Dear Coffee Shops,

I’m boycotting you.

Not because I don’t love you (I do). Not because I don’t want to support local business (I really do). But because I am tired of being price-gouged over a splash of non-dairy milk.

Seventy-five cents. A dollar fifty. One place even charged me $1.75 to not get a stomachache.

Milk isn’t kind to many of us. And yet, those of us with bodies that revolt against lactose—or who simply prefer plant-based options—are apparently expected to pay extra for the privilege of not suffering later.

Here’s the thing: I see that oat milk you're using, barista friend. I recognize that Costco-sized box behind the counter, because I buy it too. And I know it costs around $12 for eight quarts. So let’s do the math: if you’re only using about three ounces per drink… you’re not just covering costs. You’re profiting off my fragile stomach.

And it’s not a good look.

If coffee shops can proudly wave flags for sustainability and inclusion, surely they can extend that same ethos to people who can’t process cow’s milk. Charge fairly. Price it in. Treat it as part of doing business in 2025, not a luxury upcharge for the weak of gut.

Until then, I’ll be making my own lattes at home—where the oat milk is plentiful.

Sincerely,

The Oat Milk Avenger

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.

Today's links

• Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs: When your shitty boss is a shitty app and you're not even allowed to call yourself an employee.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Correcting the Disneyland Railroad's Morse code; Breathalyzer source-code; Teaching Little Brother to math students; Arson attacks on Ferguson's Black churches; Tom Lehrer in the public domain.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs (permalink)

Amazon has invented a new kind of labor travesty: the chickenized reverse centaur. That's a worker who has to foot the bill to outfit a work environment where they nevertheless have no autonomy (chickenization) and whose body is conscripted to act as a peripheral for a digital system (reverse centaur):

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

"Chickenization" is a term out of labor economics, inspired by the brutal state of the poultry industry, where three giant processing companies have divided up the market so that every chicken farmer has just one place where they can sell their birds. To sell your birds to one of these plants, you have to give them total control over your operation. They sell you the baby chicks, they tell you what kind of coop to build and what lightbulbs to install and when they should be off or on. They tell you which vet to use and which medicines can be administered to your birds. They tell you what to feed your birds and when to feed them. They design your coop and tell you who is allowed to maintain it. The one thing they don't tell you is how much you'll be paid for your birds – that's something you only discover when it's time to sell them, and the sum you're offered is based on the packer's region-wide intelligence on how you and all your competitors are faring, and is calculated to be the smallest amount to allow you to roll over your loans and go into more debt to grow more birds for them.

At its root, "chickenization" is about de-risking, cloaked in the language of entrepreneurship. Chicken farmers assume all the risk for the poultry packers, but they're told that they're their own bosses. The only way in which a chicken farmer resembles an entrepreneur is that they have to bear all the risk of failure – without having any upside for success. Packers can (and do) secretly decide to experiment at farmers' expense, ordering some of their farmers to vary their feeding, light and veterinary routines to see if they can eke new efficiencies out of the process. If that works, the surplus is reaped by the packer. If that fails, the losses are borne by the farmer, who is never told that they were funding an experiment.

Amazon makes extensive use of chickenization in its many commercial arrangements, tightly defining the working conditions of many "self-employed" workers, like the clickwork "turkers" who power the Mechanical Turk service. But the most chickenized of all the people in Amazon's network of cutouts and arm's-length arrangements are the "entrepreneurs" who are lured into starting a "Delivery Service Platform" (DSP) business.

To start a DSP, you borrow lots of money to buy vans that you outfit to Amazon's exacting specifications, filling them with interior and exterior sensors and cameras, painting them with Amazon livery, and kitting them out with shelving and other infrastructure to Amazon's exacting specification. Then, you hire workers – giving Amazon a veto over who you hire – and you train them – using Amazon's training materials. You sign them up for Amazon's platforms, which monitor and rank those workers, and then you get paid either $0.10 per parcel, or maybe $0.50 per parcel, or sometimes $0.00 per parcel, all at Amazon's sole discretion.

That's a pretty chickenized arrangement. But what about reverse centaurs?

In automation theory, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by some automation system (they are a fragile human head being assisted by a tireless machine). Therefore, a reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a peripheral for a machine, a human body surmounted and directed by a brute and uncaring head that not only uses them, but uses them up.

The drivers that DSPs hire are reverse centaurs. Using various forms of automation, Amazon drives these workers to work at a dangerous, humiliating and unsustainable pace, setting and enforcing not just quotas, but also scripting where drivers' eyes must be pointed, how they must accelerate and decelerate, what routes they take, and more. These edicts are enforced by the in-van and on-body automation systems that direct and discipline workers, tools that labor activists call "electronic whips":

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/callcenter

The chickenized owners of DSPs must enforce the edicts Amazon brings down on their reverse centaur workers – Amazon can terminate any DSP, at any time, for any reason or no reason, stranding an "independent entrepreneur" with heavily mortgaged rolling stock that can only be used to deliver Amazon packages, long term leases on garages and parking lots, liability for driver accidents caused by automation systems that punish drivers for e.g. braking suddenly if someone steps into the road, and massive loans.

So when Amazon directs a DSP to fire or discipline a worker, that worker is in trouble. Amazon has hybridized chickenization and reverse centaurism, creating a chickenized reverse centaur, a new kind of labor travesty never seen before.

