Greg Sharpe, the beloved voice of Nebraska football and baseball, has passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

The Sharpe family issued this statement through the athletic department:

Today we are saddened to inform you of the passing of Greg on Friday. A wonderful husband, father, brother, friend and of course broadcaster. While his passion and energy on the call of Husker football and baseball brought joy to so many for the past 17 seasons, it comforts us to know that his legacy will live on through these same moments that he narrated and through the relationships that he built.

While the public knew him for his booming voice and infectious personality, those closest to him knew him for his loyalty and dedication to them.

Over the last 12 months Greg has fought a very public battle with pancreatic cancer. Even though it was a grim diagnosis at the time, Greg chose to live and not to fear. He leaned into his faith, family and of course his professional calling of broadcasting Husker athletics. Without the support from the University of Nebraska, Playfly Sports and of course the best fans in college athletics, Husker Nation, he may not have been able to continue to fight and live the way that he did.

The love shown to him during this difficult time truly touched Greg and our family. We are forever grateful to Husker fans everywhere for the letters, gifts and of course prayers

We are all better for having had Greg in our lives.

The Sharpe Family

Nebraska Athletic Director Troy Dannen released this statement:

“On behalf of everyone in the Nebraska Athletic Department, I would like to share our deepest condolences with the family of Greg Sharpe. This is a tough day for everyone. Not only those who were close to Greg and those who had the opportunity to work with him, but also for Husker fans who have fond memories of Greg’s calls of iconic moments in Nebraska history.

“Greg was an incredible person and was a friend to everyone. Simply put, he defined what it meant to be a Husker, and he will always be a Husker.”

I was around Greg in the Husker football press box occasionally, and got to talk to him back when I shot baseball.

He was always a genuine human being - note the parts of the statements I have bolded above. He definitely had an infectious personality, and he was a friend to everyone. I always enjoyed running into him at the baseball games.

I looked forward to listening to baseball every season, note - ‘listening’ - rather than watching - because Greg calling the games made it feel you were hearing the action from a friend.

He was a wonderful man.

He was 61 years old. That’s still way too young.

Sharpe and his wife, Amy, are the parents of three daughters, Emily, Campbell and Taylor.

We’ll be thinking of you, Greg, whenever the Huskers are playing!

Joe Rosensteel:

Netflix deeply regrets accidentally making Netflix a better product for its customers. It temporarily pushed out a change that let people see Netflix shows in the Apple TV app, a change people have been asking for since the debut of the Apple TV app in 2016 with its Up Next queue and content aggregation features. Fortunately, Netflix swiftly corrected the error before too many of its users could experience anything approaching joy, or satisfaction with Netflix. Customers should definitely drop the issue and not press Netflix to turn the feature that certainly exists back on.

I see why Netflix is sticking to its guns on this one, but they’re on the wrong side. Apple TV users were overjoyed yesterday when the Netflix app briefly started integrating with the TV app for “what next”, etc. Steven Aquino described it as “jubilance”.

Only a small subset — perhaps, by Netflix’s grand global scale, downright minuscule — of Netflix users use Apple TV hardware. But those of us who do, do so because we love it. Most people think “Why pay extra for yet another box to connect, yet another remote control, yet another thing to learn, when Netflix and most other popular streaming services are just built right into my TV?” Apple TV users go the extra mile to buy the extra box — which isn’t cheap — because they have good taste and want an experience that is superior in all regards: technically, UI-wise, and privacy-wise.

So it’s not just a random small subset of its users that Netflix is disappointing by refusing to adopt the idiomatic conventions of good tvOS citizenship, it’s the subset of users who care the most, for good reasons. It’s a lot like making a Mac-like Mac app rather than serving Mac users warmed-over cross-platform slop. Or, as MG Siegler put it when he updated his post after it turned out this was a rug pull, “Fucking fuck, fuck, fuck. Do these fucking idiots know how stupid this looks and is?”

