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Boosted by pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow"):
ilumium@eupolicy.social ("Jan Penfrat") wrote:

Again, Linkedin refuses to share actual data of how users interact with consent screens, only speaking of "non-minimal numbers" of European users who opted out.

Boosted by pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow"):
ilumium@eupolicy.social ("Jan Penfrat") wrote:

#Linkedin clarifies they do not use Europeans' data for training #LLM/#AI models.

I assume that statement does not apply to other #Microsoft products like #Windows and of course #Copilot.

Boosted by pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow"):
ilumium@eupolicy.social ("Jan Penfrat") wrote:

Linkedin rep says they did NOT explicitly test their compliance solutions for neutrality. 👀

And results are probably not be public. How the heck is the public then supposed to know if compliance is working?

Boosted by pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow"):
ilumium@eupolicy.social ("Jan Penfrat") wrote:

After a lengthy statement by the #Linkedin rep, read out from paper with a machine-like voice, first questions from the audience:

Consumer org @beuc wants to know whether Linkedin's A/B testing for compliance solutions have been neutral and if the test results will be published. Super important for compliance #transparency!

#DMA #DigitalMarketsAct

Boosted by pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow"):
ilumium@eupolicy.social ("Jan Penfrat") wrote:

The way #Microsoft (and other #gatekeepers) present #DMA compliance is soooo annoying!

The "regulatory dialogue" with the Commission, according to #Linkedin's competition director, was a way for the company to "mature and progress in our DMA journey."

It's not a "journey", it's a law that creates legal obligations and prohibitions for the company. Get over it and get it down already. 😠

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.

Catch me in #PDX with BUNNIE HUANG at Barnes and Noble TOMORROW (Jun 20):

https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

And at the #TUALATIN Public Library on SUNDAY (Jun 22):

https://www.tualatinoregon.gov/library/author-talk-cory-doctorow

More tour dates (#London, #Manchester) here:

http://martinhench.com

eof/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Wage theft is notoriously hard to police, thanks to fear of retaliation and the precarity of victims of this crime.

The POWER Act passed as a result of the combined efforts of unions (SEIU, AFL-CIO) and the Working Families Party. Along with the Oregon Corporate Practice of Medicine ban, it shows how local, grassroots activism can protect everyday, working people from even the worst corporate criminals, even in Donald Trump's America.

23/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

As Brock Hrehor writes for *The American Prospect*, the POWER Act was passed after Trump gutted the National Labor Relations Board and left it unable to protect American workers. The POWER Act tackles one of the most pernicious forms of crime in America: wage theft, which accounts for more losses than all property crime in America combined, with losses overwhelming borne by Black and brown workers, especially women.

22/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

The POWER Act shifts the burden of proof for wage theft allegations from workers to their bosses and allows them to recover their stolen wages plus $2,000 in statutory damages per violation; it sets up a new fund (replenished with employer fines) that gives money to victims of retaliation, and it creates a public "bad boss" database of repeat offenders.

21/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Another reason to like state and local politics: local Democrats often suck *way less* than the necrotic federal Dem establishment. Some of them are even good! In Philly, Mayor Cherelle Parker just signed the Protect Our Workers, Enforce Rights (POWER) Act, which protects 750,000 workers from wage theft:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-06-18-how-philadelphia-secured-basic-rights-for-750-000-workers/

20/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

But it's good news when states and cities can use the American system to create sanctuary systems that welcome asylum seekers and treat them with dignity (which is why the American right, the standard bearer for "states' rights" when it came to school segregation and voter suppression, is now all-in on sending armed soldiers to terrorize their fellow Americans with assault rifles).

19/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

The US federal system is a big, gnarly mess, but by design, it leaves a lot of power in local hands. That's bad news when local power is being used to ban trans people from peeing, or to attack school librarians, or to ban masking.

18/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

(Fun fact: every noncompete clause is written by a lawyer, but the American Bar Association prohibits noncompetes *for* lawyers*).

Now it's time for those out-of-state healthcare looters' worst fears to be realized. It's time for the contagion to spread to other states.

17/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Nor could they warn other doctors away from falling prey to this trap because they were also bound by nondisparagement clauses.

The new bill, SB 951, passed out of the legislature and was signed by the governor earlier this month. It is now good law in Oregon, which means that corporations can't operate medical practices, and that medical personnel can't be subjected to noncompete clauses.

16/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Then, as icing on the cake, Unitedhealth's Oregon operation screwed over multiple, cancer-fightin lawmakers who were serving in the state-house as the bill was under debate. Combine this with testimony from doctors who described how they were unable to practice medicine after leaving Unitedhealth's terrible facilities because they had been trapped with noncompete clauses in their contracts.

