Duopoly’s produce excessive regulation as a means of protection.
Duopolies grow out slow growth, once the pie stops growing stealing customers is hard and is a zero sum game, reaching a comfortable stasis which then becomes the status quo is how organisms in these environments behave
Home elevators are a thing. We had one in our previous house, as did many other homes in the neighborhood. They are not terribly expensive, about $12k/floor during construction.
Not the US, but my dad just got one installed in his two story home, cost him around US$25k for installation of the lift/elevator itself, although he incurred a few grand more on modifications to create a space to install it in (would have been more but he did some of them himself). Not a new house, around 40-50 years old. In part, he got the idea because one of his neighbours had already done it. Plus his partner has dementia and climbing stairs has been becoming an ever increasing challenge for her.
We saw a new house with an elevator when we were looking, but it seemed to be an accessibility quota thing, I don’t want to think what it costs to maintain and what kind of inspections it needs.
Generally home eaevators are made of things that don't need inspections. Screws will last for decades without issues and when they fail rescue workers can get you out. Those systems are too slow and expensive for use commercial buildings but good enough for a short house. Thus commercial buildings will use a cable which is cheaper and faster but they stretch and break over time so you must do safety inspection. (a house sized screw is under a grand so not really a big factor in price, but that much cable will get several floors.
some commercial builings use hydraulic elevators which when they break just slowly lower you to the bottom floor . Again much less inspections needed because they are desirned safe. but the slow speed and cost mean only a few floors are possible
Cable systems are not cheap. The biggest issue with cables is the cores dry out. Hydraulic doesn't have to be slow by any means and they dont just seep down unless you blow a seal on the cylinder. Even then it would take an hour under a full load to move a story. Thats a lot of hydraulic fluid to displace. Hydraulic elevators are also prone to issues with cold temperature as the oil can become quite viscous when not in regular use.
I was thinking a hose break not a seal which would fall much faster. Which is why you would design them slow - if a hose breaks they are still a safe fall. (of course if you make them fast then you need more inspection, a trade off)
That said I'm not an elevator expert. The details I've given so far is about all I know. So if/when someone claims to be an expert and contradicts me - well they could be right.
Maintenance was essentially zero. No regular official inspections needed, but we had an elevator company come out every 3-4 years for a general inspection. Ours was a 3 story hydraulic unit.
How can a duopoly produce regulation? That'd be straight out corruption unless someone came up with a new word for it that suddenly made that legal, moral, and efficient.
Your are conflating asset price inflation and cost inflation, they are not the same. Apple could lose $2T in market cap next week, the cost of the fab would not be discounted in the same way.
Ok, but let's say the scenario is that Apple, Google, Microsoft need to build a chip plant for 0.5nm chips. They need $1 trillion.
If each company is worth $20 trillion in 20 years, they can easily raise $1 trillion together by selling some shares or using their shares as leverage or just straight up using their cash flow. I'm simplifying things by ignoring inflation, but you get the point.
The bottom line is, if capitalism thinks a $1 trillion fab will produce more than $1 trillion in value, it will happen.
This appears to be missing the forest for the trees.
Which is to say, if Rock's law continues to hold, it doesn't matter if some global consortium can pull together $1T for a new fab; can they pull together $2T four years later? And $4T four years after that? And $8T? $16T? To say that a doubling at this rate is sustainable is to suggest that you more than double the value at each step. At some point this can clearly not be the case, unless you want to posit a world where going from one process node to the next literally doubles the entire productive output of the human race.
Absent some unforeseeable technological breakthrough, at some point it has to slow down, either slowly, or drastically, or otherwise stop altogether. And for anyone who's currently middle age or younger, it's currently projected to happen in your lifetime.
Arbitration is just another power grab by companies, originally the government would keep this sort of excess and greed in check, as we have successively dismantled that capability the people of this country had to turn to the courts to seek redress and enforce the cost of consequences of mismanagement back on to the balance sheets of the companies via legal liabilities.
This was supposed to be the mechanism that enforced market penalization envisaged by capitalism, especially in sectors where choice was limited or no other options existed.
