(Principally from Ian Welsh's "Weekend Wrap")
- A reminder that "The law, in its magnificent equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the street and stealing bread."
- From Cory Doctorow:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism
Excerpt: "...the ultra-rich (and the states they have suborned) have a fundamental understanding that the more unfair a society is, the less stable it is. The more unstable a state is, the more its ruling class have to expend on private security. No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn.
As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it's cheaper to make society more fair – say, by building hospitals and schools – than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you'll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness:
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/
Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill.
And there's lots of money to be made by raising the greediness floor, the corollary of which is that any time you fail to act with sufficiently shameless greed, you leave a ton of money on the table. That's the substance of the shareholder lawsuit against Unitedhealthcare, alleging that after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United CEO Brian Thompson‡, United failed to screw enough patients hard enough:
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/unitedhealthcare-sued-shareholders-reaction-ceos-killing-rcna205550"
- The following headline speaks for itself:
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