adamcstephens

Except SV investors actively avoid competition with the monopolies. They will try and disrupt for sure, but there’s a dead zone around monopolies.

without regulation, perhaps. But no ism is pure, and needs countervailing forces, such as government in the case of capitalism.

Could be a fun fiction book or movie at least. :)

At a certain point there’s nothing left to spend it on, and they use the money to make more money.

In my opinion all billionaires are sociopaths. I think it’s necessary to be one in order to become one, and most definitely to stay one. If you think “yeah I am the best person to manage this wealth”, then you’re already putting yourself over society. That they can look at the state of the world, and double down on personal wealth, makes it even clearer.

And if there’s nothing they need the workers to do or goods the rich want to purchase? Then how should those without wealth eat and provide shelter for their family?

also just in - monopolies are bad and eliminate many of the positives in capitalism!

We just need to pray harder to the market god, and maybe we’ll get competition?

Even on streets with competition, such as mine, they charge more than the competition so I’m not sure why you’d use them if you have a choice. I have the following three lines run to my house, so are active options:

Spectrum 1Gig: $110/month

WOW! 1Gig: $65/month

AT&T 1Gb Fiber: $60/month

Guess which one I have?

This. So much this. We can't blame China for its emissions, while acting like we've solved ours, when all we did was shift our emissions from manufacturing to China.

> What can we do to fight it?

Build local power, sustainability and resilience. Essentially some of the things Strong Towns advocates for.

We probably can’t fix the massive systems, but we can strive to protect and decouple our local communities from them.

This is likely more in the realm of observability than what you’re thinking. eg metrics, logs and traces. Could you store marketing data in here? Sure, but that’s not really what opentelemetry is built for.

It’s not about holding a grudge, it’s a loss of trust. If an employer did this to me, I wouldn’t trust them to not fuck me over in other ways as an employee.

Yep, preventing the mergers first is part of the solution too.

Unfortunately, we’ve allowed too many, and need to break up companies across industries.

edit: and figure out a way to tell future generations not to give up on these laws next time? To your point, they may find themselves in this same place again.

> I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate.

I’d say the answer is no, it couldn’t. The internet was created during the tail end of powerful antitrust in America, which had the government actively fighting against the monopoly size of corporations. Both IBM and AT&T, had they not been kept in check with antitrust regulations, would have likely stifled the internet and the growth of the personal computer.

Hell, even the last dying gasp of antitrust in its feeble attempt to check Microsoft, paved the way for Google and the monopolies created since.

The answer is to actively support the ideas of anti monopoly and antitrust. To break up companies and punish them for suffocating the good parts of capitalism.

The subscription costs me $12/month. If my goal is to support creators, I’d like to understand what portion of that subscription is actually going to the creators, versus Google.

It sounds like the answer to that is “very little” since you mentioned fractions of a cent per view. So if I watch a few dozen videos from a single creator in a month, can I safely assume they’ll get a couple cents that month from me?

I get that it adds up, otherwise the creators wouldn’t bother creating for the platform, but I’m not sure that helps me justify paying Google another $11.96 a month.

I also question whether outsourcing is cheaper too. Once you add in all the overhead in managing the contracts and contractors, plus the profit for the companies, I struggle to see how this is a better deal for government (and by extension the taxpayer).

Having an incentive to make profit doesn’t create incentives to improve efficiency and service. A private companies incentives are the profits, and anything else is just in order to serve those.

Yes.

How do I find out what portion of a subscription goes to a creator?

A desktop would probably be quieter than my 16”, which ramps up the fans at even a whiff of CPU usage.

Can you help me get a Codespaces invite? ;)

Or Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Just use the data that the article does.

https://www.opensecrets.org/fara

A counter argument is that we have a lot of road capacity for all the cars. I agree that heavier vehicles should pay a greater share, but we don’t have eight lane highways just for trucks.

We have to offset the road funding derived from a gas tax somewhere. This is clearly an underhanded way to offset it, at the detriment to EV, but it has to come from somewhere.

My preference would be weight-weighted VMT, but that’s a complex solution to implement and manage. And dump truck owners will have a fit.

Not previous commenter, but my state only has a periodic check in some of the counties. Much of the state has no recurring check.

Part of the problem is the insistence and cost of using consultants. This LA Times article from 2019 explains it pretty well.

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...

If the hiring pool is remote, then the local market rates don’t matter. Perhaps an open cost of living difference could be ok, but there is no market rate justification.

I’m mixing up nobody. They all get my support, as I believe in my fellow citizens and their desire to feel useful in this world. Sure, some people will abuse the system, but the benefits of treating everyone equally outweigh the costs.

When you means test, you require more bureaucracy while less effectively covering the people who need support.

Oh, since when do our grandkids and great grandkids get consideration in our actions?

If they did get consideration, wouldn’t we want to reconsider a market-based economic system that destroys the natural systems they’ll be stuck with? That seems far more destructive to me than some human created currency numbers.

Sometimes when we spend tax payer dollars, we get back orders of magnitude returns in indirect benefits.

This may or may not be a 100% return, but I’m happy to invest in my fellow citizens who didn’t have a chair when the music stopped.