Quelles technologies pour une société durable ?
▻https://atterrissage.org/technologies-societe-durable-65514b474700
"Étant à la fois plus sophistiquées et plus efficaces, la plupart des technologies “vertes”qu’on nous vend sont en fait porteuses de coûts écologiques supérieurs aux technologies actuelles."
La nouvelle Inquisition et les moukhabarat parisianistes
►https://claudeelkhal.blogspot.fr/2018/03/la-nouvelle-inquisition-et-les.html
Mon intervention consacrée à la Ghouta en Syrie dans le JT du Média du 23 février m’a valu un lynchage en règle sur les réseaux sociaux et dans plusieurs médias. Les amateurs de guerre ont sorti l’artillerie lourde. Il fallait s’y attendre. Mais comme ils n’avaient pas vraiment d’arguments à m’opposer, à part la traditionnelle propagande à laquelle plus grand monde ne croit, ils ont été fouiller mon compte Twitter à la recherche d’anciens péchés qu’ils pourraient utiliser pour me salir.
Convaincus d’avoir trouvé les trésors d’infamie qu’ils cherchaient, ils les ont partagés sur les réseaux sociaux, essayant de me faire passer pour ce que je ne suis pas. En anglais on appelle ça character assassination . Il n’y a pas d’équivalent en français. Il faudrait en trouver un, ça éviterait à d’autres de subir le même sort.
Le sentiment que j’ai eu ces derniers jours m’était familier, mais je pensais qu’il faisait partie du passé. Je pensais qu’il a avait été emporté dans les bagages des troupes d’occupation syriennes quand elles se sont retirées du Liban. Ce sentiment d’être traqué, épié, dénoncé, accusé puis jugé sans autre forme de procès était lié aux méthodes des moukhabarat syriens et de l’État policier qui a sévi entre 1990 et 2005. En 2018, les moukhabarat ne sont plus syriens mais parisianistes. Ils ne sont plus ces agents hirsutes et mal fagotés qui faisaient régner la terreur au Liban mais des bien-pensants propres sur eux qui règnent sur les plateaux de télévision et dans les médias mainstream...
#Syrie #pouvoir_médiatique #monopole_de_l'information #character_assassination (attaques visant à salir la réputation)
Le Gabon prend le risque de rompre le contrat le liant à Veolia
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2018/02/19/l-etat-gabonais-requisitionne-la-filiale-locale-de-veolia_5259105_3212.html
Des militaires et des policiers sont intervenus sans prévenir, vendredi 16 février, au siège de la Société d’#énergie et d’#eau du #Gabon (SEEG), filiale de #Veolia, à Libreville, et en ont expulsé les dirigeants pour signifier que « l’Etat a mis fin à la #convention de #concession » le liant à cette entreprise, détentrice du #monopole de la #distribution de l’eau et l’#électricité dans le pays. Après cette « #expropriation brutale » et « manu militari », le géant français de l’environnement a annoncé qu’il « examine les conséquences juridiques de cette situation et attend du Gabon qu’il se conforme aux règles de droit et à ses engagements ».
C’est sans doute une page qui se tourne. Veolia est implanté depuis 1997 au Gabon, où il est l’employeur et l’investisseur français le plus important après le groupe pétrolier Total. Le ministre gabonais de l’énergie et l’eau, Patrick Eyogo, a justifié la rupture du contrat par la nécessité de « préserver la continuité et la qualité du #service_public ». Malgré les critiques récurrentes du gouvernement et des consommateurs, la concession avait pourtant été reconduite pour cinq ans en mars 2017.
Le Gabon et la multinationale se renvoient la responsabilité dans un dossier politiquement sensible. Les Gabonais ne pleureront pas sur Veolia. Les coupures d’eau et les délestages sur le réseau électrique sont très fréquents. Certains usagers se plaignent de recevoir des factures pour de l’eau qu’ils n’ont pas consommée. Ou d’attendre de longs mois pour obtenir la pose d’un compteur d’eau ou d’électricité. Ils reprochent à Veolia d’avoir sous-investi alors qu’il dégageait de confortables profits de son activité au Gabon.
le géant français de l’environnement
Pour tou.te.s les géographes ici :
Pour une géographie anarchiste
Simon Springer
Traduit de l’anglais par Nicolas Calvé
Lux Editeur
Parution en Amérique du Nord : 25 janvier 2018
Parution en Europe : 15 mars 2018
▻http://www.luxediteur.com/catalogue/pour-une-geographie-anarchiste
Grâce aux ouvrages de David Harvey, Mike Davis ou même Henri Lefebvre, on connaît aujourd’hui la géographie radicale ou critique née dans le contexte des luttes politiques des années 1960 aux États-Unis et qui a, comme le disait Harvey, donné à Marx « la dimension spatiale qui lui manquait ». Dans ce livre, Simon Springer enjoint aux géographes critiques de se radicaliser davantage et appelle à la création d’une géographie insurrectionnelle qui reconnaisse l’aspect kaléidoscopique des espaces et son potentiel émancipateur, révélé à la fin du XIXe siècle par Élisée Reclus et Pierre Kropotkine, notamment.
L’histoire de l’humanité est une longue suite d’expériences dans et avec l’espace ; or aujourd’hui, la stase qui est imposée à ces mouvements vitaux, principalement par les frontières, menace notre survie. Face au désastre climatique et humain qui nous guette, il est indispensable de revoir les relations que nous entretenons avec le monde et une géographie rebelle comme celle que défend Springer nous libérerait du carcan de l’attentisme. Il faut se défaire une bonne fois pour toutes des géographies hiérarchiques qui nous enchaînent à l’étatisme, au capitalisme, à la discrimination et à l’impérialisme. « La géographie doit devenir belle, se vouer entièrement à l’émancipation. »
#cartoexperiment bon, ben merci @sinehebdo Dror et radicalisons nous encore plus. Je viens de découvrir que je suis en plus postmoderne, je serai donc un géographe postmoderne radical(isé)
C’est la géographie qui nous conditionne, on n’a pas à s’approprier la géographie pour des raisons idéologiques.
