Today's links

• Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars: A/B splitting your way into doing a total fucking racism.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Predicting the present; Caller eye-deer; RIP Robert Sheckley; Student protesters and Google Maps vs kettling; If your kids like computers, they're criminals; A billion CC licenses; The moral character of cryptographic work; EC resurrects link-taxes.
• 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.

---

Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars (permalink)

There's a whole greedflation-denial cottage industry that insists that rising prices are either the result of unknowable, untameable and mysterious economic forces, or they're the result of workers having too much money and too many jobs.

The one thing we're absolutely not allowed to talk about is the fact that CEOs keep going on earnings calls to announce that they are hiking prices way ahead of any increase in their costs, and blaming inflation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering

Nor are we supposed to notice the "price consultancies" that let the dominant firms in many sectors – from potatoes to meat to rental housing – fix prices in illegal collusive arrangements that are figleafed by the tissue-thin excuse that "if you use an app to fix prices, it's not a crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

And we're especially not supposed to notice the proliferation of "personalized pricing" businesses that use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and charge you a premium based on that desperation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Surveillance pricing – when you are charged more for the same goods than someone else, based on surveillance data about the urgency of your need and the cash in your bank account – is a way for companies to reach into your pocket and devalue the dollars in your wallet. After all, if you pay $2 for something that I pay $1 for, that's just the company saying that your dollars are only worth half as much as mine:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

It's a form of cod-Marxism: "from each according to their desperation":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

The economy is riddled with surveillance pricing gouging. You are almost certainly paying more than your neighbors for various items, based on algorithmic price-setting, every day. Case in point: More Perfect Union and Groundwork Collaborative teamed up with Consumer Reports to recruit 437 volunteers from across America to login to Instacart at the same time and buy the same items from 15 stores, and found evidence of surveillance pricing at Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market:

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/

The price-swings are wild. Some test subjects are being charged 23% more than others. The average variance for "the exact same items, from the exact same locations, at the exact same time" comes out to 7%, or "$1,200 per year for groceries" for a family of four.

The process by which your greedflation premium is assigned is opaque. The researchers found that Instacart shoppers ordering from Target clustered into seven groups, but it's not clear how Instacart decides how much extra to charge any given shopper.

Instacart – who acquired Eversight, a surveillance pricing company, in 2022 – blamed the merchants (who, in turn, blamed Instacart). Instacart also claimed that they didn't use surveillance data to price goods, but hedged, admitting that the consumer packaged goods duopoly of Unilever and Procter & Gamble do use surveillance data in connection with their pricing strategies.

Finally, Instacart claimed that this was all an "experiment" to "learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable." In other words, they were secretly charging you more (for things like eggs and bread) because somehow that lets them "keep essential items affordable."

Instacart said their goal was to help "retail partners understand consumer preferences and identify categories where they should invest in lower prices."

Anyone who's done online analytics can easily pierce this obfuscation, but for those of you who haven't had the misfortune of directing an iterated, A/B tested optimization effort, I'll unpack this statement.

Say you have a pool of users and a bunch of variations on a headline. You randomly assign different variants to different users and measure clickthroughs. Then you check to see which variants performed best, and dig into the data you have on those users to see if there are any correlations that tie together users who liked a given approach.

This might let you discover that, say, women over 40 click more often on headlines that mention kittens. Then you generate more variations based on these conclusions – different ways of mentioning kittens – and see which of these variations perform best, and whether the targeted group of users split into smaller subgroups (women over 40 in the midwest prefer "tabby kitten" while their southern sisters prefer "kitten" without a mention of breed).

By repeatedly iterating over these steps, you can come up with many highly refined variants, and you can use surveillance data to target them to ever narrower, more optimized slices of your user-base.

Obviously, this is very labor intensive. You have to do a lot of tedious analysis, and generate a lot of variants. This is one of the reasons that slopvertising is so exciting to the worst people on earth: they imagine that they can use AI to create a self-licking ice-cream cone, performing the analysis and generating endless new variations, all untouched by human hands.

But when it comes to prices, it's much easier to produce variants – all you're doing is adding or subtracting from the price you show to shoppers. You don't need to get the writing team together to come up with new ways of mentioning kittens in a headline – you can just raise the price from $6.23 to $6.45 and see if midwestern women over 40 balk or add the item to their shopping baskets.

And here's the kicker: you don't need to select by gender, racial or economic criteria to end up with a super-racist and exploitative arrangement. That's because race, gender and socioeconomic status have broad correlates that are easily discoverable through automated means.

For example, thanks to generations of redlining, discriminatory housing policy, wage discrimination and environmental racism, the poorest, sickest neighborhoods in the country are also the most racialized and are also most likely to be "food deserts" where you can't just go to the grocery store and shop for your family.

