[Plura-list] Looting public health in a pandemic, MacGuyver mask tutorial, Prescient Reagan-era text-adventures, Landlord accidentally organizes rent strike, The Pandumbic

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Private equity looting public health in a pandemic: The math is part
of the con.

* MacGuyver mask tutorial: Crafter/filmmaker marriages for the win.

* Prescient Reagan-era text-adventures: What we can learn from the 1985
Infocom game "A Mind Forever Voyaging."

* Landlord accidentally organizes rent strike: When you're threatening
300 tenants, don't CC them all on on the email.

* The Pandumbic: Fox News is a suicide cult.

* This day in history: 2005, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🎱 Private equity looting public health in a pandemic (permalink)

During a 2007 trip to NYC, while taking long walks from one indie
bookstore to the next, lugging increasingly heavy bags of pressed
vegetable matter, I stumbled on Simon Lovell's *How to Cheat at
Everything* at the St Mark's Bookshop.

https://www.runningpress.com/titles/simon-lovell/how-to-cheat-at-everything/9781560259732/

Despite the title, its really about about not getting cheated:
anatomical dissections of scams that show you how they work. One thing
that stuck with me from all that is how to spot a dirty "proposition"
bet, a variable-odds bet on a specific outcome from a range of outcomes.

Lovell's rule of thumb is the more complicated a bet is, the scammier it
is. If it pays 2:1 for one outcome, 5:1 for another, and 100:1 for a
third, it's probably a scam. Complexity confounds your ability to match
odds to payouts – to intuit whether it's a good bet.

I remember being at Defcon one year and going into a Vegas casino and
asking a craps croupier to explain how the game worked, and as he
rattled off the different odds on the different paylines, I was like,
Ohhhhh, I get this. This is a scam.

The next time I had that feeling was during the financial crisis, when I
started to learn about CDOs and other complex derivatives, and how their
originators presented them to investors, using esoteric math to prove
they were safe. Ohhh, I thought. Oh, I get it.

The more I learned about finance, the more this insight came back to me.
Because so often the complexity was revealed to be an ornament, a form
of dazzle there to confuse the eye about the true shape of the transaction.

The rococo equations where set-dressing to support the idea that mere
mortals are disqualified from discussing, understanding, or regulating
the finance industry. And nowhere is that more in evidence than in the
private equity world.

Because the underlying scam is pretty simple, tbh. Borrow money using
the company you're acquiring as collateral (that's right: you're using
an asset you don't own as collateral to acquire it – like a mortgage,
except the transaction is nonconsensual for the "seller").

Sell off the company's assets, especially real-estate holdings, so the
company now has to pay rent for its own buildings (this is very popular
with PE takeovers of chain restaurants, exposing them to rent-shocks).

Eliminate cost-centers that provide long-term value to the company, but
whose absence isn't felt in the short term – like buying up newspapers
and firing the local sales staff who know local merchants, consolidating
sales to a national office.

(If you think Google and Facebook killed newspapers, you're not wrong,
but you're not right either: they'd been consolidated and asset stripped
for decades, had their cash reserves, plant and real estate sold off,
and were weak and flailing when the internet came along)

Declare a special dividend for the PE owners and their investors, in
which the cash you realize from the selloffs disappears into offshore
tax-havens, leaving behind a damaged, failing business.

When the company fails, restructure it through bankruptcy. Take special
care to zero out obligations to suppliers (the entire US independent toy
industry was annihilated by the PE shutdown of Toys R Us) and workers
(bye, Sears pensions).

Engage in predatory conduct. Buy doctors' groups that serve hospital
emergency rooms and opt them out of all insurance plans. Stick people
who show up in ambulances, unconscious or in extremis, with titanic
bills. $5k for an icepack? Why not!

Make minimal payments to the creditors who loaned you the money to do
the leveraged buyout. Maybe buy the debt from them at pennies on the
dollar and start extracting debt payments from the company – predatory
behavior can help with this!

Hospitals and newspapers are really great for this, because they're
important so they get bailouts. Canada's giant newspaper bailout will
direct millions in taxpayer funds to the US vulture capitalists who
tanked Postmedia and the National Post.

Hospitals are an *amazing* storefront for this kind of long-con,
especially in a crisis. There are so many ways to cash out. They're like
the craps-table of The Pandemic Casino, a moneyspinner for the casino boss.