C’est l’histoire qui nous conditionne, on n’a pas à s’approprier l’histoire pour des raisons idéologiques.
C’est la politique qui nous conditionne, on n’a pas à s’approprier la politique pour des raisons idéologiques.
C’est la nature qui nous conditionne, on n’a pas à s’approprier la nature pour des raisons idéologiques.
C’est la toxoplasmose qui nous conditionne, on n’a pas à s’approprier la toxoplasmose pour des raisons idéologiques.
C’est la glace aux myrtilles qui nous conditionne, on n’a pas à s’approprier la glace aux myrtilles pour des raisons idéologiques.
.
.
.
Tu raisonne bizarrement si jamais la géographie nous conditionne, on a toutes les raisons de s’approprier la géographie pour des raisons idéologiques.
La liberté, la guerre, la paix, la propriété, le pouvoir, la domination, la religion ... c’est pas les idéologies qui manquent pour s’approprier la terre et se servir de la géographie pour le faire.
Pour le reste je n’adhère pas à ton histoire de vérité des créateurices alors ca sert à rien de poursuivre avec cet argument.
Enfin la géographie c’est l’écriture (graphie) de la terre (géo), c’est une création humaine, ca n’existe pas sans femmes et hommes non plus. Je ne voie pas pourquoi tu la naturalise en la rapprochant de la toxoplasmose. Et si une chose à une origine extérieure à nous, je ne voie pas de raison de pas faire d’idéologie avec. On sait faire de l’idéologie avec tout, y compris la toxoplasmose ;
▻http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/05/toxoplasma-the-brain-parasite-that-influences-human-cu
Simon Springer donnera une conférence le 17 mai à Grenoble:
The Beautiful Geographies of Anarchism: Spatial Emancipation and Hope Beyond Hope
J’y serai.
Qwant, l’anti-Google français, jouera quitte ou double en 2018
►https://www.usine-digitale.fr/article/qwant-l-anti-google-francais-jouera-quitte-ou-double-en-2018.N643093
Qwant avait également passé quatre partenariats avec des fabricants de smartphones et opérateurs télécom pour être installé par défaut sur les téléphones, mais ils sont tombés à l’eau lorsque Google a menacé de leur refuser l’utilisation des Google Services (la partie propriétaire d’Android, dont il est quasi-impossible de se passer aujourd’hui).
Rapport #Oxfam : un monde toujours plus inégalitaire
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/220118/rapport-oxfam-un-monde-toujours-plus-inegalitaire
© Oxfam Les #inégalités ont atteint un niveau sans équivalent, selon le dernier rapport d’Oxfam : 82 % des richesses créées l’an dernier dans le monde ont été captées par 1 % des plus riches. Loin d’être des créateurs, ces milliardaires sont d’abord des héritiers, ou des personnes en situation de captation des rentes monopolitisques à leur profit. Avec la complicité des États.
#International #Economie #Etat #grandes_fortunes #héritage #monopoles #pauvreté #politiques_publiques #rente #services_publics
Que serait une « société sans #école ? ». Comment répondre aujourd’hui à cette question provocatrice d’Ivan #Illich ?
►http://sms.hypotheses.org/10840
#éducation, #école, #société, #monopole, #instruction, #institutionnalisation, #apprentissage, #scolarité, #métier, #élève
Amazon und Google: So will ein breites Bündnis die Übermacht der Konzerne stoppen | Berliner Zeitung
▻https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/wirtschaft/amazon-und-google-so-will-ein-breites-buendnis-die-uebermacht-der-k
In Deutschland tritt ein breites Bündnis von Umwelt-, Landwirtschafts- und Entwicklungsorganisationen gegen die zunehmende Macht von Megaunternehmen an. Die neu geformte Initiative „Konzernmacht beschränken“ ruft in einem am Dienstag vorgestellten Papier die nächste Bundesregierung auf, den Trend zu einer immer höheren Marktkonzentration zu stoppen.
Die schwache Fusionskontrolle schütze kleine Firmen, Bauern, Arbeitnehmer und Verbraucher nicht ausreichend, heißt es in dem Gründungsdokument. Daher fordern die Verbände die Politik auf, den Wettbewerbsbehörden die Entflechtung von Konzernen mit übergroßer Dominanz zu erleichtern. „Je größer die Konzerne, desto mehr Macht und finanzielle Mittel haben sie, die Politik und Märkte in ihrem Sinne zu beeinflussen“, kritisiert Georg Janßen, Bundesgeschäftsführer der Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft. Die ökonomische Kontrolle durch wenige Anbieter untergrabe am Ende auch die Demokratie.
„Amerika hat ein Monopolproblem"
Die Gefährdung der Marktwirtschaft durch Monopole oder durch Oligopole – also wenige Anbieter – ist seit langem ein Thema. Im 19. Jahrhundert etwa schalteten große Eisenbahnkonzerne und Ölmultis den Konkurrenzkampf in den USA weitgehend aus, bis die Politik nach einigem Zögern mit der Zerschlagung der bedrohlichsten Gesellschaften reagierte. Nach Ansicht vieler Experten stehen heutzutage durch die Digitalisierung ähnliche Herausforderungen an. „Amerika hat ein Monopolproblem – und zwar ein riesiges“, m eint etwa Nobelpreisträger Joe Stiglitz.
Die neuen Technologien begünstigen die Branchenführer, die auf das Sammeln und die hochkomplexe Auswertung von Daten setzen. Jeder neue Kunde beschert Amazon, Google oder Facebook mehr Informationen über das Verbraucherverhalten, ohne dass größere Kosten durch die zusätzliche Nachfrage entstünden. Entsprechend bauen diese Giganten ihre Stellung gegenüber kleineren Rivalen immer weiter aus.
