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Disabled Georgia man waited 10 years in nursing home for Medicaid home care
Wednesday September 9th, 2026 at 10:19 AM

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He lost 10 years in a Georgia nursing home. It's becoming more common

ATLANTA – Nick Papadopoulos clenched the bed at his nursing home, terrified he would roll off without guardrails.

A wispy woman floated in from another room, confused, and crawled into bed with him. Papadopoulos, 38, yelled and hit the call button for help.

“Nobody came,” he said.

It was the start of a yearslong nightmare lived by millions of disabled and elderly Americans who rely on Medicaid: Instead of receiving in-home care to live independently, they are often forced to live in institutions.

It could become more common.

On Aug. 31, the Trump administration moved to make it easier for states to place disabled and elderly people in institutions. To appease a lawsuit from several Republican-led states, government lawyers told a federal judge they were willing to erase a 50-year-old provision requiring federal funds be used to care for people in their homes, whenever possible.

In effect, it undermines a landmark Supreme Court case from Papadopoulos’ home state that said denying people the ability to live in their communities is discrimination.

Advocates say the government’s concession erodes hard-fought civil rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And it threatens the return of a system where disabled people are locked in institutions instead of being allowed to live in their homes.

“It’s simply wrong and inconsistent with 50 years of law,” read a joint statement from seven national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. “The disability community opposes any effort to turn back the clock on disability rights and community integration.”

Papadopoulos relies on this faltering system that is now endangered.

He lived independently with cerebral palsy using home-based supports until 2016 when he entered the hospital with a common wound. Papadopoulos thought he would go home after a short nursing home stay.

Instead, he was put at the end of Georgia’s list of 6,000 people waiting for disability services. He lost his job, his house and, eventually, his independence.

After 10 years, he remained locked away in Room 130 at Brown Health & Rehabilitation, more than 30 miles from his Athens home.

Supreme Court: A right to live at home

Lois Curtis proved that Americans with disabilities have the right to live at home – and federal law protected them from an empty promise.

Curtis, like many others with intellectual and developmental disabilities, had spent most of her life locked away. The 25-year-old sought care one day at Georgia Regional Hospital in 1992, but was still there years later, against her will.

From a payphone, she kept calling Atlanta Legal Aid to ask: “When am I getting out of here?”

It had been two years since the Americans with Disabilities Act established civil rights protections against discrimination. The “integration mandate” says people with disabilities have a right to learn, live and work in the community alongside their neighbors.

At the time, more than 2.5 million people lived in institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes and other large residential facilities, according to federal statistics. Many entered voluntarily but didn’t have anywhere else to go after treatment. So they were kept there.

“They had choice in theory. Except they didn’t have it in practice,” said Susan Walker Goico, a senior attorney at Atlanta Legal Aid Society's Health and Disability Rights Unit.

Doctors said Curtis could live safely on her own with a 24-hour personal aid. She tended to wander from home and needed help managing medications and money. For years, the state had not provided Medicaid services for her to live at home.

Sue Jamieson, the attorney who met Curtis when she was first sent away at age 11, filed a lawsuit on her behalf against the state of Georgia in 1995. Elaine Wilson, who the hospital had tried to discharge to a homeless shelter, soon joined as a second plaintiff in the case, Olmstead v. L.C. and E.W.

Georgia denied discriminating against the women. The state claimed it simply did not have enough money to provide community-based care. Federal Medicaid rules did not – and still don’t – require them to offer it for adults.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that the state could not institutionalize people simply because it did not want to pay for care at home or in the community. Federal research would later show that home-based services are, on average, a third the cost of institutional settings.

“Persons without mental disabilities can receive the medical services they need without similar sacrifice” of their personal liberties, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote for the majority. She added that confining people with disabilities “perpetuates unwarranted assumptions” that they are "incapable or unworthy of participating in community life."

Curtis left the hospital at last.

She lived with roommates in group homes and, finally, in her own apartment with support from a round-the-clock aid. When major decisions arose, like choosing a doctor, an expert board from a supported living program guided her.

“Lois had so much love for other people,” said Linda Pogue, who met her friend through a community art class. “She was just sharing it all out, in her way. The fun, the laughter, the art. The sharing of a cigarette.”

