[Plura-list] How to donate to John Varley; Minimum wage vs Wall Street bonuses; America needs a high-fiber broadband diet; Als Sysadmins die Erde beherrschten

[Cory Doctorow]

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

Tonight, I'm helping futurist Brian David Johnson launch his new book,
"Future You" at an event hosted by Powell's Books:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/5716148038801/WN_psgDGchIRfaUQOJyvLnvzw

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

Today's links

* How to donate to John Varley: Paypal versus science fiction.

* Minimum wage vs Wall Street bonuses: The fight for $44.

* America needs a high-fiber broadband diet: AT&T to rural America:
"Drop dead (slowly)."

* Als Sysadmins die Erde beherrschten: My "When Sysadmins Ruled the
Earth," auf Deutsch.

* This day in history: 2016, 2020

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

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤰🏻 How to donate to John Varley

On Sunday, I published a long tribute to sf writer John Varley,
occasioned by a fundraiser to defray the post-operative costs of a
quadruple bypass.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/28/the-ophiuchi-helpline/#varley-yarns

I included a Paypal link for would-be donors, but almost immediately
started to get bug-reports from readers who found that it didn't work. A
reader supplied an updated link and then it, too, started to fail.

It turns out that the Paypal donate button uses a weird HTML form
element ("input type="hidden" name="encrypted" value="-----BEGIN PKCS7")
that generates a one-time link for each donor, which makes if very hard
to share donation links!

Which means that if you'd like to donate to Varley's fund, you can visit
his site, varley.net, and then click the Donate button, it's about a
third of the way down the screen, center-left.

https://varley.net

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤰🏻 Minimum wage vs Wall Street bonuses

The Fight For 15 is back on the table, thanks to some canny procedural
wrangling by Chuck Schumer (it remains to be see whether ghouls like Joe
Manchin  and Kyrsten Sinema will sabotage it again).

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/29/minimum-wage-senate-chuck-schumer/

The Fight for $15 started in 2012. The $15 figure represented the fair,
inflation-adjusted minimum wage that Americans should have if minimum
wage tracked the cost of living. By 2021, the inflation-adjusted minimum
wage should have been $24/hour.

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/05/minimum-wage-raise-15/

That means that even if we get around Manchin and Sinema to deliver a
fair share to the country's worst-paid workers, we'll *still* be lagging
a true, inflation-adjusted minimum wage.

Now, if $24/hour gives you a little sticker shock, here's another number
to think about:

$44 per hour.

That's the minimum wage we'd have today if the minimum had tracked the
growth in Wall Street Bonuses.

https://inequality.org/great-divide/minimum-wage-wall-street-bonus/

Wall Street bonuses have grown 1,217% since 1985 - in 2020, the finance
sector handed out $31.7b in bonuses - enough to pay the full salaries of
1m workers earning $15/h.

As Sarah Anderson writes in her Institute for Policy Studies report, the
beneficiaries of this massive bonus inflation are overwhelmingly white
dudes. The targets of real-terms pay-cuts to the minimum wage are
overwhelmingly not dudes, nor white.

This increasing return to the finance sector is what we mean when we say
"financialization." The workers who literally risked their lives to keep
society from collapsing during the crisis face constant wage erosion,
while the reckless gamblers cash out ever-larger jackpots.

The finance sector has mastered the art of externalizing its risk and
privatizing its gains. When they engineer a massive crash and an
eviction crisis, they don't get punished - instead, they snap up all
those houses and become mass-scale corporate landlords.

Then they parlay the supernormal profits realized by gouging people to
live in the houses they stole into legislation that makes it easier to
raise rent, evict tenants, and neglect maintenance.

Over the period in which finance sector bonuses climbed by 1,217%, the
industry has repeatedly exacted enormous planetary-scale harms: bubble
after bubble, predatory acquisitions, pandemic profiteering, and worse.

The fact that we're fighting for $15 - and not $24, and *certainly* not
real criminal and civil penalties for destructive, fraudulent financial
engineering - means we're fighting a rear-guard action.

The Archegos collapse isn't a one-off - it's the latest in a string of
mass-scale frauds that made billionaires out of their perpetrators and
left the rest of us holding the bag.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-world-greatest-hidden-fortunes-002617417.html

NFTs, Stonks, and other tulip-bulb eruptions are pure financialization.
Like poulaines - pointed shoes whose toes grew so long they had to be
anchored by chains to the wearer's knees (!) - they are the sign that
the concerns of elites are totally unmoored from reality.

An economy that is simultaneously capable of producing billions in
wealth for pure speculation over symbolic, brittle ledger-entries, while
catastrophically failing to pay a living minimum wage, is an economy
whose priorities are wildly off-kilter.

When unproductive number-shuffling produces billions, while
back-breaking, civilization-saving work faces real-terms pay cuts every
single year, something is terribly, awfully wrong.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤰🏻 America needs a high-fiber broadband diet

Since the 19th century, AT&T has hoovered up incredible, priceless
public subsidies - despite this, it insists that it has no duty to
provide the public with the connectivity it monopolizes in markets
across the country.

