressing your glass shard further into his neck. Backing the man against the wall, you eased his short sword out his hands and jammed it into his neck, then you turned to greet your next set of attackers.

...

Ayato and Ayaka ran towards Lady Kiku’s estate. Lady Kiku’s husband had run up to them frantic. He had seen her distress lantern. The siblings quickly inquired and received reports about a gathering of attackers, former members of the gang. It was impossible for Ayato to capture every single member of the gang given their numbers. That was why he kept security up for the entire Yashiro commission. After a weak passed and no attacks were made, Ayato relaxed a touch. Despite their reputation, the gang was not known to enact revenge after a long period of time. Yet he realized, as he and Ayaka ran towards the estate, that having no leader also meant rules and expected behaviours were not being followed anymore.

When the Kamisato siblings burst through the estate, armed, they saw a bloodbath before them. Bodies littered the estate and at the centre of it all, decked in blood was you. Ayaka widened her eyes, shouted your name, and was about to run towards you.

“Be careful,” you barked. “Some of them are only unconscious”.

Ayaka nodded and slowly made her way towards you. Ayato followed her.

“Lady Kiku,” Ayaka began.

“Is safe,” you assured her. You then told her about the child. Ayaka ran towards the back estate. She returned with a sleeping toddler and walked over to the bookshelf.

“Before you open the door,” you advised. “We should get this place cleaned up”.

...

It was Ayato who escorted you back to the Kamisato estate. It was Ayato who took you to his room, a secluded area where even the staff knew they could only enter if something was urgent. It was Ayato who insisted on drawing you a bath, leaving out clothes for you to change into. You slowly washed yourself, hissing as the hot water met bruised and bloody skin. Once clean, you exited to find Ayato waiting with a medical kit. He insisted on tending to your wounds himself.

“I take responsibility,” Ayato began.

“I made the decision to fight,” you interrupted. “I could have hid with Lady Kiku, but I chose to fight instead”.

“Yes, why did you choose to fight?” Ayato asked. The was a slight tone of annoyance in his voice. Exhausted by work, by the raid, and by the tense atmosphere as everyone awaited retaliation. He had expected to see your dead body upon arriving at the estate, a thought that unnerved him more than he cared to admit just now.

You shrugged. “Because I could”.

Ayato could tell from your voice and demeanour that there was more behind those words, but he was more concerned with your wounds just now. He tugged at your hand and urged you to sit down near him. Silence entered the room as he gently dabbed each wound on your arms and bandaged them, taking special care with your right arm.

“Do you have any wounds on your body?” he quietly asked.

You nodded. You had numerous cuts on your chest and back.

“Would you prefer if I got Ayaka or a female staff member?” he inquired.

“Would you prefer it?” you asked back.

Ayato hesitated, then shook his head. You turned around and loosened your clothes, his clothes you realized.

“Whenever I’m around you, my clothes always get ruined,” you grumbled as you dabbed at your chest.

Ayato flatly chuckled, understanding your attempt to lighten the atmosphere. Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to experience joy. Not when he saw the numerous marks on your back, many of which would leave scars. By the time you were bandaged up, your entire torso was covered. Before you could cover yourself once more, Ayato stopped you. He got up and sat in front of you, gently pulling the kimono over you, taking care to keep it firm but loose over your bandages. Then he hugged you.

“I don’t know what to say or what to feel, but thank you,” he whispered into your hair. Thanks for standing up for yourself. Thanks for protecting others. Thanks for holding on till he got there. Thanks for making it out alive. Thanks for still allowing you to be in his life.

He knew he should have let you go after that, let you lie down. But he could not let you go just then. Instead he found himself gently placing you down on his bed, while he laid next to you. His arm covered your torso, keeping him near you.

“You got a lot of nerve to take me to bed, Kamisato,” you whispered. “You’re not even my lover”.

You kept a pleasant tone, but Ayato could make out a trace of unease by his sudden behaviour. You watched him, even as he gently drew his thumb across your jawline. Love was an unfamiliar feeling for Ayato. He honestly did not know what it meant to be in love. Everyone seemed to have their own understanding. He couldn’t confidentially say he loved you, and yet.

“Stay,” he whispered, not fully understanding how long he wanted you to stay.

“Why?”

“You make life fun again”.

A childish response, from a childish man. You saw how excitement bubbled in his eyes during the five days you stayed at the estate. The pranks, banter, riddles, and laughs you shared at night working while no one else was awake. You enjoyed eliciting such an automatic response in a man known little beyond his title. You would not have accepted any other answer from him.

Watching the man beside you, fast asleep, exhausted from the events of the past few days, you scoffed at the words of the poets. The grandeur they went to describe love. None of their descriptions and words ever resonated with you. You did not know if you loved Ayato, and you were relieved that he too found such an emotion to strong for whatever bond you created. You sighed, feeling the day’s exhaustion creep up on you. You moved your hand and laced it with his.

“Good night buddy”.

#Lady Kiku's husband is namless because I could not be bothered to come up with a name.#genshin #genshin impact #writing #ayato #ayato kamisato #ayato x reader #genshin ayato #genshin ayato x reader #kamisato ayato #ayato kamisato x reader #kamisato ayato x reader

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livelaughlovesubs · 5 months

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New announcement from pretty busy! I’ll post some of the pictures here and a quick summery, if you are too lazy to read

This is the link to their official website

The new contents:

- chapter 5 will come out, and they hope to release a new chapter once every three months (next update)

- a new mini game (catch minhyeok’s boxer’s) will be added, where you can earn greater and lesser keys, as well as other materials. If you are lucky, you can also earn Solomon seals (next update)

- new daily chats with the devils, they hope to release new ones every two months !(will be added in February)!

