[Plura-list] Real penalties for covid evicters; McDonald's corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers

[Cory Doctorow]

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I'm appearing at the FITC conference this morning!

* Panel: "Intersection: Seeing Our Failures from the Future"
https://fitc.ca/presentation/intersection-future/

* Keynote: "Interop: Self-Determination vs. Dystopia"
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

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Today's links

* Real penalties for covid evicters: The CFPB is set to euthanize some
rentiers - and their lawyers.

* McDonald's corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers: All the
pasteurization in the world won't detoxify the mix of franchise
agreements and rent-extraction.

* This day in history: 2011, 2016, 2020

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

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🧉 Real penalties for covid evicters

The CDC's eviction moratorium in an incredibly important piece of
public-health law: people facing homelessness may not shelter in place
when they're sick, and people who are rendered homeless are at risk of
both contracting and spreading covid.

Despite this, many states and cities have treated the moratorium as a
suggestion, not a binding law, and, of course, it's hard to get justice
when you've just been evicted (the CDC seems to have brought *zero*
enforcement actions against violators).

That's why the latest interim rule from the Consumer Finance Protection
Bureau is so important: it affirms the CDC rule and makes many other
parties liable for its violation, including, notably, landlords' lawyers
and debt collectors.

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_debt_collection-practices-global-covid-19-pandemic_interim-final-rule_2021-04.pdf

As Adam Levitin writes for Credit Slips, this is a very big deal indeed,
because in addition to expanding liability, it also expands who has a
right to seek redress.

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/04/evictions-in-violation-of-cdc-moratorium-may-violate-fair-debt-collection-practices-act.html

Under the CDC rule, only the government could punish evicters, but CFPBs
rule come wiht a "private right of action." This means evicted people
can seek redress for people who break the law to render them homeless,
including lawyers representing lawbreaking landlords.

CFPB rules come under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which also
provides for statutory damages, actual damages, attorneys' fees, and
class actions.

Levitin: "How many attorneys are going to want to assume this risk to
further a foreclosure for a client? I suspect that an informed attorney
will be much more inclined to counsel the client to follow the CDC
moratorium."

It's a good example of how important a private right of action. It's why
private right of action is a major sticking point in proposals for a
national privacy law: the commercial surveillance industry does not want
you to have recourse to legal self-defense.

Europe's flawed but crucial GDPR includes a private right of action,
which is why Digital Rights Ireland is able to bring a mass action
lawsuit against Facebook over its 500,000,000-user data-breach.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#sue-facebook

Without a private right of action, people who've been harmed, even
maimed or killed, by corporations have to petition DAs and Attorney
Generals to take up their case, while private rights of action allow
everyday people to seek justice on their own.

That's why private right of action scares the shit out of corporate
lobbyists and why they've spent decades running a disinformation
campaign aimed at ending it ("tort reform"), pushing lies like "The
McDonald's Coffee Lawsuit."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9DXSCpcz9E

Private right of action is especially important when it comes to
housing. The collapse of the defined-benefits pension system has forced
everyday people to gamble in a rigged stock market as a hedge against a
starving and homeless retirement.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#stockstonks

Many everyday, middle-class Americans rely on their homes as a
retirement piggy-bank, which sets up an unresolvable contradiction in
American finance policy. To keep home-owners solvent, politicians have
to take every possible step to make housing as expensive as possible.

When you put it that way, it's obvious why this is such a bad idea:
housing is a human right and a necessity for human thriving. Policies
that seek to make housing expensive ("increase property values") are as
indefensible as policies to make food as expensive as possible.

So: if you own a house, you get a tax subsidy (a direct way of
increasing property values). The tenants you rent it to don't get that
subsidy (an indirect means to increase tax as it pushes renters into
home ownership, bidding up prices).

https://prospect.org/justice/widely-beloved-tax-deduction-really-just-benefits-well-off-exacerbates-inequality/

Converting the human right to shelter into an asset that is its owner's
best hope for a dignified old age distorts all kinds of policy, pushing
otherwise decent people to block high-density housing because increasing
housing supply decreases the value of their assets.

