systemic fuckwittery for pain and profit…They Bought Tablets in Prison—and Found a Broken Promise | WIRED

And doesn’t this sorry saga of Silo Wars and cost overruns charged to the purchaser, totally remind you of local government in the UK after 14 years of enshittification and funding cuts?

BuggsBunny 5 : Silo War….

Classic case study material for students of technology in retail and the dangers of selling tech to glassy-eyed retailers who know nothing about consumer behaviour

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/self-checkout-kiosks-grocery-retail-stores/675676/?utm_source=feed

Where’s John Casti, of the SFI, who is credited for the ubiquitous redesign of supermarkets, —apparently he introduced it first in the UK for Sainsbury’s— when you need him

Thank you for accelerating homelessness, profiteering, and general being evil .. An Open Letter to Airbnb. The pitchforks are coming | by Jared A. Brock | Surviving Tomorrow

https://survivingtomorrow.org/an-open-letter-to-airbnb-8b1b58b4ad33

I write to you today in the hope that you will radically re-structure your company before it starts a class war in which you will almost certainly lose the lion’s share of your wealth, your moral conscience, your place in history as innovators instead of oppressors, and you and your family’s physical safety. To be clear, this isn’t a threat—I am a pacifist who never condones violence including war, but I’m also a DNA relative of Marie Antoinette and understand what happens to elites who forget about the masses — so this is a plea to do the right thing before more people, yourselves included, inevitably get hurt by the raging masses who you are making homeless by the millions.
Brian, Joe, Nathan; you started Airbnb with the best of intentions. You couldn’t afford to make rent on your San Francisco apartment, so you bought some air mattresses and served breakfast to your guests. Brilliant.
But things have changed since then. Now you control an $80 billion company that has devoured millions of housing units, evicted countless families, and turned their homes into full-time clerkless hotels, with a promise in your IPO documents to fight democracies in court for as long as you can afford to do so.

One set of rules for the rich, and another for the rest of us…

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/amol-rajan-after-the-capitalist-banquets-its-time-for-humble-pie-6258945.html

“If corruption means anything, it means buying immunity from the law. The protesters occupying temples of capitalism around the world might be an incoherent bunch – more obviously against the present than in favour of a different future – but there is great solidarity with them in Western democracies, because it increasingly feels like it’s one set of rules for the rich, and another for the rest of us.”

I like Amol Rajan, more and more.

This is the guy who started being an unofficial bus conductor (shouting ‘Room at the back!) because he was sick of bus drivers not letting people on because the sheep hadn’t ‘moved down the bus’. Observe this, unintended systemic consequence fans: one-man* buses not only increased unemployment by sacking conductors, but also made bus travel a nightmare of overloud iPods and misbehaving yoof with no one to police basic human niceness and give and take, but also – PAY ATTENTION BUS COMPANIES – reduced profit!

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/07/20/the-moral-abdications-that-lead-to-empty-rush-hour-buses-and-my-big-society-solution/

Capitalism might be the least worst system, but boy** is it dumb sometimes…

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