An Google kommt kaum jemand vorbei
So beherrscht Google nach Angaben der Initiative Konzernmacht 90 Prozent des Suchmaschinenmarktes und Facebook 75 Prozent der mobilen Kommunikationsdienste.
Amazon kontrolliere nicht nur 65 Prozent des Online-Buchhandels, sondern führe auch ein digitales Tagelöhnertum mit elektronischer Komplettüberwachung ein. Mit ihren riesigen Profiten dringen die Stars der neuen Weltwirtschaft – zu denen auch Apple und Microsoft gehören – zudem in andere Branchen ein - vom Autogeschäft über den Gesundheitssektor bis hin zu Finanzdienstleistungen.
Wirklich gehindert hat sie bislang niemand, jedenfalls nicht in ihrer Heimat in den Vereinigten Staaten. In einem harten langen Kampf zwang die US-Regierung Anfang des Jahrtausends den Softwareanbieter Microsoft, seine wettbewerbsschädlichen Praktiken beim Zugang ins Internet aufzugeben. Fachleute sehen darin eine entscheidende Voraussetzung, um neuen Anbietern wie eben Google oder Facebook den Aufstieg zu ermöglichen. Längst aber sind die US-Behörden auf einen ausgesprochen zurückhaltenden Kurs umgeschwenkt. Nach der heutigen Philosophie könnte nur nachweislich zu hohe Preise zu Lasten der Verbraucher ein Einschreiten rechtfertigen.
Megakonzerne machen es Nutzern leicht
Die Konsumenten zählen aber bislang überwiegend zu den Nutznießern der Digitalwirtschaft. Google verlangt bis heute von seinen Kunden keinen Cent für seine wesentliche Dienstleistung. Amazon macht mit Billigangeboten dem Einzelhandel das Leben schwer. Daher haben die Giganten von den US-Behörden wenig zu befürchten – und zwar auch schon vor der Amtsübernahme von Präsident Donald Trump.
In Europa sind die Instrumente der Aufsicht weniger scharf. Dennoch verhängte die EU-Kommission im vergangenen Jahr gegen Google die höchste Kartellstrafe in der Geschichte der Europäischen Union. 2,4 Milliarden Euro soll der Multi zahlen, weil er seine Marktmacht bei der Online-Shopping-Suche missbraucht habe. Allerdings hat das US-Unternehmen Klage gegen die Entscheidung eingereicht.
Das verlangt das neue deutsche Bündnis
Das deutsche Bündnis gegen die Macht der Konzerne fordert eine neue Strategie für die Wettbewerbspolitik. So sollten die Hürden für die Kartellbehörden sinken, um als letztes Mittel bei übermächtigen Konzernen Teile oder ganze Geschäftsfelder abzukoppeln. Bisher muss die EU-Kommission dafür den Missbrauch der Marktmacht nachweisen. Das fällt schwer, wenn durch Amazon und Co. die Preise nicht steigen, sondern (erst einmal) sinken.
Auch sollten Fusionen über Sektoren hinweg – etwa im Pestizid-und Saatgutgeschäft – einfacher untersagt werden können. Die Initiatoren beklagten, dass auch in vielen traditionellen Branchen wie dem Einzelhandel oder der Autoindustrie wenige Anbieter zu viel Macht erlangt hätten. Die Ministererlaubnis für die (teilweise) Übernahme von Kaisers durch Edeka sowie der Dieselskandal zeigten, welchen Einfluss die Konzerne auf die Politik ausübten.
Les policiers découvrent la dotation « tuerie de masse » - 30/10/2017 - ladepeche.fr
▻http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2017/10/30/2675164-les-policiers-decouvrent-la-dotation-tuerie-de-masse.html
Une formation « gestion d’une tuerie de masse niveau II, sur III », a donc été d’ores et déjà entamée. Elle se fait en quatre jours. Elle comprend une partie théorique, et un volet pratique en deux temps : exercice au champ de tir avec évaluations individuelles et exercice collectif « grandeur réelle » avec techniques d’intervention et de progression.
« La prise en main de la nouvelle arme reste assez facile et donc rapide », ajoute l’un des moniteurs.
« Il s’agit d’un fusil HK G36, de calibre 5,56 mm. Munitions de #guerre contre éventuelles munitions de guerre, indique l’un des moniteurs de tir. Puisque l’on peut être confronté à des armes type Kalachnikov. La nôtre est une arme allemande. Elle équipe désormais de nombreuses unités. » Le HK pèse 3,6 kg. Il sera doté de 6 chargeurs de 30 cartouches chacun. « Tir coup par coup, ou rafale contrôlée », indique un major. Cet équipement est complété d’un appareil à visée électronique : « Tir à 100 m, point visé, point touché. Il est très précis. » Autrement dit, le point rouge fait mouche ! L’arme peut aussi être dotée d’une minitorche à leds très puissante.
Joyeux Noël !
Heckler und Koch G36
Caractéristiques :
Heckler und Koch G36
Calibre : 5,56 x 45 mm.
Longueur : 500 à 999 mm.
Longueur du canon : 228 à 480 mm.
Poids de l’arme chargée : 2.82 à 3.83 kg.
Capacité du chargeur : 30 à 100 cartouches.
Cadence de tir : 750 coups/mn.
Les seuls reproches sont la tendance du garde main à chauffer en cas de tir nourri
Tu m’étonnes, à 12 coups/seconde.