- a friend system will be added, you can earn some additional items, maybe action power and that pretzel? !(will be added in March)!

- the realms of the seraphim (yes, we will fight against the seraphims) ; it’s similar to the nightmare dungeon, but you get the rewards immediately !(will be added in March)!

- a birthday system, your birthday will finally be celebrated !(will be added in April)!

- ‘lobby icon’ you can decorate your lobby with stickers too !(will be added in May)!

- new stickers of ppyong, I think chat stickers, could be merch too (once the registration is complete)

- new pricing, now you can choose which character you want if you hit pity !(will be added in February)!

- you can earn up to 500 Solomon seals a month through achievements and attendance !(will be added in February)!

- the pancake shop will be changed, S and L characters tea leaves will now give you nightmare pancakes, which you can trade for monthly L characters and artefacts, stickers, icon designs etc, other characters’ tea leaves will give you gold and tomes !(will be added in March)!

- they will make the battle pass a little cheaper !(will be added in March)!

- adjust the staging time of ultimates !(will be added in February)!

- event illustrations will be added to the gallery !(will be added in March)!

- boss skill window; you can read the skills of the boss beforehand !(will be added in March)!

- they will try to make faster announcements, something they weren’t able to do before bc of the nsfw side. App Store or Google play can just reject the update, with the reasoning that it was too sexual. That’s why they couldn’t name a specific date, since they don’t know if they will pass or not.

#whb #what in hell is bad #pretty busy what in hell is bad #pretty busy #what in hell is bad pretty busy #announcement

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atopvisenyashill · 4 days

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Whether in the books or show, didn’t Dany eventually try to prevent the pillaging of the Lhazareen village? So couldn’t her trying to protect the women from that village by claiming them as her own be all she could do considering the system the Dothraki had? Trading slaves is one of their ways of trading money. All she could do was claim the women as her own slaves, so that no harm could be done to them as they are Dany’s property. Dany obviously doesn’t share the same views but knew how to act because she knew the Dothraki ways. She cares about them and even her entire upcoming arc is freeing slaves. Dany wasn’t able to properly free them because she as a Khaleesi doesn’t have any worth without her Khal, in terms of power. But she still cared for those girls and even swore to avenge one of them. Why do ppl criticize her for that?

There are several reasons for this.

1. She burns Mirri.

Regardless of what she meant to do with her slaves, she owns Mirri. Mirri tells her what to do several times and her instructions are not followed. Dany acknowledges this herself when she thinks that Jorah killed her son, yet she ultimately makes Mirri pay the sole price for this. Later on, when a former slaver comes to her and asks for the newly freed slaves who raped his female members to be punished, she says she will not punish a slave rising up. There is no reflection here on her actions towards Mirri, there’s no growth, and it’s on purpose.

2. She doesn’t treat Irri or Jhiqui any differently

They still refer to themselves as slaves. Dany uses Irri sexually even knowing Irri feels obligated to do this, then has this weird power play moment where she implies Irri is not good enough to fuck one of her bloodriders. It is a valid point of criticism that you can say you’re a good person until you’re blue in the face but if you still see your former slaves as slaves, as beneath you, as worthy of fucking but not of marrying up - I mean what have you changed, really?

3. Regardless of her intentions, slaves were still taken in her name

This conquest is kicked off because she wants it. I get she’s not driving, she’s not even riding shotgun, and the initial fallout is out of her control in many ways because she’s literally giving birth. I also understand that she’s practically a child herself, and doesn’t quite understand what “sacking a city to build an army” actually entails until she sees it. I think you could compare the initial sack of the Lhazareen village as similar to Arya killing that stable boy, or perhaps Sansa’s actions after Ned is taken, Catelyn when she takes Tyrion to the Vale; as in, she just doesn’t have all the facts or enough agency to make this situation go the way she thinks it’s going to go, and it goes horrifically sideways.

That said, the issue here is she continues having to learn this same mistake over and over - she knows a sack is violent and unpredictable, she knows younger people often have very little control over their lives, she still sacks three cities in a row with orders to kill everyone over 13 and then doesn’t understand why they turned to hell and why the forces that sacked those cities are having a hard time taking control. Like, she hears and sees herself from the account of Eroeh AND Mirri’s own mouth that what good “freedom and safety” are worth if your home was burned to the ground before your eyes and still hasn’t made the connection here to her own actions. Tywin was mistrusted by the people of KL up until his dying day because of the brutality of the KL sack and his use of the Mountain to regularly sack & raid small towns has turned the Riverlands inside out, not dissimilar to Astapor and the Bay in general. It’s a worrying pattern that seems likely to really bite her in the ass if she still hasn’t learned this lesson by the time she lands in Westeros.

It speaks to a level of privilege, and dehumanization that puts to question whether she is capable or sincere in her quest to upend the system or whether she is simply a reactionary child grasping for the ability to protect herself at the expense of the slaves around her. I think she DOES believe what she’s talking about, that everyone deserves the chance to live a happy life (strictly in the book. i do not feel the same about her in the show). But I also think she is a child ruled by fear, with no knowledge of the context in which she exists as a valyrian and a targaryen, and actively avoids learning the truth about her family’s actions and the way she may be perceived because she ties so much of her self worth to her family’s legacy. if that legacy is bad, then she is bad, ergo her father can’t be bad. this is her constant struggle in the series - her compassion for missandei and care for the girl’s future and her complete dismissal of irri as a human being with dignity. her drive to fix injustice she sees and the idea that dragons plant no trees. all of that starts in the dothraki sea - but she never learns, even as she gains more control, she defaults to anger and violence and dangerous fire magic to solve every single problem she comes up against, and purposefully closes her eyes to the cost it has, because that cost is people like Mirri! Other slaves!!! Acceptaboe collateral damage!