What's more, the private equity-backed dollar store duopoly have waged a decades-long war on community grocery stores, enveloping them with dollar stores that use their access to preferential discounts (from companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, another duopoly) to force grocers out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Then these dollar stores run a greedflation scam that is so primitive, it's almost laughable: they just charge customers much higher amounts than the prices shown on the shelves and price-tags:

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/do-all-those-low-dollar-store-prices-really-add-up-120325.html

When you live in a food desert where your only store is a Dollar General that defrauds you at the cash-register, you are more likely to accept a higher price from Instacart, because you have fewer choices than someone in a middle-class neighborhood with two or three competing grocers. And the people who live in those food deserts are more likely to be poor, which, in America, is an excellent predictor of whether they are Black or brown.

Which is to say, without ever saying, "Charge Black people more for groceries," Instacart can easily A/B split its way into a system where they predictably and reliably charge Black people more for groceries. That's the old cod-Marxism at work: "from each according to their desperation."

This is so well-understood that anyone who sets one of these systems in motion should be understood to be deliberately seeking to do racist profiteering under cover of an algorithm. It's empiricism-washing: "I'm not racist, I just did some math" (that produced a predictably racist outcome):

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/insight-amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK0AG/

This is the dark side and true meaning of "business optimization." The optimal business pays its suppliers and workers nothing, and charges its customers everything it can. Obviously, businesses need to settle for suboptimal outcomes, because workers won't show up if they don't get paid, and customers won't buy things that cost everything they have⹋.

⹋ Unless, of course, you are an academic publisher, in which case this is just how you do business.

A business "optimizes" its workforce by finding ways to get them to accept lower wages. For example, they can bind their workers with noncompete "agreements" that ban Wendy's cashiers from quitting their job and making $0.25 more per hour at the McDonald's next door (one in 18 American workers have been locked into one of these contracts):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Or they can lock their workers in with "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) – contractual clauses that force workers to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

But the most insidious form of worker optimization is "algorithmic wage discrimination." That's when a company uses surveillance data to lower the wages of workers. For example, contract nurses are paid less if the app that hires them discovers (through the unregulated data-broker sector) that they have a lot of credit-card debt. After all, nurses who are heavily indebted can't afford to be choosy and turn down lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This is the other form of surveillance pricing: pricing labor based on surveillance data. It's more cod-Marxism: "From each according to their desperation."

Forget "becoming ungovernable": to defeat these evil fuckers, we have to become unoptimizable:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

How do we do that? Well, nearly every form of "optimization" begins with surveillance. They can't figure out whether they can charge you more if they can't spy on you. They can't figure out whether they can pay you less if they can't spy on you, either.

And the reason they can spy on you is because we let them. The last consumer privacy law to pass out of Congress was a 1988 bill that bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rental history. Every other form of consumer surveillance is permitted under US federal law.

So step one of this process is to ban commercial surveillance. Banning algorithmic price discrimination is all well and good, but it is, ultimately, a form of redistribution. We're trying to make the companies share some of the excess they extract from our surveillance data. But predistribution – ending surveillance itself, in this case – is always far more effective than redistribution:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

How do we do that? Well, we need to build a coalition. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we call this "privacy first": you can't solve all the internet's problems by fixing privacy, but you won't fix most of them unless we get privacy right, and so the (potential) coalition for a strong privacy regime is large and powerful:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

But of course, "privacy first," doesn't mean "just privacy." We also need tools that target algorithmic pricing per se. In New York State, there's a new law that requires disclosure of algorithmic pricing, in the form of a prominent notification reading, "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA."

This is extremely weaksauce, and might even be worse than nothing. In California we have Prop 65, a rule that requires businesses to post signs and add labels any time they expose you to chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer." This caveat emptor approach (warn people, let them vote with their wallets) has led to every corner of California's built environment to be festooned with these warnings. Today, Californians just ignore these warnings, the same way that web users ignore the "privacy policy" disclosures on the sites they visit:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer

The right approach isn't to (merely) warn people about carcinogens (or privacy risks). The right approach is regulating harmful business practices, whether those practices give you a tumor or pick your pocket.

Under Biden, former FTC chair Lina Khan undertook proceedings to ban algorithmic pricing altogether. Trump's FTC killed that, along with all the other quality-of-life enhancing measures the FTC had in train (Trump's FTC chair replaced these with a program to root out "wokeness" in the agency).

