Alvaro Bedoya
@BedoyaUSA
For the little guy. Former Federal Trade Commissioner. Founder @GeorgetownCPT & @EsperanzaDMV.
A man coughing up blood. Men zip-tied face down on a wet floor. CCTV turned off. Men forced to eat off of a chair like animals while handcuffed. Solitary confinement if you complain. This is three paragraphs from a report. It comes days after we learned that detainees in…
A bill to prohibit the use of surveillance-based price and wage setting is being introduced in the House today. It's called the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act of 2025. The legislation is being proposed by @RepCasar.
One of the lamentable aspects of RPA is the judicial neutering of the section (2(f)) that allows FTC and other enforcers to go after the buyer power abuses of large chains directly
I'll add two things to the Robinson-Patman Act discourse - Imposing a market power requirement is a way of turning the law into a dead letter - Suppliers can show price discrimination in favor of large buyers is cost justified. If they can't substantiate that, that's on them.
Muddled? You’re citing to a guy whose first source is a *chatbot* that *he prompted.* Billionaire big box stores have the power to force their suppliers to cut them secret deals that stick their competitors with higher prices. That power also lets them jack up their own prices…
I hesitate to post this but since I’m not running for anything or trying to get you to subscribe to a Substack I’ll use this as a chance to say 1) If this president does something illegal to you, don’t go along with it. You should definitely not go along with it if he’s doing it…
CUT OFF THEIR FINGERS AND TOES AND PULL OUT THEIR TEETH. THEN SEND THEM BACK
This is happening right now
Read this account by a British surgeon of treating a woman in Gaza shot by a quadcopter while breastfeeding her child in a tent and then try to imagine the general mentality of the person piloting the drone who hunted her down and then pulled the trigger.
ICE detain U.S. citizen outside grocery store—beat him with baton, shove his head into the ground & give him a concussion. "I told them where I was born, I had an ID, a social, a birth certificate," he said. "They didn't' care about none of that." Now in the hospital after his…
Tabarrok completely misses what @ZephyrTeachout is talking about: sweetheart deals banned by the Robinson-Patman Act but successive FTCs have refused to enforce. His whole response is to chalk everything up to economies of scale. Also lol at calling in Google AI for a tag-team
Take @ZephyrTeachout's observations (rather than her muddled arguments) seriously, and you'll become even more convinced Costco is a force for good.
“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” 8th Amendment, US Constitution.
A man coughing up blood. Men zip-tied face down on a wet floor. CCTV turned off. Men forced to eat off of a chair like animals while handcuffed. Solitary confinement if you complain. This is three paragraphs from a report. It comes days after we learned that detainees in…
The irony is that, despite the sneering tone at "populists," it's this person who has failed to keep up with modern economics
Lots of really bad economics in today’s NYT op-ed on grocery store competition. Take this passage for example:
Thousands of workers tried a 4-day week, and their mental and physical health improved. A study tracked 2,896 workers across 141 organizations for six months. Reducing the work week by 8 hours led to better physical and mental health, with no loss of productivity.
It's sad that 5-7 years ago this would dominate the news cycle and now it will get barely a passing mention from a few people on X. This is outrageous. The loss of any sense of accountability by authority figures will be devastating to humanity and feels unsustainable.
This is America Last. This president was supposed to be against foreign wars. Now he’s for the wars and bringing Abu Ghraib to America
A man coughing up blood. Men zip-tied face down on a wet floor. CCTV turned off. Men forced to eat off of a chair like animals while handcuffed. Solitary confinement if you complain. This is three paragraphs from a report. It comes days after we learned that detainees in…
When you steal from rich people it's theft. When you steal from regular people, it's innovation.
2. Anthropic's CEO says that AI may 'cure cancer' but also eliminate entry-level jobs. Policymakers need to get a hold of that, he says. Weird he doesn't want to talk about how his firm's models are trained on massively pirated content. thebignewsletter.com/p/why-are-we-p…
The result was food deserts and concentration of power in the hands of a few companies, who then, rationally, use that power to exploit crises. Recovering that wisdom will require local experiments and listening to the independent grocers that live with price discrimination.