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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Brinkwhump Linkdump

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

Once again, I find myself arriving at the weekend with a giant backlog of links, triggering a linkump, the 15th such dumpage, a variety-pack of miscellany for your weekend. Here's the previous editions:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Let's start with the latest incredible news from KPMG, the accounting and auditing giant that is relied upon as a source of ground truth for a truly terrifying share of the world's economy. KPMG has a well-deserved reputation for incompetence and corruption. They first came on my radar in 2001 when they sent a legal threat to a blogger for linking to their website without permission:

https://memex.craphound.com/2001/12/05/reason-4332442-not-to-ask/

The actual link was to KPMG's corporate anthem, which remains, to this day, a banger:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040428063826/http://chkpt.zdnet.com/chkpt/uknewsita/http://anthems.zdnet.co.uk/anthems/kpmg.mp3

Don't miss the DJ remixes (and the Nokia ringtone!) that the internet thoughtfully provided when KPMG decided that it didn't want the world to know about "Our Vision of Global Strategy":

https://web.archive.org/web/20011128153057/http://corporateanthems.raettig.org/

Now all this is objectively very funny, a relic of the old, good internet from one of its moments of glory, but KPMG? They were already enshittifying, even in 2001, and the enshittification only intensified thereafter. Nearly every accounting scandal of the past quarter-century has KPMG in it somewhere, from con-artists selling exhausted oil fields to rubes:

https://www.desmog.com/2021/06/03/miller-energy-kpmg-auditors-oil-fraud/

To killer nursing homes that hire KPMG to audit its books – and to advise it on how to defeat safety audits and murder your grandma:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan

They're the architects of Microsoft's tax-evasion plot:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

And they were behind Canada's dysfunctional covid contact-tracing app, which never worked, but generated tens of millions in billings to the government of Canada, who used KPMG to hire programmers at $1,500/day, plus KPMG's 30% commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien

KPMG's most bizarre scandal is literally stranger than fiction. The company bribed SEC personnel help its own accountants cheat on ethics exams. The corrupt officials were then given high-paid jobs at KPMG:

https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/sec-probe-finds-kpmg-auditors-cheating-on-training-exams-061819

I mean it when I say this is stranger than fiction. I included it as a plot-point in my new finance crime novel The Bezzle (now a national bestseller!), and multiple readers have written to me since the book came out a couple weeks ago to say that they thought I was straining their credulity by making up such an outrageous scandal:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

But all of that is just scene-setting (and a gratuitous plug for my book) for the latest KPMG scandal, which is, possibly, the most KPMG scandal of all KPMG scandals. The Australian government hired KPMG to audit Paladin, a security contractor that oversees the asylum seekers the country locks up on one of its island gulags (yes, gulags, plural).

Ever since, Paladin has been the subject of a string of ghastly human rights scandals – the worst stuff imaginable, rape and torture and murder of adults and children. Paladin made AU423 million on this contract.

And here's the scandal: KPMG audited the wrong company. The Paladin that the Australia government paid KPMG to audit was based in Singapore. The Paladin that KPMG audited was a totally different company, based in Papua New Guinea, who already had a commercial relationship with KPMG. It was this colossal fuckup that led to the manifestly unfit Singaporean company getting nearly half a billion dollars in public funds:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/24/incredible-failure-kpmg-rejects-claims-it-assessed-the-wrong-company-before-423m-payment-to-paladin

KPMG denies this. KPMG denies everything, always. Like, they denied creating "power maps" of decision-makers in the Australian government to target with influence campaigns in order to win contracts like this one. Who knows, maybe, this one time, they're telling the truth? After all, the company whose employees gather to sing lyrics like these can't be all bad, right?

The time is now to lead the way, We share the same the idea That may win by the end of the day. Our strength is here to stay. Identity, one energy, One strategy, with sympathy. These are the words that will lead us into a new world.

https://everything2.com/title/KPMG+corporate+anthem

You may find it strange that I'm still carrying around the factoid that KPMG once threatened to crush a blogger for linking to its terrible corporate anthem, but that's just my "Memex Method," which helps me keep track of literally everything that seemed important to me through most of my adult life:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

One of my favorite quips from the very quotable Riley Quinn is that "leftists are cursed with object-permanence" – that is, we actually remember what just happened and use it to think about what's happening now. The Memex Method is object permanence for 20+ years worth of stuff. A lot of those deep archives never see use, but there's a surprising number of leading indicators buried in the stuff that happened in years gone by.