Curtis often sat at a picnic table on the wooded shore of Pine Lake, watching ducks and drinking Coke while painting. Her art featured continuous line drawing, a technique popularized by Pablo Picasso.

Curtis spoke at disability rights conferences and statehouses. She appeared in art shows and sold her work.

In 2011, President Barack Obama invited her to the Oval Office. She gave him a hug, a smile and a painting.

Curtis lived as she chose until her death from cancer in 2022. Thousands watched a livestream of her funeral.

A common injury lands him in financial trouble

Because of Curtis and disability rights activists like her, the nation’s laws promised Papadopoulos similar access to a public education and the American Dream.

Born with cerebral palsy, he had the same energy, interests and, for a while, opportunities as other Astoria boys who explored New York City without crutches or canes. His overprotective Greek mother often kept him at home after school, so Papadopoulos delved into pop culture. He’d feed tapes into the VHS player, plop on the floor, and watch “Predator” or “Dragonslayer” on repeat.

After graduating, Papadopoulos took classes at Hunter College, bonding with classmates over sword and sorcery movies. He asked a girl out, and she said yes. He drank and partied – a little too much – like a regular college kid. He left college to manage real estate with his dad.

With settlement money from the medical malpractice case stemming from his delivery as a baby, the family had bought investment properties they rented out. He earned enough to cover his medical expenses without insurance.

“I became a slum lord,” Papadopoulos quipped.

But then he went to the hospital with a severe skin infection, a common but serious condition for people who stay in one position for long periods. Untreated, it can lead to blood poisoning or muscle and bone damage.

The cost for treatment threatened to ruin him. A Harvard analysis found that hospitals routinely bill more than $40,000 to treat his condition.

Papadopoulos had two choices.

He could sell everything he owned to pay for his care. When he was broke enough, he could apply for Medicaid. Or, he could transfer his properties to his mother and be poor enough to qualify for government health coverage immediately. That’s what he did.

“It sucks. And it’s systematic,” Papadopoulos said. “No matter how much you try to improve your situation, they bottleneck you and make sure that you remain poor.”

To maintain the services that let him stay independent, including Medicaid and monthly Social Security Insurance payments, his assets can't exceed $2,000. He can’t earn more than $1,690 a month before taxes.

It was a preview of the government bureaucracy that would shape his life.

Lost his job, his home, his independence

Papadopoulos moved to Athens, Georgia, in 2009 for warmer weather and new adventures.

At a drab Christmas party for the local Center for Independent Living, Papadopoulos caught the attention of the nonprofit’s leader when he chatted up everyone in the room, trying to “liven it up.” He offered Papadopoulos a job.

For two years, he worked as a peer support specialist, learning about the services that let disabled people live and work in their communities. He realized, “Oh, I qualify for this, too.”

After Curtis’ landmark victory at the Supreme Court, states like Georgia started using more federal Medicaid funds to provide services to adults in their homes. But Congress never changed the rules to require it. And states can arbitrarily cap how many people, like Papadopoulos, they support living in the community.

Around the same time – and a short drive from where Curtis enjoyed her freedom – Papadopoulos lived independently thanks to those Medicaid services. It paid a personal aid to help him four hours a day with basic tasks, mostly bathing and getting dressed.

He started using a power chair as he lost mobility, and he gained weight. Then, in 2016, he developed a pressure wound, a condition serious enough that it could cut to muscle or bone.

This time, there would be no returning home. On paper, he had the right to live where he wanted, but he fell into a services gap just as Curtis had decades earlier.

A long hospital stay led Papadopoulos to lose his job and his home. He lost his Medicaid support services and monthly Social Security payments. To get his home care back, he'd have to go on Georgia’s waitlist – along with thousands of others.

“I was just angry,” he recalled.

Today, a national survey shows more than 606,000 people wait for Medicaid home services. In at least seven states, people can wait more than a decade.

And the wait could get longer.

State leaders targeted these voluntary programs after Congress’ historic Medicaid cuts as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill. Several states have already cut budgets for home care and how much they pay providers.