Brian Marick posted on Mastodon the other day about resilience in the context of governmental efficiency. Reading that inspired me to write about some more general observations about resilience.

Now, people use the term resilience in different ways. I’m using resilience here in the following sense: how well a system is able to cope when it is pushed beyond its limits. Or, to borrow a term from safety researcher David Woods, when the system is pushed outside of its competence envelope. The technical term for this sense of the word resilience is graceful extensibility, which also comes from Woods. This term is a marriage of two other terms: graceful degradation, and software extensibility.

The term graceful degradation refers to the behavior of a system which, when it experiences partial failures, can still provide some functionality, even though it’s at a reduced fidelity. For example, for a web app, this might mean that some particular features are unavailable, or that some percentage of users are not able to access the site. Contrast this with a system that just returns 500 errors for everyone whenever something goes wrong.

We talk about extensible software systems as ones that have been designed to make it easy to add new features in the future that were not originally anticipated. A simple example of software extensibility is the ability for old code to call new code, with dynamic binding being one way to accomplish this.

Now, putting those two concepts together, if a system encounters some sort of shock that it can’t handle, and the system has the ability to extend itself so that it can now handle the shock, and it can make these changes to itself quickly enough that it minimizes the harms resulting from the shock, then we say the system exhibits graceful extensibility. And if it can keep extending itself each time it encounters a novel shock, then we say that the system exhibits sustained adaptability.

The rest of this post is about the preconditions for resilience. I’m going to talk about resilience in the context of dealing with incidents. Note that all of the topics described below come from the resilience engineering literature, although I may not always use the same terminology.

Resources

As Brian Marick observed in his toot:

As we discovered with Covid, efficiency is inversely correlated with resilience.

Here’s a question you can ask anyone who works in the compute infrastructure space: “How hot do you run your servers?” Or, even more meaningfully, “How much headroom do your servers have?”

Running your servers “hotter” means running at a higher CPU utilization. This means that you pack more load on fewer servers, which is more efficient. The problem is that the load is variable, which means that the hotter you run the servers, the more likely your server will get overloaded if there is a spike in utilization. An overloaded server can lead to an incident, and incidents are expensive! Running your servers at maximum utilization is running with zero headroom. We deliberately run our servers with some headroom to be able to handle variation in load.

We also see the idea of spare resources in what we call failover scenarios, where there’s a failure in one resource so we switch to using a different resource, such as failing over a database from primary to secondary, or even failing out of a geographical region.

The idea of spare resources is more general than hardware. It applies to people as well. The equivalent of headroom for humans is what Tom DeMarco refers to as slack. The more loaded humans are, the less well positioned they are to handle spikes in their workload. Stuff falls through the cracks when you’ve got too much load, and some of that stuff contributes to incidents. We can also even keep people in reserve for dealing with shocks, such as when an organization staffs a dedicated incident management team.

A common term that the safety people use for spare resources is capacity. I really like the way Todd Conklin put it on his Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast: “You don’t manage risk. You manage the capacity to absorb risk.” Another way he put it is “Accidents manage you, so what you really manage is the capacity for the organization to fail safely.”

Flexibility

Here’s a rough and ready definition of an incident: the system has gotten itself into a bad state, and it’s not going to return to a good state unless somebody does something about it.

Now, by this definition, for the system to become healthy again something about how the system works has to change. This means we need to change the way we do things. The easier it is to make changes to the system, the easier it will be to resolve the incident.

We can think of two different senses of changing the work of the system: the human side and the the software side.

Humans in a system are constrained by a set of rules that exist to reduce risk. We don’t let people YOLO code from their laptops into production, because of a number of risks that would expose us to. But incidents create scenarios where the risks associated with breaking these rules are lower than the risks associated with prolonging the incident. As a consequence, people in the system need the flexibility to be able to break the standard rules of work during an incident. One way to do this is to grant incident responders autonomy, let them make judgments about when they are able to break the rules that govern normal work, in scenarios where breaking the rule is less risky than following it.