4. Her actions are just kinda dumb sometimes?

Yeah, while she’s trying to stop the rape happening in Lhazar in the first book, her save for this is essentially “trap these women in hostage marriages, and sell their relatives for money and take their shit.” Even if she had said and been listened to by the time they got to another village (but they don’t bc Drogo dies), she’s still stealing their shit to fund a war of conquest with a group of Dothraki screamers? From a PR standpoint alone, that’s not gonna win her any friends, which is the same point of criticism with a lot of her alliances - she’s like tailor making an army that is going to piss off Westeros the most! She’s got Dothraki, she’s got ~freed Unsullied, she’s got a greyjoy in the works, she’s not paying anyone jack shit. Who in Westeros is going to ally with her here? I’m not even just talking about Westerosi xenophobia and racism here, it’s like. Sometimes it feels like watching Ned in the capital, to read Dany and see her make all the wrong choices. I get why she’s making them but my god they’re so bad. The Dothraki are near universally disliked for being a slaving culture! Armies that are wholesale bought somewhere else and brought to another place are not usually liked very much even just region to region - hello the riverlands mess! The Ironborn DO experience a level of social prejudice that feels xenophobic but there Is this element here that like,,, these bitches love to raid the coastline of their neighbors, a lot of people have legitimate beef with them! Take a step back from how much you love her and look at what she’s doing - half of the wars in westeros center around PR and her PR as of right now kind of sucks even internationally bc she’s got the crazy fire worshippers on her side who are about to have a big issue in Westeros with SOMEONE about to set poor Shireen on fire! I don’t think it’s bad to point out that she’s not gonna have an easy time getting buy in from the people of Westeros! People whack Rhaenyra for this point all the time, “she refuses to understand how she’s perceived” neither does Dany tho!!

5. She’s still in a place of privilege

This one is hard to get across and it’s the one that always annoys me most to explain. (not mad at u anon, you’re being perfectly polite but i just don’t know how to explain this without sounding patronizing and also like, rape tw here). But it’s like. I get she’s oppressed more so than the average Westerosi wife as a khaleesi. I get it. I understand this. She still isn’t a slave. She still owns slaves. When I say “she owned slaves” i’m saying THINK about this From The Slave’s POV, not from Dany’s!! Some slavers show up in your town and kill every man you know. Boys and men. Then they rape you, and your neighbor, and your niece, and leave you lying in the mud. Then another man comes by and rapes you. Then some girl comes up and says she owns you. You are exhausted and traumatized and now you’re on this long trudge so she can sell you or the other children captured into slavery somewhere else. Then the leader dies, and she burns a slave alive, and says you’re free. Yeah she doesn’t have a lot of control, but what about the control the slave has? Why should we not weep for Mirri Maz Durr? Why is her life and tragedy worth less than Dany’s and why is Dany’s story littered with women exactly like Mirri? Could it be that maybe there’s a theme going on here about the limits of power that relies on the subjugation of others and the consistent failures of Great Powers to nation build when they refuse to interact with their own complicity in violence or the harm done to the native population?

I’m not saying I don’t understand the limits of what Dany can do in many of the situations she’s in. I’m saying she is on this quest to free slaves while having no understanding and at this point is actively FIGHTING understanding what it is about slavery that is so evil and dehumanizing. I’m saying can we think about the PoV of the peasant child who is burned and eaten by Drogon? Can we think about the PoV of Irri or Jhiqui? If we’re freeing slaves and criticizing the system, why does Dany refuse to reflect on Mirri Maz Durr’s fate as a slave?

#asks #anons #for filtering purposes -#anti daenerys targaryen #slavery in essos

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tradesignalsbusiness · 7 months

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Mastering forex signals for trend following: a comprehensive guide

The foreign exchange market, or Forex, is a dynamic and ever-changing arena where traders seek to capitalize on currency price movements. One popular trading strategy is trend following, which involves identifying and following the prevailing market direction. Forex signals play a crucial role in assisting traders to navigate the complexities of trend following. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the intricacies of Forex signals for trend following, helping you understand how to leverage them effectively for successful trading.

Understanding Trend Following

Trend following is a strategy that seeks to capitalize on the directionality of market prices. The basic premise is simple: identify the prevailing trend and place trades in the same direction. Trends can be upward (bullish), downward (bearish), or sideways (range-bound). Successful trend following involves entering a trade at the beginning of a trend and exiting when the trend shows signs of reversal.

The Role of Forex Signals

Forex signals serve as triggers for traders, indicating opportune moments to enter or exit a trade. These signals are generated through a thorough analysis of market data, including technical indicators, fundamental factors, and sometimes a combination of both. For trend following, signals become particularly crucial as they guide traders on when to jump on a trend and when to step aside.

Key Components of Forex Signals for Trend Following

1. Technical Indicators:

Moving Averages: These are fundamental tools in trend following. A moving average smoothens price data to create a single flowing line. Traders often look for crossovers, where short-term moving averages cross above long-term ones, as a signal to enter a trade.