This year in Georgia, legislators approved adding 900 slots for home services to chip away at the 8,000 people on its waitlist, like Papadopoulos. But Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed that expansion.

Papadopoulos called the decision “terrible.”

“People's dreams won't happen,” he said.

'I'm going to die'

Papadopoulos understands. His own life was effectively paused at age 38.

When he lost his home services, Papadopoulos could choose to live on the streets or in a nursing home – it wasn’t a real choice.

He struggled going from a “grown-ass man” who chose his own bedtime to being the patient in Room 130.

Papadopoulos could not leave, not even for a day trip. Just to get out of bed, facility rules said he needed a medical lift and two aids. He had to wait until they were done with more than 20 other patients. Papadopoulos spent so much time in bed, he lost muscle mass and developed osteoporosis.

Sometimes, he sat in a soiled diaper for hours before help arrived.

“They did their best,” he said, acknowledging nurses and aids had to care for too many people.

While in the nursing home, Papadopoulos missed his mother’s funeral. He missed his dad’s funeral. He missed a cousin’s wedding and the birth of his nephew. Concerts and dinners and movies with friends were a thing of the past.

He was exposed to diseases he never would have been at home. In just his first year, a bacterial infection gave him nonstop diarrhea, belly cramps and a fever. And scabies mites burrowed into his skin, making painful and itchy tender spots he could not reach.

“It's scary because I'd never experienced going through this,” he said. He remembers thinking, “I'm going to die. This is the end.”

Regardless of what Curtis’ Supreme Court case said about his rights, he could not get out.

While he tried to “hold on to my humanity,” several states fought to rescind the rules requiring them to use federal dollars to keep people with disabilities in their own homes whenever possible. Several Republican-led states, including Georgia, filed that lawsuit in 2024.

In June, the Department of Justice announced it would no longer enforce those federal guidelines. On Aug. 13, justice officials asked a federal judge to vacate a related decision that protected Florida kids from being put into institutions for care.

And on Aug. 31, federal lawyers sided with the suing states, offering to erase the integration mandate from federal health regulations as part of a settlement. They said it’s not discrimination to treat someone in an institution if there are “legitimate” reasons for states to prefer it over caring for them in their homes.

Florida joined the lawsuit “to serve as a check on federal power, not to deny care," said James Williams, spokesman for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. "Reclaiming state authority gives Florida the flexibility needed to address critical public safety and homelessness issues while ensuring proper care for individuals."

Papadopoulos was outraged that the federal agency charged with protecting his rights has instead undermined them.

“The Department of Justice has become the very same bad actor they were charged to defend against,” he said.

'I'm going to fight'

In July 2026 – 10 years after he went in to recover from a common injury – Papadopoulos moved out of Room 130. He’d finally found a home services provider to take on his medically complex case.

“Even in horror movies, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he said of his time in a nursing home. “It didn’t kill me. Would I wish it on my worst enemy? No. But that experience forged me and prepared me for what comes ahead.”

On his first day of freedom, Papadopoulos went to the movies and saw “Backrooms.” He visited the state botanical gardens in Athens, where a patch of edible plants inspired him.

“That’s what I want at my house,” he thought. “My own herb garden with peppers and basil and all that.”

He looked forward to cooking again with his support staff, eating the Greek food of his childhood instead of the fried cafeteria meal of the day.

Papadopoulos now eats what he wants, when he wants.

He can make “bad choices” like drinking a diet soda with dinner or staying up late watching Netflix. He can roll through his wooded neighborhood at any hour. He can call 911 without permission from a charge nurse.

“When you're in a nursing home, your identity is stripped from you. You're no longer a person like you were. You're a patient,” he said.

Support workers and nurses often become “like family,” Papadopolous said.

They prepare meals together. Talk about movies. Go fishing. Play Uno. Commiserate about the long waits at doctors’ offices. Bicker about whether to go out or stay home.

Still, life with home services comes with challenges. Staff quit without notice – presumably for better pay or shorter shifts at nursing homes and hospitals. He rarely hears from them once they leave.

“You think you’re building these relationships,” Papadopoulos said. “But they disappear.”