In "Driven Down," a new report from the DAIR Institute, authors Adrienne Williams, Alex Hanna and Sandra Barcenas draw on interviews with DSP drivers and Williams's own experience driving for Amazon to document the state of the Chickenized Reverse Centaur. It's not good:

https://www.dair-institute.org/projects/driven-down/

"Driven Down" vividly describes – often in drivers' own words – how the life of a chickenized reverse centaur is one of wage theft, privacy invasions, humilation and on-the-job physical risks, for drivers and the communities they drive in.

DSP drivers interact with multiple automation systems – at least nine apps that monitor, score and discipline them. These apps are supposed to run on employer-supplied phones, but these phones are frequently broken, and drivers face severe punishment if these apps aren't all running during their shifts. As a result, drivers routinely install these apps on their own phones, and must give them broad, far-reaching permissions, such that drivers' own phones are surveilling them for Amazon 24/7, whether or not they're on the clock. It's not just DSP owners who are chickenized – it's also drivers, footing the bill for their own electronic whips.

First and foremost, these apps tell the drivers where to go and how to get there. Drivers are dispatched to hundreds of stops per day, on a computer-generated route that is not vetted or sanity-checked by a human before it is non-negotiably handed to a driver. Famously, plotting an efficient route among many points is one of the most insoluble computing problems, the so-called "traveling salesman" problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

But it turns out that there is an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem: get a computer to make a bizarre and dangerous approximation of the optimal route, and then blame and fine workers when it doesn't work. This doesn't optimize the route, but it does shift all the costs of a suboptimal route to workers.

Crucially, Amazon trusts its computer-generated routes, based on map data, over the word of drivers. For example, drivers are often directed to make "group stops" – where the driver parks the van and then delivers to multiple addresses at once (for example, at an apartment complex or office block). Amazon's mapping service assumes that addresses that are in the same complex or development are close together, even when they are very distant. If a driver dares to move and re-park their van to deliver parcels to distant addresses, the app punishes them for making an unauthorized positional adjustment. If a driver attempts to deliver all the parcels without moving the van, they are penalized for taking too long. Even if drivers report the mapping error, it persists, resulting in strings of infractions, day after day.

When drivers fail to make quota, the DSP's per-parcel payout is reduced. DSPs whose drivers perfectly obey the (irrational, impossible) orders of Amazon's apps get $0.50 per parcel delivered. If drivers fall short of the apps' expectations, the per parcel-rate can fall to $0.10, or, in some cases, zero.

This provides a powerful incentive to DSPs to pressure drivers to engage in unsafe practices if the alternative would displease the app. Drivers are penalized for sudden braking and swerving, for example, but are also penalized for missing quota, which puts drivers in the impossible position of having to drive as quickly as possible but also not to swerve or brake if a sudden traffic hazard pops up. In one absurd tale, a driver describes how they were shifted to an electric van that did regenerative braking when they released the accelerator. The app expected drivers to slow down by releasing the accelerator, not by touching the brakes, but this meant that the van's brake lights never switched on. When a driver slowed at a yellow light, they were badly rear-ended by a following UPS truck, whose driver had assumed the Amazon DSP driver was going to rush the light (because the van's brake lights didn't light up).

Meeting quota means that drivers are also not able to stop for bathroom breaks or to take care of other personal hygiene matters. This is bad enough when it means peeing in a bottle, but it's even worse when the only way to take care of period-related matters is to go into the back of the van – where cameras record everything you do – and manage things there.

Drivers are told many inconsistent things about those cameras. Some drivers have been told that the footage is only reviewed after an accident or complaint, but when drivers do get into accidents or have complaints lodged against them, they are often fired or disciplined without anyone reviewing the footage. Meanwhile, drivers are sometimes punished for things the cameras have recorded even when there was no complaint or accident.

The existence of all that empirical evidence of things happening in and outside an Amazon DSP van makes little to no difference to drivers' employment fairness. When a malfunctioning seatbelt sensor insists that a driver has removed their seatbelt while driving, 80+ times in a single shift, the driver struggled to get their docked wages or lost jobs back. When a driver swerved to avoid an oncoming big rig whose driver had fallen asleep and drifted across the median, the driver was penalized – the driver this happened to had his score in "Mentor" (one of the many apps) docked from 850 to 650. Amazon won't tell drivers what their Mentor scores mean, but many drivers – and DSP owners – believe than anything less than a perfect score will result in punishment or termination.

Attaining and maintaining a perfect score is an impossible task, because Amazon will not disclose what drivers are expected to do – it will only penalize them when they fail to do it. Take the photos that Amazon drivers are expected to snap of parcels after they are delivered. The criteria for these photos is incredibly strict – and also not disclosed. Drivers are penalized for having their hands or shoes or reflections in the image, for capturing customers or their pets, for capturing the house-number. They aren't allowed to photograph shoes that are left on the doormat. Drivers share tips with one another about how to take a picture without losing points, but it's a moving target.