Like, if you happen to own a beloved low-income hospital that has served
poor people in a city with some of the worst poverty in America, you can
offer to rent it to the city for $1m/month!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#joel-kills

Or if you're a PE company that staffs about half of the country's
hospitals (especially their front-line ER docs and nurses), you can
slash their pay and benefits and they'll keep showing up for work!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#private-equity

Or you can just demand a bailout. Steward is a PE-backed hospital chain
whose debt-loaded acquisition of Easton Hospital in Lehigh Valley (PA)
left the region's major hospital saddled with so much debt it was
already on the brink of collapse.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/03/hospital-bailouts-begin-for-those-owned-by-private-equity-firms/

It's owned by Cerberus, a giant and notorious PE looter. Cerebus is
about to pocket $8m in bailout money approved by PA governor Tom Wolf,
who was responding to Steward's threat to shut down the hospital
effective Mar 27 if it didn't get a payout.

https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/easton-hospital-owner-to-proceed-immediately-on-closure-without-state-takeover-by-midnight.html

The $8m is a downpayment, and there's $24m more to come. It's true that
when Cerebus bought Easton Hospital, it was struggling…because it had
ALREADY been debt-loaded by another PE looter, Forstmann Little & Co.

And while Cerebus's investors have made huge profits from the
transaction, the Steward hospitals are the worst-performing in PA, with
$592m in losses in 2017/8.

http://www.chiamass.gov/assets/Uploads/mass-hospital-financials/2018-annual-report/Acute-Hospital-Health-System-Financial-Performance-Report-FY2018.pdf

When PE companies acquire doctors' groups, they argue that they're
merely investing in the front-line caregivers, and that these are still
owned and representative of those doctors who save our lives. But that's
a lie.

Dr Ming Lin is a 17-year ER veteran who was just fired from Bellingham,
WA's Peacehealth St. Joseph Medical Center after going public about the
lack of PPE and the unsafe conditions for caregivers and patients at his
hospital.

The company that fired him is Teamhealth, owned by Blackstone. the
largest PE company in the world. Teamhealth says that the doctor's
practices it owns are actually run by doctors, but has refused to
publish the operating agreements it has with those docs.

Docs like Ming Lin. If you believe Teamhealth practices are run by docs,
then you have to believe that Ming Lin fired himself. Otherwise,
Blackstone fired him.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/what-wall-street-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-hospital-emergency

Blackstone has ordered ALL of its docs to be silent on lack of PPE, on
pain of immediate dismissal. Its CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, is a Trump
insider, and the order protects Trump from negative news stories that
reveal his complicity in the negligent homicide of Americans.

Private equity is a scam. The math that shows that it's providing value
– as opposed to helping socially useless parasites loot real businesses
that provide real value – is a window-dressing, like fraudulent bond
ratings that were used to sell CDOs.

(Image: Lisa Brewster, CC BY-SA, modified)

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🎱 MacGuyver mask tutorial (permalink)

My friends Phoebe and Erc Faden are quite a power couple: she's a
restaurateur, cook and crafter; he's a copyfighting film prof. (They
fight crime!)

They've combined their superpowers for this awesome DIY "MacGyver Face
Mask Tutorial" video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Alv5X_A1bw&feature=youtu.be

It's a really amazing collaboration. It starts with this pattern from
The Crafty Quilter.

https://thecraftyquilter.com/2020/03/versatile-face-mask-pattern-and-tutorial/

Then Phoebe uses her excellent explaining skills and Eric uses his
excellent filmmaking skills to make this legible even for thumbless
klutzes like me.

They're also running a Gofundme for central PA healthcare workers' PPE.

If you like the work, check out Eric's other stuff. He's best known in
my circles for "A Fairy Use Tale," which uses cut-up clips from Disney
cartoons to explain fair use, and which is also a brilliant example OF
fair use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeKFAM892k4

But even more impressive is "Visual Disturbances," his movie about what
eye-tracking tools can teach us about the experience of watching movies.

http://mediacommons.org/intransition/visual-disturbances

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🎱 Prescient Reagan-era text-adventures (permalink)

Veteran sf webzine publisher Eric Rosenfield's latest venture is
Literate Machine, home to long-form essays (also available as podcasts
and narrated Youtube slideshows) about capitalism, science fiction, and
our political crisis.

https://literatemachine.com/

He's done three excellent installments so far:

1. A literary history of Catherine "CL" Moore, the pioneering sf writer
whose work upended the field, and who exemplifies the way that churning
pulp writers produced some literary marvels.

https://literatemachine.com/2020/01/26/vintage-season/

2. A critique of the Dr Who episode "Kerblam!" and how it illustrates
the flawed neoliberal thinking behind the panic over technological
unemployment:

https://literatemachine.com/2020/03/29/there-is-no-alternative-doctor-who-kerblam-and-the-specter-of-technological-unemployment/

3. The history of a bizarre, prescient political text-adventure game
called A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985), created by Steve Meretzky
(designer of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure) for
Infocom.

https://literatemachine.com/2020/03/01/a-mind-forever-voyaging-into-neoliberalism-steve-meretzky-and-the-video-game-that-saw-it-all-coming/

I'd never heard of A Mind Forever, though I was a huge Infocom fan and
an even bigger fan of the H2G2 game. It's got a bizarre premise: after
the election of a far-right, Reaganesque demagogue, an AI is
instantiated to visit simulations of a town at 10-year intervals.