Things look different on the software side, where all of the rules are mechanically enforced. For flexibility in software, we need to build into the software functionality in advance that will let us change the way the system behaves. My friend Aaron Blohowiak uses the term Jefferies tubes from Star Trek to describe features that support making operational changes to a system. These were service crawlways that made it easier for engineers to do work on the ship.

A simple example of this type of operational flexibility is putting in feature flags that can be toggled dynamically in order to change system behavior. At the other extreme is the ability to bring up a REPL on a production system in order to make changes. I’ve seen this multiple times in my career, including watching someone use the rails console command of a Ruby on Rails app to resolve an issue.

The technical term in resilience engineering for systems that possess this type of flexibility is adaptive capacity: the system has built up the ability to be able to dynamically reconfigure itself, to adapt, in order to meet novel challenges. This is where the name Adaptive Capacity Labs comes from.

Expertise

In general, organizations push against flexibility because it brings risk. In the case where I saw someone bring up a Ruby on Rails console, I was simultaneously impressed and terrified: that’s so dangerous!

Because flexibility carries risk, we need to rely on judgment as to whether the risk of leveraging the flexibility outweighs the risk of not using the flexibility to mitigate the incident. Granting people the autonomy to make those judgment calls isn’t enough: the people making the calls need to be able to make good judgment calls. And for that, you need expertise.

The people making these calls are having to make decisions balancing competing risks while under uncertainty and time pressure. In addition, how fluent they are with the tools is a key factor. I would never trust a novice with access to a REPL in production. But an expert? By definition, they know what they’re doing.

Diversity

Incidents in complex systems involve interactions between multiple parts of the system, and there’s no one person in your organization who understands the whole thing. To be able to effectively know what to do during an incident, you need to bring in different people who understand different parts of the system in order to help figure out what happens. You need diversity in your responders, people with different perspective on the problem at hand.

You also want diversity in diagnostic and mitigation strategy. Some people might think about recent changes, others might think about traffic pattern changes, others might dive into the codebase looking for clues, and yet others might look to see if there’s another problem going on right now that seems to be related. In addition, it’s often not obvious what the best course of action is to mitigate an incident. Responders often pursue multiple courses of action in parallel, hoping that at least one of them will bring the system healthy again. A diversity of perspectives can help generate more potential interventions, reducing the time to resolve.

Coordination

Having a group of experts with a diverse set of perspectives by itself isn’t enough to deal with an incident. For a system to be resilient, the people within the system need to be able to coordinate, to work together effectively.

If you’ve ever dealt with a complex incident, you know how challenging coordination can be. Things get even hairier in our distributed world. Whether you’re physically located with all of the responders, you’re on a Zoom call (a bridge, as we still say), you’re messaging over Slack, or some hybrid combination of all three, each type of communication channel has its benefits and drawbacks.

There are prescriptive approaches to improving coordination during incidents, such as the Incident Command System (ICS). However, Laura Maguire’s research has shown that, in practice, incident responders intentionally deviate from ICS to better manage coordination costs. This is yet another example of flexibility and expertise being employed to deal with an incident.

The next time you observe an incident, or you reflect on an incident where you were one of the responders, think back on to what extent these ingredients were present or absent. Were you able to leverage spare resources, or did you suffer from not being to? Were there operational changes that people wanted to be able to make during the incident, and were they actually able to make them? Were the responders experienced with the sub-systems they were dealing with, and how did that shape their responses? Did different people come up with different hypotheses and strategies? What is it clear to you what the different responders were doing during the incident? These issues are easy to miss if you’re not looking for them. But, once you internalize them, you’ll never be able to unsee them.

It’s Sunday, and if it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Links.

In Mariners news...

• Ichiro gave his entire life to the game of baseball. He joined the Orix Blue Wave in 1992 at the age of 18 and can still be found in uniform around the Mariners to this day, 33 years later. And he’s getting ready to give even more.