Relative Strength Index (RSI): RSI measures the speed and change of price movements. A high RSI may indicate overbought conditions, suggesting a potential reversal, while a low RSI may indicate oversold conditions, signaling a potential buying opportunity.

Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD): MACD is a trend-following momentum indicator that shows the relationship between two moving averages of a security’s price.

2. Fundamental Analysis:

While trend following is predominantly a technical strategy, incorporating fundamental analysis can enhance the accuracy of signals. Economic indicators, interest rates, and geopolitical events can significantly impact currency trends.

3. Price Action:

Pure price action analysis involves studying the historical price movements of a currency pair. Identifying patterns, such as higher highs and higher lows in an uptrend, can provide strong signals for trend following.

Choosing a Reliable Signal Provider

With the plethora of signal providers available, it's essential to choose a reliable one. Consider the following factors:

Track Record: A provider's historical performance is a crucial indicator of their reliability. Look for providers with a consistent track record of accurate signals.

Transparency: Transparent signal providers disclose their methods, including the criteria for generating signals and their risk management strategies.

Risk-Reward Ratio: A good signal provider should have a clear risk-reward ratio for each signal, helping you manage your trades effectively.

Implementing Forex Signals for Trend Following

Once you've selected a signal provider or developed a reliable system, the implementation phase is critical. Here are some tips:

Risk Management: Set clear risk parameters for each trade. This includes defining the percentage of your trading capital you're willing to risk on a single trade.

Position Sizing: Adjust the size of your positions based on the strength of the signal and the volatility of the market.

Stay Informed: While signals provide valuable insights, staying informed about broader market trends and events is crucial. Unexpected news can impact the Forex market.

Continuous Evaluation: Regularly assess the performance of your chosen signals and be prepared to adjust your strategy if market conditions change.

Conclusion

Forex signals for trend following can be powerful tools in a trader's arsenal, helping to identify and capitalize on market trends. However, success in Forex trading requires a comprehensive understanding of both the strategy and the market itself. By combining technical indicators, fundamental analysis, and a disciplined approach to risk management, traders can use Forex signals to navigate the complex world of trend following with confidence. Remember, no strategy guarantees success, and ongoing learning and adaptation are essential for long-term success in the Forex market.

Source:

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wealthunter01 · 2 months

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What is the role of luck in forex trading? Is it worth counting on?

THAT WAS CLOSE!!!!!!! Forex trading is a complex and dynamic market that requires a combination of skill, strategy, and luck to achieve success. While many traders focus solely on developing their skills and refining their strategies, luck can also play a significant role in determining outcomes. The concept of luck in forex trading is multi-faceted and can be difficult to define and quantify.…

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moralanxietystudio · 1 year

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Roadwarden - In Search of Urgency Through Limitations

(This is a repost of my Twitter thread that got quite a dose of love yesterday, so I figured you may be interested in it as well.

1/ Hi! I was invited to post a thread for #MAMG23 on a unique feature of my fantasy game, Roadwarden. I’d like to tell you about its most controversial design choice - the time limit. The expectation that you’ll finish the game without seeing some parts of what it has to offer.

2/ In RW, you play as a single character patrolling the roads of a distant peninsula, aiding or harming its tribes. This land has grown detached from any strong, governmental body, and you start the game as an outsider, an agent, a spy sent here by the city.

3/ You’re encouraged to travel, make friends, learn more, but instead of being The Chosen One, you’re just a rider, a traveling sheriff. And you’re meant to get back to the city soon - usually, in 40 days, after which you are held accountable for your actions and their outcomes.

4/ You start with a personal goal you can select from a short list, and a few other quests to guide you, but none of them are obligatory. You may shape the fate of various people, or even whole settlements, but that’s just a small dent in the grand scheme of things.

5/ I think the reason why it works is that RW tries to make you feel attached to its NPCs and villages. Most people are guarded at first, but open up as you prove your worth to them - or manipulate them. You get options to spend time with them, to share meals and ale.

6/ You see NPCs’ perspectives as you exchange news and rumors. You get familiar with the way people get by, with their routines, and their plans for the future. My NPCs may not have the most depth, but in many ways, you get to learn about their vulnerabilities.

7/ At the start of the game, you’re also vulnerable system-wise, and you won’t increase your stats much. Instead, you rely on others to help you get out of the loop of hindrances. You grow closer with people - by quests, trading, hanging out - and open access to convenient tools.

8/ You unlock new shelters, free supplies, free care, free advice, lower prices, even direct help during tasks. You collect favors. It’s no wonder you may grow attached to NPCs and their problems, and actually care about what’s going to happen to them.

9/ (It’s a very different approach to many older video game plots, where your character would get dropped into mid-apocalypse, saving the world they know nothing about, or trying to save their sibling/village after a brief introduction, relying on our real-life contexts.)

10/ Your character is weak, and travels between the “points of light” (villages, inns) and the threatening wilderness, seeking ways to optimize your journeys, avoiding threats until prepared to face them, sticking to the main roads at first, then exploring the more obscure paths.

11/ But the game needed tension to make this work, to let you game the systems while pushing you into taking an occasional leap of faith. Balancing between risk and preparations is where the challenge comes from. Hence - the time limit.

12/ In the core game mode, the character has 40 in-game days to explore the peninsula. They can complete the game before that, but once the time runs out, they are forced to return to the city - very often begrudgingly. Not many people get to finish all of the quests.

13/ Without save-scumming (reloading the game in hopes to get better results) or looking up a guide / seeking advice online, the player will struggle. I didn’t intend for them to see everything during their first playthrough. They’re meant to taste failure.