Among drivers, there's a (likely correct) belief that Amazon will not tell them how the apps are generating their scores out of fear that if drivers knew the scoring rubric, they'd start to game it. This is a widespread practice within the world of content moderation and spamfighting, where security practitioners who would normally reject the idea of "security through obscurity" out of hand suddenly embrace secrecy-dependent security measures:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

All this isn't just dangerous and dehumanizing, it's also impoverishing. Drivers who get downranked by these imperious and unaccountable and unexplained algorithms have their hours cut or get fired altogether. The apps set a quota that can't possibly be reached if drivers take their mandated (and unpaid) 30 minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (drivers who miss quota twice are automatically terminated). This time is given over to unpaid labor. As the report explains:

Drivers are not paid for their 30 minute lunch. A full-time employee working an 8 to 10 hour shift would be working either 4 or 5 days out of each week. At $20 an hour, that is two hours a week for four-day employees, resulting in $40 of unpaid labor a week, $160 a month, almost $2,000 a year.

Drivers are also assigned "homework" – videos they are required watch and simulator exercises they are required to complete as remediation for their real or imagined infractions. This, too, is unpaid, mandatory work. Drivers are required to attend "stand up" meetings at the start of their shifts, and this is also often unpaid work.

Amazon makes a big show of "listening to drivers," but they're never heard. A driver who reported being held at gunpoint by literal Nazis who objected to having their parcels delivered by a Jew had his complaints ignored, and those violent, armed Nazi customers continued to get their parcels delivered.

Even modest requests go unanswered. Drivers for one DSP begged for porta-toilets in the parking lot, rather than having to waste time (and miss quota) legging it to a distant bathroom. They were ignored, and all 50 drivers continue to share a single toilet.

But – thanks to chickenization – none of this is Amazon's problem. It's all the problem of a chickenized DSP "entrepreneur" who serves as a useful accountability sink for Amazon and who can be bankrupted at a moment's notice should they fail to do Amazon's precise bidding.

There's one bright spot here, though: the National Labor Relations Board has brought a case in California seeking to have Amazon held to be a "joint employer" of those reverse centaurs behind the wheels of those vans:

https://www.freightcaviar.com/amazon-faces-mounting-union-pressure-as-nlrb-case-and-teamsters-wins-converge/

This is the very last residue of the NLRB's authority, the rest having been drained away by Trump as part of Project 2025. If they prevail, it will open the door to drivers suing Amazon for unfair labor practices under both federal and state law – and in California and New York, that labor law just got a lot tougher for Amazon:

https://www.laborrelationsupdate.com/2025/10/california-dramatically-expands-state-labor-boards-powers-to-cover-employees-under-nlrbs-exclusive-jurisdiction-following-new-yorks-lead/

The chickenized reverse centaur is a new circle of labor hell, a genuinely innovative way of making workers' lives worse in order to extract more billions for one of the most profitable companies in history.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Ethiopia in Talks With China to Convert Dollar Loans to Yuan https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/ethiopia-in-talks-with-china-to-convert-dollar-loans-into-yuan

• This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

• No Tricks, Just Treats EFF’s Halloween Signal Stickers Are Here! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/no-tricks-just-treats-effs-halloween-signal-stickers-are-here

• How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-dhs-ice-secret-police-civil-rights-unaccountable

• Does the Left Have Trouble with Making Things in America? https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-left-can-protest

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Ham operator corrects Morse code on the Disneyland Railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20050905155040/http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Disneyland/Secrets/Square/Morse.html

#20yrsago Accused DUIs demand access to breathalyzer software source-code https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/10/21/breathalyzers-and-open-source/
#20yrsago How Disneyland’s Mark Twain riverboat sank https://web.archive.org/web/20051025011944/http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635154764,00.html

#15yrsago Old film rejection slip: “All scenes of an unpleasant nature should be eliminated” https://oldhollywood.tumblr.com/post/1374666427/the-rejection-slip-the-motion-picture-studio

#15yrsago T-shirt turns into a zombie https://web.archive.org/web/20101123131037/http://deezteez.com/funny-t-shirts/460/turn-into-a-zombie-t-shirt.html?SSAID=112726

#15yrsago Terrified feds try to bar Bunnie Huang from testifying at Xbox jailbreaking trial https://web.archive.org/web/20101023061952/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/xbox-modder-tria/

#15yrsago Derren Brown’s Confessions of a Conjuror: funny memoir is also a meditation on attention, theatrics and psychology https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/21/derren-browns-confessions-of-a-conjuror-funny-memoir-is-also-a-meditation-on-attention-theatrics-and-psychology/

#10yrsago Wikileaks hosting files from CIA director John Brennan’s AOL account https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/wikileaks-publishes-e-mail-from-cia-directors-hacked-aol-account/

#10yrsago Hungarian camerawoman who tripped refugee announces she will sue that refugee https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/21/hungarian-camera-woman-filmed-tripping-refugees-plans-to-sue-facebook-refugee-she-tripped/

#10yrsago Entropy explained, beautifully, in comic-book form https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/10/03/sousanis/XOMd3JBYnEdzQCWHM6twTJ/story.html

#10yrsago How a mathematician teaches “Little Brother” to a first-year seminar https://derekbruff.org/2015/10/21/in-class-collaborative-debate-mapping-or-how-a-mathematician-teaches-a-novel/

#10yrsago UK “anti-radicalisation” law can take kids from thoughtcriming parents in secret trials https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/21/uk-goes-full-orwell-government-to-take-children-away-parents-if-they-might-become-radicalized/