After 10 years of isolation and dictated routine, he must rediscover himself and build a new place in the community. He plans a trip to the theater to watch the new Spider-Man movie. He considers a suggestion to attend Atlanta Dragon Con.

In between, he joins the advisory committees of disability organizations and testifies at government hearings, most virtually. Papadopoulos is prepared to defend his civil rights and the Medicaid services that fulfill those promises.

“I'm going to fight ’til the very end to help other people, free other people from nursing homes,” he said.

That July night, Papadopoulos bantered with two support people as they used a lift to swing him from a power chair to his bed. They washed his body with hand towels and said goodnight.

Secure between guardrails, Papadopoulos fell asleep, at last, in his own home.

Jayme Fraser is an investigative data reporter at USA TODAY. She can be reached by text or on Signal at (541) 362-1393 or by emailing <a href="mailto:jfraser@usatodayco.com">jfraser@usatodayco.com</a>.

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Pluralistic: Amazon achieves enshittification inception (04 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Sunday September 6th, 2026 at 10:23 AM

Comments on: Pluralistic: Amazon achieves enshittification inception (04 Sep 2026)
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Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjuror,' a painting depicting a medieval con artist playing a shell game for an audience of astonished peasant rubes. The image has been altered: the conman now has Jeff Bezos's grinning head, and the mouths of all the peasants have been replaced with inverted Amazon 'Smile' logos, so they are now frowning.

Amazon achieves enshittification inception (permalink)

Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money.

Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods.

This means that it costs Amazon itself nothing to get the merchandise it sells to your door: more than 100% of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who compete with Amazon in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit).

Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building more servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers – many of whom are also its competitors – pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing for free, and realizes a profit on top of that.

Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors!

Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's most profitable line of business, which is payola.

"Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order.

"Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music. Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource – exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe – and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that.

Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears. The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements. Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it.

Amazon's payola isn't about radio play – it's about search. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon auctions off those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product.

To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing

Thus, Amazon imposes an economy-wide tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller must sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers.

Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over the majority of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, must raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country.

AI has made Amazon much better at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results.

There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system also relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. That's why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable!

While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most profitable junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop.

Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than anything else the company does. It's more profitable than all the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service.

Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has lots of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare unit prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors. Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price per item, because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller quantity of batteries at a higher price per battery.

Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce. Amazon clearly understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by unit price and find the best bargain.

Let me remind you: payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits. When I was researching Enshittification, Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billion. A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book The Age of Extraction), I learned that this number had climbed to more than $50 billion. This year, it's on track to top $80 billion.

Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper. It's payola, more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold).

But there is a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it competes with advertising. Back in the old days, before a series of K-shaped recoveries created a vast chasm between America's haves and have-nots; before Amazon captured the majority of well-off American households with Prime; people shopped in lots of places, and in those days, companies advertised in publications, not on Amazon. Websites, newspapers, and newspaper websites made billions from those ads. Amazon's payola scheme (along with Google, Facebook and other tech monopolists) have captured almost all of that money.

As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by all the newspapers in the world by 300%. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers.

This is pure enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the most successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive even as it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's the most profitable thing Amazon does.

And then…Amazon made it worse.

You know how people like to say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product?" It's bullshit. The "advertisers" who bribe Amazon for top search placement are the customers here, they're "paying for the product," and they are getting reamed. I don't just mean they're getting screwed by being forced to shell out payola – I mean that Amazon is cheating them on that payola!

Remember: Amazon doesn't just sell search placement; they auction it. Every time you run an Amazon search, the company conducts a special kind of auction called a "sealed-bid second-price auction" (SBSPA):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction

Under an SBSPA, bidders secretly tell the auctioneer the very highest price they're willing to pay. The auctioneer then charges the highest bidder a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent.

This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually a clever solution to one of the major problems with traditional, "open call" auctions (where bidders call out the prices they're willing to pay until one bid emerges victorious). Say you're at an open call auction where the top bid is $10. You can call out $11, and then the other person will call out $12, and so on and so on. It's tedious and time-consuming. That's bad enough when you're at an estate auction that's unloading hundreds of items, but it's untenable for an eyeblink auction meant to determine search results that the user expects to get in an instant.