#Fusils_d'assaut
►http://encyclopedie-des-armes.com/index.php/armes/fusils-d-assaut/1587-hk-g36
Des champignons hallucinogènes pour redémarrer le cerveau dépressif - Sciencesetavenir.fr
▻https://www.sciencesetavenir.fr/sante/cerveau-et-psy/des-champignons-hallucinogenes-pour-redemarrer-le-cerveau-depressif
Si les résultats de l’étude sont prometteurs, les chercheurs mettent bien sûr en garde contre toute tentative d’automédication par les champignons hallucinogènes qui contiennent cette molécule. Eux utilisent une molécule de psilocybine synthétisée en laboratoire dont ils peuvent par conséquent mesurer les doses administrées avec précision. Or il est quasiment impossible de connaître les concentrations de psilocybine des champignons hallucinogènes à usage récréatif, lesquels sont par ailleurs interdits dans la plupart des pays du monde...
« On a d’ailleurs vu des effets cérébraux semblables avec la thérapie par électrochocs »
Noté ici pour rappel : l’emploi d’électrochocs n’implique pas nécessairement maltraitance.
Par ailleurs le journal fait bien de mettre en garde, les effets psychotisants (éventuels) de la psilocybine ne sont pas à négliger. C’est pas du chocolat.
Can Washington Stop Big Tech Companies ? Don’t Bet on It - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/technology/regulating-tech-companies.html
The tech giants are too big. They’re getting bigger. We can stop them. But in all likelihood, we won’t.
The history of American business is one of repeated cycles of unfettered, sometimes catastrophic growth followed by periods of reflection and regulation. In previous eras of suffocating corporate dominance over our lives — when industrialists gained an economic stranglehold through railroads and vast oil and steel concerns, or when rampant financial speculation sent the nation into economic paroxysms — Americans turned to their government for a fix.
In the last half-century, lawmakers and regulators set up a regime to improve the safety of automobiles and other manufactured goods, to break up a telephone monopoly that controlled much of the nation’s communications and to loosen the fatal grip that tobacco companies held over American society.
We are now at another great turning point in the global economy. A handful of technology companies, the Frightful Five — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, the largest American corporations by stock-market value — control the technological platforms that will dominate life for the foreseeable future.
Yet despite their growth and obvious impact on the economy and society, technology has long been given a special pass. For nearly two decades, under Republican and Democratic presidents, most tech giants have been spared from much legislation, regulation and indeed much government scrutiny of any kind.
J’avais parlé de ce phénomène en 2007 sous le vocable de #Vectorialisme pour désigner la nouvelle forme de monopole qui émergeait du numérique. Devant le scepticisme de mes collègues, j’avais laissé cette approche de côté. J’ai eu tort (de l’abandonner) car j’avais une belle intuition.
Part of what has hampered governmental action against the Five is the unusual nature of their power. Much of what they do now, and will soon have the power to do, exceeds what we’ve ever expected from corporations. In different ways, they each collect, analyze and mediate our most important public and personal information, including news, political data and our relationships. They’re being called upon to police free speech, terrorism and sex trafficking, and to defend nations and individuals against existential digital attack.
But in other ways, the Five do not cleanly fit traditional notions of what constitutes dangerous corporate power. Only a couple of them enjoy monopolies or duopolies in their markets — Google and Facebook in digital ads, for example.
Then there is our own complicated relationship with the tech giants. We do not think of them in the same way we think of, say, the faceless megacorps of Wall Street. The Five’s power comes cloaked in friendliness, utility and irresistible convenience at unbelievable prices. We hooked our lives into them willingly, and then we became addicted to them. For many Americans, life without all but one or two of them might feel just about unlivable.
Monopoly Men | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/k-sabeel-rahman-monopoly-men
Amazon. Google. Facebook. Twitter. These are the most powerful and influential tech platforms of the modern economy, and the headlines over the last few weeks underscore the degree to which these firms have accumulated an outsized influence on our economic, political, and social life. To many, including acting FTC Chair Maureen Ohlhausen, the status quo is great: the benefits to consumers—from cheap prices to easy access to information to rapid delivery of goods and services—outweigh greater regulation, lest policymakers undermine Silicon Valley innovation.
But the recent controversies suggest a very different perspective—that private power is increasingly concentrated among a handful of tech platforms, representing a major challenge to the survival of our democracy and the potential for a more dynamic and inclusive economic order. A growing clamor from both the left and right has created a sense of “blood in the water,” and suggests that Silicon Valley’s long honeymoon may finally be over.
The danger of the “platform power” accumulated by Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter arises from their ability to control the foundational infrastructure of our economic, informational, and political life. Even if they didn’t spend a dime on lobbying or influencing elected officials, this power would still pose a grave threat to democracy and economic opportunity. The fact that these companies provide enormously popular and useful goods and services is indisputable—but also beside the point. The central issue here is not simply the value for the consumer. Instead it is vast, unaccountable private power over the foundations of contemporary society and politics. In a word, the central issue is democracy.
It was this deeper problem of power—not merely the impacts on prices or the consumer experience—that motivated reformers such as Brandeis to develop whole new institutions and legal regimes: antitrust laws to break up monopolies, public utility regulation to assure fair prices and nondiscrimination on “common carriers” such as railroads, the creation of the FTC itself, and much of President Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal push to establish governmental regulatory agencies charged with overseeing finance, market competition, and labor.
But the late twentieth century saw a widespread shift away from the New Deal ethos. Starting in the 1970s, intellectual critiques of economic regulation highlighted the likelihood of corruption, capture, and inefficiency, while scholars in economics espoused the virtues of self-regulation, growth-optimization, and efficient markets. In these intellectual constructs big business and the conservative right found support for their attacks on the New Deal edifice, and in the 1980s and 1990s, we saw the bipartisan adoption of a deregulatory ethic—including in market competition policy.
These cultural currents—the skepticism of government as corrupt at worst and inefficient at best, the belief in private enterprise and the virtues of “free markets,” and a commitment to delivering for consumers above the broader social and political repercussions—suffuses our current political economic discourse. The Brandeis-ian critique of private power has been wholly absent in recent decades and nowhere is this absence more pronounced than in the worldview of Silicon Valley.