Companies got tired of having to deal with lawsuits that resulted from the misbehavior of their organizations so they started pushing binding arbitration clauses, and because no one gives a fuck about the people in this country they have been able to push this as an effective and cheap mechanism to shut customers up and remove their rights.
However you feel about corporations, they are entities that exists only because our social contract allows them to, they haven’t always existed and if we keep granting them or allowing them greater rights and freedoms than the actual people in this country, they may not always exist.
Arbitration makes sense when you think about how costly the court system is. The problem is that the defendant gets to choose the arbiter, so its not a fair system. If the arbiter was neutral I think arbitration would generally be better than the traditional court system in many cases as its easier to use without legal representation.
The "defense" would argue that the arbitrator was mutually selected when the contract was signed, because the "plantiff" agreed to the contract terms.
The fact that the contract was non-negotiable should have made it a "contract of adhesion" where the plaintiff is recognized to have little choice in the details and the courts should provide scrutiny to ensure that they were equitable. But the supreme court has decided that "contracts of adhesion" don't really exist because you always had the choice to not have a cell phone or internet service or a job.
Not really. Any corporation will be represented in an arbitration by lawyers. The arbiter will likely be a lawyer. You will be bamboozled by their arguments and the best you can hope for is to make a reasonably clear statement of your claim and hope that the arbiter doesn't agree with some technical argument the other side has.
And (I don't know if it always works this way) you will take turns speaking with the arbiter, you will not directly hear or be able to question/challenge what the the other party is saying.
> Arbitration makes sense when you think about how costly the court system is.
The court system isn't required to be trash. That's like how we made immigration so impossible that we just let people in illegally. It's a pretense. If official justice is so burdensome that we have to create extensive private legal systems, we should figure out a sane way to do things.
People who have the power to make decisions prefer it this way.
The court system is expensive because it’s the wrong mechanism to address this aspect of corporate and monopoly power, frankly all companies have gotten too large they aren’t efficient at any thing other than redistribution of the fruits of labor increasingly unfairly all the way up the organizational chart.
The fact that no-one fails no matter the egregiousness of their actions or behaviors is absurd.
Well sadly, the mechanism made to disrupt such monopolies will probably be crippled in 6-12 months, maybe even sooner. We're definitely in a plutocracy .
Yep big companies basically have too much capital to fail. They own distribution channels they seek rent on. No one else can get ahead of them. A small company making a mistake will die. A large company will not even notice it.
Depends on what you mean by "care for". Calling your parents a few times a week to make sure they're doing OK and dropping by on the weekend doesn't take too much time and effort. But as people get older they need more and more care. Caring for one person with dementia or other similar problems that comes with aging is for all intents and purposes a full time job.
And eventually if you can't afford to become unemployed to do it or pay full time caregivers, you need to move them to some kind of care home where there is minor scaling effect. Being housed together, the residents can share caregivers since most do not need continuous help.
A common arrangement is a board and care home with about 4 residents and 2 caregivers who work mostly non-overlapping shifts, and one sleeps onsite to (hopefully) be able to handle overnight care needs.
A larger place can scale a bit better. E.g. 10-20 residents can have 5-10 staff on various shifts. But some staff could be cooks or handle cleaning while others focus more on the residents' needs. And at this level of staffing, they can manage to have an overnight shift with someone who remains awake to keep an eye on things, as well as probably having other(s) sleep onsite to be on call to help with bigger events.
I agree with you, but I read the article as saying you can't care deeply about more than one person at literally the same instant. Your attention is directed to one or the other.
But I think even that's not literally true e.g. the social worker could make dinner for all four kids at once. And probably converse with all four of them while doing it!
But, I think I agree with the broader point that care doesn't scale, even if it does scale slightly greater than 1.
No, it’s a thread about car sales and cybertrucks position in that list.
Also, I’m sure we are all familiar with the value of anecdotal evidence vs data, the response of “I’m a ____ and I don’t _____” is limited at best and meaningless in the aggregate
The value of anecdotal reports that "I experienced ______ failure" is similarly limited at best and meaningless in the aggregate,
but somehow they're taken as gospel.