Today, Khan is co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's transition team, and she will use the mayor's authority (under the New York City Consumer Protection Law of 1969, which addresses "unconscionable" commercial practices) to ban algorithmic pricing in NYC:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority

Khan wasn't Biden's only de-optimizer. Under chair Rohit Chopra, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau actually banned the data-brokers who power surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

And of course, Trump's CFPB (neutered by Musk and his broccoli-haired brownshirts at DOGE) killed that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/asshole-to-appetite/#ssn-for-sale

But the CFPB staffer who ran that effort has gone to work on an effort to leverage a New Jersey state privacy law to crush the data-broker industry:

https://www.wired.com/story/daniels-law-new-jersey-online-privacy-matt-adkisson-atlas-lawsuits/

These are efforts to optimize corporations for human thriving, by making them charge us less and pay us more. For while we are best off when we are unoptimizable, we are also best off when corporations are totally optimized – for our benefit.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Uber is selling your ride and food ordering data to advertisers for marketing insights https://boingboing.net/2025/12/08/uber-is-selling-your-ride-and-food-ordering-data-to-advertisers-for-marketing-insights.html

• 404 Media Is Making a Zine https://www.404media.co/404-media-is-making-a-zine/

• Maybe a General Strike Isn’t So Impossible Now https://labornotes.org/2025/12/maybe-general-strike-isnt-so-impossible-now

• The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408

• Bringing organizational maturity to radical groups https://blog.bl00cyb.org/2025/12/bringing-organizational-maturity-to-radical-groups/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Free voicemail helps homeless people get jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210021850/http://www.cvm.org/

#20yrsago Anti-P2P company decides to focus on selling music instead https://de.advfn.com/borse/NASDAQ/LOUD/nachrichten/13465769/loudeye-to-exit-content-protection-services-busine

#20yrsago Caller Eye-Deer’s eyes glow when phone rings https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/71889050/in/pool-69453349@N00

#20yrsago EFF to Sunncomm: release a list of all infected CDs! https://web.archive.org/web/20051212072537/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004245.php

#20yrsago Only 2% of music-store downloaders care about legality of their music https://web.archive.org/web/20051225200658/http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/5002/tempo2005.html

#20yrsago Dykes on Bikes gives the Trademark Office a linguistics lesson https://web.archive.org/web/20060523133217/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/09/MNGQOG5D7P1.DTL&type=printable

#20yrsago Robert Sheckley has died https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007078.html

#20yrsago Xbox 360 DRM makes your rip your CDs again https://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-xbox-360-hands-on-report/1100-6139672/

#20yrsago Music publishers: Jail for lyric-sites http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm

#15yrsago 2600 Magazine condemns DDoS attacks against Wikileaks censors https://web.archive.org/web/20101210213130/https://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12037

#15yrsago UK supergroup records 4’33”, hopes to top Xmas charts https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/dec/06/cage-against-machine-x-factor

#15yrsago FarmVille’s secret: making you anxious https://web.archive.org/web/20101211120105/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6224/catching_up_with_jonathan_blow.php?print=1

#15yrsago Rogue Archivist beer https://web.archive.org/web/20101214060929/https://livingproofbrewcast.com/2010/12/giving-the-rogue-archivist-to-its-namesake/

#15yrsago Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan temporarily released from Iranian prison https://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/2010/12/09/iranian-blogging-pioneer-temporarily-released-from-prison/

#15yrsago Student protesters in London use Google Maps to outwit police “kettling” https://web.archive.org/web/20101212042006/https://bengoldacre.posterous.com/student-protestors-using-live-tech-to-outwit

#15yrsago Google foreclosure maps https://web.archive.org/web/20170412162114/http://ritholtz.com/2010/12/google-map-foreclosures/
#15yrsago Theory and practice of queue design https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/third-queue.html

#15yrsago Legal analysis of the problems of superherodom https://lawandthemultiverse.com/

#10yrsago A great, low-tech hack for teaching high-tech skills https://miriamposner.com/blog/a-better-way-to-teach-technical-skills-to-a-group/

#10yrsago In case you were wondering, there’s no reason to squirt coffee up your ass https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/12/10/starbutts-or-how-is-it-still-a-thing-that-people-are-shooting-coffee-up-their-nether-regions

#10yrsago Survey of wealthy customers leads insurer to offer “troll insurance” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/insurance/12041832/Troll-insurance-to-cover-the-cost-of-internet-bullying.html

#10yrsago US State Department staffer sexually blackmailed women while working at US embassy https://web.archive.org/web/20151210230259/https://www.networkworld.com/article/3013633/security/ex-us-state-dept-worker-pleads-guilty-to-extensive-sextortion-hacking-and-cyberstalking-acts.html

#10yrsago Robert Silverberg’s government-funded guide to the psychoactive drugs of sf https://web.archive.org/web/20151211050648/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-us-government-funded-an-investigation-into-sci-fi-drug-use-in-the-70s

