Just to be clear - this is a *corporate* mafia. Springer Verlag is one of the largest publishers across academic disciplines, and have a chokehold on scholarship that causes real harms. Most working academics would love to see them disappear so long as there exists a truly open academic publishing ecosystem that makes and keeps scholarship open and free.

I'm old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that you could pay for the content on the front end, and then not have ads constantly interrupting your viewing. It seems hilariously quaint now: no ads shoved down your throat at window-vibrating volumes 10-15 times/hour? These companies piloted and doubled down on systemic enshittification before Cory Doctorow gave it a name. They richly deserve to disappear forever, unmourned and unmissed.

Corporate rent-seeking has *always* had potential (national) security implications. It seems bizarre that it's only this sort of thing that's bringing it to attention. Just by sheer dint of not wanting to be nickeled and dimed to death, countless Americans are happy to bring unvetted tech from dodgy sources into their homes. What could go wrong?

Seriously: I don't wish to be reductive here, but how in the chrome-plated, ever-loving f*ck did they think this was going to go any differently (or even this well)? Have they not the slimmest idea of how LLMs work, or of their excruciatingly well documented drawbacks? Is WaPo's AI adoption policy run by dimwitted children?

Stock buybacks are the most transparently ludicrous way companies puff up their own valuation. I honestly can't believe analysts take it as a serious measure of health; surely a company whose principal means of driving stock prices is essentially financial sleight of hand should be devalued by those who pay attention to such things.

...is whether anyone is paying attention to the connections between NSO/OSY and the Israeli state. It's not a great look to have American companies put in the position of gatekeeping whether foreign surveillance of USPersons is okay or not.