"When Donald Trump agreed to attend a dinner with the largest investors in his own-brand cryptocurrency, he transformed the TRUMP coin into something else entirely: a means of access to the sitting president. As a consequence, Trump could find himself at odds with constitutional prohibitions of bribery and corruption, experts claim.

Trump’s dinner announcement on April 23 instigated a trading frenzy that, on paper, added hundreds of millions of dollars to his net worth. Two subsidiaries of the Trump Organization, a conglomerate owned by the president, control 80 percent of the total supply of the coin, which shot up in price by almost 60 percent after the announcement. Those subsidiaries also profit from any surge in trading volume as rent-seeking intermediaries.

However, the dinner maneuver may have political consequences for Trump. In creating the opportunity for anybody with sufficient wealth to purchase an audience, Trump risks falling foul of a part of the US Constitution—the emoluments clauses—that prohibit the president from accepting gifts or financial compensation from foreign and domestic state actors. In a worst-case scenario for the president, the potential for negative optics could add fuel to calls for his impeachment."

https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-quest-for-crypto-riches-is-a-constitutional-scandal-waiting-to-happen/

#USA #Trump #Crypto #CryptoCurrencies #Memecoins #USConstitution #Kleptocracy #Corryption #RentSeeking #Emoluments

The thesis that each unauthorized use of a copyrighted work amounts to a lost sale going down the drain...

"At times, it sounded like the case was the authors’ to lose, with Chhabria noting that Meta was “destined to fail” if the plaintiffs could prove that Meta’s tools created similar works that cratered how much money they could make from their work. But Chhabria also stressed that he was unconvinced the authors would be able to show the necessary evidence. When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”

When defendants invoke the fair use doctrine, the burden of proof shifts to them to demonstrate that their use of copyrighted works is legal. Boies stressed this point during the hearing, but Chhabria remained skeptical that the authors’ legal team would be able to successfully argue that Meta could plausibly crater their sales. He also appeared lukewarm about whether Meta’s decision to download books from places like LibGen was as central to the fair use issue as the plaintiffs argued it was. “It seems kind of messed up,” he said. “The question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”

A ruling in the Kadrey case could play a pivotal role in the outcomes of the ongoing legal battles over generative AI and copyright."

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-lawsuit-copyright-hearing-artificial-intelligence/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #FairUse #Copyright #IP #RentSeeking #Meta #Llama #LLMs #Chatbots

Australians are being ripped off by gas export corporations.

This briefing note highlights the case study of INPEX, a Japanese corporation that exports gas through Darwin.

Inpex exports more gas than is used in NSW, Victoria and SA combined, pays no royalties or petroleum tax and pays virtually no corporate tax.

Despite this, INPEX regularly criticises Australian Government policies.

Full report: https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/P1829-INPEX-briefing-note-Web.pdf

#kleptocracy #rentseeking #AusVotes2025

1/4
Can I just randomly rant about price discrimination for a minute? I sometimes work with trade secret law and some of the most closely guarded trade secrets I run across are pricing structures. I suppose you can tell some other stories about why you’d want to keep prices a secret, but I’m pretty sure that the main reason is price discrimination.

#economics
#policy
#pricediscrimination
#rentSeeking
#corporations
#corporategreed
#rant

Fuck Lu Heng and fuck "Cloud Innovation" for trying to privatize and sell IP addresses.

Source: https://www.capeindependent.com/article/the-campaign-to-subvert-africas-internet-registry

#internet #rentSeeking

@gocu54 @ahltorp @zakalwe

#ruleOfLaw is corrupted by #plutocracy (i didn't say #capitalism in sensitivity to your beliefs: i am asking you to see a difference between #rentSeeking #parasites and a #freeMarket)

they profit at the expense of our debilitation, bankruptcy, and early death

in such a scenario rule of law itself has been compromised

because *the law* supports mass murder on a grand scale for profit

so i ask you to understand #luigi is inevitable

i am not asking you to embrace him

@MichaelPorter @GhostOnTheHalfShell @davidaugust that's because they "#diversity" their portfolio and can cover their expenses as #Landlords and other #Rentseeking #ValueRemovers.

• After all, they too want a #Neofeudalist & #Christofacist #dictatorship!

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/114294930127912356

What distinguishes #neoliberalism and #neofeudalism from #capitalism is not that profits are moral, but that profits are morality, itself. There is nothing moral which is not profit-driven, to the neoliberal.

Neoliberalism and neofeudalism are really two names for the same ideology. They are a hypertrophic, cancerous system of voracious #rentseeking predicated on the development and maintenance of economic #monopoly power grounded in the #ownership of Nature, not of Capital.

#PoliticalEconomy

@gimulnautti When you say "charging rent on everything", I'll translate: "subscription business model". #RentSeeking is ancient. #Subscription is modern.

@kajer #CloudFlare is a #RogueISP and their "business" is at best #ValueRemoving #rentseeking but mire iften than not just a digital #RacketeeringScheme!

"Requiring AI developers to get authorization from rightsholders before training models on copyrighted works would limit competition to companies that have their own trove of training data, or the means to strike a deal with such a company. This would result in all the usual harms of limited competition—higher costs, worse service, and heightened security risks—as well as reducing the variety of expression used to train such tools and the expression allowed to users seeking to express themselves with the aid of AI. As the Federal Trade Commission recently explained, if a handful of companies control AI training data, “they may be able to leverage their control to dampen or distort competition in generative AI markets” and “wield outsized influence over a significant swath of economic activity.”