In our current moment, it is as if technological innovation has been divorced from the corporations that profit from it. Through these rose-colored glasses, technology is seen as a good in itself, promising efficiency, delivering new wonders to consumers, running laps around otherwise stale and plodding government institutions. Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have been able to resist corporate criticism (until recently, that is) by emphasizing their cultural and ideational commitment to the consumer and to innovation. They have casted themselves as the vanguards of social progress, the future’s cavalry who should not be constrained by government regulation because they offer a better mode of social order than the government itself.
But as the anxieties of the last few months indicate, this image does not capture reality. Indeed, these technology platforms are not just “innovators,” nor are they ordinary corporations anymore. They are better seen and understood as privately controlled infrastructure, the underlying backbone for much of our economic, social, and political life. Such control and influence brings with it the ability to skew, rig, or otherwise manage these systems—all outside the kinds of checks and balances we would expect to accompany such power.
This kind of infrastructural power also explains the myriad concerns about how platforms might taint, skew, or undermine our political system itself—concerns that extend well beyond the ability of these firms to lobby inside the Beltway. Even before the 2016 election, a number of studies and scholars raised the concern that Facebook and Google could swing elections if they wanted to by manipulating their search and feed algorithms. Through subtle and unnoticeable tweaks, these companies could place search results for some political candidates or viewpoints above others, impacting the flow of information enough to influence voters.
Given our reality, it would be helpful to think of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter as the new “utilities” of the modern era. Today the idea of “public utility” conjures images of rate regulation and electric utility bureaucracies. But for Progressive Era reformers, public utility was a broad concept that, at its heart, was about creating regulations to ensure adequate checks and balances on private actors who had come to control the basic necessities of life, from telecommunications to transit to water. This historical tradition helps us identify what kinds of private power are especially troubling. The problem, ultimately, is not just raw “bigness,” or market capitalization. Rather, the central concern is about private control over infrastructure.
At a minimum Equifax’s data breach suggests a need for regulatory oversight imposing public obligations of data security, safety, and consumer protection on these firms. Some commentators have suggested an antitrust-style breaking up of credit reporting agencies while others have called for replacing the oligopoly altogether with public databases.
Que faire ? (1/4)
Chacun le sent avec plus ou moins de clairvoyance : l’heure est venue de sortir de la passivité, de rompre avec le vide de sens et le conformisme ambiants. Nous ouvrons en conséquence une série de quatre billets — conclusion de nos cinq ans d’existence et de réflexion — autour de cette unique question sur l’#Université et la #recherche [1]…
Que faire ?
Que faire qui n’ait été cent fois tenté ?
Que faire qui n’ait cent fois échoué ?
Et surtout : pour quoi faire ?
▻http://www.groupejeanpierrevernant.info/#QueFaire1
#néolibéralisme #idéologie #définition #marché #échange #Etat #Etat-nation #concurrence #rationalité_économique #coopération #efficience #profit #inégalités #communs #commun #monopoles
via @SarahMekdjian
Why the Soda Industry Is the Big Tobacco of Our Times | Alternet
▻https://www.alternet.org/books/why-soda-industry-big-tobacco-our-times
Even this brief description demonstrates that the soda business involves many companies with a vested interest in its success. The stakeholders in the soda business include the soda companies themselves, of course, but also those that supply sugar and other raw ingredients, make syrup, produce carbon dioxide, fabricate the cans and bottles, can and bottle the products, make dispensers and vending machines, deliver ingredients, and supply and service the factories, dispensers, and vending machines. Sodas help support the restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores, sports facilities, and movie theaters that sell drinks to customers, as well as the advertising agencies employed to market the products and the media venues in which advertisements appear. A seemingly infinite number of individuals, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, health and environmental groups, and business associations benefit from soda company philanthropy, partnerships, and marketing. Because all of these entities depend on sodas for their livelihoods or function, they constitute an unusually wide-ranging support system for Big Soda. Indeed, one of Coca-Cola’s guiding rules is to ensure that everyone who touches its products along the way to the consumer should make money doing so. This is a business strategy guaranteed to ensure deep and lasting devotion.
In the United States, many of the companies engaged in beverage manufacturing belong to the industry trade group, the American Beverage Association (ABA). This association’s role, among others, is to promote the value of its member companies to the U.S. economy. The soda industry, it says, “has a direct economic impact of $141.22 billion, provides more than 233,000 jobs, and helps to support hundreds of thousands more that depend, in part, on beverage sales for their livelihoods.” Moreover, says the ABA, the companies and their employees pay more than $14 billion in state taxes and nearly $23 billion in federal business and income taxes, and contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable causes. Although the ABA does not say so directly, its point is that any public health campaign to reduce soda intake will cost jobs and harm the economy. You may recall that cigarette companies set the standard for use of such arguments. But in promoting the value of their industries to the economy, neither considers the economic or personal costs of the diseases their products may cause.
We Need More Alternatives to Facebook - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alternatives-to-facebook
About 10 years after TVs began to be ubiquitous in American homes, television broadcasting was a staggering financial success. As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, the industry’s revenue, more than $1 billion a year, was rising 9 percent annually, even in a recession. The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: not by serving the public interest above all but by airing a lot of dumb shows and “cajoling and offending” commercials. “When television is bad, nothing is worse,” he said.
#Facebook #Monopole #Démocratie
Facebook is fundamentally not a network of ideas. It’s a network of people. And though it has two billion active users every month, you can’t just start trading insights with all of them. As Facebook advises, your Facebook friends are generally people you already know in real life. That makes it more likely, not less, to stimulate homogeneity of thought. You can encounter strangers if you join groups that interest you, but those people’s posts are not necessarily going to get much airtime in your News Feed. The News Feed is engineered to show you things you probably will want to click on. It exists to keep you happy to be on Facebook and coming back many times a day, which by its nature means it is going to favor emotional and sensational stories.