Around the league...

• Our boy Ty France is gonna be playing a lot of ball for the Twins in 2025.
• Jim Bowden shared some strong feelings about Anthony Rendon, and then got backed up by one Jonathon Papelbon.

• Bo Bichette is entering 2025 without a contract extension, and he’s not going to let that distract him.
• Mariners legend Erasmo Ramírez is joining the Minnesota Twins on a minor league contract.
• White Sox legend Bobby Jenks is battling stomach cancer.

Nick’s pick...

• R.I.P. to one of the best to ever do it. “F**kin’ a**hole, he said that?” still lives rent free in my head.

If you watched the 2007 documentary King of Kong or followed the controversy surrounding score-chaser Billy Mitchell, you know all about Donkey Kong's famous kill screen. For over four decades, no one was able to pass the game's 117th screen (aka level 22-1) due to a glitch in the game's bonus timer that kills Mario well before he can reach the top of the stage's girders.

That was true until last weekend, when Mario speedrunner Kosmic shared the news that he had passed the kill screen using a combination of frame-perfect emulator inputs, a well-known ladder movement glitch, and a bit of luck. And even though Kosmic's trick is functionally impossible to pull off with human reflexes on real hardware, the method shows how the game's seemingly insurmountable kill screen actually can be overcome without modifying the code on an official Donkey Kong arcade board.

Breaking the broken ladder

Donkey Kong's kill screen is a side effect of the limited 8-bit register the game uses when calculating the two largest digits of a level's Bonus Timer (which doubles as the overall timer for each screen). At level 22, this calculation makes the register overflow past 256 and back down to 4, giving Mario just a few seconds to complete the stage before instant death.

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Comments

Today's links

• "The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets": Maureen Tkacik on the monstrous corporate raider running DOGE.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

"The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (permalink)

While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/

Journalists like Wired's Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:

https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/

And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/

But for me, it was Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):

https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/

Krause is a private equity looter. He's the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.

Krause has an unerring instinct for making people miserable while making money. He oversaw the merger of Citrix and VMWare, creating a ghastly company called The Cloud Software Group, which sold remote working tools. Despite this, of his first official acts was to order all of his employees to stop working remotely. But then, after forcing his workers to drag their butts into work, move back across the country, etc, he reversed himself because he figured out he could sell off all of the company's office space for a tidy profit.

Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company's practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That's not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause's company, also had to sue to get paid.

Krause's isn't a canny operator who roots out waste: he's a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook). As Tkacik reports, Krause fucked up the customer service and reliability systems that served Citrix's extremely large, corporate customers – the giant businesses that cut huge monthly checks to Citrix, whose CIOs received daily sales calls from his competitors.

Workers who serviced these customers, like disabled Air Force veteran David Morgan, who worked with big public agencies, were fired on one hour's notice, just before their stock options vested. The giant public agency customers he'd serviced later called him to complain that the only people they could get on the phone were subcontractors in Indian call centers who lacked the knowledge and authority to resolve their problems.

Last month, Citrix fired all of its customer support engineers. Citrix's military customers are being illegally routed to offshore customer support teams who are prohibited from working with the US military.

Citrix/VMWare isn't an exception. The carnage at these companies is indistinguishable from the wreck Krause made of Broadcom. In all these cases, Krause was parachuted in by private equity bosses, and he destroyed something useful to extract a giant, one-time profit, leaving behind a husk that no longer provides value to its customers or its employees.

This is the DOGE playbook. It's all about plunder: take something that was patiently, carefully built up over generations and burn it to the ground, warming yourself in the pyre, leaving nothing behind but ash. This is what private equity plunderers have been doing to the world's "advanced" economies since the Reagan years. They did it to airlines, family restaurants, funeral homes, dog groomers, toy stores, pharma, palliative care, dialysis, hospital beds, groceries, cars, and the internet.

Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class – like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod.

That's why – according to anonymous DOGE employees cited by Tckacik – DOGE managers are hired for their capacity for cruelty: "The criteria for DOGE is how many you have fired, how much you enjoy firing people, and how little you care about the impact on peoples well being…No wonder Tom Krause was tapped for this. He’s their dream employee!"

The fact that Krause isn't well known outside of plunderer circles is absolutely a feature for him, not a bug. Scammers like Krause want to be admitted to polite society. This is why the Sacklers – the opioid crime family that kicked off the Oxy pandemic that's murdered more than 800,000 Americans so far – were so aggressive about keeping their association with their family business, Purdue Pharma, a secret. The Sacklers only wanted to be associated with the art galleries and museums they put their names over, and their lawyers threatened journalists for writing about their lives as billionaire drug pushers (I got one of those threats).

There's plenty of good reasons to be anonymous – if you're a whistleblower, say. But if you ever encounter a corporate executive who insists on anonymity, that's a wild danger sign. Take Pixsy, the scam "copyleft trolls" whose business depends on baiting people into making small errors when using images licensed under very early versions of the Creative Common licenses, and then threatening to sue them unless they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

Kain Jones, the CEO of Pixsy, tried to threaten me under the EU's GDPR for revealing the names of the scammer on his payroll who sent me a legal threat, and the executive who ran the scam for his business (I say he tried to threaten me because I helped lobby for the GDPR and I know for a fact that this isn't a GDPR violation):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

These people understand that they are in the business of ripping people off, causing them grave and wholly unjust financial injury. They value their secrecy because they are in the business of making strangers righteously furious, and they understand that one of these strangers might just show up in their lives someday to confront them about their transgressions.

This is why Unitedhealthcare freaked out so hard about Luigi Mangione's assassination of CEO Brian Thompson – that's not how the game is supposed to be played. The people who sit in on executive row, destroying your lives, are supposed to be wholly insulated from the consequences of their actions. You're not supposed to know who they are, you're not supposed to be able to find them – of course.

But even more importantly, you're not supposed to be angry at them. They pose as mere software agents in an immortal colony organism called a Limited Liability Corporation, bound by the iron law of shareholder supremacy to destroy your life while getting very, very rich. It's not supposed to be personal. That's why Unitedhealthcare is threatening to sue a doctor who was yanked out of surgery on a cancer patient to be berated by a UHC rep for ordering a hospital stay for her patient:

https://gizmodo.com/unitedhealthcare-is-mad-about-in-luigi-we-trust-comments-under-a-doctors-viral-post-2000560543

UHC is angry that this surgeon, Austin's Dr Elisabeth Potter, went Tiktok-viral with her true story of how how chaotic and depraved and uncaring UHC is. UHC execs fear that Mangione made it personal, that he obliterated the accountability sink of the corporation and put the blame squarely where it belongs – on the (mostly) men at the top who make this call.

This is a point Adam Conover made in his latest Factually podcast, where he interviewed Propublica's T Christian Miller and Patrick Rucker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_5tDXRw8kg

Miller and Rucker published a blockbuster investigative report into Cigna's Evocore, a secret company that offers claims-denials as a service to America's biggest health insurers:

https://www.propublica.org/article/evicore-health-insurance-denials-cigna-unitedhealthcare-aetna-prior-authorizations

If you're the CEO of a health insurance company and you don't like how much you're paying out for MRIs or cancer treatment, you tell Evocore (which processes all your claim authorizations) and they turn a virtual dial that starts to reduce the number of MRIs your customers are allowed to have. This dial increases the likelihood that a claim or pre-authorization will be denied, which, in turn, makes doctors less willing to order them (even if they're medically necessary) and makes patients more likely to pay for them out of pocket.

