We live in a capitalist dystopia

[Dekafox]

Treasury ends ownership reporting rules for U.S. companies

The U.S. Treasury Department permanently repealed a rule Tuesday that required businesses formed in the United States to report who owns them to federal financial-crimes investigators. Foreign companies and pooled investment vehicles (such as mutual funds or hedge funds) must still report...

finance.yahoo.com

 

[KidTDragon]

An update on Our Hero:

Luigi Mangione pleads guilty in federal case related to UnitedHealthcare CEO killing

Mangione's lawyers argue his federal plea bars his prosecution for murder in state court for Brian Thompson's slaying due to New York's double jeopardy law

www.cnbc.com

 

[MrBlud]

Ok, reading the article made more sense. He didn’t plead guilty to stalking. He plead guilty to “stalking leading to death” and they plan to impose life in prison as the punishment.

Under a normal Administration that would probably be the end of it; but that’s a dangerous gamble under Trump’s lawless, bloodthirsty one.

 

[Pocket]

I'm not sure Trump cares, to be honest. A more ambitious fascist would have seized the opportunity to pivot to non-stop messaging about how the Evil Antifa has started their revolution and mobilized the military to crack down any way they can... but Trump did practically nothing, said practically nothing. His attitude toward the dead CEO is probably "Sucks to be him" because that's his attitude 24/7 towards everyone who had the misfortune of not being Donald Trump.

 

[The Mighty Mollusk]

In the past, he still would've found a way to make it all about him somehow. Now he doesn't have the capacity left to bother.

 

[Dekafox]

Comcast turns your Xfinity WiFi into a home motion detector

Comcast is promoting WiFi-based motion detection as a part of its new Xfinity Shield home protection platform, allowing routers and wireless devices to detect people moving through a home without cameras or motion sensors.

www.bleepingcomputer.com

Seems like an interesting idea for a security system at first, until you start thinking about where the data goes. As I saw it summed up:

But buried in Comcast's own documentation: they can hand that movement data over to third parties without even telling you, if it's tied to a law enforcement request, a legal dispute, or a subpoena. They won't say how long they keep it. They won't say what they'd actually hand over. When asked directly, they had no answer.

So now there's a brand new category of data floating around, a literal map of movement inside your own home, and the company collecting it can't or won't tell you what happens to it once it leaves your house.

 

[Pale Rider]

FB friend:

"Enshittification" has become a popular term on social media, but what you won't hear from most people is that they literally teach you to do this in business school.

In B-school, they teach that there are exactly two kinds of successful business:

1: "Growth" businesses.
2: "Cash Cow" businesses.

If something is a growth business, that means you try really hard to make customers happy (you know, the thing that we thought all businesses are supposed to do), because that will make it keep growing.

If something is a cash cow business, that means it has hit a growth plateau and you don't think you can grow it anymore, so you're supposed to stop focusing on customer satisfaction and start focusing on extracting the maximum possible profit from each customer. Naturally, this means charging more for less.

I'm serious. They literally teach you that if the business isn't rapidly growing, you should switch to Enshittification Mode. They actually TELL YOU TO DO THIS.

 

[Pocket]

Of course they do. Did you think every single businessman in America figured this stuff out independently from first principles?

 

[Ungnome]

Heck, it's pretty much a LEGAL requirement for them to do so thanks to a few court rulings from a century ago... At least for publicly traded companies.

 

[Pocket]

And even if it wasn't, the board will just vote out any CEO who doesn't minmax for profits.

 

[Ungnome]

I'm all for capital punishment of publicly traded corporations. If they have a track record of being poor citizens, dissolve their corporate charters and either break them up or have the government run them for a bit before allowing them to return to normal operation.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Destroying the corporation doesn't do a thing, you need to punish the boards and CEO's. Put a price on their sociopathy they aren't willing to pay, a personal one.

 

[Ungnome]

Oh, I agree. The idea of punishing the corporation as a structure is to hit the investors. You hit the investors, they will think twice about putting horrible people on the board or in the CEO position.

 

[Dekafox]

Also theoretically the entire point of corporations is to separate assets and penalties so if you start a business and it fails you don't lose your house. If you break that barrier completely, then corporations no longer have a point in existing(and whether that's a good thing or not is a whole different conversation). There'd need to be some valuation limit where that sort of thing would start kicking in, so Joe Schmoe making "Cool Stickers LLC" to sell stickers out of his home doesn't get affected. Or maybe only apply it to publicly traded companies... but then you have the issue of "unofficially public" companies that are technically private but act like they're public, so a valuation limit is probably still best.

 

[Pocket]

You can absolutely keep financial liability (for being bad at making money) separate without granting the owners legal immunity for any crimes committed in the name of profit. Honestly there must have been a time when it did work that way.

 

[Dekafox]

Google Manages to Weasel Its Way Out of Selling Its Ad Tech Business

“It takes an Olympic level of mental gymnastics to find that Google is operating an illegal monopoly and then decide to do nothing about it," activists say.

gizmodo.com

 

[Pocket]

Again that's Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, for those taking notes. Might as well add Amit P. Mehta to the list for overturning the mandate that they sell off Chrome, which I absolutely said would happen.

List of what, you may ask? That's up to you to decide.

 

[Rhinox]

Until Shareholder Supremacy is overturned, American capitalism will continue to hug over anything and everyone for a dollar.

 

[Dekafox]

Not just shareholders...

Private equity faces existential crisis in US as unsold companies pile up

Private equity firms and the companies they own employ over 13 million, from startups to rural hospitals and large retailers, but experts’ concerns of collapse are growing

www.theguardian.com

 

[Steevy Maximus]

LG (and probably other smart TV makers, but LG is particularly egregious right now) televisions are spying on you, your network, your phones and probably the car you drove in on.