#remedies

[madamlaydebug]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DOJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted monopolist.

This is huge. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kanter, has done something that was inconceivable four years ago when he was appointed. On Kanter's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case.

It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kanter quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed.

Under Kanter, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all.

Again: this is huge:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist

But also: this is just the start.

Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking. They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore"). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved.

But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities – Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc – to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor.

The big guns, though are the structural remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers and sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

All of these things, and more, are on the table:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/

We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the entire DOJ Antitrust Division for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run all of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.

This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.

I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain."

That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance.

The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually like advertisements, provided that they're relevant, so spying on people is actually doing them a favor by making it easier to target the right ads to them.

First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote – or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for more ads. People don't like advertising. And they hate "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.

Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising? More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a hell of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period.

The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google – that the company had monopolized the advertising market.

Don't get me wrong: Google has monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers. And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement the company has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and keep out smaller rivals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

One effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (like the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do – it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us. The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism

The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological – they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they're spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance.

This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don't want companies to be better at, like violating our human rights. We want to ban human rights violations, not improve them.

For other trustbusters – like me – the point of competition enforcement isn't merely to make companies offer better products, it's to make companies small enough to hold account through the enforcement of democratic laws. I want to break – and break up – Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don't want to make Google smaller so that other surveillance companies can get in on the game.

There is a real danger that this could emerge from this decision, and that's a danger we need to guard against. Last month, Google shocked the technical world by announcing that it would not follow through on its years-long promise to kill third-party cookies, one of the most pernicious and dangerous tools of commercial surveillance. The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone except Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs

It's true! This is anticompetitive. But the answer isn't to preserve the universal power of tech companies large and small to violate our human rights – it's to ban everyone, especially Google, from spying on us!

This current in competition law is still on the fringe, but the Google case – which finds the company illegally dominating surveillance advertising, but rejects the idea that surveillance is itself a harm – offers an opportunity for this bad idea to go from the fringe to the center.

If that happens, look out.

Take "attribution," an obscure bit of ad-tech jargon disguising a jaw-droppingly terrible practice. "Attribution" is when an ad-tech company shows you an ad, and then follows you everywhere you go, monitoring everything you do, to determine whether the ad convinced you to buy something. I mean that literally: they're combining location data generated by your phone and captured by Bluetooth and wifi receivers with data from your credit card to follow you everywhere and log everything, so that they can prove to a merchant that you bought something.

This is unspeakably grotesque. It should be illegal. In many parts of the world, it is illegal, but it is so lucrative that monopolists like Google can buy off the enforcers and get away with it. What's more, only the very largest corporations have the resources to surveil you so closely and invasively that they can perform this "service."

But again, some competition wonks look at this situation and say, "Well, that's not right, we need to make sure that everyone can do attribution." This was a (completely mad) premise in the (otherwise very good) 2020 Competition and Markets Authority market-study on "Online platforms and digital advertising":

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

This (again, otherwise sensible) document veers completely off the rails whenever the subject of attribution comes up. At one point, the authors propose that the law should allow corporations to spy on people who opt out of commercial surveillance, provided that this spying is undertaken for the sole purpose of attribution.

But it gets even worse: by the end of the document, the authors propose a "user ID intervention" to give every Briton a permanent, government-issued advertising identifier to make it easier for smaller companies to do attribution.

Look, I understand why advertisers like attribution and are willing to preferentially take their business to companies that can perform it. But the fact that merchants want to be able to peer into every corner of our lives to figure out how well their ads are performing is no basis for permitting them to do so – much less intervening in the market to make it even easier so more commercial snoops can get their noses in our business!

This is an idea that keeps popping up, like in this editorial by a UK lawyer, where he proposes fixing "Google's dominance of online advertising" by making it possible for everyone to track us using the commercial surveillance identifiers created and monopolized by the ad-tech duopoly and the mobile tech duopoly:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Those companies are doing something rotten. In dominating ads, they have stolen billions from publishers and advertisers. Then they used those billions to capture our democratic process and ensure that our human rights weren't being defended as they plundered our private data and put us in harm's way.

Advertising will adapt. The marketing bros know this is coming. They're already discussing how to live in a world where you can't measure clicks and you can't attribute actions (e.g. the world from the first advertisements up until the early 2000s):

https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/

An equitable solution to Google's monopoly will not run though our right to privacy. We don't solve the Google monopoly by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to end surveillance.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[nemfrog]

Advertising in a French publication promotes the use of cannabis to control asthma. L'Illustré : politique, littérature, finance. March 26, 1882.

"GRIMAULT & Co. CIGARETTES with Cannabis indica

The most effective of known means for combating asthma, oppression, nervous cough, neuralgias, insomnia."