Take James Boyle's 2014, XKCD-style comic about the experience of driving a notional Apple car:

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/11/07/apple-updates-a-comic/

Apple, it turns out, spent the next decade working on just such a car, and while that car has now been canceled, Boyle's comic correctly anticipates so much about the trajectory Apple's products took. It's uncannily accurate – real "don't invent the torment nexus"/"cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion" stuff:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

But no matter how many times we insist that the torment nexus shouldn't be created, the boardrooms of end-stage capitalism continue to invent them. Take HP, the poster-child for enshittification, edging out even KPMG in the race to turn everything into a pile of shit. After years of tormenting people to punish them for wanting to print things, HP has announced a new service that so mustache-twirlingly evil that it lacks verisimilitude:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/

Here's the pitch: HP will sell you a printer that you don't own. In addition to paying a monthly fee for your ink – which you pay no matter whether you print or not – you will also pay a monthly fee just for having HP's printer on your premises. You are absolutely, positively forbidden from using third-party ink in this printer, and must use HP's own ink, which sells for about $10,000/gallon.

But while you aren't allowed to use this printer in ways that are bad for HP's shareholders, HP is absolutely free to use the printer in ways that are bad for you. When you click through the signup agreement, you grand HP permission to surveil every document you print – and your home wifi network more generally – and to sell that data to anyone and everyone.

What's more, HP reserves the right to discipline you with punitive credit-card charges if you disconnect this printer from the internet, on the basis that doing so makes it harder for them to spy on your printer.

I'm sorry, this is just more torment nexus shit, the kind of thing you'd expect to drop on Apr 1, not Feb 29, but I guess this is where we are. I can only conjecture as to whether HP's businesses strategists are directly taking direction from my novella "Unauthorized Bread," or whether they're learning about it second-hand from a KPMG consultant who converted it to Powerpoint form and charged $1,500/day for the work:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

All of this cartoonish villainry is the totally foreseeable consequence of a culture of impunity, in which companies like HP and KPMG can rob, cheat, steal (and sometimes even kill) without consequence. This impunity is so pervasive that the exceptions – where a rich criminal faces real consequences – become touchstones: Enron, Arthur Anderson, Theranos, and, of course, FTX.

FTX was arguably the largest-scale corporate crime in world history, stealing more than $10 billion dollars, mostly from rubes sucked in by hype and Superbowl ads. When news that FTX founder and owner Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud and was in for a lengthy prison sentence made a huge stir, because criminals like SBF usually walk away from the wreckage with their hands in their pockets, whistling a jaunty tune.

One of the very best commentators on cryptocurrency scams generally and FTX/SBF in particular is Molly White, whose Web3 is Going Just Great feed is utterly indispensable. White's newsletter, "Citation Needed," dives deep into the wrangle of SBF's sentencing:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-52/

Bankman-Fried's parents – prominent law professors at top law schools – helped brief the court this week on their son's punishment. According to them, SBF faces 100 years in prison, but should be sentenced to 5.5-6.5 years at the most. Why? Because he is a vegan, who is not greedy, and feels remorse, and cares for individuals (recall that SBF presented himself as the avatar of the batshit "effective altruism" philosophy while privately admitting that he used this as a smokescreen).

The most bizarre note in the 100-page filing is SBF's mother declaring that her son is an "angel of mercy," apparently unaware of the grisly meaning of that term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_of_mercy_(criminology)

America's prisons are a travesty and I wouldn't wish them on anyone, but that's not the argument SBF's parents are making; rather, they're arguing that their special boy doesn't deserve the treatment America metes out to poorer, less white people who merely steal hundreds or thousands of dollars. A crook who steals ten billion should be handled the way a casino handles a whale – with concierge service.

The problem is, there are so many of these remorseless, relentless crooks that there's no way we could scale up that white-glove treatment when we finally round 'em all up and make them pay. Writing for The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik tells us about the ransomware attack that shut down America's pharmacy system last month:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-03-01-zoomer-hackers-shut-down-unitedhealthcare/

The attack brought down Change Healthcare, part of the monopolist Unitedhealth, which serves as the "pharmacy benefit manager" to a vast swathe of American pharmacies. PBM is one of those all-American finance scams, a middleman garlanded with performative complexity put there to make you feel stupid for asking why independent pharmacies all have to pay rent to this malicious, unaccountable – and now, manifestly incompetent – gang of crooks.