15/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Optum "fired" thousands of patients, including some who were undergoing cancer treatment, on the basis that they weren't profitable enough to care for:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/private-equity-unitedhealth-take

In the midst of all this, *another* Unitedhealth monopolist, Change Health, got hacked and virtually no one in America could get a prescription filled - worse, the hack exposed the health records of almost everyone in America, the largest health-related breach in US history:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

14/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

But the bill passed anyway, thanks to a combination of two factors. First, during the bill's legislative adventure, Unitedhealth's Optum bought out the Oregon Medical Group and made working conditions so terrible that dozens of doctors quit, leaving thousands of rural patients (from predominantly Republican districts) without medical care.

13/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

The bill took several tries to get trhough the legislature. As Oregon House Majority Leader Representative Ben Bowman told Matt Stoller and David Dayen on their Organized Money podcast, the statehouse was crawling with lobbyists hired by *out of state* private health-care firms who were worried about "contagion" if Oregon's bill passed and spread to other states:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-oregon-is-ending-corporate-run

12/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

The Oregon bill closes this loophole, and not a minute too soon. Giant healthcare monopolists - most notably groups associated with Unitedhealth, the largest health corporation in America - have embarked on a statewide buying spree, buying and shutting down rural hospitals and clinics, and transforming the remaining facilities into understaffed charnel houses that hemorrhage doctors.

11/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

The doctor takes orders from the PE firm, and hires the PE firm's outsource agencies to actually operate the clinic or hospital, absorbing the entirety of the practice's profits.

10/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

The American Medical Association has a longstanding, absolute prohibition on medical practices that are run by anyone *except* a doctor. Oregon has had a CPOM ban on the law-books since 1947. Private equity meets this prohibition with a very transparent ruse indeed: they get a "rent a doc," often out of state, to serve as the nominal owner of their practices.

9/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

But this is America: when the feds fail, that creates an opportunity for state legislators to step in and act. And that's just what's happened in Oregon, where the state legislature has passed sweeping, bipartisan legislation that bans corporations from owning or operating a medical practice in the state:

https://prospect.org/health/2025-06-13-united-health-care-oregon-corporate-medicine/

This is called the "corporate practice of medicine" (CPOM) and it's *already* banned.

8/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

The carried interest tax scam is preserved in the Big Beautiful Bill, joined with many other giveaways the least productive, most guillotineable looters America has produced:

https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/no-changes-carried-interest-big-beautiful-bill-so-far.html

Working people cannot rely on Trump's federal government and the Republican Congress to protect us from these vampires.

7/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

"Carried interest" is a tax law that gave 16th century sea-captains a break on their "interest" in the cargo they "carried." It is both weird and fantastically unjust that richest, worst financiers in America are able to take advantage of this Moby Dick-ass-law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

But while Trump sometimes talks a good line about fighting private equity looters, he does not, has not, and will not lift a finger to them. He dares not.

6/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Donald Trump sometimes panders to anti-elitist elements in his base by threatening the private equity racket. For example, Trump has frequently railed against the "carried interest" tax loophole that allows PE bosses to pay half as much tax as you or I would on their vast takings.

5/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Unsuspecting patients who went in for routine surgery a hospitals that were in-network for their insurer would get a rude awakening from sedation: "surprise bills" running to tens or hundred of thousands of dollars. PE groups did the same thing with emergency rooms, so that people experiencing serious medical emergencies who had the presence of mind to insist upon being brought to an in-network ER nevertheless got hit with life-ruining surprise bills:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

4/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

As bad as this is, it's ten quintillion times worse when applied to healthcare. When PE buys your hospital, people *die*. A *lot* of people:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

PE doesn't even have to buy the whole hospital - for a long time, PE groups bought out anesthetist practices affilated with hospitals and pulled them out of the hospital's insurance affiliation.

3/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Their favorite scam, the "leveraged buyout" is a mafia bustout dressed up in respectable clothes, and if you mourn a beloved, failed business, chances are that an LBO was the murder weapon, and PE was the killer:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

(Despite simplistic explanations and bad-faith apologestics, a leveraged buyout is *nothing* like a mortgage - it is a sinister, complex, destructive form of financial fraud:)

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

2/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Private equity firms are the demon princes of the hellspace that is the imploding, life-destroying, plutocrat-generating American economy.

--

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/20/the-doctor-will-gouge-you-now/#states-rights

1/

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

The rich are a plague on humanity.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/06/20/when-will-we-get-a-vaccine-against-billionaire-brain-disease/