A lawsuit accuses Amazon plus the four giant book publishers of fixing prices on e-books distributed anywhere but on Amazon.

I doubt that whatever damages they have to pay for this will make them really stop doing this. I expect instead that they will find a different way to dress it up. But this use of their market power is only a symptom: the disease is that they control so much of the market.

We need laws that effectively prevent so much concentration of any industry, regardless of how that concentration was or is achieved. Antimonopoly law, or better said antioligopoly and antioligopsony law, should discard the question of whether excess concentration was achieved by "unfair" means or not, and focus on protecting society from the unjust power that concentration generally tends to create.

Achieving a fair, competitive price for the not-really-sale of e-books would not make them cease to be unjust. The principal injustices of commercial e-books today are in the other aspects of their distribution: imposing DRM and its concomitant nonfree reader software, carrying an antisocializing contract instead of actual purchase, and requiring the not-really-buyers to identify themselves.

I would rather do without the e-book than submit to those wrongs.

Global heating, degradation of ecosystems, increasing general human hunger and sickness, increasing general extinction for other species — looking at the ghastly future facing us if we don't pull humanity away from it.

2020 was the year that India imposed unrestrained repression.

*By June 2020, the Modi regime began its gradual "unlocking" process. Yet, as restrictions were slowly eased, the damage was already done. The anti- CAA/NRC protests had been squashed, internal migrants were impoverished or lay dead, the general populace had endured the unhinged brutality of the police as they enforced the lockdown, the jailing of dissidents had expanded, and the already ascendant RSS had entrenched itself far deeper into society than ever before.*

Air pollution will make millions of people refugees.

There will not be places for millions (or billions) of people to migrate to. The only practical solution is to reduce the pollution, in all countries.

Not just this sort of pollution, of course. We have to make it safe for people to live in their own countries.

Sci-Hub is under attack.

The loss of Sci-Hub would be a disaster for science around the world. The loss of Elsevier, Wilie and the American Chemical Society would be a plus. There are already libre scientific journals, and once the non-libre journals are gone, the libre ones would enjoy complete success.