ucaetano

It isn't just "can't put them out", grain dust is explosive. Grain elevators are time bombs.

Wow, that's a surprisingly fair and neutral write up, really good work!

Exactly! Free market != laissez faire.

But a market where exorbitant costs of regulation drive up the minimum efficient scale to the point that no new entrants are possible is also not a free market.

Nope. It doesn't in any way.

A free market is one where prices are set based on supply and demand without restrictions on competition due to monopolistic powers, market reserve regulations, etc.

There are always limits to competition, some due to scale, some due to market size, some due to availability of resources. None of those prevent a market from being free.

Even antitrust regulation doesn't necessarily prevent a market from being free.

Strong competition would mean dozens to hundreds of sustainable entrants.

Absolutely not, there is such a thing as minimum efficient scale. Some markets might only have room for 2 or 3 companies to operate efficiently.

Essentially, the flying buttresses are designed to hold the weight of the roof pushing outside.

Without that weight, there isn't much to prevent the walls from caving in.

As far as I understand, it's back to being desert everywhere today.

Not entirely. The once massive Mesopotamian Marshes (which were largely drained by Saddam to destroy the local Shia population) have been partially restored, from about 10% of the original size to about 50%. It will probably take many decades for the ecosystems to be restored, but it is nonetheless good news.

Edit: Worth seeing here https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse#v=31.16454,47.12287...

You can address that by using Gini index x median income. The result is the same: the US continues to be an outlier with significantly higher inequality than most developed countries.

Another way to look at it is median income x Gini index. Essentially, higher-income countries tend to have lower inequality, but the US is an exception, with significantly higher inequality than other developed countries.

A nitpick: wanderlust doesn't mean in English what it means in German. While in German it still means "a desire to hike", in English it is usually associated with travel, a meaning that in German is closer to Fernweh (far-sickness, as in opposition to home-sickness, which is the literal meaning of nostalgia, the Swiss mercenary malady).

"open source the data"

What data? User's data? Algorithms? There's little value in FB's algorithms, the value is simply in its usage by users, content creators and advertisers.

Without those, FB is worthless.

"The company needs to meet a 30 percent local sourcing rule to be able to open its own stores in the country."

It is just the result of protectionism.

You are getting a cut of it, in the form of the voluntary usage of a free service. That's voluntary barter, you're trading your data for usage of a service and is perfectly fine.

If your point is "I want my cut in money", then you need to find someone who's willing to give you a cut in money.

If I deny the use of my data (opt-out, right to be forgotten), I need a way to enforce that.

But that's easy to do: don't provide your data.

Your argument seems to be more like "bartering access for data should be illegal" or "it should be illegal to offer a free, ad-funded online service without offering the same service without any ads or tracking by the price that I want, a shrubbery, a nice one, not too expensive".

It isn't wrong, but it is a different argument.

PS: Sorry for the shrubbery joke, wasn't meant to ridicule anyone but myself :)

Oh, if you could afford a computer, even an used one, in the 90's you were definitely part of a global elite.

Heck, in 2000, just under 30% of the global population had access to properly built sanitation services.

And about 28% of the global population live with under a $1 (in PPP) per day.

Respectfully, I think you are lacking some context about life in other countries.

Oh, it does. Only 5% of the global population had access to the internet in 2000.

If that doesn't qualify it as a product only available to the elites, I don't know what will...

EU ruled on it. You are wrong.

Oh, you mean that if politicians pass a law saying the sky is red, then it stops being blue?

Seriously, if the EU "rules" that gravity doesn't exist, then it suddenly stops existing?

Don't be angry because you don't understand the subject...

Which is like saying that Subaru is dominant in the market for new cars sold at Subaru dealerships.

That completely ignores the fact that there is intense competition for developers and users between Android and iOS, and renders the point moot.

Sure, you can always define an arbitrary market for which a company will have dominance, but that's irrelevant from an economics perspective.

Maybe you should go read on what a monopoly actually is...

Here's a good interview with the economist who taught me what a monopoly is:

https://hbr.org/2017/11/as-more-people-worry-about-monopolie...

Will be a good point for you to start.

You didn't, you just hand-waved and threw some claims around without any data to back it up, and you didn't address the key issue: you don't have access to datacenters, only to POPs.

while AMP was supposedly "open", Google teams such as Gmail and Search would implement it however they wanted, and that no open governance would impact them at all

And that's exactly how any open standard works, isn't it?

Or were you expecting that some standard board would have power over Google (or any other company) and be able to dictate how Google (or any other company) can implement the standard or not?

We are measuring significant latency reductions for real players to google data centers right now.

Again, you only have visibility to the POPs, so you're only seeing improvements on the path to the POP.

For example: there is no Google POP anywhere near its Oregon datacenter[1]. You literally can't just push your traffic to the Dalles and plug into the datacenter.

So, no matter where your customer is, you can only improve the traffic to the Seattle or the Bay Area POPs, where the traffic will move over to Google's private network.

Sorry, but I have to call BS on your claims...

[1] https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

Very poor where? In the US?

The "very poor" in the US are rich in most of the developing world.

No, you're measuring improvement to the POP where you peer with Google.

Unless you're telling me that Google is giving you access to its private networks all the way to the datacenters, which I'd find hard to believe.

Between you and a Google Datacenter, most of the path is through Google's private networks.

The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005).

No, it isn't false. Buying and/or installing an app today is orders of magnitude easier, safer and cheaper than 2005.

You clearly don't like it, and you probably are part of the little elite that had access to the internet before the general public did.

You can still do online everything that you used to in 2005, nothing was removed.

That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010.

Sorry the break the news to you, but the US isn't the world.

Maybe you should step out of the hacker news bubble for a minute.

Sure, someone else might have done it, but that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if it was Google or Apple, or someone else.

What matters is only the impact to the consumer, and the consumer is far, far better off than in 2005.

You also don't seem to understand economics. It isn't plain and simple, things are far more complex than that.

And if you read the EU decision, you'll notice that they're assuming that Android doesn't compete with iOS...

rich and poor

You seem to have a mental image of the internet that doesn't correspond to reality. Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan.

Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.

Yeah, I don't think that taking policy advice from movie quotes is a good idea...

Not to the datacenters, just to the POPs or edge nodes, after that, it is all private networks. And, afaik, the distance to the closest pop or edge node is a small share of the total distance to the datacenters.

It is irrelevant. Running Android apps is no longer tied to AOSP. Chromebooks run Android apps.

There is an app ecosystem composed of Google Mobile Services and the Play store, today it runs on Android and on ChromeOS, and it seems that it will run on fuchsia too.

You can do all of that, just download the apk. What you seem to want is that app stores should be forced to accept any apps?

The rest is just saudosistic nostalgia. There wasn't mass access to the internet, you're just missing the times when a small elite had access to the internet.

Consumers are far better now than they were.