Towards the end of the conversation, Miller and Rucker talk about how the rank-and-file people at an insurer don't get involved with the industry to murder people in order to enrich their shareholders. They genuinely want to help people. But executive row is different: those very wealthy people do believe their job is to kill people to save money, and get richer. Those people are personally to blame for the systemic problem. They are the ones who design and operate the system.

That's why naming the people who are personally responsible for these immoral, vicious acts is so important. That's why it's important that Wired and Propublica are unmasking the "pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" who are raiding the federal government under Krause's leadership:

https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

These people are committing grave crimes against the nation and its people. They should be known for this. It should follow them for the rest of their lives. It should be the lead in their obituaries. People who are introduced to them at parties should have a flash of recognition, hastily end the handshake, then turn on their heels and race to the bathroom to scrub their hands. For the rest of their lives.

Naming these people isn't enough to stop the plunder, but it helps. Yesterday, Marko Elez, the 25 year old avowed "eugenicist" who wanted to "normalize Indian hate" and could not be "[paid] to marry outside of my ethnicity," was shown the door. He's off the job. For the rest of his life, he will be the broccoli-haired brownshirt who got fired for his asinine, racist shitposting:

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury

After Krause's identity as the chief wrecker at DOGE was revealed, the brilliant Anna Merlan (author of Republic of Lies, the best book on conspiratorialism), wrote that "Now the whole country gets the experience of what it’s like when private equity buys the place you work":

https://bsky.app/profile/annamerlan.bsky.social/post/3lhepjkudcs2t

That's exactly it. We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government – of the USA itself. No one is better poised to write about this than Tkacik, because no one has private equity's number like Tkacik does:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Ironically, all this came down just as Trump announced that he was going to finally get rid of private equity's scammiest trick, the "carried interest" loophole that lets PE bosses (and, to a lesser extent, hedge fund managers) avoid billions in personal taxes:

https://archive.is/yKhvD

"Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest rate – it's a law that was designed for 16th century sea captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":

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

Trump campaigned on killing this loophole in 2017, but Congress stopped him, after a lobbying blitz by the looter industry. It's possible that he genuinely wants to get rid of the carried interest loophole – he's nothing if not idiosyncratic, as the residents of Greenland can attest:

https://prospect.org/world/2025-02-07-letter-between-friendly-nations/

Even if he succeeds, looters and the "investor class" will get a huge giveaway under Trump, in the form of more tax giveaways and the dismantling of labor and environmental regulation. But it's far more likely that he won't succeed. Rather – as Yves Smith writes for Naked Capitalism – he'll do what he did with the Canada and Mexico tariffs: make a tiny, unimportant change and then lie and say he had done something revolutionary:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/is-trump-serious-about-trying-to-close-the-private-equity-carried-interest-loophole.html

This has been a shitty month, and it's not gonna get better for a while. On my dark days, I worry that it won't get better during my lifetime. But at least we have people like Tkacik to chronicle it, explain it, put it in context. She's amazing, a whirlwind. The same day that her report on Krause dropped, the Prospect published another must-read piece by her, digging deep into Alex Jones's convoluted bankruptcy gambit:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-02-06-crisis-actors-alex-jones-bankruptcy/

It lays bare the wild world of elite bankruptcy court, another critical conduit for protecting the immoral rich from their victims. The fact that Tkacik can explain both Krause and the elite bankruptcy system on the same day is beyond impressive.

We've got a lot of work ahead of ourselves. The people in charge of this system – whose names you must learn and never forget – aren't going to go easily. But at least we know who they are. We know what they're doing. We know how the scam works. It's not a flurry of incomprehensible actions – it's a playbook that killed Red Lobster, Toys R Us, and Sears. We don't have to follow that playbook.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• 10 things Chairman Andrew Ferguson could do today to help people with the cost of living https://twitter.com/BedoyaFTC/status/1887222389408215548?t=72YMDDbEwrxgwYbfDnaGQw

• The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-business-community-is-extraordinarily

• Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants https://archive.ph/YqEem#selection-4600.1-4600.3