It sets parents to war against their children, who have to compete for
the dwindling supply of available housing, or rent under conditions that
favor landlords.

But (as with market-based 401k pensions), the property investment game
is rigged in favor of the super-rich, who use "mom-and-pop" investors as
human shields for policies that benefit private equity ghouls.

In many places in America, your landlord is almost certainly a Wall
Street fund, not a nice old couple who bought "income property" for
their retirement.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-housing-invitation/

Wall Street landlords spin rental income into bonds, and secure high
ratings for them by turning housing into deadly slums with high payments
and low costs, backstopped by evictions, once unheard of in America, now
a national (and racist) epidemic.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

When you hear about the CDC eviction moratorium, you might picture a
retiree renting out the family home after downsizing to a condo. But the
median American landlord is a faceless, remorseless Wall Street fund
engaged the wholesale destruction of cities and their residents.

America needs lots of housing. To get there, America needs a social
safety net, a guarantee of a decent retirement for people who work hard
all their lives - not a seat at a table in a rigged stock-market casino,
nor a chance to destroy their kids' chances at a decent home.


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🧉 McDonald's corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers

A new feature by Andy Greenberg for Wired on the bizarre fight over
diagnostic/control tools for McDonald's soft-serve machines is a
fantastic, fascinating look at the intersection of Right to Repair with
hardware hacking, corporatism, and franchising.

https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/

McDonald's ice-cream machines are notoriously finicky, so much so that
people make bots to determine whether your local McD's machines are
busted (5-16% of these machines are broken at any time)

https://mcbroken.com/

There's a reason these machines go down all the time: they are absurdly
mechanically complex, designed to do overnight repastueruizations on
leftover ice-cream mix, unlike less complex machines that have to be
drained and cleaned every day, at high labor and wastage costs.

There's a tradeoff: the machines are *much* more complex and finicky.
Not only do they fail if the reservoirs are outside of a narrow
tolerance, they still have to be disassembled for weekly cleaning, and
are *much* harder to reassemble.

Moreover, that maintenance is performed by McDonald's employees, and
thanks to low pay and high turnover, those workers are often both very
young and very new to the job. Put it all together and it's easy to see
why the machines are busted so often.

But that's not the whole story: it turns out that all of this is vastly
exacerbated by the repair-hostile design of the machines. When they do
break down, they throw cryptic errors, necessitating an expensive
service call.

This means that franchisees pay through the nose when their machines
break *and* they don't get feedback on what they can do differently to
prevent more service-calls in the future. The tale of this
user-hostility is the crux of Greenberg's piece.

The machines are made by Taylor, a giant kitchen supply company that
also supplies things like grills to McDonald's franchises. Their
distributors get paid every time they do a service call, and the
franchisees are pretty sure McD's is getting a cut.

That's where Kytch comes in. It's a tech startup that spun out of
Frobot, a company that built automated enclosures for Taylor's froyo
machines that were supposed to eliminate labor costs by creating fully
self-serve systems.

Frobot machines proved to be too complex and unreliable for the field,
and in the process of outfitting them with diagnostic tools, Frobot's
founders created Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool
that proved to be hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees.

Kytch gave these restaurateurs the ability to monitor and diagnose their
$18,000 Taylor C602 machines without having to learn technicians'
secret, obscure codes ("Press the cone icon, then tap the
snowflake/milkshake buttons to set the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then
1").

It was a runaway success: franchisees bought the gadgets and paid
activation and recurring fees and were glad of it, reporting major cost
savings over paying Taylor's service techs and extra profits because
they could sell product rather than apologizing for broken machines.

The gadget itself was superbly engineered, thanks, no doubt, to its
pedigree: in commercializing the Kytch, its inventors teamed up with
legendary hardware hacker and digital freedom fighter Andrew "bunnie"
Huang, whose every device is a perfect marvel.