Tkacik's breakdown of this scam – and how it rendered Americans' ability to get the drugs they depend on to go on breathing – is characteristically brilliant. Tcacik is fast emerging as my favorite Explainer of Scams, a print version of John Oliver or Adam Conover. You may recall her work from my post last week on how private equity has taken a wrecking ball to America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

I always try to finish these linkdumps with some upbeat news to carry you through the weekend, and this week brought two genuinely wonderful – and totally underreported – pieces of amazing news.

The first is that Starbucks has sued for peace in the war against its workers' unions. Hundreds of Starbucks stores have unionized in recent years, but not one of them had a contract. Instead, Starbucks had waged dirty war on their own workers, from denying gender-affirming care to unionized employees to simply shutting down whole stores after they voted to unionize:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/14/starbucks-union-company-threatens-that-unionizing-could-jeopardize-gender-affirming-health-care.html

But the workers held fast and after years of this, Starbucks has caved, promising contracts for all unionized stores and an end to its campaign of terror against workers seeking to unionize more of its stores. In a postmortem for Jacobin, Eric Blanc rounds up "seven lessons from Starbucks workers' historic victory":

https://jacobin.com/2024/02/starbucks-sbwu-contract-bargaining/

This is the kind of listicle I can get behind. According to Blanc, the Starbucks unions won by deploying worker-to-worker organizing, a tactic that many of the new unions that are shaking up formerly impossible-to-organize jobsites are using (Blanc has a book about this coming from UC Press called "We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Unionism Can Transform America," so he should know).

Other tactics that made the difference for Starbucks unions: new digital training and support tools and partnering with established unions for support and infrastructure. Blanc also calls out the success of "salting" – the venerable but largely disused tactic of union organizers applying for a job at a non-union shop in order to organize it.

Blanc also mentions government policy, including the outstanding work of NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, a shrewd and committed tactician whose understanding of the technicalities of labor law have let her push for bold measures. For example, in Thrive Pet Care, Abruzzo is arguing that when a company refuses to bargain in good faith for a contract with its union, she can step in and order them to honor the terms of a contract at comparable unionized competitors until they produce a contract of their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

Abruzzo is one of several smart, competent tacticians in the Biden administration who are working to kneecap corporate power. Another is Rohit Chopra, chair of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, who just announced another bold, important initiative that will help Americans fight corporate corruption and get a fair deal:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-03-01-public-option-credit-card-shopping/

Chopra is taking aim at credit-card comparison sites that purport to show you where you can get the best deal. If you're an affluent person who doesn't carry a balance, this might not matter to you, but if you're an average working stiff, high interest rates can gobble up a massive share of your paycheck. What's more, credit card margins are higher than they have ever been:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/blog/credit-card-interest-rate-margins-at-all-time-high/

The most expensive credit cards come from the big, monopolistic banks, but you wouldn't know it from the leaderboards produced by Credit Karma, NerdWallet, LendingTree, and Bankrate. All of these sites take bribes from the big banks to list their credit cards above those offered by credit unions – who are typically 10% cheaper than the big banks' cards.

The new CFPB rule prohibits this fraudulent ranking, but the Bureau is going even further. They're using their administrative powers to force banks to report their rates to the Bureau, which will publish them on a publicly funded, neutral website – what David Dayen calls "a public option" for shopping for credit cards.

This policy makes a perfect bookend to the last CFPB initiative I wrote about here: a rule that forces banks to allow you to transfer your account to a rival with a couple of simple clicks, importing all your history, payees, and everything else you need to switch to a better bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

Combine that ease of switching with reliable information on which banks will give you the best deal and you get something that will directly transfer millions and millions of dollars from giant, wildly profitable banks to low-income people who've been tricked into paying them punitive interest rates.

So that's it, this week's linkdump. I promised you I'd end on a high note, and I did it. The world may be full of all kinds of terrible things, but workers and regulators are scoring big, muscular victories in battles where the stakes are real and important. Have a great weekend – we've earned it.

And remember!

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/2024/03/02/macedoine/#the-public-option

Image: Stacy (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/notahipster/4402860361/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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livingincolorsagain · 7 months

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inspired by this lovely art by @fiprobably

“Hey, Buck,” Sam called, pushing the door closed with his hips and toeing off his shoes. “I’m back.”