14/ RW is most rewarding when the player accepts their character’s shortcomings. When they decide that they need to leave a village to itself since they lack the time to help it. That they can’t rescue a traveler, or a place, because they’ve got to move on.

15/ Judging by RW’s reception, it’s an unintuitive, and not exactly welcome, design. Most people, myself included, expect to have the option to 100% the game from the get go. Despite my best efforts, it seems like I didn’t succeed at setting the game’s promises correctly.

16/ The tutorial section of the game tries to set the expectations straight. It promises that the peninsula is overgrowing, wild, filled with monsters, that the locals are *pagans*, that the time limit is pressing. But many players don’t treat these threats seriously.

17/ Oftentimes, they see these promises as the set up for a story of success, something to overcome with enough grind and wit. It seems like the game failed at making it clear that it tries to embrace human limitations, that it’s a part of the core experience.

18/ The game didn’t make it clear that by deciding what matters to you the most, whom you want to help, whom you leave behind, which mysteries you unravel, which conflicts you solve, and when you put your needs above others - you get to make meaningful choices.

19/ My ideas did resonate with some, and I saw people playing the game once on the “standard” mode, then again, on the “casual” mode - with no time limit - to experience the rest of the story threads. I think it’s even better to take a longer break between playthroughs.

20/ This way, you focus on your character, and encounter the realm beyond your grasp. You get to embrace your mistakes and choices. If you return to the game after a year or two, it will feel different, as you are also not going to be the same being.

21/ It may not be a reasonable expectation on my part. But to justify myself, I’d like to make it clear that the time limit is not just a gimmick, but rather a system I play with in many ways. You can’t travel during nighttime. You need to restore stats every day.

22/ Some quests disappear or show up on specific days. Some actions are available only at specific hours. Days get shorter. You can care for the roads to ride faster. In many ways, time is a resource, and various tasks can be solved by spending it.

23/ Take the wooden lantern, as an example. You can buy it from a merchant, or hang out with a friendly carpenter to make your own, chatting with his neighbors. What do you need more right now? Money? Coins? Friendship? Without the time limit, you’d get limitless resources.

24/ The world of Roadwarden is rotting, collapsing, fading away, reaching a new form. With no time limit, it’s a playground, a place to be tamed according to your will. And the time limit was meant to turn it into a mystery, an interactive adventure. #MAMG23

#indiedev #pixelart #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #fantasy #rpg #pixel art #indie game #gaming #roadwarden

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thotsofsolidary · 5 months

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I took this photo in March of last year while in staying in Salt River, Cape Town. I ashamedly knew very little concerning the the 75 yr struggle that Palestineans had endured up until that time, and more importantly how its presence in Salt River revealed particularly sinister reminder of the global and interconnected struggle against neocolonial apartheid. Ahead of the ICJ hearing today, I began to reflect on my experience as a humble visitor of CT, a space that had resisted apartheid and persecution for 50 years at the hands of the same forces that are bombing Gaza at this very moment. I realized last year that my education up until that point was successful in conceslinv Salt River’s history of forced segregation, economic exploitation, and purposeful elimination of a community that was just one of many in SA. Apartheid isn’t just an abstract concept left to for historians to define or humanitarians to resolve. It’s a series of continued choices and policy changes brought down by our elected politicians all over the world as they work to maintain the demented and racist lie that one group of souls must enjoy the fruits of this earth at the violent expense of another.

Dehumanization campaigns on behalf of the state will never fail to do its job effectively, and us as a collective will continue to believe that these actions of violence are common and even necessary. These were the same campaigns that conceal/distort the history of my own ancestors as revolutionaries who were able to rise above the western imperialist project in 1804 as citizens of the first free black republic 🇭🇹🇭🇹🇭🇹 I’ve had to weep at the stories of my relatives and the conditions of my ancestors as they continue to pay the price for daring to escape from a sinister, systemic, and never-ending violence under the cruelest form of apartheid, chattel slavery. Resistance has and always willl be a continuing struggle against western hegemony and their hunger to reproduce the same value as the Transatlantic Slave Trade once did! We are fighting against the will of empires that view the labor, land, minerals of the global south as spoils of the game to win and not intrinsically tied to the indigenous that have/will continue to live there. Since columbus crossed into these shores and shifted the global order in favor of mass migrations and conquest, the world has never seen a turning tide in favor of restorative justice. We live in an age of globalized aparthied whether that therm is recognized or not by the state.

The place where I was set to study apartheid as it was EXPERIENCED, not as it was written after the fact, was itself a historical rembrandt of the Continuous Struggle. story having the familiar ending of spirits young and old gone in seconds by the “wrong” missle, or a “mistakenly”dropped bomb, or a “stray” bullet. Spirits so quickly taken away and never seen again in this realm. Imagine my shock when I passed the Statement of Significance (ZOOM IN) that welcomed visitors of the center. in CAPE TOWN SA, upholding its legacy as the literal first colonial outpost the slave trade for centuries! 30 YEARS AGO the imperial DA Party felt that the safety of the state could only be ensured though the dropping of a bomb here in 1987(Read Above). Despite this, I was able to enjoy a building that was standing tall and continued to be a center for education and community gathering despite this!

Crazily enough I was graciously given a tour of Salt River shortly after hearing the history of the SR Community Center and it’s activists, and was given incredible retelling of the street art located here. Not only fighting the hisotry of apartheid era violence, street artists of today’s time are struggling with state sanctioned gentrification efforts simultaneously eliminating the freedoms of expression and collective action calling for the end to Palestinean apartheid. Despite this, the level of Palestinean solidarity displayed so clearly across the homes of SR residents was incredible to witness despite hearing their bloody history of their oppression and continued resistance.