[numbersandstars]

✨ Ketu in Magha — what to do & how to align with it ✨

✨ Requested post — Ketu in Magha: what to do, self-understanding & strengthening Ketu

Ketu in Magha is not really about “self-discovery” in the usual sense.

It is less about understanding yourself… and more about detaching from the idea that everything revolves around you.

Ketu shifts the focus from “Who am I?” to: 👉 “What am I contributing?” 👉 “What is my place in the lineage?”

Magha brings in the theme of ancestry, legacy, and continuity. Ketu reminds us that we are not isolated individuals, but part of a chain:

ancestors → us → descendants

And what matters here is not what you accumulate… but what you transmit and what you give.

☀️ So what should you actually do during Ketu in Magha?

Focus on actions that restore balance in that chain:

• Give something useful to others Not necessarily money — time, service, skills. Something that genuinely helps people.

• Honor your ancestors 🌑 Especially on the New Moon's day. Pray for them, remember them, support them spiritually.

• Reconnect with natural order (Leo theme) 🌿 Helping animals, protecting nature, supporting life — all of this aligns with Magha.

• Stabilize your environment Magha is the throne — check what supports you physically. Even something symbolic like fixing or upgrading your chair/seat matters more than it seems.

• Take care of your nervous system Ketu can destabilize the mind. Reading scriptures, calming practices, and herbal support can help bring clarity.

☀️ About “knowing yourself”

This question depends much more on your personal chart and dasha, not just a transit.

Ketu periods can indirectly lead to self-understanding — but usually through detachment, loss, or disillusionment, not through introspection alone.

So if you feel a strong pull toward that question right now, it may be linked to something more personal in your chart.

☀️ Can (or should) you strengthen Ketu?

Not really.

Strengthening Ketu is generally not recommended.

Ketu is a planet of separation, reduction, and detachment. Amplifying it can increase confusion, isolation, or instability.

👉 The goal is not to strengthen Ketu, but to appease and align with it.

I’ve shared more complete and structured remedies in my Ketu Mahadasha post if you want to go deeper.

✨ Ketu in Magha is ultimately a reality check:

It asks — not who you are — but what remains of you beyond ego, status, and personal identity.

If my Vedic astrology insights bring you clarity or inspiration, you’re welcome to support my work on Ko-fi. ✨🙏

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Flower Remedies

Flower remedies are specially prepared flower essences, containing the healing energy of plants. They are prescribed according to a patient’s emotional disposition, as ascertained by the therapist, doctor, or patients themselves.

THE 38 BACH REMEDIES

agrimony: puts on a cheerful front, hides true feelings, and worries or problems

aspen: feelings of apprehension, dark foreboding, and premonitions

beech: critical, intolerant, picky

centaury: easily comes under the influence of others, weak willed

cerato: unsure, no confidence in own judgement, intuition, and seeks approval from others

cherry plum: phobic, fear of being out of control, and tension

chestnut bud: repeats mistakes, does not learn from experience

chicory: self-centered, possessive, clingy, demanding, self pity

clematis: absent minded, dreamy, apathetic, and lack of connection with reality

crab apple: a ‘‘cleanser’’ for prudishness, self– disgust, feeling unclean

elm: a sense of being temporarily overwhelmed in people who are usually capable and in control

gentian: discouraged, doubting, despondent

gorse: feelings of pessimism, accepting defeat

heather: need for company, talks about self, and concentrates on own problems

holly: jealousy, envy, suspicion, anger, and hatred

honeysuckle: reluctance to enter the present and let the past go

hornbeam: reluctant to face a new day, weary, can’t cope (mental fatigue)

impatiens: impatience, always in a hurry, and resentful of constraints

larch: feelings of inadequacy and apprehension, lack of confidence and will to succeed

mimulus: fearful of specific things, shy, and timid

mustard: beset by ‘‘dark cloud’’ and gloom for no apparent reason

oak: courageous, persevering, naturally strong but temporarily overcome by difficulties

olive: for physical and mental renewal, to overcome exhaustion from problems of long–standing

pine: for self–reproach, always apologizing, assuming guilt

red chestnut: constant worry and concern for others

rock rose: panic, intense alarm, dread, horror

rock water: rigid–minded, self–denial, restriction

scleranthus: indecision, uncertainty, fluctuating moods

star of Bethlehem: consoling, following shock or grief or serious news

sweet chestnut: desolation, despair, bleak outlook

vervain: insistent, fanatical, over–enthusiastic

vine: dominating, overbearing, autocratic, tyrannical

walnut: protects during a period of adjustment or vulnerability

water violet: proud, aloof, reserved, enjoys being alone

white chestnut: preoccupation with worry, unwanted thoughts

wild oat: drifting, lack of direction in life

wild rose: apathy, resignation, no point in life

willow bitter: resentful, dissatisfied, feeling life is unfair

The system consists of 38 remedies, each for a different disposition.