Jury decides to change their verdict after being algorithmicly sentenced to 90 days in jail for using the wrong exit in the court building as they were being released from duty by the court officers.
CEO of VerdictAI is quoted as saying “shit happens, if they have any value as humans they would have enough money to get out of this, so the AI must be right. One must not lose sight of the fact that we have freed Americans from millions of hours of manual labor with our InmatesAI volunteer workforce.”
Maybe I’m making assumptions a rather than making an inference, but this seems like the perspective of somebody who wants to stop development of future technology altogether because of bad actors.
I’m not saying there aren’t concerns, but risks can be mitigated and precautions put into place to prevent catastrophes. Stopping development because of valid concerns is not the right move. It’s not even the right move to stop developing weaponry which has a stated goal of causing direct harm to other humans.
There are people in the world who will attempt to do these things and much more dangerous things recklessly and with far worse intentions than making money, and if those people get technological and military superiority over The West, the world will look very different than it does today. There are a whole lot more ways the world could be worse than it could be better.
The current world order is not ideal, but think about what the actual long term outcome is if The West stops.
“Stopping a small number of incredibly over-resourced people from externalising consequences for their sole gain and causing significant and long lasting woe and damage on the rest of us” != “stopping innovation”
Nobody is saying “uh uh, no more problem solving”,drawing that conclusion would be uncharitable at best, and “wrong” at worst. The argument is “gosh, maybe we could have some innovation that’s actually useful, and not some polished-turd/enshittification”.
I’m not sure you’re making the same argument as the others in the comments above. I agree with your comment aside from your characterization of the others comments.
We’re still a democratic republic that can stop the enshittification of utilities (or whatever the problem de jour is). There are bad actors, but by and large, things are working and continue to be improving. Some things need to be bolstered, some things need to be replaced. Stagnation is not the answer.
What would you propose as the solution? All new ideas go through a centralized approval process? That experiment is already being run in other countries. If they start winning, the US will adapt or die.
But always always with Mus-informed grand intentions of changing the world for the better.
All we need is another market to solve every problem! It makes everyone with power and money happy, they love markets because they are experts at fucking everyone every way possible. Thats how you build inter-generational wealth!
Quite the opposite, depending on how it’s used it is THE authoritative system for the code, which gets exponentially more valuable with more contributors
Using your yardstick, we wouldn’t have any open source software, everything costs time to implement, that’s the point of open source, we donate time to the collective community. All those security features are not enterprise specific, they are rudimentary for any modern open source product
I'm saying that companies that opensource their products tend to distinguish "enterprise" and non-enterprise based on things like RBAC and audit mechanisms, neither of which is "security" as much as "compliance".
The original license owner, if a commercial enterprise trying to sell the product alongside the "open" version, has less incentive to accept those features from the community as it would reduce their sales of the enterprise version of the same thing, and may not align with their long-term product roadmap.
In open source, the team managing a codebase isn't under any obligation to accept contributions the community and you are welcome to fork the project, if you like.
RBAC is absolutely a practical security control, even for non-commercial users. Least necessary privilege is not a checkbox, it will 100% save your butt in a breach by limiting blast radius.
Let's say you work at a company that uses Elasticsearch. Let's say you're running a newspaper and you've got your logs in elasticsearch. Let's say one of your reporters ends up getting chopped up while they're visiting the Ostrich embassy to get a marriage license. Now let's say you're then asked "who looked at the logs of the CMS who searched for and found the IP address that was used by that reporter on October 1st 2018"
That example, purely hypothetical, is an example of "security" but not the typical security you'll see in some open source application -- it's an enterprise "compliance" feature that won't be trivial to implement and will be judged not just on completeness but on user interface, ease of use, ease of implementation, etc.
"security" means different things to different people
Duopolies grow out slow growth, once the pie stops growing stealing customers is hard and is a zero sum game, reaching a comfortable stasis which then becomes the status quo is how organisms in these environments behave