Bottom line, not only does the struggle persist, it is carelesslessly replicated and repackaged until it is acceptabe enough for us stomach on our TLs or news channels years after the fact. Genocides, ethnic cleansing, slavery, all exist and are being documented live! If you are so blissfully unaware…could you look back at your present self and take that as an excuse? if your children asked you where you were and asked what you stood for years from now, would you want to answer ‘I had no idea?’ You know what’s going on. you know that the carnage that has taken place is unconscionable!!! the people we elect, the state, whatever you want to call it at this point, has never atoned for their collective sins of the past few centuries. Not with actual fucking reparations, we’re far beyond expecting anything close to receiving back the value of systemic violence that was never contained. all that the opressed ask is to LEAVE US ALONE!!! it’s that simple. Stop sending your bombs! Stop sending your diplomats! Stop sending your twisted policies. This is only my second election cycle and I refuse to play these fucking mind games. Not that I belive voting really matters atp, but we must take back power where we can get it. I am of the opinion that this only comes from demanding MORE from OURSELVES than the people that end up on our voting ballots! How have you genuinely re-examined your position in this world and used the thinkers of today to challenge your position?

All I can ask of this world is for us to question where our collective allegiance rests. Are you fighting for or against western neocolonialism it’s quite literally that simple. the other side is clearly operating under delusion. this delusion…no this privilege…clearly knows no bounds! Our collective consciousness has long been shattered. From 🇭🇹 to 🇿🇦 to 🇵🇸 no land on this earth has been untouched by the dropping bombs and destroying community/culture in the name of successful western diplomacy. What can be changed is our individual alignment towards rge support of the oppressed, the dismantling of global apartheid, . Youtube/Google/Public Libraries are free belovedss 💔 If you have an iphone you can take a couple hours to hear the other side for maybe the first/only time in your life. play it in the background of whatever you need to do but even at 2x speed if you have to! challenging your own mind is the bare minimum…

youtube

#Youtube

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fumblingmusings · 1 year

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You ready for the most niche thing ever but hey this is what we do here you just have to bear with me as I take 3,000 years to get to the point because learning more about the repeal of Britain's Corn Laws in the 19th Century the more it's just a microcosm of that oh so blessed North American Triangle of Britain and America making deals and Canada going hey wait a second dynamic. Poor Mattie playing second fiddle at... nearly every interaction involving these two.

So. Corn. The Corn Laws were passed after the Napoleonic Wars by Britain to keep prices high for domestic producers, of course making lovely profits for landowners, rather than the farmers who actually grew the stuff. It also prioritised colonial grains, so Canada got a boon with its wheat and flour. Nice example of Mercantilism right there.

The problem wassssssss by the 1840s you have the Irish Famine, food prices are too gosh dang high, no-one has disposable income because factory owners are cutting wages wherever they can, and it's so blatantly obvious that this system only profits the top 10% of British Society. There's no shortage of food, it just costs too fucking much. Ireland is starving and the government is sitting on their hands being useless.

A lot of pressure later, Free Trade is favoured over Mercantilism, and the Corn Laws are dropped. Britain can start importing wheat, barley and other cereals form the cheapest supplier: the US. This is not coincidental that the main MP pushing for their repeal - Richard Cobden - was a massive fan of the USA, doing a lot to try and get the two countries to be friendlier to each other. He subscribed to the 'the more economically entangled you are with another country the less likely you are to fight them' which... has its truths.

So... cheap bread good? So that's one thing.

EXCEPT Canada got completely screwed over since they had gotten priority for any externally grown grain for most of the 1840s - causing a bubble in their market. So when the Corn Laws got repealed and it was open season to the cheapest supplier much of Canada's businesses went bankrupt and following series of unfortunate events semi related to corn people burnt Montreal's Parliament and the capital moved to Toronto and it gave yet another push towards Confederation in the 1860s.

So that's a second thing.

It also kind of screwed over the domestic UK farming industry as the age old 'why buy domestic expensive if foreign cheap?' came into play and another wave of emigrants move to the US and the Dominions in the second half of the 19th century because being an agricultural labourer ain't what it used to be (like 100,000 of people with those jobs 'vanish' from the census within ten years, going to the city of abroad). The fact that, compared to 1830 where Britain imported just 2% of its grain, to the 1880s where it was 45%, (65% for wheat)... Uh-oh.

So that's a third thing.

ALTHOUGH, this did have another side affect of ensuring Britain could not get involved in the American Civil War like okay yes the South was very much banking on the need for cotton to push Britain to intercede but psych! The working class people of Lancashire are braver than any Confederate solider and refuse to work with cotton picked by enslaved peoples and would literally rather starve. Especially as, at that point 40% of the wheat people ate came from Northern US states. What's more important? Bread or cotton?

So... that's a fourth thing.

Anyway. Corn.

Sorry I had to make use of an out of date meme.

I'm just fascinated by how domestic actions can still massively impact other nations... Arthur doing the right thing for his people by lowering bread prices indirectly fucks over Matthew but also protects Alfred down the line. Like... urGH! You know?

