Een zeemensliedje gemaakt voor de EuroFISHion Song Contest, bij de viering van de Wereld Vismigratiedag 2020.

Dit liedje beschrijft de levenscyclus van de paling, een trekvis die naar de Sargassozee zwemt om aldaar nakomelingen te verwekken, die terugzwemmen naar het ouderlijk leefgebied.

Evenals andere trekvissen (denk aan de zalm, houting, fint, spiering, zeeprik, zeeforel, steur) wordt de migratie van de paling gehinderd door dammen, stuwen en sluizen. En mede door vervuiling door stedelijk en industrieel afvalwater is het aantal trekkende zoetwatervissen is tussen 1970 en 2020 wereldwijd met meer dan 80% afgenomen.

Dat sportvissers daar last van hebben is nog tot daar aan toe, maar het is allemaal slecht voor het ecologische onderwaterleven. Dat moeten we niet willen.

Dus luister naar Jessica Law die nog hoop ziet voor de paling:

But safe to say we do have friends
We call on you to make amends
The paths you build are heaven-sent
A guide over troubled terrain

Pussy Riot said the charges against Aysoltan Niyazova were fabricated and politically motivated.

Gay Palace was dertig jaar lang een begrip in de stad. Het was niet alleen een van de grootste homodiscotheken van het land, maar ook een toevluchtsoord waar vrijheid en uitbundigheid samenkwamen. Een terugblik.

In Zuidland is afgelopen donderdag een 88-jarige man aangehouden. De politie kreeg een melding dat er een vuurwapen zou liggen in de woning van de bejaarde man. Bij betreden van de woning werd er inderdaad een doorgeladen vuurwapen aangetroffen. Het pistool is in beslag genomen.

Met zijn torenhoge masten, 56 meter lange blauwe romp en rijen klassieke gouden raampjes is 'De Eendracht' een schip dat opvalt. Stuurman Shee Mzee (34) voer het zeilschip de wereld rond, maar meert deze week aan in zijn vertrouwde Rotterdamse thuishaven. "Geen plek ter wereld kan tippen aan de Maas."

Er waren bijzondere schepen en een heleboel spektakel op, naast en boven het water tijdens de tweede dag van de jaarlijkse Wereldhavendagen in Rotterdam. Lees hier alle hoogtepunten terug!

Red Bull driver Max Verstappen pulled another lap out of the bag to claim pole position for the Italian Grand Prix, pipping McLaren rivals Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri in an incredibly close Qualifying session at Monza.

Lando Norris brought his Friday form forward by topping the timesheets during Free Practice 3 ahead of the Italian Grand Prix.

Live coverage of the Formula 1 Qualifying session for the 2025 Italian Grand Prix in Monza.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

from a box of slides postmarked September 18, 1941

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Social

Dat is een ingewikkelde vraag als je Chris Martin, zanger van Coldplay bent. Maar gelukkig kwam ook zijn hivemind na wat hakkelig hardop nadenken tot de enige juiste conclusie: ja, Israëliërs zijn mensen. Of ze nu naar het Coldplay-concert gaan of niet. Sterker nog, omdat hij het hardop zei, heeft zijn doorsnee-publiek dat nu ook een keer gehoord en wie weet is dit een van die eerste kleine stapjes richting een betere wereld, waar ook in een stad als Amsterdam het weer veilig is, voor het Oude Volk. 

Israëliërs zijn mensen, wat de volgende generatie academici ook beweert.

LA FARRAPONA (ANP) - Marc Soler heeft de veertiende etappe van de Ronde van Spanje gewonnen. De 31-jarige Spanjaard van UAE Team Emirates ontsnapte op de slotklim uit een grote kopgroep en kwam solo over de finish op de top van Alto de La Farrapona.

Jonas Vingegaard blijft het algemeen klassement aanvoeren. De Deense kopman van de Nederlandse ploeg Visma - Lease a Bike finishte met een achterstand van 39 seconden als tweede, met zijn grote concurrent João Almeida in zijn wiel. Soler bezorgde UAE Team Emirates de zevende ritzege in veertien etappes in deze Vuelta. Vingegaard heeft in het algemeen klassement een voorsprong van 48 seconden op Almeida.

Een kopgroep van 24 renners nam ruim zes minuten voorsprong op het peloton, waar de ploeggenoten van Vingegaard lang op kop reden. Op de Puerto de San Lorenzo, de voorlaatste beklimming van de dag, namen de renners van UAE Team Emirates de regie over in de achtervolgende groep. Ze hoopten dat hun kopman Almeida nog net zo goed in vorm was als vrijdag, toen hij de dertiende etappe naar de top van de gevreesde Angliru won.