#10yrsago Toy demands that kids catch crickets and stuff them into an electronic car https://www.wired.com/2015/12/um-so-the-bug-racer-is-an-actual-toy-car-driven-by-crickets/

#10yrsago The crypto explainer you should send to your boss (and the FBI) https://web.archive.org/web/20151209011457/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/08/you-already-use-encryption-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-it/

#10yrsago French PM defies Ministry of Interior, says he won’t ban open wifi or Tor https://web.archive.org/web/20160726031106/https://www.connexionfrance.com/Wifi-internet-ban-banned-17518-view-article.html

#10yrsago The no-fly list really is a no-brainer https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/09/no-fly-list-errors-gun-control-obama

#10yrsago America: shrinking middle class, growing poverty, the rich are getting richer https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/

#10yrsago Marriott removing desks from its hotel rooms “because Millennials” https://web.archive.org/web/20151210034312/http://danwetzelsports.tumblr.com/post/134754150507/who-stole-the-desk-from-my-hotel-room

#10yrsago China’s top Internet censor: “There’s no Internet censorship in China” https://hongkongfp.com/2015/12/09/there-is-no-internet-censorship-in-china-says-chinas-top-censor/

#10yrsago Stolen-card crime sites use “cop detection” algorithms to flag purchases https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/when-undercover-credit-card-buys-go-bad/

#10yrsago UK National Crime Agency: if your kids like computers, they’re probably criminals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYrxzSe3DU

#10yrsago US immigration law: so f’ed up that Trump’s no-Muslim plan would be constitutional https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/trumps-anti-muslim-plan-is-awful-and-constitutional.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Ecuador’s draft copyright law: legal to break DRM to achieve fair use https://medium.com/@AndresDelgadoEC/big-achievement-for-creative-commons-in-ecuador-national-assembly-decides-that-fair-use-trumps-drm-c8cdd9c57e01#.n1vkccd3r

#10yrsago One billion Creative Commons licenses in use https://stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/

#10yrsago The moral character of cryptographic work https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf

#10yrsago Everybody knows: FBI won’t confirm or deny buying cyberweapons from Hacking Team https://web.archive.org/web/20151209163839/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbi-wont-confirm-or-deny-buying-hacking-team-spyware-even-though-it-did

#10yrsago European Commission resurrects an unkillable stupid: the link tax https://web.archive.org/web/20160913095014/https://openmedia.org/en/bad-idea-just-got-worse-how-todays-european-copyright-plans-will-damage-internet

#5yrsago Why we can't have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#bribery

#5yrsago Facebook vs Robert Bork https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked

#1yrago Tech's benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

#1yrago Predicting the present https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/#deny-defend-depose

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU

• Enshittification on The Daily Show
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

• Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q

• The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY

• Enshittification (Future Knowledge)
  https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "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).

• "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).

• "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.

• "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

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

I attended the New York International Auto Show last year, and honestly, it was kind of boring. Sure, there were some cool brands there and lots of nice industry people to mingle with, but since the COVID-19 pandemic, the show has been a shadow of itself.

That is, except for one specific display. Tucked all the way in the corner of the Jacob Javits Convention Center, on display at Fiat’s booth, was, amazingly, a Fiat Topolino. It’s a tiny, city-minded EV based on the Citroën Ami with a top speed of 28 mph, and it looks absolutely adorable. Our own Matt Hardigree got to see it up close and got trapped inside.

The Topolino was designed to be used in European cities, but now, it’ll finally come to the United States, according to Fiat. Interestingly, the announcement has nothing to do with the Trump administration’s declaration to bring small cars to America, according to the brand. Either way, I’m hyped.

I Need More Details

Fiat CEO Olivier Francois revealed the news yesterday while presenting a Topolino art car created by artist Romero Britto at Art Week Miami. As it turns out, Fiat showing the Topolino at a few auto shows in the U.S. last year wasn’t just for fun.

“The Fiat Topolino, our small, joyful, colorful car that is now everywhere in Europe, has made several appearances in the U.S. over the past year, including last month at the LA Auto Show, where it’s creating tremendous excitement among consumers. So much so that I’m happy to share that we’ll be bringing the Fiat Topolino to the U.S., with more details to come next year.”

This announcement comes just one week after President Trump claimed to have legalized smaller kei-style cars for assembly and sale in America, but according to Fiat, the decision to bring the Topolino to the U.S. is unrelated to the administration’s comments. Its statement to CNBC lines up with what the CEO said in the release:

A Stellantis spokeswoman said Fiat’s announcement was unrelated to Trump’s comments last week and that the automaker has been gauging customer interest for the Topolino at U.S. events such as auto shows.

Fiat hasn’t shared any details on when the Topolino might come stateside, though it sounds like American buyers will have to wait until at least next year to know anything more. Considering the car is already in production and the president says cars like this are legal to drive in America, it might be as simple as putting it on a boat and selling it at dealers.

