Amazon bullied Seattle into retracting a tax increase by threatening to abandon expansion plans there. Seattle caved in, but Amazon has cancelled the plans anyway.

Amazon is not merely an snooping abusive monopolist. It is a cheating snooping abusive monopolist. You shouldn't trust Amazon to keep a deal unless you get your benefit in advance.

This joins a host of other reasons for refusing to buy from Amazon.

I urge Seattle to reinstate that tax. In the long term, we need to teach these companies that we are the boss.

The Ring (now Amazon) doorbell camera is designed so that the manufacturer (now Amazon) can watch all the time. Now it turns out that anyone else can also watch, and fake videos too.

The third party vulnerability is presumably unintentional and I suppose Amazon will fix it. I do not expect Amazon to change the design that allows Amazon to watch.

The EFF explains how US antitrust law is ineffective for internet platforms because it is blind to the harmful consequences of concentration there.

This critique is not deep enough — it accepts the idea that massive surveillance is a mere "cost", rather than a threat to human rights and democracy.

More generally, the basic approach of US antitrust law is ineffective in general. I've proposed a system to replace it.

New Orleans has reduced homelessness by 90% by working assiduously to give homeless people homes.

It costs money, but not as much as you would expect, because it saves money on dealing with medical problems and harassment by thugs. The main obstacle to lasting success is that the failure to build affordable housing in the US generates more homelessness.

An interview with Martin Guerri, a CIA analyst who predicted that internet organizing would destabilize power structures by denying elites their spheres of control over information.

I think Guerri underestimates the influence of demagogues. It is true that the bullshitter appealed to a few preexisting hates and desires of right-wing Americans in order to come within voter-suppression distance of victory. But those people were not totally unscrupulous at the outset. Many of them would not have openly countenanced and protected baldface lying and casual violence — not then. The bullshitter transformed them from indignant citizens into a mafia-like hate gang.

Meanwhile, the scientific elites that we need to trust — including climate scientists and vaccine developers — are getting dragged down, too.