With software? Good luck with that….

You know how Iran shut down it's internet? It's like that, but with Money and Politicians.

Stop big companies from ever forming. They are not a natural force that cannot be reckoned with. We allow them to exist. Revoke the charters of any business over 500 employees.

I can see a number of ways to work around that limitation, without even lobbying and bribing. And I'm not even a lawyer or an accountant.

Eventually all the money and power will converge in a few sub 500, or sub 50, companies and nothing will change.

You will find that morals and ethics at that scale are too expensive to maintain.

Then that scale should not be allowed to exist and we should fight aggressively to prevent it

The government does NOT let people have choices in many cases. People should NOT be forced to choose between medical privacy and potential prosecution.

That your comment even implied that would be acceptable in this context is appalling.

I don't know where you got "the government" from, all I'm saying is that apps should be allowed to have cute designs or boring designs, based on their own judgement, and that people should be allowed to freely choose between those. No one should be FORCED to chose anything, I agree, and I didn't imply anything like that.

Parallel construction like that is unambiguously fruit from the poison tree. It should never be allowed, and the fact that it is used routinely is one of the many ongoing travesties in the US.

My understanding is that it would be, if admitted to. That's where the parallel comes in: establish an evidentiary trail that's plausible enough to withstand defense scrutiny, and count on the court itself (ie, judge) not to dig any deeper.

Right, but since that's the world we have today, our threat models should all account for it until we can meaningfully change things.

That's the "parallel" part. They're using information that they aren't allowed to use but are constructing an alternate path to get to the same conclusion with information they could be allowed to use, even though they didn't.

Because they think it might make people give a shit enough to do something to change that outcome?

Fear is a strong motivator, but it is not a good one in this case. To really be effective, there must be the threat of direct, immediate, and severe consequences.

Instead it causes people to treat their messages as hyperbolic and undermines their entire movement.

There also has been, in the past, threat of indirect consequences that would happen in the future and which never came true.

And a lesson in the psychology of sunk costs.

They probably did not suddenly wake up after six months and realized the Indian developers were mot getting the job done. They probably lied about how long it would take. The consultant that said they could do it in a month probably also lied about their estimate.

Now, might think I should be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. However I once had the chance to talk with the CTO of a major embedded consultancy about how to get those first few jobs where you really can’t be confident about any estimate, and that was the explicit and unambiguous advice he offered to me: lie. Tell them you can do it.

Once a company hires a consultant, it can take a lot of pain to make them go back to the drawing board. They do not want to admit they made a mistake hiring someone, so they will accept less than they expect… but only up to a point.

I want to see math on how a single GPU will pull down that much revenue, because that seems like a dubious outcome.

Fair, I was hand waving to make a point. “If it generates more than $1100 + (resale price * WACC) + opportunity cost from physical space/etc” would have been more accurate.

But the point is — you don’t decommission profit generators just because a competitor has a lower cost structure. You run things until it is more profitable for you to decommission them.

That all depends on if you're running your own hardware (unlikely) or renting.

You will stop being asked when you give up McDonalds. There is no other way out.

This. Leaning into touch screens and apps were the last straw for me.