As for how much it’ll cost, the Topolino is priced from €9,890 (around $11,500) in Europe. Fiat hasn’t said anything about pricing in the U.S., though, seeing as how it’s built in Morocco, the microcar will certainly be subject to tariffs if imported.

Will Anyone Actually Buy This Thing?

I hate to admit it, but I’m not sure there’s a real market for the Topolino in the U.S. The car is inexpensive and straightforward, but it also comes with a healthy set of limitations for use on public roadways. Its single electric motor makes just 8 horsepower, fed by a 5.4-kWh battery that gives it just 46 miles of range. That makes the Topolino pretty much useless outside of suburban side streets and dense city landscapes. That’s on top of the fact that American buyers just don’t like small cars.

Personally, I’m over the moon. Living in New York City, I’m one of the very few people who might actually benefit from owning a car like the Topolino. I love using my Range Rover in the city, but this Fiat would be much more convenient and cost-effective. The Rover is annoying to park because it’s so big, and the back-up camera sucks, and it absolutely guzzles fuel in low-speed environments.

But even I, a target buyer for this car, still see limitations. Its low top speed means I can’t ever take the Topolino outside city limits, which is half the reason anyone in a dense city owns a car in the first place. As it’s designed right now, it uses a wall plug to charge, which means it’s not compatible with any real charging station (though U.S. market Topolinos might be different).

Even with those limitations, it’s hard to imagine the Topolino will sell worse than the current Fiat 500. Fiat has sold just 1,076 examples so far this year through September. While that car can be driven on highways, it also starts at $37,695, which is likely far more expensive than the Topolino will be. Even if the Topolino sells in minuscule numbers, I’d consider that a win. Because a few adorable microcars are better than no adorable microcars at all.

Top graphic image: Fiat

The post My Dream Is Coming True: The Best Car Fiat Sells Is Finally Coming To The U.S. appeared first on The Autopian.

LOUISVILLE — E-bike of Colorado sales manager Perry Fletcher said his sales and repair shop saw an increase in back-to-school sales to young riders and families this fall as the popularity of the battery-powered bicycles revs up.

But the kids’ excitement for their new rides is tempered by a recurring question from worried parents: Are they safe?

That can be a difficult question to answer. The federal government’s e-bike regulations are sparse, and efforts to expand them have stalled, leaving states and even counties to fill the void with patchwork rules of their own. Meanwhile, the seemingly endless variety of e-bikes for sale vary in design, speed, and quality.

In that environment, retailers like Fletcher aim to educate consumers so they can make informed decisions.

“We’re super careful about what comes in the shop because there are hazards,” he said.

Federal rules requiring safety standards for batteries in e-bikes and other devices such as e-scooters are in limbo after the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the independent federal regulatory agency meant to protect people against death and injury from bicycles and other consumer products, withdrew proposed regulations in August.

The commission then sent the rules for review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs inside the Office of Management and Budget, responding to President Donald Trump’s February executive order demanding that independent agencies like the CPSC be more aligned with White House priorities. In May, Trump fired three members of the commission who had been appointed by his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, separate proposed rules by the commission to address injuries from mechanical failings have languished. Shira Rawlinson, the CPSC’s communications director, said it plans to update the status of both proposed rules.

That leaves e-bikes subject to existing standards written for traditional bicycles and which the commission has said, based on a preliminary assessment, aren’t adequate to reduce the risk of e-bike injuries. Colorado, Minnesota, and Utah recently passed laws regulating e-bikes to fill the gap.

The laws address issues such as battery fire risks and rider safety and seek to distinguish lower-speed e-bikes from faster e-motos, or electric motorcycles, which can reach top speeds of 35 mph or faster. No federal law dictates the age at which someone may operate an e-bike, but more than half of states have age restrictions for who can operate Class 3 bikes, which reach a top speed of 28 mph, while two California counties recently set a minimum age to operate Class 2 bikes, with their 20 mph top speed.

“The biggest issue is e-bikes that switch from a power-assisted bike to essentially a motorized scooter,” said Colorado state Rep. Lesley Smith, a Democrat who co-sponsored Colorado’s bill.

Colorado’s e-bike law requires safety certification of lithium-ion batteries, which can explode when manufactured or used improperly. They caused 39 deaths and 181 injuries in people using micromobility devices such as e-bikes from 2019 to 2023, according to the CPSC.

Most dealers, importers, and distributors have agreed to use batteries that meet safety standards, but there will always be manufacturers who cut corners on safety to save money, said Ed Benjamin, chairman of the Light Electric Vehicle Association, whose hundreds of members supply light electric vehicles such as e-bikes, or their parts.