Huang describes Kytch as a huge leap in the control systems for the
Taylor machines, which were mired in the "dark ages" of 50-year-old
technology. Adding a Raspberry Pi-based controller took the machines
from the late mechanical age to the late digital age in one step.

But this reformation met a counter-reformation. McDonald's and Taylor
teamed up to crush Kytch. Taylor engaged in all kinds of skullduggery to
acquire a Kytch unit and then rolled out a (less capable, more
lucrative, more extractive) competitor.

(The company swears it didn't rip off the Kytch and it's all just a huge
coincidence, really.)

But the real muscle came from McDonald's, which owns the land underneath
each of its franchisees' restaurants and can take away their restaurants
at the stroke of a pen.

McDonald's began to traffick in increasingly unhinged scare-memos,
warning that Kytch might steal "confidential data" and that it "creates
a potential very serious safety risk for the crew or technician
attempting to clean or repair the machine."

The memos conclude that this diagnostic and monitoring device could
cause "serious human injury" and "McDonald’s strongly recommends that
you remove the Kytch device from all machines and discontinue use."

Kytch's founders confide that this will probably kill their business.

It's quite a tale: a clanking, breakdown-prone Rube Goldberg device
that's turned into a money-spinner for a giant corporation that values
the service charges more than it rues its disappointed customers.

A pair of scrappy inventors and a legendary hardware wizard who
transport this gadget half a century forward in one fell swoop - and who
get destroyed by the corporate behemoth through a mix of scare-stories
about maimed teenage shake-jockeys and eviction threats.


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🧉 This day in history

#10yrsago ACLU to Michigan cops: stop searching mobile phones during
traffic stops
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a6685/should-cops-be-alowed-to-scan-your-phone-during-a-traffic-stop-5587825/

#10yrsago Before 1988 Olympics, South Korea sent ‘vagrants’ to camps
where rape and murder were routine
https://web.archive.org/web/20160420234916/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/c22de3a565fe4e85a0508bbbd72c3c1b/ap-s-korea-covered-mass-abuse-killings-vagrants

#5yrsago Colorado school district wants to arm security staff with
military-style rifles
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2016/0419/Colorado-school-district-to-equip-security-workers-with-semiautomatic-rifles

#5yrsago UK Chancellor exempts families of “Politically Exposed Persons”
from money laundering scrutiny
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/uks-osborne-exempts-members-of-parliament-other-politically-exposed-persons-from-money-laundering-oversight.html

#5yrsago Volkswagen’s internal Dieselgate probe stuck because the
company used code-words for its cheat software
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/vw-cheating-code-words-said-to-complicate-emissions-probe

#1yrago 94.5% of "small business" money went to giant corporations
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#ppp

#1yrago Denmark: no bailouts for companies headquartered in tax havens
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#great-danes

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🧉 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* A Little Brother short story about pipeline protests.  RESEARCH PHASE

* A short story about consumer data co-ops.  PLANNING

* A Little Brother short story about remote invigilation.  PLANNING

* A nonfiction book about excessive buyer-power in the arts, co-written
with Rebecca Giblin, "The Shakedown."  FINAL EDITS

* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause."  FINISHED

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues."  FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
https://craphound.com/news/2021/03/28/past-performance-is-not-indicative-of-future-results/

Upcoming appearances:

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

* Book launch for Bruce Sterling's Robot Artists & Black Swans (Book
People), Apr 27,
https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans

Recent appearances:

* The Right to Repair Movement, Monopolies, and Solarpunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmosdDCrL-4

* The surveillance state, digital monopolies, and why we should be
worried (Podsongs)
https://anchor.fm/podsongs/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-the-Surveillance-State--digital-monopolies--and-why-we-should-be-worried-eso43k

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/conspiracy-theory-w-cory-doctorow

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

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