#10yrsago How enforcing a crappy patent bankrupted the Eskimo Pie company https://web.archive.org/web/20190309071221/https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/what-the-history-of-eskimo-pies-says-about-software-patents-today.html

#10yrsago TPP means no more domain privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/us-bypasses-icann-debates-domain-privacy-closed-room-deals-oecd-and-tpp

#10yrsago McDonald’s China debuts a cement-gray bun https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/weird-mcdonalds-food-around-the-world/

#10yrsago Terrorists torch five black Ferguson-area churches, nation yawns https://web.archive.org/web/20151020194546/http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/black-churches-burning-ferguson-area/

#10yrsago HOWTO make a trashcan Stormtrooper helmet https://scudamor.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/make-your-own-stormtrooper-helmet/

#10yrsago Fable Comics: anthology of great comics artists telling fables from around the world https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/fable-comics-anthology-of-great-comics-artists-telling-fables-from-around-the-world/

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover fought to write ex-FBI agents out of Hitchcock’s scripts https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/22/alfred-hitchcocks-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Canada’s new Liberal majority: better than the Tories, still terrible for the Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/canadas-new-liberal-majority-better-than-the-tories-still-terrible-for-the-internet/

#10yrsago Forced laborers sue Mississippi debtors’ prison https://theintercept.com/2015/10/22/lawsuit-challenges-mississippi-debtors-prison/

#10yrsago Son of Dieselgate: second line of VWs may have used “defeat devices” https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/22/us-volkswagen-emissions-engines-idUSKCN0SG0US20151022/

#10yrsago Obama administration petitions judge for no mercy in student debt bankruptcy https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33068-obama-administration-urges-no-bankruptcy-relief-for-student-debt

#10yrsago Complexity of financial crimes makes crooks unconvictable https://web.archive.org/web/20151022014805/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/has-it-become-impossible-to-prosecute-white-collar-crime-

#10yrsago Half of Vanuatu’s government is going to jail https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34600561

#10yrsago DHS admits it uses Stingrays for VIPs, vows to sometimes get warrants, stop lying to judges https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/dhs-now-needs-warrant-for-stingray-use-but-not-when-protecting-president/

#5yrsago Free the law of Wisconsin https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#rogue-archivist

#5yrsago US border cruelty, powered by Google cloud https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#poulson

#5yrsago Companies target robots in disclosures https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#goodharts-bank

#5yrsago ENDSARS https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#endsars

#5yrsago IDing anonymized cops with facial recognition https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#sousveillance

#5yrsago Falsehoods programmers believe about time https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#a-sort-of-runic-rhyme

#5yrsago Trustbusting is stimulus https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#break-em-up

#5yrsago Tom Lehrer in the public domain https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#poisoning-pigeons

#1yrago Retiring the US debt would retire the US dollar https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
  https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

• The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

• Enshittification (The Gist)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0

• Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
  https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Daring Fireball:

If your opinion of a work art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. […] If an image, a song, a poem, or video evokes affection in your heart, and then that affection dissipates when you learn what tools were used to create it, that’s not a test of the work of art itself. To me it’s no different than losing affection for a movie only upon learning that special effects were created digitally, not practically.

Gruber is a tech writer, not an art critic, but his view is not uncommon, and I think it’s nonsense. Knowing how Chuck Close’s paintings were made changes the experience of them, and should.

Or consider this 16h-century Dutch miniature altarpiece — something I make a beeline for whenever I’m in the British Museum:

If I found out that it had been 3D-printed rather than meticulously hand-carved, that would change my experience of it, and rightly so.

In precisely the same way, I judge an essay differently — I apply different standards, have different reactions — depending on whether (a) it was written by a 20-year-old student who is wrestling with the things we’ve been discussing in class or (b) it was written by ChatGPT at that student’s prompt.

See also: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”

Gruber appears to be interested only in artistic product, not artistic process. I’m interested in both, as are most people, and our judgments of works of art are complex things that involve everything we know about both process and product.

The man that my wife and I found ourselves talking to at the bar of a restaurant in Rockland, Maine in the summer of 2019 had arrived in town as your fancier visitors do, which is by boat. He told us that he worked in Democratic politics, and because my wife and I care about both politics and the state where she grew up, it was both intriguing and a bit strange to learn from this man that a candidate had already been chosen to run against Maine's reliably Deeply Concerned and long-tenured Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the fall of 2020. A good candidate, he seemed to think: the speaker of the state's House of Representatives, whom a quick web search later revealed to be a woman named Sara Gideon. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee endorsed Gideon before what wound up being a walkover of a primary, and oversaw her general election campaign against Collins.