“There are some out there who don’t care what is the right thing to do. They just want to make the cheapest bike possible,” Benjamin said.

Amy Thompson, the Safe Routes to School program coordinator for the Boulder Valley School District, said education officials are scrambling to install more bike racks at several schools to meet the increase in e-bike usage.

Students use them to quickly get to school or activities and carry their sports equipment or instruments with ease, Thompson said. She said she’s seen some alarming behavior, such as students’ riding three to a bike, riding without helmets, or attempting power wheelies popularized by social media.

Thompson said kids are disabling the speed limiter on e-bikes to operate at higher speeds. “It’s super easy for kids to go on YouTube and find a video that will coach you how to override or disable the governor on a bicycle,” she said.

Thompson alerted parents to monitor their children’s e-bikes in September and described the blurred lines between e-bikes and e-motos last fall.

Those blurred lines bedevil an e-bike classification system adopted, in part or full, by nearly all states, in which e-bike motors generally must operate at 750 watts or lower. Class 1 e-bikes use pedal assist and must not exceed 20 mph; Class 2 e-bikes include a throttle and also must not exceed 20 mph; and Class 3 e-bikes use pedal assist that must not exceed 28 mph.

Some e-bikes easily switch between Class 2 and 3, sometimes unbeknownst to parents, said Smith, the Colorado lawmaker. A California parent sued an e-bike manufacturer last year, saying it falsely advertised as Class 2 an e-bike that could switch to Class 3.

The dangers of Class 2 e-bikes prompted California’s Marin County to ban children under 16 from operating them and require that anyone riding one wear a helmet. Youths ages 10 to 15 who crash their e-bikes require an ambulance at five times the rate of other age groups involved in e-bike crashes, according to county health officials.

A growing number of serious injuries on e-bikes, particularly among adolescents, is an emerging public safety problem, the American College of Surgeons said in June.

Talia Smith, Marin County’s legislative director, championed the California law that permits Marin County to impose age restrictions. After hearing from a dozen other counties experiencing similar problems, though, she said state legislators should move to a statewide law from piecemeal, county-by-county ordinances. San Diego County bans riders under 12 from operating Class 1 or 2 bikes.

Vehicles claiming to be both e-bikes and e-motos fall into the cracks between two regulatory agencies, the CPSC and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said Matt Moore, general and policy counsel for PeopleForBikes, a trade association for bicycles, including e-bikes.

PeopleForBikes wants the traffic safety administration to stop shipments of or take other legal action against e-motos that are labeled as e-bikes and do not comply with federal standards, Moore said.

If the federal government won’t act, states should clarify their laws to define e-motos as off-road dirt bikes or motor vehicles that require licenses, he said. In October, California defined e-motos, which it requires to display an identification plate issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles for use off-highway.

In Boulder, Thompson said, the school district considers communication and education cornerstones of safety. Children and teens should learn and practice traffic rules, whether they’re powering two wheels with their own legs or a throttle, she said.

“E-bikes are fun, environmentally friendly, and relatively cheap transportation,” Thompson said. “So how can we make them safer and more viable for families?”

---

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Facing five lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths, OpenAI lobbed its first defense Tuesday, denying in a court filing that ChatGPT caused a teen’s suicide and instead arguing the teen violated terms that prohibit discussing suicide or self-harm with the chatbot.

The earliest look at OpenAI’s strategy to overcome the string of lawsuits came in a case where parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine accused OpenAI of relaxing safety guardrails that allowed ChatGPT to become the teen’s “suicide coach.” OpenAI deliberately designed the version their son used, ChatGPT 4o, to encourage and validate his suicidal ideation in its quest to build the world’s most engaging chatbot, parents argued.

But in a blog, OpenAI claimed that parents selectively chose disturbing chat logs while supposedly ignoring “the full picture” revealed by the teen’s chat history. Digging through the logs, OpenAI claimed the teen told ChatGPT that he’d begun experiencing suicidal ideation at age 11, long before he used the chatbot.

“A full reading of his chat history shows that his death, while devastating, was not caused by ChatGPT,” OpenAI’s filing argued.

Allegedly, the logs also show that Raine “told ChatGPT that he repeatedly reached out to people, including trusted persons in his life, with cries for help, which he said were ignored.” Additionally, Raine told ChatGPT that he’d increased his dose of a medication that “he stated worsened his depression and made him suicidal.” That medication, OpenAI argued, “has a black box warning for risk of suicidal ideation and behavior in adolescents and young adults, especially during periods when, as here, the dosage is being changed.”

All the logs that OpenAI referenced in its filing are sealed, making it impossible to verify the broader context the AI firm claims the logs provide. In its blog, OpenAI said it was limiting the amount of “sensitive evidence” made available to the public, due to its intention to handle mental health-related cases with “care, transparency, and respect.”