The basic theory is that if the remedy for the correct disposition is chosen, the physical illness resulting from the present emotional state can then be cured.

There is a rescue remedy made up of 5 of the essences—cherry plum, clematis, impatiens, rock star, and star of Bethlehem—that is recommended for the treatment of any kind of physical or emotional shock.

Therapists recommended that rescue remedy be kept on hand to help with all emergencies.

Flower remedies are more homeopathic than herbal in the way they work, effecting energy levels rather than chemical balances.

They have been described as ‘‘liquid energy.’’

The theory is that they encapsulate the flowers’ healing energy, and are said to deal with and overcome negative emotions, and so relieve blockages in the flow of human energy that can cause illness.

Edward Bach was a graduate of University College Hospital (MB, BS, MRCS) in England.

He left his flourishing Harley Street practice in favor of homeopathy, seeking a more natural system of healing than allopathic medicine.

Concluded that healing should be as simple & natural as the development of plants - nourished & given healing properties by earth, air, water, and sun.

Bach believed that he could sense the individual healing properties of flowers by placing his hands over the petals.

His remedies were prepared by floating summer flowers in a bowl of clear stream water exposed to sunlight for three hours.

He developed 38 remedies, one for each of the negative states of mind suffered by human beings, which he classified under seven group headings: fear, uncertainty, insufficient interest in present circumstances, loneliness, over-sensitivity to influences and ideas, despondency or despair, and overcare for the welfare of others.

The Bach remedies can be prescribed for plants, animals, and other living creatures as well as human beings.

Originally, Bach collected the dew from chosen flowers by hand to provide his patients with the required remedy.

This became impractical when his treatment became so popular that production could not keep up with demand.

He then set about finding a way to manufacture the remedies, and found that floating the freshly picked petals on the surface of spring water in a glass bowl and leaving them in strong sunlight for three hours produced the desired effect.

Therapists explain that the water is ‘‘potentized’’ by the essence of the flowers.

The potentized water can then be bottled and sold. For more woody specimens, the procedure is to boil them in a sterilized pan of water for 30 minutes.

These two methods produce ‘‘mother tinctures’’ and the same two methods devised by Bach are still used today.

Flower essences do not contain any artificial chemical substances, except for alcohol preservative.

Bach flower remedies and flower essences have not yet officially won the support of allopathic medicine, despite the fact that more and more medical doctors are referring patients for such treatments on the strength of personal conviction.

However, it is difficult to discount the scores of testimonials.

Some practitioners refer skeptics to the research that has been done regarding the ‘‘auras’’ of living things.

Theoretically, the stronger the aura, the more alive an organism is. Flower essences have very strong auras.

Source ⚜ More: Notes & References

[goldplume]

𝓡𝓮𝓶𝓮𝓭𝓲𝓮𝓼.

Grief is a privilege bespoke for the living. Blade knows it well – truth be told, Blade knows it best. There is a certain sangfroid that consumes him whenever he brushes fingers with death – the prayer that he might die and the knowledge that he will not. To grieve your life while you still live it… he wonders if there is a single other man in this world that bears his tribulations. Or his blessings.  After all, that he will not die regardless of the circumstance feels far sweeter than usual. He would do nothing that would cause concern – not today, never today. After all, it is your birthday. And, he thinks, he is glad for his grief. He mourned his erelong death as Yingxing, and he mourns his ceaseless life now. At least this way, you get to keep him – a bloodied blade, nothing more – and he will be the one to bury you, or turn you to ash, or send you heavenward on a skyskiff. Whatever it is that you may desire (and somehow you desire him – his chest beneath your cheek, his forehead beneath your lips. You smell of peonies and he smells of blood and he sees no sense in it – but who is he to deny you?) Today… he glances toward you as you sleep, and lifts up your draping sleeve to plant a kiss on the back of your hand resting sweetly atop a pillow. Right atop the mole. (He wonders how many hours – days – he has spent looking at it. He wonders how many times before he has kissed it. His face flushes, and he buries the thought deep in his heart.) Today, he shall adorn you (in affection, if nothing more), and today, he shall cherish you (today is all you ever have, after all) and today… He exhales. Today he shall wish you a happy birthday, and secretly congratulate himself. For him to find an excuse to celebrate you, to unreservedly indulge for once in your frivolities… yes, that sounds good. Today is no day for grief. After all, what are you if not light itself?

Happy birthday Mila <33

@millurie <33

[anuragreddy108]

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