The first step would be to acknowledge that even with the seemingly limitless competition that already exists on the Internet, Facebook has an outsize role in our society. Sixty-eight percent of all American adults use it, according to the Pew Research Center. That compares with 28 percent for Instagram (also owned by Facebook), 26 percent for Pinterest, 25 percent for LinkedIn, and 21 percent for Twitter. And none of these other sites aspire to be as many things to as many people as Facebook does.
Why are we finally now in what’s often called a golden age of television, with culturally influential, sophisticated shows that don’t insult our intelligence? It’s not because broadcasters stopped airing schlock. It’s because the audience is more fragmented than ever—thanks to the rise of public broadcasting and cable TV and streaming services and many other challenges to big networks. It required a flourishing of choices rather than a reliance on those huge networks to become better versions of themselves. As Zuckerberg wrote in February, “History has had many moments like today.”
We Said #Google Was Dangerously Powerful, Then Google Proved Us Right
▻https://www.buzzfeed.com/mattstoller2/google-tried-to-shut-us-down
The reason American governance is dysfunctional is simple: We have turned much of our sovereignty over to private interests in the form of monopolies. So while our politicians can discuss important social questions, the structure of our political economy lies outside the realm of our democratic debate.
This became obvious yet again today when the New York Times revealed that a team of anti-monopoly researchers had been fired from the New America Foundation, an influential Google-funded think tank in Washington, after the researchers pointed out that Google misused its power.
Monopoly, it turns out, is the power of which we dare not speak.
I am a member of the team that was let go, the Open Markets program. We research monopoly power not because business is bad, but because democracy is good. We try to understand our corporate and banking institutions not because we oppose commerce, but because we support commerce in open markets. Business is good, commerce is good, freedom, democracy is good. And monopolies are an enemy to all of these things.
Samsung Verdict Sends a Tough New Message to South Korea Inc. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/business/samsung-bribery-embezzlement-conviction-jay-lee-south-korea.html
More than two decades ago, South Korean prosecutors indicted the chairman of the powerful Samsung conglomerate on charges of bribing the president. He was let off with a suspended sentence and then a presidential pardon.
About a decade later, he was indicted again, on tax evasion and embezzlement charges. And again he escaped prison time.
The message was clear: Samsung was essentially untouchable, and the family that ran the company wielded the true power in South Korea.
On Friday, the country’s courts sent a different message.
Lee Jae-yong, the third-generation heir to the Samsung empire, was sentenced to five years in prison over a bribery scandal that has already contributed to the downfall of the country’s former president and shaken the country’s political and economic foundations.
It was the most remarkable sentence yet for a South Korean business titan, and a sign that the country is no longer willing to offer its business leaders political impunity in exchange for untrammeled economic growth.
Who Owns the Internet? | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/who-owns-the-internet
Both Taplin and Foer begin their books with a discussion of the early days of personal computers, when the Web was still a Pynchonesque fantasy and lots of smart people believed that connecting the world’s PCs would lead to a more peaceful, just, and groovy society. Both cite Stewart Brand, who, after hanging out with Ken Kesey, dropping a lot of acid, and editing “The Whole Earth Catalog,” went on to create one of the first virtual networks, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, otherwise known as WELL.
In an influential piece that appeared in Rolling Stone in 1972, Brand prophesied that, when computers became widely available, everyone would become a “computer bum” and “more empowered as individuals and co-operators.” This, he further predicted, could enhance “the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and human interaction.” No longer would it be the editors at the Times and the Washington Post and the producers at CBS News who decided what the public did (or didn’t) learn. No longer would the suits at the entertainment companies determine what the public did (or didn’t) hear.
“The Internet was supposed to be a boon for artists,” Taplin observes. “It was supposed to eliminate the ‘gatekeepers’—the big studios and record companies that decide which movies and music get widespread distribution.” Silicon Valley, Foer writes, was supposed to be a liberating force—“the disruptive agent that shatters the grip of the sclerotic, self-perpetuating mediocrity that constitutes the American elite.”
The Internet revolution has, indeed, sent heads rolling, as legions of bookstore owners, music critics, and cirrhotic editors can attest. But Brand’s dream, Taplin and Foer argue, has not been realized. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple—Europeans refer to the group simply as GAFA—didn’t eliminate the gatekeepers; they took their place. Instead of becoming more egalitarian, the country has become less so: the gap between America’s rich and poor grows ever wider. Meanwhile, politically, the nation has lurched to the right. In Foer’s telling, it would be a lot easier to fix an election these days than it was in 1876, and a lot harder for anyone to know about it. All the Big Tech firms would have to do is tinker with some algorithms. They have become, Foer writes, “the most imposing gatekeepers in human history.”
Tens of thousands line up at Amazon job fairs as Dow tops 22,000 - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/03/pers-a03.html
How the other half lives in 2017
Tens of thousands line up at Amazon job fairs as Dow tops 22,000
3 August 2017
“Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’”—Jacob Riis, 1890
Two scenes played out across America yesterday, providing a window onto two separate worlds: one occupied by a small, wealthy elite; the other by the working class, who comprise roughly the bottom 90 percent of the population.
Shortly after the opening bell on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average broke the 22,000 mark for the first time in history, a milestone that was greeted with exuberant headlines in the establishment press and made the lead story on NBC’s evening news program.
L’annonce avait été faite ici ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/618059
Oups ! j’avais pas vu, avec mes excuses. Je voulais ajouter en commentaire mais je vois que tu as tiré plus vite que moi !
Une histoire de « conquête » en #Turquie : De l’espoir de la #démocratie à la dérive autoritaire
La venue au pouvoir de l’#AKP s’est appuyée sur la contestation des #monopoles économiques d’Etat et de la bureaucratie en charge de ces monopoles. L’AKP s’est ainsi fait la voix des populations marginalisées par cette organisation économico-sociale, initiant un bouleversement de la structure sociale turque.