In physical auctions the top bidder often clobbers other bidders with a big increase – going from $10 to $50, say. This can end the auction quickly, but it means that the high bidder often overpays for their purchase.

In an SBSPA, every bidder enters their highest price, but none of the other bidders know what that price is. This encourages everyone to name their true highest price, but it protects the top bidder in the instance in which they are willing to pay a much higher price than anyone else.

Say you're that person who raises the bidding from $10 to $50 – you have no way of knowing whether the other bidders would have dropped out at $15 or at $45. If you were the only person who was willing to pay more than $15 for the item, you've just vastly overpaid (by $34.99). But in an SBSPA, you name your true price, but you only pay the price you would have paid if you'd gone through the tedious, expensive, time-consuming process of an open call auction.

Amazon's search auctions are SBSPAs. A merchant tells Amazon the maximum they're willing to pay to be at the top of the search results for a given query, but they pay a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent. This lets auctions run so quickly that they can be used as the basis for ordering a search results page.

That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. The FTC and 22 states just filed a suit against Amazon because Amazon was cheating on its own SBSPA process:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme

Over the past 7 years, Amazon has been secretly charging the winning bidder an amount equal to their own sealed bid, not the amount that the next-highest bidder was willing to pay (plus a penny):

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199

According to the suit, Amazon did this 80% of the time. That is tens of billions of dollars Amazon extracted from platform sellers, who passed those costs onto you, and onto every other retailer in the country (thanks to AI-enforced Most Favored Nation policies).

Amazon's defense is that this is all a big misunderstanding. Platform sellers just didn't understand how a SBSPA worked. Amazon has a special kind of SBSPA where they could unilaterally and secretly charge the winning bidder the maximum price they'd pledged, if, in Amazon's judgment, the closing price for the auction was below "the true market value of the ad placement":

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/

This is darkly hilarious. The whole point of an auction is to determine "true market value." That's why neoclassical economists worship auctions as the world's best form of "price discovery" and why economics Nobels are awarded for "auction design":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory

The definition of "true market value" is "the closing price in an auction." Amazon claiming that it secretly jacked people because the auction generated a price that was "below the true market value" of an ad tells you that the whole business is a sham. The point of Amazon's payola scheme is only and ever a way to parasitically extract the maximum amount a platform seller is willing to part with, and by running a fake SBSPA, Amazon was able to trick its customers into revealing those maximum prices.

Cheating on a bribery scheme is a mood. This isn't just enshittification, it's enshittification inception. Amazon managed to enshittify their own enshittification!

This case was brought by Trump's FTC, which means that Amazon can get out of it by paying a chud podcaster to tweet at the president and he'll order them to drop it, just like he did with Ticketmaster:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

But – just as with Ticketmaster – the feds aren't the only parties to the suit. With 22 AGs ("Aspiring Governors") on the suit, there's a chance this will go to trial. We might even learn the identity of the inventor of this enshittification-squared gambit, a veritable Louis Pasteur of enshittification. Assuming that person doesn't go to prison, the Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne can give that sloshing, ambulatory pile of hot liquid garbage a Nobel Prize in Economics.

(Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Electrolite relaunches https://web.archive.org/web/20010927195348/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/electrolite.html

#25yrsago How to play Mafia https://web.archive.org/web/20011113011546/http://www.stud.ntnu.no/studorg/mafia/

#20yrsago How Wikipedia entries get written http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

#5yrsago Proctorio's awful reviews disappear down the memory hole https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (11893 total).

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sarcozona
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If You Want Companies To Behave Well You Have To Punish Decision Makers by Ian Welsh
Friday September 4th, 2026 at 11:56 PM

Ian Welsh
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Regular readers will know that China has been going after billionaires hard. So much so, in fact, that the number of billionaires is dropping in China.

Back after the financial collapse executives did very very well. They had been lying repeatedly, had engaged in wide-scale fraud and to the extent that there was any punishment it was fines on the companies involved.

Not only were the fines less than the companies had made, but even in the rare case that the company went bankrupt, the executives involved still got to keep all the money they had made. Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers wound up with a net worth of over 500 million — after his company was bankrupt.