AT&T's subsidies started early with things like rights-of-way, the
privilege of digging up public lands, piercing and even knocking down
buildings to allow it to string the wires it charged us to access.

All along, AT&T has maintained the fiction that the expensive part of
the network was the copper wires and the poles and the switches - not
the incalculably massive discount it got by not having to buy its
rights-of-way on an open market.

AT&T has enjoyed many other subsidies along the way as well - fat
government contracts (including hundreds of millions in compensation for
the illegal mass surveillance it partnered with the DHS on), antitrust
waivers, and the right to sue competitors who made phone devices.

Now, AT&T has finally admitted what everyone else already knew: the only
future-proof internet infrastructure is fiber. Not copper. Not 5G
(useless without fiber). Certainly not satellites (whose speeds are an
infinitesimal fraction of fiber).

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g

The admission came in a blog-post that was aimed at heading off a new
Biden FCC that promises to reverse Trump FCC Chair Ajit Pai's cozy,
fraud-friendly relationship with the Big Telco industry he once served
as a top executive lawyer.

https://www.attpublicpolicy.com/wireless/defining-broadband-for-the-21st-century/

Despite admitting the only future-proof internet is fiber, AT&T Exec VP
of Federal Regulatory Relations Joan Marsh went on to say that America
does not deserve fiber. Instead of 100,000,000,000bps fiber, we only
need 10,000,000bps copper lines.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/att-lobbies-against-nationwide-fiber-says-10mbps-uploads-are-good-enough/

Not coincidentally, sticking with copper allows AT&T shareholders to
trouser the billions they'd need to spend to upgrade their creaking
infrastructure - and it would also head off public broadband investment
comparable to the rural electrification projects of the New Deal.

They call fiber "overinvestment" and add "there is no compelling
evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality
of a 50/10 or 100/20Mbps product."

Thankfully, Congress has moved way, way past AT&T's 20th Century
definition of "broadband." As Jon Brodkin writes in Ars Technica,
there's already a proposal to spend $80b upgrading rural networks to
symmetrical 100mbps service.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/democratic-led-congress-gets-serious-about-universal-broadband-funding/


And that's just table-stakes: the $3t infrastructure package includes
massive cash infusions for rural broadband:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/business/biden-infrastructure-spending.html

Brodkin gives the last word to Glen Akins, who led an historic effort to
build municipal fiber in Ft Collins, CO, clearing the absurd state-law
threshold that ALEC lobbied for, which blocked cities from providing
high-speed networks.

"If you run power to a house, you can run fiber to a house. Substituting
anything else is grift."

https://twitter.com/bikerglen/status/1375537893368795144


_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤰🏻 Als Sysadmins die Erde beherrschten

When the lockdown started, I got a ton of messages from readers  who
were thinking of my 2005 story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," set in
a sealed data-center where network admins struggle to keep global comms
going in the midst of a global biowar.

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html

I revisited the story then, recording a special reading of it on my
podcast, where I recounted the circumstances of writing it, in the midst
of the London 7/7 bombings, which hit my usual morning bus and my wife's
usual morning train:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#eschatology-watch

It was indeed timely, and as the new edition spread around the world, I
started hearing from IT workers who were living out a real-world version
of the tale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/09/all-hail-morlocks/#morlocks

A year later, the story still resonates. Christoph Jansen, a German
reader, used the Creative Commons Non-Commercial/Share-Alike license and
made an open access German edition ("Als Sysadmins die Erde
beherrschten"), which I've hosted here:

https://craphound.com/als-sysadmins-die-erde-beherrschten/

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤰🏻 This day in history

#5yrsago How DRM would kill the next Netflix (and how the W3C could save
it)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present

#5yrsago Judge says Citibank’s law-school loan isn’t “student debt” and
can be discharged in bankruptcy
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/judges-ruling-law-school-grads-debt-signal-seismic/story?id=37981518

#5yrsago Up to half of the Americans killed by police have a disability
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/29/media-must-report-police-violence-towards-disabled-people

#5yrsago Playable records laser-etched in cheese, eggplant and ham
http://matthewherbert.com/edible-sound-dj-experiment-at-the-science-gallery/

#1yrago Digital rights are human rights
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#fiber-now

#1yrago Lax antitrust killed ventilator stockpiles
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#market-oxygen

#1yrago Private equity firms scooping up pandemic bargains
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#blackstone-kkr

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤰🏻 Colophon

Today's top sources: Late Stage Capitalism
(https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism.

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 532 words (121548 total).

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1042 words (44653 total).

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:

* Launch for Brian David Johnson's Future You (Powell's Books), Mar 30,
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/5716148038801/WN_psgDGchIRfaUQOJyvLnvzw

* All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing, Apr 13,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

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

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

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤰🏻 How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and
advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20210330/46543fc9/attachment.sig>