#follow me for more stupid not entirely correct history ramblings with the hetalia lens slapped on #hetalia #op #historical hetalia #hws england #hws canada #hws america #headcanon

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gereklikalite · 2 years

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Ademcetinkaya - Gold

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moonlit-tulip · 2 years

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Tales From The Runescape Economy: The Rise and Fall of the Blast Furnace Clans

For all the complexity of its supply chains and resulting market behaviors, the Runescape economy is in many ways very limited. Most significantly, it has nothing resembling lastingly-binding enforceable contracts. One can make whatever instantaneous two-person trades one wants and have a game-mechanical guarantee that both parties will, in fact, give the other what they said they'd give; but there's no similar mechanism for binding a person's future actions.

Because of this, there are many forms of complex economic organization one doesn't encounter in Runescape. There's no enforceable way to short-sell items; as a result, it's hard to turn a profit on a successfully-anticipated price crash, and the market is thus less efficient in updating prices downward than in updating them upward. There's no enforceable way to offer players venture-capital to fund short-term equipment or stat-leveling in exchange for a share of their longer-term profits gained through the aid of that equipment or those levels. Et cetera.

Despite this handicap, though, sometimes Runescape players manage some genuinely impressively elaborate feats of economic organization, to enable productive market activity above and beyond what the trade system and Grand Exchange might straightforwardly seem to enable. The most impressive such feat to have come to my attention, over the course of my time playing Runescape, was the rise of the Blast Furnace clans, which, over their year or two of operation, forever changed the shape of the economy around Smithing in Oldschool Runescape.

1. The Blast Furnace

At most furnaces in Runescape, one can smelt ores (supplemented, in some cases, with coal) into bars, gaining Smithing experience in the process, at a rate of one bar produced per 2.4 seconds. Taking into account the time spent running between the furnace and the bank (withdrawing ores and coal-if-applicable from the bank before running to the furnace, then taking the produced bars back to the bank before withdrawing the next round of ores), it's difficult to produce much more than 1,000 bars per hour, even for those ores such as silver and gold which don't require coal to smelt or otherwise have associated complications that might slow things down. Smelting is thus, under normal circumstances, a relatively slow process.

The Blast Furnace is a unique and specialized furnace which makes smelting far more efficient, both in terms of speed and in terms of resources. Unlike other furnaces, the Blast Furnace can take in an entire inventory's worth of ores / coal simultaneously, and process them all into bars simultaneously, rather than going only one bar at a time. Moreover, when making bars of varieties which require coal, it uses only half as much coal; steel bars made at the Blast Furnace require 1 coal apiece rather than 2, mithril bars require 2 rather than 4, et cetera. And, in the style of the most usable ordinary furnaces, the Blast Furnace has a bank right nearby. Where ordinary furnaces can produce at most 1000ish bars per hour, the Blast Furnace can get closer to 6000 if used at optimal rates.

Offsetting this advantage is a complication: unlike ordinary furnaces, which are permanently operational without requiring any sort of player intervention, the Blast Furnace requires maintenance in order to remain operational. It has components which can break, requiring repair; its internal heat needs to be regulated through a mix of "shovel coke into the stove" and "operate pump to send hot air from the stove to the melting pot"; also, it has a conveyor belt which needs manual pedaling to move the ores into the melting pot. On the whole, then, while the Blast Furnace, operated optimally, is an extremely fast device for smelting, there's a lot of logistical work that goes into operating it optimally.

For a time, there were essentially three major approaches by which people could handle that logistical work and use the Blast Furnace. One was to use the furnace solo, on a server with no one else around, and just eat the time costs of keeping it operational in between rounds of smelting. Another was to jump to one of the standard "everyone who wants to do massed-up Blast Furnace goes here" servers, which were full of many people all trying to use the Blast Furnace, all hoping that someone else would handle the maintenance for them while they go about their smelting. (These servers were, I think, among the more beautiful demonstrations I've seen of the Tragedy of the Commons, somehow managing in many cases to underperform even soloing.) And another was to try to coordinate a group of friends to run the Blast Furnace together on an otherwise-empty server, each taking on a share of the furnace-maintenance work, with sufficient social bonds in place that people wouldn't defect and just make bars without contributing to the maintenance; this was the most efficient among these three options if one could pull it off, but it was difficult from a coordination perspective and wasn't, in practice, something most people would be able to take advantage of very often.

Somewhere around 2014 or 2015—I wasn't active in Runescape in 2014, and wasn't paying enough attention in early 2015 to remember whether it had happened yet, but it definitely happened before July of 2015—a fourth approach was introduced to this field, one which outperformed the others by such a large margin that it shifted the Blast Furnace from an obscure piece of content which sat mostly unused despite its potential over into being one of the economic cornerstones of the Smithing skill: that of the Blast Furnace clans.

2. The Rise of the Blast Furnace Clans

The business model of the Blast Furnace clans most closely resembled the third of the models described above—the friend-group model—but it was depersonalized and taken to an extreme. In place of a friendgroup's members each taking on shares of the furnace-work as a cooperative endeavor while spending their time in between those chunks of work smelting, the Blast Furnace clan model had a much clearer delineation of duties: three furnace-maintainers maintain the furnace full-time and do no smelting whatsoever; arbitrarily many smelters use the very-consistently-maintained furnace at full efficiency, without needing to do any maintenance themselves, in exchange for a modest fee; and one coordinator sits in the middle of all of this, advertising the situation to the smelters, taking their fees, and passing shares of the earnings on to each of the furnace-maintainers. (Traditionally an even four-way split.)