The Raine family’s lead lawyer, however, did not describe the filing as respectful. In a statement to Ars, Jay Edelson called OpenAI’s response “disturbing.”

“They abjectly ignore all of the damning facts we have put forward: how GPT-4o was rushed to market without full testing. That OpenAI twice changed its Model Spec to require ChatGPT to engage in self-harm discussions. That ChatGPT counseled Adam away from telling his parents about his suicidal ideation and actively helped him plan a ‘beautiful suicide,’” Edelson said. “And OpenAI and Sam Altman have no explanation for the last hours of Adam’s life, when ChatGPT gave him a pep talk and then offered to write a suicide note.”

“Amazingly,” Edelson said, OpenAI instead argued that Raine “himself violated its terms and conditions by engaging with ChatGPT in the very way it was programmed to act.”

Edelson suggested that it’s telling that OpenAI did not file a motion to dismiss—seemingly accepting ” the reality that the legal arguments that they have—compelling arbitration, Section 230 immunity, and First Amendment—are paper-thin, if not non-existent.” The company’s filing—although it requested dismissal with prejudice to never face the lawsuit again—puts the Raine family’s case “on track for a jury trial in 2026. ”

“We know that OpenAI and Sam Altman will stop at nothing—including bullying the Raines and others who dare come forward—to avoid accountability,” Edelson said. “But, at the end of the day, they will have to explain to a jury why countless people have died by suicide or at the hands of ChatGPT users urged on by the artificial intelligence OpenAI and Sam Altman designed.”

Use ChatGPT “at your sole risk,” OpenAI says

To overcome the Raine case, OpenAI is leaning on its usage policies, emphasizing that Raine should never have been allowed to use ChatGPT without parental consent and shifting the blame onto Raine and his loved ones.

“ChatGPT users acknowledge their use of ChatGPT is ‘at your sole risk and you will not rely on output as a sole source of truth or factual information,'” the filing said, and users also “must agree to ‘protect people’ and ‘cannot use [the] services for,’ among other things, ‘suicide, self-harm,’ sexual violence, terrorism or violence.”

Although the family was shocked to see that ChatGPT never terminated Raine’s chats, OpenAI argued that it’s not the company’s responsibility to protect users who appear intent on pursuing violative uses of ChatGPT.

The company argued that ChatGPT warned Raine “more than 100 times” to seek help, but the teen “repeatedly expressed frustration with ChatGPT’s guardrails and its repeated efforts to direct him to reach out to loved ones, trusted persons, and crisis resources.”

Circumventing safety guardrails, Raine told ChatGPT that “his inquiries about self-harm were for fictional or academic purposes,” OpenAI noted. The company argued that it’s not responsible for users who ignore warnings.

Additionally, OpenAI argued that Raine told ChatGPT that he found information he was seeking on other websites, including allegedly consulting at least one other AI platform, as well as “at least one online forum dedicated to suicide-related information.” Raine apparently told ChatGPT that “he would spend most of the day” on a suicide forum website.

“Our deepest sympathies are with the Raine family for their unimaginable loss,” OpenAI said in its blog, while its filing acknowledged, “Adam Raine’s death is a tragedy.” But “at the same time,” it’s essential to consider all the available context, OpenAI’s filing said, including that OpenAI has a mission to build AI that “benefits all of humanity” and is supposedly a pioneer in chatbot safety.

More ChatGPT-linked hospitalizations, deaths uncovered

OpenAI has sought to downplay risks to users, releasing data in October “estimating that 0.15 percent of ChatGPT’s active users in a given week have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent,” Ars reported.

While that may seem small, it amounts to about 1 million vulnerable users, and The New York Times this week cited studies that have suggested OpenAI may be “understating the risk.” Those studies found that “the people most vulnerable to the chatbot’s unceasing validation” were “those prone to delusional thinking,” which “could include 5 to 15 percent of the population,” NYT reported.

OpenAI’s filing came one day after a New York Times investigation revealed how the AI firm came to be involved in so many lawsuits. Speaking with more than 40 current and former OpenAI employees, including executives, safety engineers, researchers, NYT found that OpenAI’s model tweak that made ChatGPT more sycophantic seemed to make the chatbot more likely to help users craft problematic prompts, including those trying to “plan a suicide.”

Eventually, OpenAI rolled back that update, making the chatbot safer. However, as recently as October, the ChatGPT maker seemed to still be prioritizing user engagement over safety, NYT reported, after that tweak caused a dip in engagement. In a memo to OpenAI staff, ChatGPT head Nick Turley “declared a ‘Code Orange,” four employees told NYT, warning that “OpenAI was facing ‘the greatest competitive pressure we’ve ever seen.'” In response, Turley set a goal to increase the number of daily active users by 5 percent by the end of 2025.

