yeah - i'm done with that, now, convinced the pull was comprehensive.

i should have an outline posted here relatively soon....

i'm concluding that the archive.org servers somehow knew how to remove duplicates. this is very curious to me...

i haven't completely convinced myself that the pull was complete, but i'm getting there.

so, what that means is that this is the earliest media list that i've got:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010628155850/http://chat.carleton.ca:80/~jparent2/music/music.html

and, i'm going to guess that this is actually dated to something more like winter, 2001 because radiohead's amnesiac is not in the list, and that would have been a prompt snag.

there's still the tripod site, if i'm lucky. but i've been hitting it for a few days now and it's just 403s. i'm not going to give up on that very easily...

i really need to focus.






.......now.

what this "small business" rhetoric actually does is undermine unionization, and take away the bargaining power of workers. if the company you work for only has a handful of employees, you are at the absolute mercy of your boss - you cannot  push back on anything. the result is a more stratified, class-oriented society with a larger bourgeois class and a subsequent underclass with almost no functional rights.

"small businesses" is code for "class war". it's divide and conquer.

leftists should not be buying into liberal rhetoric about small businesses; they should be pushing for big unions, instead.

in the context of an amazon, what that means is that what sanders is doing - pushing for the rights of the workers - is the better option. if warren has her way, they all end up as unpaid interns in unsuccessful businesses that are unnecessarily competing in saturated markets and that need yearly tax breaks to put off their inevitable collapse.

do small businesses unionize?

do they offer dental plans for workers?

then why would i care about them?

i, like most people, don't go to amazon to buy things made by independent sellers; i go to amazon to buy amazon products.

that's why amazon beat ebay...

i think it's just fundamentally a misunderstanding of what amazon actually is.

ok ok.

so, the argument is apparently that amazon is a "marketplace" rather than an online sore.

uhmm. ok.

who thinks that?

amazon is providing a space for people to sell their products. they don't have to do that. and, if the government is going to get in it's face about it, they should just stop doing it.

i firmly doubt that much of anybody interprets amazon as a "marketplace"; most people just think it's a store.

if i were amazon, i would actually push for the opposite argument, as a compromise, if i had to - i would convert amazon into a brand product, and throw the third party sellers off the site.

i'm just thinking this through.

i'm a musician. is this going to mean i can't sell my own product on my own website - that i'll only be able to sell other people's music?

would a grocery store be unable to sell it's no name products on it's website? will walmart be unable to sell it's house lines on it's website?

it just seems fundamentally backwards. if amazon is going to sell anything at all, it's own products and services ought to be the thing that it sells, not the products and services of others.

https://mashable.com/article/elizabeth-warren-amazon-basics/#HRhAEtYf2gqn

well, they can change the concept of antitrust, in theory - and, maybe it is indeed a little out of date. i think that is the simple takeaway from the discussion: if you're going to be talking about antitrust laws in 2019 in any context at all, the entire theory needs to be updated.

but, again: i don't think this is a step forwards.

there was an article at business insider trying to argue the approach is left-wing because it's focus on local job creation (however disingenuously, however abstractly) contrasts with the chicago school focus on price. this is a weird characterization of the difference between 20th century liberalism and neo-liberalism in the first place, but that's like arguing that churchill was on the left because he fought against hitler. it really restricts the spectrum - but that is itself pretty normal, at this point.

here's an idea - maybe the internet should be approached as a tool to use to better society, rather than as a way to make a profit. maybe we should be basing policy on the use value of these sites, rather than scheming up ways they can make the most money for the most people. so, maybe the government policy around google search should actually be to maximize it's function and use as a search engine. i know: this is radical.

warren has been clear enough that she wants to support free-market capitalism, which means looking at the internet through the lens of entrepreneurialism, rather than through the lens of use and function. a service is about an accumulation process, rather than the service itself. this is happening when americans are rejecting this kind of logic in other sectors. so, it's up to the american people to decide if they agree with her or if they want to align their views on the internet with their evolving views on healthcare and education.

http://time.com/5548262/elizabeth-warren-antitrust-amazon-facebook-google/