Woman, 24, dies days after twice being sent home by doctors when she returned from holiday in Greece
Georgia Taylor, from Gwaelod-g-Garth in Wales, passed away in the early hours of August 21 following a week-long trip to the Greek Island Zante.
Crime ridden town on the edge of the Cotswolds blighted by a migrant hotel where residents spend all day drinking in park 'where woman was raped' - just yards from a police station
A migrant hotel has become the centre of rising tensions in the market town of Banbury after a woman 'was raped' in a nearby park.
Cory Doctorow Explains Why Amazon is 'Way Past Its Prime'
"It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast," writes Cory Doctorow. Sunday he shared an excerpt from his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
He succinctly explains "this moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening" using Amazon as an example. Platforms amass users, but then abuse them to make things better for their business customers. And then they abuse those business customers too, abusing everybody while claiming all the value for themselves. "And become a giant pile of shit."
So first Amazon subsidized prices and shipping, then locked in customers with Prime shipping subscriptions (while adding the chains of DRM to its ebooks and audiobooks)...
These tactics — Prime, DRM and predatory pricing — make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too... [M]erchants' dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts...
[Amazon] uses its overview of merchants' sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants' contracting factories, to cream off its merchants' bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don't use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a "service" in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon's own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.
All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants' goods.... Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the "Amazon tax" on your behalf, it couldn't. Merchants just don't make 51% margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot... [W]hen merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it's key to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon...
If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you're paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop — even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you'll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match — which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.
Doctorow knows what we need to do:
Ban predatory pricing — "selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again)."
Impose structural separation, "so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform."
Curb junk fees, "which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in."
End its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants "to raise their prices everywhere else, too.
Unionise drivers and warehouse workers.
Treat rigged search results as the fraud they are.
These are policy solutions. (Because "You can't shop your way out of a monopoly," Doctorow warns.) And otherwise, as Doctorow says earlier, "Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care."
In the mean time, Doctorow also makes up a new word — "the enshitternet" — calling it "a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love.
"The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers mspohr and fjo3 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gary Neville sparks fury by claiming 'angry middle-aged white men' flying Union Jack flags are dividing Britain in wake of Manchester synagogue attack
The former Manchester United defender made the comments around 24 hours after worshippers at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation were attacked by Syrian-born terrorist Jihad Al-Shamie.
Inside Tyson Fury's wedding to Paris: Boxer salvaged love with a text after break-up just months before, she thought he was an 'old man,' Gypsy King made a BIG hotel room mistake... and now their daughter, 16, is engaged!
Tyson Fury 's daughter, Venezuela, is not waiting around. This week, at her 16th birthday party, she said yes to give her hand in marriage to young boxer Noah Price.
Death notices and funeral announcements from Essex Chronicle this week
Our thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one
Lauryn Goodman 'has no plans to see Jack Draper again' after one coffee date with the tennis ace she met on celebrity dating app Raya
The influencer, 34, was said to have matched with the sports star, 23, on celebrity dating app Raya.
Revealed: The tangled love life of the marijuana-smoking Synagogue terrorist who was on bail for rape and obsessed with messaging women on a Muslim dating site
Jihad Al-Shamie, 35, was also potentially married to two different woman and was obsessed with a Muslim dating site.
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley shows off her lithe legs in a sophisticated blazer dress as she leaves the Ritz during Paris Fashion Week
Completing her look with a pair of matching stiletto heels and smart leather clutch, Rosie, 38, inevitably commanded attention while exiting the Ritz.
Newbuild mansions on sale for £1.8m in upmarket country village home to footballers and celebrities called a 'hideous blob' by wealthy neighbours
The village is known as a millionaire hotspot where the average home sells for one million pounds but the latest addition may challenge that.
Record number of children in England are abused because parents think they are witches or possessed by black magic
The number of children in England suspected of being abused because of witchcraft, sorcery and black magic beliefs has surged to its highest level on record, the Daily Mail can reveal.
Emma Watson looks carefree as she steps out at Paris Fashion Week after being branded 'ignorant of how ignorant she is' by JK Rowling
The actress, 35, offered a wave, while wearing a light pink checked oversized shirt, days after Ms Rowling told her she had 'poured more petrol on the flames' with criticism of her gender critical stance.
Lana Del Rey makes extremely rare appearance with her alligator tour guide husband Jeremy Dufrene at Paris Fashion Week's Valentino show
Lana Del Rey made an extremely rare appearance with her alligator tour guide husband Jeremy Dufrene at Paris Fashion Week's Valentino show on Sunday.
Plans to abolish NHS England 'floundering' amid lack of Government direction, staff say
The closure was expected to lead to the loss of almost 10,000 jobs and save hundreds of millions of pounds a year in admin costs that could be spent on frontline care.
Patients abusing pharmacists after being denied NHS Covid jab this winter due to little-known rule change
Chemists claim 'poor communication' from health officials and a 'confusing' online booking system has left many patients unaware of the change until they arrive in store.
Sam Altman Promises Copyright Holders More Control Over Sora's Character Generation - and Revenue Sharing
Friday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced two changes coming "soon" to Sora:
First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls...
Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we want both to be valuable.
"We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of 'interactive fan fiction'," Altman wrote, "and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all)."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SNL makes mockery of JK Rowling as her trans clash with Emma Watson reaches boiling point
SNL aired a controversial skit mocking JK Rowling amid the author's ongoing public feud with Emma Watson over trans rights.
A near-death experience left Eric Dane in tears, forced to confront his terminal diagnosis… but would it stop his wife from abandoning him?
Eric Dane had the perfect body, and he wasn't shy about it. His matinee idol looks electrified Grey's Anatomy viewers, which makes photos of a gaunt Dane in a wheelchair even harder to bear.
Hollywood's long-lasting golden couples who prove love isn't dead yet… after Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's shock split
Couples like Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have been held up as rare examples of a celebrity relationship finally gone right, only to land on the scrap heap with the rest of them.
JoJo Siwa fan addresses being thrown out of her concert over 'offensive' hoodie and insists she didn't know about cruel hairline memes
A woman who was thrown out of JoJo Siwa's concert last week for her hoodie has insisted she had no idea it was offensive.