I have a kiddo with (very likely genetically and behaviourally, but not yet diagnosed by a psych) adhd. He runs us ragged. Love the bugger to death but he is a handful.
We had him at a McDonalds playground the other day, and a nonverbal autistic kid came in escorted by a parent. He immediately got overstimulated and screamed. And ran out.
He started doing laps of the McDonalds. Every time he would pass the play area, his parents would gently guide him towards it, then he would bugger off out the front door again.
He did like 12 laps with his father, 12 laps with his grandfather, then 12 laps with his mother, and eventually he came back to the playground and goofed off a bit with his father again. I could clearly see they were drilled on this behaviour and used to take turns minding him.
They very clearly love their son. But they really don't deserve to have a kid more than 1000 times more difficult than I can even imagine. Like even shifting that kids range a bit so that he could tolerate more play time, and do less laps of the building would help everyone involved. He wouldn't be losing some valuable element of his identity for that to happen.
Whereas my kid might have trouble paying attention to the boring bits in school and want to run around a lot. I am not pining for a cure. We might medicate if it becomes an issue. Its hardly worth talking about in comparison.
They aren't a monopoly, and especially not a monopoly on emails.
How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.
I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.
Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)
"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
The point is that they don't provide the level of services required by their position, which is dominant.
When you have a legitimate problem with Google, they don't reply to you. The news here is again an example of that. The only thing you can do is abide by their rules, which often requires you to subscribe to their services or be at their mercy.
Thats the point? The point seems to dance around and shift every time I address it.
I have had this specific issue with an absolute laundry list of email providers and senders, including Google. Googles probably not even in the top ten worst offenders. Getting Sony to remove an ip from its PSN email blacklist was much more difficult.
So they are a monopoly in the sense that they aren't a monopoly, and just have massive corporate power, and that massive corporate power translates into them acting like every other email provider with a spam blacklist and that's uniquely bad somehow? Is that a good description?
Or will the point now shapeshift into something else?
Are you sure it's the point itself shapeshifting and not your responses to it?
> have massive corporate power, and that massive corporate power translates into them acting like every other [massive corporate] email provider with a spam blacklist
If that's how you want to sum it up, sure. Unaccountable corporate power is bad. That people instinctively reach for the "M-word" in response to this dynamic doesn't invalidate their criticisms. And no, I don't find your "if corpos didn't do this on their own then the government would force it" argument compelling. The problem isn't spam filtering (etc), but rather the details of how they're implemented.
This sounds flippant, but I agree with it, so I'll expand on it:
"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Ideas and information, however, are not scarce. Any number of brains and storage media can hold them simultaneously. That's not true of a pizza. But for a long time "intellectual property" worked pretty well because the copying of ideas and information required significant effort and materials. Books had to be typeset and printed. Music had to be stamped onto vinyl or written onto tape, which needed specialized equipment. All this made it so that we could pretend that ideas and information were scarce.
Now, that's not true anymore. Our technology has advanced to the point where the equipment for copying information is ubiquitous and unspecialized. We have to face the actual nature of information: It's not scarce. "Property" doesn't work on it anymore.
Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down. We have this kind of thing now where it either doesn't exist at all or it exists in such abundance that the adjective is unneeded. How do we economically incentivize something like that?
Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
>"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Yep
Theres no scarcity to manage here and its more comical the further I look at it.
>Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down
Well it may have done with LLMs we arent 100% sure there yet.
>Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
You cant copy an experience, people will always pack out stadiums for live music. If musicians wont make music because oops it got added to the gestalt cultural heritage of mankind well they can jump in a lake. And I have talked with tons of authors who have full time jobs on the side. This will only really impact the top 5% or so of professional authors, and force them to be more productive too.
>The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
Being the first person who can manufacture something still gives you a decent first mover advantage. It doesn't mean you cant sell your goods at a profit, it just means you have to sell your goods with competition. So less profit. Likewise with Music and Fiction, lots of people want to be first, your first book will sell a lot of copies, the first pressing of your vinyl also.
Honestly it probably means more public sector RND funding is required and not much else.
>I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish.
>But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?
Spotify cancelled my package, and keeps sending me offers to rejoin at twice the price (actually more than that, it was a joint account with my wife, so its like 2.5 times if we were both to start paying again). Every time I listen to spotify without the package I get 3 ads to 1 song. Sometimes 2 ads when its generous.
I would have probably paid my spotify tax on time every month without thinking about it. But now I hate them to pieces.
It seems like my options are:
1. Sign up for a service without the all of music I want to listen to.
2. Sign up for a service thats as scummy as spotify but hasnt quite enshittified yet.
3. Download all the mp3s from my spotify playlists and listen to them locally without the weird payment/advertising apparatus in between.
Sell some AI chips to a chinese company lmao. America wasn't even this back when everyone says America was this.
America is a bunch of slave and non slave states in a big trench coat, sharing the costs of bullying the rest of first the continent and then the rest of the planet.
From the limited amount of business I have done in both countries, in terms of overall freedom I absolutely stan Canada. The difference is they dont advertise it.
This reminds a lot of this: "I'm going to try this extremely difficult pastry recipe at home, but I'll use margarin insted of butter because <idiot reason> and a teasponn of stevia instead of the prescribed 200 g of sugar for <another idiot reason>."
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