arrosenberg

While Matt is technically correct, it's much easier to maintain a conspiracy like this when you have a small number of participants with a high concentration of share.

If power is more diluted among a greater number of participants you are way more likely to see defectors, which would provide accurate pricing data to the market and cause the conspiracy to fail.

The point of democracy is consent of the governed. We very much do know the dumb or smart answer as to whether or not to vaccine the military.

Hadrian’s Firewall

Campaign donations are already public if you donate over $200 - https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup

For California, CAISO publishes a ton of data. Here is daily fuel mix - https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso

You can also see Texas (ERCOT), New York and a few other operators.

The point is to bankrupt the country so the robber barons can buy up all the assets for pennies on the dollar.

Every cell in your body (excepting red blood cells) has a complete copy of your genome. What differs is which portions are activated.

Predatory pricing is illegal in the US, but difficult to prosecute under the existing laws.

The fear is being heavily stoked by agitprop on social media.

Lina Khan did try and regulate. She had some successes, but the major cases w/r/t concentration of power against Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple have all moved slowly and (so far) failed to result in break ups.

Antitrust laws were written in the early 1900s and updated through the 1950s. Credit cards weren't available until 1966 and didn't become widely used until the 1990s. Digital platforms weren't a thing until the late 90s/early 2000s and the Apple app store didn't exist until 2008.

The courts can only enforce the laws on the books. Congress needs to update the laws, but they won't because they are hopelessly corrupt :(

If they know about malfeasance and don't stop it, they are complicit; if they don't know about it, they are grossly negligent. In either case, they should be held accountable for the crimes. Maybe in an ideal world it would not be that way, but since we are seeing corruption run amok in corporate board rooms, it's clear they need a greater incentive to police their organizations.

That's exactly my point. It's not hard to figure out how to "put a corporation into prison", the issue is that we've been trained to accept corruption as a normal facet of corporate personhood.

This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.

There's nothing stopping the legislature (other than their own self-interest) from passing a law that executives and board members are criminally liable for the malfeasance of their entity. We already apply that logic to positions like a medical lab director.

And if you are white and have an American accent you're going to be ignored entirely anyway.

For now, until they move on to persecuting political adversaries.

Kind of hard for the government to “prepare society to move forward” when the AI companies and their financiers lobby for conditions that worsen the ability of society to do so.

Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop? Also, walking places in US suburbs is a miserable experience, especially in the Southwest where it gets hot. Everything is spread out with large parking lots, sidewalks are a maybe, the roads are busy and there is no shade or sound dampening.

They are talking about US suburbs. For example, the house I grew up in is over a mile to the nearest grocery and you have to cross two large intersections on the way.

Because the oligarchs who own the media and the politicians don’t care about the petty lives of regular people.

I fail to see how. Having ad-subsidized access to Facebook and YouTube has not reduced poverty, hunger or made housing and healthcare more affordable for them. The overwhelming majority have not used it to up-skill or improve their income prospects. Predatory "free" pricing appears to have simply made the poor more easily targeted by propaganda and advertising.

We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them. They distort the idea of a free and fair marketplace by poisoning consumer expectations of what things should cost.

FYI, you can append &udm=14 to Google searches to remove AI results and a bunch of the other clutter they've added.

Sure. If Smedley Butler has been less disillusioned by his work history and successfully carried forward the business plot it’s pretty easy to imagine.

Can you explain why this situation is any different than regular meat? I.e. Fish immune systems don’t stop parasites from being present in the meat, flash freezing is what kills the parasites.

The only way Silicon Valley will become pro-family is if they are dragged kicking and screaming by the organized force of their workers. I'm not particularly optimistic.

Is something else gained by the generated storybook?

The opportunity for low-effort, low-talent grifters to make a buck on Amazon?

This would be less of an issue if there was robust competition in payment processing. Time to break up Visa and Mastercard.

You obviously know which ones I mean.

I think it's less the ignored regulations (I'm also happy with the CEQA reforms), and more that they engaged in predatory pricing schemes to stifle competition. This has resulted in a duopoly that engages in politicking to lock in their position and suppress labor rights (e.g. Prop 22).

That does seem to be a right-wing capitalist attack on the public good? Like, do we still believe in markets, or are we just cool with mega-corporations setting prices and wages?

I wonder how the people at NPR feel about all those donations they took from the Koch Foundation over the years...