It was Sam’s turn to pick up Cass and AJ from school, and he dropped them off at their house and went to pick up the groceries before heading back home.

“They were all out of the creamer you like,” he said, placing the bags down on the countertop and starting to empty them out. “I got the pumpkin spice latte one instead.”

“Buck?” He called again after a minute had passed with no answer, pausing halfway through shelving the cans.

Bucky came into the kitchen then, all dressed up in a smart black suit and a pressed white shirt, his dress shoes squeaky clean.

Sam felt his eyebrows shoot up as he blinked a few times. His eyes went from Bucky to the magnetic calendar on the fridge and back to Bucky.

The date wasn’t marked up, but still, Sam asked, “Did I miss something?”

Bucky smiled softly, shaking his head as he walked over to the remaining groceries and started putting them away.

Sam looked down at himself—a well worn sweater that was actually Bucky’s and jeans and black and red socks—then said, “Do I need to change?”

“No, sweetheart,” Bucky said, collecting the bags and shoving them with the other plastic bags under the sink. “You look perfect.”

“Okay,” Sam said, feeling bewildered.

“Did you get—“

“The peaches? Yeah. Cherries, too. Make as many pies as you please.”

Bucky smiled brightly, taking a few steps closer to where Sam was next to the pantry. He held his hands out, and Sam grabbed them without hesitation, intertwining their fingers together.

“I have something to ask you,” Bucky said, and his voice betrayed him a little at the end.

Sam felt his heart skip in his chest, feeling warm all over. “Anything, baby.”

Bucky’s face melted into something much more tender, and he placed a kiss on the back of each of Sam’s hands before dropping them.

Then he dropped to one knee.

Sam’s heart fluttered in his chest like a bird learning how to fly, eyes immediately blurring with tears.

“Bucky,” he croaked.

“Sweetheart,” Bucky answered softly. “I’ve been thinking about this for so long, getting on my knees and asking you to spend the rest of your life with me, because there’s nothing I want more than to spend the rest of mine with you. To wake up every morning to you, to kiss your smile as you drink your coffee and watch you as you make breakfast. To watch you fly like you were made for it, like you were born to have wings. To spend every day we have together reminding you that I’ll love you purposely and unconditionally for as long as you’d let me.”

“Bucky,” Sam breathed, unconsciously covering his mouth with his hand.

“Samuel,” Bucky whispered thickly, pulling a small, velvet box out of his pocket and opening it. “Marry me?”

“Yes.”

Bucky beamed. “Oh yeah?”

Sam grabbed his arms and pulled him up, slamming their lips together until they ran out of air, then he pulled back to pepper Bucky’s face with kisses, ending every kiss with a whispered yes.

Bucky chuckled as he snapped the box closed and wrapped his arms around Sam, pulling him as close as they could get.

Sam pulled back, looking at all the happy lines on Bucky’s face. “I love you,” he said, his voice cracking.

Bucky raised his hands to wipe his tears away with his thumbs. “I love you too, darlin’,” he said, “I love you and your pumpkin spice latte obsession.”

Sam scoffed, fighting back a smile. “I don’t have one!”

“Please,” Bucky said, leaning in to catch Sam’s lips in a kiss. There was a lull in the conversation as the kiss grew passionate, then Bucky pulled back, face flushed and smile so wide his eyes crinkled with it. “I can taste it on your lips.”

#sambucky #sam wilson #bucky barnes #onlysambucky #sambucky fics #a writes sambucky #yes sam took his nephews to starbucks and got a pumpkin spice latte before dropping them off #he’s a cool uncle #two fluffy fics in row #will wonders ever cease

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soup-scope · 1 year

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my interpretation of Tank/Darlin’

ok so. in my hc, tank used to have a bunch of piercings in highschool and longer hair. they used to have gauges too.

but post-quinn, darlin shaved their head and stopped wearing their piercings. less for someone to grab when they’re fighting.

darlin’s jacket is a hand-me-down from Gabe.

