Reason 237 I fucking hate #brightspace: they lock all conversation about their product behind a soft paywall (e.g. I get stupid emails like this where I can't just see what Yi Yan.L.782 said). Every fucking interaction has to be on their platform, under their control. Much of the content is hidden from search engines.

Of course, once you get into their little walled garden you discover that searching for unfixed bugs or unmet feature requests is only possible on a one-term-at-a-time search basis. There's almost no way to see if related issues exist.

No surprise: when I dove into this last year and spent a couple of hours trying to answer some questions about basic, industry-standard functionality (spoiler: the answer to all of them was "No"), I figured out that they have hundreds or thousands of unresolved issues going back 20 years.

This company is worth a billion dollars.

Edit: I clicked the link. I did. The message was "We have also had this question. Does anyone else know..."

Holy fuck this is stupid.

What fresh hell is this? #boardgames #capitalism #latestagecapitalism #monopoly

I realized something today as I once again chewed over the rank moral cowardice of #Substack both profiting off Nazi content *and* not carrying pornography.

A huge part of the problem of the modern internet is that we have private #monopolies standing in for and being treated like public services.

Had to help a friend fix an #Microsoft #Office license issue.

Apparently the download was corrupt & hence MS thought it was a invalid copy. The only way to fix it was uninstall it, but Windows didn't recognize it as installed, even thought it was! Ended up downloading an offline copy, mounting it and installing with no internet connection & that worked.

Absolutely mindboggling how bad this all is. This is #monopoly #tech in action. Being forced to pay $$$ for shitty products that don't work.

The Big Fix – Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar

Denise and Vass us this book to take a look at the regulatory framework that Canada uses to evaluate competition and monopoly powers. While I knew that many companies owned many brands that "competed" with each other, this did bring more of that to the forefront.

https://curtismchale.ca/book/the-big-fix-denise-hearn-and-vass-bednar/

Perplexity proposes buying TikTok, promising to open-source its algorithm and rebuild it “without creating a monopoly.” Could this be a game-changer for social media? #Perplexity #TikTok #SocialMedia #TechNews #OpenSource #Innovation #Monopoly

Brettspiele sind toll, aber gelegentlich ist nach einer Partie #Monopoly doch mal die Stimmung schlecht. Dennoch ist es eines der beliebtesten Spiele weltweit. Ursprünglich stammt die Idee dazu von Elizabeth Magie, die damit eigentlich über die Gefahr von Monopolen aufklären wollte.

#monopoly #ludophile #boardgames #NoBillionaires #TaxTheRich #EatTheRich #GuillotinesWork

Monopoly wasn't invented by the Parker Brothers, nor the man they gave it credit for. In 1904, Monopoly was originally called The Landlord's Game, and was invented by a radical woman. Elizabeth Magie's original game had not one, but two sets of rules to choose from.

See Alt-Text

#Denmark: government plans to hand postal service to private #monopoly that uses precarious employees. #Union expects further price increases and service deterioration.

https://uniglobalunion.org/news/denmark-ends-letter-delivery-3f-uni-global-union/

Huh.

Right this second is when I learned that the .mobi file format is owned by Amazon !

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobipocket

#Monopoly #BoardGame #BoardGames

By demand of the #DOJ, Google could be forced to sell off #Chrome, to make things fairer for the online search market. https://mindsconnected.tech/index.php?showtopic=1044&view=getnewpost #Google #law #business #monopoly #software #browser #browsers #tech

Interesting look at the precursor to Monopoly, and specifically a British version of The Landlord’s game, published in Dumfriesshire in 1913. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGMAAqF-As4&feature=youtu.be #boardgames #games #Monopoly #Dumfriesshire

[USA Department Of Justice]: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next, https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-chrome-android-could-be-next/.

If you think #eggs price increase in the last few weeks are mostly due to the avian flu, you are being misled…

Why we are in an #eggopoly :

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investigation

@MattStollerSubstack on the egg mess.

TLDR?

Takeaway — the avian flu is not responsible for increased prices.
Once again, the culprit is corporate #monopoly.

The avian flu is just an excuse.
When industry gets monopolized, the monopolizers will seize upon any excuse to jack prices through the roof.

From the article:
** Cal-Maine Foods — the largest egg producer and the only one that publishes its financial data as a publicly traded company — has been making more money than ever. It’s annual gross profits in the past three years have floated between 3 and 6 times what it used to earn before the avian flu epidemic started — breaking $1 billion for the first time in the company’s history. All of this extra profit is coming from higher selling prices, which have been earning Cal-Maine unprecedented 50-170 percent margins over farm production costs per dozen. Taking Cal-Maine as the “bellwether” for the industry’s largest firms — as people in the egg business do — we can be pretty confident that the other large egg producers are also raking in profits off the relatively small dip in egg production.**

Post covid inflation??? Yeah, it’s 99% price gouging.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investigation

In prehistoric times, it took a regulator to break down monopolies.

Thanks to AI, monopolies can now shoot themselves in the foot without external assistance.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/google-is-expanding-ai-overviews-and-testing-ai-only-search-results/