It didn't go well. Gideon raised and spent many millions of dollars, much of it from out of state; the campaign was still sending fundraising emails on Election Day, and Mainers talked about Gideon campaign mailers arriving in their inboxes daily, in duplicate or triplicate. In the end, Gideon spent $62.9 million, more than twice what Collins spent, and lost the election by nearly 9 percentage points. After the end, Gideon's campaign still had $14.8 million on hand. It was the sort of experience that does not so much lead to recriminations as demand them; duffing what had seemed like a winnable election, and one in which Gideon led in most reputable public polls for much of the way, fit into a long, broader story of abstracted, consultant-scented, one-size-fits-all national-level Democratic campaign incompetence. Amanda Litman, co-founder of the progressive organization Run For Something, told The 19th News after Gideon's loss that the DSCC's tendency to run qualified and cautious races built around national issues and argued almost entirely through advertising was indicative of the party's longstanding disregard for state political cultures and the realities of retail politics. "A sustained campaign of year-round contact is far more effective than $100 million spent on ads,” Litman said. “You don’t believe an ad; you believe a person."

thelawfulchaotic:

epicscizor:

thelawfulchaotic:

warmhappycat:

thelawfulchaotic:

You’ve been convicted of a crime. You’ve (perhaps) served jail or prison time, paid your debt to society, and you’re done. You step out of those jailhouse doors absolutely free!

Haha. Hahaha.

Welcome to Part 5 of How Courts Actually Work. Part 1 (Why are police so bad at investigation?), Part 2 (How to pay money to leave jail), Part 3 (What is a trial and how), and Part 4 (Why prison?) are all available on my tumblr.

–

In our current criminal punishment bureaucracy, realistically no one gets released without being on some form of “community supervision.” This may sound unfamiliar to you, but you’ve heard of it before, usually in the forms of “parole” or “probation.”

It works like this.

Once you are released, you report first to your parole/probation officer. (I’m going to be using “probation” here because my jurisdiction has abolished parole; see last post. This is essentially equally applicable to parole, though.) They have you sign a set of rules. These rules usually have some variation of the following:

1: NO CRIME.

2: Get a job, keep a job. (Exception is if you are disabled and on Social Security disability income.)

3. Always tell the truth to the probation officer and let them visit your house.

4: NO DRUG. NO ALCOHOL (maybe). NO GUN.

5: Call your probation officer if anything happens at all at any time and get their permission to do normal adult things.

There are some more subtle variations like don’t live with anyone else convicted of a felony, and there can also be “special” conditions like submit to drug treatment, or register on the sex offender registry, or no contact with your ex.

On the surface, these things seem more or less simple: lots of adults every day in America get by with no alcohol, gun, drug, crime. However. You start running into trouble right there at “job.” It’s pretty commonly known that having a crime on your record makes finding a job A Lot Worse, so I’m not going to harp on that one; we all know. If you were hiring, you’d probably consider it, especially before you read this and realized how stupid most successfully prosecuted crimes are.

Let’s talk about no drug, alcohol. You will probably be required to do random drug and alcohol screens (they can detect the byproducts of alcohol in your urine, so buckle up, you’re still on the hook for that one). You will be observed peeing. It will be humiliating. That will be the least of it. You’re like: no problem, I don’t do drugs. Hold on, my friend.

Pretty much every “scheduled drug” (drugs that are classified according to potential for abuse) has benign/legal compounds that create false positives. Gabapentin can create a false positive for benzodiazepines (like Xanax, Valium, etc). Effexor can create false positives for methamphetamine. So can Prozac or beta blockers. Adderall creates a correct positive for amphetamines, but is, let’s be clear, one of the safest and most effective psychiatric medications for any condition on the market. Various cold and flu remedies can give false positives. Depending on how they are washed and processed, poppy seeds can still give false positives for marijuana. Antihistamines, Benadryl, and ibuprofen can show up as PCP. Seroquel shows up like methadone.

In a simple drug screen, none of these are distinguished from each other. All a drug screen does is show yes/no. A more complex drug test (off to the lab!) is required to distinguish. Probation officers may not want to send a test to the lab, may believe you’re lying about what you took, and may attempt to intimidate you into signing admissions for drug use. Given that a probation officer can have you arrested without a warrant or any kind of judicial approval, their threats are gonna seem pretty important!

So that’s the problem with drug screens and their accuracy. How about timing?

One of the most common ways to do random drug screens is called “color code.” People have to call in every (day? week?) by a certain time to hear whether their “color” is up for a random screen. If it is, they have to find a way to get in to the probation office to get tested. With lack of transportation, spotty cell access, and potentially great distances to the probation office, as well as punishing work schedules in places that will fire you if you miss your job without notice, these can be a problem. Moreover, those of you with executive dysfunction should be wincing right now, because you know that correctly calling in every week at the right time is going to be a problem for someone who’s drowning.

In addition, probation will almost certainly require you to go and do some kind of treatment for something, these days. It’s usually drug treatment, but sometimes psychological treatment. These groups will be whatever is cheap and available, which means it’ll likely be during business hours. Pray to your gods that your Early Recovery Skills group is available by phone and you can fit it in your lunch break, or otherwise your constant need to drive to the probation office to go to that appointment is going to lose you your job.

And, oops, you violated probation.

Or you could skip the Early Recovery, keep the job, and –

Sorry, no, you’ve violated your probation.

You missed Early Recovery because it was a shift you couldn’t reschedule, but you can make it in next week! Okay but if you miss one more you’re terminated from the class, and, you guessed it –

Violation.

Folks, probation is actually pretty hard and complicated. In addition, it does not help the people who are going through it. Like, in an ideal world, we’re talking: people get out of jail, and someone keeps an eye on them to make sure they don’t return to a Life of Crime and to help hook them up with the right job programs to give them something to strive for. In reality, they go straight from being institutionalized and subject to a rigid routine to being free and needing to jump through what’s actually an incredible number of hoops, very quickly.