Is the staggeringly profitable #business of scientific publishing bad for #science? | Science | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.
[...]
It is difficult to overstate how much power a journal editor now had to shape a scientist’s career and the direction of science itself. “Young people tell me all the time, ‘If I don’t publish in CNS [a common acronym for Cell/Nature/Science, the most prestigious journals in biology], I won’t get a job,” says Schekman. He compared the pursuit of high-impact #publications to an incentive system as rotten as banking bonuses. “They have a very big #influence on where science goes,” he said.
And so science became a strange co-production between scientists and journal editors, with the former increasingly pursuing discoveries that would impress the latter. These days, given a choice of projects, a scientist will almost always reject both the prosaic work of confirming or disproving past studies, and the decades-long pursuit of a risky “moonshot”, in favour of a middle ground: a topic that is popular with editors and likely to yield regular publications. “Academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands,” said the biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in a 2014 interview, calling the system “corrupt.”
Un peu de réaction:
Major German Universities Cancel Elsevier Contracts
Diana Kwon, The Scientist, July 17, 2017
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/615916
#résistance #Elsevier #université #Allemagne #éditions_scientifiques #publications_scientifiques
#Robert_Maxwell #Reed-Elsevier #Elsevier #multinationales #business #Pergamon
With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.
In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.
The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.
Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications
It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is no longer a viable career option. Under today’s system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job.
Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.
Scientific articles are about unique discoveries: one article cannot substitute for another. If a serious new journal appeared, scientists would simply request that their university library subscribe to that one as well. If Maxwell was creating three times as many journals as his competition, he would make three times more money.
“At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. #Cell (now owned by Elsevier) was a journal started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to showcase the newly ascendant field of molecular biology. It was edited by a young biologist named #Ben_Lewin, who approached his work with an intense, almost literary bent. Lewin prized long, rigorous papers that answered big questions – often representing years of research that would have yielded multiple papers in other venues – and, breaking with the idea that journals were passive instruments to communicate science, he rejected far more papers than he published.
Suddenly, where you published became immensely important. Other editors took a similarly activist approach in the hopes of replicating Cell’s success. Publishers also adopted a metric called “#impact_factor,” invented in the 1960s by #Eugene_Garfield, a librarian and linguist, as a rough calculation of how often papers in a given journal are cited in other papers. For publishers, it became a way to rank and advertise the scientific reach of their products. The new-look journals, with their emphasis on big results, shot to the top of these new rankings, and scientists who published in “high-impact” journals were rewarded with jobs and funding. Almost overnight, a new currency of prestige had been created in the scientific world. (Garfield later referred to his creation as “like nuclear energy … a mixed blessing”.)
And so science became a strange co-production between scientists and journal editors, with the former increasingly pursuing discoveries that would impress the latter. These days, given a choice of projects, a scientist will almost always reject both the prosaic work of confirming or disproving past studies, and the decades-long pursuit of a risky “moonshot”, in favour of a middle ground: a topic that is popular with editors and likely to yield regular publications. “Academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands,” said the biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in a 2014 interview, calling the system “corrupt.”
As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars.
Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted.
With the purchase of Pergamon’s 400-strong catalogue, Elsevier now controlled more than 1,000 scientific journals, making it by far the largest scientific publisher in the world.
At the time of the merger, Charkin, the former Macmillan CEO, recalls advising Pierre Vinken, the CEO of Elsevier, that Pergamon was a mature business, and that Elsevier had overpaid for it. But Vinken had no doubts, Charkin recalled: “He said, ‘You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. That’s what happened at Pergamon. And then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.’ He was right and I was wrong.”
By 1994, three years after acquiring Pergamon, Elsevier had raised its prices by 50%. Universities complained that their budgets were stretched to breaking point – the US-based Publishers Weekly reported librarians referring to a “doomsday machine” in their industry – and, for the first time, they began cancelling subscriptions to less popular journals.
In 1998, Elsevier rolled out its plan for the internet age, which would come to be called “The Big Deal”. It offered electronic access to bundles of hundreds of journals at a time: a university would pay a set fee each year – according to a report based on freedom of information requests, Cornell University’s 2009 tab was just short of $2m – and any student or professor could download any journal they wanted through Elsevier’s website. Universities signed up en masse.
Those predicting Elsevier’s downfall had assumed scientists experimenting with sharing their work for free online could slowly outcompete Elsevier’s titles by replacing them one at a time. In response, Elsevier created a switch that fused Maxwell’s thousands of tiny monopolies into one so large that, like a basic resource – say water, or power – it was impossible for universities to do without. Pay, and the scientific lights stayed on, but refuse, and up to a quarter of the scientific literature would go dark at any one institution. It concentrated immense power in the hands of the largest publishers, and Elsevier’s profits began another steep rise that would lead them into the billions by the 2010s. In 2015, a Financial Times article anointed Elsevier “the business the internet could not kill”.
Publishers are now wound so tightly around the various organs of the scientific body that no single effort has been able to dislodge them. In a 2015 report, an information scientist from the University of Montreal, Vincent Larivière, showed that Elsevier owned 24% of the scientific journal market, while Maxwell’s old partners Springer, and his crosstown rivals Wiley-Blackwell, controlled about another 12% each. These three companies accounted for half the market. (An Elsevier representative familiar with the report told me that by their own estimate they publish only 16% of the scientific literature.)
Elsevier says its primary goal is to facilitate the work of scientists and other researchers. An Elsevier rep noted that the company received 1.5m article submissions last year, and published 420,000; 14 million scientists entrust Elsevier to publish their results, and 800,000 scientists donate their time to help them with editing and peer-review.