The cooperation between the smelters and the coordinator-plus-maintainers team—which is to say, the part where the former paid the latter a fee in exchange for their services—was enforced, not by bonds of friendship, but by a tit-for-tat strategy on the part of the team: anyone free-riding on the furnace the clan was maintaining would be banned from the clan chat channel, which was where they advertised which server they were set up on at a given point in time; someone who did the free-riding thing once would thus set themselves up to forevermore need a laborious search through hundreds of servers to find where the clan was set up, each time they wanted to take advantage of the clan's services. The expected cost of such a search, in terms of time spent searching rather than smelting (and thus in foregone profits and experience), was larger than the fee for essentially anyone capable of using the furnace at all; thus the incentives pointed strongly in the direction of paying up.

(And, indeed, monitoring for free-riders was another of the central jobs of the coordinators, alongside their advertising and accepting payments and passing profit-shares on to the maintainers. Because that incentive system worked only as long as the "free-riders get banned from the clan chat" rule was enforced, after all.)

So, through the efforts of the Blast Furnace clans—which each generally did their best to keep a furnace-maintenance team running at all times, in order to keep customer loyalty—it became possible for people to use the Blast Furnace at full efficiency, no difficult Tragedy of the Commons-dodging required, in exchange for only a small fee per person.

This, in turn, had major effects on the economy around the Smithing skill more generally: ores and coal became worth more (since smelting them was more viable as a source of profit and/or experience), and bars became worth less (since the Blast Furnace's influx of users was driving bar supply up while simultaneously driving bar demand down (the main use of bars was as a source of relatively-fast Smithing experience, and the Blast Furnace offered that too, siphoning off some of the demand for the bars)). Which, in turn, made profit margins at ordinary furnaces lower and in some cases negative (since ordinary furnaces used up more coal per bar created than the Blast Furnace), feedback-loopishly siphoning yet more people to the Blast Furnace, until it became one of the central economic cornerstones of the Smithing skill.

3. The Fall of the Blast Furnace Clans

...and then problems started popping up. Or, more precisely, one big problem.

As previously discussed, the Blast Furnace requires maintenance in order to run efficiently. The conveyor belt needs to be kept moving; the pipes need to be repaired; the stove needs to be fueled; the air needs to be pumped; et cetera. And, most importantly: the temperature needs to be kept in the proper range. If it's too low, the furnace won't run, and the maintainers will need to pump more hot air in until it's back up. If it's too high, the furnace also won't run, and there's nothing to do but wait for it to drop down on its own.

So, one day, someone associated with one of the Blast Furnace clans had a bright idea: let's send someone to go sabotage our competitors! Someone associated with one of the clans went and started deliberately overheating the furnace-instance being run by one of the other clans. Because, after all, that way, their customers will be incentivized to look elsewhere and potentially come to us, right?

This worked out in thoroughly-predictable manner. Which is to say: the targeted clans started retaliating, and, before too long, the Blast Furnace clans were once again pretty evenly matched in terms of quality-of-product, except that quality was lower, because instead of ~100% furnace uptime, they were now offering only however much furnace uptime they could maintain through the occasional rounds of sabotage they underwent, which, while still very much higher than the uptime one could expect if bypassing the clans altogether, was noticeably sub-100%.

This went on for a while, and the game developers Did Not Approve; while they were fine with the Blast Furnace's prior state as a living example of the Tragedy of the Commons and of profits foregone through coordination-failure, the escalation from mere failure-to-profitably-cooperate up to direct sabotage was too much for them. Soon after the sabotage became a trend, they made an update to automatically kick people who overheated the furnace too much out from the furnace area temporarily; the clans responded by stubbornly continuing to sabotage one another, just with more saboteurs and/or more calculated pacing in order to avoid all getting kicked out too quickly.

Finally, after about a year of this mess, the developers ran a poll: should we add some NPCs to one of the servers who do the furnace-running automatically in exchange for payment comparable to that demanded by the Blast Furnace clans, and who block players from operating the furnace in any way other than smelting with it? (While still leaving other servers with the Blast Furnace unmanned-by-default, for players who want to take their shot at handling the coordination themselves.) The proposal passed with 87.8% of voters voting in favor; the NPCs were added; and, with that, the Blast Furnace clans fell to pieces, unable to compete with the NPCs service-quality-wise since they were subject to sabotage and the NPCs weren't.

4. Now

The Blast Furnace remains, to this day, an economic cornerstone of the Smithing skill. The Blast Furnace clans may have fallen, but their economic impact lives on through their replacement, the Blast Furnace servers. (What started out as a single NPC-maintained Blast Furnace server has now grown to fifteen of them, on account of that one's immense crowding.) The Blast Furnace servers fill much the same economic niche, albeit NPC-run rather than player-run, and with the side effect of doing some gold-sinking since the furnace-users' service fees are going to those NPCs rather than to other players.

For all that the new arrangement might fill the same economic niche and provide a higher-quality user experience, though, I remain somewhat nostalgic for the old days of the Blast Furnace clans, sabotage problems and all. They were one of the most complex bits of economic organization I've seen players set up throughout my time playing Runescape, and while the NPC-run servers may fill the same economic niche and lead to a very similar gameplay experience for the smelters, they lose that complexity, replacing it with a simpler and less interesting "pay coins to NPC and NPC does things" arrangement with no room for non-smelter participants in the exchange.

One day, I hope, the Runescape community will find some new opportunity to build other similarly-complex pieces of economic infrastructure. Ones which lack the "devolving into PvP and thus driving the developers to come in and undercut the player market" failure mode which ultimately sunk this one.

#Archive #Runescape #Economics #Infodump #Tales From The Runescape Economy

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