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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

The more I read about how big businesses operate the more I think it resembles the weather. There's no intelligence in there, it's just random fluctuations. FiveThirtyEight never made any sense at Disney and seems to have been passed around there more like a trinket than a decades work of dozens of people.

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One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.”

We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc.

Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)

The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.

> (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)

I would argue Clinton's presidency moved the Democrats from a center-left party to a center-right party, given its platform of welfare reform and free trade at the expense of labor rights and the social safety net.

Yeah, we've only had 3 dem presidents in 30 years and they all collectively moved the dial a certain way. That's an entire generational upbringing of leadership that's a dim shadow of what Carter, FDR, and the ghost of JFK managed to do for its people.

Neoliberal ideals are really good at keeping a machine running in the direction it's already going. And we arguably needed that with Biden for a short spell. It's never going to change the direction of the machine, though. And we're heading off a cliff

Interesting in learning more - what bill is this that was passed by Clinton?

The Telecommunications Act of 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

It passed with support from both parties in both the House and Senate.

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