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Every technology has negatives that companies try to turn into externalities. The ones that hurt their non-customers are the most egregious and should be subject to the highest corrections. Hardly a new theory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

To give an example, we should be paying more for many electronics as the result of suits against most existing companies for not dealing with Tantalum sourcing.

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Not really a useful concept since it’s purely subjective and may not meaningfully exist in any way at all.

This is the kind of attitude that disturbs me about recent journalism and what appears to be the dominant opinion in the US.

Getting quantitative results is entirely useless if you don't want to think about the subjective qualitative reasons we thought some arbitrary metric might matter and how they might be limited. Having a high GDP or salary is about raising your quality of life and options. If you are actively prevented from living all sorts of other lives simply because they are not as profitable then you are poorer than the wild man.

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