The job of the AI is to walk around this simulated town and report on
the long-term effects of these neoliberal policies, so that a far-right
Senator can sell the new president's policies to the nation by
demonstrating that they'll all work out for the best.

And while the 10-year picture is relatively rosy (they're even setting
up moon colonies), the longer-range picture is increasingly dystopian,
as religious police seek out criminals to force into slave labor and
pit-fighting.

Public parks are taken over by far-right militias backed by
billionaires. National forests are razed for strip-mining, etc. As
Rosenfield notes, this is *not* a subtle critique. It's basically
predicting that Reagan's policies will produce barbaric oligarchy
stabilized by allowing religious maniacs to enact cruel, bloody policies
against nonbelievers and members of other sects, allowing the wealthy to
rule with impunity.

The only puzzle in the game comes at the end, when the senator who
commissioned the experiment learns of the result and decides to suppress
it by killing the AI, because in his view, this dystopia is worth the
short-term gains he'll receive. You have to outsmart the senator.

While Meretzky's 1985 take on the Reagan dystopia might have felt a
little over the top, today it seems mild by comparison, and the
decade-by-decade reports an AI visiting a small town in 1995, 2005, 2015
and today are pretty close to Meretzky's parodical guesses.

As Ted Chiang says, the pandemic wouldn't work in fiction, it's an idiot
plot, "resolved quickly if your protagonist weren't an idiot. What we're
living through is only partly a disaster novel, it's also a grotesque
political satire."

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#disaster-capitalism

You can still play A Mind Forever Voyaging (there's never been a better
time).

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/a-mind-forever-voyaging-59/play-59

And here's the supplemental materials that came with the game.

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/amfv/amfv.html

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🎱 Landlord accidentally organizes rent strike (permalink)

Saturn Management is a brutal LA landlord. On Tuesday, it sent all 300
tenants an email telling them they had to pay their rent in full, or
else, irrespective of state and local emergency tenant protections.

https://la.curbed.com/2020/4/1/21203672/rent-strike-los-angeles-coronavirus

Saturn Management is a *stupid* LA landlord. Instead of BCCing those 300
tenants, they CCed them. That allowed all 300 tenants to email one another.

They organized a rent-strike.

"They quickly created a communal Google document and a Slack channel,
where they have continued to compile complaints about building
management and have started to organize plans for a potential strike,
which would likely happen in May"

They're working with the Los Angeles Tenants Union:

https://latenantsunion.org/en

"I don't think they realize that the tool they just provided us by
giving us every single email. They essentially did all of the hard work
for us." -Strike organizer Roberto Torres.

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🎱 The Pandumbic (permalink)

This supercut of Fox News hosts insisting that coronavirus is no cause
for concern isn't ha-ha-weird, nor ha-ha-funny. It's more
ha-ha-Exhibit-A-for-a-future-war-crimes-tribunal. It's the work of The
Daily Show (of course), who call it "The Pandumbic."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o

Here's a still version, courtesy of Joey DeVilla.

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🎱 This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Shadow Cities: the untold lives of squatters
https://boingboing.net/2005/04/04/shadow-cities-the-un.html

#15yrsago 300 private islands shaped like world map, near Dubai
https://web.archive.org/web/20050406012725/http://guide.tenuae.com/living/dubai/the_world_islands.php

#15yrsago Star Wars geeks in line at Grauman's will answer payphone
calls
https://web.archive.org/web/20050827183820/http://liningup.net/news/2005_04.php

#1yrago Fear that far-right terrorists will stage attacks if Brexit is
canceled
https://theintercept.com/2019/04/04/specter-far-right-violence-haunts-brexit-britain/

#1yrago Chicago's first gay, Black, woman mayor won all 50 wards,
defeating the machine candidate with an anti-corruption campaign
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/elections/ct-met-chicago-election-results-mayors-race-lightfoot-preckwinkle-20190402-story.html

#1yrago "Open source" companies are playing games with licensing to
sneak in proprietary code, freeze out competitors, fight enclosure
https://www.scalevp.com/blog/making-sense-of-a-crazy-year-in-open-source

#1yrago A rapidly proliferating software license bars use by companies
with poor labor practices
https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU/blob/master/LICENSE

#1yrago After Christchurch shooting, Australia doubles down on being
stampeded into catastrophically stupid tech laws
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/04/australia-passes-social-media-law-penalising-platforms-for-violent-content

#1yrago News organizations have all but abandoned their archives
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/the-dire-state-of-news-archiving-in-the-digital-age.php

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🎱 Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/),
Super Punch (https://superpunch.net/), Accordion Guy
(https://www.joeydevilla.com).

Currently writing: I'm getting geared up to start work my next novel,
"The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland:
it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs.
Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a
magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they
cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into
Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt
Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to
it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Author's Note from Attack Surface
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/30/authors-note-from-attack-surface/

Upcoming appearances:


* Short Story Club, April 7, 530PM Pacific https://www.shortstory.club/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies
and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the
monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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

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