Legacy gatekeepers have already used copyright to stifle access to information and the creation of new tools for understanding it. Consider, for example, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, widely considered to be the first lawsuit over AI training rights ever filed."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/ai-and-copyright-expanding-copyright-hurts-everyone-heres-what-do-instead

#AI #GenerativeAI #Copyright #AITraining #IP #RentSeeking #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Censorship

The typical cost for rental housing in this economy right now? $1,965.

Holy Cow! That is WAY more than my monthly mortgage payment on a 3 bedroom 2 bath sitting on over an acre. #rent #rent-seeking #economics
Rents keep rising, but not everywhere - Marketplace

Don't know who needs to hear this, but subscription "family plans" aren't real. You are just lowering subscription costs for higher switching costs, at a bad exchange rate.

#subscriptions #capitalism #rentseeking #cloud

"Popular shadow library LibGen continues to face trouble. In addition to ongoing technical problems, a U.S. lawsuit resulted in several domain suspensions and seizures in recent weeks. To top it off, the shadow library was just added to Germany's pirate site blocking list, making it harder to access the remaining domains."

https://torrentfreak.com/domain-seizures-and-german-isp-blockade-add-to-libgens-troubles-241222/

#Copyright #IP #Libgen #Censorship #ShadowLibraries #A2K #RentSeeking

The death of #NetNeutrality was (or is) inevitable, so long as our entire socio-economic system is constructed upon monopoly #rentseeking.

The only way around this is #LandValueTaxation, reclamation of the value of artificial and natural economic monopoly privileges and the redistribution of that wealth to the community, which is solely responsible for its creation.

#LVT is the only meaningful pathway by which we can provide a negative feedback loop on monopoly power.

Here come the rentseekers, feudal lords who extract rents from everything that moves. I don't like AI-based art because I find it mediocre most of the time. These rentseekers are only degrading the public's opinion of their work when they feel so enraged with people generating works with the help of AI tools. They're telling to anyone that wants to listen that they're so afraid of the lack of quality of their creations that they even fear that something created with the help of machine learning can make them loose their careers. All-in-all, they're a total shame for people who really love art.

"People working in the music sector will lose almost a quarter of their income to artificial intelligence within the next four years, according to the first global economic study examining the impact of the emerging technology on human creativity.

Those working in the audiovisual sector will also see their income shrink by more than 20% as the market for generative AI grows from €3bn (A$4.9bn) annually to a predicted €64bn by 2028.

The findings were released in Paris on Wednesday by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), representing more than 5 million creators worldwide.

The report concluded that while the AI boom will substantially enrich giant tech companies, creators’ rights and income streams will be drastically reduced unless policymakers step in."

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/dec/04/artificial-intelligence-music-industry-impact-income-loss

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Music #RentSeeking #Feudalism

Aaargh batteries! Another fast moving target.

A domestic install cost is solidly in the $1000/kWhr range, but factory cell cost is now hitting $100/kWhr this year.

I'll run with $500/kWhr.

Generating capacity first.

For solar to match the annual output of our reference 1GW plant (ignoring time of generation for now) needs around 5 GW of install. (I'm basing that off my own rooftop install's performance over the last 5 years.) That 5GW of cells will yield around the 7000 GWhr of electricity over the course of a year, plus or minus a percentage for weather, location etc etc.

So $5B for generating capacity. On to dispatch.

Look, I'm going to run with the conventional wisdom here. When sizing a battery for overnight dispatch a solid working estimate is for storage that can support 4 hours of peak delivery. In our case that leaves us at 4 GWhrs.

(I'm juicing the numbers in favour of nuclear here. Recall that its availability factor was 80% of peak, so arguably I should go with a like for like of 3.2 GWhrs. Not going to though).

At $500 per kWhr that runs us $2B.

Grand total of $7B. 35% of our nuclear option.

Circling back to the start, the stand up build cost of our nuclear plant was $20B. But achievable real world best case is closer to $9B, which is now within a reasonable distance (not close exactly, that would be doing violence to the language, but they can at least see each other and wave).

To me, there are 2, say, clear tie breakers.

The first is that nuclear isn't being built in Australia, while renewables plus battery is. So we're comparing desktop possibility with realised constructed actual along with actually having the engineer/procure/construct skillset in place right now. That's a huge advantage.

The other is that renewables are built out, over time, but each individual unit has the potential at least to be generating right away.. A nuclear plant doesn't generate until it's done. Once the first solar panel or wind turbine is up and running, though, it's generating. So there is a year 1 benefit from renewables that you don't see with nuclear at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/04/no-bigger-rent-seeking-parasite-than-nuclear-industry-matt-kean-tells-former-coalition-colleagues-in-heated-debate

#auspol #nuclear #rentseeking

4/n

@EUCommission will this mean that #Apple isn't allowed to deamdn #RentSeeking with bs like "platform fees" from #Developers?

If not, why??

Have you heard of the term #CyberMugging? It denotes the strategy used by companies to force you to pay a #subscription by locking out the devices you bought from them (printer, heated seats, etc) using software and the internet and thus creating an artificial scarcity. In other words, digital #RentSeeking on steroids.

[1/3]

Why should tech companies pay for the infrastructure work that #BigTelco companies should be doing? This is just #RentSeeking behavior.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/italy-moves-ensure-big-tech-share-costs-telecom-networks-rollout-2024-10-21/

#Italy #Rentism #BigTech