Voorsprong

Onderaan de Alto de la Farrapona was de voorsprong van de vluchters tot ruim drie minuten geslonken. Soler concludeerde dat het tempo van de kopgroep te laag was. De Spanjaard viel aan en kreeg Johannes Staune-Mittet mee. De Noor kon het tempo van Soler even volgen, maar haakte 15 kilometer voor de finish af.

Zo ontstond een beetje de vreemde situatie dat Soler op kop reed en zijn ploeggenoten het tempo in het peloton verhoogden om hun kopman Almeida te helpen. Uiteindelijk hield Soler stand en bleek Almeida niet in staat om Vingegaard te lossen. De Deen passeerde hem zelf tijdens een sprintje naar de finish.

MONZA (ANP) - Max Verstappen heeft enigszins verrassend poleposition veroverd in de Grote Prijs van Italië. De viervoudig wereldkampioen was de snelste in zijn Red Bull in de kwalificatierace op het circuit van Monza. Het is zijn vijfde pole van dit jaar.

Verstappen versloeg de coureurs van McLaren en Ferrari op de hogesnelheidsbaan van Monza en dat was vooraf niet verwacht. Hij was in zijn tweede run van de derde en laatste sessie 0,077 seconde sneller dan Lando Norris van McLaren. Kampioenschapsleider Oscar Piastri reed de derde tijd in zijn McLaren. Hij gaf 0,133 seconde toe op Verstappen.

BRUSSEL (ANP/BELGA) - Iraniërs uit heel Europa demonstreren in Brussel massaal tegen het regime in Iran. De exacte opkomst is nog onduidelijk, maar persbureau Belga houdt het op tienduizenden deelnemers. Zij worden toegesproken door prominenten als de voormalige Amerikaanse vicepresident Mike Pence, de Belgische oud-premier Guy Verhofstadt en John Bercow, voormalig voorzitter van het Britse Lagerhuis.

De betogers verzamelden zich onder meer bij het Atomium, een toeristische trekpleister in de Belgische hoofdstad. "We staan hier vandaag om onze stem te laten horen tegen het Iraanse regime en om Maryam Rajavi, de voorzitster van de Nationale Raad van het Iraanse verzet, te ondersteunen in haar pleidooi voor een Iraanse democratie", aldus een woordvoerder van de Nationale Raad van het Iraanse Verzet.

Deelnemers komen uit allerlei landen. Een aanwezige verslaggever van de VRT zag bussen uit Duitsland, Polen, het Verenigd Koninkrijk en Nederland. De omroep bericht dat ook veel vrouwen onder de betogers zijn. Iran wordt sinds de Iraanse revolutie van eind jaren zeventig bestuurd door een islamitisch regime en vrouwen hebben in het openbare leven allerlei beperkingen opgelegd gekregen.

De organisatoren sturen aan op Europese sancties om het Iraanse regime te verzwakken. Ook willen ze dat de Revolutionaire Garde, een gewapende steunpilaar van de machthebbers, op de terreurlijst komt. Pence zei dat de Iraanse machthebbers banger zijn voor dissidenten in het buitenland dan voor andere mogendheden. Daarom wordt overgegaan tot intimidatie, betoogde hij voor de mensenmassa. "Maar die intimidatie is duidelijk mislukt. De Iraniërs zijn niet bang meer."

De spionage-operatie zou plaats hebben gevonden voorafgaand aan nucleaire besprekingen tussen de Verenigde Staten en Noord-Korea in 2019. Bij de operatie kwamen volgens The New York Times meerdere Noord-Koreanen om het leven.

Na een zomer vol gedoe en teleurstellende peilingen moest VVD-lijsttrekker Dilan Yesilgöz zaterdag het congres toespreken. Ze klonk rustiger en minder polariserend dan eerder – al zette ze GroenLinks-PvdA opnieuw weg.

Quan Yuan Photo has added a photo to the pool:

Black Spur Drive, Victoria, Australia. A road winds gracefully through a lush green forest with towering trees and carpeting ferns. The mist softens the scene. It’s the kind of place where time seems to slow, and every breath feels infused with the scent of trees and damp earth.

tintinetmilou has added a photo to the pool:

Green Car Tsubasa Shinkansen

Today's links

• Stock buybacks are stock swindles: Raising the value of a stock without raising the value of the company.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Marshmellow longtermism; Physicists are not epidemiologists; CO asphyxiation accounts for half of Hurricane Laura deaths.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Stock buybacks are stock swindles (permalink)

Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure, but it's worth paying attention to this, because this form of stock swindle stands to make billionaires a lot richer (and thus more powerful).