It’s hard to be an adult and alive. Imagine being an adult and alive who has to stay out of jail by doing a bunch of extra shit!

It’s important to note that probation was not always this way. Not everyone used to get probation, and not every violation turned into jail time. There has been a noticeable change.

According to the Office of Justice Programs, about 1 in 6 offenders admitted to prison in 1980 were there for probation or parole violations. In 2021 and 2022, the percentage that were there for violations of probation or parole was 44-45%. From 17% in 1980 to 45% in 2022.

From 17% in 1980 to 45% in 2022.

From 17% to 45%.

Are you starting to understand why the population of our prisons skyrocketed between 1980 and 2010?

The reality of probation and parole now is that you can’t get free. There are too many requirements. It’s made for failure. And even if you do complete your requirements completely, even if you are picture perfect on probation, you will never stop paying for what you did, because criminal records are forever.

In my jurisdiction, this includes juvenile records. If you have any conviction as a juvenile, it will last past your adulthood. A misdemeanor will stick around until you’re 21 or after 5 years has passed, whichever is longer. A felony will stick around forever (but might not prevent you from voting or buying a gun after the age of 29!).

Okay, okay, you say, at least tell me that all this probation, all these violations, have done something. Have they made people safer? Have they reduced crime?

Uh, apparently? No. Extra-intense supervision has been studied with relation to both low-risk and high-risk offenders, and it doesn’t help community safety with either one. What it does do is send more of them to prison in the first two years of probation. Same with extra-long terms of probation. Same with kids on probation. There’s no point; there’s no benefit.

If I bring this up to a prosecutor, you know what they have always said? Literally, without any exception? All of them?

“Okay, we’ll just put them in jail instead.”

Coool. Cool cool cool. That’s the point you should take from this, for sure.

–

Let’s talk about the impact of this incredible explosion in extra jail time.

This is felt most keenly in poor communities. (Especially poor communities that are black or Latino.) Remember when I was talking about investigations, and how nearly every case is low-hanging easy fruit? That stuff is all from poor communities. Search a beaten-up car, and the odds are pretty decent that you’ll find, somewhere in the trash, a used baggy or bit of pipe that has some drug residue on it. Bam, drug felony, and that person’s in the system.

Every time one of these people goes to jail, those closest to them are seriously affected. You’re taking away single parents and primary wage-earners, and putting them behind bars long enough for them to lose their jobs, apartments, and cars, and have all of their possessions carted off to the dump, kicked to the curb, or destroyed. Imagine starting from zero. Imagine starting from zero with your credit score shattered because you couldn’t make your car payments because you were in prison for not going to your Early Recovery Skills group.

Kids are deprived of their parents not once, not twice, but over and over again over the course of childhood. They’re deprived of the food and shelter that adult could maintain for them. They see their parent get sucked back again and again. How is a kid like that supposed to have any hope for the future? How are they supposed to feel about themselves when they constantly see their dad over a tablet at a jail, fifteen minutes at a time?

Figures indicate that as many as a third of black men spend time in jail or prison over the course of their lives. Those black men and their sons are wrenched apart. Their futures are squeezed dry because Joe Senator doesn’t want to pay for another program. The kids are deprived at school, stereotyped, and eventually arrested. When they’re arrested and sentenced, more money is spent on them to lock them up a single year than has been spent on their education and medical care over the course of a lifetime.

In the meantime, the Atlantic is writing articles about our Generation of Loneliness. They note that in the inner city, facilities that used to be public are only opening behind locked doors. Pools, clubhouses, sports fields? Community gathering centers? They don’t exist anymore. These kids have nowhere to go. If they go into foster care, and dare to express any non-positive emotion, especially the older kids, they’re likely to be shunted off to restrictive and locked mental health facilities that are rife with abuse and corruption, and that, on the surface, look a hell of a lot like jails.

I’m off-topic.

What leaves me speechless with my clients isn’t that so many of them fail. It’s that some of them actually succeed. In the midst of the economy and more stacked endlessly against them, they manage to trick Medicaid into funding drug treatment programs long-term, or they find programs that act as job resources too. They build themselves up from the ashes they started with. And they thrive.

–

Let’s talk about penalties for probation violations.

My jurisdiction, a couple years ago, switched up the penalties. If you do a “technical violation” – that is, if you don’t get a new criminal charge, and instead you just fail a drug test or don’t keep employment – your first time carries no jail time. Second time, a few weeks.

Great! That’s a step in the right direction.

Again, not so fast. “Technical violations” did not include “special conditions of probation.” You know, the ones like sex offender registries and no contact with exes? So, when faced with this limitation on their previously unlimited power to sentence for violations, judges began to list every

single

condition

as a special condition of probation, in their sentencing orders.

When the Court of Appeals shot this down, they started putting in any possible way they could expand those conditions to make it a special condition.

And it’s worked.

You have to “follow the probation officer’s recommendations for drug treatment.” But if the court orders a special condition of drug treatment, and you don’t go? That’s a special condition violation, not a technical violation, and now you can get jail time for it.

Yes, courts responded to this clear signal of legislative intent by directly attempting to bypass it and give people more jail time. This should not be surprising. Judges sentence people to jail, and they have to believe that it works. Ego protection and confirmation bias entrench them in this position over the course of decades.