The saying at the time when bad deals were made was IBGYBG. “I”ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

So if you want to dis-incentivize bad executive behaviour, you have to really go after the execs. Here’s an example of China doing it the right way:

Notice that all his personal assets were seized. I’d also track down any family member he made rich and take that money away.

The only way to restrain capitalists is real prison sentences or execution (Vietnam is fond of executing corrupt execs) and taking their money, and thus power, away. The idea of corporations being used to shield decision makers and beneficiaries of illegal or evil behaviour from liability has to go away. Corporate personhood has to end, as well, or they have to be given the disadvantages of personhood. “Committed a serious crime? OK, the corporation is dissolved.”

Psychologically the most important thing here is for government officials to not identify with business leaders. Chinese CCP bureaucrats do not think of themselves as part of the same class as executives at companies. Organizationally there can be no revolving door between business and government. You can move from biz to government, but not vice versa. There can be no route for payoffs, including the old “I”ll hire or give your wife or kid a sweetheart deal.”

For most of Western history bureaucrats – aka. civil servants, were considered morally superior to businessmen, because they were working for the common good and by doing so earning less than they could if they were in the private sector. Business was what you did if you were morally inferior: a person who was concerned about yourself and not others.

That ethos produced some very competent and high powered government bureaucracies which were well respected, especially when combined with civil service examinations.

Government and business are two different things. There has to be some understanding between them, since government must regulate business, but government’s job is to make the people better off, not to make businesses richer.

When government operates this way it can control private enterprise so that markets work to the benefit of society. When it doesn’t, usually because it’s been corrupted by capitalists, it enables monopolies and oligopolies and exploitative practices and when there are crises, it bails out the rich, not the people.

All of this is well understood, really, it’s just that there’s a lot of money to pay for scummy intellectuals and journalists and experts to obscure the fact and pretend that there’s a trickle down effect or that what’s good for rich is good for society. (Hello Milton Friedman, you corrupt hack.)

Markets are a lot like nuclear energy. Great if you do it right, but if you don’t, it’ll blow up in your face, and the first rule is that the more money a capitalist has the more harshly they should be treated if they break the law or hurt the public. In China, that’s how it is. In the West, the rich skate and the poor go to prison for life or have their homes and savings and livelihood stolen.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

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sarcozona
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Instead of Using Opioid Settlement Money to Help Poor Communities, Police Are Buying Flock Cameras to Play With by Joe Wilkins
Friday September 4th, 2026 at 10:12 PM

Futurism
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With over 100,000 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) sprouting out of the ground over the past few years, you might be tempted to ask: “with what money?”

Drug money, as it turns out, though it’s not exactly what you might think. A bombshell investigation by Mother Jones found that police departments across the US are using settlement money from the opioid crisis meant for struggling communities to instead fund Flock surveillance cameras.

All together, Mother Jones identified 19 agencies across ten different states which spent nearly $1 million of opioids settlement funds on ALPRs from companies like Flock and Axon (though the publication notes that’s almost certainly an undercount.)

The funding pipeline looks like this: after massive pharmaceutical firms agreed to pay out a combined $50 billion for their role in the opioid crisis, state agencies responsible for allocating those funds decided that police departments would make efficient use of the dough. Police agencies — which already account for one of the largest shares of municipal expenditures in the US overall — made a heartwarming pitch: send us that opioid money, and we’ll use it to buy new police toys and stamp out drug dealers.

As police departments across the US have made abundantly clear, ALPR systems are much better for stalking and harassing innocent civilians than they are for actually fighting crime. And when it comes to combatting the opioid crisis, specifically, there are perhaps few police toys less suited to the task.

“While $50 billion may seem like a lot of funds, once it’s divided up over 18 years and thousands of localities, a lot of places really aren’t getting that much, particularly given the scope of the crisis,” Robyn Oster, director of policy at the Partnership to End Addiction told Mother Jones. “Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

Overall, it’s a slap in the face to anybody victimized by the man-made public health emergency that was — and still is — the opioid crisis. Rather than funding state-run rehab clinics or harm reduction campaigns, that money is being flushed away into AI surveillance cameras so that police can catch hardened criminals legally buying weed, or picking up petty cash from the ground.