In a sense, it is not any one publisher’s fault that the scientific world seems to bend to the industry’s gravitational pull. When governments including those of China and Mexico offer financial bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, they are not responding to a demand by any specific publisher, but following the rewards of an enormously complex system that has to accommodate the utopian ideals of science with the commercial goals of the publishers that dominate it. (“We scientists have not given a lot of thought to the water we’re swimming in,” Neal Young told me.)
Since the early 2000s, scientists have championed an alternative to subscription publishing called “open access”. This solves the difficulty of balancing scientific and commercial imperatives by simply removing the commercial element. In practice, this usually takes the form of online journals, to which scientists pay an upfront free to cover editing costs, which then ensure the work is available free to access for anyone in perpetuity. But despite the backing of some of the biggest funding agencies in the world, including the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, only about a quarter of scientific papers are made freely available at the time of their publication.
The idea that scientific research should be freely available for anyone to use is a sharp departure, even a threat, to the current system – which relies on publishers’ ability to restrict access to the scientific literature in order to maintain its immense profitability. In recent years, the most radical opposition to the status quo has coalesced around a controversial website called Sci-Hub – a sort of Napster for science that allows anyone to download scientific papers for free. Its creator, Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazhakstani, is in hiding, facing charges of hacking and copyright infringement in the US. Elsevier recently obtained a $15m injunction (the maximum allowable amount) against her.
Elbakyan is an unabashed utopian. “Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers,” she told me in an email. In a letter to the court, she cited Article 27 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserting the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.
Whatever the fate of Sci-Hub, it seems that frustration with the current system is growing. But history shows that betting against science publishers is a risky move. After all, back in 1988, Maxwell predicted that in the future there would only be a handful of immensely powerful publishing companies left, and that they would ply their trade in an electronic age with no printing costs, leading to almost “pure profit”. That sounds a lot like the world we live in now.
►https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
#Butterworths #Springer #Paul_Rosbaud #histoire #Genève #Pergamon #Oxford_United #Derby_County_FC #monopole #open_access #Sci-Hub #Alexandra_Elbakyan
Publish and be praised (article de 2003)
It should be a public scandal that the results of publicly-funded scientific research are not available to members of the public who are interested in, or could benefit from, such access. Furthermore, many commercial publishers have exploited the effective monopoly they are given on the distribution rights to individual works and charge absurdly high rates for some of their titles, forcing libraries with limited budgets to cancel journal subscriptions and deny their researchers access to potentially critical information. The system is obsolete and broken and needs to change.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/oct/09/research.highereducation
Why Europe got tough on Google but the U.S. couldn’t - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/06/28/why-europe-got-tough-on-google-but-the-u-s-couldnt
Which leaves government regulators. The Europeans seem to be more resistant to #Google’s lobbying power, perhaps because they have far more restrictive campaign finance laws. In addition, Europeans have been far more skeptical about the surveillance capitalism that Google and Facebook practice, in which your every move is part of their data record of your life. (Witness the “right to be forgotten,” a European legal innovation.) One could imagine a politician like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, raised under their constant surveillance of East Germany’s #Stasi secret police, being rather offended by Google’s ad tech following her everywhere on the Web (…).
Le New Deal agricole
▻http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Le-New-Deal-agricole.html
Dans La Politique du Blé, Alain Chatriot retrace le débat politique qui a accompagné la naissance de l’Office Interprofessionnel du Blé, établissement public créé en 1936 par le gouvernement de gauche au pouvoir en vue d’une stabilisation du prix du blé – et contribue ainsi à l’étude des interventions étatiques sur les marchés agricoles.
Livres & études
/ #agriculture, #monopole, #régulation
Dockers strike disrupts Spanish ports and trade routes | News by Country | Reuters
▻http://af.reuters.com/article/moroccoNews/idAFL8N1J239L
Some of Spain’s biggest port terminals came to a standstill on Monday as shipping companies redirected cargos to avoid a dockers’ strike.
After months of talks between unions, companies and the Spanish government over a reform of port hiring practices, dockers held the first of several planned strikes to protest against possible job losses.
Some container shipping firms such as Maersk re-routed boats destined for the southern port of Algeciras to get around the strike, during which dockers will stop working every other hour on Monday, Wednesday and Friday this week.
Alternative destinations used by firms included Portugal, Morocco and Malta.
Five further days of industrial action have also been called for next week, raising the prospect that the shift to rival ports could have lasting consequences, especially for those handling merchandise not ultimately destined for Spain.
[…]
The ports reform, which aims to crack down on #closed-shop_hiring in a heavily unionised sector as demanded by the European Union, was passed through parliament in mid-May after a series of setbacks and clashes between political parties.
Algésiras et Valence en première ligne
#monopole_syndical, en bon français #closed_shop
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop
Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker. Here’s What’s Really Going On.
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/be-careful-celebrating-googles-new-ad-blocker-heres-whats-really-going
Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers, has hit upon a neat idea to consolidate its already-dominant business : block competitors from appearing on its platforms. The company announced that it would establish an ad blocker for the Chrome web browser, which has become the most popular in America, employed by nearly half of the nation’s web users. The ad blocker — which Google is calling a “filter” — would roll out next year, and would be the (...)
The Chrome ad blocker would stop ads that provide a “frustrating experience,” according to Google’s blog post announcing the change. The ads blocked would match the standards produced by the Coalition for Better Ads, an ostensibly third-party group. For sure, the ads that would get blocked are intrusive: auto-players with sound, countdown ads that make you wait 10 seconds to get to the site, large “sticky” ads that remain constant even when you scroll down the page.
But who’s part of the Coalition for Better Ads? Google, for one, as well as Facebook. Those two companies accounted for 99 percent of all digital ad revenue growth in the United States last year, and 77 percent of gross ad spending. As Mark Patterson of Fordham University explained, the Coalition for Better Ads is “a cartel orchestrated by Google.”
So this is a way for Google to crush its few remaining competitors by pre-installing an ad zapper that it controls to the most common web browser. That’s a great way for a monopoly to remain a monopoly.