For a special condition violation, you could get all of your suspended time back.

–

Let’s talk about an example in a previous post, Jane, who gets 3 years with 2 years suspended. Jane is ordered into drug treatment. Jane can’t juggle it, mostly because of transportation. She gets 2 full years revoked. She appeals it – this is wrong!

The Court of Appeals will tell her: you can’t appeal this jail time. It was previously imposed on you back when you agreed to your deal. It’s too late now.

Let’s go back in time. Say Jane appeals it at the time, and says that two years of suspended time is too much. You know what the Court of Appeals would say?

You can’t appeal that jail time. It’s not imposed; you don’t have to serve it. You have no grounds for appeal. It’s just suspended. It may never happen to you.

–

To my authors reading this: there is almost no possible way that you can make a bureaucracy more nonsensical than our criminal justice system already is. You will, in fact, probably have to tone it down, if you’re going to write about it. This is one big reason that nobody knows what a clusterfuck it is.

idk, y'all, I think I’ve basically covered it. If anyone has specific questions about aspects of this – appointed lawyers? Jury selection? Juvenile law? – let me know and I’ll do my best. Again, I’ve been a practicing lawyer going on ten years. I don’t mind spilling the bean tea.

Well this is horrifying

Yes! Correct!

So I decided to check out laws for parole here in Norway, and generally speaking (to my surprise) we actually have the same permissive language allowing the parole officer equivalent to impose these kinds of mutually exclusive conditions about being drug free, meeting at check ins, and needing to be either looking for or having a job.

Language permits one violation before you can be brought back to court with aim of putting you back in jail for the rest of your prison sentence (which has a legal limit of 21 years for the combined sentences in Norway)

One saving grace is that it’s illegal to fire someone for fulfilling a legal obligation (and, in general, firing people is difficult and time consuming).

I think this demonstrates that

1) many many harm reduction and social support programs in Norway help a great deal on the front end in preventing crime, and

2) the lack of the Americanized war on drugs, and the violence it inflicts on generations after generations also prevents some of the actual harm perpetrated by the government

3) what a good sentence cap.

It also shows that

4) everywhere has stupid ideas and does stupid shit and thinks they’re helping.

But also I really appreciate the addition and I found it very interesting!

David Brooks is a writer who purports to explain America even though he spends one hundred percent of his time shuttling between the New York Times building and the Aspen Ideas Festival. You can see how this might leave a gap in his knowledge. He fills this gap with endless amounts of pop psychology, always ready to latch onto a new sociological theory to explain why poor people don’t understand fancy sandwiches. Brooks is the most prominent example of the “guy you made an excuse to walk away from at the party because every time you said something he replied, ‘you know, I read an interesting theory about that.’” Had he not landed at the Times, he could have had a more appropriate career as a bad personal therapist. There, he could have only misled one person at a time, whereas journalism gives him the opportunity to mislead millions.

Though Brooks’ original position was as the Times’ in-house conservative, you need only spend one second gazing at him giving a TED Talk in a quarter-zip fleece to know that the Republicans left him behind long ago. This leaves him in the odd position of being a man who gives advice for a living while having no idea what just happened to his own party. Needless to say, this has not stopped him from writing things. He engages in self-reflection the same way that a newscaster on live TV picks his nose: quickly, leaving no evidence that it ever happened.

Now, Brooks is alarmed for our country. He is able to see that Trumpism is destroying our country, but his own intellectual toolbox, stuffed with Steven Pinker books and course catalogs from Yale, is comically unsuited to deal this this moment in history. His response is to write a long article in The Atlantic titled “America Needs a Mass Movement—Now.”

If you’re thinking to yourself, “David Brooks calling for a mass movement in the pages of The Atlantic is like me calling for a parade of supermodels to come date me as I sit in my cousin Roy’s garage surrounded by half-eaten chicken wings,” well—yes. Yes, this is accurate. It is a measure of the depth of our national crisis that I am going to try to offer a good faith critique of Brooks’ arguments here, rather than just trying to point and laugh and mutter about how mind-blowing it is that he still has a job. No! No I won’t! Because surviving this descent into fascism will require, ugh, unity, and that will require all of us to accept bizarre new allies, with grace. Or with some measure of grace. Our derision must be leavened with grace, at least.

Watching Brooks waste many thousands of words trying to explain the rise of a racist reality show host who has never read a book as a product of “the writings of people such as Albert Jay Nock, James Burnham, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Christopher Lasch” is amusing and all, sure. But the broader flailings of Brooks do, I think, have a real value. His sense of being overwhelmed by the daily onslaught of outrages from the Trump administration prompts him to desperately try to construct coherent explanations in line with his existing worldview—something many of us have done! And his sense of dread in the face of onrushing fascism pushes him to the conclusion that, as our institutions fail, only a mass movement will be capable of saving us—something many of us have concluded! In this sense, Brooks is an unlikely everyman in this moment; just another alarmed American frantically yelling, “Why don’t people do something???”