“It’s just really not the way to make the most impact in addressing addiction,” Oster said.

More on Flock: Flock’s Network Is Losing Value to Cops as More and More of Its Cameras Go Offline

The post Instead of Using Opioid Settlement Money to Help Poor Communities, Police Are Buying Flock Cameras to Play With appeared first on Futurism.



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sarcozona
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Epiphyte City
rocketo
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seattle, wa
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I constantly think about the quote (literally no idea what it’s from) I read once about how teenage…
Friday September 4th, 2026 at 10:07 PM

Random inflexion
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transmascmikey:

reuscaptivus:

I constantly think about the quote (literally no idea what it’s from) I read once about how teenage girls want to fuck their band guy idols because it’s the closest they can get to wanting to BE their band guy idols. Like damn… way to recontextualize my entire adolescence with 1 sentence

this is the quote

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sarcozona
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Nadezh
6 days ago
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Melbourne, Australia
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The Slow Demolition of Vancouver by Michael Kalus
Friday September 4th, 2026 at 10:06 PM

Michael Kalus.ca
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The Slow Demolition of Vancouver

The Vancouver Aquatic Centre closed its doors for good in June 2026. By this fall, the building will be gone. Demolition equipment is already lined up — the city approved a $3.5 million contract to knock it down in July, per the council's own project report.

The building is fifty years old.

Read that again. Fifty. The Aquatic Centre opened in 1976, the year the CRTC said yes to curling on television and I was two years old. It is not a ruin. It is not a safety hazard. It is a building that somebody decided, at some point, was cheaper to demolish than to paint.

And the thing that troubles me about it isn't even the building itself. It's what the decision tells us about Vancouver — because the aquatic centre is just the most visible symptom of a disease the whole city shares.

We Used to Build Things That Lasted

If you think I'm exaggerating, read the city's own paperwork. The Current State Report that accompanies Vancouver's community centre strategy — the city grading its own homework — finds that over half of the community centre inventory is rated "poor" or "very poor" on the Facility Condition Index.

Britannia, Marpole-Oakridge, Ray-Cam, and the West End centre are all in various stages of renewal planning. Hastings Community Centre scores a facility condition of nearly 26% — firmly "poor" — and carries a high seismic risk rating, in an earthquake zone, while ABC forces through budgets that save the millionaire homeowners a few dollars a month.

Then, in September 2025, the city's Auditor General made it official. His audit covered the 46 recreation facilities the ParkBoard operates — 24 community centres, 14 pools, eight rinks — and put a number on the neglect: a funding deficit of $33 million per year, part of a citywide infrastructure deficit the AG pegs at $500 million per year.

That's not a rounding error. That's a city choosing, annually, not to keep its own buildings alive.

The Aquatic Centre didn't crumble. It was allowed to fail — a slow, budgeted neglect over decades, ending with a press release about exciting new waterfront opportunities.

The Shell Game

Here's where it gets really fun. In 2014, the city took over building maintenance for the Park Board's facilities under a formal agreement. The buildings, the boilers, the leaky roofs — that became the city's job. And ever since, the city's favourite talking point has been that the Park Board hasn't done enough to keep facilities up to date.

The Auditor General, with the patience of a man who has read all the contracts, notes that while the 2014 agreement exists, there is no operating-level agreement that actually defines who is responsible for what. A decade of shared maintenance duties, no written division of labour, and endless mutual finger-pointing.

I keep reading that sentence hoping it will make sense eventually. The city holds the wrench. The city blames the other hand for having no holes in its pocket. It's like watching someone burn down a kitchen and then complaining the chef isn't cooking fast enough.

The Slow Demolition of Vancouver
Vancouver Aquatic Centre

Zero Means Zero

So why does a city with one of the healthiest downtowns in North America have community centres held together with caulking? Because Vancouver underfunds itself. Deliberately.

Our property tax rate is the lowest in the entire metro area (compare it yourself) — lower than Burnaby, lower than Surrey, lower than every suburb that supposedly envies us.

