I was wondering if it went through the Mackinac Strait, and it does! This would be an utterly beautiful trek, but best not attempted in February:
9 Likes
I know someone who is thrilled at being able to reserve an off-road âwheelchairâ for her friend who can no longer hike, so that they can do a (national or state, Iâm not sure) trail together in Colorado. It comes with a trail guide, no less, which is probably for safety reasons but also a very nice perk!
11 Likes
Thank you, Charles!
6 Likes
9 Likes
9 Likes
Oh, awesome article!! Sally Bethea is an absolute legend, and anyone who uses the Chattahoochee for recreation owes it to her. What a total rock star.
I think every state in the US has a Riverkeeper organization, and they get localized to the rivers they caretake. There are waterkeepers worldwide doing great work.
Riverkeepers do water testing, and also cleanups, send out alerts, maintain signage and some light trailway work, and host river cleanups.
This handy page helps you find the waterkeeper near you, worldwide:
7 Likes
TL;DR: A well respected disability provider sold a parcel of land to the Education Department for $0.50 in the 1980s. Part of the deal was that when the school was finished with it, the charity could buy it back for the same, plus inflation.
Then decades passed and everyone forgot. But an old employee of the charity saw the âFor Saleâ signs outside the now closed school, and thought âhang on⌠wasnât there some sort of thing in the contract?â
It turned out there was, and the charity is going to turn that property, now worth millions, into a multi-purpose site for the use of the community, with a priority on health and disability support, but as much common community use as possible.
17 Likes
(excerpt) U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled Monday that he could only decide disputes over the facts of the cases and the credibility of the witnesses after a full trial, which he set for September.
[Hm. Doesnât sound 100% encouraging⌠but thenâŚ]
âAdditionally, given the gravity and importance of the right to an equal vote for all American citizens, the court will engage in a thorough and sifting review of the evidence that the parties will present in this case at a trial,â Jones wrote.
7 Likes
Fuck yes. Yes yes yes.
7 Likes
Progressive economists had long understood that tech companies, backed by gobs of venture capital, were effectively subsidizing the price of their products until users couldnât live without them. Think Amazon: Offer stuff cheaper than anyone else, even though you lose money for years, until you scale to unimaginable proportions. Then, once youâve crushed the competition and become the only game in town, you can raise prices and make your money back. Itâs called predatory pricing, and itâs supposed to be illegal. Itâs one of the arguments that progressives in the Justice Department used to bust up monopolies like Standard Oil in the early 20th century. Under the rules of capitalism, you arenât allowed to use your size to bully competitors out of the market.
The problem is, conservative economists at the University of Chicago have spent the past 50 years insisting that under capitalism, predatory pricing is not a thing. Their head-spinning argument goes like this: Predators have a larger market share to begin with, so if they cut prices, they stand to lose much more money than their competitors. Meanwhile their prey can simply flee the market and return later, like protomammals sneaking back to the jungle after the velociraptors leave. Predatory companies could never recoup their losses, which meant predatory behaviors are irrational. And since Chicago School economists are the kind of economists who believe that markets are always rational, that means predatory pricing cannot, by definition, exist.
The Supreme Court bought the argument. In the 1986 case Matsushita Electric Industry Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp*.*, the court famously ruled that âpredatory pricing schemes are rarely tried, and even more rarely successful.â And in 1993, in Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the court said that to convict a company of predatory pricing, prosecutors had to show not only that the accused predators had cut prices below market rates but also that they had a âdangerous probabilityâ of recouping their losses. That effectively shut down the governmentâs ability to prosecute companies for predatory pricing.
Lots of economists have come up with solid counter-counterarguments to the Chicago Schoolâs skepticism about predatory pricing. But none of them have translated to winnable antitrust cases. Wansley and Weinstein â who, not coincidentally, used to work in antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department â set out to change that. In a new paper titled âVenture Predation,â the two lawyers make a compelling case that the classic model of venture capital â disrupt incumbents, build a scalable platform, move fast, break things â isnât the peak of modern capitalism that Silicon Valley says it is. According to this new thinking, itâs anticapitalist. Itâs illegal. And it should be aggressively prosecuted, to promote free and fair competition in the marketplace.
âWe think real world examples are not hard to find â if you look in the right place,â Wansley and Weinstein write. âA new breed of predator is emerging in Silicon Valley.â And the mechanism those predators are using to illegally dominate the market is venture capital itself.
9 Likes
Ah, but under the (unwritten) rules of neoliberalism, you certainly are.
Fingers crossed that Biden and Co. are motivated to go after these bastids.
7 Likes
Of course, the best counter-counter argument is that nothing the Chicago School has asserted, ever, has been remotely true. Itâs all bullshirt, top to bottom, right to left, as reality has proven over the last half century.
11 Likes
Not just âallowed toâ, you are a fool and a communist if you donât, which means shareholder value and executive bonuses demand that you do.
The only thing Iâve found the Chicago School to be useful for is the high correlation between âfollowing (read: worshipping) the Chicago School of economicsâ and âsimping for fascismâ.
11 Likes
Come now. Letâs be civil. Thatâs not a fascist boot on your neck; itâs the invisible boot of the market! /s
12 Likes
12 Likes
Support labor.
Article is gifted.
12 Likes
14 Likes
And Republicans are scrambling for answers.
So they finally realize that declaring them all indoctrinated by Marxist professors into wokeness isnât working?
8 Likes
How the hell is that going to work?
1 Like