The sentiment is understandable. Even laudable. The specifics of Brooks’ ideas, though, are pretty dumb. Steeped as he is in the world of elite punditry, he sees the problem before us not as one of changing the material conditions of the world, but rather as one of constructing “a more accurate and compelling narrative” that will convince all of the dazzled Regular Folks that they were wrong to follow this fella. This tendency, endemic among pundits, to see changes in society as nothing more than the outcome of a battle between competing thinkpieces leads Brooks to waste much space filtering his desire for a movement through the lens of messaging, as if the key to bringing millions of people into the streets is striking the exact right tone. This allows him the intellectual security blanket of imagining that our uncertain future can be tamed by using just the right Richard Hofstadter quote, and that we can spin up an an “anti-populist social movement” by creating “a competing cascade of mini-dramas.” The solution to fascism, you see, lies in winning the news cycle.

As a writer, I sympathize with this fantasy. What America needs is a better narrative, and who can create it? Heroes like me! This fantasy is shared by millions of relatively educated liberals who cling to the belief that Trump can be defeated if only the wishy-washy media would finally publish the perfect, cutting headline about how This Guy Is Bad. Ah, what a sweet world it would be if it were that simple. In truth, we are in much deeper shit than that. Saving our democracy—and building our mass movement—is going to be much harder than that, and much more disappointingly prosaic.

In the same way that we on the left must gracefully accept our new allies in the fight against fascism, people like David Brooks must also have the grace to be quiet when they find themselves out of their depth. You want a movement? Brother, there are people who have been neck-deep in social and political movements for their whole lives, right here in America. Ask them what to do! They know! One of the reasons why it is hard to build and sustain movements is that it is more fun to be “a wealthy pundit basking in praise for your brilliant insights” than it is to be “one of a million anonymous people acting in solidarity with a million more.” David Brooks does not need to give us any more social theories. The best thing that he, and others like him, can do right now is to learn how to follow, not lead.

The final three sentences of Brooks’ piece are revealing. “Cultural and intellectual change comes first—a new vision,” he writes. “Social movements come second. Political change comes last.” Note that this formulation places visionary intellectuals such as David Brooks as the protagonists of all occurrences. This is false. Note also that the only sorts of change mentioned are “cultural and intellectual”—the things that David Brooks likes to focus on—and not, for example, “economic.” This inescapable urge to place himself at the very center of the world is why people like David Brooks are not incisive political thinkers. And why they are a real pain in the ass in union meetings.

Union meetings! Heard of that? Union meetings happen in unions. Unions are things that once covered a full third of working Americans. Now they cover less than a tenth. That decline, and the accompanying decline of power for the working class and rise in economic and political power of the rich, does more to explain how we got here than all of the books that David Brooks has ever written. Happily, it offers a hint that America has done this before. And we can do it again.

Order my book, "The Hammer"

Unions are part of the labor movement. Movement! There’s that word. The labor movement rose from the awful conditions of industrial capitalism and fought decades worth of bloody battles in the streets in order to reach the point that it could fight its battles in the halls of Congress instead. The labor movement used the simple concept of worker solidarity to painstakingly build real power for people who were treated as if they had none. The power of the labor movement grew strong enough to create America’s golden age of shared prosperity, and has since been ground down by the forces of investor capitalism to such a degree that we find ourselves once again plunged into a morass of plutocracy. But we know how to get out. It ain’t a mystery, brother.

America does need a mass movement now, David Brooks. You’re right about that. Once you realize that, the most productive thing to do is not to write ponderous Atlantic essays implying that you alone can guide us, but rather to join a movement. Join a union and become a part of the labor movement. Join DSA and become a part of the movement for social democracy. Or join one of the many fine activist groups in this country and become a part of the movement for civil rights or reproductive justice or environmentalism or one of the other worthy causes. Movements have been around forever. All of these movements, joining together, unifying in the shared cause of Not Being Fascist, will be the real base of the mass movement that will—in time, we trust—form as the wall that prevents the bad people from dragging us into the bad place.

Mass movements sound dramatic. But they are not built dramatically. They are built through many, many mundane actions. Talking to people. Making a list. Knocking on doors. Planning a meeting. Going to the meeting. Setting up for the meeting. Participating in the meeting. Cleaning up after the meeting. Planning the next meeting. On and on. You get to go hurl rocks at the barricades sometimes, yes, but you can’t just do that part, and not do the meetings. This is why the real heroes of mass movements are… the masses. Not the guy who gets in the spotlight to announce his unique plan to save us all—all the people who actually do all the stuff.

We need someone to take notes at the meeting. David? Welcome to the group. Can you take notes for us today? Thank you for participating. We’re glad to have you here. Truly.

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More

• Related reading: Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; Talking Our Way Forward; There’s No Justice Without Power; The More You Have, the Less You Fight.

• I wrote a book about the labor movement, and how it can in fact be the mass movement we need right about now. You can order a copy wherever books are sold, but if you are David Brooks, I will be happy to send you a free copy. Email me brother!

• If you want to organize your workplace, contact EWOC. If you want to get out in the streets and yell, go to one of the many protests happening nationwide this Saturday. After that, organize your workplace.

• You are reading How Things Work. I have not yet been offered a job by either Yale or the New York Times, for some reason. Instead, my income comes directly from readers just like you, who become paid subscribers to this site, because they like it and want to help it to continue to exist. If you like this publication and want to help it to continue to exist, please take a quick second to become a paid subscriber right now. It’s $60 a year, which is not too expensive, and it offers great karma. Thank you all for being here.

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