Amid user complaints, OpenAI has continually updated its models, but that pattern of tightening safeguards, then seeking ways to increase engagement could continue to get OpenAI in trouble, as lawsuits advance and possibly others drop. NYT “uncovered nearly 50 cases of people having mental health crises during conversations with ChatGPT,” including nine hospitalized and three deaths.

Gretchen Krueger, a former OpenAI employee who worked on policy research, told NYT that early on, she was alarmed by evidence that came before ChatGPT’s release showing that vulnerable users frequently turn to chatbots for help. Later, other researchers found that such troubled users often become “power users.” She noted that “OpenAI’s large language model was not trained to provide therapy” and “sometimes responded with disturbing, detailed guidance,” confirming that she joined other safety experts who left OpenAI due to burnout in 2024.

“Training chatbots to engage with people and keep them coming back presented risks,” Krueger said, suggesting that OpenAI knew that some harm to users “was not only foreseeable, it was foreseen.”

For OpenAI, the scrutiny will likely continue until such reports cease. Although OpenAI officially unveiled an Expert Council on Wellness and AI in October to improve ChatGPT safety testing, there did not appear to be a suicide expert included on the team. That likely concerned suicide prevention experts who warned in a letter updated in September that “proven interventions should directly inform AI safety design,” since “the most acute, life-threatening crises are often temporary—typically resolving within 24–48 hours”—and chatbots could possibly provide more meaningful interventions in that brief window.

If you or someone you know is feeling suicidal or in distress, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline number, 1-800-273-TALK (8255), which will put you in touch with a local crisis center.

Read full article

Comments

HP Inc. said that it will lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees in favor of AI deployments, claiming it will help save $1 billion in annualized gross run rate by the end of its fiscal 2028.

HP expects to complete the layoffs by the end of that fiscal year. The reductions will largely hit product development, internal operations, and customer support, HP CEO Enrique Lores said during an earnings call on Tuesday.

Using AI, HP will “accelerate product innovation, improve customer satisfaction, and boost productivity,” Lores said.

In its fiscal 2025 earnings report released yesterday, HP said:

Structural cost savings represent gross reductions in costs driven by operational efficiency, digital transformation, and portfolio optimization. These initiatives include but are not limited to workforce reductions, platform simplification, programs consolidation and productivity measures undertaken by HP, which HP expects to be sustainable in the longer-term.

AI blamed for tech layoffs

HP’s announcement comes as workers everywhere try to decipher how AI will impact their future job statuses and job opportunities. Some industries, such as customer support, are expected to be more disrupted than others. But we’ve already seen many tech layoffs tied to AI.

Salesforce, for example, announced in October that it had let go of 4,000 customer support employees, with CEO Marc Benioff saying that AI meant “I need less heads.” In September, US senators accused Amazon of blaming its dismissal of “tens of thousands” of employees on the “adoption of generative AI tools” and then replacing the workers with over 10,000 foreign H-1B employees. Last month, Amazon announced it would lay off about 14,000 people to focus on its most promising projects, including generative AI. Last year, Intuit said it would lay off 1,800 people and replace them with AI-focused workers. Klarna and Duolingo have also replaced significant numbers of workers with AI. And in January, Meta announced plans to lay off 5 percent of its workforce as it looks to streamline operations and build its AI business.

That’s just a handful of layoffs by tech companies that have been outrightly or presumably connected to AI investments.

According to analysis from outplacement services and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, as of October, technology firms had announced 141,159 job cuts since the year’s start, a 17 percent increase from the same period last year (120,470).

But some experts question whether or not AI is really driving corporate layoffs or if companies are using the buzzy technology as a scapegoat.

Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told CNBC this month that “there’s very little evidence that [AI] cuts jobs anywhere near like the level that we’re talking about.” He noted that effectively using AI to replace human workers is “enormously complicated and time-consuming.”

In September, Gartner analysts predicted that all IT work will involve AI by 2030, compared to 81 percent today. However, humans will remain essential, per VP analysts Alicia Mullery and Daryl Plummer, who said that 75 percent of IT workloads will still involve people.

More broadly, there’s hope that AI will actually lead to more jobs, not fewer. In January, the World Economic Forum released its Future of Jobs Report 2025, which predicted that AI would create 78 million more jobs than it eliminates by 2030. The report was based on data from 1,000 companies with 14 million employees worldwide.

It will be years before we comprehend AI’s impact on the workforce. In the meantime, we can expect AI to be at the center of more layoff announcements —whether people believe the job cuts are solely the results of AI or not.

Read full article

Comments