American companies are headed for the stock buying-backest year on record, having already pissed away $1.1 trillion in 2025:

https://www.baystreet.ca/stockstowatch/21522/Stock-Buybacks-Surpass-1-Trillion

So what's a stock buyback, then? On the surface, it's pretty straightforward: during a stock buyback, the company uses its cash reserves to buy its own stock. When they do this, the supply of shares goes down, so the price per share goes up.

Say a company has issued 1,000 shares, and they're selling at $1,000 per share. That company has a "market cap" of $1,000,000 (1,000 x 1,000). Now the company takes $500,000 out of its bank account and buys half of those shares. Now you have a million-dollar company with only 500 shares, so each of those shares is now worth $2,000 (1,000,000/500 = 2,000).

Why is this so bad?

Let's start with what capitalism's advocates claim about the power of markets. Markets, they say, are a kind of alchemist's crucible, a vessel that transforms self-interest to a public good. Capitalism's theory is that if we let people pursue their own profit, they will chase efficiency, because anything that lowers costs will leave more profit for capitalists to reap. But as those capitalists discover better, more productive ways to get goods and services to market, they face competition, who force them to accept lower profits, which makes everything cheaper and more abundant for us. That means that even the greediest capitalists have to find new ways to increase efficiency in order to recapture their profits. Lather, rinse, repeat, and capitalism can make more material abundance available that we can dream of.

This isn't just what capitalists say – it's also the thesis of Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j08.a1xP.KLkhosG_PxkP&smid=url-share

Marx and Engels were seriously impressed by the productive power of capitalism, but they had a prescient suspicion that capitalists hate capitalism, and would do whatever they could to interrupt this process. After all, if you can prevent competitors from entering the market, you can innovate just once, find a new way to make something that's cheaper and better, and never share those profits with your customers or workers, because you won't have to outbid your competitors. The alchemical reaction is halted at the point where capitalists are rewarded for their efficiency, and they are never forced to repeat that performance.

Monopoly isn't the only way that capitalists can thwart this transformation of greed into abundance. The finance sector is awash in illegal scams that let capitalists get rich without increasing efficiency or making anyone except for themselves better off.

Take "wash-trading": this is when a seller buys their own products, sometimes using an alias, other times using a shill. The idea is to trick people into thinking that something is valuable and liquid (that is, that you can easily find buyers for it), when it is really worthless and undesirable. Remember all those multi-million-dollar NFT sales? Almost every one was a wash trade, a way to pump and dump.

The problem here isn't just that the buyer is getting defrauded. It's also that the seller is being "allocated capital" (getting money) that gives them power – power to decide what else should be bought and sold in our society.

Remember the alchemy theory of markets: if you're a productive capital allocator (if you make things that lots of people desire), you are given more capital to allocate further. This is the market's "invisible hand": elevating the people with proven track records to positions of power over their neighbors and their society, on the basis that they have shown themselves capable of enriching us all, because (the theory goes), capitalism rewards people whose greed translates into a common benefit. As Adam Smith wrote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Wash trading creates misallocations of capital. It makes stupid people rich, and lets them allocate capital to projects that make us all worse off. The whole theory of markets – the reason we're all supposed to leave money that we could all use to make ourselves better off in the hands of the wealthy – is that wealth is the payoff for efficiency, and we are all better off when the most efficient allocators make investment decisions.

Modern theorists of capitalism tell us that this isn't alchemy, it's computing. The market is a giant "information-processing" system that incorporates trillions of "price signals" (how much we are willing to spend and how much we are willing to accept, for goods, services and labor). The market processes all these signals to direct allocation and production, ensuring that shortages are met with increases in supply, and that overproduction is tamped down by falling prices, and that inefficiencies provoke investment in process improvements.

Which brings me back to stock buybacks. Stock buybacks are a way to make a company's shares more valuable, even as the company itself becomes less valuable.

Think of it this way: imagine you've got a company with 1,000 shares, worth $1,000 each, and this company has $500,000 in the bank. The company is valued at $1,000,000 (1,000 x $1,000), and half of that valuation is based on its cash reserves ($500,000 in the bank), which means the other half must be reflected in the company's physical plant and "intangibles" (knowledge, contracts, efficient team structures, copyrights, patents, etc).

The company announces a stock buyback: they will withdraw the $500,000 from its bank account and buy half the shares. The company is now $500,000 poorer, which means that its shares should go down in value. After all, that $500,000 is capital that could have been mobilized to make the company more profitable: it could have been spent to hire new people, do R&D, or buy machines that lower the price of making the company's products. That $500,000 represented the company's future growth potential, and the company has just pissed away that potential.

This is a company whose future growth has gotten much more expensive, because it will have to borrow in order to fund any expansion. Its shares should be worth less than before. By zeroing out its cash reserves, the company has actually reduced its value by more than the value of those reserves, because it is now stuck in place, forced to fund expansion with debt rather than capital. It is at risk from "shocks" like higher rents or higher energy prices. It's a brittle, hollow vessel for the intangibles that made up the other $500,000 in valuation before the buyback. It will be worse at turning those intangibles into profits in the future.

But the buyback hasn't reduced the price of the company's shares: it has doubled that price. The company has made its shares more valuable while making itself less valuable. If you think that markets are a computer that calculates efficient allocation based on prices, this should freak you the fuck out, because as we all know, the iron law of computing is "garbage in, garbage out." The company is feeding an objectively – and grossly – false price signal into the computer's input hopper.

That's why stock buybacks were illegal until 1982, when Ronald Reagan's SEC changed its Rule 10-b to legitimize this form of stock manipulation and turn stock swindlers into billionaires:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/#executive-excess

At root, stock buybacks are just wash-trading, the company buying its own shares to move their price, without doing anything to justify that price movement. Before Reagan legalized stock buybacks, companies returned capital to their investors through dividends. Why would companies prefer buybacks to dividends? Because corporate executives hold tons of shares in their employer's company, and it's much better for them to push those share prices higher even as they gut the company's ability to function.

So why should you care about this? After all, statistically you own either very little or no stock. The richest 10% of US households own more than 93% of all stocks held by Americans:

https://inequality.org/article/stock-ownership-concentration/

Your 401(k) account might see a small boost from this stock swindle, but again, statistically, that 401(k) is unmeasurably infinitesimal compared to the holdings of America's oligarchs.

Stock buybacks are a way of making the stock owning class much richer, by swindling everyday investors – who don't understand that companies who drain their cash reserves are less valuable – into buying shares in the companies they loot.

And that's why you should care: in the first 8 months of 2025, Trump has allowed America's oligarchs to get $1.1 trillion richer. That's money that you don't have – you won't get the lower prices and higher wages and superior goods that $1.1t would have paid for if companies had spent it on process improvements. It's money they have, which they can spend on things that make you worse off – buying everything from Twitter to the presidency.

There's a lot to be furious about right now, like the masked fascist goons kidnapping our neighbors off the street, and the upside-down health system that is reviving the vaccine-controlled deadly pandemics of yesteryear. But the reason those fascist goons and antivaxers are able to decide how we all live our lives is that a very small number of very rich people converted their stolen wealth to illegitimate power, which they wield over us.

Anyone who lived through the 2008 crisis knows that finance is a deadly weapon. Let the finance sector run your economy and they will steal everything and leave you jobless, homeless and hungry. Trump is a casino guy, and he knows that the only guy making money in a casino is the owner, who gets to set the odds at the machines and tables. By opening the floodgates to trillions in stock buybacks, Trump is turning us all into the suckers at the table, and turning his oligarch investors into little autocrats, with the power to degrade our lives and steal our future.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Five for 50 – Anil Dash https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-for-fifty/

• How To Touch Grass https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/powerandmagic/how-to-touch-grass

• Why This Economy Feels Weird and Scary https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-this-economy-feels-weird-and

• A Navajo weaving of an integrated circuit: the 555 timer https://www.righto.com/2025/09/marilou-schultz-navajo-555-weaving.html

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Interview with mom who won’t pay off the RIAA shakedown https://web.archive.org/web/20051204021157/https://p2pnet.net/story/6134

#5yrsago Political ads have very small effect-sizes https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#persuadables

#5yrsago CO asphyxiation accounts for half of Hurricane Laura deaths https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#co

#5yrsago Trump is a salesman https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#cialdinism

#5yrsago Physicists overestimate their epidemiology game https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#hubris

#1yrago Marshmallow Longtermism https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/04/deferred-gratification/#selective-foresight

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11
  https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman

• Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
  https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/

• Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
  https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
  https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047

• Techtonic with Mark Hurst
  https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658

• Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
  https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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