MASSIVE RBF

facial scars from quinn mayhaps. body also has a bunch of scars

they’re also ridiculously jacked.

theyre 5’9”

i also have a design for current!Tank with them finally feeling comfortable enough in their skin to grow their hair out longer and wear piercings again. but rn y’all get angsty first introduced Tank.

anyways imma post my seer!listener next 🫡🫡

#redacted asmr #redacted audio #redacted angst #redacted darlin #redacted quinn #redacted tank #redacted sam #redacted art #redacted fanart #asmr fanart #asmr boyfriend #asmr rp #i can’t decide if i wanna post my freelancer design or my seer one. my seer one is funny #based on vibes which one should i do #for fun i made the seer!listener a manager at starbucks who hates their job #rayrayart

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izzytown · 1 year

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back by popular demand, i have yet another strange LOTR headcanon post. i present to you all, a sequel to “the fellowship reacts to kombucha,” titled: “the fellowship’s starbucks orders.”

for context, just started my job as a starbucks barista about three months ago, and trying to figure out what drinks the fellowship would order has been at the forefront of my mind. i will be providing their opinion on coffee and then their starbucks order.

aragorn: this bitch thrives off of black coffee, how else is he supposed to rule the kingdom of gondor?? he’s a dunedain, so while he probably limits his caffeine intake for health reasons, he definitely is the type to go into Starbucks and order a dark roast, black. and if there’s no dark roast brewed atm, then a hot americano.

legolas: this man. this pretentious-ass elf, oh my god. no coffee for this woodland elf, although he seems like the type—he’s a tea-drinker, let’s be real. and although i think his soul would give out if he even dared to walk inside a starbucks, he would be the type to order a “medicine ball” unironically.

gimli: obviously gimli is a coffee drinker, have we seen him?? he’s a coffee enjoyer, but not a snob—wherever he can get a cup, he’ll get some coffee, whether it be a local shop or a stbux. he’s definitely more drawn towards darker roasts, and i have an unexplainable feeling that gimli orders a venti cappuccino, extra dry, with an extra shot. he brings legolas with him, who rolls his eyes when gimli orders. hipster blonde tea drinker forced to go with his gruff coffee drinker boyfriend. they’re in love your honor

gandalf: gandalf has to take care of four hobbits, an elf, a dwarf, and two men—all of which are temperamental and argue NONSTOP. his caffeine intake is unlike anything anyone has seen. coffee is not about the taste for him, therefore he has no specific “order.” if he needs a quad americano, he’ll get one. if he just needs a pike, he’ll get a pike. he has no shame. he has become a notable regular simply from the one time he ordered a ten shot latte—he also tips a LOT. he is adored by all the baristas, and they’re also probably scared of him

boromir: he likes coffee, but he just kinda drinks whatever is available to him. he doesn’t have a caffeine addiction, but every daily starbucks run brings him closer to getting one. i feel like boromir is that guy who gets a salted caramel cream cold brew, or a red-eye. no in between. he probably gets an irish cream cold brew during the holidays.

frodo: frodo…doesn’t love coffee. correction, book frodo LIVES off of coffee, but I think for movie frodo, coffee isn’t his favorite thing. he probably gets dragged to starbucks with merry and pippin once, and doesn’t know what to order, so he just goes for a hot chai tea latte. this starts an addiction, especially once he realizes that starbucks is a nice place to read and study. he’s always polite to the baristas and makes sure to tip extra, if he can spare it

sam: bless his little gardener heart, he cannot afford starbucks. he definitely has a morning cup of coffee with cream to fuel his caffeine deficiency. if he joins frodo to hang, or is dragged along with the other hobbits, he’ll get just that. plain coffee with a splash of cream, nothing fancy for him. he also tips extra, and if frodo’s drink is made incorrectly, he huffs and puffs and politely asks the baristas to remake it. frodo insists they charge him, but sam and the baristas fight against this.

merry: oh merry…(movie) merry likes to believe he enjoys coffee, but realizes very quickly that he only likes it when it’s covered up by the flavor of pure sugar. he cycles through quite a few regular drinks at starbucks, some of which include the mocha cookie crumble frappuccino, an iced white mocha with sweet cream cold foam and caramel drizzle, or maybe a hazelnut latte with two extra pumps (to cover up the bitter coffee, obviously).

pippin: pippin does not like coffee. period. does he have a caffeine addiction? yeah, but his sugar addiction is probably worse. like merry, he has a handful of go-to drinks, depending on the weather, the day, his mood, etc. any of the creme based fraps, especially vanilla bean and strawberry, tickle his fancy. he also gets a strawberry acai lemonade with no inclusions (chunks don’t sit well with him), or occasionally a blended strawberry lemonade. he also buys an entire backpack full of pastries every time he goes, so he has a snack for the road, for home, for dinner, for dessert, for—

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