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Nobody to blame but Biden and that Hussein Obama who is in that White House as well, the piece a .more greedflation
more greedflation
Nobody to blame but Biden and that Hussein Obama who is in that White House as well, the piece a .more greedflation
It's still price fixing if an algo does it for you.
It’s uncanny how most of the modern ills plaguing our economy today can be traced back to airlines. The industry is a petri dish of contaminants, from deregulation to market consolidation to financialization, that metastasized into other sectors in the 20th century.
We can add to that list the rise of algorithmic pricing, an emerging economic configuration where all compe ors in a market outsource their price-setting functions to the same third-party software, in a not-that-innocent plot to fix prices.Three Algorithms in a Room - The American ProspectThese new pricing intermediaries are similar to ATPCO, but don’t just act as information exchanges between compe ors. They actually set the prices for an entire industry by using machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, which are programmed to maximize profits. To arrive at optimal prices, these software applications aggregate vast amounts of relevant market data, some of which is public and much of which is compe ively sensitive information given to them by their clients.
Each algorithmic scheme has its own distinct features, but they all share the same underlying philosophy: Competing on price in an open market is a race to the bottom, so why not instead coordinate together to grow industry’s profits? In other words, it’s another version of the notorious Peter Thiel adage that “compe ion is for losers.”
These business arrangements are coming under fire from a new crop of an rust regulators who are far more aggressive than their predecessors. Both the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are intervening to help in numerous lawsuits making their way through courts that target algorithmic price-fixing. The DOJ has even returned to the arena with its own collusion case against an agricultural information hub called Agri Stats. The outcomes could have major ramifications for this field, and rectify the lax enforcement of ATPCO in the 1990s.
dynamic pricing surely wasn't developed to give out more discounts than upcharges
The internet nearly exploded this February when Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner announced that the fast-food chain intended to embrace “surge pricing,” raising the prices of a burger and a Frosty in line with customer demand.
The company had included a mention of “dynamic pricing” in its fourth-quarter earnings presentation, but clarified after the kerfuffle that the announcement of its new digital menu displays had been “misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest,” and said that it had “no plans to do that.” Instead, the new system would merely allow Wendy’s to “offer discounts and value offers to our customers more easily.”
It's called AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, honey.
the GOP takes the side of the oligopoly and greedy exploitation
link
another banger Cory Doctorow thread
https://x.com/doctorow/status/1806733317779423397
payment processing for public school lunches
https://x.com/doctorow/status/1816910676574801930
Eh. We then turn around and giveFREE FULL RIDE health-care to millions of Nazi's in Ukraine. You know who did that, Winester?...
Let us proceed...
How did CrowdStrike get the clout to screw up IT globally and get away with it?
https://x.com/doctorow/status/1819771847766110494
Eh. We then turn around and giveFREE FULL RIDE health-care to millions of Nazi's in Ukraine. You know who did that, Winester?...
Let us proceed...
Lina Khan going after greedflation
https://x.com/AnnaForFlorida/status/1820242936556052612
Lord-a-mighty, does she have a honker on her.
not likely, but fun to think about
https://x.com/mattdpearce/status/1821337802748936201
The Robinson-Patman Act is still on the books
https://x.com/ernietedeschi/status/1824097882678632647
Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all • The Register
According to a report published by UK cloud outfit Civo, more than a third of organizations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over half reported a rise in their cloud bill.
Although the survey, unsurprisingly, paints Civo in a flattering light, some of its figures may make uncomfortable reading for customers sold on the promises from hyperscalers. Like-for-like comparisons for a simple three-node cluster with 200 GB of persistent storage and a 5 TB data transfer showed prices going from $1,278.58 in 2022 to $1,458.68 in 2024 on Microsoft Azure.
For Google, the price went from $1,107.61 to $1,250.35. According to Civo's figures, the cost at AWS increased from $1,142.46 to $1,234.59.
"The Kubernetes prices were taken from the hyperscalers' very own pricing calculators," a Civo spokesperson told The Register.
In the IT world, there is an expectation that bang for buck increases as time goes by, but in this example, prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, and what customers receive for their money remains unchanged.
John David-Lovelock, VP analyst at Gartner, said CIOs had been conditioned not to expect price increases since the cloud emerged.
"Cost control, based on operating datacenters at massive scale, was part of the early sales pitch and in the intervening 15 years, it had proven out – cloud product costs were stable, and either went down in price or more features were added at the same price," he told us.
"However, the rapid rise in the cost of electricity post-pandemic, coupled with the rising cost of skilled IT staff, put cloud delivery under new cost pressures that had to be passed on, from hyperscalers to platform provider, from platform provider to software provider, and finally from software providers to clients.
"While there are cost pressures behind these increases being felt across the cloud spectrum, opportunistic price increases cannot be ruled out."
FTC going after Pharmacy Benefit Managers
Another great explainer thread from Cory Doctorow
https://x.com/doctorow/status/1838240320653291841
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