We've been treating that as a badge of honour for decades instead of what it is: a fifteen-year-olds'-homework understanding of how municipal finance works. Low taxes aren't free. They compound, just like interest — except what compounds is the repair backlog.

And the current response to all this is a budget branded "Zero means Zero," which sounds decisive until you notice that the zero applies to tax increases and not to the crumbling. A tax freeze in a city with a $500 million annual infrastructure deficit isn't fiscal discipline. It's a demolition order with extra steps. You don't save the money; you just spend it later, at demolition-contract prices.

The Auditor General, again and to his credit, says the quiet part out loud: if these gaps aren't bridged with taxpayer funding, the city will have to choose which assets it keeps and which it "decommissions" — which services it simply discontinues.

Vancouver has apparently made its choice. Ask anyone who used to swim laps at the Aquatic Centre.

Who Actually Runs the Parks?

Meanwhile, the Park Board has developed a habit of signing contracts with private operators that read like they were negotiated by the operator. No rent — instead, the concessionaire pays a percentage of revenue. Sounds reasonable. It isn't. If your income is a slice of the pie, your incentive is control of the bakery, and you've paid nothing for the oven. That arrangement means for the operators of the Prospect Point Cafe if they dislikes what the Park Board is doing — say, don’t fancy a bike lane passing their business — they can simply shut the doors and wait for the city to blink.

Which, during the Stanley Park bike lane fight, is more or less what happened. A public street in a public park was effectively held hostage by the terms of a lease the public's own board signed.

Destinations, Not Cities

And then there's the philosophy underneath all of it. The Aquatic Centre replacement is the case study.

Back in 2022, Vancouverites voted in favour of borrowing $103 million for the renewal of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre — Bylaw 13442, if you want to read the fine print yourself.

Now, the ballot question itself was lawyerly about it — the wording covered "replacement, renewal or rehabilitation," a spread broad enough to drive a zamboni through.

But nobody has to guess what voters thought they were buying, because the city's own information sheet for the plebiscitespelled it out: the proposed first phase would focus on renewing the existing 50-metre lap pool and diving pool.

The 50-metre pool was the product on the shelf. That's what the brochure said. That's what people voted for.

What the city is now delivering is a 25-metre pool. Half the length. The response to "this isn't what we were told" is essentially a shrug about modern construction costs and the desire to create yet another destination by adding a water park feature to the centre.

Notice what survived the value-engineering process and what didn't. A destination on the waterfront — render-ready, ribbon-cuttable, great for tourism brochures — fits the budget. A genuine 50-metre facility, the thing the city's own materials promised as phase one, does not.

The community was sold infrastructure. The city is delivering an attraction. And this is exactly the trap the ballot wording built: borrow against a promise vague enough to mean anything, then let the meaning shrink in private, after the votes are counted. The lawyers were careful. The swimmers weren't consulted twice.

The same logic produced another example: at English Bay, the concession stand was replaced with a Cactus Club restaurant. A chain restaurant in a public park, on public land, and then — of course — the concession portion promptly closed, because the restaurant would rather you sit down and pay table prices. We traded cheap beach food for a table minimum.

Destinations photograph well. Maintenance does not. But a city is made of Tuesdays, not grand openings — of the swim lane at 6 a.m., the bench you sit on, the parent paying four dollars for a hot dog after soccer practice.

Vancouver keeps optimizing for the photograph and tourist.

What This Says About Us

The Vancouver Aquatic Centre is fifty years old and we're tearing it down. Not because it failed, but because letting it fail was cheaper than maintaining it, and because a replacement gives someone a ribbon to cut — provided the ribbon can be attached to something a little smaller than what was promised.

Zoom out and you can see the pattern: buildings we don't repair, mandates we quietly shrink, revenue we sign away, blame we redirect, and taxes we refuse to collect.

Vancouver likes to think of itself as a green, livable, world-class city.

World-class cities fund their libraries, their pools, and their community centres.

What the Aquatic Centre tells us is that we've become very good at the branding and very bad at the boring part. The wrecking balls are coming for the pool this fall. Judging by the state of the rest of the city, they'll have plenty more to do after.

The next municipal election is on Saturday, October 17, 2026.

Sources

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sarcozona
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mkalus
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iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
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