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Hacking the no-fly list is only bad if you like no-fly lists https://web.archive.org/web/20050210021849/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/weblog/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2005/02/07/0

#20yrsago Toronto’s Bakka Books moving back to Queen St, March 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20050207210939/https://bakkaphoenixbooks.com/movingpage.html

#20yrsago EFF app helps sysadmins find sneaky logs before The Man does https://web.archive.org/web/20050213011718/http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_02.php

#20yrsago Canadian Internet pharmacies being strong-armed by US pharma http://www.michaelgeist.ca/resc/html_bkup/feb72005.html

#15yrsago Turd transplant leads to rapid weight-gain https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31168511

#10yrsago Anyone who makes you choose between privacy and security wants you to have neither https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/the-real-impact-of-surveillance/

#10yrsago The Seven-Year-Old Diet https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/07/the-seven-year-old-diet/

#10yrsago Andy Offutt, insanely prolific porn pioneer https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/magazine/my-dad-the-pornographer.html

#10yrsago Samsung: watch what you say in front of our TVs, they’re sending your words to third parties https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2uuvdz/samsung_smarttv_privacy_policy_please_be_aware/

#1yrago The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boskone (Boston), Feb 14
  https://schedule.boskone.org/62/

• Picks and Shovels with Ken Liu (Boston), Feb 14
  https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

• Picks and Shovels with Yanis Varoufakis (Jacobin/virtual), Feb 15
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM

• Picks and Shovels with Charlie Jane Anders (Menlo Park), Feb 17
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow

• Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton (Los Angeles), Feb 18
  https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing

• Picks and Shovels with Dan Savage (Seattle), Feb 19
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989

• Picks and Shovels at Another Story (Toronto), Feb 23
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/picks-shovels-cory-doctorow-tickets-1219803217259

• Ursula Franklin Lecture (Toronto), Feb 24
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/2025-ursula-franklin-lecture-cory-doctorow-tickets-1218373831929

• Picks and Shovels with John Hodgman (NYC), Feb 26
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-john-hodgman-picks-and-shovels-tickets-1131132841779

• Picks and Shovels (Penn State), Feb 27
  https://www.bellisario.psu.edu/assets/uploads/CoryDoctorow-Poster.pdf

• Picks and Shovels at the Doylestown Bookshop (Doylestown, PA), Mar 1
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419

• Picks and Shovels at Red Emma's (Baltimore), Mar 2
  https://redemmas.org/events/cory-doctorow-presents-picks-and-shovels/

• Picks and Shovels with Matt Stoller (DC), Mar 4
  https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

• Picks and Shovels with Lee Vinsel (Richmond, VA), Mar 5
  https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305

• With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Indiana University/virtual), Mar 7
  https://events.iu.edu/mediaiub/event/1783095-with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshitti

• Picks and Shovels at First Light Books (Austin), Mar 10
  https://thethirdplace.is/event/cory-doctorow-picks-shovels-1

• Picks and Shovels at Dark Delicacies (Burbank), Mar 13
  https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

• Cloudfest (Europa Park), Mar 17-20
  https://cloudfest.link/

• Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast (Remote), Mar 24
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189

• Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal (Chicago), Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• ABA Techshow (Chicago), Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern (Bloomington), Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Teardown 2025 (PDX), Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• DeepSouthCon63 (New Orleans), Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Elon Musk's Digital Coup and the Future of the Internet (System Crash)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEZPa-YzaUs

• A Weird Way to Win the Trade War with Trump (Canadaland)
  https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/1100-a-weird-way-to-win-the-trade-war-with-trump/

• Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley (How To Academy)
  https://www.ivoox.com/en/novelist-and-activist-cory-doctorow-fear-and-audios-mp3_rf_138898836_1.html

Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Canada shouldn't retaliate with US tariffs https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/02/02/canada-shouldnt-retaliate-with-us-tariffs/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla