“Amazon has secured a major win in its lawsuit against Perplexity. A federal judge has ordered Perplexity to block its AI agents from placing orders on Amazon without permission. In the lawsuit filed in November, Amazon accused Perplexity of using its Comet AI browser to covertly access the Amazon website and users’ accounts to place orders on their behalf. Before filing the complaint, Amazon had also sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter accusing it of disguising Comet as Chrome to ensure its AI agents could avoid detection. … Amazon has welcomed the preliminary injunction. … For the e-commerce giant, the case could also be about protecting its advertising revenue. As Bloomberg notes, Amazon earned $68 billion from ads last year, as brands are still willing to pay huge sums for prime visibility across the platform. If customers purchase products without visiting the website, that revenue could take a hit.” (03/11/26)
“Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven’t improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn’t recovered since. A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations, so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive. What’s the solution? Many have been proposed, some with very snazzy websites.” (03/11/26)
“It is impossible to understand the recent politics of the Western world without considering a giant sociological transformation—one that, inevitable though it may seem in retrospect, nearly nobody predicted: The bourgeoisie has switched sides. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the proletariat was the political stronghold of the left. The bourgeoisie was the stronghold of the right. Indeed, the assumption that affluent professionals would tend to be conservative is reflected in the most famous political treatises and pieces of art that the period produced. Karl Marx called on the workers, not on the lawyers or freelance illustrators, of the world to unite. … But of late, these realities have started to shift, with huge impacts on contemporary politics.” (03/11/26)
“The strongest objections to fiat money are moral and institutional, not legal. Inflating a currency erodes trust over time, but it isn’t counterfeiting.” (03/11/26)
“For anyone looking into the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, what’s laid bare is not a history of friendship, diplomacy, and mutual respect, but rather a past marked with covert action, harsh rhetoric, and now, hot war.” (03/11/26)
Source: Property and Environment Research Center
by Jonathan Wood
“Federal permitting reform is usually framed as a question of efficiency: why do approvals take so long, and how can agencies move faster? But recent bipartisan permitting talks have surfaced that the problem is not just efficiency but also certainty. Even when permits are issued, the government often retains broad discretion to pull them back, grinding projects to a halt and stranding investments. Rather than providing the security of property rights or an enforceable contract, federal permits can be more of a promise from one whose fingers are crossed behind their back.” (03/10/26)
“British police said they had banned a pro-Iranian march due to take place in London on Sunday, citing the possibility of ‘extreme tensions’ with counter-protesters and the risk posed by Tehran during the conflict in the Middle East. The Al Quds march in central London is organised annually by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which the police said was supportive of the Iranian regime. The threshold to ban a protest is high in Britain, with the police saying this was the first time the power had been invoked in 14 years, but the risks of public disorder were ‘so severe’ it was right to block it. The ban also applies to any counter-protest marches.” (03/11/26)
