#monopolies — Public Fediverse posts

@chris @unfa is this still a problem if you run graphene or lineage?

To any youtuber or play store slave: you are Google's employee, but with no workers rights whatsoever. Google can take away anything and not be accountable.

#monopolies  #capitalismsucks

Demand Is Booming for New #NoTech, #Repairable #Tractor

"There is consumer pressure to back away from technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks."

by Jason Koebler
Jun 3, 2026

"The secondary market for decades old, low-tech #JohnDeereTractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, 'no-tech' tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?

"Alberta’s #UrsaAg says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. We have for years covered the frustration that farmers have felt as they have been locked out of their Deere tractors with digital rights management systems that prevent them from fixing their machinery, tractors that won’t run because of minor sensor failures, and crops that literally die on the vine as they wait for an 'authorized' repair person to fix tractors during critical harvesting periods.

"Ursa Ag markets its tractors as '#NoFrills' and 'built to last.' Ursa Ag’s Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn’t loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like #Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and #Framework, which makes modular, repairable #laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair #monopolies and the injection of #technology and #InternetConnectedSensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets.

" 'I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn’t have a computer on it,' Wilson said. 'All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that’s what we built.'

"Ursa Ag’s tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. 'I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn’t own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors,' he said."

Read more:
https://www.404media.co/demand-is-booming-for-ursa-ag-new-no-tech-repairable-tractor/

#SolarPunkSunday #LowTech #LoTech #RightToRepair #Farmers

This #SpaceX Situation: Not Good!

by Jason Koebler, Feb 5, 2026

Excerpt: "There are many reasons that 'AI data centers in space' may be a pipe dream and may not happen, but what he is proposing is a magnitude of #SpaceJunk that no other company could plausibly promise to launch. Data centers or not, SpaceX is now dominating #LowEarthOrbit in a way no other company or country has. While Musk has been gutting the federal government, interfering in #elections, allowing people to generate #CSAM, engaging in white supremacy, planning trips to #EpsteinsIsland, implanting #chips into people’s brains, siphoning off taxpayer money to build ridiculous tunnels, giving his sperm to whoever will take it, turning his cars into experimental robot taxis, and pretending to build #HumanoidRobots, #SpaceX has somewhat (?) quietly #colonized and dominated low earth orbit.

"Musk has taken this space for his own use, concerns about #LightPollution, satellite collisions, and telecom #monopolies be damned. This has always been concerning, but explicitly intertwining the aspirations and fate of SpaceX with Musk’s CSAM generating social media website, his #AIBullshitMachines, and his right wing political project is horrifying and monopolistic. What happens next, I have no idea."

Read more:
https://www.404media.co/this-spacex-situation-not-good

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/vUubi

#TechBros #Technopoly #DarkSkies #SpacePollution #AISucks #DataCenters #SkyNet #KesslerEffect #KesslerSyndrome #USPol #WorldPol #SpaceNews #EpsteinFiles

Why struggling #Thailand keeps voting for change tt never comes
"A group of academics published an open letter warning🇹🇭 is approaching “breaking point.” It urged voters to shun #political parties hostile to LT devt, w dismantling #monopolies among its core proposals. The top 5% of cos control >85% of tot revenue across🇹🇭 #economy.. Cos linked 🇹🇭’s #richest men hold outsized influence in #energy, F&B, #retail & #telecommunications, & together acct for nearly ⅕ of #SET index"
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/why-struggling-thailand-keeps-voting-for-change-that-never-comes

Pluralistic: Where did the money go? (08 Jan 2026)

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/08/after-the-moneys-gone/

“In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them.”

New research examines more than “low prices” to gauge community health.

Walmart hurts the communities it assimilates.

#USeconomics
#USpolitics
#monopolies
#giftLink

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/walmart-prices-poverty-economy/681122/?gift=V2Xz1LHbTiPfZ3uourZyW7REJcSz6uA6UdEv69aOVug&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

The payoff from Thiel’s early gamble in Trump is a lesson that has not passed others by.

As with their other obsession, #crypto, the best time to have invested in Trump was 2016,
and the second best time is today.

We already have a word for what we’re watching now:
it’s #oligarchy.

And we’ve already seen how this plays out.

In Putin’s Russia, political and commercial interests are one and the same.

Thiel is betting
– again
– on the same phenomenon in America.

Betting that he will be first among a new breed of tech bro oligarchs
– a new super-class of #broligarchs.

In Trump’s America, there will be hard choices for everyone, including the billionaires. --
Though it may be less hard for them.

Vance has said he wants to #deregulate crypto and
unshackle AI.

He’s said he’d #dismantle Biden’s attempts to place safeguards around AI development.

And while he has it in for the #legacy #monopolies of Google and Facebook
– the platforms that his ideological bedfellows in the “new right” see as part of the “censorship industrial complex” suffocating rightwing speech
– Silicon Valley is betting on a gloves-off, regulation-free, pro-business #goldrush.

Another Peter Thiel acolyte was on stage at the Republican National Convention last week,
electrifying the crowd:
#Hulk #Hogan.

Hogan is less well known as one of Thiel’s longterm bets, though in some ways he’s even more instructive than Vance.

In 2007, the online magazine #Gawker outed Thiel and ran a series of unflattering articles about him.

It took him years, but he ultimately got his revenge, covertly funding Hulk Hogan to the tune of $10m to sue the publication for invasion of privacy and forcing it into #bankruptcy.

On stage at the RNC, the wrestler, a permatanned orange, ripped off his shirt for the man who increasingly looks like he’ll be America’s next president.

Or, if JD Vance, is correct, the man who will prove to be the #Caesar he says America needs.

A man who he has already urged to fire the nation’s civil servants to
💥 “replace them with our people”,
to defy the courts and rule his own way.

Or, to put this in simple terms:
to foment a #coup.

Thiel knows what every investor knows. That a crisis is an opportunity.

And that if Trump succeeds in tearing up the federal administration,
there is not only billions to be made in the ensuing market #turmoil but that a new breed of oligarchs,
close to Caesar’s throne, will be the first to share the spoils.

And chief among them will be Thiel.

It’s not a stretch to see how #Palantir, his data-mining company
– that under the Conservatives got its teeth into the NHS
– will profile and surveil and target Caesar’s enemies.

And Thiel’s track record in winning, in successfully betting on the longest of odds, on biding his time, is maybe the most chilling of all the factors in a fortnight that has started to feel like the start of a run on the bank.

Biden’s debate disaster,
Trump’s victorious assassination survival,
and now Silicon Valley’s ascension to the presidential ticket.

The broligarchs have made their move
– and the rest of us need to understand exactly what that means.

#tech #elite #Sandberg #Page #Bezos #Peter #Thiel #tech #bro #Vance #Elon #Musk #Marc #Andreessen #Ben #Horowitz #Winklevoss #Chamath #Palihapitiya #David #Sacks #Palantir #Vance #Mithril #Capital #Narya #Capital